Page 44 of The Reckless Rookie

I keep my feet moving and my mouth shut, and Sully’s line from way back in the fall runs under it all, what he said in a quiet room down a goal: you want to hurt a team like that, put one behind their goalie. Answer it where it counts. I’ve spent a whole season and a whole ranch learning the difference between the answer that feels good and the answer that works, and tonight, for once, I’ve got them sorted before the puck drops.

Then number twenty-two takes a run at Ryan.

It’s late, and it’s high and it’s got nothing to do with the puck, which left three seconds ago. Ryan’s got his head down on a breakout and the guy comes across the grain and catches him, shoulder to the ear, and drives him into the boards with everything he’s got, and the sound it makes is the sound that empties a bench.

Ryan goes down and doesn’t get up right away.

And something in me that I have spent four months rebuilding comes apart at the seam.

Because it’s Ryan. Ryan who put his arm across my chest on this same ice in the fall and walked me off before I ended my own life. Ryan who sat next to me in the box of my own head all season and never said the easy thing. The one guy in this building who’s stopped me from being the worst version of myself more times than I’ll ever pay back, face-down on the ice because a coward came across the grain, and the heat doesn’t come up my spine this time.

It detonates.

I’m moving before I’ve decided anything. Gloves already going. Three strides and I’ve got a lane to twenty-two and the whole building is coming up out of its seats because they feel it too, they want it, this is the clean one, the righteous one, the fight not one soul in Texas would blame me for. My gloves hit the ice. I have never in my life been this sure of anything.

Two more strides.

And I hear it. Not Ryan’s voice, not Sully’s, not anybody’s arm across my chest, because there’s no arm this time, nobody’s coming, it’s just me and a clean lane to a man who deserves it.

I hear the whole rest of it.

The box. The instigator. The suspension that doesn’t come from the league this time but from a judge, because a playoff ejection is an incident and an incident is a phone call and a phone call is a felony and two-to-ten and a barn I never see again and a woman an hour north explaining to Diaz why the kid he vouched for couldn’t go one round without blowing it all up. I see the whole chain, every link, in the half-second I’ve got left before I reach him.

And I stop.

Not gloves-back-on, not walked-off, not somebody-saved-me. I plant a skate and I stop myself, two feet from the guy, further out over the edge than I have ever hauled myself back from, my own body screaming that I’ve gone coward again, that Ryan’s down and I’m doing math. Twenty-two flinches, braces for the hit that’s got every right to come. It doesn’t come.

I look at him. I let him see me decide not to. Then I turn my back on the cleanest fight of my life and I skate to Ryan, and I get a glove under his arm, and I help my captain up off the ice while a building that wanted blood makes a confused sound that doesn’t know what it is yet.

“You good?” I ask him.

Ryan’s blinking it off, finding his legs. He looks at me, and he looks at twenty-two still standing there untouched, and something moves across his face that I’ll take to my grave before I explain it to anybody.

“You didn’t,” he says. Not a question.

“Wanted to.”

“I know you did.” He gets his feet under him. Squeezes my shoulder once, hard, through the pads. “That’s the part that counts.”

They give twenty-two a two-minute minor for the hit. Two minutes. A coward’s tax.

I make him pay the real one on the power play.

It’s my shift and I’m still shaking with everything I didn’t spend, and there’s nowhere for it to go but the game, so I put it there. Ryan wins the draw back and we work it low, and I get to the net-front and eat a cross-check across the wrists and another and I don’t give an inch, because the thing that wanted to swing at twenty-two will absolutely stand in the paint and take abuse until the seam opens, and when Colt drives wide and drags his man with him, the puck comes loose to the slot, and it’s there, and it’s mine, because I bought it.

I bury it.

Top corner, over the glove, and the building doesn’t make the confused sound anymore. The building comes down. Eighteen thousand people who wanted me to fight two minutes ago screaming because I found the better answer, the one Sully handed me in a losing room in the fall, the one it took me a whole season to learn how to hear.

You want to hurt that man. Put one behind his goalie.

Done.

Ryan gets to me first in the pile, helmet against mine, yelling something I can’t hear and don’t need to. Evan’s next, glove on the back of my neck. Mack’s somewhere in the middle of it hollering my name like it’s a touchdown. And Colt, the actual cowboy of the two, the one whose hat I wear on the ranch, finds my eye across the scrum and nods, once, the way he handed me that hat across a room in the fall, a man confirming what he already decided.

Most of the room takes me back tonight. I feel it happen. The careful distance the guys kept all season, the wide berth around the thing that might go off, it burns off in one shift where the thing that might go off chose the net instead. I didn’t earn my way back with the fight. I earned it with the one I didn’t have.

Most of the room. Not all of it. I don’t clock the one who’s missing from the pile until later.