glove open at his left shoulder, his stick pressing flat against the ice. I wondered if he had always been a goaltender. Many a player becomes a goalie by default: as a six- or seven-year-old, he’s the weakest skater on the frozen lake or the flooded backyard, so he gets stuck standing at one end of the rink, stopping pucks and jumping up and down on his blades to keep warm when the action’s at the other end. But many goalies develop into strong and agile skaters who can stay with the fleetest defensemen and forwards on their teams, even while wearing all that extra armor. And some can shoot as hard as any of them, too, for their arms and wrists have grown sinewy wielding that big stick with those potholder gloves.
But, at least on the ice, they remain alone, always.
I’d thought I quit tending goal because I was tired of waiting around for things to happen. Which is what goalies do, a lot of the time. But now, as the referee dropped the puck and I followed it between one center’s skates to a winger’s stick blade and off the high glass and outside the blue line where the River Rat center gave chase against a Marquette defenseman, I thought maybe I had stopped because I no longer wanted to feel alone.
In the dressing room, in the hockey shop, in the tavern, the goalie is one of the boys. On the ice he is stranded, lost inside his bloated pads, hiding his face behind a mask. When he gives up a goal his teammates figure he should have stopped, he is alone, circling his crease, dousing himself from his water bottle, wishing he had another chance at the shot he was sure he had with the toe of his skate until it hit someone’s knee and deflected just inside the post.
He knows that on the bench the other guys are muttering about the pylon or sieve or funnel between the pipes. He knows that even if he had a chance to explain-the puck took a funny hop, the defenseman left a guy uncovered-he would not be understood. Because nobody sees the game as a goalie does: as a low, flat, horizontal puzzle of bodies and blind spots and caroms and bounces that is constantly being assembled and disassembled on his left, his right, behind him, his left again, in front of him, beneath him, down low, up high. All of which he feels responsible for trying to control. Even if he isn’t, really. Even if it’s ultimately impossible to control, or even make sense of.
Not terribly unlike my day job. Or my life.
Marquette’s number 6 collected the puck and slapped it across the rink to his defensive partner, number 4. Beyond the boards behind him I noticed Darlene and Deputy Skip Catledge standing in uniform at the entrance to the Zamboni shed. No yellow police tape was in sight. The Zamboni driver was dead but the game would go on.
Number 4 shoveled the puck right back to 6. High above 6’s helmeted head at the top of the bleachers perched the private box Laird Haskell had built. A banner proclaiming “The Rat Pack is BACK” hung the length of the box. I couldn’t see inside the box from where I was, but usually Laird Haskell stood at one end with a mixed drink in hand, chattering with whatever guests he might have without ever taking his eyes off his son. Whenever the puck was around Taylor’s net, Laird Haskell would stop his conversation and shout clipped commands at the boy: Stop it! Kick it! Grab it! Freeze it! And just before face-offs, always: Focus! I never heard him say “Taylor”; instead Laird Haskell called his son “19”, or “number 19”. I couldn’t tell if Taylor heard his father. He never looked up at the box or made any other sign of acknowledgment, unless you counted the way he sometimes bowed his head when his father snapped, Nineteen! Focus! Maybe Taylor was focusing. Or maybe not.
Next to Haskell’s box, the bleachers were filled top to bottom, blue line to blue line with high school kids wearing gold sweatshirts embossed in blue with the slogan the puck stops here. The Rats had started selling the shirts after the Haskells arrived the autumn before and Taylor, the brand-new goalie from downstate, started the season by shutting out the first five opponents he faced. He snapped his catching glove like a bullwhip, and he got down and up and from one post to the other faster than goalies who were years older. Some of the kids passing me to go to the concession stand and the pay phones had had their sweatshirts autographed by the fourteen-year-old guarding the Rats goal tonight.
I had met Taylor Haskell once, a few weeks before.
I had gone into the rink pro shop to buy a stick. I was looking at the rack with left-hand curves when I noticed a kid in River Rats sweats picking through the right-curve sticks on the opposite side of the rack. Taylor said the gold stitching over his left breast. He selected an Easton and held it in both hands like a right wing would. He leaned down on the shaft until it bent a little, testing its stiffness.
“Fresh lumber?” I said. “Aren’t you in the wrong rack?”
He looked up and his cheeks flushed as if I had caught him doing something wrong. He glanced quickly over his shoulder at the door to the shop.
“Um,” he said. “Just waiting for my mom.”
“You want those, don’t you?” I pointed at a rack of paddle-bladed goalie sticks across the room. “That little thing you got isn’t going to stop a slapper.”
“I’m just looking.”
I walked around and offered my hand. We shook. He was a little taller than I’d thought. His damp brown hair-he’d just showered after practice-glistened over blue eyes flecked with green. He had a pinkish sprinkle of acne along his forehead. Except for the eyes, he looked like his father.
“Gus Carpenter,” I said. “I used to have a jacket like that.”
He looked down at his jacket, as if he’d forgotten he had it on. “You were on the Rats?”
“A long time ago. Played goalie, too. Not anymore, though.”
“Huh. How come?”
“How come what?”
“How come you stopped playing goal?”
It was not an idle question asked by a bored adolescent. Number 19 of the Hungry River Rats really wanted to know why I had chosen to leave goaltending behind. I wondered if Taylor Haskell knew that I had been the goat of the ’81 title game. Maybe he hadn’t been in Starvation long enough for that indoctrination.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Guess I had enough of people shooting pucks at my head. Time to have some fun for once, you know?”
I was joking, but Taylor didn’t take it that way.
“Yeah,” he said. “What’s it like?”
“Playing out of the net?”
“Yeah.”
I really hadn’t given it much thought. I knew I didn’t feel nearly as much pressure playing wing. That was probably the best part. Even in a men’s league where games started at 11:45 p.m. and guys showed up stoned or drunk, I got butterflies before going out to tend goal. Wingers can screw up two or three times a shift and nobody cares. A goalie screws up twice in a game and their buddies start yelling at them to start fucking trying already.
“It’s fun,” I said. “I mean, I’m nothing great on wing and, from what I’ve seen, I wasn’t nearly the goalie you are.”
“Taylor, what are you doing?”
The woman was standing in the lobby just outside the shop in a white ankle-length parka trimmed with fur. She gave me a once-over without meeting my eyes. Taylor turned around and said, “Can I get a stick?”
“Taylor,” she said. “We don’t have all day.”
“Come on, Mom.”
The woman gave me a look that said this was none of my business.
“We’ll talk to your father again tonight.”
Taylor’s shoulders drooped. “Oh, right.”
“We’ll see.” She waved him out. “Let’s go.”
Now Marquette’s number 6 faked around a Rats wing and veered left toward the center of the ice. Jeremy Bontrager, Elvis’s nephew, stepped up to cut him off but 6 wound his stick back behind his left ear and, one stride outside the blue line, slapped a long, chest-high, flip-flopping shot at Taylor Haskell.
Following the fluttering puck while watching Taylor out of the corner of my eye, I knew immediately that he’d come out of his crease half a second too late. The crowd didn’t know it, but I could feel them holding their breath anyway, because Taylor Haskell, for all of his shutouts and spectacular stops, had gradually gotten a reputation for giving up soft goals.
