Twenty Miles (19 page)

‘Uh, we’re getting up to laundry time here, so...’ He stood with his hands behind his back, scanning the room like he was the one
who had just arrived. ‘Oh! Have a seat.’ He gestured to the bed and I sat at the far end.

‘Do you mind if I – ?’ He pointed to the other side. I shook my head. He sat and looked at me like I might hit him.

‘Awkward,’ I said. And then we both started to laugh a bit. At first, we were laughing to punch a hole through the tension. Then, we stepped through this hole, laughing in relief. Then laughing because we hadn’t stopped laughing yet. Laughing because we couldn’t stop. Jacob’s shoulders shook. He tossed his head helplessly. I bent over my knees, tears hot in my eyes. Tipped upside down like a jar. Laughing in rewind, back through matching jackets, Rookie Night, Rocks for Jocks, tequila, Flames, Oilers, awkwardness, Don Cherry. Laughing at the terrible drawing. I held it up.

‘I have no idea what this is,’ I said, wiping my face with the back of my hand.

Jacob made a moaning sound as he calmed. ‘I made it in class,’ he said.

‘What – Arts and Crafts for Jocks?’ My face still frozen in a smile. Jangly shoulders.

Jacob yelped. ‘Touché.’ He took the paper from my hand, tilted his head as he examined it. ‘You don’t get it?’

‘What’s this?’ I pointed to the wave. It looked like the smiley-face heart was throwing up.

A confused squint. ‘It’s the lake,’ he said. ‘It’s you.’

I grabbed the paper from him, looked again.

‘So what – I have two heads?’

‘No. Your real head is the – ’ He laughed. ‘Yeah, I forget.’

‘I think my real head should be the lake, if anything.’

‘Your head’s a lake?’

‘No.’

We studied the picture.

‘I had this theory.’ Jacob chewed his lip. ‘But I forget it. I’m sorry, I’m a nerd.’

‘You can’t be a nerd,’ I said. ‘You’re a hockey player. But you’re a terrible artist.’

Jacob fell back on the bed, clutching his chest. ‘All my hopes and dreams – what will I do?’ he said.

‘This doesn’t look like me in the least.’

He jumped up and grabbed a pen, took the sheet, held it against the desk and scribbled something. When he gave it back to me, there were skates on the girl’s feet.

‘Even worse,’ I said.

‘Harsh.’ He sat back down, closer. The silence between us had changed shape.

‘Hey,’ I said, quieter now. ‘Did I scare you that other night?’

‘You mean with the Flames game?’

‘No, not that.’ I paused. ‘The other one.’

‘Oh – well, okay. Yeah, a bit.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No, it’s not a bad thing, it’s – you’re scaring me right now, actually. Sober. It’s a good thing, though.’ He glanced at me quickly and smiled.

I could blow over buildings then, and I couldn’t imagine a time I hadn’t felt that way. I was giant. As big as Hal.

Then, in the next breath, the next held breath, I shrank. Jacob put his hand on my knee and I could hear my bones folding, small, into a compact version of me, one he could slip into the breast pocket of that old blue dress shirt, right next to the pen leaking a tiny map, and I’d smell his sweat and ink, and be incubated like an egg by the bramble of hair over his heart, by the hot plate of skin.

I didn’t want to feel small.

I took a deep breath and moved my knees slowly toward him.

U
niversity of Brandon. Bunch of thick-necked players and they played the body like it was going out of style, their homer refs hit with these sudden attacks of blindness whenever a Bobcat elbow or knee slipped. Breaking the puck out of our end, attempting the push down to theirs, was like swimming out from the dock in a Small Craft Warning wind, muscular crash of white caps against your bones, the relentless beatdown.

Bitty stopped behind our net, dribbling the puck for a couple of seconds, looking for the play that would get us out of our end, we needed out, finally, please, someone, and then she stepped out, skating through the middle, sailing the puck over to Pelly near the blue line for the break-out and I skated up through centre ice for the pass from Pelly, but the ubiquitous Number Ten had already stepped in, cleanly, quickly, squishing Pelly along the boards – I heard the breath siphoned from her lungs, an urgent
oof
– and then Pelly struggling with the puck, arms squashed up against her body, Ten’s embrace from behind, Pelly’s stick moving like some crawling animal on its last legs, the puck jittering around at their feet. I went at the puck, trying to extract it from their legs, Ten kicking it back into their mangled feet, going for the whistle, and the ref – their ref – more than thrilled to accommodate Ten, as she had been the entire goddamn game.

Whistle.

‘Uggghhhhhh!’ Pelly warbled. ‘Fucking get off me, you cow!’

‘Grow up, baby girl,’ Ten sneered as she slowly, slowly, peeled herself off Pelly.

Hal and Toad skated up. The ref moved in nervously, hands up, ready to catch bodies.

Pelly took off a glove, grabbed the front of her own twisted jersey, straightened it out with a grimace.

‘Yeah. Yeah, okay,’ she said, turning toward our bench. Then, over her shoulder, ‘Your girlfriend’s straight, shitface.’ And she skated off.

Toad emitted a sound of undiluted delight. She grabbed my shoulder, pulled me toward her, and touched her cage to mine. An astonished grin glowing beneath the cross-hatches.

‘Did that just happen?’ she said. ‘That burn? From our little Pelly?’

‘It did, it did,’ I said. ‘She’s good.’

Toad backed away, shaking her head. ‘Top ten proudest moments.’

We skated to the circle.

‘Awesome calls, ref,’ Toad said as we passed a linesman along the boards. ‘Top-notch work you’re doing here this aft. Fucking art.’

‘Watch it, Two,’ the linesman barked.

‘We’d say the same to her, but we know that’s not happening,’ I mumbled to Toad. Toad snorted. We were in the second period now and a slow boil had been building in my chest since the beginning of the game. U of B throwing their bodies around like gymnasts, amputating our plays, the refs rewarding their cheap elbows and hip checks with blind eyes. The viral spread of frustration among my teammates.

Toad and I settled into our posts at opposite sides of the circle, Hal bent over in the centre, stick braced across her thighs, shoulders hunched. Boz and Duff behind us on D. I lined up against the drag-queenish Ten, who must have been close to six feet, the lanky bulk of her legs, submarine skates. She spit through her cage onto the ice.

The ref lumbered down into a wide stance and raised the puck, then paused for a few teasing seconds, as though posing for a picture, Hal and the other centreman jerking out a false-start scrabble with their sticks, then settling back down, pretending patience, Ten wheedling her elbow into my side. I moved away from it, jabbed her forearm with my glove, and then the ref dropped the puck, flicking the switch, all of us moving at once, a giant wind-up toy, Brandon’s centre winning the draw, throwing it back to a D who chipped it along the boards, dumped it back into our end, no icing call. I caught up to Ten and glanced off her side like a car against a guardrail, letting her know I was there and nothing was going to happen between her and the puck, tying up her stick a bit. Then Duff dove in for the puck in the far corner and I moved away, looking for open ice, Duff moving up along the boards and running into their winger. Duff sent it back along the boards, behind the net, knowing Boz was there even though she didn’t look. Knowing that Boz would be backing her up. I looped back again, back toward our net, toward Boz, looping up around the boards, looking for the opening, eyes slicing out a clean angle to Boz, hands ready. Boz scooping up the puck behind the net, deking around their centre, flowing up along the boards. Open.

Whistle.

Hal and Ten were pushing each other, back and forth like a seesaw, just beyond the blue line. A strong matchup, both of them big. The coil visible in Hal’s arms sent a cold chord up my spine, the
ref sprinting over. All of us, skating toward them, Moon bellowing ‘Chris!’ from the bench.

‘Come on, bitch,’ Hal was saying, straining against the ref, Ten turning a bit, like she might be backing down. ‘Where ya goin’, eh? I got lots, I got lots.’ A mean twist of a smile that jerked adrenalin into my throat.

‘Enough!’ the ref said.

Boz pushed back gently on Hal’s shoulder. ‘It’s okay, Hally. It’s not worth it.’ All of us crowded in so close we could feel the hard push of each other’s breath. Ten turned back. Her eyes settled on Boz, a smirk cracking open one side of her mouth.

‘Whatever, nigger,’ she said.

Our circle smashed. Toad and Hal leapt at the same time. Hal spiked her stick and gloves to the ice almost before the word was all the way out of Ten’s mouth. She lunged forward, eyes wide, mouth a gash in her face – ‘I’ll take your fucking head off!’ – but Boz was still blocking Hal, Toad getting a quick blow in to Ten’s chest before the ref wrangled her roughly around the waist and Toad staggered to her knees on the ice – ‘If that’s how we’re doing it, you fucking cunt, if that’s the fucking way!’

Ten started her cruel laugh as Boz pushed Hal away.

‘It’s not worth it, Hally. Not worth it. Let’s go,’ Boz hummed quietly.

Chest hardened, I looked at Hal’s face and saw my own pulse of anger. Her eyes were flashing and she looked like she was trying to hug Boz as she struggled to get her arms around, to get leverage, to get away so she could kill Ten, but Boz had her skates dug in, knees bent, and held her back murmuring, ‘No, Hal, don’t,’ as though placating a child. But that look around Boz’s eyes, that injured look like she’d pulled herself inside.

Ten laughed again and went to her bench, then Boz let go of Hal and skated over and picked up Hal’s stick and gloves and brought them to her as Hal gestured violently in the ref ’s face.

‘You’re kidding me!’ she said. ‘You’re
kidding
me.’

The ref shook her head and pointed to the box. ‘You want more?’ she said, brightly, like a server offering another beer, and Hal skated
to the box, shaking her head, violent strides. She wanted to cut the ice to the bone.

I skated to the bench, last man standing on my line, and sat for a moment, sucking back the cool air, trying to force breath through my coiled throat, examining the closed hunch of Boz’s shoulders, wanting to reach into her eardrums, to pluck out that word, to give her back the game for which she would cut off her finger.

Playing on the boys’ teams, I’d felt a certain kind of anger during games, an adrenalin-shoved cloud of it blooming thick and red behind my eyes. But it was always held in place by a knowing fear, fear that watched this anger, that kept it contained, kept my bones safe, prevented me from doing anything that would get me hit by a two-hundred-pound train. But I could feel the edges slipping now, that hot path through my chest, down my legs, rising in my throat. Its heat pulled from Boz, Hal, Toad. Passed between us, flowing outward, losing shape.

Moon put me on Penalty Kill. Ten was on U of B’s power play. I hit her the way a person might try to break down a locked door. Heard the crunch and felt a shudder echo through her, the horrible intimacy. A gasp, a sigh, a clattering swoon. The hit an act of honesty, motion stripped of pretence. The clarity of violence. Pure intention.

I began to skate to the penalty box as the ref whistled a quick hard burst like an outraged shriek, skating toward Hal and Toad before she’d even called the penalty, looking to the bench, Moon frozen in a pose of frazzled disbelief, Stan smiling a bit but trying to hide it with his hand, my teammates’ faces shadowed behind cages, Boz there at the D end of the box, beside the door, face unreadable.

‘Way to go, Iz! Way to go, buddy!’ Tillsy called down the ice from the net. Every breath of mine still a roar, thick and scorching, a back-draft through the burning house of my chest. And in the centre of this heat sat the hit, a stone I might retrieve with my hands and give to Boz, to Hal.

Toad opened the box for me and I settled in next to Hal as the U of B trainer crouched over Ten’s fetal curl, the three of us cramped, shoulder to shoulder on the small bench. Toad let out a quick,
crazed giggle. Hal looked straight ahead. From behind the scratched glass of the Sin Bin, we all watched, like a silent movie, the pain in Ten’s slow movements.

The audience buzzed concern for a couple of stretched minutes. Then Ten got up and, leaning on a teammate, one leg dragging behind, she skated back to her bench. The trainer trailing in their wake, running on tiptoes. The crowd made their applause into an act of aggression against the three of us and players on both teams banged their sticks on the ice for Ten. We, the captured, didn’t move.

‘Heinous,’ Toad said quietly. ‘I wanted to hear ambulance sirens, no?’ She elbowed Hal, but Hal didn’t respond. Instead, Toad turned to me. An accusing look, like it was my fault Ten had gotten up.

The bow-tied announcer played a little Doomsday tune over the loudspeaker to herald my penalty. Then he played it again. And again. Hal stood up.

‘Hey!’ she shouted over the glass wall dividing our box from his. He looked over, surprised. ‘Enough,’ Hal said. ‘Stop it.’

He shrugged uncomfortably, paused for a moment, then leaned into the microphone. ‘Scarlet penalty! To Number Five ... ’ he drawled.

Hal looked at me. ‘It was good,’ she said quietly. I shook my head.

Then we sat, silent, caged in together, watching our wounded team limp on, down three men. Five on three. Nothing we could do. The silent reckoning demanded by the Sin Bin: we’d hurt our team, ourselves. The refs like tongue-clucking playground monitors. The rules were there to keep us safe, keep us in the lines. Keep it off the ice. Hockey: the same story told over and over. All of us, trying again and again. Never getting it right.

S
ig had picked up Terry in Winnipeg and then they did the three-hour trip together to the afternoon game in Brandon. Sig felt her shoulders loosen as the Chevy’s tires buried the grey jungle gym of downtown in the rear-view, the old road-trip feeling. Just to Brandon, but still. They ate a bag of jelly beans and then giggled like sugar-shocked kids at some perverted joke on the radio. Sig glanced
over then and saw the smile fall quickly from Terry’s face, sharpened fins of cheekbone pushing out, her eyes dragging along the highway out the window. Pulling that huge jacket in tighter. She looked at Sig and gave a tired wink.