He goes. Find the puck. Let the rest be noise. It’s a good sentence built for a brain that can let things be noise, which isn’t the brain I have. I borrow it anyway because Bodie is rarely wrong about the one thing.
Lundy comes down the room on the crutches, which take him longer than walking, and stops at my stall and balances there with the braced leg held off the floor.
“They’ll screen you off the rush,” he says. “Not set plays. Off the rush. Their third guy peels to the front instead of going for the rebound. Third time you’ll feel him coming and you’ll want to look. Don’t look. Trust where he has to be and play the puck.”
“I know how to play a screen.”
“I know you do. I’m telling you the shape of theirs.”
There’s a pause where his mouth opens on a different shape. Not hockey. Then the shape closes and becomes hockey again, and I watch it go.
“And the cross-seam. They’ll move you east-west and make you reset twice. Don’t reset twice. Take the first one away, trust your D on the backside.”
“I’ll trust my D.”
“You’ll trust your D.” It’s the worn-in echo, the call-and-response we ran for two hundred mornings. It comes out of him cold now. The warmth nine days gone. He shifts his weight on the crutches. There’s something I want to say and nothing to say that isn’t the thing. The thing is mine. It has a brace on its leg.
“Eight forty tomorrow,” I say, because I don’t have the words for the actual sentence and the carpool time is a word I have.
“Eight forty,” he says, and goes back down the room on the crutches. Slow. I lace the skate my hand is on. I’m about to go do the one thing my brain has never gotten wrong, alone, with him on the bench where the net used to put him beside me.
They live in my kitchen.
Bodie called it and Karl built it and it’s worse than the film, because the film is silent and this isn’t. Three of them at the top of the blue every shift, a forest that re-grows the second I clear it. I find the first puck through a screen. Glove. Freeze it. I find the second the same way. I’m square and set, where the geometry says to be. The geometry holds, because it’s never lied to me.
Then they make it stop holding the way they want it to stop.
The first goal is a point shot through two bodies that I never see leave the stick. I get a piece. The piece isn’t enough and it trickles, and their third man, the one Lundy named, is at the back post because he peeled off the rush instead of chasing. Exactly the shape Lundy drew on the crutches. I knew it was coming. Knowing didn’t put my pad on the post in time.
One to nothing.
The second is the cross-seam, the hard east-west that moves me. I don’t reset twice. I take the first one away the way he said.The puck is already gone into the room I just left before my pad finds the post.
Two to nothing. My building goes quiet the way a home building goes quiet. Worse than roaring.
Câlisse. Find the puck. Let the rest be noise. The rest won’t be noise. The rest is three men in my kitchen and a coach across the ice who watched the same four hundred views of film I watched and built a machine from it. There’s no one two stalls down. No glove tapping a post, no voice saying that one’s yours and mine. There’s the net and the score.
The third I do not even fight. A rebound through too many sticks, in before I find it. The light goes on. Three to one. We got one back at some point, Marchetti I think. One doesn’t matter against three.
I get up off my knees, because getting up is the next thing and the next thing is the only unit of time I can hold.
I do not look at the bench. If I look at the bench my eyes will do what they’ve done all season, the scan that ends on him, and he will be there with a brace on his leg and his hands doing nothing because there’s nothing for them to do. I can’t carry his face and the score in the same body at the same time.
So I look at the puck. I square to the next faceoff. The forest forms at the top of my crease, three of them, sticks up. I set my feet in the paint where the geometry says to set them, down by two in the Final with the season coming apart around my net. There’s no one coming.
I find the puck.
?
Chapter 27: Lundy
Davis sets a stool down at the end of the bench and shoves it toward my braced leg with his skate.
"Brought you a stool for the leg. Bodie’s orders. He says if you tip over the bench he’s not picking you up."
"Tell Bodie I’ve never tipped over a bench in my life."
"You’re on crutches."
