Chapter Three Zach
The league takes four days to decide what I already know.
Four days I’m not allowed in my own building.
Nobody warns you about this part of a team suspension.
It isn’t the games. It’s the key card that stops working, the group text that goes quiet because nobody knows what to say to a guy who got sat down, the morning alarm you don’t turn off because your body has gotten up at five-forty for twenty years and doesn’t accept new information.
I can’t sit still, so I run.
Not like I run for camp, with a watch and a number to beat.
I just go out into the heat and let the city take me.
Nine years in San Antonio and I couldn’t tell you what sits four blocks off the River Walk.
You don’t learn a city when you give the whole of yourself to a rink.
You learn the building and the road there and back, and call it a life because you’re winning.
I could find ice if I wanted it. There’s a public sheet on the east side that’d let me on before open for cash. Two years ago I’d have been there at five every morning of a suspension, skating alone in the dark like penance, proving something to a room that couldn’t even see me do it.
I don’t go.
There’s a thing in here I don’t look at too hard.
That I stood at my door one morning this week with my skates in one hand and my runners in the other, and I put the skates down.
Some engine in me that used to turn over at the first open sheet just. Didn’t.
I laced up the shoes instead and ran till my lungs burned, and I let the restlessness go somewhere that isn’t the game, for the first time in twenty years.
I don’t have a word for what that means yet. I’m not sure I want one.
The narrative starts without me. It always does. I make the mistake of turning on the TV the second night, and there’s the freeze-frame from the fight, my arm cocked and Doyle’s head gone sideways, and under it two men in good suits debating whether a franchise should pay to keep me around.
I turn it off. The story’s out of the building now, loose, and a story doesn’t wait around for the guy it’s about.
On the fifth day Eddie flies in.
Twenty years my agent, and he still does the hard ones in person. Still thinks a man deserves to take the number off a face instead of a phone. We sit in a glass meeting room with a table too big for two people, and he slides his tablet across like he’s serving me something.
“Three games and a fine,” he says. “Fine’s the max for the category. Thirty grand and change.”
“Three’s light.”
“Three’s a gift. Doyle’s people wanted a number with a five in front of it, and two beat guys had already written the column.” He doesn’t say what the calls cost him. Eddie never does. “You should be relieved.”
“Am I?”
He leans back. Looks at me over the glasses he won’t admit he needs.
“No,” he says. “You’re not. Because you can do the rest of the math same as me.”
Here’s the math.
The three games don’t matter. The season ended four days after they threw me out of it, four games to one, the last two without me, and a suspension with no games left to eat rolls forward into October.
First three of next season, if I have one.
Underneath it, the team’s number: benched, indefinite. Nobody serves both. I just sit.
What matters is the clause.
Eleven months ago they put a conduct provision in my deal.
Standard language, they said. Boilerplate.
I signed it in a room with Tessa across the table not looking at me, her pen already capped, the whole thing done before I’d finished reading it.
That’s how she works. She hands you the pen at the exact second arguing starts to look like weakness.
The clause says a league suspension in the term of the contract triggers team discretion.
Discretion is a soft word for a hard thing. It means they don’t have to bring me back. It means the option year they’d have picked up in July without a phone call is now a choice, and choices get made by men in suits who’ve been waiting for a reason.
“Contract year,” Eddie says, like I need reminding. “You wanted to bet on yourself. I told you to take the extension in December.”
“December they were offering enforcer money for a job that’s already gone.”
“They were offering money.” He spreads his hands.
“Zach. You’re thirty-four. You’re a defenseman who fights, in a league that stopped paying for the fighting and started paying for the skating three drafts ago.
The suspension didn’t make that true. It handed everyone a clean place to finally say it out loud. ”
There it is. Plain, on the table, in Eddie’s flat voice.
I’ve been outrunning that sentence for two seasons.
Faster feet, harder hits, first man on the ice and last one off, so the room can’t picture itself without me.
And a kid named Doyle put his shoulder into my rookie, and I did the only thing I’ve ever been reliably good for, and it cost me the last lie I had left.
“So what do I do?” I say.
“You serve the three. You keep your name out of everything that isn’t hockey. And you let the building decide what you’re worth to it.” Eddie stands, gathers his tablet. “And you let me do the worrying. That’s what you overpay me for.”
“I don’t pay you enough for this.”
“No,” he says. “You don’t.”
At the door he stops.
“For what it’s worth. There’s still a version of you they’d want around a long time. It’s just not the one you’ve spent your life selling them.”
Then he’s gone, and I sit in the too-big room and try to work out what the hell else I’ve got to put on the table.
Marc catches me in the players’ lot.
He’s leaning on my truck when I come out, tie loose, sleeves pushed up, the assistant GM look he wears like it itches. We’ve been friends since we were sixteen and sharing a billet bed in Brandon, two kids too big for one mattress. There is no version of my life he isn’t standing in.
“You look like hell,” he says.
“I’ve had a week.”
“I know. I was in the room for half of it.” He rubs the back of his neck. “For what it counts, I argued for less on the bench. Me and Sully both. Got outvoted by people who don’t have to look at your face when the number lands.”
“Upstairs.”
“Upstairs.” He says it careful. Marc knows what upstairs means, knows whose office sits up there behind the frosted glass.
He’s the only person alive who knows exactly what her being here does to me, and he’s never once made me say it out loud.
That’s Marc. He guards the ground he knows I can’t stand on.
“It’s fine,” I say.
“It’s not. But that’s not why I’m out here in ninety-five degrees.
” He glances back at the building, then at me, and drops his voice even though the lot’s empty.
“They’re cooking something. Marketing. Carrigan’s got a whiteboard and that smile he gets, and every time I walk past his office the door’s already closing. ”
“Cooking what?”
“I don’t know yet. That’s what’s got me sweating through a good shirt instead of sitting in the meeting.
” He holds my eye. “But I know the smell of a plan that uses a person instead of helping one. And I know you’re the person on the board.
They don’t rehab a man’s image because they care about the man, Zach.
They do it because somebody ran the numbers and there’s money in the story. ”
“There’s no story. I hit a guy who ran my rookie from behind.”
“There’s always a story if somebody upstairs wants to sell one.
” He pushes off the truck. Puts a hand on my shoulder, heavy, the way he’s done it since we were kids and one of us needed the other to stand still and take something true.
“So whatever they bring you. Whatever it is, however good it sounds in the room. You call me before you say yes. Not after. Before.”
“Marc.”
“Before, Zach. I mean it.”
I look at my best friend, the one man in this whole organization whose loyalty I’ve never had to price, and I give him the truth back.
“I’m running low on things I’m allowed to say no to,” I say.
Something moves in his face. Not quite worry. The front edge of it.
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “That’s the part that’s got me out here.”
He claps my shoulder once and goes back inside, into the building where somebody with a whiteboard is drawing up the rest of my life.
I drive home with the windows down and the radio off.
The apartment’s too clean. Idle does that to a man like me. Four days off my feet and I’ve scrubbed a kitchen that was already clean, reorganized a closet, oiled a glove that didn’t need it. A body built to be spent has to spend itself, and when you take the thing away, it starts eating the room.
I stand at the counter and don’t turn on a light.
My phone sits face up where I dropped it. No missed calls. Two years ago this thing never stopped. Media, teammates, the kid I mentor, the charity golf people. Now it’s a benched man’s phone, and it knows it, and it stays dark.
I pick it up anyway. Scroll to a thread I keep at the bottom and never open, a name I stopped letting myself type.
The last message in it is two years old and it’s mine and she never answered it.
I don’t know why I’m looking at it tonight.
Maybe because upstairs put her office over my head and a whiteboard under my future in the same week, and the walls I built around that thread are thinner than they were on Monday.
I put the phone back down. Face down this time.
I think about Eddie’s version of me they’d still want around. I don’t know that guy. I’ve never been paid to be him.
Then I think about a whiteboard, and a closing door, and Marc sweating through a good shirt to warn me in a parking lot, and I get the first real bad feeling of the whole bad week. Not about the suspension. That one’s already done its damage.
About whatever’s coming next, and how little I’m in a position to turn down.
I leave the light off and let the feeling settle in for the long stay.
The Damaged Enforcer.