8. Finn
Chapter eight
Finn
The alarm goes off at four-thirty and for one merciful second I don’t remember where I am.
Then I move, and my whole body files a complaint, and I remember.
Nine days in and I’ve unlocked a whole new catalog of pain, which is great, love that for me.
Hockey pain I get. This is a different genre.
This is what your back feels like after doing the job of a machine somebody was too cheap to buy.
My hands look like I lost a fight with the fence, which, most days, I do.
There’s a blister on my palm with its own pulse.
I named it. Seemed rude not to, given how hard the little bastard’s working.
I lie there for exactly ten seconds, which is all the self-pity the schedule allows.
Then I get up, because the alternative is explaining to a judge why I didn’t.
The hands’ quarters are a long bunkroom that smells like coffee somebody already made and boots nobody’s aired out since the Bush administration.
I pull on jeans stiff with yesterday and lace the work boots that are finally starting to feel like mine, and I go out into a dark that’s got a whole day loaded in it.
The chickens are already complaining from the coop. Juniper trots at my heel like she has been assigned to supervise me, and Mabel is asleep under the feed cart as if she pays rent.
Vicente’s at the barn. Vicente is always at the barn. I’ve started to suspect he doesn’t sleep, powers down standing up like a horse.
“You’re late,” he says.
I’m four minutes early. I’ve learned not to argue this one. Out here “late” means “not already sweating,” and there’s no winning it, so I shut up and grab the damn fork.
Here’s what nobody tells you. You can be the best-conditioned athlete in a building of eighteen thousand people and be completely, humiliatingly useless at moving hay.
I know how to move fast. I know how to take a hit and give one and read a play three seconds before it happens. I do not know how to set a fence post so it doesn’t lean, or throw a bale so it lands where I’m aiming, or do anything with a horse that isn’t standing near it hoping.
Vicente corrects me maybe forty times a day. He doesn’t soften any of them.
“Not like that.”
“Like this?”
“No.”
That’s the whole lesson. No. Over and over, until my hands figure out what my brain can’t be told.
It’s the most I’ve been coached and the least I’ve been praised since I was eight years old, and some ugly proud part of me wants to tell him where to put the fence post, and I eat it instead, because the one thing I will not do in front of these men is quit.
Some of it comes in Spanish. Vicente doesn’t decide to switch, it happens when his hands move faster than his patience, a low fast run of it at me or the post or God, and I catch about one word in ten.
Despacio. He says that one enough that I work out it means slow down, or you’re an idiot, or both.
Half this ranch runs in a language I don’t have, and nobody’s slowing it down so the felon can keep up.
Fair enough. I keep my mouth shut and my ears open and I start banking the words I catch, like a man saving for something he can’t name yet.
That’s the currency out here. I clocked it the first day. Nobody cares who I am. A couple of them care enough to want to hit me and one kid asked me to sign a puck he drove home to get, but mostly they’re asking one question: does the famous guy fold when it gets hard.
I don’t fold. It’s the only thing I’ve got out here and I’m hanging onto it with both wrecked hands.
Jason’s the one who throws me a bottle of water around ten without being asked. Three months into a placement for a DUI that put his truck through a fence and a parked car, quiet, doesn’t perform anything. He watches me trying to set a post and says, “Choke up on it. You’re fighting the bar.”
I choke up on it. The post goes in straight.
“Huh,” I say.
“Yeah,” Jason says, and goes back to his own row, and it’s the closest thing to a friendly word I’ve gotten from anybody out here who isn’t a horse.
She’s everywhere and she never looks at me.
That’s what I can’t get past. Catalina runs this place like gravity.
Quiet, total, not up for a vote. She turns up wherever the problem is, sleeves shoved up, and says the one sentence that fixes what six men have been standing around failing to fix for an hour.
And in nine days she has looked directly at me maybe twice, both times about work, both times about as long as you’d look at a gate latch you already know is closed.
I know what she’s doing. I invented the move. You don’t look at what you’re most aware of.
I’m aware of her too. And I want her, which is the single dumbest thing I could pick to want right now, and lately I’ve been picking dumb things to want like it’s a paid position.
She’s got a decade on me, zero interest in my highlight reel, and every reason to treat me like the liability I am.
And she doesn’t even have to lift a finger to end me, she told me so my first morning: one wrong move out here and the deal collapses on its own, no phone call, no favor, nobody to blame but me.
Wanting her is handing the collapse a reason.
One more felony-adjacent decision on a list I clearly cannot stop making.
Cool. Good. Adding it to the pile.
Bonita drifts to the rail when I pass the paddock. She does it every time now, and I’ve stopped pretending I don’t stop.
Today she does the other thing. She swings her head around and looks at me, dead level, one eye the size of my fist, and holds it.
Not the way a dog looks at you, wanting something.
The way something bigger than you looks at you when it’s decided to check.
A thousand pounds of animal reading me right down to the parts I don’t show the men, and finding them, and not looking away.
It makes me feel about two inches tall. It makes the whole morning feel enormous and me feel small inside it, which I did not come out here expecting a horse to do to me.
“Quit it,” I tell her.
She doesn’t quit it. Horses don’t take notes. She keeps reading, and whatever she finds, she doesn’t spook at it, and God knows why, but that gets me.
The drive is an hour and change and it’s the seam where one life gets stitched onto another that doesn’t fit it.
I drive south still wearing the ranch. Dirt in the creases of my knuckles I can’t scrub out at a gas-station sink, the smell of animal and diesel baked into a shirt I’ll change in the parking lot.
Windows down the whole way, and around the halfway mark the thing in my chest starts winding up, because I know what’s waiting, and the only living thing that looked at me straight all day was a pregnant horse that doesn’t even like me.
I want to put my foot through the floor of this truck.
I want to find number six and finish the conversation.
I want to drive off this road into something and hear it break, because at least breaking makes sense, at least I’m good at that.
The wanting-to sits right up under my sternum where it always sits, and I hold it down the way I’m learning to hold everything down out here, and my hands are shaking on the wheel by the time the skyline shows up.
And beneath it all, she’s there, quieter and worse. There’s this woman I shouldn’t even be looking at, and I’m craving a life that’s not mine, all while my current one is falling apart because of my own doing.
Suspension means I skate alone, then watch from the tunnel while they run the drills I should be in. You don’t know how much something belongs to you until you’re behind glass watching other men do it.
Three games. One down. And the careful way the guys nod at me now, like I’m something that might go off. Nobody’s cruel. That’s almost worse. Cruel I could skate at. This is distance, a whole room of men I’ve bled next to deciding, quietly, to keep clear until they know which Finn came back.
Ryan skates over on a water break. Leans on the boards.
“You look like hell,” he says.
“Ranch life.”
“That a complaint?”
I think about it, which surprises me. “No.”
He nods slow, like I passed something. Ryan stopped me from throwing the punch that would’ve saved us all this trouble, back on the ice that night, and neither of us has said a word about it since. Some things you carry next to a guy.
“Colt and Mack are looking for you,” he says. “Fair warning.”
They ambush me in the room after.
“There he is,” Mack says, arms wide. He’s the big warm one, the guy who never met a room he couldn’t fill. “Our own cowboy. Tell me you’ve got the hat.”
“There’s no hat.”
“Colt. The man has no hat.”
Colt doesn’t say anything. Colt reaches into his stall, unhurried, and comes out with an actual straw cowboy hat, creased and sweat-stained and clearly owned, and holds it out to me across the room without a word.
Because of course Colt has a hat. Colt talks like Texas and drives a truck older than Mack and I’m halfway sure ropes things on the weekend.
Colt’s the most cowboy thing in a building full of Canadians and he’s never made a thing of it.
“He’s had that in his bag the whole time,” Mack says, betrayed. “You’ve been waiting.”
“Man needs a hat,” Colt says. First words out of him, flat, final. He tips it at me. “Take it. You’re gonna cook out there without one, hockey hair or not.”
I take the hat. It fits, which is the funniest and most unsettling part.
“See, now he’s engaging,” Mack crows. “That’s growth. Nine days ago this man would’ve told us both to eat glass.”
He’s not wrong. Nine days ago I might have. There’s something about being humbled at dawn by a fence post that takes the edge off a guy by nightfall.
Colt finally looks up. “You good out there, though? Actually.”
And it’s a real question, under the bit, the kind Colt only asks with his eyes half on his stick so you don’t have to make it a thing. These two didn’t write me off after the lot. Half the league did and most of my own building did, and these two showed up to give me hats.
“Getting there,” I say, which is the most honest I’ve been with anybody in nine days.
“Good,” Colt says, and that’s the end of it, and it’s enough.
By the time I point the truck back north it’s full dark and I’m running on a gas-station sandwich and the kind of tired that comes from fitting two jobs into one day. The schedule protects the team hours. It doesn’t make the miles shorter.
Two lives. Neither one gets my best. Sully saw it today, watched me skate and didn’t say anything, which from Sully is a paragraph of concern. The ranch is grinding me down at one end and the game’s waiting at the other and there’s not enough of me to give full measure to both.
Here’s the part I don’t say out loud, driving back up a black county road toward a bunkroom that smells like other men’s boots.
I don’t hate it.
The work. The ranch. Any of it. By every law of who I’m supposed to be I should be counting down the days on the wall like a man in a cell, and instead I caught myself today, elbow-deep in a job I couldn’t do a week ago and can do now, feeling something I don’t have a name for and don’t trust. Nine days ago a fence post beat me.
Today I set eight of them and one of them was straight because I made it straight, with these hands, and nobody handed it to me and nobody bought it for me and no agent negotiated it.
I don’t know what to do with that. I’ve never in my life been proud of anything that didn’t come with a crowd.
The ranch is the one I’m driving toward. I tell myself it’s the sleep. You drive toward where the bed is. That’s all it is.
It’s not the sleep.
Somewhere up this road there’s a woman who won’t look at me and a horse who reads me like a book and a man who says no until my hands learn something true, and God help me, at the end of the worst stretch of my life, that’s the direction that feels like the right way. I don’t look at why.
I drive toward it, and tell myself that’s the sleep too.