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With my eyes laser-focused on the ice in front of me, I’d actually been able to pick up some speed. I turned my head toward the bench. Were the guys seeing this?
I looked up too late. The hit slammed me backward, flat on the ice, knocking the wind out of me. “Sorry, Padre,” said a man the size of a brick wall, as he skated off after the puck.
The other team fell on the puck and sent it straight down the ice in the opposite direction. I watched, still fumbling to get to my knees, as number seven pulled his stick back and shot it straight into the upper right corner of the goal.
And straight into George’s glove!
Waylon, Cameron, and the rest of the guys cheered. I could almost register the surprise on George’s face. The man was actually good.
Thirty seconds later, I was getting booted off the ice by a scowling Waylon, as he came on to win the face off in the last minute of the game, but ultimately lose the game five to four, because the rest of us were still shit.
I’d always been pretty decent at picking up sports, but apparently my skills ended on the ice. Reyes was becoming a good skater, but he was a Ferdinand the Bull type—with all his bulk, he was too hesitant to actually block an offensive play. Cameron was a good shooter, but couldn’t catch passes. And George had thrown himself in the path of a lot of pucks tonight, but still... five four.
“We doing beers after?” Reyes asked as we waited in line for the handshakes.
“Beers. And they’re on you until you can learn how to block your zone.” Waylon shoved him in the back.
“Good game.”
“Good game.”
“Sorry, Father,” said a guy who’d gotten a penalty for tripping me, even though I’d really tripped over my own skates.
“Good game.”
We were the worst team in beer league hockey, but the losses still felt like we played for the Predators and just lost game seven of the playoff finals.
Waylon felt it the hardest, since he was the only one of us who regularly played.
He was the cruise director of this ragtag group of deathcare spouses, which basically meant he had gathered up all the thirty-something men he knew and figured out something we could do as a bonding thing. And since making friends after college seemed like an impossible feat, we were all pretty fast to admit we needed the guy time.
Except hockey might not have been the best choice of activity. Waylon was a center and won us a shit ton of face-offs. Javier Reyes and I, who flanked him, were still figuring out how to catch passes, so we lost the puck just as quickly as Waylon won it.
Ewen Cameron, a Williamson County District Attorney, was roped in as a defender, since he was tall, fast, and strong. Just not on the ice.
And then there was George: loner, grump, perpetual weirdo. He was our goalie. Anyone who willingly stood in the path of a puck careening towards his chest at ninety miles per hour—probably closer to fifty in the beer leagues—had to be slightly off kilter. It fitmy brother to a tee and the only reason we ever won games was because he was off kilter enough to stop a lot of pucks.
Thus, the Puck Bearers were born. Our logo, designed by George’s stepdaughter, featured a cartoon Grim Reaper wielding a hockey stick instead of a scythe.
Because, of course, we were all married to the dead.
“I only request we go somewhere outside,” Reyes said. “‘Cause we smell like shit, and none of us are showering in that gross-ass locker room.”
“You share a bathroom with five kids. I’d think you’d welcome the relative privacy of a locker room shower,” Cameron said.
“Dude. Have you seen my shower? I’ve got, like, nine shower heads built into the wall and ceiling. No kids allowed.” Javi shot Cameron a for-fucks-sake look. “Besides,Iclean the bathroom of my five kids, and it sparkles like diamonds when I’m done. Who knows when the last time the locker room bathroom was cleaned. That grout is black. And I’m not into communal showers, unless the commune is Tiff and me.”
Reyes’s wife, Tiff, was an autopsy tech. She laid out the bodies, performed the initial exterior examinations, did the imaging, and was Soula’s right-hand woman in the county morgue.
“I request somewhere closer to home, since I have the farthest to drive,” I said.
“The Pig it is,” George sighed. “I just hope someone good is playing tonight. Not some pop-country duo trying to suck enough dicks to open for a bigger pop-country duo.”
“Way to keep it positive, George,” I said.
“My pleasure,” George grinned.
Waylon stormed in and threw his stick into the corner of the locker room. “Fuck. We had them. I thought we had them.”
