Page 135 of The Off Limits Captain
I am already thinking about how to get Finn to Maren without making it worse.
Peyton
The source has eleven minutes and is not happy about any of them.
He has agreed to a diner on the southeast side: pie case that looks like it predated everyone in the room, a booth in the back with a view of the parking lot. He is already there when I arrive, coffee half empty, jacket still on.
Dwyer. Retired. Professional hockey career, eight years. Three organizations, none of them this one. Currently something in player-agent services he stays vague about. Close enough to the game to still hear it. Far enough out to say so.
I order coffee. Click on my recorder. Say, “What did you want to say?”
He looks at the recorder. “Off.”
I click it off. “Okay.”
“I want you to remember I said that.”
“I remember.”
He looks out the window toward an idling van.
I wait.
“When I played,” he says, “we had a guy who took a bad hit in February. Eye tracking was wrong. Headaches. He played March, April, and most of May.”
“What happened to him?”
“Retired early. Had maybe three seasons left, according to the doctors.”
He says a guy.
He means himself.
The three teams. The early exit. The agent job he will not describe.
I do not say it out loud. Naming it would cost me the minutes I have left.
My pen stays still. “Did the team know?”
“The room knew.”
“Did the organization know?”
He wraps both hands around his mug. “That’s where it gets interesting.”
I wait.
He does not fill the silence the way I need.
He tells me the shape of the thing without the center. The culture of it. The way a locker room learned that silence was survival. That reporting symptoms meant losing the spot you had worked four years to earn.
Nobody had to say it.
You just knew what happened to guys who did.
I write on the back page of my notebook.
Not quotes.
