Page 17 of Five Hole

I lie in a complete order and I cannot sleep. After a while, lying there, I understand why.

His side is quiet.

No music. No thread of it coming through the thin place in the wall. I am waiting for it. I have been lying here in the dark. Waiting for a sound that is not mine to want. It has not come. The sequence will not close without it.

I make myself hold still and look at that, the way I would look at a shooter’s hips before he declares. I have built him into the order. Without deciding. Without permission. Without one ritual to mark it. I made the low sound through the wall a station on the road to sleep. Tonight the station is dark and the sentence will not finish. I am a man lying awake inside a complete order because one variable did not play a song.

I understand exactly what the thing is. It is not that the order can break. I have always known the order can break. It is that a person can become part of it. That I can need a variable to complete the sequence.

A variable is a thing that leaves.

I do not sleep. In the morning I set the gear on the shelf. My hands are not quite steady. Glove. Blocker. My fingers on the corner. A small furious tremor in the two of them. The ones that touch the wood. Sowa sees it. He is the only one who would. He says nothing. It is the kindest and the worst thing he does. Both at once. Which is his whole gift.

* * *

Marquette calls me in before practice. Sowa is in the room, which means it is real. When it is only Marquette it is scheduling. When Sowa is against the wall with his arms folded, it is the position.

“You’re my one,” Marquette says. He doesn’t waste words. It is why he and I have never had trouble. In a year of each other. “That’s not the question. Depth is the question. It’s a long winter. Longer if we’re lucky enough to earn a spring. I’m not grinding you down to nothing to keep Fortin in a suit and a clean sweater.” He taps the desk once with one finger. “He earns starts. Nothing games. The odd back-to-back where I rest your legs. You stay the one. But he plays. You hearing me?”

I say the right thing. I make myself say it in a voice with nothing in it.

“He is ready.”

It is true. That is the part that sits wrong. It would be easier if it were a lie, a lie I could set down and step around. And I am the man who has to say it out loud, which hands him the first inch of the one thing I have held with both hands since I came to this place. The net was the one thing that was ever fully mine. Not the house I grew up in. Not the sleep I lost. The net. I just told the man who signs the lineup card that the boy down the hall is ready to have a piece of it.

Sowa walks me out. In the hall, quiet, in Polish. So the building cannot have it. He says, “The net is not the order.” Six words. He has a way of putting a true thing down in six words. Then walking off before you can argue it. I do not answer him. I do not have an answer that is not a lie. I will not hand Sowa a lie. He has never handed me one.

* * *

I find Fortin after. I do not plan to. My feet do it while the rest of me is still deciding.

He is in the equipment room, because of course he is. Alone. His music leaking off him, as it always does. Low. A thread of it filling the flat gray air. He is on the bench with his gloves in his lap. Not taping them, not checking a strap. Just sitting. His head is down. For once there is no grin on him. He doesn’t know yet that anyone is watching. When Emile Fortin thinks no one is watching, his face is a quieter thing. Quieter than he lets the room have.

Then the door goes. He looks up. The grin starts to build on him out of pure reflex.

I do not let it finish.

“Stop,” I say.

“Wrobel.” He starts on something else. Something light. I do not let him have it.

“You’re getting starts. Marquette told me this morning. I told him you were ready.” My voice comes out wrong. I meant it flat. I have been flat my whole life. It is not flat. “You are ready. You are going to take my net one game at a time, with my own coach’s blessing, in my last year in this building, and you are going to grin at me the whole way. Is that the plan?”

He sets the gloves down. He stands up off the bench. The grin is gone now. All the way gone. What is under it is the thing I saw in the crease. The night of the horn. The thing under the joke. He has a face under the face. And I am the one who keeps making him show it.

“That’s the job,” he says, low. “You know that’s the job, don’t you? I never lied about it. Told you the first day. Told you at the board. Lists change. What do you want me to say?”

“No.” That is the worst of it. “You never lied about anything. That’s the problem. You moved the glove and you waited to see what I would do. You didn’t hide it. You did it in the light and you watched.”

“Casimir.”

He has never said it. Not once. It has always been Wrobel. The last name. The rivalry name. The name you use for a wall you mean to beat. He says the first one now. Quiet. Careful. You try a word like that in a language you are only just starting to learn. Unsure of the weight of it in your mouth. It lands somewhere the order does not reach. There is no shelf for the sound of him saying it. There is no sequence that puts it back.

I should leave. The correct move is to leave. Every system I have built says leave. I built every one of them for exactly this. For the moment when the floor tips. For the moment the thing gets in.

I do not leave.

I close the distance the way weather closes it. No hurry. Nothing that could be stopped. His eyes go wide. He doesn’t step back. He never steps back. It is the maddening whole of him, that he does not step back from me. And I kiss him.