Chapter 26 Soucy
The routine is at sixty-one minutes and it isn’t done.
It’s supposed to be forty-five. I built forty-five eight years ago with my first therapist one disgusting rep at a time, and forty-five was the floor and the ceiling both.
Now forty-five is a country I left an hour ago and I’m still pressing tape onto the left pad.
The tape is on top. I know it’s on top. The knowing doesn’t reach the hands that need it pressed again.
“Sixty-one,” Thompson says from the doorway. He doesn’t come in. He read the room from the hall.
“I know the number.”
“I’m not telling you the number. I’m telling you I’m here and I’m going to keep being here and you can take ninety if you need ninety. They can’t drop the puck without you. You’re the whole show tonight. They’ll wait.”
“They won’t wait.”
“They will literally wait. That’s how hockey works. The goalie has to be in the net. You’re the goalie.”
“The tape’s on top.”
“Okay.”
“It’s been on top for six years. I know it’s on top.
” My voice is the high tight one I don’t like, and I press the tape again.
“I can’t get to the next thing. I do the tape and then I’m supposed to go to the skates and I can’t get to the skates because the tape isn’t...
it’s. It’s done. I can’t make my hands believe it’s done. ”
“So don’t make them believe it. Just put your hand on the skate. You don’t have to believe anything. Hand on the skate.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“I know it’s not how it works. I’m asking you to put your hand on the skate anyway, because the tape is going to be on top whether your hands believe it or not, and the puck drops at seven-oh-five whether you’re at forty-five or ninety. Hand on the skate. That’s the only ask.”
I put my hand on the skate. The tape is behind me. It’s two feet away and it’s screaming, but my hand is on the skate and the queue lurches forward one place. It’s the not-reaching, tape instead of a tablet. My hands don’t believe it. My hands don’t have to.
“I’ve never started one of these.”
“I know. And I watched you read their whole power play off the bench in Game 1 before Bodie’s staff had it on a whiteboard. Cold.”
“Watching isn’t the net.”
“No. It isn’t. The net’s worse, and the net is also the one place on this earth you’ve never once been wrong. So go be in the worse place you’re best at.” He pushes off the frame. “I’m going to go stand somewhere else and be extremely calm at you from a distance.”
He goes. Two people can stand in a doorway and do that, and the other one is at the end of the bench tonight with a brace on his leg. I’m going to think about the skate, which is under my hand, which is the next thing.
Bodie comes in and crouches at the edge of the six feet instead of pulling the stool into it. Someone told him. Or he learned.
“One thing.” He waits until I look up. “They’re going to live in your kitchen tonight. Three of them at the top of your crease every shift, sticks in your eyes. When it gets loud in there and you can’t see, you find the puck. One puck. Let the rest be noise. Say it back.”
“Find the puck. Let the rest be noise.”
“They’ll get one early. Maybe two. That’s the design, not the verdict.” He stands and knocks the frame twice on the way out. “Go be the reason we’re still alive Thursday.”
He goes. Find the puck. Let the rest be noise. It’s a good sentence built for a brain that can let things be noise, which isn’t the brain I have. I borrow it anyway because Bodie is rarely wrong about the one thing.
Lundy comes down the room on the crutches, which take him longer than walking, and stops at my stall and balances there with the braced leg held off the floor.
“They’ll screen you off the rush,” he says. “Not set plays. Off the rush. Their third guy peels to the front instead of going for the rebound. Third time you’ll feel him coming and you’ll want to look. Don’t look. Trust where he has to be and play the puck.”
“I know how to play a screen.”
“I know you do. I’m telling you the shape of theirs.”
There’s a pause where his mouth opens on a different shape. Not hockey. Then the shape closes and becomes hockey again, and I watch it go.
“And the cross-seam. They’ll move you east-west and make you reset twice. Don’t reset twice. Take the first one away, trust your D on the backside.”
“I’ll trust my D.”
“You’ll trust your D.” It’s the worn-in echo, the call-and-response we ran for two hundred mornings.
It comes out of him cold now. The warmth nine days gone.
He shifts his weight on the crutches. There’s something I want to say and nothing to say that isn’t the thing.
The thing is mine. It has a brace on its leg.
“Eight forty tomorrow,” I say, because I don’t have the words for the actual sentence and the carpool time is a word I have.
“Eight forty,” he says, and goes back down the room on the crutches. Slow. I lace the skate my hand is on. I’m about to go do the one thing my brain has never gotten wrong, alone, with him on the bench where the net used to put him beside me.
They live in my kitchen.
Bodie called it and Karl built it and it’s worse than the film, because the film is silent and this isn’t.
Three of them at the top of the blue every shift, a forest that re-grows the second I clear it.
I find the first puck through a screen. Glove.
Freeze it. I find the second the same way.
I’m square and set, where the geometry says to be.
The geometry holds, because it’s never lied to me.
Then they make it stop holding the way they want it to stop.
The first goal is a point shot through two bodies that I never see leave the stick.
I get a piece. The piece isn’t enough and it trickles, and their third man, the one Lundy named, is at the back post because he peeled off the rush instead of chasing.
Exactly the shape Lundy drew on the crutches.
I knew it was coming. Knowing didn’t put my pad on the post in time.
One to nothing.
The second is the cross-seam, the hard east-west that moves me. I don’t reset twice. I take the first one away the way he said. The puck is already gone into the room I just left before my pad finds the post.
Two to nothing. My building goes quiet the way a home building goes quiet. Worse than roaring.
Calisse. Find the puck. Let the rest be noise.
The rest won’t be noise. The rest is three men in my kitchen and a coach across the ice who watched the same four hundred views of film I watched and built a machine from it.
There’s no one two stalls down. No glove tapping a post, no voice saying that one’s yours and mine. There’s the net and the score.
The third I do not even fight. A rebound through too many sticks, in before I find it. The light goes on. Three to one. We got one back at some point, Marchetti I think. One doesn’t matter against three.
I get up off my knees, because getting up is the next thing and the next thing is the only unit of time I can hold.
I do not look at the bench. If I look at the bench my eyes will do what they’ve done all season, the scan that ends on him, and he will be there with a brace on his leg and his hands doing nothing because there’s nothing for them to do.
I can’t carry his face and the score in the same body at the same time.
So I look at the puck. I square to the next faceoff. The forest forms at the top of my crease, three of them, sticks up. I set my feet in the paint where the geometry says to set them, down by two in the Final with the season coming apart around my net. There’s no one coming.
I find the puck.
?