Page 47 of Five Hole

Chapter 26

Emile

Casimir starts the playoff push and I sit, and it’s the best hockey either of us has ever been part of.

You know what nobody warned me about? Sitting doesn’t feel like losing.

I braced for it to. I’ve wanted the net since I was a kid with cheap pads in a rink two hours from anywhere. And I told myself the bench would taste like ash every single night I watched him take it. It doesn’t. It tastes like the thing I’ve been chasing my whole life and looking for in the wrong crease, because I’ve got his rope now. He handed it to me, and every game I hand it back. Two fingers on the boards, once, right before he skates out. Our thing. Nobody in the barn knows what it is. Closest I’ve ever come to a marriage, and we still haven’t had a meal in the light.

Watch him now, out there in a barn on a cold night we had no right to still be playing in, and he’s the wall again. Better than the wall, because a man who has been let all the way in plays looser than a man holding it up alone. I know his game down to the grain. I studied it to steal it. Now I get to just love it. Down the row the young guys are making the sound they used to only make for me.

I don’t mind. That’s the part that undoes me, sitting there. I don’t mind at all.

The bench taught me something I never got when I hated it. From here you see the whole sheet. From the crease you see a puck coming and you kill it, then you reset and wait for the next one, alone in a square yard of blue paint, the loneliest real estate in the sport. From the bench you see the game breathe. You see the shift turn before it turns, you see the guy at the point wind up. And you’re already leaning, already yelling, already living it a half-second ahead. I used to think the bench was where they put you when you didn’t matter. It’s where you get to matter for everybody at once.

So I do that. I live every shift out loud. I bang the boards when he robs somebody blind, I get in the young guys’ ears between whistles, because I’m the loudest thing in any building I stand in and I finally have somewhere to point it that helps. And before he goes out, every game, I lean over the boards and put my two fingers on the top of them. Once. He doesn’t look at me when I do it. He never looks. He doesn’t have to. I watch his shoulders drop a quarter inch, which is what they do when the sequence is whole, and I know he felt it. I know he carried it out there with him. It’s the one prayer I know, and I say it with two fingers on a cold board.

The best of it comes on a night on the road, a barn full of somebody else’s fans, a team that’s beaten us twice already this season. We’re down going into the third. The horn goes on a bad change and it rattles him. I see it rattle him. His glove twitches for an order that isn’t on the ice to hold. Old Casimir loses the next shift. This Casimir goes back to the top. I watch him do it from the bench, watch him reset exactly how he taught me to reset, glove up, blocker square, run it clean. And I’m on my feet yelling nothing words. Just noise. Just here. Just I’ve got the roof with you. He doesn’t give up another one. And we steal the game. In the handshake line the other goalie taps his pads, which is goalie for I see what you are, and Casimir taps back, which is goalie for I know.

The room feels it. A room always feels it. All season the two of us were a seam running down the middle of the team and everybody skated careful around it, same as they skate around his shelf. Now the seam welds back the other way and you can feel the building get lighter. Rocco feels it first, because Rocco feels everything. In the last of his time wearing the letter he does the thing captains do, which is stop naming the war. There’s no war to name. And the team that was skidding, coming apart along the crack of us, remembers how to win.

We claw back into it game by game, a team nobody was writing about a month ago, and we make the tournament we had no business making. The barn on the night we clinch it comes off its feet. I’m on the bench for it, banging the boards, and I wouldn’t trade the seat for anything.

* * *

We get back to the Stable that night still wearing most of the barn on us, and he comes to my room without either of us saying a word about it, which is new, and I am not going to be the guy who points that out and jinxes it.

Here’s what he does first. Before anything. This man peels off his shirt and folds it.

“No,” I say.

“What.”

“Not in here. Absolutely not. That’s a felony in this room. You can’t walk into a man’s house and fold.”

He looks at me. Then he looks down at the shirt. Then, holding my eyes the entire way, this granite, order-keeping, medal-winning monster of a human being folds it one more time, in half, slow, and sets it square on the corner of my desk.

“Voyons donc.” I’m laughing so hard I have to sit down on my own bed. “You did that on purpose.”

“I did.”

“You’re a menace. You’re worse than me. This whole building has had you wrong for four years.”

He gets me out of the rest of my gear in about as long as it sounds like it should take, and then he lies back on my bed with his hands up over his head like a man who has decided to let a thing happen to him. I get one knee down either side of him and I just sit there a second and look. He left the lamp on without me asking. I have not gotten used to that and I’m in no hurry to.

“Are you going to say something,” he says, “or are you going to look at me all night.”

“Both. Obviously both. You’ve met me.”

There’s oil on the nightstand, because apparently we live here now, and I take my time getting him slick because I like what it does to his breathing. Then I take him inside me slow, all the way down, and the sound he makes goes straight through me and out the other side.

“Oh,” I say, when I’ve got some air back. “Oh. Okay. Wow.”

“Emile.”

“Give me a second. I’m a verbal learner, me.”

“Move.”