Page 16 of Five Hole

“I fixed it because I want your net,” I say. “I do. I want it so bad it keeps me up nights I’ll never cop to. And I’m going to take it, fair, on the ice, this year. I mean that. Every word. But I don’t want it because you came apart in the middle of a hockey game over a horn. That’s not a net worth taking. I want it because I beat the best there is. And how’s a guy the best there is if some idiot backup lets his bottle sit backward when he could’ve reached over the boards and turned it around?” I let that hang too. Then, quieter, just for him, only for him. “So I turned it around.”

He turns his head.

Finally. He turns his head and looks at me, and we’re closer than I planned to end up. Close enough that I can see it isn’t stone, never was. It’s a man holding himself very still, and the holding costs him. I can watch the cost sitting right there, high up, where I’ve learned the window is. His eyes go over my face like he’s hunting the trap in it. There’s no trap in it. That’s the trap.

He doesn’t move away.

There it is. And my heart turns clean over. He doesn’t move away. A man who lives and dies by keeping his exact measured distance from every moving body in a building lets me stand inside that distance, at a bar, in the Hitch, with half the town in the room. And he doesn’t move. His eyes drop to my mouth, just for that breath, then come back up, and he knows I caught it. I can see him know it. He still doesn’t move away.

“Fortin,” he says.

This time my name in his mouth isn’t a verdict. He’s said it like a card he reads a penalty off of. He’s said it like a door closing. He doesn’t say it like that now. Now it’s a question he hasn’t decided whether he’s allowed to ask, and it comes out careful, like a man setting a glass down on a shelf he isn’t sure will hold.

“Yeah,” I say. Whatever it is. Whatever he’s asking. Yeah.

Then Rocco stands.

He stands at the head of the long table and calls the room to some toast, low and plain, no clichés. Rocco does every last thing like that. The whole back of the bar turns toward him with glasses up, and it breaks like a stick across a shin. The moment. The eighteen inches. Casimir straightens off the bar, putting the distance back between us inch by careful inch, and I let him, because there’s nothing else to do with twenty guys turning around. I don’t hear one single word of the toast.

I find his eyes one more time across the room while everybody else is turned to Rocco, and he’s already looking at me. We’ve done this since the equipment room on the first day, the two of us the only ones in a place not watching what everybody else is watching. We call it rivalry, because rivalry is a word we both know how to hold on to. It fits in the hand. You can carry it out of a bar without anybody asking what it is.

Here’s what I carry home instead. I lie awake on it, with a thin wall at my back and a saint asleep on the other side of it, his day set down in rows in the dark.

I wanted him to not move away more than I wanted the toast. More than the room. More than the win we got tonight. More than, for one whole breath at that bar, I wanted the net.

And wanting a single thing on this earth more than I want that net. That’s the most dangerous thing that’s ever happened to me.

Chapter 8

Casimir

The controversy has a shape now. The shape has my name on one side of it and his on the other.

It lives where those things live. The student site. The boards where people who have never stopped a puck decide who should. Somebody set his glove save from the first week of practice next to a soft goal. A goal I gave up the night the horn went wrong. Cut them together. Ran them back to back. The cut does what a cut does. It lies by leaving things out. It leaves out the ten thousand saves that were nothing to look at. It keeps the one that was.

I do not read them. I want that on the record. In my own head. Where it is the only record that counts. I do not read them. Sowa reads them so I do not have to. Then he does not tell me what they say. That is how I know what they say. There is a kindness in it. There is a warning in it. With Sowa the two are usually the same object. Seen from different ends.

He puts us head to head in practice now. He calls it competition. It is competition. Same drills. Same shooters. One net each, and the room keeps a count no one says out loud. I can feel the count. It sits in the air of the barn like cold coming up off the concrete. The young ones keep it without knowing they keep it. I keep it too. I have never in my life been able to not keep a count.

Fortin beats me on a Tuesday.

A breakaway rep. A read he has no business making. Committed early. Wrong by every book I have ever been handed. The read is right anyway. His glove fills with a puck that should be behind him. The young guys make a sound they do not make for me. A short bright sound. The sound a room makes for something it did not see coming.

I beat him back on the next one. Clean. The save I have made ten thousand times. Made the same way I have always made it. The puck dies in my chest. I smother it before the rebound can become anything. The room is quiet for mine.

One drill holds all of it. A wall doing its job is not a story. A boy guessing right is a story. He is the story now. I am the thing the story is happening to.

I have spent my whole life turning myself into the easiest thing to locate on a rink. The save that lands every time in the place the save belongs. There is no font for that. There is no clip for that. There is a font for a boy who is never where you left him.

I know how this story goes. I have watched it happen to other men. The room decides a thing before the standings do. I can feel it in the way the young ones look at him and then look at me. Measuring. You measure a bridge like that when you are not sure it will hold your weight anymore. Most of them do not know they are doing it. But a goalie learns to read a room like he reads a rush, all of it at once, the whole picture before the puck moves. The picture this season is drawing has a boy at the front of it and me a step behind.

I tell myself the count in the barn is not real. It is real. Everything I have ever refused to look at has turned out to be real.

So I keep the order tighter. I add nothing and I remove nothing. The two fingers on the corner. The pieces square. The sentence finished before I step onto the ice. It holds. I tell myself the holding is the answer. It has been the answer since Babcia set my hands on the good plates and taught me that a squared thing keeps the dark out of a house.

Then one night I catch the thing I have spent my whole life watching for.

I am in my room. Everything on the shelf standing where it stands. The day set down piece by piece. The room holding it around me. The way the room is built to hold it. I have done everything right. Every ritual run clean. And I cannot sleep.