1
John Blakely tied his skates together by the brown (blood) stained and frayed laces, slung them over his shoulder, and bicycled to the bottom of Hill Street, past the train depot, and downtown to Olympia Arena. He concealed his bicycle in the scrubby hemlocks by the emergency exit on the side, and hustled up the concrete steps into the refrigerated building, holding the right skate to his chest, left skate bouncing against his back. He was dressed like a boxer doing roadwork and wore his Bruins cap backwards, milky gray sweatstains in the sunbleached black cloth. He paid the man in the skate shop and walked down the hall to the rink reserved for public skating, pausing at the swinging double doors to peer through submarine windows at the high school girls in white skates with toe picks, performing spins and jumps. The girls wore colorful short, pleated skirts and leggings, hair tied back in pony tails—young tsarinas of polar realms, elegant carnival clowns, cold whirling rainbows. A girl looked back through the glass: glacial eyes unblinking in a blank face.
At the wooden bench behind the penalty box, he sat and took off his sneakers, stuck his feet into the skates, banged his heels against the bench and pulled the laces tight into big loops. Standing, he stalked across the rubber floor to the threshold as if wearing stilts, and pushed off onto the ice.
There was a spindly woman with silver hair and earmuffs, practicing graceful, decelerated figures, and a high school couple on a date, tripping along close to the boards, arms stuck out for balance. John skated his laps furiously, cutting in and out, switching backwards, stopping on a dime, reversing. The others were invisible to him. The yellow rectangle of sun from the plate-glass window progressed across the ice. Now John skated alone. The man who drove the ice-resurfacer came out—mean face, bald, greaseshiny head on scruffy, puffed-out neck—and yelled, “Scram kid, it’s noon! Come on, move it!” John skated to the threshold and stalked back to the wooden bench, the ice-man staring, eyes like dead fish bloating in skinny red squiggle nets.
John watched the ice-man drive in a tightening gyre, erasing all the grooves and gouges, while he changed into his sneakers and tied the skates back together. The ice-man finished and drove off.
Through the window John could see the parking lot—buckled asphalt, weeds bursting through the cracks, two green dumpsters, rusty chain-link fence, telephone poles and the redbrick towers of silent mills. A young man in shorts and a dirty t-shirt wandered through the parking lot, drinking from a green bottle. His boots were untied and flapped as he walked. He hopped the fence. On the other side, he finished the drink and threw the bottle into the air. It shattered in the street and the young man clomped on.
A school bus pulled in and parked. The door opened and teenage boys clambered out, shouldering huge duffel bags, carrying hockey sticks. They were boys who played in the summer league. Soon they burst onto the ice in red and white practice jerseys, shiny red helmets with black cages, soaring like birds, chasing each other backwards and forwards. Two boys pushed the nets into place. The coach, who had a whistle around his neck and a black baseball cap low over narrowed eyes—his bottom lip bulging with tobacco, spitting muddy juice into a water bottle—Cohanet Sachems in red cursive across the crown, emptied a 3-gallon bucket of pucks onto the ice. The players scooped and cradled the pucks with stickblades and slung them at the goaltenders who squatted in the red-barred nets, jigging from side to side like athletic crabs, catching and deflecting shots. The coach blew the whistle and practice began. John took up his skates and left.
2
Next door at Kosta’s, he bought a chocolate milk and ran into Zoe Cauthen and her friends having lunch. “John! Hey!” She waved him over. The girls broke into giggles.
“Is Eva here?”
“No, she’s at home.”
“Can you tell her I say hi?”
“Tell her yourself. Give her a call. Do you have our number?”
“No.”
The girls giggled. John scratched his arm.
“Well, it’s in the phone book,” said Zoe. “And Juliet knows it—ask her. Give her a call, seriously. Or drop by sometime. She’d like that. Hey,” she said, “sit down.”
“I have to get home.”
“Why? It’s the summer.”
“Tryouts are at the end of August. I have to practice.”
“Suit yourself.”
“I have to go. Tell Eva I say hi.”
Zoe laughed and said, “No way, John—you have to call her. I won’t even say I saw you.”
3
At home he changed into shorts and a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves cut short, and strapped on rollerblades. He skated in the driveway, back and forth, stick-handling a tennis ball, shooting at a homemade net set in front of the garage. Skating up the driveway a ragged, black-haired, bloody-kneed blur, he deked, evaded an imaginary defenseman, and slapped the ball into the back of the net. He practiced his shot for an hour with his only puck, a mutilated rubber disc. Dripping sweat, he went inside. Peter was in the family room kneeling in front of the TV, eyes glued to the screen; he did not turn his head when the door slammed shut. John pushed off of the rug in the front hall and glided on the wood floor to the kitchen. Juliet, thirteen with freckles and acne, brown hair cut raggedly short and helmet-like (she had done it herself with pinking shears in the bathroom), was sitting at the table, writing in a spiral ring notebook. She wrote very quickly as if she must get the words down before they disappeared forever.
She paused when John came in.
“Mom told you not to wear those in the house.”
John said nothing. He turned on the faucet and filled a cup.
“She’s told you a million times not to.”
John drank and refilled the cup.
“Like a million times.”
“Well, she’s not here.”
“Doesn’t matter, you aren’t supposed to do that. It leaves marks all over the floor—look. She’s gonna be really pissed when she gets home.”
“I don’t give a shit.” John drank and stared at his sister. “Your haircut looks ridiculous.”
Face going crimson, Juliet threw down her pencil. “You’re such a jerk, John.” She took up her notebook and stamped from the kitchen. “Grow up.”
John finished the water, placed the cup on the counter, and turned off the faucet. He rolled over to the telephone mounted on the wall. The curly cord hung almost to the baseboard. On the chair next to the phone was the directory. Opening the book, he flipped through torn and dogeared pages to C and scanned down the columns to CAUTHEN, GEORGE. He put the book on the chair, lifted the phone, and listened to the dial tone. Abruptly, he replaced the phone and flipped the book shut.
Outside he skated for another hour. A piece of gravel shaped like a fossilized tooth tripped him up and he spilled out on his back onto the lawn. Pale green weeds, speckled with brownish spots, sharp to touch, like thin, curling blades of bendsome steel, sprouted in sunburnt patches of brittle brown grass that crunched underfoot. It had been a hot summer. No one had mowed since June. On his back he looked up at the sky webbed with electrical lines sagging between tilting telephone poles, upon which bedraggled pigeons perched, from which a pair of sneakers dangled, and the clouds beyond—full ship sails sailing across the blue—and silver airplanes and the white lines they left behind that slowly unraveled and disappeared, as if they had never been there. Just looking at the sky you could be anywhere. There were clouds like those all over the world. Watching clouds, he could be anyone—in any place, in any time.
The airplanes—he guessed how many passengers were on board, where they were coming from, where they were going, who they were, what they had done, what they were going to do. They could be coming from Finland; they could be going to Japan. Visions of white clad soldiers wearing mittens and bug-eyed goggles frosted over with blue crystals, black rifles strapped to backs, zooming down mountainsides on skis, dodging pine trees and granite crags, and samurais in horned helmets and sneering wooden masks, and wooden armor, lacquered bright stickyred like blood, all rolled before his mind’s eye. They could be anybody, going anywhere: the possibilities were infinite and unknowable.
And what about himself? He turned over on his side and, propped up on an elbow, surveyed the house with the broken shutters and the wheelless Galaxie balanced on cracked, oil-stained cinderblocks next to the garage. Mice lived in the engine and there were no seats—as a kid he painfully sat where there was no driver’s seat and steered and worked the pedals, going nowhere.
At the end of the driveway, a girl went by on a bicycle. John watched her until she was out of view. Suddenly, he scrambled to his feet, twisting his knee. He heard it crunch. He stumbled but skated down the driveway. “Hey!” He winced—his knee felt spongy. Pain shot up his leg. He turned into the street and skated hard. The girl was not so far away. He skated harder.
“Hey! Eva!”
She heard him and pedaled backwards to brake.
Nicholas Hannon is a novelist and connoisseur of the masterful prose of Hemingway, Joyce and Kerouac. He resides in the contemplative expanse that is Southern Arizona.