Page 3 of Puck the Coach's Son
“Creed,” my father says.
Creed doesn't answer.
“Creed, do you have a problem with the whistle?”
“Sorry, Coach.” He says it in a flat voice, facing away.
“Look at me when you apologize.”
A ripple goes through the room. A couple of the guys on the line shift their weight. Phoenix's jaw sets. Creed turns his head, slow enough to make you watch, and he looks at my father like they're two dogs meeting in a parking lot.
“Sorry, Coach,” he says again. Slower. Louder. The mockery is so thin it can't technically be called mockery. Dad's jaw tightens.
“On the line.”
We skate it a third time. Creed is on the whistle. Dad doesn't acknowledge it.
The rest of practice is drills. Stick-handling, breakout, defensive-zone coverage, the forecheck system Dad made me memorize before I could legally drive. I run the center's routes from muscle memory and try not to be in anyone's way. Every time I come off a rep I don't look at the bench, because if I look at the bench I'll look at Dad, and if I look at Dad one of the other players will clock me looking. So I look at the glass. I look at the Zamboni door. I look at anything but him.
I end up looking at Creed instead. I don't mean to. It keeps happening.
He plays the way he skates—aggressive, fast on first step, not elegant. When he gets into a battle along the wall he doesn't stop until his man is off the puck, and he comes out with it every single time. He doesn't show off. He just wins his touches and then he's where he's supposed to be. There's a quietness to watching him play hockey if you didn't know who he was. He's efficient.
I shouldn't have thought the wordefficient. I delete it.
He's good.
He's more than good. He's the kind of player who doesn't get his due because the league has already decided what his due is. I can see it in two shifts. I wonder if he knows.
Then he looks up across the neutral zone and catches me watching.
He doesn't smile. He doesn't nod. He just holds my eyes for one full second and lets me see him seeing me, and my body does something it has never done on ice in my life. It goes hot under the gear. Hot everywhere, and with a specificity that does not feel like anything it's supposed to feel like on a rink, and I am wearing two hundred dollars' worth of padding and I am still afraid my face has told him.
I do the breathing exercise. Four in. Seven hold. Eight out. It doesn't touch me. My pulse is in my throat and my throat knows a thing my head won't agree to.
I drop my gaze to my blades. I hope nobody saw. I hope nobody ever sees. I hope my face doesn't do anything my face is not supposed to do. I skate to the bench door on the next whistle because Dad is calling lines and the one he's naming is not mine.
The locker room after practice is a different animal than the locker room before. The volume is twice what it was and the air is wet and everybody is dismantling the practice we just did, retelling it while it's still warm.
“Benched for the whistle.” Jax has got his skate off and is waving it like a gavel. “He benched a guy for the whistle. That's a new one, boys. That's one for the tape.”
“He's setting tone.” Somebody on the opposite wall, still in his base layer, chucks a piece of stick tape into the laundry bin without looking.
“He's setting tone, sure. On day one. WithCreed.”
Grayson leans back in his stall and stretches his arms over his head until something cracks. Veteran, quiet. Not chirping. Observing.
“That's how it goes, though,” he says. “New coach, new rules. Happens every time.”
“Yeah, but not with Creed.”
Somebody floats a line about the fine structure and somebody else answers with one about the union, and the joke builds and breaks and builds again, and I sit on my bench and unlace my skates one eye and one hole at a time. My shoulders are up around my ears. I drop them. They come back up.
Then the room quiets a quarter-inch and I know he's in the doorway before I see him.
Creed doesn't say anything. He goes to his stall, which is four down from mine on the opposite wall, and he starts taking his gear off without the chatter everybody else is doing. He doesn't look at me. He doesn't have to. I can feel him not looking at me, a heat on the side of my face I don't have to open my eyes to find.
“Mad Dog,” somebody says, half a laugh in it. “Welcome back.”
