Page 49 of Five Hole

And it comes out with no ash in it. None. I keep waiting for the old animal in my chest to get up on its feet and hate it like it hated Casimir holding a puck he had no business holding, back when I was a backup dressing for a party I never got to eat at. The animal stays down. What comes up instead is pride, the clean kind, the kind I didn’t know I had a slot for.

Vinh doesn’t say anything for a second, and Vinh not saying anything is never nothing.

“What. Say it,” I tell him. “You think I’m going to wake up next season hating it?”

“No.” He sets the label down flat on the table and smooths it out. “I think he’s gone next season, and you’re right here, and neither of you has said one word out loud about that part.”

And there it is, dropped on the table between the trays with the microwave going and somebody down the row hollering about shuffleboard. The thing I have been carefully declining to look at since the second time the scout came back. Casimir graduates. The pro thing takes him wherever it takes people. I get the crease and whatever’s left of my own time in this town and a phone.

“I don’t have that one worked out,” I say.

“Nobody does.” Vinh shrugs, and it isn’t unkind, it’s just true. “You do it and you find out. That’s the whole answer. It’s a garbage answer. It’s the only one anybody’s got.”

He’s the guy who let an enforcer put a hand on the back of his neck in the middle of this room and never spent the night waiting for the bill. He figured out the thing I spent a whole season being too stubborn to figure out, that you don’t have to earn the hand. You just have to let it land.

“I spent my whole life trying to be the pick,” I say, quieter, because true things come out quiet. I turn my glass a slow quarter on the table. “There’s no drill for it. Turns out somebody just has to choose you, and you have to be dumb enough to believe them.”

Vinh grins, slow, and tips his glass at me, which is what he does when he’s clocked something and is being kind enough not to say it out loud.

And across the room, Casimir catches me looking.

Of course he does. He’s already looking. He always is. We’ve done this since the equipment room the first day, the only two people in a loud place turned away from whatever everybody else has their eyes on, and we called it rivalry for a whole season because rivalry was the one word we both knew how to hold on to in daylight.

All season the move was the same. He’d let me have his eyes for one breath, then set the space back inch by careful inch, like a man returning a borrowed thing before anybody could notice it was gone. Not tonight. Tonight he holds it, in the full light, in front of the whole team, over a cooling tray of food he isn’t going to eat. It’s the loudest thing this quiet man has ever said and there isn’t a word anywhere in it. I feel it land in my chest like a flat palm pressed there.

I don’t look away either. Let the room watch. Let the whole town watch. Let Denny hear about it and pour us both the thing he decides we drink. Let the bad-font internet make of it whatever it wants. I’m done being careful about the one true thing I’ve got. I spent a whole season taking separate elevators from the only person I wanted in the same room with me, and I’m not doing another one.

Chapter 27

Casimir

The conference final comes down to a night in a barn. A barn that will not sit down.

We are in it. Deep in it. A one-goal game in a building louder than weather. The banners shivering in the rafters. The noise quit being sound a while ago. It turned into a pressure you feel in your teeth. I know this pressure. I stood in this and gave a team one goal and not one thing more. They handed me a little brass thing at center ice. I held it out from my body like it might come alive. That was a different man. That man was holding the roof up alone. He did not know there was another way to do it.

My leg is under me. The order is set. I laid the last course of it in the empty end this morning, brick on brick, and carried it out here filled to the lip. Somewhere up under the lights there is a man with a notebook. He came all this way to see one thing. Whether the senior makes the save in the last minute of a final the same way he makes it in the first period of a nothing game. Whether the wall is a wall when the whole season is standing on it.

I can. I have never been more sure of anything in my life.

Because I am not holding it up alone anymore.

This is Rocco’s last game too. He stands up in the room before and the noise drains out of it, a tub with the plug pulled.

“Four years,” he says. “That’s the whole thing. That’s all anybody gets.” He looks down the row at the freshmen, who are looking at the floor. “So don’t play like there’s another one coming.”

He sits down. That is the speech. He does not say the word last and he does not say the word me, because Rocco does not say things about Rocco. The whole room knows it anyway, and the room plays like it. Our captain out there on the blue line, low and wide and impossible to move. Spending his body on every shift. The way he has spent it for four years. Sowa is behind the bench with his arms crossed, and the stone in his cheek. Fortin is down the bench in his gear, not playing, ready in case. Doing the thing he does now. Watching me the way you watch weather you are on the right side of. Before I skated out he put his two fingers on the boards. Once. I felt it in my chest the whole first period. A hand on the roof beside mine.

I take what they bring and they bring all of it. A point shot arrives through four sets of legs and I never see the release, only the lane narrowing, and I narrow with it, and the puck is dead against my chest before the screen has finished being a screen. A tip skips off the far post and I am down on it in the same breath, smothered, buried, nothing loose left for anybody to build a season out of. Then a bad change, and a boy alone with the puck, and the whole sheet open in front of him.

Let him come. Chasing is how the young ones die.

Everything out here is moving. I am the one object that is not. He hunts the gap. They all hunt the gap, because five-hole is the story they have been told about goalies since they were small, and the story is old and the story is wrong. The pads are shut. They were shut before he decided. The barn does what the barn does and it arrives in my teeth as pressure and never as noise.

Back to the top. Glove up. Blocker square. Next.

They come in waves after that. Because a team down a goal in a final stops playing a system and starts playing a fever. I take a slapper off the hip and steer it to the corner. I take a scramble in tight. Two whacks at a loose puck in my paint. I get a pad on the first and my blocker on the second. Rocco arrives to eat the third body before it can arrive at me. He taps my pads with his stick on his way back up the ice. From Rocco that is a whole speech. I hear all of it.

The clock bleeds down. The barn will not sit. Every rush that dies in my glove, the noise climbs another floor. I stay under it, in the still place, where the crowd is only weather and the score is only a rumor. This is the man the notebook came to see.