Page 10 of Five Hole

I’ve been trying to beat him. Outwork him. Outshine him in the net beside his until Marquette has to turn his head. Fine. Good. I keep doing it. But it’s the long road, and it’s uphill both ways, because the man’s a machine. Machines don’t lose their jobs to a backup making noise. And I’ve made a lot of noise.

Machines lose their jobs when somebody finally works out how they run.

I know a little about being a machine. Two years I’ve been the guy who’s always ready and never needed, the one in the clean dry pads who takes the whole warm-up and then takes a seat. You learn to look like discipline from the outside so nobody clocks the hunger underneath. So I’ve been faking a kind of order myself, and a faker always knows a faker. Except when I look hard at Casimir I don’t find a faker. I find the real thing. That’s the part that starts to worry me.

So I quit trying to break his order and I start trying to read it. I make myself his student, which is a job I never applied for. I get to the barn even earlier, which shouldn’t have been possible and was. I stand in the corridor outside the equipment room with a coffee going cold in my hands, the door propped open like it always is, and I watch him set his gear without letting him catch me. And I collect things.

He touches the top corner of the shelf the moment the blocker goes down. Two fingers. Once. A man tapping a doorframe on his way through. Never twice. Never skipped. I watched a week of mornings and it was the same two fingers every single day. The sameness of it stopped being funny somewhere around the fourth morning.

If the rink crew drops something loud in the middle of the sequence, he doesn’t curse, doesn’t sigh. He goes back to the top and starts the whole thing clean. Patient as rain.

He drinks water at the same points, always. Like the sequence has stations along it.

He sets the leg pads faces out. Always out. I watched him do it a dozen mornings before I understood there’s no reason for it a coach would sign off on. The faces don’t need to see the room. He needs them to. It’s the kind of thing that isn’t about the gear at all, and it took me the better part of a week to let myself say that out loud.

He doesn’t hum. He doesn’t talk to himself. Where I’d fill the room, he empties it, on purpose, down to the tick of the bad light. He lives in that much quiet like a fish lives in cold water. It’s the one place he looks entirely at home, and it’s a place I’d drown.

It does not occur to him to check whether anyone’s watching. Who lives like that? When I worked it out I felt like a thief. A man who never checks if he’s watched is a man who’s decided he’s alone.

One morning he nearly catches me. I’m too close, all the way inside the room, back behind the gear cage pretending to hunt for a lost roll of tape. He stops mid-sequence and goes still. Head up. I’m sure I’m caught, sure he’s about to turn and find me standing there with his whole life in my hands. He doesn’t turn. He waits. He listens, an animal working out whether the sound it heard has teeth in it. Then he decides it doesn’t, goes back to the top, starts clean. I stand there with my heart slamming so loud I’m amazed he can’t hear that, at least. And I understand that I didn’t want to get caught because I didn’t want him to stop. Not the sequence. The being-let-near-it. I keep telling myself I’m scouting. A scout wants the guy to stop. Every time I run it back, that’s the sentence that won’t sit down.

Sowa catches me, though. Not Casimir. Sowa.

I come around the corner with my coffee going cold and he’s standing in the corridor like he grew there, arms folded, watching me the way he watches a puck whose flight he already knows.

“Fortin.”

“Coach.”

“You’re here early.”

“I’m always here early. It’s my whole thing. Ask the mop kid, he’ll vouch for me, we go back years.”

“You are here early and you are not on the ice.” He gives that room to breathe, which with Sowa is longer than a man would choose. “There is a word for a goalie who studies another goalie.”

“Preparation?”

“That is one of the words.”

“How many are there?”

“Two.” He unfolds his arms and starts past me toward the room, and stops, and does not turn around. “Be careful which one it turns into. From the outside they look the same.”

“And from the inside?”

“From the inside,” he says, “you always know.”

Then he’s gone through the door, and I stand in the corridor holding a cold coffee, being extremely careful not to run that one back.

I put all of it in the drawer with the rest of him, and the fuller the drawer gets the worse I feel, and it takes me most of the week to work out why. There’s a name for what I’m doing, when a guy does it right. Preparation. Every coach I’ve ever had would call it homework and hand me a gold star. So why does it feel like reading somebody’s mail? You don’t feel guilty about homework. You feel guilty when you’ve started to care about the guy whose life you’re taking notes on.

One night I pull his tape when the film room’s empty. The room smells like burnt coffee and the carpet that’s been in here since before I was recruited. I put my feet up on the chair in front and I tell myself it’s scouting, and it half is. Every goalie studies every goalie, that’s the work, and any coach in this conference would tell you the same thing with a straight face. You learn a man’s tells so you can be him or beat him. So I sit in the dark and run Casimir Wrobel a full season back. Save after save. The blue light on my face. And I watch him make the same stop the same way until the sameness quits looking boring and starts looking like a man holding a rope with both hands so nobody notices it’s the only thing keeping the roof up. I watch him give up a goal, one of the few he gave up all year, and I watch what he does after. Which is nothing. Which is reset, glove up, blocker square, the exact same crouch, like the puck had never gone in. It should look like ice water. It looks like the loneliest thing I’ve ever seen.

I stop the tape. The frame sits there on the wall, a goalie coming up out of a crouch with the light already on behind him, and I don’t advance it and I don’t rewind it, and that’s how Bruno finds me.

The door goes and I don’t jump, because jumping is an admission.

“Fortin.”