Twenty Miles

  Twenty Miles

  CARA HEDLEY

  copyright © Cara Hedley, 2007

  first edition

  This epub edition published in 2010. Electronic ISBN 978 1 77056 232 5.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House also acknowledges the support of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Hedley, Cara, 1979-

  Twenty miles / Cara Hedley.

  ISBN 978-1-55245-186-1

  I. Title.

  PS8615.E315T84 2007 C813′.6 C2007-905766-7

  To my parents,

  for early-morning practices

  One

  Light smacked the ice in Sam Hall Arena and bounced off, blooming bright in the air above. The empty stands looked tired in their worn tiers, the sag of a wilted wedding cake. And the same smell, always, in every rink. Mineral, metallic, but something else too. Something unnameable, old, the smell of a museum. It’s in this smell, maybe, where a person can start to get lost.

  A player strode across my path from the hallway joining Sam Hall to the Phys. Ed. building. She carried a black hockey bag branded with the Scarlets’ red W over one shoulder and a red backpack over the other, handling each as though it were the weight of a purse. I fell in behind. Sandals yawned from her heels, calloused the colour of potatoes – the three-headed-monster heels of hockey players, skate-boot friction over the years wrenching eruptions in the bone. A ragged swath of red at the tip of each toenail. Her hair’s dark waves moved stiffly as she walked.

  We passed a desk, the gel-headed guy behind the counter dwarfed by the giant wall of shelves behind him, overflowing with every type of ball imaginable, their colourful skins scattered among helmets, skates, racquets, sticks. He looked up from a textbook spread on the counter and smiled.

  ‘What’s up, Hal?’ he said, saluting with a highlighter. ‘Back to work, eh?’

  She nodded at him like she was the CEO returning from lunch and he was the secretary. ‘You bet.’

  Tall, with the bulk of her thighs given away by the jeans – loose waist bunched in by an old leather belt but tight across her quads and butt – and the wide-legged strut dictated by those skating muscles, the hockey legs. I felt the narrowness of my own legs and pictured Hal shovelling me like a pile of snow from the crease as I went in for a rebound.

  We entered the long hallway of yellow dressing-room doors and my stomach spasmed – I couldn’t picture what I was about to walk into. Hal opened a door near the end and an off smell leaked from the room. The sharpness of onions and something else – chili powder? She groaned under her breath. The door opened onto a short, dim hallway inhabited by a stick rack. It was still early, but a few sticks were propped crooked in there already, sloppy numbers written in black marker on their handles. Hal glanced back at me briefly as she threw her sticks into the rack and then warbled ‘Burrito!’ like a war cry. She stalked into the room, dropping her hockey bag to the floor with a dull whump, and her back burst suddenly into light.

  I tucked my sticks into the far corner of the rack and followed her. Stood in the entrance to the room behind the small hill of Hal’s bag. She was framed now by the bathroom doorway cut out of the far wall, hand outstretched toward a player decked out in Scarlet hockey gear: baseball cap, T-shirt, sweatpants. The top of her head reached Hal’s chin, and Sig – my grandmother – would have called her, with approval, sturdy. They were between the sinks and a tattered brown velour couch, stuffing bursting from an arm, a green toilet stall looming in the background. The short player jockeyed from foot to foot, mirroring Hal’s moves, as though she were trying to hide with her back the giant faux-wood microwave that was buzzing with geriatric exertion. On the wall above the bathroom door, a mural: the huge red W, penned in on three sides with Character, Dedication, Excellence. These words startled me. They reminded me of the campus holding Sam Hall in its palm, the university unfolding layers all around it, and how this made me lost.

  ‘Just give it to me,’ Hal said.

  ‘You’re confused.’

  ‘Toad. Do you see this?’ Hal pointed to her face. ‘This is a nose. Rule number thirty-eight. Now take it out and put it in my fucking hand. I can’t believe we’re already doing this.’

  ‘Your nostrils are uncommonly large, friend.’ Toad turned and fished a burrito swaddled in paper towels from the microwave. She took an exaggerated bite, her back to Hal.

  ‘Delicious!’ she mumbled, chewing.

  ‘It’s that extra-spicy, extra-heinous kind too, isn’t it? You bastard.’

  I felt the mounting vertigo of a tourist. They might have been speaking Spanish. Only a few spots were taken around the room, a handful of players taping sticks, pawing through their bags, so I looked for the biggest gap. The benches lining each wall were broken up into stalls, black wooden partitions separating them and a shelf traversing the top of each. Small, empty porches. Silver-tusked hooks everywhere and clear Tupperware bins under the benches. All the stall walls were bare except for one with a poster of David Hasselhoff in a green Speedo and a Santa hat.

  ‘Hugo, how’s it smell in here?’ Hal poked her head around the corner of the doorway and Hugo looked up from her stall wearily, shoulders dropping a bit, like a seasoned little sister who didn’t want to be enlisted. She was pale and small, but with a veined bulge in her forearms as she leaned over her bag, elbows on her thighs.

  ‘Like ass,’ she said dully.

  ‘And rule thirty-eight. Say it.’

  Hugo pulled a pair of long underwear from the bag and mumbled, ‘Thou shalt not eat burrito.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  I dropped my bag in front of a stall in a deserted corner, across from David Hasselhoff and a few down from the next closest player, and then someone grabbed the back of my shirt and pulled, steering me away. I turned; her face was inches from mine, nose wrinkled, tongue crooked, unsnagging a lip from braces. Her mouth shifted into an apologetic smile.

  ‘Diss one,’ she said, gesturing to a stall four down, now smoothing my shirt where she’d grabbed it. ‘That’s the one you want.’ French accent throwing a kink into some of her words. She nodded encouragement and I moved away from her hand on my back.

  ‘Oh? Okay.’ I picked up my bag. ‘Thanks.’

  She nodded again and hung her backpack in the stall next to the one she’d assigned me. We both looked to the bathroom. Toad now held the burrito above her head.

  ‘If you cut it, does it not bleed?’ she said, gesturing at it.

  ‘Don’t do this. You can still do the right thing.’ Hal shook her head, hands on her hips.

  My neighbour clucked her tongue, rolled her eyes at the display. She turned to me. ‘I’m Pelly,’ she said.

  ‘Hi. I’m Iz.’ We smiled at each other and then she smiled a bit too long and I unzipped my bag.

  ‘You’re discriminating against my favourite food just because it has body-odour issues – which is a fucking tragedy, Hally. Listen, I’m an elite athlete. I’m a leader of this team. I’m giving my body the sustenance it needs to give a hundred and ten today and you’re trying to sabotage this? Let’s look at the underlying issues here, let’s talk about this, let’s have a chat. Are you worried that someone’s going to be a little, um, more of a champ than someone else today? ’Cause you know – ’

  At this, Hal turned on her heel and strode over to her hockey bag. She yanked it up and then threw it down in front of the stall I’d first chosen. Toad devoured the burrito, a victorious grin. ‘Kisses!’ she called, mouth full.

  Pelly shoo
k her head, turned to me. ‘It’s always like this,’ she said, apologetic.

  Three stalls down, Hal pulled off her T-shirt and bent over her bag in a black lace bra, a ridge of muscle moving over the small etches of rib in her side. The intricate stitches and eyelets of the bra. With brisk, businesslike motions, she sat up, unhooked it and I looked away and knew they must be older, these players.

  Pelly went to the toilet stall and Toad shoved her a bit as she passed, Pelly squeaking protest. Toad had taken off the hat; her eyebrows surprised me. Thin, high arcs. They seemed to set the rest of her face off balance, working against the sweats, mocking them, and I wondered if she plucked the eyebrows to make them go like that, to go so high and ironic, or if they were some freak genetic occurrence she tried to hide with a baseball cap.

  I pulled off my shirt and jeans and got into my old under-equipment clothes – the lull that always comes at the beginning of the equipment dance, my limbs falling into the familiar rhythms, the pattern looped and repeated a million times. Shirt. Left leg of the tights. Right leg. Right shin pad: hold and tape. The creaking trumpet of tape as I yanked it off the roll, drawing quick circles around my calves.

  A cluster of voices echoed hollow down the hallway and then four more players burst in and greetings ricocheted rapidly around the room. Then two more and another and another in quick succession, like someone had rung a bell and they’d all come running, and the windowless room swelled suddenly with sound, their voices getting all tangled up in each other, a laugh track layered in. Angles of conversation grew more complex as the empty stalls filled, voices now in competition, cross-room shouts, players craning their necks to talk over neighbours’ heads. Someone turned on the CD player in the corner where I sat and the Tragically Hip screamed, pinning everyone’s voices back. But they just adjusted, cranked up their own volume, veins bulging in the side of Toad’s neck as she talked to Heezer, who sat in the Hasselhoff stall wearing a bowling jersey with ‘Juan’ stitched on the pocket. Heezer smiling and nodding, leaning forward to lip-read. Turning down the music wasn’t an option. They carried on around it, some mild affliction they just had to live with.

  Hockey pants, cinched in. Left skate, the lace burn on my summer-thin skin. Right skate.

  The stalls began to run out. A stack of orange plastic chairs that looked like imports from a Grade Six classroom scattered into available spaces around the room. I guessed at the other rookies – the ones who went straight to the plastic chairs, kept their heads down, weren’t pelted with insults or nicknames when they walked in. Darting quick glances at them, I tried to decide whether or not they looked like they’d be good. A broad-faced player ambled in then with a stubby but tall hockey bag bulging like an overstuffed cushion. Goalie. She let the bag drop in the entrance to the room and spread her arms wide.

  ‘What’s up, savages?’ she bellowed. Two players on the plastic chairs looked over with the eyes of startled horses and then I knew for a fact they were rookies and I felt comfort for a moment in their disoriented stare.

  Shoulder pads, left elbow pad, right elbow pad. I pulled my practice jersey over my head. I usually left my helmet off until I was walking out of the room, but I put it on now and leaned back into the shadowed nether regions of the stall, letting the little walls on either side close me in.

  Hal slipped on a pair of hockey gloves, scuffed, with beaten-looking edges. I wondered how long she’d been playing. She dropped her chin to her chest and began to slowly hit the gloves together; the sound was like a thick book being slammed shut over and over again. She kept doing it and others joined in and the sound got into my chest and found the adrenalin that began its snake-charmed dance through my limbs, murmuring to my legs, my hands, my heart. Humming them awake.

  Sig ashed a cigarette out the open window, smoke and leaf-bloated air layering September into the cab of the sagging grey pick-up. The ashtray overflowed with mottled butts, Styrofoam cups from the Laketime coffee shop and Coke cans littering the passenger side floor. She flicked a butt out the window. Iz always got after her for doing that – the reason behind the ashtray affront. She’d spot Sig winding up with a butt and say, ‘Sig.’ That’s all she’d say, just her name, and Sig would wink and stuff the butt into the ashtray.

  She’d left Iz standing in her miniature room in the residence. The room held a cot the university supplied, Iz’s childhood dresser, a couple of old suitcases bursting with winter clothes, and her hockey equipment, the black bag pocked with dust from its trip on the truck bed. She’d have to lug the equipment across campus to the arena later that afternoon by herself. Sig wanted to stay and help her unpack, find her a good meal, drive her and the hockey bag over to the arena later. But a quiet insistence in Iz’s posture, the way she stood in the centre of the small room, told Sig that if this move was going to work at all, it would have to start right then, right there. No use dragging it out.

  She closed the door against the tears threatening to spill from Iz’s eyes, the embarrassed tilt of her head. Her steps down the worn hallway carpet, her opening of the door, her turning of the key in the truck’s ignition, each felt like a failing.

  Stacy Moon, the Winnipeg University Head Coach, had found Sig in the stands at the Rec Centre during one of Iz’s games last year – Iz still playing in the Midget boys’ league, although she was older than most of them by then, her old teammates all moved on to the Junior league, if they were good, or the Friday-night beer league. Sig saw the Scarlet Hockey crest on the woman’s jacket, and then Moon explained how they’d come to see Iz and how excited they were with what they’d seen so far. She said this with the necessary confidence of a small woman wearing big shoes, cut with a strangely girlish enthusiasm. Sig had heard about this already – 1997 and they’d finally started a women’s hockey program in Canadian universities, the next logical step for the sport that seemed to be gathering force with a why-didn’t-we-think-of-this-before energy. The hockey parents had already begun to ask Sig about it, about getting Iz in there.

  Moon explained the team was still in the building phase and didn’t have a lot of money, but the program was growing, and then she lost Sig a bit in the spiel about costs and retroactive scholarships, and Sig looked out and found Iz on the ice, striding through centre, looking for a pass from the boards and getting it. The way Moon told this part of the story sounded more like they were getting off welfare to take a job at McDonald’s, but Sig didn’t care about this. Then they stood and watched the girl stick-handle around a cement-footed defenceman, big oafish boy, in for a shot. The puck left her stick and stopped the breath in the crowd’s throat, one huge gulp, and Sig saw science textbooks. She saw a bed-in-a-bag and bulk sweat socks and five-pack Jockey bikini briefs from Zellers. She saw the numbers in the bank account they’d opened for Kristjan’s university fund and that they’d continued for Iz instead. Kristjan – Iz’s father – gone two months before the girl was born, but some parts of him, like this, overlapped into her. The density of the fund’s sediment and the way it bloomed thick stalks of intention. She saw notebooks and ballpoint pens and highlighters. She saw a woman, an older woman with Iz’s face, wearing a white coat, a child’s knee in her hands, bending and straightening the leg like a wing. A physiotherapist, Iz had said once, shyly. What she wanted to be. This woman holding the leg made sense to Sig and she’d often gone there in her mind, placed her own aching joints in those hands, let them bend her back into health. The goalie covered the puck. Breath out with the whistle and Sig knew she’d pass Iz to Moon. To those faceless girls. As though the whistle sliced open the inevitability.

  ‘We’ll see,’ she’d said to Moon.

  Truth be told, she’d waited after dropping Iz off at the residence. She’d sat out the afternoon in the parking lot of Sam Hall Arena, the truck hidden among the students’ shit-heaps, the accidents-waiting-to-happen all decked out in skateboarding stickers and rust. The players began to arrive, small in the distance with the growth-like bump of hockey bag across their bac
ks, and Sig squinted until she had a headache, watching the gaggles of girls disappear into the blank face of Sam Hall.

  She held her breath as she watched Iz walk slowly up the arena sidewalk, leaning slightly against the weight of her shouldered hockey bag. She’d changed into a different pair of jeans, different T-shirt. ‘What’re you going to wear?’ Sig had asked her on the way out. ‘Dunno,’ Iz grunted as though she didn’t care.

  Chin up, Sig thought angrily as she squinted at Iz’s hunched back. Get your goddamn head up. She couldn’t walk into a murder of girls with her eyes glued to the bloody floor. She’d be eaten alive.

  Her ponytail was crooked.

  She walked through the door.

  We fell into a swarm around the gate to the ice, watching the Zamboni amble a lazy line down the far boards, erasing the remains of the practice before ours.

  The players’ chatter sawed through the Zamboni’s stretched movements. I stood in their middle and felt the waiting in my legs. The transformation always begins here, in the drum roll off the ice, waiting for a Zamboni, or for the rest of the team or the coaches, summer leaking from your body, muscles rearranging themselves under the weight of equipment into memories of this theatre of winter contained by the boards. How to act.

  After the final lick of the Zamboni’s slow tongue, its last lazy circle, the ice lay smooth, a thin-skinned sheen. Dizzying mirror. The Zamboni inched toward its door and our swarm shifted, tightened, everyone moving toward the gate, lifting their sticks off the floor. Muscles flooding with memory.

  Tykes league – me and all the boys. Chad Trenholm, a notorious parent-clinger, crying his eyes out beside the other team’s net, stick on the ice, wailing, ‘I want my mommy.’ Even the motherless among us could feel his loss there on the ice, small but urgent. It spread among us, contagious as head lice.

  Our coach, Uncle Larry as we all called him, stood on the bench behind us, unmoved, the sloppy game going on around Chad’s inert body.