Page 15 of Five Hole

“That’s what she said.”

Denny cuts himself a slice with the air of a man conceding a point he does not intend to acknowledge out loud.

Over at the pool table Harlan and Kaspar are running the thing they run. Kaspar calls a shot he has no business calling, two rails and a prayer, and doesn’t say it out loud so much as tap the wood twice where he wants it to go. Harlan sinks it. They’ve been doing this so long neither of them bothers celebrating. Between shots they end up leaning on the same six inches of rail with their hands side by side on the wood, close enough that you’d have to be looking hard to find the daylight, and nobody in this bar is looking hard. Somebody hollers at them to move it along because there’s a table waiting, and Harlan says something in Finnish that is definitely not about pool, and the room laughs and goes back to what it was doing.

That’s it. Nothing more to it. I turn my glass a quarter on the wood and file it somewhere I don’t have a name for yet.

Bruno’s here again, off the clock, out of the team jacket, on the town side of the job for once. And he’s here anyway on a team night because Vinh is here.

The two of them have washed up in a booth by themselves, which is what two guys do when the rest of the room is somebody else’s noise. Bruno’s arm is along the back of the seat, Vinh’s fit up under it telling a story with the hand he’s got free, and there it is again, the thing I don’t have a word for in either language I own. Two guys just letting themselves have it. Out loud, in Denny’s bar, in front of the whole team, and the whole room lets them without making an event of the letting. That’s the part that gets me. Not that they’re allowed. That nobody in the building has decided it’s a thing to be allowed or not.

I think about a kid who stopped sleeping one winter, who built himself a chapel so it would never happen again, and I think about how far a chapel like that sits from an arm along the back of a booth. I do the math on the distance. I don’t like the number I get.

I don’t clock that I’ve been staring until Vinh catches me at it. He grins and tips his glass at me, small, like he knows something, which he probably does.

“What?” I say, loud enough to cover it. “You want my drink? Come take it.”

He lifts the glass a little higher instead of answering, which is worse than anything he could’ve said. Vinh’s got an eye on him that misses nothing. And lately he keeps pointing all of it at me. So I turn my attention somewhere my face can behave. There’s a lot of my drink left. I get busy with it, and I stay busy with it a good while.

Bruno comes back from the bar with two fresh glasses and stops at my stool. He’s got no hand free for the usual, so he does the next thing, which is put his shoulder into mine and leave it there a second, all that weight, warm and unbothered. He did that in a sweater. He hasn’t quit doing it in a headset.

“Fortin.”

“Câlisse, Thibault. They still let you in here? Thought there was a rule in here about coaches. Thought there was a whole plaque about it up over the door, right next to the horseshoe.”

He tips his head toward the far end of the bar without looking at it. Toward the one guy in the room. Nobody else in this place would’ve clocked that I keep clocking him. “Go easy on him this year, eh?” He says it light, no weight on it. “He’s better than he lets anybody see.”

There’s nothing in it. It’s just a thing a good captain’s old enforcer says on his way past, a guy who spent his whole time here learning to see the quiet ones. But my face wants to do something, so I put a grin on it fast, before it can.

“Somebody’s got to keep him honest,” I say. “Ostie, I go easy on him, he starts thinking I’ve gone soft. And I don’t do soft, me.”

Bruno laughs, big and helpless, the whole-body laugh, then moves on back to his booth, to his Vinh and his easy warm life. I sit there wondering what a man learns to see about Casimir Wrobel across three seasons in the same room, and whether he even knows what he just handed me for free.

Somewhere else in the room is Casimir.

End of the bar by himself, which is where he always ends up, close to the room without ever joining it. There’s a glass in front of him he isn’t drinking. He isn’t watching the TV. He isn’t watching the shuffleboard. He’s just sitting inside himself at the end of the bar, being the one still object in a room full of moving ones.

And I do the thing I do around him, the documented condition. I can’t not.

I bring my glass down the wood and lean on the bar next to him. Not too close. Close enough. Denny clocks it from the far end and pours something for a man who didn’t order it, which is Denny for I see you. And I’m staying out of it.

“You did a thing tonight,” I say.

He doesn’t look over. “I made twenty-four saves. I did a number of things.”

“The bottle.” I turn my glass a slow quarter turn on the bar, just to have something to do with my hands, because they want to do something dumb. “You were rattled after the horn. Don’t bother arguing. Nobody in that whole building saw it but me, and I’ve been watching you long enough now to catch it. The horn went when no horn should go, your body went looking for a wall that wasn’t there, and for one shift you were a guy in the gear instead of the guy in the net. Your bottle got spun backward in the scramble. Label to the boards.” I let it sit. “And I fixed it.”

“I noticed.”

“You want to know why?”

“No,” he says.

Which is a lie, and we both hear that it’s a lie, sitting there between us on the bar. His trick, start to finish. He’ll hand you a lie so bald it’s basically a dare to call it. He wants you to. He’d never in a hundred years admit he wants you to.

So I call it.

I shift, just a little, just enough that my forearm on the wood comes up a breath from his forearm on the wood. Not touching. A hair from touching. I feel him clock the hair. I drop my voice under the noise of the room, under the TV and the shuffleboard, under Rocco laughing at something down the way, until it’s a thing that only exists in the eighteen inches between us.