Page 12 of Five Hole

Instead he looks at me. Really looks. Same as he did in the equipment room. Except this time it doesn’t slam. It stays. Open and level. It costs him, and I stand there and watch him pay. He says it flat. No pity in it anywhere, because there’s no pity anywhere in this man, not even for himself.

“The winter I stopped sleeping.”

That’s it. He doesn’t explain it, and he doesn’t have to. This is the part that undoes me. I’ve never once in my life stopped sleeping over anything. I sleep like I’ve never done a wrong thing in it. And I can hear the whole story in five words anyway. A kid. Something that came in the dark and took the sleep. A boy who got it back one plate, one prayer, one squared glove at a time. Who’s kept the order every day since, so the dark stays on its own side of the wall.

I’ve got no chirp for that. My whole life I’ve had a chirp for everything, one tool in the box and it fits every screw. It doesn’t fit this. I stand there in the cold tunnel with my mouth full of nothing and I let it be nothing, because for once the true thing is that I heard him and there’s nothing to put on top of that.

“Okay,” I say.

He nods, like okay was the right thing. The only thing. Maybe the first right thing I’ve handed him all season. He walks off up the tunnel with his water bottle, sealed back up, his steam going with him. I watch him go and I don’t chirp the back of him. Not chirping the back of him is the hardest athletic feat I’ve performed all week.

I stand there in the cold with the storm going and understand I’m in trouble. I came here to take his net. What I’ve gone and done instead is find the window. And the trouble with the window is that once you’ve watched the light move behind it, you stop wanting to put a puck through the glass.

You want in.

You want in.

Chapter 6

Casimir

Opening night. Non-conference. A nothing game by the standings. Which makes it the opposite of a nothing game, because Sowa’s voice is in the back of my skull now, where the weather lives. They are buying the next ten years. Somewhere up under the lights there is a man with a notebook, or there is not. The not-knowing is the whole discipline of it. You play every night as if the page is open and the pen is uncapped.

I keep the order. The shelf. The two fingers. The sequence clean and unbroken. I set each piece square to the next and I do not hurry and I do not think. For the length of it the boy through the wall is not in the sequence, because the sequence is the one place I have kept him out. The settled feeling comes at the right distance for the first time in a week. I carry it out onto the ice like a cup filled to the lip. I do not spill it in the tunnel. I do not spill it at the anthem.

The barn is full tonight, and a full barn is a different cold than an empty one. It is warmer and it is worse. The noise is a weather I have to stand under all night without letting it reach me. I know how to be the still thing in the middle of the loud thing. It is most of the job. It is most of me.

In the room before, the team makes its noise. Music. Tape tearing. Someone’s cleat heel drumming the floor. Then Rocco stands, and the noise goes out of the room the way water goes out of a tub.

“Nobody’s watched us play yet. Not them, not the paper, not you.” He gives the room exactly as long with it as the room needs. “So go find out.”

He sits down. The speech, complete. Three sentences and no clichés, and he does not raise his voice, because he never raises his voice, and the room is heavier after it than it was before.

Coop bounces a ball off the wall in the rhythm he has kept since the second round. Off the wall, off the floor, into his hand. Off the wall, off the floor, into his hand.

“Coop.”

“Don’t.”

“I have not said anything.”

“You looked at the ball.” He does not miss a beat of it. “Nobody looks at the ball.”

No one tells him to stop. If Coop stopped, we’d lose. I do not think anyone else even hears it anymore. I hear it. His rhythm has folded itself into mine since the first night he did it, without either of us deciding it should. It is the one order I let another man hand me, and only because he does not know he is handing it.

Then I am gone. Mask down. Inside the place I go, where the crowd is only weather and the score is only a rumor, and there is the next shot and the angle it will arrive on and nothing else.

For most of the night I am where I am supposed to be.

It is honest hockey, the kind that never makes the screens. I make the save the same way. The same way. The same way. A shot from the point, taken high and swallowed. A wrister off the rush, gloved and held for the whistle so the boys can change. A goalie who shows up on the highlights has already had a bad night by definition. The highlight is the goal he should not have needed to make. I want to be the most boring man in the building. For the man in the seats, if there is one. For the spring. For the door at the end of all of it, the one the order was always secretly the key to.

Somewhere in the second, without meaning to, I know exactly where Fortin is on the bench. Down the far end, where they plant the backup. I do not look. I do not have to look. I have started to carry a sense of him the way I carry the location of the posts. I do not remember agreeing to that, and there’s no time in a hockey game to argue with yourself about it.

A breakaway in the first. A boy comes down clean off a bad change. The bench behind me goes quiet. A bench goes quiet like that when it has stopped being able to help. I do not chase him. That is the young goalie’s death, the chase. I let him come. I make myself the last still thing on a sheet of moving ice. I give him nothing to read, no lean, no early drop, only a wall and the small dark gap the wall pretends to leave. He tries to go five-hole, because they always try to go five-hole, because the gap is the story they have been told about goalies their whole lives. There is nothing there. I have sealed it before he shot it. The puck dies in my pads. The barn makes its sound and I do not hear it, not really, it reaches me as pressure and not as noise. I am already resetting. Glove up. Blocker square. The next one.

Then, midway through, the building turns on me.

I have thought about how to explain this to a person who is not a goalie, and I have never managed it. Everyone else on the ice can be a half-second wrong and skate it off. A defenseman misreads a play, and there is a backchecker, and there is me. I am the last thing. There is no one behind me but a red light and eighteen hundred people who will make a sound I will hear in my sleep. So the building is not scenery to me. The building is a body I have to keep calm. When it behaves, I do not notice it. When it does not, it can reach all the way into the crease and put its hand on the back of my neck.