Chapter 21 Riley - March 2020, Hibbing
They shut the league down on a Thursday afternoon and I was on the interstate by Friday morning with everything I owned in the bed of the truck under a tarp.
The drive took most of a day. Two stops, both for gas, both at pumps where the guy inside had put a folding table across the door and was taking cash through a gap. The radio kept saying the word border like it was a thing that could close.
I called my mother from somewhere in Wisconsin.
"Where are you?"
"A few hours out. I've got the gear in the back and it's snowing on it, so if there's a tarp situation later that's a me problem. Don't wait up."
"I'm going to wait up."
"Ma, I'm telling you not to, and I'm telling you now so that when you do it anyway it's on the record as your decision."
"And I'm telling you I heard you," Denise said, and hung up.
She was at the door at two in the morning with a coat over her nightgown, and she did not hug me. We had all read the same articles by then and none of us knew anything.
"You've lost weight."
"I've been in a truck all day, Ma. I've lost water."
"Your father's up," she said, and stood back to let me past her.
He was, at the kitchen table in a work shirt with a piece of paper in front of him, and he did not say hello. He turned the paper around and put one finger on it. "They sent this out at four o'clock. Read the first paragraph."
"I've been driving since dawn."
"Read it."
It was a memo from the plant. Two paragraphs, a list, a signature block, and the third item on the list was building systems and maintenance.
"That's me," Walt said. "That's my whole department. That's in writing. And it came from Duluth, which means somebody in an office who has never been in that building put my name in a column."
"Congratulations."
"I'm not saying anything about it."
"You're saying a lot about it. It's two in the morning and you're conducting a press conference."
My mother put a hand on the back of my chair. "He's read it all night."
"It's a short memo," Walt said, and folded it into his shirt pocket, where it stayed all spring.
The thread started up before I'd unpacked.
Riley: made it. gas stations have gone medieval, there's a folding table across the door and a man taking cash through a gap like it's a toll bridge
Nate: How's the hip?
Riley: the hip is a hip. it complains and then it does the work. how's philadelphia?
Nate: Empty. I ran the stairs in my building tonight. All of them.
Riley: you did not
Nate: Twice.
Riley: you ran a skyscraper twice, alone, in the dark, and then you reported it to a man in minnesota like it was the weather
Nate: You asked.
Riley: I did ask. that's the most Sinclair thing I've ever heard and I once watched you iron a sock
Over the next four months, two men who had never had more than a night lived their entire lives through one text thread.
The gym came first, because I needed something to do with my hands. By the second week of April my father, who did not build things so much as overbuild them and then apologize for the paint, had welded me a rack in the garage.
Riley: rack is up
Nate: What's it rated for?
Riley: a thousand pounds
Nate: You weigh two hundred. So it's rated for five of you.
Riley: it's rated for five of me and he apologized for the welds anyway. stood there with his hands behind his back and said the beads were inconsistent, and I said dad it's a rack, and he said that's how it starts
Nate: What color is that?
Riley: tractor paint
Nate: That's not a color.
Riley: it's green, nate. tractor paint is green. that's the entire industry, there's one color and everybody agrees on it
I sent a photo of that rack every single day for a month. Same angle, same corner, sometimes with nothing new about it at all, and he never once said stop.
He sent times back.
Nate: 4:11.
Riley: absolutely not. you took the elevator down and then you got out and you lied to a man in minnesota
Nate: [photo: digital watch face reading 4:11]
Riley: that's a watch face. anybody can produce a watch face. I want a timekeeper, a witness and a doctor
Nate: There's nobody in the building.
Riley: then how do you know the doors open at the bottom. you could be running into a sealed shaft every night and philadelphia would never find you
Nate: The doors open. Goodnight, Kowalski.
The movie thing started as a joke and turned into an institution inside a week. We started on three, not on go.
"Go is ambiguous," he said. "Three is a number. Nobody has ever misread a number."
"That is the single most Sinclair sentence ever constructed."
"Do you disagree with it?"
"No. That's what's upsetting about it."
Riley: 00:14. that hatch would not hold
Nate: It's a movie.
Riley: it's a hatch, nate! I have spent my entire life around a man who fabricates things for a living and I'm telling you that one is decorative
Nate: 00:31. He's about to say the thing about his father.
Riley: he is not
Nate: 00:33.
Riley: ...how did you do that
Nate: Every submarine movie has a father in it. It's the whole genre. The boat is the father.
Riley: I'm going to need a minute with that one. possibly the whole night. don't text me
Nate: I'll text you.
We did that all spring. Every time, one of us said at the end that the movie was terrible. Neither of us ever proposed stopping.
The cooking arc was my mother's fault. She went to her sister's for two days and left a list, and item one was rice.
He picked up on video, which we did not do, and there he was in a kitchen the color of an airport, standing at a counter with nothing on it.
"You look terrible."
"You called me."
"Both of those are true." I turned the phone around. "Okay. Rice."
"What kind of rice?"
"There's kinds?"
"There are about nine kinds, Riley."
"It's rice, Nate. It's the white one. It's in a bag with a picture of rice on it." I propped the phone against the sugar canister. "It says two to one on the bag."
"Two to one what?"
"That's the thing. It doesn't say."
"Two parts water to one part rice."
"You don't know that. You're guessing. You're a man with one bowl in his kitchen and you're guessing at me in a very calm voice, which is the thing you do, and it works on general managers and it is not going to work on me."
"Two to one," he said, and I heard him settle onto a stool somewhere, the way he did when a thing had become a project. "And then you cover it and you turn it down."
"Down to what?"
"Down."
"That's not a number! You gave me a number for the water and now you won't give me a number for the heat, and I want you to understand that this is exactly how you play hockey."
"Turn it down to two."
So I turned it down to two and put the lid on. We talked about the flat cap for a while, and then the smell came up, and it came up fast.
"Oh."
"Riley. What did you do?"
"Nothing. Nothing has happened. Everything in this kitchen is fine and under control and going to plan."
I took the lid off and a cloud came out of that pot like a mine collapse. I heard him say my name in a voice I had never had off him before. I put the whole thing in the sink and ran the tap and it screamed.
Then I picked the phone up and turned it around, and he was standing in a kitchen that had never once been heated with his hand over his mouth, laughing so hard he had to put his other hand flat on the counter.
"You're going to be on the floor in a second. I can see it coming."
"Turn it down to two," he said, into his own palm.
"You said two! You gave me the number! You gave it to me in the voice, the one where you're too reasonable to argue with, and I wrote it down."
"You did not write it down."
"I wrote it down in my head, which is where I keep everything you tell me, and I'd like a refund on the whole account."
"I've never cooked anything in my life."
"I know that, Nate! That's what makes it a crime. You had a chance to disclose and you took the podium instead."
He got himself back together the way he always did, and then he didn't, because it kept coming back on him.
I stood in my mother's kitchen with a ruined pot in the sink and watched a man I had not been in a room with in months laugh at me on a screen the size of a coaster, and I thought, with no warning at all, that I would burn every pot in this house.
I filed that one so fast I heard the drawer shut.
The league had died, so we ran our own. The Invitational conducted a full offseason with no hockey anywhere on earth. An expansion draft, a protected list, and an arbitration over a player who did not exist, at which the commissioner's office ruled against itself.
Riley: I'd like to formally request the arbitrator recuse himself
Nate: Denied.
Riley: on what grounds
Nate: The arbitrator has reviewed the request and finds no conflict.
Riley: the arbitrator is you! the arbitrator is a defenseman alone in an empty apartment who has ruled in his own favor in every proceeding since february
Nate: The arbitrator notes your tone. The arbitrator also notes that you have never once appealed a ruling that went your way.
Riley: those ones were correct
It was the only economy either of us trusted, and it stayed open when everything else was shut.
Two real things happened in there and both arrived looking like nothing.
The first was the cap. They flattened it, and there was no room left in any western market for a contract like mine.
The scenario a man had said out loud on a Thursday morning show, with a city in it, stopped existing on a spreadsheet somewhere, and nobody called to tell me.
In the last week of June the club got it done quietly and put out two lines.
Player, term, done. No press conference, no hat.
Riley: be advised the commissioner's office has received notice that the pittsburgh franchise has extended its keeper rights over its own player
Nate: Term?
Riley: 5 years
Nate: Congratulations.
Riley: don't