Twenty Miles (2 page)

The stalls began to run out. A stack of orange plastic chairs that looked like imports from a Grade Six classroom scattered into available spaces around the room. I guessed at the other rookies – the ones who went straight to the plastic chairs, kept their heads down, weren’t pelted with insults or nicknames when they walked in. Darting quick glances at them, I tried to decide whether or not they looked like they’d be good. A broad-faced player ambled in then with a stubby but tall hockey bag bulging like an overstuffed cushion. Goalie. She let the bag drop in the entrance to the room and spread her arms wide.

‘What’s up, savages?’ she bellowed. Two players on the plastic chairs looked over with the eyes of startled horses and then I knew for a fact they were rookies and I felt comfort for a moment in their disoriented stare.

Shoulder pads, left elbow pad, right elbow pad. I pulled my practice jersey over my head. I usually left my helmet off until I was walking out of the room, but I put it on now and leaned back into the shadowed nether regions of the stall, letting the little walls on either side close me in.

Hal slipped on a pair of hockey gloves, scuffed, with beaten-looking edges. I wondered how long she’d been playing. She
dropped her chin to her chest and began to slowly hit the gloves together; the sound was like a thick book being slammed shut over and over again. She kept doing it and others joined in and the sound got into my chest and found the adrenalin that began its snake-charmed dance through my limbs, murmuring to my legs, my hands, my heart. Humming them awake.

S
ig ashed a cigarette out the open window, smoke and leaf-bloated air layering September into the cab of the sagging grey pick-up. The ashtray overflowed with mottled butts, Styrofoam cups from the Laketime coffee shop and Coke cans littering the passenger side floor. She flicked a butt out the window. Iz always got after her for doing that – the reason behind the ashtray affront. She’d spot Sig winding up with a butt and say, ‘Sig.’ That’s all she’d say, just her name, and Sig would wink and stuff the butt into the ashtray.

She’d left Iz standing in her miniature room in the residence. The room held a cot the university supplied, Iz’s childhood dresser, a couple of old suitcases bursting with winter clothes, and her hockey equipment, the black bag pocked with dust from its trip on the truck bed. She’d have to lug the equipment across campus to the arena later that afternoon by herself. Sig wanted to stay and help her unpack, find her a good meal, drive her and the hockey bag over to the arena later. But a quiet insistence in Iz’s posture, the way she stood in the centre of the small room, told Sig that if this move was going to work at all, it would have to start right then, right there. No use dragging it out.

She closed the door against the tears threatening to spill from Iz’s eyes, the embarrassed tilt of her head. Her steps down the worn hallway carpet, her opening of the door, her turning of the key in the truck’s ignition, each felt like a failing.

Stacy Moon, the Winnipeg University Head Coach, had found Sig in the stands at the Rec Centre during one of Iz’s games last year – Iz still playing in the Midget boys’ league, although she was older than most of them by then, her old teammates all moved on to the Junior league, if they were good, or the Friday-night beer
league. Sig saw the Scarlet Hockey crest on the woman’s jacket, and then Moon explained how they’d come to see Iz and how excited they were with what they’d seen so far. She said this with the necessary confidence of a small woman wearing big shoes, cut with a strangely girlish enthusiasm. Sig had heard about this already –
1997
and they’d finally started a women’s hockey program in Canadian universities, the next logical step for the sport that seemed to be gathering force with a why-didn’t-we-think-of-this-before energy. The hockey parents had already begun to ask Sig about it, about getting Iz in there.

Moon explained the team was still in the building phase and didn’t have a lot of money, but the program was growing, and then she lost Sig a bit in the spiel about costs and retroactive scholarships, and Sig looked out and found Iz on the ice, striding through centre, looking for a pass from the boards and getting it. The way Moon told this part of the story sounded more like they were getting off welfare to take a job at McDonald’s, but Sig didn’t care about this. Then they stood and watched the girl stick-handle around a cement-footed defenceman, big oafish boy, in for a shot. The puck left her stick and stopped the breath in the crowd’s throat, one huge gulp, and Sig saw science textbooks. She saw a bed-in-a-bag and bulk sweat socks and five-pack Jockey bikini briefs from Zellers. She saw the numbers in the bank account they’d opened for Kristjan’s university fund and that they’d continued for Iz instead. Kristjan – Iz’s father – gone two months before the girl was born, but some parts of him, like this, overlapped into her. The density of the fund’s sediment and the way it bloomed thick stalks of intention. She saw notebooks and ballpoint pens and highlighters. She saw a woman, an older woman with Iz’s face, wearing a white coat, a child’s knee in her hands, bending and straightening the leg like a wing. A physiotherapist, Iz had said once, shyly. What she wanted to be. This woman holding the leg made sense to Sig and she’d often gone there in her mind, placed her own aching joints in those hands, let them bend her back into health. The goalie covered the puck. Breath out with the whistle and Sig knew she’d pass Iz to Moon. To those faceless girls. As though the whistle sliced open the inevitability.

‘We’ll see,’ she’d said to Moon.

Truth be told, she’d waited after dropping Iz off at the residence. She’d sat out the afternoon in the parking lot of Sam Hall Arena, the truck hidden among the students’ shit-heaps, the accidents-waiting-to-happen all decked out in skateboarding stickers and rust. The players began to arrive, small in the distance with the growth-like bump of hockey bag across their backs, and Sig squinted until she had a headache, watching the gaggles of girls disappear into the blank face of Sam Hall.

She held her breath as she watched Iz walk slowly up the arena sidewalk, leaning slightly against the weight of her shouldered hockey bag. She’d changed into a different pair of jeans, different T-shirt. ‘What’re you going to wear?’ Sig had asked her on the way out. ‘Dunno,’ Iz grunted as though she didn’t care.

Chin up,
Sig thought angrily as she squinted at Iz’s hunched back.
Get your goddamn head up.
She couldn’t walk into a murder of girls with her eyes glued to the bloody floor. She’d be eaten alive.

Her ponytail was crooked.

She walked through the door.

W
e fell into a swarm around the gate to the ice, watching the Zamboni amble a lazy line down the far boards, erasing the remains of the practice before ours.

The players’ chatter sawed through the Zamboni’s stretched movements. I stood in their middle and felt the waiting in my legs. The transformation always begins here, in the drum roll off the ice, waiting for a Zamboni, or for the rest of the team or the coaches, summer leaking from your body, muscles rearranging themselves under the weight of equipment into memories of this theatre of winter contained by the boards. How to act.

After the final lick of the Zamboni’s slow tongue, its last lazy circle, the ice lay smooth, a thin-skinned sheen. Dizzying mirror. The Zamboni inched toward its door and our swarm shifted, tightened, everyone moving toward the gate, lifting their sticks off the floor. Muscles flooding with memory.

Tykes league – me and all the boys. Chad Trenholm, a notorious parent-clinger, crying his eyes out beside the other team’s net, stick on the ice, wailing, ‘I want my mommy.’ Even the motherless among us could feel his loss there on the ice, small but urgent. It spread among us, contagious as head lice.

Our coach, Uncle Larry as we all called him, stood on the bench behind us, unmoved, the sloppy game going on around Chad’s inert body.

His leather mitts formed a fat bracket around his mouth. ‘Keep it off the ice, Chad!’ he called, a voice scrubbed porous by cigarettes and rink air. ‘Off the ice!’

Our ice grew walls this way, conjured gradually through Uncle Larry’s mantra.
Keep it off the ice, boys. Off the ice, Isabel. Am I speaking Chinese here, or what? I said, Keep it off the ice.

Even if we did miss our moms, dads, grandparents – if their faces flickered lonely in the stands, an impossible distance away, if our toes were so cold we were convinced they’d fallen off and were rattling around in our skates, none of it was to touch our ice. This was our first training as men.

I wasn’t a girl then. Not a tomboy either – that word, like some ragged misfit cat, tripping on the tails of others. I was a girl, of course, but not a
girl.
We were the same size, had the same voices, the same disguised faces behind our too-big helmet cages. And we all pretended we were someone else when we were out there. Someone bigger, faster. Someone with hands, as Uncle Larry said, as though the ones we owned were imposters, all the real hands leading disembodied lives out there, magic bleeding from their elusive fingers like the coins Sig used to conjure out of nowhere, silver blooming from the crack between her ring finger and pinky before her arthritis got too bad.

We played together, so we were the same. That was a long time ago.

But it can’t all be kept off the ice. Even after the Zamboni has licked away the violence of our skate blades, there is always more. There’s more and more.

I
glided up the ice, right wing, playground squawk of voices behind me, eyes on Pelly’s strides like a speedskater through the middle, but she’d lose the puck, I saw this in her flimsy grip. Voices around me calling for the puck, calling Pelly’s name, along the boards, behind me, voices circling like seagulls, and I should call, I should call, but why didn’t Pelly see me open? Head down, Pelly wouldn’t look up, and she’d lose the puck, she was about to lose the puck. Open. And Pelly, head up, finally, cage tilting toward me and the puck coming fast,
tock
of the puck on my tape. Breathless, ready. And legs springing long, eyes breathing the bobbing helmets, and the jerseys all different colours – shit, different colours – and holding on to the puck, keeping it – who was on my team, I didn’t know – their voices shouting my own name hot in my ears, coming from behind and beside, the heated jazz of the Z, sawing me open. Chest growing in breath, red bloom of lungs, ribs’ tectonic shift. Open.

Breath moving in smooth currents, in and out of my lungs, puck clinging tight to the stick, and bodies everywhere, colours everywhere. But now I saw only the spaces between, precise. Incisions in the frozen air. The smooth slice of blades, alignment of joints and muscle, angles measured and tight. Mathematical wonder.

And then Hal was bearing down on me, and I could feel the swing, tumbling back into myself, but not quite, logic still strung down the electrical wires of my legs, Hal bearing down, script unravelling in my limbs, legs coiling and then boneless, not thinking, feeling Hal’s hard bones against my shoulder, all of Hal’s bones at once against the boards, and then I was looking down, spine still buzzing.

Hal sprawled, her gloves and stick littering the ice in a circumference appropriate to impact, like a plane wreck.

‘Yard sale!’ someone shouted across the ice.

Hal lay on her stomach, hands clutching at her helmet, ragged gasps. She rolled on to her back.

‘I’m – I’m sorry – I forgot– I played hockey with guys, and – ’ I couldn’t breathe, Hal’s face red and crumpled. Moon sprinted over.

‘Jesus Christ! What’s wrong with – ?’ She saw my face. ‘Oh – well, there’s no hitting – Hal, are you okay?’

‘I’m fine,’ Hal said and hoisted herself up off the ice with a sharp breath.

‘I’m really sorry. I – ’

Hal turned her back and skated away. I looked to Moon, throat tight.

‘Hey, no,’ Moon said, as though reprimanding a puppy. ‘No. You injure one of our players and that’s – Hal’s our captain – if she got bumped off pre-season, I don’t – ’ Tears elbowed the backs of my eyes. Moon touched my arm with her glove and tilted her head slightly. ‘Hey, I know – listen. It’s like this. Just don’t do it again.’

I glided back to the line at the boards.

‘You okay, buddy?’ Toad asked Hal. I slouched behind them, making myself small. I could see the muscle in Hal’s jaw clenching through the side of her cage.

‘I was just laid out by a fucking Barbie doll. Other than that, I’m great,’ she said.

I
cleared my throat and looked over into Pelly’s stall where she hid, face red and wet, her braces exposed in a pained grimace, silver gleaming from the vague shadow cast by the shelves above. Her shoulder pads spun slowly on their hook, like a mobile, shrouding half her face.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked. Pelly shook her head, hopeless. Toad came over and sat on the other side of her, nudging her to make room.

‘I won’t steal your tape any more, champ. You don’t have to cry about it.’ She smiled into the stall.

‘I sucked.’ An echo.

‘If you sucked, Pelter, then we all did. It was a fucking gong show. Mooner got a heinous haircut, and she’s taking it out on us.’

‘I’m going to get cut.’

‘Nope.’

‘I am, Toad. You don’t know.’

‘I do know. And, anyways, it’s just the first day. You can get better, but Mooner’s mullet won’t improve for a long time, unless she shaves her head. And that’s a good thing, you know?’

Silence.

‘It is a mullet,’ Pelly said.

Toad hit her on the knee. ‘It really is. Boz says no, but it is. Heinous Hall of Fame material. Just don’t worry about stuff right now, Pelter, okay? Seriously.’

Toad went back to her stall. Pelly’s head emerged after a bit and she leaned over again, attacking her laces.

‘I’m okay,’ she said to me, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

I nodded. ‘That’s good.’ We undressed in silence. I looked over at Hal, speaking gravely to Boz, eyebrows raised. Boz nodded her head over and over, the tiny tips of braids dancing on her shoulders. Her glasses filled with the yellow light of the room, burning bright ovals against her dark skin.