Page 11 of Five Hole

“Thibault. You live in here now?”

“I do, actually.” He comes in far enough to look at the frozen frame, and then he looks at it a while longer than a man looks at a still picture. “That’s a strange one to stop on.”

“It’s the reset.”

“I know what it is.” He doesn’t sit. He puts one hand on the back of a chair and leans his weight on it and lets the room be quiet, which is a thing big men are better at than the rest of us. “You grading him?”

“That’s the job.”

“So grade him.”

I open my mouth. Nothing comes out of it. That does not happen to me. Ask anybody who has ever tried to make it happen. And Bruno stands there and watches it happen anyway.

“Give me a scale,” I say finally. “You can’t just say grade him. Grade him against what?”

“Out of ten. Same as you’d grade anybody.”

“That’s not.”

“Yeah,” he says. “That’s what I thought.”

He knocks the doorframe on his way out, easy, no weight on it at all. “Lights, when you go.”

I sit in the blue dark with a stopped goalie on the wall and I don’t give it a number. What do you even give that? There’s no number for it.

Here’s why. I came in to scout a machine, and that’s not what I’ve got. A machine you can take apart on the bench, learn the trick of, put back together dumber than you found it. You can’t take apart what I saw on that tape. There’s no trick in it. There’s only a man, and a rope, and a roof. And the plain arithmetic that if he ever lets go with one hand the whole thing comes down on him. I’ve spent my life wanting the net he stands in. It never occurred to me to wonder what standing there cost the man who had it.

I catch it clean the day the power stutters.

There’s a storm sitting on the ridge all afternoon, the kind that turns the light in the barn the color of a bruise, and you can hear it lean on the roof. Long before anybody’s on the ice, the overheads hitch. Brown out. Come back. Casimir’s mid-sequence at the shelf when they go, and he stops.

The room does what a room does. “Pay the bill, Marquette,” somebody hollers down the row, and a freshman laughs a half-second too long, which is what freshmen are for, and Coop says, “That’s a sign, that’s a bad sign,” to nobody, and a D-man tells him to shut up in the fondest possible way. Fifteen guys turned a power flicker into a bit inside four seconds.

One guy didn’t.

I’m close. Three stalls down, pretending to fuss with a stick, tape in my hands going nowhere. I’ve got a clean line on his face. For one second, in the brown-out, before the backup lights catch, the room goes almost dark, and in the almost-dark I get the truest look at him I’ve ever gotten. It isn’t the face of a man doing a superstition. It isn’t the face of a guy knocking on wood. There’s no little smile in it, none of the private embarrassment a normal man wears when he does his lucky thing.

It’s the face of a man leaning his whole weight against something that’s leaning back.

The lights come up. He breathes out, slow, through his nose. His hands aren’t quite his own for a second and I watch him get them back. He touches the top corner, two fingers, then starts again from the top. By the third piece his hands have quit their small shaking. By the end he’s sealed up tight again. I sit there with a stick across my knees and feel something in my own chest roll over and show its belly.

Voyons donc. It’s not a routine. It’s not a charm. It’s not a machine idling.

I don’t have to finish the thought. I watched it. He built himself a chapel and he goes to his knees in it before every single game, because if he doesn’t, the thing on the other side comes in. And I’ve spent a year strolling into his chapel to move the candlesticks for a laugh.

I sit with that for a while. I think about my own room, two hours from anywhere, and how I never had to build a chapel. How I fill my quiet with cheap speakers and other people, because the quiet has never come after me with teeth. Not one night of my life. You don’t know a thing’s a gift until you meet the guy who never got it. I’ve wanted the net so bad it cost me sleep, sure, but that’s a want, and a want you can put down. What lives on the other side of that wall isn’t a want. It’s a thing that has to be knelt to, every day, forever, or it wins.

I find him after, in the tunnel, alone. Water bottle in his fist. Steam still coming off him from the skate. The storm’s still going out past the loading doors, and you can smell it, that wet-iron smell that gets into the concrete. Thunder rolls somewhere over the ridge, and the lights in the tunnel flicker once and hold. I don’t have a plan. That’s new. I always have a plan. I open my mouth to chirp him, because chirping’s the nervous system I got issued instead of the standard one. And what falls out is:

“Why bantam?”

He goes still. Not the shelf-still. A different one.

“That’s when it started. The order. Somebody told me once. Why then?” I don’t dress it up. For once in my life I don’t dress it up. I don’t put a grin on the front of it to give him somewhere soft to land. I just ask it. “What happened?”

The tunnel drips somewhere behind us. The storm mutters. He doesn’t answer right away, and I let him not answer, which is another new muscle I’m learning this week. It aches like one too.

For a second I think I’m about to get the locked box. Because it does.