Nowhere to Be

The read had never been something Owen thought about, which was why it took him the better part of a week to notice it had stopped working.

He could not have explained it to anyone who asked, and in nine seasons nobody had. You came off the half-wall with your head up and you did not look for your winger, because looking was slow and the play did not wait for slow. You knew where he was the way you knew where your own hand was, and you put the puck into the ice he was about to be standing on, and then he was standing on it. Owen was not fast and had never been big and his shot was something other teams had heard rumours about, and what he had instead was a half-second of quiet arithmetic finished before anyone else had started the sum.

He was looking now. He had caught himself doing it in Edmonton, turning his head an actual inch to find a man he already knew the position of, and the inch had cost him the pass, and the shift had ended with the puck three feet inside his own blue line and the bench very quiet about it.

The radio call for him, the one the local guy used, was the most reliable defensive centre on this roster, and men said it in rooms, and he had never once said it about himself or anything else. He was thirty. He was six foot even and had been the same weight since he was twenty-three, built low to the ice and short-levered. Heavy through the hips and the backside, with dark hair cut short and pushed back off his forehead. The pale winter skin of a man who had not been warm outdoors since April, which reported nothing whatever about him at any temperature. He took the faceoffs nobody wanted, against men with three or four inches on him, and he won enough of them that the coaching staff had stopped charting it. He had been out since he was twenty-four, which had happened because somebody asked him a direct question in a hallway outside the equipment room and he had answered it, flatly, the way he would have answered a question about a flight time. He had not raised it again in six years. The room had noticed, priced it somewhere he never saw, and shrugged, and that had been the end of it, and Owen had gone on being a man nobody had to ask for anything twice because nobody had ever had to ask him for anything at all.

August Wieland had been on his right wing since training camp broke.

Thirty-eight on the back of him, six foot three, built the way a dairy farm builds a body rather than the way a hockey program does — deep through the ribs, thick at the neck, short in the arm for a winger, hands a full size past the rest of him. He forechecked like a man who genuinely enjoyed it, which was rarer than the coaches pretended, and he came back hard, and he talked the entire time. On the bench he narrated. Off the bench he narrated. His hair had been cut at his mother's kitchen table in Wisconsin in August and had been losing the argument ever since; he shoved it off his forehead and it came straight back down and he shoved it again. Everything happened on his face roughly four seconds before it would have been wise, so you could watch him decide to say a thing, and watch him know he shouldn't, and watch him say it anyway.

What he said was never clever and was almost always true. He told the trainer his shoulder was fine when it was fine and bad when it was bad, which was not how anybody else in the building handled that conversation. He asked Owen, in his second week, straight out and in front of four other men, how you were supposed to know when to go and when to hold, and Owen had told him, and he had gone away and done it, and by the next road trip he was doing it without being watched.

He was twenty-five. He was also, on the evidence of the tape, the best linemate Owen had had in three years.

Owen had known since September where his eyes went. He had named it inside a week of the reads starting to go, because he was not a man who let a thing sit unnamed, and then he had gone on carrying it named for the weeks that followed. The knowing had arrived on a Wednesday, in a hotel elevator, when Gus had leaned back against the mirror with his bag hanging off one shoulder and said something about the continental breakfast, and Owen had looked at the line of his throat and thought, with the exact flatness he brought to a video session, ah.

He had decided inside the same minute what it was. It was his. It belonged to him the way a bad ankle belonged to him — a thing you managed, quietly, with tape and an earlier alarm, and did not mention, because a thing you could carry alone was a thing you did not mention. His mother had taught him that in a kitchen in a river town south of Pittsburgh and he had never found a situation it failed in.

What he had not decided was what to do about the read.

The second period was half gone and they were down one when it went wrong the first time. Owen took the puck below the goal line off a ring-around, squared his shoulders to the wall, and had the whole picture in front of him, the way he always had — their D pinching, the far winger cheating up, and Gus coming off the wall with speed into the soft middle where he should have been. Owen knew exactly where he was. He knew, and then he looked, and the looking took the half-second the pass had been living in. He put it behind him. The defenseman had it at the blue line before Gus had finished turning his head, and Owen was already skating backward, and the shot came through traffic and their goaltender got a shoulder on it and held on with about a foot to spare.

The whistle. Nobody said anything. In this building, when a thing was bad enough to mention, nobody mentioned it.

He came off through the gate and sat with the cold rolling in off the sheet against his shins and the bench smelling of what it always smelled of — sweat, ammonia, mint gum, wet wool. Somebody two stalls down the boards was reading a number off his phone to somebody else, which meant there was a line open on something, which there always was.

"That was me," Gus said. He dropped down on Owen's right and pulled his glove off to get at his water. "I stopped. I shouldn't have stopped, I was going to cut and then I thought you had the far side and I —" He shoved his hair back. "That was me."

It had not been him. He had been exactly where the play said. Owen looked at the far end of the ice, at the linesman skating into the circle, at nothing.

"Next one," Owen said.

"Yeah." Gus knocked their shoulders together, unbothered, easy about it, and went back to narrating.

The second one was in the third and it was worse, because the second one he saw coming and it happened anyway. Owen had the puck at the top of the circle with a man on him and Gus was at the back post, alone, both hands on his stick, his whole enormous frame turned open to the ice — the pass was there, it was the only pass, a kid in his first year of hockey would have found it. Owen's eyes went to him. Not to the lane. To him. To the back of his neck above the collar of his jersey and the wet hair stuck to it, and it lasted whatever a look lasts, and by the time Owen's hands were told what to do, the defenseman had put a shin pad in the lane and the puck went off it into the corner and the horn went somewhere in the middle of all that with the Frost a goal short.

In the room afterwards he sat and took his gear off in order and answered the one question the beat guy had for him about faceoffs in the defensive zone. He was tired. He had been tired since Edmonton. Across the room Gus was standing in his base layer with his skates still on, holding forth about a call in the first, and two men were laughing at him, and Owen took his own skates off and did not look up.

He had already worked out what he was going to do. He had probably worked it out in the elevator in September, and spent the weeks since finding the version that cost the least.

There were three ways. He could say nothing and keep playing badly, which was the kind of thing that ended with a coach solving it for you in front of the room. He could sit down with a twenty-five-year-old and explain to him what Owen's eyes did when he skated behind him, which would make it a thing that existed between them and would follow the kid around a dressing room for the rest of his career whether he wanted it or not. Or he could take it upstairs and have it done as hockey, in ninety seconds, by somebody whose whole job was moving names, and nobody would ever have to hold anything.

It was not a difficult choice. That was the part he would go back over afterwards, for weeks: how easy it had been, and how sure he had been that the version that touched the fewest people was the version that cost the least.

The corridor behind the coaches' room had carpet instead of the rubber matting the tunnel had, so you went from the sound of your own feet to no sound at all in one step, and it smelled of the coffee they burned in there at four in the afternoon and again after every game. Marta Kowalczyk came out of the door with a laminated line sheet in one hand, face down, squared against her thigh. She was a head shorter than him and square through the shoulders and she had her jacket on, which meant she was going to her car.

"Novak."

"You got a minute."

"You have until I get to the door," she said, and kept walking, and he walked with her.

He had it ready. He had had it ready since the second intermission and he had turned it over enough times to sand off everything that was not hockey.

"Wieland on my right isn't working," he said. "It's not effort. He works. It's that I can't find him. I come off the wall and he's not where the read is — he's a beat late getting down low, or he's high when the picture says low, and I'm hunting for him instead of moving it. It's costing us possession time." He heard himself keep going, which was not like him. "Tonight both of those were that."

And there it was — the one word, going flat in his mouth the way it did when he was tired, dahn, a single syllable with a river town in it and a mill and a grandfather who had come off the boat with the ck still on the end of the name and a father who had done thirty-one years and then eleven more at a hardware store, out of him and gone before he had finished the sentence around it.

Marta did not break stride. She got to the door at the end and put her hand on the bar and turned round.

"You have not wasted ninety seconds of mine in six years," she said, "so I will move him, and you will both understand that it is a line change and not a verdict."

"Yeah," Owen said.

She pushed the bar with her hip and went out into the dark and the cold came down the corridor after her and then the door shut and the carpet took the sound of it.

The skate was at ten the next morning and the lines were on the whiteboard when he came in off the ice with his helmet in his hand. He read them the way he read everything, once, without any change in his face. Wieland was in the third group with the two kids, and the winger they had been carrying on the fourth was where Wieland had been, on his right, listed under his own name in green marker.

The groups went over the boards and Owen took his spot at the dot and looked down the sheet, and Gus was at the far circle with his gloves under his arm, looking back at him down the length of clean ice. He lifted his chin at Owen — an actual greeting, warm, entirely uncomplicated, a man saying hello to the guy he had played with last night.

Owen lifted his chin back, and put his hand on the puck, and the whistle went.

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

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