Fresh Sheet

The lot had gone over in the night. Deke felt it under the truck before he saw it, that long soft slide from the turn-in to the space he'd parked in for eleven years, and he came off the brake and let the tires find their own way home the way you let a bad knee find the stairs. First real ice of the season. November second, four fifty-one in the morning, and Anchorage was so dark it didn't feel like morning at all — it felt like the underside of something.

He sat a second with the engine ticking. Snow had started and quit sometime around midnight and left an inch of dry powder over black ice, which was the worst combination the city made and the one it made most. Out past the lot, past the chain-link and the loading dock, nothing but the orange sodium wash on the snowbanks and the mountains somewhere behind all that, invisible, taken up into the dark like they'd been put away for the winter.

Deke got out. The cold took hold of his face immediately, familiar as a hand.

He had a key to the loading door because he'd asked for one his first season and nobody had ever asked for it back. Inside, the building was doing what it did at that hour — humming to itself, ticking, breathing out that smell. Cold rubber. Old coffee that had been old since September. Under both, the thin chemical sweetness that came off the resurfacer and got into everything, and under that, faint and permanent and a little bit disgusting, the funk of a barn a lot of large men had sweated into for twenty years. It had not changed once. Not one year of eleven. Deke had been traded nowhere and had gone nowhere and every October he came back through that door and his body said, before his head had any opinion at all: home.

He hit the bank of switches by the coaches' door — you had to know where they were, they were mounted behind the frame like the electrician had been ashamed of them — and forty feet of rubber matting came up gray in front of him, walled both sides in framed team photos going brown at the edges under the glass. Twenty years of Frost clubs. He walked it slow, because he liked the walk and because his hip liked five minutes before it liked anything.

Halfway down was the '13 team, and Deke, thirty-three years old, still slowed for it the way he had at twenty-three, which was embarrassing and which he had never told anybody. Second row, fourth from the left. A kid with more hair, no gray anywhere near the fade, arms folded because the photographer had said to fold them, and the only Black face in the picture except for a goalie coach who'd lasted one season and gone back to Michigan. Deke had grown up in a rink on the east side of Detroit where that had not been true — four of them on his squirt team, four kids who looked like him, and he was the only one of the four still playing at twenty. He'd stopped doing arithmetic about it a long time ago. It was just a thing his eye did on the way past, the way your eye finds your own name in a list.

Further down, near the tunnel end, was the one with the two kids at twenty-two with their arms around each other, holding a trophy the club had won before Deke had ever seen Alaska. Nobody in the current room could read the names off the caption plate. Somebody said once they should look it up. Nobody had.

The home room was dark and he left it dark, dressed at his own stall by the light off the corridor, and this was the part of the day he would not have given up for money. Five in the morning. Not one voice in the building. No music, no Sandeen's phone, no Tommer reading the trade wire out loud in his announcer voice like a man doing a bit nobody had ever asked for. Just Deke and the click of buckles.

He pulled his right glove on last, which was never quick. He opened the hand and closed it. Opened it, closed it. Opened it, closed it — three times, the middle knuckle grinding through something it should not have been grinding through, a break from a February in his fourth season that he had never had looked at, because getting it looked at meant it went in the system, and a thing in the system was a thing somebody had to decide about. Third time the hand agreed to be a hand. It always did. He'd had eleven years of it agreeing on the third one.

Thirty-three. Expiring deal, one year, signed cheap last summer with the kind of handshake that meant we'll see. Fourth line most nights, penalty kill, a shift with the kids when Marta wanted someone to make them stop cheating up the wall. He was, if he was honest at five in the morning when there was no one to be modest in front of, about half a step slower than he'd been at twenty-nine, and half a step was the whole distance between a career and a decision.

Which was why he was here at five and not at seven. He had been first man in this building for eleven years. It was the only thing he'd ever asked for and nobody had ever had to give it to him, which was the ideal shape of a thing to want.

He came out of the tunnel with his stick over his shoulder and stopped.

The lights were already up over the far end — one bank, so the ice ran that flat skim-milk color it got when the building couldn't be bothered — and there was a man on the sheet.

Deke stood in the gate mouth with the cold coming up off the rink into his teeth and watched a stranger go the length of the ice backwards on one foot.

That was the part he couldn't make sense of. Not the speed. He'd seen fast. It was that the man wasn't doing anything. Both arms low and easy, the free leg lifted behind him at hip height and held there, dead still, and the whole body carving one enormous unhurried curve out of the corner like the curve had already been drawn on the ice and he was only agreeing to it. Then, at the blue line, the free leg came in to the skating foot and went straight back out behind him to exactly where it had been — the only thing on the man that moved, and it moved the way a door shuts in a still house — and he was going the other way on the other edge, and the curve reversed and kept its size, and he was traveling back down the ice he'd just come up.

Deke had played hockey for money since he was seventeen. He could not have told you the name of what he had just watched. He wasn't sure it had one.

He stepped through the gate and let the door swing shut behind him, loud, because he was raised right and it seemed rude to just appear.

The man came out of the arc, brought the free leg down, and stood. Little guy — five-nine, maybe, though the way he held his head added a couple of inches to the general impression. Black, deep brown skin, close-cut hair, a long neck, and built out of two different men from the waist down: narrow through the hips and then thighs that had no business under a person that size. Black leggings, black quarter-zip, no helmet, no gloves, nothing on his hands at all in a room this cold. He wasn't breathing hard.

"Morning," Deke said, and gave him the smile. It had been getting him through rooms since he was nineteen — wide, easy, the gap in the front teeth doing the heavy lifting, out on his face a good half-second before he'd decided whether he meant it. That half-second was the whole trick. By the time he knew what he thought about you, you'd already relaxed.

"Good morning," the man said.

And then he didn't say anything else. He stood there with his hands at his sides and waited, perfectly pleasant, entirely still, as though Deke had come out to tell him something and would presumably get to it.

Deke skated up to the boards and leaned on them.

He was extremely good at this. Eleven years of waiting for freshmen to figure out which stall was theirs, for kids to get off the ice at the end of camp, for Théo to move his three-hundred-pound gear bag out of the doorway at the speed of continental drift. You leaned on the boards. You looked comfortable. You made no request at all, and the other man worked out on his own that you wanted the room and gave it to you, and nobody had to be told anything, and everybody kept their dignity.

He leaned. He looked comfortable. He tapped his stick twice on the toe of his skate.

The stranger looked back at him with an open and unbothered face and did not move an inch off the ice.

"I'm Deke," Deke said finally, which was surrender and both of them knew it.

"Micah Sarr." The man came over, unhurried, and offered a bare hand across the boards. His grip was small and dry and much stronger than it had any right to be. "Skills. They put me on from the first of the month through March."

"They did," Deke agreed.

The club had not told anybody. Deke had found out about a skills coach the way the room found out about everything, which was Tommer reading it off his phone in the middle of a card game and Okafor saying something about ballet, and then everybody forgetting about it inside of ninety seconds because it did not concern the price of anything.

"I usually have this hour," Deke said. He heard himself land on usually and hated it a little.

"I know," Micah said. "The attendant told me. He said a guy's had the five o'clock since before he started working here, and he asked me not to be a problem about it." He tipped his head toward the far end, the one bank of lights, the corner he'd been working. "I'm using two hundred feet of the long way around. You won't know I'm here."

That was, technically, the ice back. It was also not the ice back at all.

"Sure," Deke said. "Yeah. No problem."

He pushed off.

He took his first lap as he had taken every first lap of his life — long and lazy, letting the blades do it, feeling out which parts of him had shown up. Second lap he opened it up a little through the corners because the hip had said yes. He was aware, the entire time, in the back of his neck, of a small motionless man standing at the far blue line watching him with his hands at his sides.

He came around the third time and Micah was at the boards. Not waving. Just there, the way a thing is there.

Deke swung in and stopped, and the shave off his edges went out over the ice in a long dry hiss.

"Can I tell you something," Micah said. It was not a question and it did not go up at the end.

Deke gave him the smile again. "That's never how anybody starts good news."

"Your outside edge on your left is a lie," Micah said. "It's been a lie for a long time. You don't ride it, you rush through it and you pull yourself around with your shoulders and the shoulders are strong enough to get away with it, so nobody ever made you fix it. My guess is nobody's made you fix anything since you were twelve, because you were the best kid in the building at twelve, and the best kid in the building never gets his edges done."

The rink hummed. Somewhere under the stands the compressors turned themselves on.

"That's a lot," Deke said pleasantly, "off two laps."

"It was one lap. The second one was manners."

Deke laughed. It came out of him honestly, which he had not planned. "Okay."

"You're losing time on your off side and you're paying for it with your hips, and you're what — thirty-two, thirty-three?" Micah watched him. "You don't have to tell me. I only need to know for the arithmetic."

"Thirty-three."

"Then it matters this year," Micah said, "and it won't matter at all next year, because next year you'll have retired instead."

Deke stood there in the cold with his stick across the top of the boards and felt something go through his chest that was not, embarrassingly, anger.

He put the smile back on. Wider this time, the full one, the one that had gotten him a room key, a lower cap hit, four dressing-room fights he never got fined for and eleven seasons of nobody ever finding him difficult. "You always come on this strong before six a.m., or am I special?"

And Micah Sarr looked at it — looked right at the smile, patiently, the way you look at a car alarm going off in a parking lot two rows over — and did not take it. Didn't warm. Didn't back off. Waited it out with his head up until it died on Deke's face all by itself, and Deke felt the last of it go and had, for the first time in a very long while, absolutely nothing to put there instead.

"Both," Micah said. "You can fix the edge. It's four weeks of being bored and hating me. But it's mine to give and I'm here until March, so."

He turned and started back down the ice, and then, over his shoulder, without raising his voice, entirely certain he'd be obeyed:

"Five o'clock. Same skates."

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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