2. Finn
Chapter two
Finn
The showers are empty by the time I get out of the ice bath, which is how I like it.
Maren already read me the riot act about the knee. Ice tonight. Tell her tomorrow if it climbs. Don’t be a hero.
“I’m never a hero,” I told her.
“That’s the problem,” she said and left.
I dress slow. The knee’s stiff and loud and I test it lacing my boots. Bend, straight, weight. Holds. It’ll hurt worse tomorrow. Everything hurts worse tomorrow. That’s the job.
The building’s near dark when I come up the tunnel. Cleaning crew running blowers over the seats. Somebody’s already stripped the ice of everything but the logos. Two hours ago this place had eighteen thousand people screaming, and now it’s a man with a leaf blower and me.
I should go straight to the truck.
I know the exact shape of the smart night from here. Drive home. Ice the knee. Text nobody. Wake up tomorrow with the loss a little smaller than it is right now.
I loop through the public lot instead.
Tell myself it’s the knee. Needs to keep moving, keep from seizing up on the drive. That’s a lie and I know it’s a lie the second it’s out, and I let it stand anyway, because the truth is I’m not ready to be alone in a quiet truck with a game I can still feel in my chest.
The loss is sitting where the want sat all night. Same spot. The two of them have kind of become the same thing.
Six, bored, skating away both times. The laugh from their bench I didn’t catch the words of. Ryan’s arm across me. The horn, and the scoreboard telling the truth we didn’t.
All of it, folded up small, in the place that’s already full.
“Hey! Forty-four!”
I keep walking.
My truck is about twenty yards away from me. I can see it. I count the steps in my head the way you count anything when you’re trying to keep your hands where they belong.
A nacho tray hits the pavement in front of me. Cheese and jalapenos going everywhere, bright orange under the lot lights. A beer bottle follows, shattering on the pavement at my feet.
Laughter.
Five of them by a lifted truck, all in Dallas jerseys, all deep into the case that makes men brave in a group they’d never be one-on-one.
“Game’s over,” I say. “Go home.”
I don’t stop walking. That’s the thing I want on the record, if anybody ever asks, which nobody with a camera will. I didn’t stop. With my feet heading to my truck and my voice calm, my presence conveyed a simple message: you won’t find it here; look elsewhere.
“That’s him.” The big one comes off the tailgate. “That’s the little guy. Six ate your lunch all night, forty-four.”
I keep walking.
“Skated away every time like a little bitch.”
And there it is.
The exact thing.
The thing everyone in that building saw all night and kept swallowing and calling discipline.
You took it and did nothing.
Some drunk in a parking lot, saying the one thing that’s been chasing me all night, and I feel the front come in. The pressure drop. The place in my chest with no room left in it.
I stop walking.
That’s the choice. Right there. Not the punch.
The stopping. A man walking to his truck doesn’t turn around to hear a drunk finish a sentence, and I turn around, because I want to hear it, because I want the reason, because part of me has wanted a reason since the second period and here’s a man dumb enough to hand me one.
“Say that again.”
“Finn.” Not a name I know. One of them, farther back, smart.
“Come on, man, let it go. He’s just…”
“No, let him say it again.”
The big one grins. He’s got no idea what he’s holding. To him I’m a small guy in a bad mood he can poke for a story to tell at work. He doesn’t know about the front coming in. He doesn’t know I’ve been folding things up all night and ran out of room.
He says it again.
Then he shoves me. Two hands, in the chest, hard.
It catches me on the bad knee and the leg’s already gone before I can set it.
I go down. All the way down, onto the pavement, glass under my palm, and the wind knocked half out of me, and five of them standing over me in the dark.
That matters, and it’s the part the pole camera will show and the clip never will.
I was on the ground. Five of them. One of me.
I want to be honest about what happens next, because it’s mine.
The first part I’d do again. A man on the ground with five guys over him and a bad knee doesn’t get to wait and see how friendly they are. I get a hand under me and I come up hard and I put the big one down when he reaches for me. Clean. He folds against the truck and he’s done.
That part was an answer. That part I can live with.
But he’s down. And the wiry one who swung at me is down, went into the glass and stayed there. The other three just froze, hands up. They’re not so brave now that it’s not five against one, especially since the skinny guy turned out to be a handful.
It’s over.
Everyone in that lot knows it’s over.
And I’m still moving.
There’s the big one, getting up off the pavement, sloppy and bleeding and no fight left in him. Done. And I close the last of the space he’s trying to put between us, and I hit him again.
Not to stop him. He’s stopped.
I hit him because the entire night finally has somewhere to go.
The defeat. The knee. The bored way Six skated off.
Ryan’s arm. Skated away like a little bitch.
All of it, everything I folded up small and told myself was discipline, it all comes out of me and goes into a drunk who was already down, and it feels, for exactly one second, like relief.
That’s the part I can’t ever explain to anybody. That it felt like relief.
He drops and he doesn’t get up right.
And the second is gone, and the relief with it, and I’m standing over a man who isn’t moving the way people move, in a lot gone dead quiet, with my knuckles split and my knee screaming and the loss still sitting in my chest exactly where it sat before.
Because that’s the joke nobody told me. It took nothing out.
It’s all still there. I added a man on the ground to it.
No crowd. No phones. Late enough that everybody with somewhere to be is already there. Just the drunks who stayed to find trouble, and me, who stayed for no good reason at all.
The only thing watching is a camera up on a light pole. A little dead eye I don’t think about until much later. When it’s the only thing in the world that knows the entire story.
Red and blue wash across the pickups. Fast. Stadium unit, already on the grounds the way they are on a game night, the ambulance rolling in behind it from wherever it sits parked.
“Nobody move.”
I don’t. Hands where they can see them before the words are all the way out.
I know this part. I’ve watched enough of it happen to other guys.
The one who reaches me knows my number. I watch it land on his face.
A Stampede fan, some guy who’s cheered for me on a Tuesday, looking at me now.
He looks at the man on the ground; the medics are already working, and back at me, and something in him goes tired.
“This means nothing to you, then, O’Sullivan?” Low. Almost as if it cost him to say it. He doesn’t wait for an answer; he knows I don’t have one. “Turn around.”
I turn around. Hands behind me. As the cold cuffs click twice, a second passes where the metal bites, my shoulders are pulled back, and my whole body comprehends what’s occurring a beat before I do.
The knee’s screaming. The split knuckles start to sting in the night air.
I stand there and let a stranger check the cuffs aren’t too tight, which is a kindness I don’t know what to do with.
They walk me to the car. Down the block, the arena’s dark now, the crimson and gold gone black, the building where we lost a couple of hours ago.
I’m still watching it. Easier than the medics.
The man on the ground has it harder. Compared to the little dead eye on the pole that witnessed it all and will not speak for me tonight, this is easier.
The back seat smells like disinfectant and somebody else’s terrible night. My hands are cuffed behind me so I sit forward, off the seat, and watch the lights go red then blue then red across the headliner, and the thing I can’t put down keeps turning over.
He shoved first. I was walking away.
Both true. Neither one’s the thing.
The thing is the last hit. He was down. It was over. And I hit him anyway, because I wanted to, and I told myself in the half-second I had that I still needed to, and I have never in my life been able to tell those two apart fast enough to stop.
Nobody taught me where that line is.
The rink paid me not to find it.
And tonight a stranger’s in an ambulance learning it in my place.
The door shuts. The lights turn. Red, blue, red.
I close my eyes and I do nothing with my face.
I haven’t earned it.