Two-Way

The heat came up off the parking apron in a way Beau felt through his boots before he felt it anywhere else, which was backwards, because in Anchorage the cold always started at the face.

He stood at the kerb outside the arena's east service door with a duffel at his feet and a parka folded over his forearm like a waiter's towel, and he did not put the parka down, because putting it down would have meant deciding where to put it. Ten hours ago he had scraped a windshield in the dark. The lift ticket from Arctic Valley was still wired through the zipper pull, a curl of paper gone soft from a season of pocket lint, and it had made it through two airports and most of a continent and was now sweating gently in eighty-degree sun beside a row of golf carts.

The mountains here were the wrong colour. That was the thing he kept coming back to. They were the right shape — rock, bare, close enough to read the shadow on — and they were beige.

"Tessier."

A woman came out of the service door at a pace that suggested the door had been in her way, reading glasses pushed up into a low bun that had gone grey at the front, a lanyard in one hand and a clipboard in the other. She was maybe five foot two. She looked him over the way a person looks over a delivery, checking not the man but the condition.

"Beau," he said.

"Delphine Arriaga. Housing and player services, which mostly means housing." She shifted the clipboard to her hip and put out a hand, and her grip was brisk and dry and let go first. "You came off the ten-forty out of Seattle."

"The nine-fifteen. It sat."

"They all sit." She looked at the parka. Did not comment on it. "That's your bag?"

"That's my bag."

"Eleven years and one bag."

"It's a big bag," Beau said.

Her mouth did something at the corner and put it away again. She used the lanyard to point at a white Tucson three spaces down with a parking pass on the dash and a car seat in the back, and started walking before she was finished talking.

"We'll do the keys at the apartment, not here, because the office printer is dying and I've stopped negotiating with it. You've got a per-diem card in this envelope, activated Thursday, don't lose it, because they will not replace one that's lost and I will have to write a letter about you. Practice is nine-thirty, on the ice by nine-forty, and Mackie will have gear for you tonight if you want it or tomorrow if you don't." She opened the driver's door and paused with her forearms on the roof, looking at him across it. "Do you want it tonight?"

"Tomorrow's fine."

"Everybody says tomorrow's fine." She got in.

The car smelled like sunscreen and a child's crushed cracker. Beau put the duffel in the back with the parka on top of it and folded himself into the passenger seat with his knees against the dash until she reached over without looking and hit the lever and the seat went back eight inches. He got a look at the clipboard on the console between them on the way past. His name at the top of the top sheet, printed, and under it a unit number, and under that, in a different pen, a date that had not been filled in.

They came out of the lot past the loading bays, and the arena sat behind them in all that light like a shipping crate somebody had left in a field — big, pale, humming, and improbable, with an ice plant inside it working around the clock in the middle of the desert because a man in an office had decided in 2021 that this was a hockey market. In the mirror it went orange along one edge where the sun hit the signage. Beau had watched clips out of this building for years, mostly at midnight, mostly of some kid in the ugly orange who was allegedly the future. He had never thought about the parking.

"You've been down before," Delphine said. It was not a question, so he did not answer it, and she let that ride for two blocks and then said, "Not here, though. Grand Rapids, was it."

"Grand Rapids. Two thousand thirteen. Nineteen days."

"You know the number of days."

"It was nineteen days."

"Sure." She signalled. "How long this time?"

"Couple weeks," Beau said. "It's paperwork."

She nodded, pleasantly, the way she might nod at a weather forecast, and turned left onto Cook Street.

It was one-story country. Everything low and pale and stucco, dust on the kerbs, oleander going hard at the edges, and the palms doing that thing palms did in a hot wind where they sounded exactly like rain and were not. Two women walked a small dog in the shade of a wall. A landscaper's trailer sat open with the mowers still on it. A billboard said something about a casino. In eleven years Beau had learned to read a place fast, off the top of a bus, and what he read here was: this is where people live who are from here, and none of the men on his flight had been from here.

The building was two floors around a courtyard with a pool in it and a sign about glass containers. Delphine parked in a visitor slot, took the clipboard, and led him up an outside staircase that had been hot enough to feel through his soles.

"Two-oh-four," she said, and unlocked it, and stood aside.

Cool air, and not much of it. The unit ran shotgun back to a sliding door: a small square kitchen with brown cabinets, a living room with a sofa in it the colour of oatmeal, a hallway, two doors, one bathroom. The carpet was new. It was the newest thing in the room and it had been installed around the furniture.

"Air conditioner's a 1998 with a rebuilt fan," Delphine said, using the lanyard to point at the vent above the hallway, "so it runs constantly and it wins nothing. Don't touch the thermostat below seventy-four, it doesn't do anything except cost the club money and make the compressor scream. The washer's in the walkway closet, shared, it's fine. Water pressure is a rumour." She turned. "Kitchen's clean because I cleaned it."

There were two of everything on the drying rack. Two plates, two glasses, one pan. A goalie mask sat on the counter by the toaster, off its cage, cheek pads pulled out and set beside it in a row to dry.

Through the glass, out on the balcony, a set of leg pads leaned against the rail in the sun with a chest protector hung over the top of them and a blocker balanced on the AC housing, and the whole arrangement had the look of something done the same way every day for a long time. Beau stopped with his hand on the strap of the duffel and looked at it and thought, without wanting to, he sets them where the sun comes across at four. Which was a thing he knew because he had spent sixteen years around men who dried gear, and which was also, obviously, none of his business.

"Ostrowski," Delphine said. "He'll be at the rink till six or seven, he does his own thing after skate. You'll get on fine or you won't. I have stopped predicting."

"Ostrowski," Beau said. "Goalie."

"Number two goalie, and don't say it like that, he'll take your head off." She was moving already, down the hall. "Your room."

She opened the right-hand door.

It was a bedroom the size of a penalty box, with a window, a set of blinds, a lamp, a dresser with a drawer that did not sit flush, and a bed. The bed was long. It had been made — properly made, hospital corners, a folded towel on the end of it like a hotel — and it took up the wall the way a piece of gym equipment takes up a garage.

"That's an extra-long twin frame with an extension," Delphine said. "It's the only bed in this complex that a six-foot-four man can sleep in without hanging over, which is why it's yours."

Beau looked at her.

"He's six four," she said. "He's in the other one. He's had that room since October and he asked to keep it because the window faces the wall and he sleeps in the day. So the long bed's in here, and you're in here, and everybody's taller than the furniture, and that's the valley."

"You gave him the choice."

"I gave him the room he wanted. That's not the same thing and don't tell him it is." She made a mark on the clipboard. "Keys."

She handed him two on a ring, a fob for the pool gate, and a form on a second sheet with a box for a signature and a box beside it, empty, ruled, that said Anticipated departure.

Beau signed the first box. He held the pen over the second one.

"You can leave that," Delphine said.

"I'll be out of here by the first of February," Beau said. "You can put it down. It'll save you a phone call."

"I could." She did not take the clipboard back. "I've done this since they opened the doors. Would you like to hear the thing I actually think, or would you like me to write February first?"

"I'd like you to write February first."

"Okay," she said, warmly, and did not write it. She took the clipboard, tucked it under her arm, and looked around the little room at the blinds and the dresser and the made bed and the fitted sheet with the club's crest on it that somebody had bought forty of in 2021. "You'll want a fan. There's a place on Highway 111, it's twenty-two dollars, get the one with the metal cage, the plastic ones die. Don't buy a lamp, there's a lamp."

"I'm not going to be here long enough to need a fan."

"Right," she said. "You'll want one anyway."

She went. At the door she turned around with her hand on the frame and told him practice again — nine-thirty, on at nine-forty — and then told him that the mail slot was 204 and that whatever came for him would come, because the equipment room forwarded everything and the equipment room knew about him already, and Beau said, "I bet," and she said, "You have no idea, they knew Thursday," and shut the door on the outside heat.

The apartment ticked.

Beau stood in the middle of the living room for a while with his hands loose at his sides and his hands, after ten hours and two airports, not closing all the way. There was a stack of mail on the end of the kitchen counter that he had not seen coming in. Somebody had sorted it by size: a fat envelope from a bank at the bottom, then a hockey magazine, then two bills, then a postcard from somewhere with a lake on it, square, on top. Not by date. Not opened. By size, largest at the bottom, like a set of plates.

He looked at it for longer than he could later account for.

Then he carried the duffel down the hall and put it on the floor at the end of the long bed, and did not open it, because opening it would have been a decision too. He set the parka on the dresser with the lift-ticket wire hanging off the edge. He sat down on the corner of the mattress and it did not give much, and the springs said something, and he leaned his elbows on his knees and blew out and looked at the window.

The blinds were shut. The light came through them anyway, in slats, and lay across the new carpet in bars — thick, orange, low, the colour of a fire in a stove.

It was four in the afternoon in January. In Anchorage the light was going right about now and would come back grey at ten, the way it had every one of the last eleven winters, and he had a house up there with a driveway he paid a man to plow and a room in a building where twenty guys knew he took his coffee black with two ice cubes in it so he could drink it fast.

Down here in January the light was the wrong colour, and it was going to be the wrong colour tomorrow.

He got up and opened the blinds anyway, because the room was his for two weeks and a man could stand to see out.

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

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