Fourteen hours.
“We cancel,” Maddox said. It was not a question.
“Cancel what,” Beckham said.
“The road trip. Duluth. Saturday night, right?”
“Yeah.”
“We cancel. We hunker. The rink has capacity. We have cots in the back. We have the kitchen.”
Wilder was already nodding. The captain’s role — note the problem and signal agreement — the rest of the team felt it and fell into line. Hudson was talking about pulling guys’ families in. Theo Nash was already on his phone. Banks was quiet in the way he had been quiet since his wife died, the way you are quiet when the world was already bad once and your body recognized the setup.
I listened to the logistics unfold. How many cots. How much food. How long the rink would hold heat if the power went out. Where the backup generator was located. Whether it had been serviced. The answer was yes, it had been serviced last month.Beckham was thorough about the things that could be managed. About the things that could be prepared for in advance.
Beckham was also, I understood, the kind of man who had accepted that you could not save everyone. That sometimes you had to choose between the structure and the person. That the rink was the priority because the rink could hold people. The rink was infrastructure.
No one asked whether they should check on people in town. No one asked whether there were individuals whose houses might not be heated. No one asked whether there was a woman who ran a diner and probably did not have a generator and definitely did not have supplies because she was too busy trying to keep the bank from taking her grandmother’s building.
Beckham and Maddox were talking about power priority — the rink’s generator would keep the common areas warm. The locker rooms. The offices. The weight room could cycle if they staggered its use.
I waited.
I waited through the conversation about food supply. Through the contingency discussion about water in case the municipal lines froze. Through the entire careful choreography of thirteen men deciding how to survive the next three days without losing the town.
When the conversation had cycled back to itself for the second time, when the redundancy had set in and no new information was coming, I stood up.
Maddox looked over.
“What,” Maddox said.
“Has anyone checked on the people in town.”
The conversation stopped.
Beckham said, “The town has its own emergency services. The sheriff has a plan. We’re the rink. We hold position. We wait it out.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I know.”
I let that sit.
Maddox said, “Knox.”
I said, “No.”
“No what.”
“No, you have not checked on the people in town.”
“We have not. We are going to assume they are prepared, and if they are not prepared, they are going to use the emergency services that are designed to service them, and we are going to make sure that the Fury has the resources to do our job, which is to maintain this rink as a shelter if the evacuation becomes necessary. That is how this works.”
I knew how it worked.
I had read the emergency management protocols when I arrived. I was the new assistant coach. I had read everything.
I knew that Beckham was right. That the rink’s role was structural, not personal. That the town had infrastructure. That you could not save anyone by burning yourself down first.
