Twenty Miles (6 page)

A few years ago, Grace had dragged her to an art show. Grace knew the artist and Sig had laughed when she first told her about it. The woman had saved the garbage from each of her breakfasts over the course of a year. She dried out orange and grapefruit rinds, apple cores, banana peels and then painted them with varnish. She kept milk and orange juice cartons and oatmeal packages and coffee filters and grinds and arranged them all in glass boxes. She saved every piece of eggshell. Sig was ribbing Grace – Grace quietly trying to shut her up – when they rounded a corner of the exhibit and came upon these shells. They were glued onto a vast red canvas, arranged in no particular pattern or form, just their own small broken shapes jostling sharp against one another, and Sig stopped suddenly, halted by this landscape, the unexpected violence. She didn’t say a word.

Sig finally gave up on the egg. Spiked it into the garbage can with a frustrated grunt. Then, turning toward the sunlight coming in from the window, she held the hand up to her face as she might a misbehaving child, peering angrily into its stubborn flesh. And there. Proof. The fluttering thumb, its movement like a butterfly wing. A rhythm-less beating, fumbled attempt at flight. She felt a strange thrust of relief: it wasn’t her after all. It was this thumb, this separate thing. Wriggling like some insect caught by her hand. Held captive by skin.

W
e all got letters one day, those of us who remained. The cool white envelopes neatly containing three weeks’ worth of anxiety. Over the course of tryouts the orange plastic chairs in the dressing room had begun to disappear one by one. A couple of players didn’t make it through the first week. Tall, quiet Sandra with the wobbling
slapshot, the sad eyes when the puck didn’t get off the ice, watching it dribble to the net. Christy, whose mascara ran macabre rivers down her face beneath her cage when she sweated. Her glacial stride. These two cut in the first week. Then, with what seemed like random whim, a pack of ducklings picked off by a muskie, others disappeared. There were covert meetings involved, I knew, hushed requests to visit Moon in her office. But I didn’t witness any of this, kept my head down in the halls, avoiding the crosshairs of the coaches’ eyes. Small mumbles before practice announcing the room’s latest losses: ‘Christy got cut. Sara got cut.’

The stack of orange chairs grew higher and the team tightened, drills quicker with fewer skaters, the weaker links gone and a different friction now during scrimmages, the taut motions of teammates used to each other’s play, each other’s hands. I tried to attach names to strides, to playing posture, to ponytails. I began to get it right more often. I stayed away from Hal on the ice. The dressing room distilling slowly to its core of stalls.

The hockey itself was the easy part: hands remembering the story, legs revising, improvising, that self-renewing drama unfolding in the white space between thought, the hard-breath moments when your brain forgets itself and the hands take over. Those seconds around the net during scrimmage when we looped a tentative sinew across the ice, the pulsing geometry of the puck as we attached ourselves briefly to our linemates, willing ourselves to connect into different bodies, into moving, breathing shapes. These moments were muscle.

There was a weight outside these seconds, though. Sabrina was cut. Theresa was cut. The suggestion of a blade hidden somewhere – behind the coaches’ eyes, buried in the bones of our own hands – and how deep this blade might go, where it would hit, how much blood. And whose blood – my own, Kristjan’s, Sig’s? I tried to keep it off the ice.

Another possibility, a simple solution: I’d get cut, I’d go home. Freed suddenly from Sam Hall, from the thin stall walls dividing me from the Scarlets, from Rez, from books. They’d invited me but they didn’t have to keep me. Cut: rebounding off the grey edges of the
city, down the highway. Home. Jamey was cut. Jana was cut. They took their bags and didn’t come back.

Stan, the assistant coach, stood outside the dressing-room door and handed the letters to everyone as they left. He held the envelope toward me, stone-faced, but then he winked and I took the envelope and had to force myself not to run, pulse knocking around in my ears. I marched stiffly out to the ice, vaguely registering the weak-ankled circles skated by a Peewee team in orange and red practice pinnies, and sank down against the wall. Tore open the envelope. ‘We’re looking forward to having you onboard.’ Undoubtedly, a contribution of Stan’s; he had a penchant for metaphors involving cars and trains.
You need to fuel up, ladies, get those wheels moving, shift gears, park it in the garage, ten minutes ten miles, running on empty, eh, running out of steam?
An impersonal letter, my name written into a blank following ‘Congratulations,’ but there it was. Another season.

Boz came through the door holding her own identical envelope. I was still slouched against the wall and she stood in front of me, watching the shaky trajectory of the Peewees. She shook her head and smiled.

‘So cute.’ She wore capri jeans and runners and her dark ankles shone a smooth gleam. They looked like they’d be cool to the touch, like stone. She looked down at me and then crouched and grabbed both of my wrists and pulled me to my feet. She smiled and then wrapped her arms tight around my shoulders. I could feel the muscles in her arms as she moved her palm in a slow circle on my back. I understood instantly the currency of Boz’s hugs, the way some of the players fell so easily against her body, in the dressing room, in the hallways of Sam Hall. I felt a blush plunge from my cheeks down my neck.

‘Welcome,’ she said. The warmth of her face, one hand still on my shoulder. ‘We’re celebrating tomorrow. Someone will call you.’ And then she walked off toward the parking lot door.

I was a Scarlet.

I stood, flattered and shipwrecked, and watched the coach lob pucks into the corner, a surge of kids following it in, their comic
hunger for that skittish black dot. I walked around the boards toward the door.

‘Made the team, eh Isabel?’ Ed called as I walked past his office.

The door was cracked open wide and Ed sat in the middle of the tiny room on a narrow wooden chair, red paint peeling off it like a bad sunburn. He leaned back, hands folded behind his head, feet up on an orange plastic chair like the ones in the dressing room, those sweatpants riding up around his ankles. A small
TV
flickered silently on another plastic chair next to a mini fridge. He grinned widely, as though he’d just given me the news himself.

‘I did,’ I said and held the envelope up.

‘Already knew,’ he said, still grinning. ‘Friends in high places, you know. Congratulations to you.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. I put my hand to my mouth, tried to cover a smile.

‘Naw, you should be proud, Isabel. This is a big deal, you know? Norse’d be proud as shizz, I’ll tell ya that. Yep.’ He bobbed his head and took his feet off the chair. Eyes darting nervously around the room, he made a jokey Vanna White gesture at the chair. ‘Take a load off for a sec, eh? We should celebrate or something.’ He cleared his throat, embarrassed.

I hesitated. The prospect of returning to my Rez room at night after practice, after team workouts, had begun to cause small pebbles of dread to roll around in my stomach. Gavin had been playing Rammstein the night before, their German shouts jerking guttural anger through the wall. The night before that had been the Goo Goo Dolls. It was less the music itself, more the unpredictability of Gavin’s taste, that unsettled me, a musical identity crisis enveloping me every night. And there was a Pizza Hut just down the street from our building, so there was always someone eating pizza. There was never no one eating pizza. The ghosts of pizzas past, present and future roamed the hallways. They got in under my door. The unshakable cologne of melted cheese in the fibres of my clothes.

I walked into Ed’s office, sat in the chair across from him. He examined my face with the same surprised look he had when we first met.

‘You want a pop?’ he said, going over to the fridge. He leaned over it, a fist on the fanny pack belt on his hip. ‘I got Coke here. I got Sprite. Grape Crush. Beer.’ He turned, eyebrows raised, and put a finger to his lip. ‘Not that I drink and drive the beast ever.’ A nervous laugh.

‘I’ll have a Grape Crush,’ I said.

‘Excellent choice.’ Ed opened the can for me and handed it over. Then he picked up an empty Coke can sitting beside the fridge and poured a Molson Canadian into it.

‘To celebrate,’ he said and we touched cans. The Grape Crush on my tongue tasted of swimming lessons at Clementine Beach when I was a kid, of Buck counting out quarters at the canteen. Ed settled down into his chair like he was getting ready for a class to start. He took a sip, cleared his throat.

‘So, Norse and me billeted together at the Ferrys,’ he began. ‘Old couple, real nice. Didn’t know what they were getting themselves into, I guess. Didn’t know Junior hockey players were all shizz disturbers as a rule, you know. Just a nice little couple wanting to do their part for the team. First night there, Norse and me didn’t get home till five in the morning. Old Mrs. Ferry waiting up for us in this heartbreaking nightgown all worried. Norse didn’t even make it inside. We get to the door, it’s like his knees just buckle. Had a little nap on the front step. That’s what he called it – having a little nap. I sent her a card a few years ago, feeling all bad thinking about the way we acted, the two of us, and them just trying to be nice. But it came back to me. Guess they’re probably gone by now too.

‘Anyway, you live with a guy, you share the same room, you play hockey together, you get to know him pretty well. We were like Siamese frickin’ twins,’ Ed snorted.

As though I was interviewing him. He didn’t stop until he’d covered the first month of his relationship with Kristjan. The two of them dating sisters. Rookie Night and Kristjan so drunk he passed out in his underwear and a scuba mask in a bathtub at somebody’s friend’s brother’s party.

As far as I can tell, a hockey player dies young in a small town and his death grants him a different sort of fame. Even people who had
never spoken a word to Kristjan seemed to feel they knew him intimately. To know him was to know the grief that had covered the town like a rough, wool blanket. They felt compelled to tell me about him, as though I were some walking, talking memorial wearing a sandwich board that said,
Please deposit testimony here.

Ed’s nostalgia was a less polished brand. He talked about Kristjan like Kristjan was in the room and Ed was bringing up these stories with me to razz him. Like we were all shooting the shit over beers, recalling the glory days, the three of us. There was a kind of recklessness around the edges of his stories that I hadn’t heard before, that made me wary. But I listened. I nodded my head and asked small questions and let Kristjan spill, drunk and disorderly, into the room.

Ed stopped talking suddenly and cocked his head to the side. He put a finger to his ear. ‘You hear that?’

Just the mosquito song of the fluorescent light. I shook my head.

‘Quiet, right?’ he said. We listened again and now I heard that the Peewees’ high-pitched shouts, the puck tocks and blade rasps, were gone. Ed’s office flooded with the absence.

‘That means I’m on.’ He grinned quickly, feeling the pocket of his old dress shirt, and then grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair.

I watched him pull the Zamboni out of its bay, his palm drawing the steering wheel in a slow circle, popping the gears, the Zamboni’s black bulk jumping slightly and then falling into a sluggish pace, trailing a tail of gleaming ice behind it. Ed looked over and steered toward me. He shouted down from the high black chair, over the boards, ‘Talk to you again soon, Norse.’ Then he winked and drove off. The Zamboni ambled slow across the empty rink. In its wake, strips of licked-raw ice, perfectly aligned.

‘S
hove over, then,’ Sig said and perched awkwardly on the bed’s edge. I wormed over to the other side and Sig paused, my expectant breath at her elbow. I reached beside my bed and hauled up a photo album, the blue one all cracked at the corners like dry lips.

‘I’ve got one,’ Sig said and shuffled around in the album until she found the newspaper clipping the colour of a nicotine stain.

Norse Giant Crushes Pykes.
Kristjan, a teenager, winced, crunching a wan-faced opponent along the boards.

‘I’ve heard this one,’ I said gently. ‘I think.’

‘No, no,’ Sig was impatient; I could hear the words building up gritty in her throat. ‘You haven’t heard this one. Just listen.’

She cleared her throat, a loose rattle. This sound made goose-bumps wave up along my arms, underneath the flannel pyjamas. Sig’s Ready-Go whistle. Her voice would change now; it would get bigger. She’d be a different person.

‘Well, then. You see, Kristjan, he wasn’t always this big.’ Sig tapped the photo with her wedding band. ‘In fact, when he was your age, he was smaller than most kids. A real runt, you know? Much smaller than you. And he was probably about your age when he met the bear.’ Sig paused for dramatic effect, and I didn’t move, breaths long and sleep-heavy, eyes measuring Sig’s mouth in dreamy sweeps.

‘Well, so Kristjan was taking Elskin for a run, out back of the Keewatin baseball diamonds – that old path where we saw the beaver with its babies and the snapping turtle last summer? You know the one. I warned Kristjan not to go back there. “You’ll be eaten by a bear,” I told him, but when he started running, that boy, it’s like his legs kidnapped the rest of his body, mind of their own, you know. So he finds himself on this path, sun going down. “You be back before sunset,” I told him, but his legs wouldn’t listen. And it’s real quiet on the path, just old Elskin panting and Kristjan’s heart going
ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom.
And the path runs beside the lake, so he can see it the whole time, and you know how when you see the lake, it’s as though it’s watching you and Kristjan feels safe.

‘It starts with a rustling in the bush, like it always does, in all the scary movies. But it’s real this time. Kristjan looks up to the treetops, and I’d always told him, “If you see one tree shaking when there isn’t any wind, that’s a bear scratching its back on the bark.” And sure enough, there’s one tree shaking in its boots. Right there. The fur on the back of Elskin’s neck stands right up and she starts growling – a pistol, that dog. She was. Kristjan starts running faster,
yanking Elskin along – she stopped right there on the path and started growling and snapping at the air. And that’s when it happens. This bear comes slinking out of the bush. And isn’t it always a Jesus surprise when you see a bear – do you remember that bear that walked into the backyard when we were having your birthday party, just like he’d been invited, the saucy old thing?