Twenty Miles (8 page)

O
nce we were all dressed for the Home Opener, Hal began to pound her thighs with her gloves. I felt this beat in my stomach. On one side of me, Clare Segal had a sneeze attack. On the other side, Pelly tilted her grin toward me, nervous, expectant. Hal leaned over.

‘Twenty minutes, twenty miles,’ she said loudly. She looked at me.

The path from the dressing room to the ice went like this: down the hall, a right turn, and there was the door that opened onto the rink itself. Tillsy pushed through, a wide-legged stride in her goalie pads, and we walked into a corridor like a mountain tunnel, the stands high above.

As soon as Tillsy reached the gate to the ice she stopped, all of us held in the thrumming tension of our line. The lights dimmed like it was our birthday and they were bringing in the cake and then the music began. ‘Thunderstruck,’ by
AC/DC
. The crazed moaning sound at the beginning that got louder and louder, like the band was creeping up behind you and then the first hit of
THUN-DER!,
a crack felt in the knees.

Hal’s gloves still beating inside my chest. Pelly, in front of me, bounced her shoulders up and down, she shook her head from side to side like a horse.

THUN-DER!

Alberta circled their end of the ice, green and yellow, picking up pucks from a spilled pile of them in front of their box, where a suited coach paced the bench, pissed-off face, studying a clipboard.
Players began to sprint arcs up around the red line, coming around the boards and slowing down. Hard slow hard slow.

‘’S go, White!’ Heezer shouted near the front. ‘Showtime, White!’

‘C’mon, Scarlets!’ someone yelled behind. ‘’S do this!’

Hal, ahead of Pelly, horked out the side of her cage onto the floor. When she turned her head to the side, her face was tight.

The announcer cleared his throat into the microphone and then he yelled in a talk-show-host baritone above the
AC / DC
: ‘Here. Come. Your Winnipeg University Scarrrr-lettttts!’ And the beat jumped into my throat and cracked open.

One of the Events guys, dressed like a Puck Bunny in a Scarlet Hockey T-shirt, flung open the gate for us like it was a rodeo and we were the bulls, and my team began to waddle-sprint down the hallway, and soon I was leaping through the gate into light and the thick applause of a crowd in mitts and the manic screech of
AC / DC
and I skated the fastest warm-up circle I ever had because if I stopped skating I would throw up.

S
ig sat in an empty row near the back of the stands and searched for Iz on the ice. She found her in the other team’s end, pinning a girl against the boards, the two trapped in the tangle of their bodies, writhing for the puck hidden between their feet. Sig was surprised: Iz, her back leg dug in strong, had the girl caught like a fly by the wings.

She was used to seeing Iz knocked around. The games played out fast when Iz was a teenager, and the boys sometimes didn’t realize they were hitting a girl until she was crumpled on the ice, head curled into her body, trying to disguise the pain. The boys’ bodies slumped when they realized what they’d done, and they’d crouch next to her on the ice, suddenly gentle, offering a hand up. Iz refused. The regret of those boys was what she hated most about hockey. She’d rather have her ribs cracked than hear their sheepish apologies.

The whistle went and Iz skated to the bench. Sig watched her move to the middle, lean an arm over the boards, the other bracing
her upside-down stick. The player next to her poked her with an elbow and gestured at the ref, her helmet moving up and down as she spoke. Iz nodded.

They didn’t look so different from the boys, Sig thought. A bit shorter, but they still had that bulky, square-shouldered look about them, the same loping stride. Ponytails whipping around in their wake.

A gust of perfume, and a woman sat down on the seat next to Sig. Sig looked over briefly, caught the bones in the woman’s face, purple scarf wound like a turban around her sharp head, the red lipstick that arrowed from her lips into the outskirts of her mouth. A man in the row ahead of them twisted stiffly. He’d smelled the perfume, no doubt, the exotic scent moving uneasily among the worn rink seats.

‘How are ya, Terry?’ the man smiled through a moustache, eyes slits in his wide face.

‘Just fine, Mo. Hi, Eileen.’

‘Oh hi, Terry! Oh shoot, did you just get here? You missed Hal’s goal.’ Eileen, dwarfed next to the huge man, had the tendoned neck of a bodybuilder, a restless mouth.

‘A beauty, Terry. Top right-hand corner. Deked the goalie. Fucking goalie’s a mess, anyways, but Hal schooled her.’ Mo chuckled.

‘I’ll catch the next one,’ Terry said, and the couple turned back to the game, Eileen gripping Mo’s jacket sleeve as the team threw the puck around the net.

‘Oh. Oh! Oh!’ Eileen breathed.

‘Shoot! Shoot! Corinne, you bloody scag – girl’s got the puck glued to her stick,’ Mo spat as the whistle went. Sig chuckled. Terry looked over at her as she pulled a fleece blanket from a handbag patterned with parrots. She wrapped it slowly around her legs.

‘Hi there,’ she said, smiled.

‘Hello.’

‘Who are you cheering for?’

Sig craned her neck, looked for Iz on the ice.

‘Number Five. Isabel, my kid – my grandkid,’ she said, pointed to the faceoff circle where Iz was locked, arm in arm, with a short girl on the other team, her jersey practically a dress.

‘Oh yes, of course. She’s a rookie.’

‘That’s her.’

The women followed the play to the opposite end of the ice. ‘Poor thing,’ Terry said. ‘How is she holding up? They’re not being too mean, I hope. Those girls can be so silly.’

‘Iz’s tough. Played with boys all her life.’

‘Oh,’ Terry nodded knowingly. ‘What did you call her?’

‘Iz.’

‘Right, right.’ Terry nodded. ‘I’m Terry, by the way. Chris’s mom – Number Seventeen. Right there.’

‘Sig.’ She reached her hand over and Terry took it, her fingers collapsing in Sig’s grip. ‘Good to meet you.’ They were silent for a while, cheers climbing up to them from the rows ahead, contagious spurts of clapping. Clouds of heated air, coils glowing orange on the rafters above.

‘Funny, I was just thinking – you said you call your granddaughter Iz?’

‘Yes.’ Sig looked over, tilted her head.

‘My daughter goes by Hal – that’s what the girls call her. Our last name is Hallendorf – ’ Terry coughed suddenly, her head whipping forward, hand flying to her mouth. She cleared her throat and smiled, one front tooth tilted in toward the other. A cheer swelled above the benches as the team scored.

Eileen, hands blurred in a feverish clap, turned. ‘That’s her third point, Ter,’ she said. ‘She’s on a roll.’

‘Oh, good. She’ll be in a good mood tonight.’ Terry clapped quietly, watched Hal skate past the bench. She drummed her team-mates’ extended gloves, stick dragging next to her on the ice.

‘That her?’ Sig asked, pointing to the pin on the lapel of Terry’s purple coat. Behind a circle of scratched plastic, a girl posed in a jersey, tangled hair, her teeth too big for her head. Terry looked down, rubbed at a smudge on the plastic.

‘That’s her. She’s about ten there, I guess.’ She leaned toward Sig. ‘She hates that I wear it. It’s so embarrassing. I like to razz her, Sig. Is that bad?’ She laughed. ‘Well, and look how darling she is too.’

‘Nothing wrong with a bit of razzing,’ Sig said. ‘So that’s Hal, eh? I think Iz’s mentioned her name before.’

‘Oh, lord. I take no responsibility.’

‘What’s her real name, her girl’s name?’

‘Her girl’s name,’ Terry laughed. ‘Oh God, she would kill me if I called her by her girl’s name.’ Terry looked, distracted, toward the bench. ‘Don’t you dare, Mum,’ she mimicked in a high-pitched voice. Skin pulled tight across her cheekbones, patches of blush like burns. ‘I’m bigger than you, you know, I can kick your ass.’ She chuckled and turned toward Sig, leaned in. ‘Her name’s Crystalline,’ she whispered. ‘This is a big secret, apparently.’

‘Crystalline?’

‘Yes.’

‘Unusual, eh?’

Terry leaned back, pulled the blanket tighter across her knees. She took a deep breath, raising her hands, palms up, as she inhaled. ‘I was so tired when they brought her in after she was born. You need a name, they kept saying. And this was about the time I got into makeup with my friends – I was sixteen, you know – and my favourite – ’ Terry began to laugh. She leaned toward Sig and grasped her knee. ‘My favourite eyeshadow was called Crystalline! The seventies, right? So it was kind of whitish with these sparkles. “Mom!” Chris says, “You named me after a bloody eyeshadow!” I don’t know how to defend myself.’ Terry picked a tear from her eye with a raspberry nail.

‘Don’t know if you can defend yourself on that one,’ Sig chuckled.

She looked back to the ice and searched for Iz.

N
umber Three on Alberta had her priorities mixed, as Stan suggested gently between the first and second periods.

‘Mixed!’ Toad said, furious and dripping sweat, gulping for words. ‘Mixed! She’ll get fucking mixed!’

Moon shrugged in a not-discouraging way. Voices sprung up along the benches, adrenalin shared around the room in an electric surge.
Come on, guys. We can do this. Come on. We’re doing awesome, come on. We can beat them, you know we can.
Then Hal began to beat
her gloves together, head down, over and over, a tribal drum, until a knock on our door told us the ice was ready.

I raced back to our net alongside Three, dropping back for Heezer, who was scraping herself geriatrically from the boards after a collision at the other end. The Pandas’ power play schooling us all over our end, like a game of Keep Away.

And there was Three all over Tillsy, and me trying to get Three out of there, shovelling at her concrete shins, Tillsy still getting thrown off balance, Three all over our goddamn goalie, and I kept hearing this word in my ears, pushed like blood with every breath, on the knife edge of hyperventilation.
Priorities, priorities,
the word over and over again like my brain had shrunk for lack of oxygen and lassoed this word, just this word, and Three’s stick still between Tillsy’s pads, and they’d score if she kept doing that, and I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t breathe.

‘Bitch!’ Three screamed shrilly as she fell. She sprawled face down on the ice, kicking my shin with her skate until I backed away, blood in my ears.

Whistle.

‘Number Five, White, two minutes for cross-checking!’ The ref skated at us as though someone might pull out a gun at any second and shoot, Three still kicking and spitting, and I glided into the ref ’s overeager wake, a handful of road-tripping Panda parents applauding my capture.

Toad opened the door to the penalty box from inside, grinning. She was in for tripping (‘Could she have taken a bigger dive? Look – I can dive too. I’m an actress! I’m an actress! Look at me!’ Tripping along as she was hauled off to the box).

‘Duh, duh, duh – The Sin Bin!’ she sang doomfully as I stepped in. ‘Yeah, don’t do us any favours, Ass Eyes!’ This, shouted in the direction of the ref ’s zebra back as she slammed the door. The box vibrated like the inside of an old piano and I edged around Toad to sit on the bench. I felt a gathering in my throat, adrenalin turning to venom, turning on me – the slow, snake-eyed blink. So embarrassing to be caught like that, acting out a private violence, frozen into a red split-second in your mind, like dreaming of peeing and then
wetting the bed. The announcer drawled my penalty over the loudspeaker.

‘Hey, Five, you watch your back, eh? Shauna will paralyze you! She has a black belt in karate! You won’t feel your goddamn legs! Wheelchair!’

I turned, and a miniature woman five rows up snarled, straining against her husband’s forearm grasp. The husband grimaced with embarrassment, eyes sliding side to side.

‘Wheelchair!’ she shrieked again, her voice cracking. Toad cranked my helmet back to the ice.

‘Don’t look. Never look,’ she said, laughing. She watched the play, darting glances at the clock, and snorted. ‘That’s awesome –
wheelchair, wheelchair
! Worst fucking heckle in the history of hockey. I love it.’ The ref whistled Hugo offside and Toad hit the side of her helmet with her glove, dumbfounded. ‘Eleanor!’ This was the ref ’s name and Toad used it throughout the game like they were chummy.

She watched the clock shuck off the last seconds of her penalty and lifted the door handle.

‘Keep the Sin Bin warm for me – and don’t forget to say your Hail Marys – ’ And she leapt out of the box as though skydiving, plummeting toward a snarl of players biting at the puck along the boards.

I half-turned and looked for the heckler out of the corner of my eye. She’d forgotten her promises of my imminent handicapping and was now engrossed in the play, little claws buried into the husband’s bicep. I tried to think of the last time I was heckled, but couldn’t. Parents of the boys floated threats over the rink, but never at me.

Sleeping Beauty Syndrome, Sig called it. No matter what I did on the ice, no one would touch me. Not the boys, not their parents. ‘Princess force field,’ Sig would say, drawing an invisible line around my body with her finger. I hated it. To hear those words directed at me – this seemed an impossible decadence.

‘Black belt!’ the heckler barked behind me, freed from her trance by a whistle.

I sighed and watched the penalty’s epileptic countdown on the clock, my gaze seeming to slow it. The box hyperventilated around
me, and I imagined the ancient breath of my sinning teammates growing inside me like mould.

‘Iz!’ Moon bellowed from the bench, on her toes, chin up. I nodded.

‘Go right on!’ she yelled, pointing to the net where Hal was wrestling the puck around a defenceman.

Seventeen. Sixteen. Fifteen. Fourteen. Thirteen. Hal shot the puck at the goalie’s pads, a wicked wrist shot, and the Alberta D scrambled for it.

I threw open the gate and jumped out, the air flooding my mouth like water, ice drenching the bloodied inside of my cheeks – I chewed them while I played, iron tasted later with the vague amazement of a sleepwalker.