Page 16 of Locke

“Most commanders don’t think past the victory,” Locke says.“That’s the failure point.You plan for the battle and not for the morning after.”

He racks the bar and sits up.We look at each other and I sense no professional friction between us.

I pull the thread very carefully, understanding how fragile it is.“Do you think Eisenhower ever made peace with it?The gap between knowing what was right and living with what that rightness cost him?When the cost turns out to be—”

Locke stands up so abruptly, the words freeze in my mouth.His expression has gone blank, walled off into nothingness.

“Good conversation,” he says flatly, but his manner indicates he found nothing good about it.

In fact, I think what I said there at the end might have been distasteful to him.

Locke reaches into his pocket and pulls out earbuds.He puts them in and moves to a different section of the gym, closing off the conversation as final as a dead bolt sliding home.

I sit on my bench and look at the space where he’d been standing.

He was right there.

For ten minutes he was engaged with me as we talked about history.He was unguarded until he was triggered and the shutters came down.

The frustrating part isn’t that he disengaged but rather trying to figure out what caused the change.My mind rewinds the conversation, and it seems the change came when I asked him about the cost of being right.

It’s a clue, for sure, but without context, I have no idea how it matters to him.I reach for my water and take a sip.

Whether the rightness of a thing is ever enough when the cost turns out to be something—what?

That question was going somewhere Locke didn’t like and that’s why he stood up.

I pick up my weight and finish my biceps curls and think about the man who walked away from a question like it had knives that would cut him open.

Chapter 7

Locke

Thearenaisthunderous,the Calgary Wild fans losing their shit because their team just went up by two goals and there are nine minutes left.Calgary has been playing a suffocating defensive game that makes a comeback feel less like an opportunity and more like a mathematical problem with no clear solution.

I sit with one elbow on my knee, the other clutching my stick at mid-shaft as I watch the ice and wait for my line change.

I ignore Adam on his own bench, just as I’ve been trying to ignore him for most of the game.Of course, that’s virtually impossible given we are opponents whose lines are facing each other.

Warm-ups were the first test.We were out there at the same time, the two teams sharing the ice in a loose pregame ritual.I had prepared for it the way I prepare for most things—by lifting my walls and locking them tight into place.I skated my patterns and I took my shots.I kept my eyes where they belonged, and I envisioned my performance on the ice.

I truly don’t find it difficult to cut someone out of my sphere of interest so completely.I’ve had experience with this, having played against Adam a handful of times per season over the last nine years.It’s like we don’t even exist to each other, unless a puck gets in between us.

It doesn’t mean I don’t feel him though.He was too integral to my formative life that I can’t switch off the anger just because I refuse to look at him.

My very first shift out on the ice during the game, I’d hopped out and barely made it down to the blue line before I knew he was out there with me.

Knew it before I saw it.

All these years and my nervous system still has him mapped like a threat.

The trick for me is to recalibrate him in my mind to be nothing more than a threat against the win.I have to consider him nothing more than an enemy, same as all the Wild players, and hope to fuck my temper doesn’t get the better of me.

The game has been physical, but then again… this is hockey.Calgary’s system is built on long shifts, heavy forechecking, and grinding possession along the boards until the other team makes a mistake out of exhaustion or frustration.

Every shift my line has been matched against Adam’s, we look like nothing more than two defensemen doing their jobs.Bodies against the glass, sticks in each other’s space, scrabbling for the puck.

There’s no chirping, though.