"Everybody knows he listens to you, Ash. It was never a secret."
Mäkinen rolls his shoulders the way he does when he’s deciding to hit someone for the good of the group. "You want me to send a message early? Loosen them up?"
"No. No messages. We can’t give them a power play, not tonight. Just play. Hard, clean, fast. Mak, I mean it, gloves stay on."
"Fine."
Marchetti, halfway into his gloves, says it without any heat in it, just true. "You should be telling us this from the net, Lundy."
"Yeah. Well. I’m telling you from here. Same information, worse seat." Bodie hits the door and holds up two fingers, and I get the rest out before they go. "Two minutes. Left pair. Bodies at their goalie. Go."
They go, and I crutch back to my stool at the end of the bench. Soucy comes through the tunnel ahead of me without slowing. There’s a version of this intermission where I catch his eye and say one dry thing about the screen and he hands me the number and we set the three goals down together. I don’t catch his eye. He goes to his net. I go to my stool.
The third period is Soucy holding the line.
They throw everything at him and he does not give. He is square. He is set. He is exactly where the geometry says, and the pucks that beat anyone else die in his glove or his chest. We claw one back. Then closer. Within one. It is his game now, the kind he is keeping alive at one end while we try to solve their goalie at the other.
"He’s holding," Davis says next to me on a TV timeout.
"He’s holding."
"They’ve thrown everything at him since the second and we’re within one. That’s him, that’s not us. We handed him a three-goal hole and he climbed out of it so we’d have a game to play."
"So climb the rest of the way. Get him even. He can’t score them too."
"We’re trying."
"I know you’re. Keep going at the left pair. They’re done, they just don’t know it yet."
And somewhere in there my hands go still. I do not decide it. I am watching him take a slap shot off the chest and freeze it. The whistle goes. I notice that my hands are folded on my good knee. They have not stopped all night. They have lined up bottles and picked at tape and pushed my hair back a hundred times. They have been folded for a while. He does not need me out there. He has never needed me less than he needs me right now. He is under more than I have ever had on me. He is not falling apart. He is the best player on the ice. The part of me that has spent its whole life believing that the day I stop being useful is the day I stop being wanted is sitting on a stool with its hands quiet, watching him hold a one-goal game together with nothing from me at all. I do not have a word for what that is. I just stop reaching for the strap.
Marchetti gets robbed on a chance that was in. All the way in. The glove came out of nowhere.
"That was in," Davis says. "That was in and their guy robbed us."
"It was in. Next one doesn’t get robbed. Get another."
We don’t get another. They score into our empty net with the goalie pulled. The horn goes. We’re down three games to one with the whole season standing on the next one. Across the glass, in the seats behind their bench, I find my mother. She’s wearing my jersey tonight. Or his. I can’t tell from here which number it is, and she isn’t watching the scoreboard. She’s watching my father. He’s shaking hands with his assistants, the staff that built the machine that just took us apart. Her face is doing the thing it’s done for thirty years. Holding two men at once without letting either of them see the cost.
Mäkinen taps my shoulder on his way down the tunnel and the hand stays a beat longer than a tap. Davis, behind him, slows at the door. I wait for myself to say the thing I always say. I’m fine. Go get some rest. The thing doesn’t come. The hand lifts. Davis nods once and goes. The room empties past me. I stay on the stool with my quiet hands. None of them needed a thing from me tonight. They walked past slowly anyway.
"Lundy." Tikh, last one off, waiting on me the way I’ve waited on him a hundred times. "You good down here? You don’t have to sit the bench. They’d put you up in the room, get the leg up."
"I’m good. I want to see it."
"See what, a loss?"
"I want to see him. Whatever happens out there, I want to see it from here." I get the crutches under me. The leg holds enough. I go down the tunnel after my team with the score against us and the series against us and one small impossible thing loose in my chest that I’m not going to look at directly yet, the way you don’t look directly at a light that’s finally, after a long dark, coming on.
?
Five Hole Fiction #3
Lundy
is anyone else still reading this or is it just me
Kowalski
