Page 41 of Five Hole

And now it’ll never look like anything but the con he named. That’s the trap he built and I walked into it wide-eyed, because a hurt man doesn’t check where he’s putting his feet. He accused me of a thing I hadn’t done. I was so gutted by the accusing that I went out and did it to spite him. In the doing, I made his lie the truth. I handed him the proof of the very thing I came here to disprove. I’m so good at winning arguments, crisse, they’re going to carve it on my headstone. Won every point. Lost the game. Undefeated, me. Ask anybody who’s still speaking to me, which is a short list and getting shorter by the week.

I go to the Hitch after. I don’t want the team. I don’t want the pile and the chant and the guys buying me the thing you buy the shutout goalie. I want the dark corner under the deer head, the one with the Renegades cap on it, and I want the drink Denny pours without being asked.

The place is warm and low and smells like fried everything. The horseshoe is still nailed over the door, older than anybody who drinks under it. The deer head still wears its Renegades cap, which it has worn since before I was born. Half the town is in here off their shifts, a couple of old-timers at the rail, the little TV over the bottles running a pro game nobody in here pulls for. It’s still the closest thing I’ve got to a living room. Tonight I don’t want the family part of it. I want the corner and the dark and the drink.

Denny pours it and sets it down on the wood in front of me. Then he doesn’t move off, and that’s the tell, because Denny works this bar the way he used to kill a penalty, always sliding, never in one spot long enough to get scored on. He puts both hands on the wood across from me instead.

“Thirty-four,” he says.

“You counted.”

“I watch the games. I’m not dead.” He looks at me a beat longer than the room would call polite, and there’s nothing in the look trying to be wise about it. It’s a guy who came up the same tunnel not that long ago reading a guy who’s still coming up it. “Worst night I ever had in this building, I got the empty-netter against these same guys. Whole barn saying my name. Never happened before, never happened again.” He shrugs one shoulder. “Drove up the mountain after wanting to put my fist through the windshield. It’s never the hockey. Everybody figures it’s going to be the hockey.”

“So what is it, then. If it’s never the hockey.”

“You know what it is.”

“Humor me. Say it out loud so I’ve got something to argue with.”

“No.” He picks up a glass that doesn’t need picking up. “You’d win. You’re better at talking than me and then I’m up all night about it.”

Then he sets the bottle down next to my glass instead of capping it and carrying it back to the rail, and he goes off to work the far end and leave me alone, which is the second kindness and the bigger one.

The bottle isn’t the message. The bottle is Denny getting out of the way after he already said it, out loud, in plain words, in about forty seconds flat. He sat in the seats they park you in when you don’t play. He can tell a guy who lost from a guy who won and came out worse, and he can tell it in the time it takes to pour.

I sit there with the net I always wanted and the bottle Denny left. And somewhere in the low warm dark of the place, I finally understand what I’ve been doing my entire life.

Earning it. All of it. Every hour on the milk crate with a garage door for a net and a tennis ball for a puck. Every early morning first-idiot-in. Every tell I studied in the dark of a film room. Every guy I out-hustled to the corner seat on the bus. Every drill I turned myself inside out to win. Every party I filled with noise so nobody would notice I was the one who never got picked to lead the rush. Ostie, you know how much noise a thing like that takes? My whole life I’ve been trying to earn the thing that would finally make me worth choosing. I thought if I just worked hard enough at being good, being funny, being early, being useful, somebody would eventually look at the list and put my name at the top of it. And then the thing in me that’s been cold since I was a kid would finally warm up.

I thought the net was that thing. I stood at the end of a bench in clean dry pads and decided the net would fix the part of me that never got chosen first.

And I did it to him too. That’s the part that puts my forehead down on the bar. I did the exact same thing to Casimir. I tried to earn him, like a crease, like a start. Study his tells, learn his order, out-work the other guy for the right to stand in front of him. I courted him the only way I know how to want anything, which is to compete for it.

I brought him flowers the only way I’ve got, by trying to be better than him, by going five-hole on him in a duel and calling it a love letter. In my whole vocabulary the highest thing you can say to a person is this. I studied you and I beat you. You were worth every hour of it. Nobody ever taught me a softer word than that. I grew up in rooms where you earned your seat or you rode standing, where love was a locker-room thing, gruff and sideways, a roll thrown at your head, a hand on the back of your neck you didn’t get to keep. I didn’t know there was another language for handing a person your heart. So I handed him a scouting report, and then I couldn’t understand why he flinched every single time.

And when he wouldn’t be earned, when he stopped being a wall to beat and asked me in his own bricked-up way to just be loved instead of won, I didn’t know how. I short-circuited. Because nobody ever taught me the difference between being wanted and being chosen, so I’ve spent my whole life mixing them up, drinking one and calling it the other, wondering why I’m still thirsty.

Wanted is a thing you can earn. You out-work it, you out-hustle it, you make yourself so useful they can’t run the room without you. Chosen is something else, and it doesn’t answer to work. Chosen is a person looking at you with your gear off and your best game nowhere in the building, and picking you anyway, for no reason you could put on a résumé. Who does that? I built my whole self to be wanted. I never learned how to let myself be chosen. I wouldn’t have known what to do with it if it had walked up and sat down next to me. It did, in an equipment room, with a glove in my hand, and I tried to scout it.

I’ve got the net. I’ve never felt less picked in my life.

I lift my head off the bar. Denny is down at the far end with his back half to me, which is Denny for still here. What are you supposed to say to a guy who says his piece and then quits looking at you on purpose so you can have the room? Nothing. That’s the correct answer, and I’m the only guy in this town who has never managed it.

So I did the thing I know how to do. I competed harder, I took the net, I proved I didn’t need him. Proving is the only tongue I speak. I proved it so well I convinced everyone in the building, including, maybe, him.

I’m done confusing them. That’s the thought I walk out into the cold with. I leave Denny’s bottle mostly full on the wood, which is its own kind of answer to the man who left it, and I go out into the dark of a town that took a couple of seasons to decide I was all right. I don’t know yet what it’s going to cost me to fix this. I know it’s going to cost. But I know, for the first time in my whole earning life, which of the two things I actually want. And it isn’t the one they let you hang from the rafters with a date on it.

Chapter 22

Casimir

Rock bottom has a scoreboard. I know, because I am reading ours. It is telling me a true thing. In the only language I have ever fully trusted. The language of the number that does not lie.

We lose. Then we lose the next one. The team that was rolling starts to skid. It skids for a reason that is never printed anywhere, and is understood by everyone. A room feels a goalie war in its spine even when nobody names the war. It feels the two of us not sitting together at the Trough. It feels the separate elevators, the careful choreography. Two men taking the long way around each other. Through a building that is not big enough for it. It feels the thing that welded this room around the winning come apart. Along the exact seam where he ends and I begin.

You can watch it happen if you know where to look. A defenseman hesitates a half-beat before he throws his body in a lane. A team that trusts its goalie plays in front of him without thinking. This team has stopped being able to not think about its goalies. The forwards grip their sticks tighter. The freshmen go quiet. Rocco tries. He is the moral center of this room. He can feel the poison in it. He works it as he works everything. With weight, with the tap on a shin guard, with three sentences and no clichés. But a captain can only weld so much. You cannot weld a crack you are not allowed to name. No one is allowed to name this one. The crack is a thing that happened in a gray room with a door shut on it.

The scout closes his notebook. He came to see one thing, and the senior is in a suit on the bench with a healed leg, so the man with the little book grades the goalie who is actually out there. That goalie is coming apart. Two nights running, soft ones, the kind that live on film forever. A boy who was reading plays before they declared is a half-beat behind everything now. That is what closes a notebook. Not the drama in the room. The soft goal on the tape. But the drama in the room is the whole reason it is on the tape at all. My spring goes gray and his is going gray beside it and I am the one who did that. I set out to protect my net, my showcase, my one clean thing, my door, and I came apart doing it and took him apart on the way down. A man defending a house does not usually think to check whether he is the fire.