Chapter Sixteen
SAINT
The league leader came to Austin on a Saturday, and the building sold out by Tuesday, which had never once happened in franchise history, and Rich walked the concourse all week touching things like a man checking whether his lottery ticket was still in his pocket.
Quebec. First in the conference, first in goals, first in the standings since November, a power play that moved the puck like it was being graded on it, and a first-line center named Tremblay-Roy who had scored on me twice in January, both times high glove, both times with a little nod afterward that I had been carrying around since like a pebble in a skate.
That was the ritual now. I had stopped pretending otherwise, at least internally.
Oatmeal, tape, pads, pipes, and somewhere in the sequence, her voice doing something unnecessary to my day.
Olle’s machine, one part added. The machine did not seem to mind.
That was its own problem, filed under later.
Warmups, the barn was already loud. There were signs.
There are always signs now, that’s the era we live in, SUNSHINE 00 and MARRY HIM JUNIE and one enormous bedsheet in the family section reading THE TORTILLA FORGIVES YOU that I chose not to interrogate.
I skated my crease, cut my grooves, and went to the pipes.
Two taps left, two taps right. Quiet, in Swedish, the usual briefing: big night, boys, first place is here, the glove side has been drifting high all month and we both know it, hold the line.
The left post rang a little flat, the way it does in a humid building. The left post is older. It’s allowed.
Then the puck dropped, and Quebec came at us like the standings were a rumor they intended to confirm.
I will keep the hockey brief, because Junie says my game recaps read like maritime accident reports, but the record should show the shape of it.
They put nineteen shots on me in the first period.
Nineteen. A team gets nineteen shots in a period when your defense is having a group emergency, and ours was, Mason was playing through the shoulder he swears is fine at a volume that meant it wasn’t, Pickle got walked twice by Tremblay-Roy and came back to the bench the second time looking like a man who’d seen the future.
Barb chewed her gum at a speed I’d only seen once before, in the Hartford meeting.
And I had it. Some nights the puck is a rumor and some nights it’s a fact, big and slow and honest, and that night every shot came in wearing its intentions like a name tag.
I stopped all nineteen. Stopped a two-on-none in the second that had no business being stopped, got a toe on a deflection I never saw and will take no questions about, and in the third, with four minutes left and us up one on a Mason goal he celebrated with the wrong arm, Tremblay-Roy walked in alone off a turnover and went high glove, the pebble shot, the nod shot, and I had been waiting for it since January, and I took it out of the air like it was mail addressed to me.
He looked at me. I looked at him. No nod this time. He tapped his stick on my pads on the way past, which in this sport is a formal apology, and skated away, and the building made a sound I want to describe accurately: it was the sound of eighteen thousand Texans deciding hockey was theirs now.
Final: 2-1. Forty-six saves. Best game of my season, maybe of my career, and I say that as a factual assessment and not a feeling, because I checked the numbers after, the way I check everything.
Then came the part I need to explain, because it was not an accident and I want credit.
Normally after a game like that, the scrum finds me and I give it three words and a nod and the beat reporters write “Lindell, characteristically brief” and everyone goes home. That was the standing arrangement between me and the English language on camera.
But I had spent the week watching Junie fight the engagement graph.
She didn’t know I watched. The viability review was April 30, the numbers had plateaued in the soft middle of March, and she’d been in the media room until nine three nights running, A-B testing thumbnails, muttering at Solange, wearing the specific bright face that means the real one is tired.
On Thursday I’d heard her tell Rich the accounts needed “a moment that isn’t manufactured,” and Rich had made the noise he makes, and she’d smiled at him like a professional and then stood in the tunnel for a while not filming anything.
So when the scrum formed after the Quebec game, and the first reporter asked the standard question, the one built for three words, “Saint, forty-six saves, what was working tonight,” I set my mask on the shelf of my glove, looked into the cameras, and gave them a paragraph.
“Three things were working,” I said. “First, the building. That was the loudest this barn has ever been, and a goalie hears his rink the way a sailor hears his engine, and tonight the engine sounded like a playoff team’s.
Second, Mason Duffy scored the winner playing hurt, which he’ll deny, so ask him about it and watch him lie with his whole face.
Third, their top center has been beating me high glove all year, and tonight I finally read his hands instead of the scouting report, because sometimes the answer to a problem is to stop studying it and look at the man.
That’s it. Three sentences. I’m told that’s my limit. ”
Silence. A full second of it. Somewhere behind the cameras a beat reporter whispered “oh my God” into a live mic, and off to the left, at the edge of the scrum, Junie stood with her phone up and her mouth open, filming, and her face was doing a thing I filed and will keep.
It got worse, by which I mean better. A second reporter, emboldened, giddy, pushed his luck: “Saint, the league’s noticing this team. What do you want people to know about Austin?”
“That we’re not a novelty act,” I said. “The cat has a stall, the coach has forgotten more hockey than I know, and the woman who runs our accounts built a following out of a market everyone said was a punchline. People keep asking when the joke ends. Look at the standings. It’s not a joke, and it hasn’t been since January. ”
Then I nodded, once, and left, because a man should exit while the market’s high, a thing I learned from watching Junie edit.
The clip did what her graphs needed it to do.
By the time I was out of my gear it had a number with an M on it.
By the time I’d fed Tuna the ceremonial post-win treat, the league’s own account had posted it with the caption “THE GOALIE TALKS??” and two national shows had requested interviews through Rich, who was reportedly crying near the cactus tie, and the group chat had renamed itself, briefly, “Saint’s Media Training Committee” before Mason changed it back on the grounds of tradition.
Junie found me in the tunnel after, when the building had mostly emptied and Gus was making his slow last laps. She had her phone in her hand and the real face on, the Waco one, no wattage added.
“Forty-six saves,” she said, “and you buried the lede.”
“Which lede.”
“You did press. Voluntarily. In paragraphs. You made a JOKE, on camera, a structured joke with a setup, do you understand what happened tonight? The internet thinks you’ve been media trained. There are threads. Somebody’s claiming I wrote it for you.”
“You didn’t write it.”
“I know I didn’t write it, Lindell, that’s the point, I’ve been trying to write you for three months and the best I ever got was a taco rating, and then you go out there on your own and do numbers I couldn’t buy.
” She stopped. Looked at me the way she looks at footage before she decides what it is. “You did it for the graph.”
“I did it because they asked what was working.”
“Saint.”
“The engagement numbers plateaued on the eleventh,” I said.
“The viability review is April 30. You’ve been in the media room past nine all week.
You told Rich you needed a moment that wasn’t manufactured.
” I picked up my bag. “It wasn’t manufactured.
I meant every sentence. I just usually don’t say them out loud. Tonight there was a reason to.”
She stood very still in the tunnel, and Gus’s machine hummed by out on the ice, and somewhere in the building a door boomed shut, and she said, quietly, “You’re the worst fake boyfriend in professional sports,” which from her, in that register, I logged correctly.
“Satisfactory,” I said, and got the laugh, the real one, and carried it out to the truck like a save.
I was still in the parking lot when it happened.
Engine on, defrost clearing, phone in the cupholder syncing to the truck, and her name came up, not a text to me, a text she was forwarding to me, and then a call, and I answered and her voice came through the speakers with all the wattage gone from it, all of it, none left, and she said:
“Saint. Someone just texted my work phone.”
“Who.”
“I don’t know the number. It’s a screenshot.” I heard her swallow. “It’s the Rulebook. The early draft, the one from my template folder, before we moved it. Rule 7 is highlighted. Yellow. And under the screenshot there’s one line of text.”
“Read it to me.”
“It says,” and she read it flat, like evidence, which it was, “‘Care to comment? Smiley face. D.’”