The fellows never let an ankle bender like me play forward. Even if it’s pickup hockey out on the school lake, they consider me a role-player, not a scorer. Well, tonight I’m steering The Rust Bucket down the wet lines of the state route and it feels like a breakaway play like I’ve got the puck and an open lane with no defenders. I stickhandle the steering wheel with one hand while groping under the driver seat for the Kaopectate bottle. I’ve got The Rust Bucket’s porthole rolled down and the wind in my wet hair feels good. I don’t care I’ll never be famous at hockey. I slurp off the bottle and think if I was someone who wanted to be famous at stories I’d scribble down: From his rain-soaked red bangs, Lucas Zablocki pushes the rainwater slopping up his vision of slippery Maine State Route 2. If he loses control, surely the waves will cause his father’s old cigarette boat to flip into a flying explosion. But the closer The Rust Bucket gets to Middleburg, the tougher the sulfur stink from the papermill down there, and I know I’d be a flop at stories too. I wonder if I’m going to explode tonight, or if it’s all going to be just more applesauce.

Kaopectate is a new scam, my friend Taft’s idea to rinse out a bottle and refill it with good junk. Earlier tonight I klepted hard stuff into my bottle from The Dean’s pantry. “The Dean” is the nickname of my father, who doesn’t partake, who’s also a bigwig at our private school, and who has to host alumni celebrations all the time, even though he hates the junk, and he’d rather be in his den making his flipping model ships. Anyway, stomach junk’s a swell deke for what’s really in the bottle, especially when, like Taft says, you’re questioned by a teacher and you’ve got a puny gas bomb already packed to detonate.

Tonight it doesn’t bug me driving with The Rust Bucket’s speedometer limper than the speed limit just like any dopey citizen on the half-hour trip from the school to Middleburg. My mother can’t holler at me for being a jerk for law and order on a flooded flipping road. I have another smoke, but keep the porthole open even if the death stink of the papermill creeps in. If the smoke smell doesn’t circulate out of the car, my mother will sniff out another reason to elbow me. My stepfather will smell another opportunity for a long story and crummy advice. He and my mother were jazzed to jet up here from D.C. for Harding Academy graduation. I could give a flip.

Everyone’s jazzed but me. Last night the hockey gang was celebrating up on the roof deck of the Zamboni garage. I got goofed up on beer and rode the pine bench, just watching kids make dopes of themselves. My girlfriend Smithe and the other puck bunnies have been saps these last weeks. Smithe is a beauty, but I thought she looked like a jerk stumbling around the deck wearing two fellow’s letter jackets and an H logo hockey helmet. Her hands were moving a jillion miles an hour while she blabbed and tried to go wise about the end of everything. I’m still sort of stuck on Smithe, even if she says we’re supposed to be taking a breath, even if we’ve been more like party dates than a pair. She’s a smart sort of trophy for a grub below-average hockey goon like me.

Taft was making a giant sloppy creep of himself up there, too. He’s already a big ape, but last night he smashed a bottleneck on the deck railing and poured champagne over his balding bean. He hollered, “Ladies and gentle-marigolds! Here’s to corny old Harding, and to me for busting the league’s goals-scored record!” He started singing, “Boola! Boola! We like Yale!”

Then there was The Beautician. Near the railing, with his loud admiring puck bunnies pretending to learn the Yale song, Hill stood silent and crunched under his Red Sox cap. Chip Hill may be the shortest guy on Harding’s team but he has it all. He’s nicknamed The Beautician because he plays center ice so beautiful. Hill’s every fellow’s idol and every puck bunny’s crush. Both he and Taft got recruited to play hockey at Yale. Personally, I think what’s spiff about Hill is he always looks like he doesn’t give a flip about any of that. He’s not typical Harding swank. He drinks hard stuff and smokes apple-leaf, but never acts goofy like us other slobs. Another thing I love about Hill is how he holds his smoke like a teacup­–thumb under and all four fingers on top–as he inhales between his beautiful fat lips.

I never told anyone freshman year that Hill was the reason I quit the boys’ fancy diving team and started skating hockey. All I cared about then was making hockey so I could loiter around Hill. I was sort of late for learning the game, and I still scrape up a lot of ice. Crummy ankle-bent skating is where Taft got his nickname for me. My name’s Zablocki, the fellows on the team call me The Zamboni, as in the clumsy jalopy that slows everything down to wash the rink ice. The name sort of hurts but it’s a way of being with the team and the bunnies. I’m the only one of the gang who lives at home with my father and I attend Harding on faculty-kid welfare. Taft, Hill, Smithe and the rest of them all have game plans: graduation plans, summer plans, college plans, career plans. I don’t get jazzed about planning. I could give a flip whether I leave Maine. Maybe I’ll die working down at the smelly paper mill. The only thing I give a flip about right now is remembering to hold my smoke like a teacup, like Hill, who doesn’t even think about holding his smoke in that swell way. That, and I feel like another slug of Kaopectate.

 

In Middleburg, I honk the horn like a loon instead of getting out of The Rust Bucket in the rain. My headlights bomb the Motor Inn window and a white cowboy hat comes to the door. It’s my stepfather, Ken, and he’s waving like a dope for me to Come on in! I inhale Bianca to cover the stink of smokes on my gross breath and cut the engines. Tall and dressed in a white-striped suit, Congressman Ken King holds the door open with one hand while stretching out the other to grab me. “Put’er there, Graduate!” Ken says like a sap. As I loiter into the motel room Ken whistles the tune Pomp and Circumstance and pretends to be marching in a fake parade. “Our gal is still putting on her face, and I’m hoping it’s her pretty one.”

My mother hollers from the bedroom, “Congressman, is there a guest?”

“Yes, Rebecca. It’s the Avon lady!” Ken winks at me.

“Well, I hope she came to sell me an eyebrow plucker because I look like one of those public television puppets.” My mother’s not really a fatso, but when she enters a room her whole self takes up a lot of space. She looks too swank in her pink gown and diamond earrings. “There’s my Raspberry. Who’s getting too tall? Hug Mommy.” My mother’s hands are splayed like knives to dry off her wet fingernail junk and hugging her is like getting mushy with a wooden piling up at the lake. “Your sport jacket’s wet.” She pushes up my rain-soaked red bangs. “And it smells worse than this papermill town! You told me you weren’t making a habit of cigarettes. What do your athlete friends say?”

Ken hears an opening for a speech. “Lucas, I ought to tell you about a young man in Texas who had the world at his beck and call. This youngster thought ladies would think he was a stallion with his vices of nicotine addiction and whiskey drinking. Them young ladies came and went, and the man only ever married his nasty habits. Well, on his fortieth birthday the old ranch hand got a heart attack. After that, he made a commitment to living right and finding a woman who got a kick out of pink lungs. That man went on to become rich, get elected to the House of Representatives, and he got to marry your mama. What I’m saying is, great men don’t cough through their victory speech.”

“Grad Dinner’s only semi-formal,” I say to my mother. I beg her, “Can’t you slob it up a little?”

She brings her hand to her chest and rises on her feet for her own speech. “I attended Harding events for years as a faculty wife.” She inspects her nail polish. “I know the school, the women, how they dress, and I know what they’re going to be saying about me. Now, it’s raining tonight. Some gentleman fetch my cape!”

 

Rebecca is leaning forward from the rear seat of The Rust Bucket to fix her hair in the dashboard light and her enormous bean is blocking my rearview mirror. “Do you want the dome light turned on?” I kindly offer, “You’re driving me loony!”

“And you’re driving too fast in a flood, Raspberry!” She sits back and fidgets in her handbag. “My hair needs time to set. Besides, you should never drive with the dome light on. They can give you a ticket. Tell him I’m right Ken.”

Ken turns to me from the passenger seat side. “Lucas, I haven’t been briefed on Maine highway ordinances and whether or not drivers can be cited for operating a vehicle with the dome light on at night. But in any state, driving with the dome light is dangerous to you and to your fellow pilots. What I’m saying is, it’s a bad idea.”

“Did the father finally buy a new car and give you this old arc?”

I hate my mother’s phrasing of things, like how she sarcastically says give. “Why do you make father sound like the cheapo? You’re the one I have to chauffeur.”

“Congressman King’s staff arranged our seats on a military transport to the Middleburg base and car service only to the motel, saving taxpayers lots of money. I’m sure if there’s some question of propriety your father can be reimbursed for mileage tonight at the dinner.”

“Father’s not going to the dang dinner! When you told me you were coming I asked him what to do.”

“What was his answer?”

“He said I should do whatever I want.”

“That’s typical. He probably didn’t want to take a night off from those tacky ship models to try reconciling differences.”

“I haven’t reconciled my differences with any of you loons.”

“You could resolve to be more respectful to mommy when she comes all the way from Washington on your account. Ken?”

Ken inhales deep. “Lucas, I believe every man gets to a point in life when he realizes no matter how much his mama seemed too practical, everything she ever said turned out to be right.”

“That’s right, Raspberry. Start listening to mommy by quitting those cigarettes. This car smells like a snooker hall.”

Ken lets out creepy laugh. “Snook-her? That’s just what I’d bet our Lucas does in the back seat of this car with that pretty girl, Smithe!” Ken slaps his ape hand down on my knee as if to pass on his terrible sense of humour through electricity. I wish he’d push down real hard on my accelerator knee until the car flies right off a cliff.

I could give a flip what Ken thinks, but Smithe and I have never done monkey business in The Rust Bucket. We’ve never done it anyplace even though we’ve been steady two school years. Not to say she hasn’t done it with other fellows.

Last summer Smithe went to ballet school at Julliard. That’s where she met this African ballet crumb who called himself the Prince of Mauritius. I asked Smithe that time I phoned her up in New York City, “Some dancing marigold?”

“Lucas, you’re not good at the role of a jerk.”

“You’re telling me over the telephone you’re dumping me for this creep because he’s more mature and has direction in life. I’d like to phone him up and ask for directions.”

“It’s not dumping, it’s taking a breath.” I pictured her naked under this beautiful prince from some beautiful island of the world while she talked to me on the phone and her free hand pivoted in the air. “And no, Lucas, he and I aren’t doing monkey business. The Prince is a strict Catholic. He cares about my dancing and what I’m like on the inside.”

A few weeks after the telephone dumping, Smithe’s no messing around affair with The Prince of Mauritius ended anyway. One of the puck bunnies, who claimed to be Smithe’s best friend, told me that the prince was recalled to Mauritius. Smithe returned to Harding fall semester and wanted to return to being steady with me on account of needing a hockey player date to go places with the hockey gang.

As to our monkey business, attempts have all been a flop. Like I said, I’m sort of still on my first time and Smithe isn’t. She told me she’d consider messing around again with the right fellow. Part of the year, I was suspended from the team for bringing in a D average. Hill and Taft were away at a hockey tournament in Boston. So, I took a timeout in their grub dorm room that weekend instead of staying home. I kept a bottle of wine from The Dean’s pantry and smuggled it and Smithe past the housemaster. The plan was I would spear her that night, but wine only turned-on her desire to yap about how bad her first time went. And she blabbed that the crumb who speared her first was none other than the prince of jerks, DeWitt Taft. She told me when they had monkey business she started bleeding and he flipped. After that, typically creepy Taft started giving her the brush off. As she and I sat goofed up and fully clothed on the edge of Hill’s dorm bed, she held my hands and went sap. “I thought I was over it, Lucas, but it feels creepy here in Taft’s room.”

“You just told me you did this with him at that celebration at the Taft’s summer house on Nantucket.”

“Yes, but Taft is surrounding us now. Taft’s hockey sticks. Taft’s giant underpants. These gross posters with half-naked chippies selling beer. I can even smell Taft.”

“That’s just the death stink from the paper mill.”

“I’ve decided against monkey business tonight, Lucas.”

The next porthole of opportunity was winter break celebration at the Hill’s ski lodge in Vermont. Smithe and her hands yapped about planning our first time so far in advance that when the trip came around I had to smoke apple-leaf to relax. Whatever Taft gave me got me so goofed up I fainted in the sauna fully clothed. I woke up alone, face down in my own upchuck, and still a virgin. I barely remember, but Smithe said I’d lost my masculine appeal early in the evening.

Next, we’re about to get killed in The Rust Bucket. Rebecca’s trying to study her fingernails in the passing street lamps instead of the car dome light, to prove a nutty point, when, from nowhere, a red Land Cruiser is steaming headfirst at us. I have to steer onto the shoulder, and the Land Cruiser adjusts its course in time before speeding away. Rebecca hollers, “I see those doggone millers haven’t changed!” I don’t tell her I know it’s not millers. I recognize the red blur of The Cruiser.

When we do get back up to the Harding campus in one piece, and I moor The Rust Bucket outside the banquet hall, Rebecca wants us all to delay in the car to watch poor dopes running through the rain. “Is that the Headmaster’s wife?” she asks. “She was always a nasty gossip. Is she wearing a doggone pantsuit? And there’s professor-what’s-her-name, dressed like she came from a day of horse riding!”

I grip the steering wheel like it will save me from going loony. “I tried to tell you the Grad Dinner isn’t swank.”

“Mommy has to go back to Middleburg and change.”

“Applesauce! It’s raining like it’s the end of the world and it’s a dang half hour each way!”

My hero Ken jumps to save the day. “Don’t worry. I’ll wait inside and make sure they don’t auction off your pudding.” He pops his cowboy hat on, springs out of The Rust Bucket, and gallops through the rain into the banquet hall. Rebecca never demotes herself up to the front seat for the tour’s return to Middleburg.

 

The Rust Bucket has docked outside Motor Inn again. While Rebecca’s inside changing into something less beautiful, I suck out the last drops from the Kaopectate bottle. I imagine the scene in the back of The Cruiser like I’m re-watching a movie the jillionth time. Taft is definitely goofed up on apple-leaf he brings back from New York. I picture I’m some ride-grabber from the dorms who didn’t want to walk to Grad Dinner in the rain, some virgin to Taft’s journey of terrors down Maine SR-2, a dope who hadn’t heard about Taft’s history of driving penalties, and I imagine I’m probably right now getting ready to upchuck in the back seat. The person is also looking at the back of Hill’s bean with that famous black hair flowing out the edge of his Red Sox cap. His’s fat lips stick out and his cheeks have that red flush. He’s maybe changing the radio and holding a smoke in his way, steady on the ice, paying zilch attention to Taft’s drunken creeper. Taft carries a hockey stick under the front seat, a weapon he can take out if they have to dance with millers from Middleburg Public High. People think Taft’s fearless. I think he’s full of applesauce. Hill’s the one who’s fearless. Hill doesn’t get turtle-eared around those hose-rink hockey goons and, unlike everyone else, Hill has no fear of Taft.

I talk about Hill a lot. I think about him a lot too. I even started imagining stories about him when I jazz myself. At first, I felt like a secret creep and tried to force thinking about Smithe or other puck bunnies. But after every practice, I stand next to Hill in the showers. He’s short but he’s shaped like a statue or something classical. I think about the water rolling off his naked shoulders, and I can’t force my thoughts away anymore. I don’t want to.

I have this once upon a time story in my head where me and Hill are both on the Olympic hockey team: Team USA travels to Africa to play against the national hockey team of Mauritius. Of course, USA clobbers Mauritius on the ice. Then The Prince of Mauritius orders me and Hill to start playing for Mauritius. Being real Americans, we tell him to flip off. The Mauritite police show up to arrest us in the middle of a practice, but we’re all guys in matching red uniforms and they don’t know which is who. They’re about to arrest everyone when Taft rats us out to save himself. So, me and Hill get locked up all night in a damp smelly visitor’s locker room. By morning we must decide–play for their hockey team or be executed. Hill gets cold in the locker room and claims it’s okay for teammates to keep each other warm. We lie all night next to each other on a bench, like real chums. Then Hill tells me it’s also okay for two fellows to mess around if they know it’s the last night of their lives. All of a sudden he’s planting one on my puss with his fat lips, and we have monkey business in the locker room. That’s how I save him from freezing to death. Some of the story parts are clumsy. Like how did I get good enough to make the Olympic hockey team? Why would Mauritius want me so bad to play for them? There’s a lot of fellows better. Also, Hill would never act mushy that way.

 

When Rebecca and I finally arrive in the banquet hall everyone else is on dessert. Empty plates are waiting for us at a round dining table with Taft’s father from New York City and Hill’s parents from Wellesley. Taft and Mr. Taft are guzzling down wine carafes and making drunken slobs of themselves. They’re both giants with matching bald hairlines and the same cruddy sense of humour. The only thing splitting them up is their nicknames The Big Taft and The Little Taft, which is dumb because in real life The Little Taft is the bigger of the two.

Rebecca re-arrived wearing pants and something she calls a “smart blazer.” With all her makeup she looks like a ventriloquist dummy. She talks like a dummy too, always filling every puny pause in the conversation. “Congressman King and I missed the hockey championships because we were in Prague. I’d love to be sipping a goblet of Becherovka now. I told our Raspberry him not being allowed to play hockey while he caught up in academics was better.” Mister and missus Hill are paying polite attention to my mother’s endless yapping and using food chewing to not get dragged into the puny talk.

I’m watching Hill. He’s the only one at the table watching the stage where the horrible Harding Dixieland Ensemble is performing. He has one leg up on a chair and an already loose necktie. Without his Red Sox cap, he looks sort of like a grub little boy. His hair needs a comb, his red round ears are sticking out, and his fat lips look like flower petals. I start to wonder what I’ve been secretly slobbering about. He’s not so mysterious and he’s got an ugly, fatso face.

Meantime my dummy’s still yapping. “Where bound are the graduates at this table?” Rebecca knows I didn’t get into a college. I didn’t apply to colleges. She wants to deny I’m a miller to the bone.

Hill, of all people, saves me. “Actually, The Zamboni and I plan to skip college and become beauticians.” The Big and Little Tafts almost crack their laughing skulls together.

Rebecca, not sure if Hill’s giving her jazz, just fills in her blank with more talking. “Lucas has decided to take a year for self-examination before college.” The two Taft’s are about to die from laughter again. Maybe “self-examination” is funny.

The room cuts engines when the key blabbermouth is introduced to the stage. Congressman Ken King, still in that corny cowboy hat, takes the microphone in his hand and steps around the podium to go wise with the audience. “Folks, I didn’t attend a famous preparatory school. But I wonder if the values they teach up here don’t look a lot like ones I learned at the little red schoolhouse and growing up on my Grandmom’s farm down in Waxahachie, Texas. I remember in my Grandmom’s house we had this old granddad clock with a big pendulum. When the clock chimed it was louder than heck, and as a tyke, I’d cover my ears for the last minute of every hour. I used to stare at that clock and imagine inside was a whole world of tiny little people whose job it was to make sure the clock hands kept turning, to keep the pendulum swinging, and seeing to it that them noisy chimes rang out on the hour. Today I think the real world’s a lot like Grandmom’s clock. All us tiny people have a job to do, keeping the springs and weights and gears moving. We all have a responsibility to do our little job to keep the big machine working. You, graduates, have earned your station to join the many who keep the chimes ringing. Whether Grandmom’s chimes call you to Washington, or Wall Street, or just to set your days like an old ranch hand in Waxahachie, you have a great advantage. What I’m saying is, at Harding you’ve been taught what kids used to learn in every school, the rules of the game, what washes, and what role to play.”

I’m about to kneel over from this dopey speech when I see Smithe standing in the corridor. I run over there. “Smithe, come sit down at my table. I want my mother to see we’re swell.”

Smithe makes a big motion of brushing wet hair from her face. “I’m going to sit with the bunnies. I don’t want your mother thinking you and I are steady any longer.”

“So, it’s official we’re not?” I pull Smithe by the hand back toward the doorway. “I thought you said we were breathing?”

“Maybe my words were too careful. I meant to say that we’re breaking.”

“But we’re still chums?”

Smithe throws her famous hands up. “Yes, Lucas, but graduation’s a time for a change. Besides, I might want to see somebody else.”

She wants to give me the brush off and I want to do the same to Ken’s speech. I’m in deeper than my head with Rebecca’s denials and Smithe’s applesauce and Congressmen Ken King’s…well, him. I escape through the kitchen, klepting one of those wine carafes. Outside the rain feels slower, so I leave the keys to The Rust Bucket on the front seat and scud out of the dock in the two muddy boats of my shoes.

 

The dark old buildings of Harding, built up and down the side of a hill, are sharp and creepy like giant tombstones. I’ve lived here my whole life but loitering around campus roads in the dark and drizzle, even I get sort of lost. I stumble by the domed hockey rink they’re building at the top of the slope. It’s Harding’s only new thing in a jillion years. Everyone says it’s going to be a beauty next season. It looks to me like a giant tuna fish can being swallowed by a giant clam. Where’s a pen when I think up something swell like that?

I don’t feel like going home to The Dean’s. Maybe my real beef tonight’s with him. Getting sore with my father’s like hollering about an icing penalty in hockey­­, the puck makes it down-ice before you do and there’s nobody around to blame. I picture him sitting at home, hovering over some dang model ship and all its puny parts and it gets me sort of steamed.

I imagine a story where I come in the house, follow the smell of model glue to his den, and push through the den door. Around the room’s a sea of glass shelves and a thousand years of ships­–The Flying Cloud, The Victory, The Dreadnought. In the middle of it, wrestling with some nylon rigging is the man in his robe and slippers. I stand silent a while waiting for The Dean to notice I’m there, then I jump across the den and grab the model he’s working hard on. I heave the dang thing into one of the glass shelves and it all shatters into a jillion broken pieces. I skate around the room grabbing all the models off the shelves and smashing them on the floor into a big cemetery of wood scraps and wires. When I’m done, he puts down his calipers and starts picking the wrecked ships from the pile. Then he probably says, “I guess hockey hasn’t taught you anything about sportsmanship.” He’d say, businesslike as ever, “I’ve seen all of you I care to tonight, Lucas.”

I finish off the wine carafe, throw the glass into the tin wall of the tuna can, and start walking toward home. I know tonight I’ll probably just creep into my bedroom and float off into some once upon a time about Hill and I having monkey business. The story will have more junk in it I know will never come true but, for a timeout, it’ll make me feel invincible.

Walking on Maine SR-2 I pull my sport jacket over my head to get a smoke lit in the rain. The wet wool feels heavy as an anchor on my back. Headlights are behind me. There’s a truck coming down the route like a destroyer. It crosses lanes, heading for me. I run up into the shrubs to avoid getting clobbered and a flash of red sweeps past me before it cuts engines. The driver door opens and a huge balding kid is standing in the rain, hollering at me from a fountain of tobacco juice. “Zamboni! You crummy excuse for a defenseman! Get your red-headed free tuition junk on board!”

I’m in the back seat of The Cruiser. I see over Taft’s shoulder he’s tacking about 85 on the state route. Hill’s in the front passenger seat, back under his Red Sox cap, holding his smoke like a teacup in his right hand and searching the radio dial with his left. I notice both fellows have loose neckties, so I copy them.

Hill mutters, “You look like you’re about to flip, Zamboni.” He reaches into the glove box and pulls out a rolled apple-leaf. He lights the end and hands it over the seat to me.

“Yeah, Zamboni. I thought you had The Rust Bucket tonight.” Taft says.

“I left it with my mother to go jujutsu my father, but I was too goofed up to find my way home.”

Taft wonders out loud, “Can they expel you for clobbering a teacher if he’s your dad?” There’s a six-pack of beer cans on the deck of The Cruiser and I grab one. “So far tonight we’ve all kept our front teeth. Listen to this applesauce, Zamboni.” Taft spits tobacco juice out The Cruiser’s porthole. “We ran into millers from the Middleburg Public team at Oasis-24. Hill was in the store trying to klept a six in his sport jacket while I was sitting in the parking lot partaking some apple-leaf. From nowhere came Kronwal and three or four others from that hose-rick goon squad. They were trying to pretend friendly, and jazz me with congratulations on getting Harding to championships. So, I say, ‘Whoopee! Means a lot coming from a bunch of field-hockey marigolds we mugged at regionals.’ And that louse Kronwall whipped out a dang switchblade on me. Then, while I was surrounded by five of them pub school ice thugs, The Beautician here crept out of Oasis-24 and snuck up behind that dumb miller with the old lumber.” Taft picks up the hockey stick next to him on the seat and bangs it on The Cruiser’s dashboard like a loony. “Hill clobbered Kronwall across the back of his bean and Kronwall slipped straight down on the wet pavement. Then Hill picked up the knife and held it at Kronwall’s throat to scare back the other millers. They’re a whole squad of turtles if you ask me. Every one of those hose-rink slobs ran home to their ugly mother. They’d never stand by their chum like The Beautician, you know what I mean Zamboni? So, Kronwall was lying there and Hill stepped off to let him go. Like Hill would ever be crumb enough cut a fellow’s throat, right? Just as Kronwall stood up, Hill slashed the goon’s face with the blade of the hockey paddle. While that pilon was rolling on the ground and bawling and holding his bleeding grub face we scrammed the double hockey stick out of there. Now, look what we almost collided with, The Zamboni!”

“Where are we going?” I close my eyes and guzzle the beer.

“Rink garage,” Hill says.

The Cruiser chops as Taft avoids a mailbox while opening another beer can. “The puck bunnies are going up on the garage and they should be pretty goofed up by now. I guess you and me are both playing rover position tonight, Zamboni.”

I swallow another hunk of beer. “Aren’t we all playing rover? Why isn’t Hill a rover?”

“This beauty up here hasn’t told you yet? I guess he’s still thinking up a corny pantomime to break it to you that he’s spearing Smithe now.”

“Is that true, Hill?”

“It’s not like that, Zamboni,” Hill says.  “She and I aren’t steady or any of that jazz.”

My stomach feels gross. I wish I had a bottle of Kaopectate full of the real junk. I upchuck out the porthole of The Cruiser and then faint or something in the back seat.

The next thing I know I’m being suffocated to death with an athletic cup that stinks worse than Middleburg times a jillion. I push away the hand that’s pushing the business into my face. “Like the stink of my junk-can, Zamboni? Shake it off you red-topped marigold!” Taft jumps out of The Cruiser and leaves the door open for me to follow him. When I climb out I see Hill leaning on the truck and getting a smoke. The three of us hike the trail around the thawing school lake. I feel pretty goofed up and I slip a jillion times in the mud coming down the incline to the Zamboni garage.

Taft jumps first up the ladder to the roof deck. There’s supposed to be a celebration up there but it’s just Smithe and a couple of the other bunnies under umbrellas. “Where in double hockey stick is the gang?” Taft wants to know.

Smithe and her fluttering hands fill us in. “They all flipping left.” She looks goofed up again. “Some millers came around looking for you fellows and started pushing people, demanding to know where you were. They stole all the beer. One boy had blood all over his face. Everybody was afraid of them, so we left. Then we hid until we saw them drive off. We came back up here waiting to warn you. Now we’re going back to the dorms too. The smell of that papermill is over-gross tonight!”

“God dang, Kronwall!” Taft swears. “I can’t believe those millers are coming back for more of my jujutsu. Come on Hill, let’s go get our hockey paddles!”

“You go, Taft. The Zamboni and I will guard center ice.” Taft jumps back down the ladder, followed by the bunnies. Smithe pauses at the top of the ladder and walks back over to me and Hill. Her hands aren’t flying this time, instead, she puts one on each of our forearms and suddenly goes wise. “You can’t stop other people from doing the wrong thing. But it’s worse when you don’t do anything to stop yourself.” She starts to bawl and then climbs down the ladder.

My bean is spinning. I lie down on a bench and can feel the wetness of the wood through my sport jacket. Hill’s standing across from me, leaning against the railing. He lights another smoke and holds it like a teacup. I want to say something, but I close my eyes so I don’t have to look at him. “When was I supposed to find out about you and Smithe?”

“What you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you,” Hill says. “Graduation is tomorrow. When will I see her again? She’s not going to get stuck on me and some monkey business in the last week of school.”

“Isn’t that the worst thing a fellow can do? I sort of look up to you, Hill.”

“You look in the wrong place, Zamboni. You’re a worse ankle bender in life than you are on the ice.”

“‘ Play the man.'” I recite.

“Right, play the man. My scam in taking a slow defenseman like you Zamboni is in my stickhandling. I dribble the puck on the end of my stick as I skate and it never rests against the blade. If it did, you could just hit my stick and make the puck sail away. I’ve got control of the puck the whole time even if I hardly ever touch it. I’ve got my lateral dribble, my forward-backward dribble, my quick-inside dribble. It’s so fast you don’t have any idea where I’m headed.” He leans toward me. “Now here’s your scam. You can beat me if you stop chasing after my puck. Watching my puck will always goof you up. Watch me, my body. Keep your eyes on my chest and you’ll see which way I’m going. Your job’s to move with the play. You don’t need to be a hero to be spiff. There’s a role for you on the ice Zamboni if you ever learn how to play it.”

This speech is the most words in a row I ever heard from Hill. “Sounds like applesauce,” I say. “My job’s to watch you dribble Smithe like a hockey puck? I wish I could explain how you make me feel. What I mean is…” I pause because I’m turtle-eared over the words. “It’s not just about Smithe. It’s you.”

Hill flicks his smoke butt over the railing. “People always jazz me because I don’t say zilch. The way I figure it, a lot of junk’s better left unsaid. Sometimes saying the thing is worse than not saying. I know what you have to say to me, Zamboni, save yourself from having to.”

“You’re the only one I believe in.”

“Applesauce. I’m not the spiff you think I am. I’m the creep who ran across Oasis-24 parking lot with a stick and danced with that pub school goon for no reason. Taft was trying to scam those millers.”

“Scam?”

“Taft sold them some New York apple-leaf but it was actually a deke. Now they’re coming after us for their dough. Playing third-line defence might not seem swank to you Zamboni, but you were part of a team; you did what was expected. Play the man Zamboni. Whether or not I score is my problem. You can’t save me. If I fall and you try to catch me, I’ll just melt like ice in your hands.” Now that sounds famous! Hill climbs down the ladder to go find Taft and the hockey sticks. I start to bawl.

The night sky has finally cleared of clouds and a breeze rolls an empty beer can across the roof deck. There’s another once upon a time in my head where me and Hill are in a race on skates across the frozen St. Croix River. We’re not worried about the future or even what we’ll do when we get to Canada. In this story, I happen to have in my sweatshirt a tube of model glue that I’ve klepted. Occasionally we take a timeout in the race to pass and sniff on the tube, just getting goofed up and laughing. The story makes me feel happy and I float away.

Something loud startles me. I sit up from the bench and stumble toward hollering. Over the rail, I see Hill below me against the Zamboni garage wall. He’s surrounded by a squad of longhaired millers. One kid, with dried blood all over his face, is pointing a handgun at Hill.

“Like this puck drop, prep?”

“You’re hose-rink, Kronwall,” Hill says businesslike. “Too turtle-eared to dance without a gun.”

Kronwall hollers, “We want our damn money!”

It’s like they’re putting this corny story on just for my sake.

At first, I lean over the railing trying to grab the gun, but the deck’s about the same height as a diving platform and my arms are nine meters short. Once upon a time, before hockey, there was something else I could’ve got famous for­–the fancy high diving team!

The dive must be properly executed. I pull off my muddy sport coat, climb up on the railing, balance myself into the standard position, and zero on the gun below as my entry point. I spring from the railing. My head is level. I focus on my legs as I form an open pike. I don’t plan anything ritzy, just a basic forward.

Then, like the end of a fuse, my head ignites my not quite famous 5134D dive, a forward with one-and-and-half flips and two twists. As I roll the first flip and turn into a twist, it feels like time takes a timeout. I tuck my body in, then start it again. I’m flying through the dark and the death stink and the hollering, and my fancy diving technique is beautiful. That should be my nickname –The Beautiful Flying Zamboni. Hill’s going to be jazzed for once over some athletic thing I do. At the bottom I unwind and square out my arms, my head aimed first at Kronwall, my hands with palms open and thumbs locked together stretching for the gun. As I push my palm into the gun and I topple down onto Kronwall, I hear bones crack and the boom, and I smell the sour gunpowder. When the sharp bullet rips through my hull, I feel like I’m being torn in half, or like a bomb has exploded inside me.

I could never think up a famous story like: Once upon a time a bullet went through the middle of one fellow then just kept going and killed another. They say I’m a hero trying to save Hill, even though I flop at it.