Page 14 of Five Hole

I do not understand it. I do not like not understanding it. A variable I cannot understand is the entire definition of a threat.

I try to file him again. The old label. Fortin. Backup. Manage. It will not hold. You cannot file a man who reaches over the boards when the floor is going out from under you and hands you back your own order and asks for nothing. That is not a variable. A variable does not care whether you drown.

He catches me looking, across the room, half out of his gear. He does not grin. That is what I take home with me. Not the win. He only holds my eyes, the high window, and does not ask for anything with them. Every kindness I have ever been shown came with a hand out afterward, wanting me fixed, wanting me open, wanting me easier to be near. He wants nothing. He turns back to his skates and lets me have the moment to do with as I please.

Then Rocco says something to the room and it closes. The noise folds back over us. I go home through the cold. I check the shelf and the shelf is fine. I run the order and it closes tonight, the first clean close in a week, and I should be able to sleep on it. I do not, for a while. I lie in the order with the win under me and I try to file the boy one more time and the file will not shut.

It is not the shelf. I know by now it is never going to be the shelf.

Chapter 7

Emile

Team night at the Hitch is a rite, not a plan.

Nobody calls it, nobody texts a time, the season just turns a certain way and the whole roster drifts toward the same low door on the same night, because water knows which way a floor tilts. You end up there. And you’ve always ended up there, you will end up there, right up until they hand you a diploma and point you at the highway.

Denny Plourde is behind the bar, where he has been since he graduated, a fourth-liner who never left the mountain and now pours for the guys who took his spot. There’s a horseshoe nailed over the door older than anybody currently standing under it. The paint on the sign has given up in patches and none of it has ever mattered a day in its life. What matters is the room. It decides who’s all right and who isn’t and it takes its sweet time about it, and Denny pours to the verdict, because Denny stood on the wrong side of that verdict himself and has never pretended otherwise. An athlete earns a nod across a couple of seasons or he doesn’t, and I’m somewhere in the back half of earning mine. And some things you should have to earn.

The door sticks. It always sticks, you have to put a shoulder in it like you mean it, so I mean it. The warm hits me first, fryer grease and old wood, the particular smell of a room that’s been keeping people warm through bad winters longer than any of us have been alive.

“Fortin,” Denny says from behind the bar. From Denny that’s a marching band.

“Denny. You miss me?”

“Nope.”

“You will.”

He pours the thing he’s decided I drink without asking, which is its own kind of nod, then slides it down the wood so it stops exactly in front of me, which it always does, like the bar is on his side. I carry it to the back where the team always ends up. There’s a deer head on the wall back there, and some dead genius put a Renegades cap on it before I was born. Nobody’s ever taken it down. You don’t take down scripture.

The place is low-ceilinged, warm, half full of the town. Guys off shifts still in their work coats, a pair of old-timers at the rail who’ve been coming since long before Denny was ever behind it. They don’t bother us, we don’t bother them, that’s the treaty. It’s a good treaty. I have yet to see it broken.

There’s a game on the little TV wedged up over the bottles, some pro team nobody in here pulls for, and half the guys are half-watching it while they argue about it anyway. Which is the correct amount of attention for a team you don’t care about. Girard’s at the shuffleboard teaching a freshman the puck. And the freshman is hopeless. Girard is patient about it in his nine-words-a-season way, nudging the kid’s elbow down, tapping the line he wants, never spending a syllable he doesn’t have to.

“So what’s the secret?” the kid asks him.

Girard weighs it like it costs money.

“Aim better,” he says.

The kid nods like he got handed scripture.

Denny works the length of the bar without ever looking rushed, refilling a glass before you’ve noticed it’s empty, reading the whole room the way Casimir reads a rush. Everything at once. Nothing showing on him. A freshman makes the mistake of ordering something with a name in it.

“You got anything with, like, mint in it?”

Denny looks at him until the words die in his mouth. The kid orders a beer. Denny pours the beer. He does not ask the kid anything, and he never has, not of any of us. Somebody poured for Denny across this same wood when he was the one ordering, back when he was still a fourth-liner in this program and two years from standing where he stands, and a man does not take a thing like that and then get careful with it. He has been waiting his whole time back here to hand it on. I sit there with the drink he decided on, thinking that this is the nearest thing I’ve got to a living room. My mother would love it here. Manon would take one look at Denny and adopt him.

Wyeth Stack is down the wood with a plate in front of him, which is a trick, because this bar does not serve food. He came in carrying a foil pan under one arm and set it on the bar without a word, and Denny put it under the heat lamp without a word back, and now half our table is eating pie nobody ordered and nobody is going to pay for. Wyeth’s people run the kitchen at Stack’s, the diner up the road where the team eats breakfast and Bev holds the counter like a defensive zone. They’ve been feeding this town longer than anybody in here has been drinking in it.

“Your mother send this?” Denny says.

Wyeth thinks about it. Our defenseman thinks about everything, and he takes the same amount of time over all of it, whether it’s a two-on-one or a question about pie.

“Bev,” he says finally. “She said you looked thin.”

“I look the way I have always looked.”