Page 3 of Five Hole

I just don’t know yet it’s also the year I stop being able to tell that want from the other one.

Chapter 2

Casimir

Glove. Blocker. Chest. Pads. Mask.

I set each piece square to the next. I do not hurry. I do not think. The not-thinking is the point. The order is a language. I have spoken it so long my hands say it without me. The blocker goes down. My fingers find the top corner of the shelf. Two of them. Once. The way you touch a doorframe before you go through it. Then the chest protector. Then the leg pads, faces out. The same faces out they have shown since I was small.

There. The shelf is a sentence. The sentence is complete. The room settles around it. Something in me settles too. Low. Quiet. A water finding its level.

Spokój, my grandmother called it. Peace. She had a word for the settled feeling and a word for the order that earns it. Kolejność. Keep the order and the order keeps you. She said both over the plates and the folded cloths and the candles set just so. She was right about all of it. She is gone. This shelf is the last place I can still hear her.

I was small when she taught me. It is less a memory than a shape a memory left. Her hands over my hands on the good plates. The cloth folded in thirds, never in half. The candle set a thumb from the edge, where it could not reach the curtain. She smelled like wax and cold flour and the inside of a coat that has been out in the snow. She was teaching me a way to stay standing. I thought it was only how a table got set.

I did not understand it as a boy. I understand it now. You cannot stop the thing from coming. You choose only what it finds when it comes. Let it find the plates straight. Let it find the candle set safe. Let it find me in the crease, and the crease in order, and the order holding.

The fluorescent hums. The tube has a tick in it near the end of its life. I have learned the tick. It is not in the sequence, so it does not touch the sequence. Someone drops a stick two rooms over. It rings on concrete, a bright ugly sound. I do not flinch. The order is complete. A complete order can take a dropped stick. No one else here knows that about me. I am fine when the sentence is finished. It is the unfinished ones that open the floor.

The gear smells like it always smells. Old sweat gone cold. New tape. I have set my gear in a hundred rooms and every one of them smelled like this one. That’s a kind of home. Not a warm one. A reliable one. I made that trade a long time ago and I do not reopen it.

I am reaching for nothing, my morning done, when the door goes. Then the boy.

I hear him before the door. There’s always a thread of music where he is. It comes off him like heat off a stone in the sun. Then he is in the frame of the room, saying my name.

“Wrobel? You back there?”

I do not answer. I wait for him to leave. Weather waits out a man who will not come inside.

He does not leave. He crosses to the shelf.

I feel it the way you feel a hand near your face in the dark. He picks up my glove and sets it on the right. The sentence breaks. The floor tips.

I put the glove back. I say the thing I say. It is not an answer. It is not owed to be one. He grins and needles, and I give him more words than I mean to. You have never been well-behaved for a full minute in your life. I am angry at the words the moment they are out. Words are a door left open. He hears the door. Of course he hears it. He lives for the sound of a door coming open. Then I wait for the settled feeling to come home behind the correction, the way it always comes home.

It comes home slow.

That is the part I carry onto the ice, later, when I should carry nothing. It came slow. In the slow, in the open stretch where the peace should already have been, I made the mistake of looking at him.

Grinning. He’s always grinning. A boy’s grin. The grin of someone who decided long ago the world is a joke he is on the inside of. I spent a whole season unbothered by that grin. I mean to spend this one the same.

Fortin. Backup. A variable. Manage it.

You manage a variable by killing its power to surprise you. I have made a study of him, the way I study a shooter. He comes first because he is hungry and files it under discipline. The music is not for him. It is for the silence. Silence is a thing that happens to him. Noise is a thing he does to it. He moved the glove not to break me but to watch whether I break. That’s the worse of the two. A man who wants to hurt you can be answered. A man who only wants to see cannot.

So I do not let him see.

I have a list of him now. It runs longer than it should. He lifts his chin at the rink kid who never takes the earbuds out. He knows the name of the man who runs the Zamboni. He’s warm to everyone and close to no one, and I don’t think he knows there’s a difference. A man who gives that much away has decided he has more than enough. I do not know what it is like to decide that.

That is not on the list. I take it off the list. It is not intel. It is only noticing. I have started confusing the two, and confusion is the first crack in any wall.

* * *

Sowa runs the goalies through the warm-up.

The barn is cold in the way it gets before the crowd comes and warms it with bodies. My breath hangs. My pads are stiff at the first flex and then they are not. I move through the warm-up the way I move through all of it. Nothing wasted. Each save a word I have said ten thousand times. Glove. Blocker. The pad down and sealed and up again. He watches me more than he coaches me. That is what I need from him, and part of why I can stand him.

“Slow,” he says, when I come up off the second one.