Twenty Miles

by Cara Hedley

  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.

  ‘Shove 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 t
his 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?

  ‘So sure enough, a bear walks out onto the path, right in front of Kristjan and Elskin, a giant bear, bigger than any we’ve seen, kiddo. Likely about ten times the size of Grandpa. Maybe more. Just huge, with paws the size of your head, and teeth the length of your hand. And Kristjan stands there with Elskin still growling beside him. Remember, he’s just small. And the bear staring them both down. Kristjan – he’s thinking of everything everyone has told him to do at this moment. You know, play dead, cover your neck, clap your hands, make yourself big. And he doesn’t have much time, he can see the bear’s eyes turning red and his neck tensing up like a spring, and so, in that second, he just does it. He’s small, but he makes himself big. He raises his arms out like this and thinks himself big, and something happens. He grows tall, up and up until he’s looking down on the bear. And he sees the bear’s scared, trembling. Bear’s the one thinking now, How do I get out of this alive? He’s met his match. So he takes a swipe at Kristjan, real quick, and hits him on the shoulder before he disappears back into the bushes, whimpering like a little pup. Kristjan had a scar after that, looked like a sliver moon hung there on his little shoulder. And he was different in other ways too, I’m telling you.

  ‘Next time he plays hockey, couple days later, he’s still small, smaller than you, but he’s playing big, he’s playing gigantic. He’s the star of the team now, no one can believe it. They start calling him the Norse Giant. And then that’s all they call him. On the ice – “Norse! Norse!” And he really is giant. He’s huge out there. Something of the bear in him after that day, I’d guess.’

  Tipsy Cups: one table, longish. Ten plastic beer cups in total, the cheap kind but not too flimsy, five lined up on each side of the table. Three inches of beer in each. The first people on each team do a cheers, then chug the beer. Empty cup is placed face down on the edge of the table, a fraction of the cup’s rim hanging over the side. Using your pointer finger, lightly flick the cup upward. When the cup lands upright, the next person chugs. Flicks the cup. Lands it. And on down the line. First team to finish wins, obviously. Winning was the point – it was the point for most things when it came to the team. Eating, drinking, pranks. And hockey.

  I mounted these details in my mind with the urgency of a physics student about to take a pop quiz. I watched Boz’s technique carefully. The placement of the cup on the table. How much rim hanging over. How light the flick.

  Boz’s basement apartment was an amber-filled cave. The kitchen walls surrounding the Tipsy Cups table were painted dark orange, round lanterns of yellow paper hung in the corners, dribbling out muted light. On the wall above the crooked pyramid of beer boxes across the room: a framed painting of an African woman in a colourful dress, grinning and barefoot. On the adjoining wall, a huge poster of Mario Lemieux. A trophy towered in the centre of the table, complicated scaffolding of flaking gold leading to a bowling man. A piece of masking tape with the title Rookie of the Year taped over the nameplate on the trophy’s base. Boz assured our group of dubious, slouching rookies that this title didn’t rest on the outcome of Tipsy Cups. The trophy was present instead, I assumed, to remind us of our continuing obligation to compete.

  Hal placed me second in line on Boz’s team. Up first versus Toad’s team. Hal took her position as ref at the head of the table, raising her whistle. This triggered a rash of shouts and cheers, team members strung along both sides, encouragement shouted down to number one. Subs swarming around the table, the friction of bodies in Boz’s cramped kitchen, not enough elbow room. The competitive lean of my teammates’ faces down the line was as heavy as if they were sitting on me. I was going to choke, I could feel it. How far over the edge? How light the flick? My hands didn’t know this game.

  ‘And the losers each have to say something real nice about Toad’s daddy,’ Heezer said, performing some deep knee bends, a pre-competition stretch. ‘Eh, buddy?’ She grinned across the table at Toad, who stirred the air with her hand and then cupped her ear like Hulk Hogan.

  ‘Oh, sorry! I didn’t catch that, sport. I don’t speak Asshole.’

  ‘All right, on your marks, ladies,’ Hal boomed. The chatter rose to a din. Adrenalin burned the back of my throat. Pelly, first in line on the opposite team, cracked her knuckles. Boz, our number one, cleared her throat, looked at me.

  ‘All set, babe?’ she said.

  ‘What if I can’t do the flick thing right?’

  Boz laughed. ‘You’ll get it. No prob.’

  Hal put the whistle in her mouth. I bent my knees a bit.

  Whistle.

  Boz and Pelly crashed their cups together, then threw the beer back. Pelly spluttered a bit and belched, but got the cup down quicker than Boz and fumbled her first attempt at the flick, the cup over-rotating and landing on its side with a hollow clatter.

  ‘Shit!’ she shrieked.

  ‘Light as a feather, Pell!’ Toad yelled next to her. ‘Light as a feather!’

  Boz fumbled her first try too – the landing was almost there, but not quite, the cup catching too much of an edge, and my pulse picked up on the cusp of my turn. Boz reset the cup, calm in her speed, while Pelly’s bounced on its side again.

  ‘Mother of, mother of – ’

  You could tell Boz’s second try was going to be it, the smooth, arcing flow, and it landed firm, my hands in motion on its landing, to the laughing chants of my teammates. Choked the beer back in two gulps, the raw tickle of it in the back of my nostrils, holding back a cough while I swooped the cup down to the edge of the table. That’s when the hands kicked in. I could feel the cup’s centre of gravity in my palm as I moved it swift into place over the edge. The weight of it, how it would fly. I flicked the rim like turning on a light switch and knew the way it would go even as I made contact, like hitting a baseball in the sweet spot of the bat, and it soared up smooth and landed solid. First try. Boz and Pelly yelped congratulations, Boz grabbing my shoulder, and relief flooded the tension in my arms, cheers swelling over the table, over me. Thank God.

  Another rookie, Roxy, flubbed six times at the end of our line and I felt a bump of sympathy and validation
every time she screwed up. We lost, but not because of me, so I didn’t care.

  But then, immediately, the next obstacle: saying something about Toad’s dad, a heavy red-headed man with a sarcastic smile who picked her up after practice in a rusted K-Car and called her Toots.

  ‘Mo is a silver fox,’ Boz said. Toad gave an uninterested shrug.

  ‘Iz?’ Heezer said, pointing like a director. I didn’t have enough time.

  ‘Well,’ I stammered. Toad faux-glared at me. I looked at Pelly. She flexed a bicep and tapped it furtively. ‘Mo has nice muscles?’

  ‘Clearly, she’s drunk and confused,’ Toad said, and that was it. Another pass. Heezer pointed to Tillsy, the goalie.

  ‘Uh, okay, Mo. Well.’ Tillsy looked at the floor, deep in thought, then grinned up at Toad. ‘Mo wears extra large bikini briefs.’ Mild groans and Toad gave an exaggerated so what? shrug. Tillsy followed it up: ‘And I know this because we do it every weekend.’

  Heezer grabbed the whistle hanging around Hal’s neck and gave a couple of supportive bursts. Light applause around the table.

  ‘You know what, Tillsy?’ Toad shouted, her face reddening. ‘You can say whatever you want and it will roll off my fucking back. It’s extremely unconvincing, frankly. Not to mention disturbing that you would sacrifice your gay fucking pride for a childish game. Honestly.’ Toad shook her head in disgust and Tillsy shrieked with delight, hands clasped, like Toad had just surprised her with a present.

  ‘So if any more lesbians,’ Toad continued, ‘would like to jump in and testify on behalf of my dad’s sexiness? Then step right the fuck up. I will open the door for you.’

  Heezer blew the whistle again and Hal wrenched it out of her hand. I examined Tillsy uncertainly. I couldn’t tell whether Toad was countering Tillsy’s burn with a false accusation, or if Tillsy really was gay. In the dressing room, lines between burns and reality were perpetually blurred. Tillsy seemed thrilled with the exchange, red-cheeked and laughing.