Twenty Miles (15 page)

Toad pivoted messily. She looked at me and rubbed her eyes like a cartoon character.

‘Where ya been, bud?’ she said.

‘Man, Toad,’ Pelly said. She hiccupped and hit her chest with her fist.

‘I’ve been around,’ I said. ‘I saw all your moves on the dance floor.’

‘Yeah?’ Toad put her arm around me, drew a shaky line from her eyes to mine with two fingers. ‘Fucking eagle-eyes here. You should watch my moves, kid, for sure. Fo sho. I gots moves like ya never seen.’

Then she grabbed my wrist and twirled me around once, wrapped my arm around my body and pushed me backwards against her arm into a low dip. She staggered a bit, her face bumping above mine and I shrieked, my head so close to the ground, hair dusting the cement. But she held me there, her Cheshire cat grin through the darkness, breath like an open beer bottle, and I felt a hit of gratefulness. Pulling me through the darkness into her spotlight, our teammates the audience that held us there.

She set me on my feet and smacked my butt, then poked a finger in the air and announced, ‘Friends. I gotta whiz.’

‘Seconded,’ Hal said and we all moved toward the Agriculture Building where Toad whipped down her pants and crouched, slamming her back against the wall. Hal and Pelly followed suit, Heezer standing off casually to the side. My decision was made while Hal bent her knees. I had to go, but I hadn’t realized until then, until I saw them crouch, but it was suddenly obvious and urgent, and we were all held together by the darkness, and so I squatted too. I pulled down my pants and slouched against the wall at the end of the line beside Pelly, the dry scrape of brick on my lower back, and joined their collective privacy. I’d never.

‘I have stage fright,’ Pelly announced loudly.

‘Visualize, Pelter. A stream of flowing beer.’ Toad pointed accusingly at Heezer. ‘Hey! Where’d that beer go, Heez? From before. I’m going to close my eyes and count to ten, you stale scammer.’

‘Just hurry up, Toader,’ Heezer said beside the bush.

‘One, two.’

‘Poutine,’ Hal mumbled. ‘Whopper and poutine. Barbie. Make it happen.’

I could make poutine happen, I could make anything happen in the double invincibility of darkness and the group, our line united by the trickling stream at our feet. The campus shifted then, all of its paths pouring toward us, the drunken braying of a group of guys across the street a laugh track played for us, the flat peak of Sam Hall rising darkly just beyond the Agriculture Building. Ours. The city getting to its knees, then, peering down, looking at me, saying,
There you are, finally. You’ve arrived.

The flashlight beam, when it shot at us, pinned me to that wall, to the coattails of that giant girl with her booming voice. The light sealing us together, pants around our ankles.

‘Uh, what are you doing?’ A man’s voice said, uncertain. I scrambled with my pants, still crouching, but trying to yank them up over the hills of my knees. Toad’s only movement was the slow rising of her hand to shield her eyes.

‘What’s it look like, champ?’ she said. ‘Carry on.’

‘Uh, I’m campus security, actually.’ We could just see his silhouette around the yellow star of the flashlight, the confused tilt of his head.

Heezer shrieked with delight. ‘The name is Corinne – that’s C-O – ’

‘Pull up your pants, please.’ The flashlight beam swung to the right, drawing a line of light through the trees before settling in a small pool in the grass at the guy’s feet, illuminating the cuffs of his safari uniform pants.

Thrown back to the darkness, we all sprung to our feet, yanking up our sweats, our jeans, our xylophone flies. Toad gave a hushed, desperate laugh.

‘Oh shit oh shit,’ Pelly breathed.

‘What do we do?’ I whispered. I felt loose-limbed in the darkness, flight instinct kicking in.

‘Well, I mean fuck, what can the guy do to us, really?’ Hal said quickly. ‘I mean, really?’

‘Do we run?’ Heezer hissed manically. ‘Like, do we just bust it right now?’

This idea struck me as criminal, desperate. I saw handcuffs, jail cells. ‘He probably saw our jackets, though,’ I said, breathless. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘Shit shit shit,’ Pelly intoned. The flashlight bobbed up and down, stabbing at our knees as the guard approached. He stopped and raised the light around our waists; it bloomed a wan green-yellow glow up around our faces. I looked around our circle for cues. Toad’s face erupted into a garish grin.

‘Evening, officer! How’re you doing tonight, sir!’

The guard was skinny with a sad, failed attempt at a moustache, and he looked about my age. I moved in closer to Pelly. He just stood there. Bewildered eyes.

‘Why were you doing that?’ he said finally. We hadn’t expected this – this opportunity for moral reckoning. We shifted, looked at each other. I felt small comfort, knowing that, among them, I wouldn’t have to talk. Heezer let a short, uncomfortable giggle spill. Pelly followed with a barked laugh like a tic, then clamped her hand over her mouth, wide-eyed.

‘I just mean, uh,’ the guard shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot and I felt sorry for him. ‘There are ladies’ bathrooms all over campus. You know?’

‘Yeah, okay, but. Do we look like ladies to you?’ Toad slurred the word
ladies
slightly. ‘Well, except for Hoots here maybe.’

‘Toad, just shut up.’ Hal elbowed Toad in the side and Toad yelped.

‘Sorry, we’re sorry,’ Hal said, quick, gruff.

‘The point is,’ the guard said, his voice growing confident edges in the face of Toad’s drunken disorder. ‘This is campus property and – ’

‘And we’re campus broads, detective sir. We own this place. Seriously, seriously.’ Toad leaned forward unsteadily.

The guard shuffled back slightly. ‘I don’t think I like your attitude,’ he said.

‘Yeah, well,’ Toad pronounced, ‘I don’t like your muss-stash.’

I grabbed Pelly’s arm like it was the scary part of a movie and she leaned into me. Hal stepped directly in front of Toad.

‘Don’t listen to her,’ she said. The guard touched his upper lip as though expecting to feel blood.

‘I see you play hockey,’ he said and shone the flashlight on the Scarlet crest of Hal’s jacket. ‘What do you think your coaches are going to say about this?’

Pelly and I gasped under our breath.

‘Please. I know this – ’ Hal began.

Toad stepped out. ‘They’ll be thrilled! Our coaches are propeeing! They’re progressive!’

I laughed a bit by accident as Toad swayed and Hal shot me dead with the
FOAD
look.

B
ehind the closed door of her office, Moon asked that we issue an apology to the team for misrepresenting them.

Toad bristled with indignation. ‘Mooner, come on. If anything, it was an accurate representation. It was like a real Discovery Channel moment for buddy. Like,’ Toad switched to a teacher voice. ‘And today in biology class, Moustache, we’ll be learning that women
also
have bladders.’

Toad, as a form of protest, was wearing a T-shirt that said
Guns Don’t Kill People. People with Moustaches Kill People,
next to a silk-screened outline of a grinning, moustached man who looked like Burton Cummings. Sober, her political stance had sharpened.

‘So, let me get this straight,’ Moon said. ‘You are pleading ignorance to the wrongness of ... defiling campus property while wearing team issue. You’re telling me that what you did was perfectly okay.’

Stan coughed into his hand.

‘Precisely,’ Toad said. ‘I think we should fight this, personally. It’s discrimination, this notion that we should have to run around frantically with our knees together looking for the closest powder room, when guys – they just – ’

Moon sighed. ‘Let me stop you there, Corinne.’

‘Buddy,’ Hal groaned. ‘Buddy, you have to shut up.’

Pelly and I glanced at each other. I raised my eyebrows. Pelly looked scared, like she’d lost some sleep over this, bruised wedges under her eyes. Moon pinched the bridge of her nose, closed her eyes. ‘Enough, you two,’ she breathed, a weary mother. ‘Okay, okay.’

‘STOP.’ Stan slammed his palms on the desk next to Moon and leaned forward. A vein bulged in his forehead and his face grew red. ‘You acted like jackasses. All of you. You were caught. Your teammates know. You have to be accountable. You are ambassadors of this team and of the Scarlet Athletic Program and you have to be held accountable for acting like assholes and getting caught. That’s it. Bottom line.’

Silence. Stan rarely raised his voice. Now:
jackasses, assholes.
Our eyes slid like kicked dogs to our laps, slinking down across the dirty beige carpet.

‘Ah did not have sexual relations with that woman,’ Toad mumbled to her knees. Hal punched her in the arm hard enough that I heard the dull rap of knuckles on bicep. And this sound released in me a startling surge of inspiration. I stepped out, suddenly, from the escarpment of their egos.

‘We’re sorry,’ I said tentatively, looking up at Stan, at Moon. The resonant wobble of that word,
We.
Then, again, louder, with conviction. ‘We’re really sorry.’

Hal and Toad looked at me as though I’d just broken out into Spanish opera. Pelly smiled like I was a boyfriend who had surprised her with flowers. The horn signalling the end of the ice time before ours sounded through the office wall. The ice just there on the other side. Ed starting up the Zamboni.

Toad dragged her eyes from me. ‘We are, Mooner,’ she said in a voice as quiet as she was capable of. Hal gave a grudging nod.

And then we couldn’t waste any more time. The Zamboni’s shining tail dragging us all toward practice.

Toad, Hal and Pelly all seemed relieved to get back to their stalls, climb into their equipment, return to the ice. But I felt like I’d been away for a long time, like I’d been on vacation, and was now forced to go back to school. I didn’t want to put on my skates.

‘W
hat the hell is Moon doing? That is not a power play – there, okay, that’s better, now you’re talking. Go, Corrine! Shoot that! Shoot that!’ Mo bellowed, pushing himself up from his seat, hands raised over his lap. Sig looked over to Terry and the two chuckled. Eileen, on the other side of Mo, grabbed his jacket sleeve and yanked.

Sig pulled her glasses down her nose and squinted at the numbers around the faceoff circle, the name bars too blurry from this distance. She was starting to attach numbers to names, names to parents. She’d gone for coffee with a few of them after the last game, Mo inciting a cheer right in the middle of Tim Hortons. These parents were different from the parents of the boys Iz used to play with. Chuckling about their hockey-playing daughters, the nicknames twisted roughly from the girls’ names they’d given
them, laughing about the game-time spars. Pride edged with a kind of vigilance like something might break at any time, blood in their eyes when a daughter got benched or shaken up along the boards, but laughing all the while.

Terry, all bundled in that fleece blanket of hers, leaned in to Sig. ‘Iz is looking strong out there tonight, Sig.’

‘Not bad at all, you’re right.’

A University of Regina player tripped a Scarlet, and Mo leapt to his feet. ‘Get your head out of your ass, ref! Here – ’ He fumbled wildly in his jacket pocket and yanked out a pair of glasses. ‘You want these? Want these? You’ll – ’

Eileen gave his arm a violent tug and Mo fell hard to the bench.

‘Enough,’ Eileen hissed. Mo craned his neck at her, spread his hands.

‘What? I was just offering – that was bloody Sausage, you remember her? Number Six! She’s been getting away with this shit all game – ’

‘Bloody Sausage?’ Eileen giggled. ‘Listen to yourself, Mo. For chrissake. It’s different when the girls say it.’

‘What?’ Mo began to laugh.

The Scarlets wove down the ice, passes echoing tightly into the stands, the players’ calls to each other blurring into crowlike squawks. Sig watched Moon pace along the bench, pen in her mouth. Her eyes darted from the ice to the tops of the players’ helmets to her clipboard, in ticlike sweeps.

A scream.

Movement on the ice sprayed to a quick stop, stilling the bobbing toques in the stands. Breath caught under parkas. A circle of teammates gathered around a fallen Scarlet player, and Sig murmured, ‘What happened?’

Another howl from the ice. Sig had heard the sound before, in countless other rinks. Always made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Eileen leapt up, eyes wide, and stepped from side to side. Mo breathed heavily.

‘Shit. Shit. It’s her knee.’ Under his breath. The stands were still, faces slanted toward the trainer slipping across the ice on Hal’s arm.

‘Oh dear,’ Terry said and shifted uneasily.

Eileen sprinted to the stairs, skittered down to the ice, arms pumping at her sides, her mouth a wild arc. Mo didn’t seem to notice Eileen’s departure, eyes fixed on the circle surrounding Toad, swearing steadily under his breath.

Sig clucked her tongue as she watched Eileen fumble with the gate to the ice, no one helping her. She yanked the handle frantically, and a young man ambled slowly from the penalty box, the one who took the stats, and began to jiggle the handle. Eileen stood back for a second, arms jerking at her sides. He wasn’t fast enough, Sig could feel this in the urgent appraisal of Eileen’s eyes, remembered the way her kid’s, her grandkid’s, screams would rip the inside of her ears, rip through and grab some hidden muscle, ancient and red inside her. The kid wasn’t fast enough with the gate.

Then Hal reached down, took Toad’s arm and hoisted her up. A small cheer moved in the stands as she glided slowly across the ice, Hal helping her along.

‘Not her knee then,’ Mo said, blew out a long breath. ‘Probably just got the sauce knocked out of her.’ He turned to Sig, wiped a big hand over his cheek.

‘She’ll be fine,’ Sig said.

‘That wife of yours is quick.’ Terry leaned over toward Mo.

‘Yeah,’ Mo laughed incredulously. ‘Corinne’ll give her crap for that later. Girl’s twenty-one and she still has her mom trying to come on the ice when she’s hurt.’

‘Ah, can’t blame her,’ Sig said and watched as Eileen leaned toward the stats boy, saying something to him with an embarrassed smile.