Page 13 of Five Hole

There is a thing that happens. A horn from the wrong bench. A scoreboard that lies for a moment. A sound that lands out of sequence. It is nothing. It is truly nothing. It takes one shift of me clean off the board.

The horn goes when no horn should go. It comes up out of the wrong side of the building and my body answers before my head can call it off. My body lunges for an order that is not on the ice to hold. For one shift I am not the wall. I am a man in forty pounds of gear who has lost his place in the sentence. Their top line reads it the way sharks read a change in the water, and they come. I am guessing. I am late. I am every single thing I have spent my life refusing to be.

Two shots I do not so much save as survive. One caroms off my shoulder and over. One I smother by luck, not by craft, my glove finding it like a drowning hand finds a rope by accident. The crowd does not know the difference. I know the difference. The difference is the whole of me.

The third one goes in.

A wrister from the top of the circle. Nothing on it. The kind I have eaten ten thousand times without thinking about it after. My glove is late because my glove is still listening for a horn. The puck goes under it and the light comes on and the wrong side of the building gets the sound it wanted. It is a soft goal. There is no other word for it and I do not go looking for one.

We survive the rest of the shift. A whistle. A stoppage. A defenseman flat on the ice with his body in the lane, because the goalie could not be trusted with it. He gets up slow. He taps the puck to the ref and skates to the bench. He does not look at me. That is its own mercy and I know it. There is a code. You do not stare at the goalie after you have covered for him. You let him find his own way back. Even that kindness is a way of saying he saw me fail.

I know what that is. A teammate spending his body to close a hole I left open. For them I am supposed to be one thing. The last certainty. The floor that does not give. For one shift I was not it. I feel the not-it in my chest like a missed stair in the dark.

I skate to my crease to reset. I already know the order is not here to be found. The order lives on the shelf and the bench and the sequence, not in the middle of a period with the clock still bleeding.

And the water bottle is turned wrong.

Nothing. A nothing thing. But it sits on top of the net with the label out, always. That is part of it. In the scramble a stick or an elbow spun it, and the label is to the back now. My eye snags on it and my chest does the thing. The floor-tips thing. The unfinished-sentence thing. I am at the worst possible moment to be a man who cannot let a label sit wrong.

Before I can get a glove up to it, a glove gets there first.

Fortin. Leaned over the boards from the bench. He rights the bottle, label out. Then he squares the towel the way I square the towel. Then he touches the top corner of the boards, two fingers, once. The way I do it. He drops back onto the bench and looks out at the ice like his hands were never anywhere near it.

He gave it back.

He knows the sequence. He has known it for days. He has been gathering it piece by piece while I let him stand too close. The one thing a person does with that knowledge, the exact thing I have braced against my entire life, is use it. Spin the bottle. Move the glove. Find the gap and go up the middle.

He found it and he covered it with his body.

The settled feeling comes back. Not off the shelf. Not out of the sequence. Off a boy on the bench who put my label out because he could see, from there, that I needed it. The floor comes back up under me. The sentence, which had been hanging open and bleeding, finds its last word in the last place I would have looked for it. I did not put it there. He did.

I make the next save the way it is meant to be made. Square, sealed, unhurried, boring. And the one after that. The rest of the night I am the wall again. Their top line reads it and quits coming up the middle. We win the nothing game that is not a nothing game. The horn at the end is the right horn, and I let it be the end of it.

In the room after, everyone is loud. Someone dumps a water bottle over someone’s head. Rocco is grinning, which he does about four times a year. He knocks two knuckles on the frame of my stall on the way past.

“You good?”

“I’m good.”

“Yeah?” He does not wait for it. That is how Rocco asks.

Sowa stops at the end of my stall on his way out. He does not sit. He does not sit down in this room and he never has.

“Twenty-four.”

“Twenty-four.”

“Two of them you survived. The rest you made.” He lets it sit. “A man in the seats cannot tell those apart. You can. So can I.”

“I know.”

“Good. Then we do not have to have the other conversation.” He puts his hand once on the top of my stall, on the wood, never on the gear, not once in all the mornings of us. “Something put you back on your feet in the second. It was not the shelf. Whatever it was, do not go looking for it in daylight. You will only frighten it off.”

He leaves before I can work out whether I have been praised or warned.

I sit in my stall and I cannot make the thing balance. You do not hand your rival his order back in the middle of a game. It breaks every unwritten law of the work we do. He wants my net. He has said it to my face, at the board, in ink. Lists change. Then he leaned over the boards and steadied the one man standing between him and the top of the list. Who does that?

I turn it over in my hands the way I turn the blocker at the shelf, looking for the lace, looking for the wrong thing in it. There has to be a wrong thing in it. Maybe it was for the team. Steadying me steadies the score, so he did it for the two points and not for me. It is a clean explanation. It does not fit what I saw when he sat back down. He did not look at the score. He looked at me, and then he looked away and gave me the moment for nothing. A man playing the two points does not do that.