Chapter 18 Riley - May 2019, Bratislava, Slovakia #2
"You've got something in that kit and you moved like a guy at a border crossing. You've never moved that fast on a backcheck." I brushed my teeth, in his sink, out of spite. "Fine. Sinclair fussiness. I'll file it."
"File it," he said, and went and got dressed, and I filed it.
The rest of the room life was comedy, because there was a 19-year-old on that team named Tucker Pyne who had appointed himself ambassador of peace. He'd knock at nine at night with his eyes wide. "Everything okay in here? I heard yelling."
"It's a discussion, Tuck."
"It sounded like…" He looked from me to Nate and back. "Guys, we've got a group here. We've got a real thing going. I don't want the rivalry to, like, be a thing in the room."
"Tucker, he took the good pillow."
"There's no good pillow," Nate said. "There are four identical pillows and I've counted them, and one of them is under your head right now."
"There is one good pillow, and everybody in this hotel knows it, and it's the one under yours, and I want the kid to see it with his own eyes."
Tucker Pyne stood in the doorway with his mouth open and then went away, and I heard him tell a guy in the hall that he thought he'd calmed it down.
He did that four times in three weeks and every one of them was about a pillow, or the shower order, or once about a plug adapter, and by the end I think that kid believed he had personally prevented an international incident.
The towels started because of the balcony. The bathroom had a rack that fit exactly one towel and we had two, so they went out on the rail, and by day four they had positions, mine on the left and his on the right, and neither of us ever discussed it.
By day six there was a fold. I got up first for a 9 a.m. video session and he was still out cold, and I wanted him to know the bathroom was free without saying anything out loud, so I put my towel over the rail folded in half, square, on my side.
He came out and looked at the balcony and said nothing and went and had a shower.
And that night he put his out folded the same way, and it meant done, all clear, nobody's in there.
By the end of the second week we had four of them.
Square meant clear. Long meant occupied.
Both on one side meant somebody from the team was in the room.
And once, on a night when the coaching staff did a bed check in the corridor, he hung his over the rail lengthwise before he opened the door, and I was already sitting up in my own bed six feet away with a book about a shipwreck.
Nobody taught us that. Nobody wrote it down. Two guys who had a whole encryption system for a phone built a second one out of laundry in nine days without discussing it once.
Then the hockey blew the entire thing wide open in front of the world.
The staff had watched practice for four days. That's the whole conspiracy. There was no plan and no agenda, just a Czech assistant coach standing at the blue line watching a two-man rush drill, and on the sixth day they put us on the same power-play unit.
First shift, first game of the group stage, against Latvia. Under half a minute.
I came off the half wall and he was already moving, and I did not look at him.
I put it into a space at the top of the circle that had nobody in it, and by the time it got there he was there, and it came back to me off the far post side and I put it in the top corner.
Give and go, and neither of us looked at the other one once.
Our bench came apart. Tucker Pyne fell over.
The broadcast lost its mind. I've watched it since, in three languages. The English feed says, "That is shocking. Those two men do not like each other and that was telepathy."
Both group chats melted. Angelo sent Nate something with a wall of exclamation points that Nate showed me and then immediately regretted showing me.
Somebody from the Post-Gazette wrote a column about how the rivalry had produced the best power play in the tournament, which was true, and which explained nothing.
Grant Sinclair went on a panel back home.
"That's proof that elite reads translate," he said.
"You put two high-IQ players together and the language is universal.
" He was completely correct and he was talking about something else entirely and he had no idea, and I watched it on a laptop sitting four feet from his son.
Neither of us said one word about that either.
And then, that night, Bo texted.
Bo: Saw the power play. You've been carrying that around a while.
I looked at that for a long time and then typed carrying what and deleted it and typed thanks and sent that instead.
We won five in a row. The Accord held, technically. It held the way a rope holds, with the strands going one at a time.
On the last night of the group stage I was lying on my bed at eleven with the lights half off, and he was at the desk in a t-shirt with his back to me, pressing tomorrow's collar.
He does the points first, then the band, then he turns it and does the underside of the points again, and he checks it against the light, and then he puts it on the hanger and squares the hanger up with two fingers so it hangs flat.
About four minutes. He'd done it every night since we got there.
I lay there and watched the whole thing without making one joke about it.
That's the part I could not get past afterward.
I had a dozen of them loaded. I had an all-time one about the sock.
And I lay there in the dark with my hands behind my head and just watched a man iron a collar, and something in me was taking it down carefully, in order, like a guy learning a route.
Then he turned the lamp off and got into the other bed. "Goodnight, Kowalski," he said, the way he does, in that flat voice, with the last syllable coming down.
"Night."
And I did the arithmetic, because I always do the arithmetic. Group stage done, quarterfinal in three days, semi in six, final in eight, charter home on the ninth. Nine days.
And the thing that got me, lying six feet from him with the thermostat at twenty and a half, was that I was not counting down to getting out. I was counting down to the end.