Page 4 of Five Hole

“The ice is slow.”

“The ice is the ice.” He fires the next one before I am set, to see what I do with it. I take it clean. “You are slow because you are listening to the door.”

I am not listening to the door. I do not say so. Saying so would be the same as agreeing.

“Nothing to say?”

“No.”

“Good. A goalie who explains himself is already beaten.” He puts the next puck a foot outside where the last one went, and the conversation is over, because with Sowa the conversation is always over at exactly the point it has done its work.

The rest of the team filters in around us. The forwards loud, the defense slower to wake. Rocco in the middle, setting the temperature, which is a captain’s whole job. I am on the ice with all of them and apart from all of them. This is not new. This is the arrangement. I keep the net and they keep the noise and it works.

The shooters line up. I take them. I am where I am supposed to be. The job, entire. Being where I am supposed to be. The men with notebooks come to buy nothing else. There are men with notebooks this year, or there are not. You play every rep as though the page is open.

Rocco runs a breakout drill. The defense moves on his voice. Wyeth Stack goes over the boards a half-beat before Rocco calls for him, because Rocco was never going to have to call for him. Three years on the same pair does that to two men. They change without looking. Their whole language has about four words in it and they have never needed a fifth.

“Reverse,” Rocco says.

Wyeth is already reversing. Then, a beat late, to no one in particular: “Was going to anyway.”

“I know.”

I take what the drill spits out at the net. A point shot through a screen. I do not see the puck leave. I see the lane close and I close with it. Save. A tip off the far post. I take it in the chest and smother it before the rebound can become a chance. Save. This is the work. Not the highlight. The next one, and the next one, made the same, until the same is a thing a man in the seats can lean his whole report on.

Then it is Fortin’s turn in the far net. I make the mistake again.

I watch him.

He is loose where I am sealed. He flops, he scrambles, he throws his whole body across the crease with no economy at all. He talks the whole time. To the shooters. To himself. To the puck. A goalie who narrates his own net.

Rocco passes him at the blue line without turning his head. “Fortin. You think the puck can hear you?”

“It hears me fine. It’s scared of me.”

“It’s not.”

Half of it is bad. A coach’s nightmare. He gives up his feet before the shot declares. He chases the fake and pays for the real one. The kind of goaltending that gets a boy scored on in ways he will see again at night. The other half.

The other half I do not have the word for. A defenseman walks the line and slides a puck down for a one-timer. It is a goal. It is already a goal. I have conceded it in my own body from across the ice. Fortin is there. Early. Wrong, by every book, committed to a read the play had not yet declared. The read is right. His glove is full of a puck that should be in the net. He laughs. At his own save. Like it surprised him too. The young ones down the bench bang their sticks on the boards for him.

He is not better than me. Let me be clear, in my own head, where no one can hear me be this small. He is not better than me.

He is only harder to find. I have spent my life becoming the most findable thing on a sheet of ice. The save that is always exactly where the save was. Here is a boy who is never where you left him. Down the bench the young ones watch him like weather no one forecast.

The drill has moved on without me. A shooter is set at the top of my crease, waiting on a goalie looking the wrong way down the ice. I find my angle late. I make the save because I always make the save. But I made it a half-step behind myself. Half a step is the whole distance between the man in the book and the man they close the book on.

Sowa says nothing. He does not have to. He saw me watch the boy. He watches me not-watch the boy for the rest of practice. That is its own kind of comment.

In the tunnel after, he holds the door with one glove and lets the room go past him, and waits until I am the last one through.

“You saw the glove save.”

“Everybody saw it.”

“Everybody is not a goalie.” He lets it sit. He lets everything sit, long enough that I have to stand in it. “A man watches a thing because he is afraid of it or because he wants it. There is no third reason.”

“There is. Scouting.”