Twenty Miles (12 page)

Students flowed through the beige hallways, streams of coloured chatter, the smell of soup weaving salty currents among us from the café by the entrance. Everyone with the burdened postures of backpack wearers, or leaning like wind-blown trees to balance messenger bags anchored with books. The girl ahead of me wove a highlighter through the air like a baton, conducting her conversation with a guy in a trenchcoat, laughter peeling off and falling behind them, over me. I looked around for Jacob. I’d seen him between classes in this hallway before, rolling to Sport Psych in his Scarlet Hockey jacket. I watched for him at the rink, in the dining hall, on the paths leading to Sam Hall, mentally mapping escape routes. The humiliation of Rookie Night could be isolated in this way, made into some far-off island. If necessary, I was prepared to
deliver a deke, a head fake, to go wheeling around him. Head on a swivel, quick feet, as Moon would say.

Outside, I crouched beside the sidewalk and opened my backpack. Stuffed the essay inside the black cover of my Scarlets Play Book, a hefty binder crammed with hockey’s arithmetic – permutations and combinations, algebra and angles, as though a goal might start here, on a page, spilling its story onto the ice with us, its bulky heroines. Pages and pages of happily-ever-after pitches.

The campus was built on paper, everything boiled down into books – parts of the human heart, the fall of civilizations, hockey. I’d never seen so many books in my life. But we were moving forward. We were making something happen. Weren’t we? Moon had us working on the
2–3
Press last practice and it was a good system, a smart system if we used it against the right team – the Pronghorns, maybe – and if we got it down, if we perfected it there during practice – all of us treading ice, free from the pressure of opponents – I could see it working, I could almost picture it, that shining, future game.

As I zipped my backpack, I saw Jacob, late for class, jogging toward the Meade building doors, the collar of his hockey track jacket twisted under at the back, the front half-zipped and billowing. I crouched down farther and let another swell of students coming out through the doors crush my view. When they’d passed, Jacob had disappeared into Meade.

D
r. Chester had a tiny smudge of peanut butter on the corner of his mouth, and Sig was supposed to listen to him say all this garbage with peanut butter on his mouth like a five-year-old? He repeated himself, slower this time. His elegiac voice and the perfectly-straight part through his black hair. As though she were hard of hearing.

She thought of old Arnie Talbot at Bingo, his bobbing head. Sitting, yet never still. Feet battering the floor beneath the table. He, and his wife and daughter and son-in-law all arriving one Friday night at the Hall, all of them but him with ice cream cones from the Dairy Queen, his hands and tongue not stopping long enough for
such meditative licking. How bereft he’d looked without an ice cream cone.

‘Yes, uh huh, I heard it all the first time, thank you.’ Sig plucked a Kleenex from Dr. Chester’s immaculate desk and thrust it toward him, tapped the side of her mouth. He made a surprised sound and swabbed idiotically across his lips as though she’d told him he was wearing lipstick. ‘Now, how’s your mother?’

She began to mourn ice cream cones.

H
al put on cowboy music while we got dressed. Limp Bizkit whining about breaking shit, then silence for a moment, Toad freezing mid head-thrash. Johnny Cash began to croon, and Toad looked accusingly at Hal, clucking her tongue.

‘Please, not this crap again,’ she said. Hal ignored her, head down, tying her skates.

‘Delia, oh Delia ... If I hadn’t have shot poor Delia, I’d have had her for my wife,’ sang Johnny Cash.

Boz put a hand on her chest. ‘Oh, that’s awful,’ she said.

No one changed it. Toad bellyached, but it was just for show. She’d never change it if Hal didn’t say she could. When Heezer put on Sarah McLachlan or Tori Amos, though, Toad sprinted over there, pulled the cord from the wall as though yanking a poisonous barb from a teammate’s heart. Heezer started to put on that music as a joke, tried to trip Toad mid-sprint.

The music seemed like strange taste for Hal. I would have guessed she’d like something a little more intense, music that throbbed like a headache, not the banjo-drunk hiccups of the cowboy ballads. Above the
CD
player, on a bulletin board dripping pictures, their edges curled like leaves from the shower steam, hung a picture of Hal, Toad and Heezer last Halloween. Toad and Heezer, dressed as football players, winced grins as they butted heads in oversized helmets, and Hal glared grimly at the camera from behind a black mask. The Lone Ranger.

I’d heard Toad call this expression of Hal’s the
FOAD
look, which stood for
fuck off and die.
But it was more complicated than this.
Hal’s glances held a dictionary of violence, an A to Z of ways to make a person want to die. I wanted to get inside these looks, to speak their tongues. Or to find a way into that locked space surrounding her, like Boz had, the way she leaned against Hal’s knee and nodded over and over while Hal spoke gravely, quietly, eyes cast off somewhere just beyond Boz’s face, trailing back for confirmation. But my flight instinct was stronger.

Hal shouldn’t have been the Lone Ranger. I’m not sure what costume I would have placed her in instead. You learn not to guess at these things. You take cowboy music and Lone Ranger costumes and file them away in that chameleon jumble of other stuff that you never would have guessed. You learn this after a while: you can’t guess, because you’d be wrong most of the time.

A
fter practice I visited with Ed. Tuesdays had become Date Night with him. When I walked toward the rink door by his office, he’d be watching
TV
while some team circled the ice outside his door. He was waiting for me, I could tell, but he pretended he was surprised, making a big fuss about getting a chair, grabbing me a Grape Crush from the fridge.

We talked hockey and Kristjan and he grew younger and tougher and happier and more perverted, falling into a kind of Glory Day swoon when he really got into the stories, staring at some invisible rink beyond my head, he and Kristjan, Siamese frickin’ twins, first-line wingers, ruling the ice and keg parties and the lust of underaged girls and the streets of their borrowed suburban neighbourhood. Ed shedding skin and regret and all the layers of ice he’d made since then, since the Zamboni found him.

He liked to get the stories straight, struggled to find the exact words Kristjan used when he woke Ed on the top bunk in their room at the Ferrys, their billets. Kristjan had punched Ed in the chest and when Ed looked up, through the darkness, Kristjan had the window open, one foot on the sill.

‘He said, ‘You’re snoring, buddy. I’m ready to jump.’ No, it was, ‘That snoring, brother. I’m gonna put myself out of my bloody
misery.’
Bloody misery,
that was it. And he kind of makes a move like he’s really going to do it and I’m half asleep, right, and I jump from the bunk and grab his arm because I actually thought. He starts laughing his head off but I really thought. Went to save his life.’

There are people who let their ghosts swear at them with one foot on the windowsill in the middle of the night. I nodded and nodded. The patient student. I think he told himself he was doing me a favour. Like he was giving me Kristjan, which he kind of was, except the sound of Kristjan’s voice in my head was still Ed.

When the ice time ended and all the voices and blade gasps and echoed shots drained from the office, his eyes cannonballed back to the room, to Sam Hall, to the Zamboni. I hated this moment. When he remembered that the ice had turned on him. He put on his jacket slowly, then pulled a photo from the pocket. Handed it to me.

‘Found this the other night, going through some pictures. Thought you might want it.’

The photo was full of Kristjan’s head, his face tilted up, smiling peevishly at the camera, one eye half-shut. His mouth was open a bit, saying something that looked like it was probably an insult to whoever was behind the camera.

‘That was one of the last ones I had of him. Some Halloween party.’ Ed smiled a bit, went to the door. ‘And yeah, he’s drunk as hell, I’m willing to bet.’ Proud.

I tacked the picture on my wall in Rez, in the middle. It was the only thing up there, and when I lay in my bed, it looked like he was sneering right at me. I wanted to tell the kid to shut up.

L
egend has it that a boyfriend Boz had the season before punched her, gave her a black eye. Drunk on rye, Hal and Toad climbed into a tree outside this boyfriend’s apartment and waited for him. When he walked up the driveway, they pelted him with stones they’d gathered. I pictured Hal selecting the ammunition, turning each stone over in her hands, testing it with a fingertip as she glared through the darkness. She would have chosen the sharpest rocks, the heaviest, the ones like arrowheads. I saw her launching them from the tree,
knees bunched up to her chest, and the look she had when winding up for a slapshot – you could tell that whoever got hit with that shot would hurt like hell, like she’d planned – and the muscled arc of her arm, the violent flick of her wrist.

The boyfriend tried to see into the tree at first, shouting, but then he got a stone in the eye and ran into the house, blood on his face. When he came back out, waving a knife, Hal and Toad were halfway down the street, laughing because the knife was so small they could barely see it from that distance, it could have been a butter knife, and because the boyfriend was crying – the sobs echoing off the black pavement.

I watched Boz on the red couch in the lodge where Team Day was being held, the fireplace throwing strands of liquid shadow over her face, and tried to picture her as a punched-up girlfriend, a bruise cloaking her eye. Responding to Question Four on the Team Bonding Questionnaire, she explained to me, right hand threading a pen through the air, how she planned to become a child psychologist: the programs she’d have to take, the schools that offered them, the exams. And why. The blunt-edged kindness cutting these reasons jolted me. I thought she was joking at first, parodying someone, and I almost laughed. But she didn’t stumble over any of these words. She didn’t flinch.

She touched her fingers to her lips and tilted her head. ‘And that’s my story.’ She smiled. ‘What do you think? Have we bonded yet?’

‘Pretty close,’ I said, and she winked at me and flipped the sheet in her lap. Stan ambled past and gave us a questioning thumbs-up.

‘We’re good,’ Boz said to him, and Stan looked pleased.

‘I knew you two would be a good pair,’ he said, nodding happily, then wandered off toward Woo and Toad. Stan seemed perpetually on the hunt for some elusive team adhesive:
stick together, tight, like glue, good, we’re gelling, girls, we’re really coming together now.
He’d walked through twice already and called out ‘Team bonding!’ like a photographer reciting ‘Cheese!’ and hoping for that shot with everyone smiling in perfect order, no one caught in a blink.

‘Getting to know you, getting to know all about you ... ’ Boz sang, her singing voice a shade deeper than when she talked. A
framed black-and-white next to her head showed two men in buckskin parkas standing over a deer, its blood casting a Rorschach pattern onto a bed of snow. I wanted to know: did she fight the boyfriend after he punched her?

She cleared her throat.

‘Okay, Number Five. Here we go. Number Five – why do you play hockey? Do you want to go first again, babe?’

I shook my head. ‘No, you go ahead.’

‘Okay ... wow. Hmmm.’ She cupped her chin with a hand and stared at the floor. ‘I guess it’s supposed to be a simple answer, huh? You know, “Because I love it,” or something along those lines. And I do love it, of course, but I don’t want to just ... ’

She stared at the floor again, head tilted.

‘Okay, I’ll tell you a story. When I was at home this summer, my brother was watching this show on
TV
. This gangster movie. And I usually can’t stand those movies, with the shooting and all that, but I was hanging out with my brother, so I just sucked it up. Anyways, so there was one scene where they had this guy tied in a chair, and they were trying to get information out of him, but he was resisting – the usual. They say, Tell us or we cut off one of your fingers. But he still doesn’t tell them, he’s squirming and crying – it was awful. So, of course, they cut it off – I didn’t watch that part. But that whole night I was thinking about it, because it was so brutal – but also, I was thinking, what would I do that for? You know, sit there in a chair and let someone cut off my finger. I was up all night. Anyway, you don’t need to know all that. My point is, I suppose, hockey. It passed the test. I asked myself, cut off your finger or never play hockey again in your life? I know this probably sounds stupid, but I pictured never playing again and the way that I would just suffer, you know? The way I see it, it comes down to this equation, a sort of math. The physical pain of having a finger cut off goes away, heals in a relatively short period of time, versus losing hockey forever, which, I think, would be like walking around with a broken heart for the rest of your life. Like a never-ending breakup. With your
man.
You know? So do it, then. Chop it off. Done.’

Boz pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. ‘Whew. I talk too much.’

‘What else?’ I said.

‘Sorry?’

‘What else passed the test?’

‘Oh. Well.’ Boz smiled and counted off on her fingers. ‘God. Family. Friends – you guys.’

‘Oh.’

Boz settled back on the couch and laced her hands together. ‘How about you? Do you think you’d do it?’

‘Chop off a finger?’ I looked at my hands doubtfully, spread my fingers wide.

‘Yeah – goodness, that sounds awful coming from someone else’s mouth. You must think I’m morbid.’

‘No, no, it’s okay. Um, would there be anaesthetic?’

Boz smiled and shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Anything for the pain?’