Page 19 of Five Hole

I watch him build it in real time, laying each brick, testing each brick, setting the next one on top, and standing there I understand something I wouldn’t say out loud with a gun on me. This is how he keeps everything. This is him, top to bottom. He takes a thing too big to hold and puts walls around it until it’s a size his hands can manage. He’s doing to us what he does to the dark. He’s squaring it on a shelf. And the terrible part, the part that tells me exactly how far gone I already am, is that I find it unbearably dear. I want to live in whatever small room he’s willing to build for me. I’d take a closet.

“A contained thing,” I say.

“A contained thing.”

And I should say no. I want to be clear about that, in case somebody runs the tape on my whole life someday and stops it right here. A smarter version of me is standing in that doorway screaming no. You can’t wall the two of you off from each other, you absolute goalie. What line do you draw down the middle of a person that you can stand on one side of?

But smarter-me doesn’t have his hand in the shirt. Smarter-me didn’t hear his own first name come out of Casimir Wrobel’s mouth against his skin. Smarter-me is a coward with good instincts, and in a whole life I have not taken his advice one single time, me. I’m not about to start. Not on the best morning I’ve ever had.

“Okay,” I say. “Contained.”

We shake on it. We actually shake on it, like it’s a trade at the deadline, like you can sit down and negotiate the terms of a thing that already has both hands wrapped around your throat. His palm is dry and cool, a goalie’s palm, and mine is not. I feel the shake go all the way up my arm and land somewhere it’s got no business landing. He sees it land. I know he sees it, because the corner of his mouth does a thing, a small private thing, a thing I’d fight the entire conference to see again. He lets go of my hand a half-second after he needs to. I count the half-second. I keep it.

I go to practice. The barn is loud and ordinary. Sticks, shouted names, the scrape of a hundred stops. Sowa lines the goalies up head to head and calls it competition. It is competition. So I put my mask down and become the daylight version of me, the one the room gets, the one who wants the net and nothing softer.

I outplay him in the duel. I go five-hole on him twice, clean, up the middle, looking him dead in the eye and going anyway. Both times it lands in me like a betrayal and a love letter at the exact same time. Because I’m the only guy alive who can find that gap on him. I proved it the first time I ever stood across from him. And now I’m finding it in front of the whole room, to keep a job I want, on the one man on earth I’d sooner throw my body in front of than beat.

The first one, the young guys make their sound, the short bright one. The second one they go quiet, because twice isn’t luck. Twice is a scouting report walking around in pads. I skate back to the line and I don’t look at him, because if I look at him I’ll do something my face can’t afford in front of Sowa. I look at my glove instead. I tap the puck out of it. I get back in line like it was nothing.

The second time, he says it flat, from his crease, not even mad. “You’re showing off.”

“For the scouts,” I say.

We both know it isn’t for the scouts. There are no scouts at a Tuesday practice. He knows it, I know it, and neither of us can say the true thing at the top of a faceoff circle with twenty guys and a goalie coach watching. So we say the rivalry thing. We’re so good at the rivalry thing. It’s the one language we’ve found, the one we’re both allowed to speak in daylight, out loud, where the team can hear. It fits in the mouth. It doesn’t give us away.

That’s the game now. Two games. The one everyone in the barn can see, and the one that only exists in the two feet between his stall and mine, in the thin place in the wall, in a contained thing we both already know is going to leak. Even standing there shaking hands over it like idiots.

Because here’s the thing about a contained thing. It doesn’t stay contained on its own. It’s a fire, and I built my half of the wall around it out of wet cardboard. Wet cardboard, at a fire, and who does that? I lay another sheet of it up every morning anyway. He’s better at walls than me. But even the best wall in this conference has a gap in it dead center, and I’m the guy who finds gaps.

I’m in so much trouble. And I’ve never in my life been happier to be losing.

Chapter 10

Casimir

The rule holds for a week. I want that on the record. The rule I built. The contained thing. Off the ice. Two things that do not know about each other. It holds for a week. Then it does not hold. Because you cannot wall a fire into a room and be surprised when the room gets warm.

He comes to my door after practice. Late. When the hall is emptied out and the Stable has gone quiet around us. He does not knock in words. He knocks in the rhythm. Two fingers. Once. The way I touch the corner of the shelf. He took the one private thing I have and made it a way to reach me. The fact of that should make me furious. It does not make me furious. That is the first thing I have lost.

I open the door.

He is in the hall in a hooded sweatshirt with both hands shoved in the front pocket of it, which is the first time all season I have seen him with nowhere to put his hands.

“So this is where you tell me to go to bed,” he says.

“Go to bed.”

“See, you say that.” He does not move. “But you opened the door. Not opening it was available to you. That was right there on the menu, Wrobel, and you went past it.”

“It was not on the menu.”

I did not decide to say that. It is out of me before the sentence has been checked, and it is the truest thing I have said out loud in this building in a year. Whatever he had loaded behind his teeth, he puts it away without firing it. That costs him. I watch it cost him.

“Okay,” he says.

* * *

I have decided, going in, that I will keep the order even here. That a body is a sequence like any other. That it has a first thing and a next thing. That I will run it clean. One piece and then the piece after it. Stay inside it. Come out the far side of the night still myself.