Twenty Miles (25 page)

Toad turned and began to gather the bags in her arms, shoulder pads shifting awkwardly as she crouched, head comically small above the huge equipment. Glaring, she looked up and took stock of our faces. Her eyes settled on me like Hal. That look that said you
were about to be enlisted, useless to try to escape. Toad wasn’t as good at it, though; there was a kind of listlessness around her eyes. Her mouth was softer – a joking mouth even when she was furious, the threat curled in her lips that they could break at any time.

‘Iz, grab the rest, eh?’

I nodded quickly and crouched next to her, grabbed at the slippery skins and wadded them into the crook of my arm. Pelly watched me, frowning.

I followed Toad out into the hall, past the garbage can in the dressing room. We’d both already put on our skates, so our walk down the hall was a tandem waddle, bouquets of bags blooming ghostly from our hands. The garbage can inside the door to the rink was overflowing with ketchup-smeared cardboard baskets, Styrofoam cups, banana peels. A ripe, hot stench clouded around it.

Toad grunted in frustration. ‘Apparently no one works in this place.’

She stalked off around the perimeter of the ice, following the curve of boards to the back door, the one past Ed’s office that led to the parking lot. She flung it open and looked over her shoulder for me. At her back, I peered past the bulk of her shoulder pads, out into the combined grey of the parking lot and the night filtering in.

All hockey players have been instilled with the healthy fear of concrete; we’ve all imagined the sound our skates might make against it if we dared venture past the islands of black rubber. The intolerable scrape, fever-dream screech, fingernails against a chalk-board. Blade edges lost in a heartbeat.

We were trapped, Toad and I, marooned by our blades. Toad threw the bags overhand from the doorway, like she was pitching a ball, and I watched their white edges catch at the orange sky as they winged away on the breeze. I shut my eyes. I threw the bags like that, with my eyes closed, and when I looked again, they were scattered at the foot of the door, scuttling small tics across the pavement, the wind holding its breath.

A
hockey game is the same story told over and over again. Shift the plot around, switch the characters, change the ending a bit, but it’s all the same and we already know how it will end. Even if the scoreboard doesn’t give you what you want after the last seconds have fallen down over the players’ helmets and the final horn has bounced off the ice, you’ll still be okay. It’s just a game. A safe place for people to put their hope. The promise of trying again and again. This is what they tell us.

U
of A loped slow arcs along the boards toward the net, yellow and green, sprinting up around the red line toward the sloppy line of us waiting at the gate. Hard slow hard slow. The hammered blare of
AC / DC
and the announcer clearing his throat into the microphone.

‘Here come your Winnipeg University Scarrrr-lets!’

Flooding fast onto the ice, finding our rivets under the crowd’s eyes, quick circles.

The same circles. A few hours earlier, I’d written a history exam, a hundred of us hunched over identical booklets, all those blue lines, digging at the pages with our pens as though we might gradually unearth some buried machine, some system to initiate us into action. In Sam Hall, we skated these blue lines. We dug at the ice with our blades. We weren’t finding anything.

Spilling ourselves around the circles. The dull thunk of pucks against Tillsy’s pads. Warming up, revving our legs like snow-stunned cars, forcing the blood thaw.

The same circles, but Hal wasn’t there. It wasn’t like the whole team was injured just because she wasn’t playing; teams are adaptable, shapeshifters, growing over the holes, the hurt parts, inventing new ways to thrive. Hal was our captain and a ringer, but the team could reinvent itself around her absence for one game, Heezer taking her position on the first line, the line shifting, stretching, a different ladder of hands reaching toward the goal.

She wasn’t just
MIA
. Her absence, that loss into which she’d disappeared, had enacted a violence on each of us. You couldn’t see it, but it was there, as though we’d all gone out on our days off and
gotten into a gigantic scrap, each of us limping back to the ice, to this game. The evidence hidden under our equipment, in the shadows of our helmets.

Our legs weren’t in it. Moon could see this before we even hit the ice. She’d tweaked our line combos, hoping this minor disorientation might jolt us awake. She wanted us chipping the puck past the trap. She wanted the
2–3
Press. She wanted.

‘Listen,’ she’d sighed in the dressing room after laying out our strategy. ‘I know we’ve all had a rough week and we’re worried about Hal.’ Here, she’d tried to goose up her tone a bit. ‘But we’ve gotta just get out there and give it a hundred and ten. Play every shift like it’s your last. And just ... keep it off the ice.’ No one said anything afterward, the silence pointedly empty, as though it should be filled with a gaudy
Amen.
Her words held a brassy quality, a Don Cherry monologue delivered by a bad actor. They weren’t hers.

‘Just imagine,’ Sig said once as I hovered in a snowbank next to the lake rink Buck cleared each winter, terrified of the ice’s deep-bellied percussion. These sounds seemed to come from the dark purple fissures threaded through the ice, bruised mouths that might creak open at any time, swallowing me whole.

Sig stood in the middle of the rink in her prehistoric skates with the long, sabre-toothed blades and she told me to imagine that the same family of giants who bowled in the sky during the summer – the ones who made thunder – moved south in the winter and there they were, playing, far beneath the ice. Instantly, I could see this: the sky-sized ice ruled by giants. She tapped her stick and shrugged and the ice sounds shrunk suddenly on that small jerk of her shoulders. With one touch of her hockey stick.

Moon wanted us to imagine. Imagine the ice was a safe place to put our hope. Imagine Hal and Terry never existed, just for one game. Keep it off the ice. I looked around the room at my team-mates’ faces. We didn’t believe.

‘Fuck!’ Toad yelled as her shot got away from her during warm-up, grazing the goal post and then rebounding with a high-pitched gong off the glass behind. I skated in on her heels, took my own shot, Tillsy licking out her glove hand, folding the puck quick into
her catcher, then dropping it by her feet, ready for the next. I glided up beside Toad, into the lineup along the boards.

‘This is such bullshit,’ she grumbled, holding her stick upside down, picking slush off the tape on her blade.

‘Yeah, it is,’ I said and she looked at me sharply, like she’d expect this from herself but not from me, her thin eyebrows arched beneath her cage.

‘You okay, bud?’ she said. ‘You look kinda shitty.’

‘Yeah,’ I shook my head. ‘I just don’t feel like playing.’

‘I’m with ya,’ she said and then it was her turn again to get a pass. The Horseshoe drill, it was called.

I’d forgotten which U of A players I was supposed to hate. Some of my teammates held a hit list, a catalogue of numbers and names and all of the sins they’d committed against us. But I’d only played against U of A once at the very beginning of the season and so I’d lost my grip on any violence I might have held in my teeth a million years ago. You play against enough girls and they begin to lose their faces, like the endless students I passed on campus every day. They become just another set of hands and legs moving toward you, forcing you to make a choice about how you’re going to tell the next part of the story. And, anyway, we all know how it will end.

The puck dropped. We played the game. We skated to open ice, called for the puck, found new angles to invest in, but our passes wilted around the edges. Our legs weren’t in it.

Toad and I leapt onto the bench, line change, both of us hauling breath, Toad gasping furiously.

‘Fuck, you guys,’ Toad said to no one in particular. ‘You’re killing me with the shitty passes. I’m fucking breaking my legs to get to your shitty passes.’

The last bad pass had been from Duff, obvious in its shittiness. Duff leaned backwards in the D end, her face crimson.

‘Get in your fucking position then,’ she bellowed down to our end.

‘Hey!’ Moon barked behind us.

‘Oy,’ Pelly breathed. Wary glances exchanged down the line. We were turning on each other. I leaned on the boards, a red tickle at
the bottom of my lungs, gulping air. Looked at the scoreboard. Sixteen minutes left, still in the first. It occurred to me we wouldn’t make it that far, and then that I didn’t want to make it. A simple fact, sharpened by the blade of my breath. I didn’t want this.

Sig walked in then, along the stands across from our box. I hadn’t seen her since Terry’s funeral. I remembered, my pulse revving again. She walked past the canteen, slow, leaned on the railing for a bit like she was taking a break. Then she began to make her way again, her hand still dragging along the railing, toward our offensive end where the other Scarlet parents were clustered. She was so small. How long had she been humouring her knees like that, tottering along like an old lady? Days, weeks. Years.

Thrown back onto the ice before I could think. We were bouncing off each other like bumper cars, our two teams, a lack of conviction in our roughness. U of A could smell our weakness maybe and decided to save their own bodies; we weren’t going to put up a fight, they’d just outskate us. And anyway I’d forgotten who to hate, skating up the far boards, looking over my shoulder, Toad clamouring for the puck Duff had rung around the boards behind our net.

It wasn’t a hit or an elbow or a stick. I was alone along the boards, trying to get open. But my movements were becoming unglued. I tripped. I did it to myself, my right blade catching the ice, just the tip, as though I was a figure skater digging in my pick, about to launch my body into something beautiful. But, instead, I could feel the ugliness, falling out of myself, my limbs turning to liquid, boards leaping toward my head. The thunder of my helmet shook my eardrums and a spool of red light unravelled from my head down my neck. I crumpled to the ice on my side. Turned over onto my back and closed my eyes to feel it, every inch of that light, to float down its hot path.

I heard the whistle and the approach of skates, the quick, panicked rasp of blades, and I heard Toad’s voice dropping over me.

‘Iz, Iz, come on, buddy, you okay? You’re okay. You okay? Come on, buddy.’

But I kept my eyes closed. Gathering the words together in that ringing white space behind my eyes. To tell them. Because they
needed to know this, that Hal was playing when Terry died and how could she? And that Sig was sick and hockey is the same story told over and over, a safe place to put your hope but what is hope and we already know how it will end. And that eventually we won’t come back to the dressing room, to that giant girl who’s fearless and brave, and we’ll skate off the ice, go to our separate houses, we’ll be as small as we are in our own beds at night and then how will we be brave? And that Hal was playing when Terry died and we couldn’t keep it off the ice and I couldn’t find Kristjan and Sig was sick and hockey was the same story.

I opened my eyes. My legs, my arms, sinking like swamped boats, down into the ice. Tamara, the trainer, her long black hair falling over me like poured oil, thrust three fingers at my cage. The faces of Toad, Pelly and Boz crowded next to her, the curves of their helmets sharp against the fluorescent lights above them, the edges of an eclipse.

‘You okay, hon?’ Boz said. I let the question roam through my body. The pain had retreated. Or maybe there hadn’t been pain at all. I couldn’t remember it. Someone had opened a door in my head and fresh air had flooded in.

‘I’m okay,’ I said. Then, ‘Three.’ And I swung myself up to the clucked objections of Tamara and got to my feet. I skated around my teammates – Pelly offering me her arm for support, confused face – and jumped through the gate, off the ice. I walked around the perimeter of the rink, past Ed in his office. He looked up and just stared, open-mouthed, quickly adjusting that thin raft of hair across his scalp once again, and I saw a wary kind of pain around his eyes; I think it had been there from the beginning. Like it was me, not Kristjan, who had broken his heart. I wanted to tell him I couldn’t pay Kristjan’s debts, I didn’t have enough, I’d run out. But I just kept going until I reached the door. Then I pulled off my skates and walked out into the indigo night.

I
didn’t have a lot to pack. In Rez, they like you to make yourself at home in the most refugee way possible. Just threw my clothes into
the two suitcases, left all my books on the desk. Left the photo of Kristjan up on the wall with its Milky Way swirl of tack holes, tiny memorials for all the photos that had come here to be lost, hundreds of them over the years and none of them had lasted. Then I ripped the picture down and put it in the pocket of my jeans because I didn’t want the wall to win.

S
ig was sitting outside Rez in the truck when I walked out with the first suitcase. I peered into the truck briefly and saw the pale glow of her face in the shadows and then I hoisted up the suitcase and levered it carefully over the side of the truck bed. When I went around to the passenger door, I heard the click of the automatic lock. I pulled on the handle but the click had been Sig locking me out. The window yawned slowly down. Sig glowered at me through a cloud of cigarette smoke.

‘None of us know what this is about. But if you aren’t broken, you aren’t getting in this truck. And all I know is that you walked out of there on two legs. Now. Are you hurt?’

I shook my head.

Sig gave a deep nod. ‘You finish what you started, girl. Get your bag out.’ And she rolled up the window.

S
now began a slow descent as the Greyhound lurched toward the outskirts of the city, the snowflakes tentative, polite. Barely there in the darkness. Somewhere along the line Winnipeg had stumbled into winter.