Page 26 of Five Hole

I got none of the thing the start was for.

Casimir finds me in the hall after.

I’m still half in my gear, sweat cooling on me, the good ache in my legs, and I come around the corner toward the bus to find him leaning on the cinderblock in his suit, waiting. He doesn’t wait in halls, that one. Not for people. Never for people.

He doesn’t say good game. I’d have bet against him saying good game and I’d have won. I’m glad I’d have won, because good game is what you say to a stranger.

“You went back to the top,” he says. “On the goal against. After.” He’s looking at me now, straight, the expensive thing, spent on me in an empty hall where nobody can see him spend it. “You reset. You didn’t chase it.” He leaves a space after it, on purpose. “Good.”

Like he watched only me. Like the scout wasn’t even in the building. Like the one thing worth seeing in that whole barn was whether the kid in his net would come apart when the puck got in, and the kid didn’t. That’s the report he’s filing, to an audience of one, in a hall that smells like floor cleaner and other people’s cold cuts.

“Thanks,” I say. It comes out smaller than I want it. “You gave me that. The going-back-to-the-top thing. That was yours, no?”

He doesn’t take it and he doesn’t give it back. He just holds my eyes another second, the cost of it sitting high up in him where the window is, then pushes off the wall and starts down toward the bus, unhurried, which is how he does everything that isn’t a save. I watch him go.

That one word does more to me than a whole building full of guys chanting my name. It isn’t close. It isn’t a contest. A room full of strangers screaming a thing at you is loud and it’s nothing. One word from him in an empty hall is quiet, and it’s everything. So I stand there soaked in somebody else’s aftershave and my own sweat, and I understand exactly what the trap is.

You want the shape of it? Here it is, laid out clean.

The better I get, the more of his net I take, and every save I make in a barn like this is a save he didn’t get to make in front of the one man whose book is the door out. The more of his net I take, the harder I want the one word he says in a hall where nobody can hear him be proud of me. The two things pull opposite directions, both of them running straight through him.

I can’t have the net and the man. I know it cold, to the decimal, and there’s no arguing with a number like that.

I want both so bad I could scream.

Chapter 14

Casimir

I watch him win my net from a suit in the press box. I feel two things at once. They do not cancel.

I have spent my life making feelings cancel. It is most of what the order is for. You set one thing square against the next and the wanting comes down to zero and you are level. I am the best I have ever met at it. Tonight, high behind the glass with a tie knotted at my throat, the two things will not go to zero. They sit in me side by side. Both of them are true. There is no wall between them.

The first is pride. That is the one I did not expect and cannot afford.

He goes back to the top after the goal against. The way I told him. I said it over his stall with the room too loud to hear me. He took it out onto the ice and used it. I watch it work from behind the glass. The puck gets in on a tip he could not have stopped. A puck that changed its mind in the air. I watch his shoulders. I have learned his shoulders the way I learned his everything. A young goalie’s shoulders climb after a goal. They come up around the ears. Then the next three shots beat him, because he is still playing the one that already went in. His do not climb. He resets. Glove up. He runs it clean, the small private course I handed him. The next shot dies in his chest. Something in me stands all the way up in that press box and says there. That is mine. I gave him that.

A coach’s feeling. A thing I have no right to. I am not his coach. Sowa is his coach. I am the man whose net he is standing in. I am proud of him the way you are proud of a thing you built. It is the most dangerous feeling I have had all year, because it is warm. And warm is the thing the order exists to keep out.

Under the pride, the other thing. The cold one.

That is my crease. My paint. My showcase, my last one, the final season the whole order was ever secretly the key to. And I am up here behind glass in a suit, with the man who came all this way to write my name sitting three seats down and one row up, watching a boy play my position. Every save the boy makes is a save I did not get to make, in front of the one book that is the door.

Both. At the same time. The pride and the cold thing under it. No partition between them. No ritual on this earth that takes them down to zero.

The radio man on my left has been working up to me since the anthem. He waits for a whistle and leans over with his headphones down around his neck.

“Wrobel. Leg all right?”

“Fine.”

“Coach resting you, or.”

“Resting.”

He waits for the rest of it. There is no rest of it. Down on the ice Fortin robs a man from the top of the circle and the barn makes the sound it makes, and the radio man forgets he was ever talking to me, which is the only kindness anybody in this box does me all night.

At the next whistle he comes back. They always come back.