Page 8 of Five Hole

I turn my music on. Low. Not for me. For him. To let his side know the noise moved in, that he’s not as alone over there as he’s decided he is.

I lie in the dark and wait for his side to tell me to knock it off. A thump on the wall. A door. Anything. That’d be a whole speech, from Casimir. That’d be him admitting he can hear me at all.

Nothing comes. His side stays quiet.

But it’s a listening kind of quiet. I’d bet my next start on it, if I had a next start to bet. He’s over there awake, letting my music fill the crack. Neither of us is going to say a word about it tomorrow. Somehow it’s the most either of us has said all day.

So I let the song run all the way out and I don’t put on another one, and neither of us moves. Two guys awake in the dark with a wall between them, both of us pretending otherwise. First idiot in. First idiot still up.

Chapter 4

Casimir

Sowa keeps me after.

He works the goalies to the last, and then he keeps me after the last, and I stay. Tomasz Sowa is the only man in this building who knows what the shelf is for. He is Polish the way I am Polish. A generation off the boat. The accent still a stone he carries in his cheek.

He was not always here. There were seasons in this program before him, when the goalies were a thing the staff got to on Thursdays if there was ice left, and nobody in the room knew what a crease costs a man. I do not like to think about them. Then one fall he was standing at the end of the bench with a bucket of pucks, and he has been standing there every fall since, and the whole position in this building changed shape around him without anybody announcing it.

When he took over the goalies he watched me set my gear for a week and said nothing at all. Not how the team watches, sidelong, half a joke already loaded. A man watching a thing he recognizes. On the last morning of it he came and stood at the end of my stall while I set the gear. He did not speak. He did not reach for anything. He did not ask me to hurry. He let the sentence finish. Then he nodded, once, the way you nod at a job done right, and said it quiet, in Polish, so the room could not have it. You keep the order. I said it back to him. He walked away.

He has never touched the shelf. Not once, in all the mornings of us. Proof of love, the only kind I trust. The not-touching. Everyone I have ever let close wanted, in the end, to fix me. My mother wanted it, gently, as you want weather to change. A counselor a school made me see wanted it with forms. A boy once, years back, wanted it with his hands on my gear. He moved a pad to show me the world would not end. The world did not end, but a thing between us did. Sowa only wants me to keep the order and stop pucks. Those are the same wanting. I have never known how to answer any other wanting.

So he keeps me, and we work angles in the empty end while the building drains and the seats go dark in banks. He fires pucks off a stick from the top of the circle. Unhurried. Watching more than shooting. I take them and put them where a save puts them. The pucks make their flat crack off my pads and die. Every so often he changes the angle without a word, just to see me find it. I find it, and he nods and does it again. The conversation, all of it. Two men and a bucket of pucks and the seats going dark in banks above us. Neither of us says much. It’s why I can stand him. There is a kind of man who fills a silence because the silence scares him. Sowa is the other kind. So am I. It is a small country, ours, and it has two citizens.

Then he leans on the crossbar and looks at me with the face of a man who has decided to say a true thing out loud.

“This is the year they watch you.”

I know. I do not say I know. Saying I know would be a word spent. I have started to guard my words the way I guard the shelf, ever since the boy taught me they could be picked up off the floor and kept.

“There’s a man coming through. More than one, before the winter is out. They come for the seniors, the ones with a spring still in the legs. They sit high and they write it down.” He taps the bar with one gloved knuckle. “You know what they buy? Not the save that ends up on the screens. The save you make the same in the first period of a nothing game as you make in the last minute of a final. They’re not paying for one good night. They’re paying for the next ten years of them.”

“I know how to be consistent.”

“I know you do.” He says it plain. Then he lets a pause sit, which he does when the next thing is the one that matters. “Consistency in an empty room is a habit. Consistency in a loud one? That’s a nerve. They’re buying the nerve.” He fires another puck. I take it clean. “You’ve got the habit. Nobody in this conference has it like you. The habit’s what got you the little brass thing at center ice.”

“But.”

“But a scout doesn’t watch the habit. A scout watches what the habit does when a boy is standing on your paint asking whether it holds.” He straightens. Looks at me a moment past what the sentence needs. “You know how to be consistent when the room lets you,” he says. “The room is about to stop letting you.”

He does not say the name. He does not have to. We both hear the door at the far end, and the little thread of music that comes in ahead of the boy, as it always does.

Fortin is back on the ice.

Of course he is. The one hour of the day I have carved out of the building for myself, and he has found it. A draft finds the one window nobody ever sealed. Everyone here knows the hour is mine. Nobody else has ever once decided that made it a thing worth turning up for. He did, the same way he has learned everything else about me this season. By standing too close and paying a kind of attention no one has paid me since my grandmother.

He is not meant to be here. Practice is done. The Zamboni is turning over in its bay, coughing to life, filling the far end with its low animal idle. This last hour is mine. The hour I go post to post alone in the quiet and lay the day’s final course. Brick on brick, until the order is whole and I can carry it home in one piece. It’s one of the things simply known here, the way the shelf is. Like where the cold spots are. Like which board is dead.

The building is a different animal empty. The lights drop to the work set, half of what a game gets. The cold comes up out of the concrete now that there are no bodies to hold it down. You can hear the building talk to itself. A pipe knocking somewhere high. The compressors under the ice keeping the sheet hard. I like it here like this. No one to be apart from. Just the net, and the order, and the sound my pads make when I go down. Nothing else sounds in the place, so I hear it clean. Post to post. Down, sealed, up. The ridge of my crease worn into the ice where a thousand of these have gone before. I lay the day’s last course and the barn holds still for me. It never holds still with people in it.

This hour is not superstition. I want that understood, if only by me. This hour is the tax I pay so the game can be free. If I lay the last course clean tonight, tomorrow I do not have to think. Tomorrow the body knows. A goalie who has to think has already lost. So I do the thinking now, alone, in the cold, where it costs nobody but me.

He skates a lazy loop past my net with his stick across the back of his shoulders like a yoke. Grin already loaded.

“Don’t mind me,” he says. “Getting my reps. Backups need reps. It’s in the handbook.”

“There is no handbook.”