Page 25 of Five Hole

“You nervous?”

“No.”

“Good. Be nervous. Nervous is fine.” He taps the top of my pad once with his stick. “Just don’t be careful.”

Then he’s gone down the row, because Rocco says his piece and assumes you’ll get to it on your own time.

Sowa comes by after him and doesn’t say good luck. Sowa would sooner swallow his own whistle.

“First one.”

“First one.”

“You’ll want to be busy early. Everybody wants to be busy early.” He hands me my stick, which he has not done for me before and does not remark on doing now. “Don’t go hunting work. It comes.”

“And if it doesn’t come?”

“Then you have a boring night and a win, and you complain about it to somebody, and it is not going to be me.”

Coop has his rhythm going in the corner, ball off the wall, off the floor, into his hand, the one nobody’s allowed to interrupt.

And Casimir isn’t playing. He’s got every reason on this earth to want me exactly bad enough to keep himself the one. He comes and stands at the end of my stall.

He doesn’t touch anything. He never touches anything that’s mine, the same way I’m not supposed to touch anything that’s his, except I always did, and that’s the whole story of us. He stands there in his warm-ups with his hands at his sides, looking at the wall over my head instead of at me, because looking at a person straight is the most expensive thing he owns and he spends it careful.

“When the horn goes and it rattles you,” he says, low, so the room doesn’t get it, “and it will, go back to the top. Do not chase it forward.” A breath. “Go back to the start of the thing and run it clean.” Another. “That’s what I do.”

I have to look at the ceiling a second so my face doesn’t do something in front of twenty guys.

Because he just handed me the rope. The private engine of him, the sequence he built one winter so the dark would stay on its own side of the wall. He leaned down over my stall and gave it away before I go stand in a net that’s supposed to be his. It’s the most naked thing he’s ever done in a room with people in it, and nobody else in the building knows they just watched it, because to them it looked like a senior giving a kid a word of nothing.

“Okay,” I say. My voice comes out normal, which is a small miracle. “Back to the top?”

“Back to the top.” He straightens, already gone, back inside himself, back to being the guy in a suit tonight because of me. But he did the thing first, and I get to carry it out onto the ice. And I do.

I play out of my mind.

I want to be careful how I say this, because a goalie who talks about his own good night is a goalie asking to get lit up the next one. But I was there and I’m telling you. I play out of my mind.

Thirty-one shots come at me and I turn away thirty. The one that beats me is a tip off a stick in front, a puck that changes its mind in the air, and everybody in the barn knows it isn’t my fault. I know it. So I do the thing. I go back to the top, I don’t chase it forward, I don’t let the one that got in walk me backward into the next three. I reset. Glove up. I run it clean, exactly like a guy told me to over the end of my stall. And the next shot dies in my chest like it was always going to.

The rest of it I couldn’t tell you in order if you paid me. It comes back in pieces, a glove save in the second that surprises me as much as it surprises the shooter, the puck just there in the web of it, me looking at my own hand like it made the save without me. And a scramble in the third where I lose my stick and throw my whole body across the crease with no economy at all, the puck somehow under me when the whistle goes. And their bench chirping me, me grinning back through the cage and giving it to them with interest through a mouthful of mouthguard.

There’s one in the second I’ll keep for the rest of my life. Their center on a two-on-one, the guy who fakes and waits, and I know he fakes and waits because I ran him in the dark last night until the animal wore out. So I wait too. I go dead still while the whole sheet keeps moving around me. I watched a wall at the other end of a rink do exactly this a hundred times when I was supposed to be resting. He fakes. I don’t bite. He waits. I wait longer. When he finally has to shoot he’s got nothing left to shoot at, because I gave him the fake back and kept the net. And the puck goes into my pads to die there. Behind the glass a guy says no way, out loud, no way. Best review I’ve ever gotten in my life.

The cold air burns in my chest by the third and my legs are gone in the good way, the way that means you spent all of it. The building, half full, makes the sound a building makes when the road team’s kid goalie won’t break, that low frustrated groan better than any cheer, because it’s your barn, your barn, making it.

We win. My teammates come off the bench and bury me, Rocco getting to me first, grabbing the back of my helmet, putting his forehead on my cage and saying something I don’t hear over the noise. From Rocco that’s a parade. The freshman is screaming. Somebody’s pounding my pads. And guys who have gone a whole season without saying my name in a hallway are yelling it into my earhole. It’s everything. The whole dream in a pile on top of me at center ice, the reason I get up in the morning.

And up in the seats, off the near blue line, high, there’s a man with a notebook.

I clocked him in the second, because you learn to clock them, a goalie learns the seats the way a deer learns the tree line. There’s a way a scout sits. Still. Apart. Not cheering for anybody, writing when nobody around him is writing. He was up there through my best period of hockey, and I let myself think, for one stupid second between whistles, that some of that pen was for me. Some of it, no?

It wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t even while I hoped it was.

He’s there for the senior. He came all this way to write down what Casimir Wrobel is. And Casimir is in a suit tonight, up behind the glass with the notebooks and the radio guys, his legs getting their rest. Because of me. Because I earned the start. The one scout in the building spends my best game watching an empty crease where the guy he came for is supposed to be standing. Perfect sightline on it, too. Nothing blocking his view of nobody.

I got the start. I got the win. I got the pile at center ice and Rocco’s forehead on my cage.