Page 29 of Five Hole

Somebody’s skate. Somebody’s weight, coming down where weight is not supposed to come down. Casimir goes into the pile the way he goes into everything, sealed, low, giving the net nothing. And he goes down in the paint. And he doesn’t get up the way you get up.

Tabarnak. Get up. Get up the normal way. Get up mad. Get up and chew somebody out about the scramble in front, like you always do.

I know it before anybody, I know it in my body before my head has the words, because there’s a way a goalie goes down that’s part of the job, that’s a save, that’s him choosing the ice. Then there’s the other way. This is the other way. And I’m over the boards before I know I’m moving.

Backups don’t do that. You stay on the bench, you stay ready in case they call the next guy, in case the guy on the ice can’t go, and the guy who can’t go might be you next, so you stay ready. That’s the job. The second guy’s whole job, to be dry, warm, ready. And I’m not ready. I’m over the boards in full gear, blades on ice I’ve got no business putting them on, sliding the last of it on my knees into his crease before the trainer’s even off the bench.

He’s got both hands wrapped around his lower leg. And his face is doing a thing.

That’s what stops my heart. Not the leg. The face. Casimir Wrobel’s face never does anything, it’s the flattest, most sealed thing I’ve ever stood near, a face that gave up a goal in a final without so much as blinking. Now, on a Tuesday, in a half-empty barn, it’s doing this. White. Open. A window with the blind torn all the way off.

“Do not move me,” he says through his teeth.

Not to the trainer. Kilpatrick’s coming, I can hear him, and Casimir doesn’t say it to Kilpatrick. His eyes find me and lock on. He says it to me. Just to me. Low, wrecked, only for the two feet between us.

“Do not.” His hand comes off the leg and grabs my wrist, hard, cold through the sweat. “Move me.”

And I understand he isn’t talking about the leg.

He’s talking about the net. The order. The season. The one showcase he built his whole life toward, the scout, the door, the spring, the pro look, the whole cathedral of it coming down right now in a scramble on a nothing Tuesday. He’s holding my wrist and asking me not to let it. As if I could. As if there’s a single thing on this earth my two hands could do about it.

“Okay,” I say. “Okay. I got you, I’m right here. Where is it? The leg? Tell me where it is.”

Nobody answers me. I don’t know if he even hears it. His grip on my wrist isn’t letting go, his eyes aren’t letting go, and I put my other hand over his fist on the leg, careful, not moving it. Just covering it. The way you cover a thing to tell it you’re there without asking it to be different. His knuckles are white. Mine go white on top of them. For one second in the middle of the worst thing, before the trainers arrive, it’s just the two of us again, like it’s always just the two of us, the only two people in a building not watching the thing everyone is watching. Except this time the thing everyone is watching is him.

Then Kilpatrick gets there, and the world fills up with people who know what they’re doing. I get moved back where the useless go. They cut his leg pad, the good scissors going through the strapping he sets in the same order every single day, and I watch the pad come off him in pieces until I have to look at the ceiling of the barn instead, the dark folded seats up top, the banners, anything. They talk to him low and steady in the language of trainers, the calm-voice language. He answers in clipped one-word pieces, back inside himself already, gone flat and sealed over again, because there are people watching. He’d rather bleed out quiet than be seen bleeding.

“How bad?” I ask Kilpatrick’s back.

“Fortin.”

“Just tell me if it’s the season.”

“Fortin.” He doesn’t turn around, not once, not for any of it. “Go stand somewhere else.”

Nobody in a barn ever tells the backup anything. I could catch fire out here and read about it in the game notes.

They get him to his feet with an arm over two guys’ shoulders, his skate not touching the ice, not even brushing it, and they take him down the tunnel slow. The barn does the terrible quiet thing a barn does when it’s bad. Even the other bench is quiet. Even their winger, the one who cut to the net, taps his stick on the ice, the old salute, because hockey knows what it’s looking at even when it’s nobody’s fault. Nobody did anything wrong. That’s the part that makes it worse, somehow. There’s no one to be angry at. A skate and some weight and a Tuesday.

Rocco comes past me on his way to the bench and doesn’t slow down for it.

“Fortin. In.”

“Yeah.”

“Hey.” Then he does slow, one stride’s worth, which from Rocco is a full stop with the engine off. “He’s fine. Say it back to me.”

“He’s fine.”

“Good.”

And he goes, and neither of us believes one word of it, and that was never what the words were for.

I stand in the crease he left. Full gear, clean dry pads, my mask still shoved up on my head, planted in the warm hollow of the paint where a body was. The refs are waving play back on. The clock will start again. I’ll finish this one in his net, because there’s nobody else dressed who can. The nothing game will finish itself the way nothing games do. We’ll win it or we won’t, and I won’t remember which, because the only thing in this barn that mattered got carried down a tunnel with his skate not touching the ice.

Here’s the part I hate myself for. Here’s the part I’m never going to say out loud. Not to him, not to anybody. Not on the last day of my life. You want the worst of me?

Somewhere in the back of me, in the drawer, in the ugly folder I keep swearing I threw out, there’s a voice that sounds exactly like the animal that’s lived in my chest since I got here, and it says it plain and quiet, without any shame at all.