Page 23 of Five Hole

I watch it happen through the window. The pass goes white while we are still on it. The ridge coming down in one long slow curtain. By the time we reach the hotel on the far side, the road we came in on is gone. Closed. A man in a plow truck at the turn, waving us past with a gloved hand. There is a certain peace in a road closing behind you. It decides a thing you were going to have to decide yourself. You cannot go back. So you stop spending the strength it takes to want to.

The bus was quiet on the way in. It is always quiet on a mountain road in a storm, even a busful of hockey players, even the loud ones. The driver took the switchbacks at a crawl with both hands high on the wheel and I watched the world narrow to the little cone the headlights could hold, and found, to my surprise, that I liked it. A storm is a kind of order. It makes the choices for you. There is one road and one speed and the next turn. A man who has spent his life squaring plates against the dark can rest. Rest a little. Inside weather that has already decided everything.

Sowa is across the aisle with his hat in his lap and his eyes shut. I take him for asleep until he isn’t.

“You like this,” he says, without opening them.

“Nobody has to decide anything.”

“Mm.” A long stretch of switchback goes under us. Chains on a truck coming the other way, then gone. “That is why men like us are dangerous in a good season. Nothing decides for us. So we go looking for something that will.”

“That is not a coaching point.”

“No,” he agrees. He does not open his eyes, and he does not say another word the rest of the mountain, and I sit with it the whole way down the far side, which is exactly what he intended and both of us know it.

Half the rooms the team booked have gone to travelers stranded off the highway. The lobby is full of them. Families in the wrong coats. A baby somewhere winding up. Marquette works it with the front desk in his low way and comes back with fewer keys than we have bodies. Moose comes down the aisle of the lobby with his clipboard and the face that shows nothing and reads the new pairings off it. Flat. Name by name. The way he reads everything.

He gets to the bottom of the list.

“Goalies,” he says, and hands me a key. One key.

I look at the key. I look at Moose. Moose Tessier has handed a wrong-size glove to every freshman on this roster. Straight-faced. For the sole pleasure of watching each one work it out. In slow dawning horror. Moose sees everything in this program and says a tenth of it. Moose does not make mistakes with equipment. A rooming list, in Moose’s hands, is equipment.

“One key?” I say.

“One room. One bed. Storm. Problem?”

Fortin arrives at my shoulder out of nowhere with his bag already up on it. “Is there a problem, Wrobel? The man asked if there’s a problem.”

“No problem.”

“He says no problem, Moose.”

“I heard him.”

He is already moving on down the list. Already handing the next key to the next pair. Over his shoulder. In the flat voice he uses for the weather and for everything else the world does: “You’ll manage.”

He does not look back. Watching the back of his head go, I would swear to a smile. Something almost like one. In the set of his shoulders. Moose. Sees everything. Says a tenth of it. Routes the last of it, apparently, straight at me.

* * *

We ride the elevator up together. Because there is only the one, and there is no version of this where we take separate cars. That is the first crack in it. On the road we always take separate cars. We stand at the doors and watch the numbers and wait each other out. It is stupid. It is careful. It has kept us safe all season. Tonight there is one elevator and one key and one storm. We stand in the small moving box together with our bags between us. Not touching. And the careful thing we built does not have a rule. Not a rule for a mountain closing a road.

The room is small and too warm. There is one bed. There is nowhere in it for the two things that do not know about each other. Nowhere for them to stand apart.

The danger sits in exactly that. On campus there are two rooms and the thin place between them, and a door I open on my own terms, in the dark, when I have decided to. Here there is one door and one bed and a boy sitting on the end of it unlacing his boots, pretending his hands are steady on the laces. Every rule I built was for off-ice. This is off-ice with no map.

I set my bag down square to the wall, out of habit, before I have thought about it, and I understand that I brought the order into the room with me, because the order is the only luggage I never learned to put down. He watches me do it and says nothing about it. That is one of the things I have come to trust in him. On the ice it would be intel. Here he just lets it be a thing I do.

The radiator ticks under the window. The storm leans on the glass. He gets one boot off and sets it down and does not look up. Which for him is a kind of noise.

“I can take the floor,” he says. “That what you want?” Not meaning a word of it. Watching me sideways. The way he watches a shooter coming down the wing. Reading which way I will go before I go there.

“No,” I say.

That is all it takes. One word. He gets the other boot off and stands and crosses the small warm room, and I meet him in the middle of it. It is not the door-in-the-dark thing. It is not the quick hard contained thing we do at home. Not with a wall to hide behind. It is his hands coming up to my face. Both of them. Mine going to the small of his back. The whole long day coming down all at once. The bus and the ridge and the two elevators.

When we get to the bed it is slow. Slower than we have ever let it be. There is no clock in the room and neither of us reaches for one. There is no wall. There is no one on the other side of anything to be quiet for. No team down the hall. No thin place. No daylight waiting to make us strangers again in the morning. There is a storm on the window. A lamp we do not turn off. A boy under my hands. A boy who has stopped pretending anything at all.