Small Ceremonies

game one

It starts with a rumble, a heartbeat, a powwow on a gym floor. All echo and thunder, a storm before the lightning, coming not from the sky but from the ice, rising above the glass and mesh meant for foul pucks and empty cans and trash and wrappers, the revenants of lost souls. Foot stomps and air horns. It’s the sound of a beginning, a new longing, a new hockey season.

There’s excitement in the air: it’s growing, raising hearts and neck hair, and a residue of sadness. It starts before the players leave the dressing room, with the music turned up deafeningly high, all eighties rock and guitar solos, by a boy DJ not yet old enough to be in high school, operating from a stereo system in the box beside the scorekeeper. There are fans, but only a few, mostly parents and friends and fellow students and girlfriends in jerseys with their boyfriend’s name and number on the back in thick font, climbing aboard paint-­chipped bleachers in what looks like single file, mining the seats for a place along the cracked wood and wobbly planks.

Outside the sky is big and blue, as endless as the prairies. The fall sun hangs on, casting lean shadows over the uneven sidewalks and dusty pavement. Inside Memorial Arena, a place where it’s unclear what is being memorialized because all around there seems nothing worth remembering, the scoreboard counts down from fifteen minutes, at which point the puck will drop and a new campaign will begin. It’s colder in the lobby by several degrees and the temperature drops even further behind the doors where the game is played. Each cold breath rises from the mouth and floats for a moment above toques and ball caps and then vanishes before the next one.

Boys, in groups of three or four, push their way to the front of the crowd, ahead of parents and elders. Local misfits and dropouts smile and laugh at nothing in particular, each holding something long and bottle-­shaped inside their baggy sweaters and jackets, and in about four or five elegant leaps and a single breath, using muscles and tendons that could only be exercised by scaling beaten streets slant with danger and a certain beautiful misery, they reach the very top of the stands, where they will stand above the rest like it means something special to be there and where they shout a graphic litany of curses at the opposition and their supporters for the next three periods like prophets of a lost world. Some younger boys, a dozen in all, follow the pack nervously, careful to avoid the stern eyes and shaking heads of their grandmothers and aunties. Their movement is rough and forced, and the chants from the top only begin once all the boys assemble: “Fuck you, Bullfrogs! Fuck you, Bullfrogs! Fuck you, Bullfrogs!” And then the aunties turn around and hiss at the younger boys to smarten up and act civilized, but the older ones continue hurling their curses across the ice to the bleachers filled with the other team’s supporters. In front of them, just behind the glass, elders escorted by adult grandchildren take their seats, and their laughter, when it comes, is high-pitched and with their bodies as much as their faces. They disappear into the crowd.

The first games always begin with faces halfway hopeful, because even in the North End, the soul of this young city, triumph is scary business. The game never changes—­the pucks are made of hot rubber and a goal means the same and there is the constant mixture of dread and pleasure and suspense; a coming-­together of a whole country’s faith and passion and geography and the histories that hang from rafters and are carefully etched forever on trophies. For the Tigers, the outcome of the games doesn’t seem to change either. But there’s hope anyway. None of it changes but it’s always changing.

Tommy sat in the dressing room rubbing the whites of his knuckles. Games always made him nervous, but there was something different about the first one of the season. Something different about the first and last and playoffs (maybe) games, which during his tenure they never, ever, qualified for. They felt like the exam, a test of their preparation and how far they’ve come as a team and as players and as men, if one ignored that few of them were actually raised by men and instead by women with dreams of something better. The first game of the season was their chance, his chance, to reap the rewards of all their hard work over the summer, all the weights lifted, all the miles run, all the whey protein shaken and consumed.

There was a breathable tension in the room, not much chatter. Most of the players bounced their heads in time to the music echoing through the walls. A whistle sounded in the distance, a referee trying out his silver. A scrawny eleventh grader pounded a fist on his naked chest and smiled with the enthusiasm of a bright-­eyed rookie, then leaned toward Tommy and said shyly, “How’d you get so big, Tomahawk?”

Tommy worked on lacing his skate, flexing his biceps with each tight pull. “Water,” he said, and immediately regretted trying to act good but continued getting dressed in silence.

“Water,” the boy repeated. “Holy smokes.” When their coaches came in for the pregame pep talk Tommy pulled on his jersey—­black with orange stripes on the arms and shoulders and around the waist—­and smoothed out the hissing face of an angry tiger stitched across his abdomen, while Coach Johnson took the locker room floor, his hands deep in the pockets of his track pants, his eyes fixated on nothing in particular. His speeches, which had become a pregame fixture ever since he took over the bench, had drifted more and more toward animal allegory.

“We’re Tigers,” he began, raising his head to observe the faces of his players. “They’re Bullfrogs. If this was tigers versus frogs, and by that I mean tigers versus frogs in the wild, I know for damn sure which animal would come out on top.” He cleared his throat and continued in a different vein: “Look, there are two types of sharks. Real-­life sharks and the Hollywood myth of a shark. Real-­life sharks are boring, they’re actually quite smart, not easily fooled, they don’t really care for human flesh, and really, they only ever attack humans when they’re curious what we taste like. But the Hollywood Shark, the Hollywood Shark is a monster from hell, killing and eating anything in sight. Anyone see Jaws? The Hollywood shark takes names, has memory, exacts revenge on its enemies. He’s a ferocious motherfucker. A complete badass. What I’m saying is, the Hollywood Shark mentality wins hockey games. We lost to these fucking frogs twice last year, don’t forget that. We need to go out there and be hungry, hungry to win. Play for each other, play for Jonah, play for your school. Go out there and play like fucking sharks!” For a moment the room remained quiet. There was an air of confusion, but once Coach Johnson started circling the room to give each player a fist bump the room erupted with claps and cheers and high-­pitched battle cries. They were Sharks, the Hollywood kind, but also Tigers.

Tommy didn’t listen. The words were muffled in his ears. He tried to visualize his game, his reactions to both dangerous and opportunistic situations, the pass he’d make, the shot he’d take, and each time it ended getting knocked on his ass he smacked the side of his head with his palm. He came out of it as Coach Johnson, already sweating and screaming, the veins bulging from his neck, issued his final words, “Urgency, urgency, urgency, urgency!” The whole team cheered but not him. The graduating class before him didn’t cheer either, they held it together. Or maybe they didn’t care anymore, they’d accepted defeat because defeat was all they’d ever known and therefore they felt no more pressure to care about winning or their dimming window of success, which would close on all of them. He couldn’t decide which version made more sense. His stomach fell into a crevice and his hands were damp and cold with sweat. Together they latched on their helmets, slipped on their gloves, clutched their two sticks, the preferred weapon and a spare, and marched toward the ice.

Jonah, their goaltender, stepped onto the ice first, and Tommy followed. Sometimes he was third, fourth or fifth, but rarely farther down the line. At the tail end of the order was Clinton, who always went last. He never wavered on this. He liked the feeling of seeing everything in front of him, the vision it gave him, like he could predict what was going to happen before it happened. Clinton searched the crowd for familiar faces and immediately recognized Jonah’s auntie Maggie in her bright orange jacket with “Tigers” embroidered in big black letters that she had sewn on herself, whistling with two fingers and cheering them on like she always did, and then there was Tommy’s koko Olga a few rows down to the left, who would remain cold and still until something more exciting happened, and beside her Tommy’s sister Asemaa, who everyone except Olga referred to as Sam, holding a cup of something hot between her hands, and he often felt like he knew these people more than he actually did because of the kindness they showed him at hockey games. Clinton imagined his mother as if she were there, his brother Kelvin too, standing close to the glass so they could have something to thump on with their hands because neither of them knew how to whistle.

Tommy did a slow lap, testing the sharpness of his edges, knees high like a galloping horse. Floyd, their best player, skated fast until he felt a burning in his thighs, and then he parked at the red line and entered into a staring contest with players from the other team, which he won out of confusion alone. Jonah scraped the crease around his net with his blades. This he did to avoid sliding too far outside the blue paint when shit got heavy.

Being last to hop through the boards made the chaos of a game make more sense. Clinton could see all the pieces—­the players, the coaches, the refs, the spectators, the girlfriends, the girlfriends that didn’t know the other girlfriend was somewhere down the aisle, the moms, the absence of fathers, the rink manager with his nose almost touching the glass—­and how they fit together like a perfect round of Tetris. It was its own thing, an ecosystem in which each person had a role to play and failure to perform that role meant the whole thing didn’t work. Zamboni drivers needed ice and ice needed skates and skates needed feet and feet belonged to the human body, which sometimes took the form of a hockey player, and teams needed these players and these players needed parents, who largely made up a team’s fan base, and these parents were relied upon in many cases to drive their hockey-­playing children to each game, or at the very least retrieve them after the final horn rang, and when all the pieces worked together in harmony, that meant three periods of the game could be played and for the next two hours nothing else in the world mattered to Tommy and Clinton and Jonah and Floyd and the rest of the Tigers except the scoreboard.

Their opponents were the St. Norbert Bullfrogs, who in previous years achieved great regular-­season success but ended the year with post-­season disappointment. Coach Johnson’s orders were simple: keep the puck away from their best, and only good, player. Serhii. He dodged and weaved and dangled around opponents with deadly grace, and before you even noticed the puck sliding between your legs you were made temporarily blind by the glittering, fake diamond-­studded Ukrainian trident dangling from his neck. And before you knew it, you were lost in his trance, puck-­watching, awestruck by the stick-­handling moves of an ice-­skating magician, and then you lost.

Earlier, before the start of the season, Tommy bet Clinton two burgers that by season’s end he’d not be knocked over once by someone from the opposing team, any team. Tommy didn’t have much but he had faith and hope in how big his quads got over the summer. They weren’t just ripped, he told Koko, running downstairs to inform her what he’d just discovered in the mirror, but “jacked, like Tootoo’s.” He’d always been a skinny kid. Weak and lanky. And just when it seemed he’d made gains that only come with age he was always a step behind the other boys in the development ladder. Clothes were too short or hung awkwardly off his skinny body, and even though his calves and the rest of him were still not all that, he felt his newfound strength with every squat and stride on the ice and could trace the outline of his new muscles through his pants, like mountain ranges of manliness. Bruce Wayne in the bat suit. And like all great rolling hills and caped crusaders he couldn’t be knocked down. Not this year. This year he’d finally live up to his name, the long version. The one thing his mother did right before she left them.

It was a name that instantly summoned attention, like Sitting Bull or Poundmaker, but any reverence evaporated when they realized he was a liability on the ice more than a sacred weapon. At hockey camp the summer before, Jordin Tootoo paused after reading Tommy’s name during roll call. Mesmerized by it.

“Deadly,” he said. He mouthed it silently—­Tomahawk Shields—­as if reciting a prayer, as if there was a hidden meaning. “Might be the deadliest name in the game.” After he saw Tommy skate he never said it again.

The idea for the bet came to him after spotting his sister’s tattoo as she reached for her stash of multivitamins and fish oils. In recent months she’d become health-­obsessed, and Tommy reckoned it was because of all those social media posts that announced if you were Native you were either prediabetic or just diabetic. Those posts, which always began with the disclaimer “Personal News,” came with their own kind of PTSD, and Tommy wondered from time to time whether the disease would eventually come for him. He likened it to an alien inside of him, hiding, waiting, lurking in his blood, and such anxiety heightened when he found himself with an unquenchable thirst. But the Shieldses were no strangers to amputated limbs. Regardless, Tommy saw Sam’s new lifestyle as an opportunity. Her knowledge had become encyclopedic. She could cite a food’s nutritional benefits offhand and had been fasting a daily sixteen hours long before The Rock made it cool. When she grabbed her krill tablets from the top shelf the phrase “Fall Down Seven Times Stand Up Eight” revealed itself in cursive near her ribs.

Sam made Tommy swear to secrecy. Koko considered tattoos a poor investment. He obliged because he needed her whey.

“Makes no sense,” he said. He pictured the scene in his head, a man falling and getting back up, dusting himself off only to get swept off his feet again and again, and then explained the math. Falling down seven times meant you got up that same number.

“Not if you’re already on the ground,” she said.

“You’re living off a scholarship funded by energy companies. Who’s plotting against you?”

“This settler-­colonial-­white-­supremacist-­state called Canada. You’ll learn.”

The words of the tattoo still stuck. Tommy was tired of losing. Tired of falling and picking himself up. Tired of picking himself up eight times and falling down nine. On the ice and off. The city had a way of keeping boys like him down, big legs or no. And in the three years he’d been with the St. Croix Tigers they’d never won a game—­no one knew the last time they’d tasted victory. It was a forgotten history, a forgettable history, a history you wanted to forget because the truth was so shameful, an erasure. The talent was raw but coachable, most of the kids new to the game, and Tommy knew that’s where the problem started: the coaching staff. The coaches were teachers and teachers didn’t last long in the hood, retreating to the other side of the tracks as soon as the opportunity presented itself.