Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

Number 4 shoveled the puck right back to 6. High above 6’s helmeted head at the top of the bleachers perched the private box Laird Haskell had built. A banner proclaiming “The Rat Pack is BACK” hung the length of the box. I couldn’t see inside the box from where I was, but usually Laird Haskell stood at one end with a mixed drink in hand, chattering with whatever guests he might have without ever taking his eyes off his son. Whenever the puck was around Taylor’s net, Laird Haskell would stop his conversation and shout clipped commands at the boy: Stop it! Kick it! Grab it! Freeze it! And just before face-offs, always: Focus! I never heard him say “Taylor”; instead Laird Haskell called his son “19”, or “number 19”. I couldn’t tell if Taylor heard his father. He never looked up at the box or made any other sign of acknowledgment, unless you counted the way he sometimes bowed his head when his father snapped, Nineteen! Focus! Maybe Taylor was focusing. Or maybe not.

Next to Haskell’s box, the bleachers were filled top to bottom, blue line to blue line with high school kids wearing gold sweatshirts embossed in blue with the slogan the puck stops here. The Rats had started selling the shirts after the Haskells arrived the autumn before and Taylor, the brand-new goalie from downstate, started the season by shutting out the first five opponents he faced. He snapped his catching glove like a bullwhip, and he got down and up and from one post to the other faster than goalies who were years older. Some of the kids passing me to go to the concession stand and the pay phones had had their sweatshirts autographed by the fourteen-year-old guarding the Rats goal tonight.

I had met Taylor Haskell once, a few weeks before.

I had gone into the rink pro shop to buy a stick. I was looking at the rack with left-hand curves when I noticed a kid in River Rats sweats picking through the right-curve sticks on the opposite side of the rack. Taylor said the gold stitching over his left breast. He selected an Easton and held it in both hands like a right wing would. He leaned down on the shaft until it bent a little, testing its stiffness.

“Fresh lumber?” I said. “Aren’t you in the wrong rack?”

He looked up and his cheeks flushed as if I had caught him doing something wrong. He glanced quickly over his shoulder at the door to the shop.

“Um,” he said. “Just waiting for my mom.”

“You want those, don’t you?” I pointed at a rack of paddle-bladed goalie sticks across the room. “That little thing you got isn’t going to stop a slapper.”

“I’m just looking.”

I walked around and offered my hand. We shook. He was a little taller than I’d thought. His damp brown hair-he’d just showered after practice-glistened over blue eyes flecked with green. He had a pinkish sprinkle of acne along his forehead. Except for the eyes, he looked like his father.

“Gus Carpenter,” I said. “I used to have a jacket like that.”

He looked down at his jacket, as if he’d forgotten he had it on. “You were on the Rats?”

“A long time ago. Played goalie, too. Not anymore, though.”

“Huh. How come?”

“How come what?”

“How come you stopped playing goal?”

It was not an idle question asked by a bored adolescent. Number 19 of the Hungry River Rats really wanted to know why I had chosen to leave goaltending behind. I wondered if Taylor Haskell knew that I had been the goat of the ’81 title game. Maybe he hadn’t been in Starvation long enough for that indoctrination.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Guess I had enough of people shooting pucks at my head. Time to have some fun for once, you know?”

I was joking, but Taylor didn’t take it that way.

“Yeah,” he said. “What’s it like?”

“Playing out of the net?”

“Yeah.”

I really hadn’t given it much thought. I knew I didn’t feel nearly as much pressure playing wing. That was probably the best part. Even in a men’s league where games started at 11:45 p.m. and guys showed up stoned or drunk, I got butterflies before going out to tend goal. Wingers can screw up two or three times a shift and nobody cares. A goalie screws up twice in a game and their buddies start yelling at them to start fucking trying already.

“It’s fun,” I said. “I mean, I’m nothing great on wing and, from what I’ve seen, I wasn’t nearly the goalie you are.”

“Taylor, what are you doing?”

The woman was standing in the lobby just outside the shop in a white ankle-length parka trimmed with fur. She gave me a once-over without meeting my eyes. Taylor turned around and said, “Can I get a stick?”

“Taylor,” she said. “We don’t have all day.”

“Come on, Mom.”

The woman gave me a look that said this was none of my business.

“We’ll talk to your father again tonight.”

Taylor’s shoulders drooped. “Oh, right.”

“We’ll see.” She waved him out. “Let’s go.”

Now Marquette’s number 6 faked around a Rats wing and veered left toward the center of the ice. Jeremy Bontrager, Elvis’s nephew, stepped up to cut him off but 6 wound his stick back behind his left ear and, one stride outside the blue line, slapped a long, chest-high, flip-flopping shot at Taylor Haskell.

Following the fluttering puck while watching Taylor out of the corner of my eye, I knew immediately that he’d come out of his crease half a second too late. The crowd didn’t know it, but I could feel them holding their breath anyway, because Taylor Haskell, for all of his shutouts and spectacular stops, had gradually gotten a reputation for giving up soft goals.

It’s one thing for a goalie to stop back-to-back shots then watch a third one go in as he’s sprawled on the ice. It’s one thing for a goalie to be beaten by a sniper firing a bullet of a shot through a tangle of bodies. It’s one thing for a goalie to succumb to a skater bearing down unmolested who knows exactly what he’s going to do with the puck. But it’s another thing entirely for a goalie to let in a goal he should not let in: A middling wrister that sneaks between his legs or wobbles high when he guessed down. Or, worst of all, a long dying quail of a shot that the shooter himself never imagined would score, that the shooter was just flipping toward the net in hopes of a rebound or a face-off.

Soft goals are death to a hockey team. Almost nothing-a stupid penalty, a missed empty net-is more demoralizing. A team can totally dominate a game, outskating their opponents, beating them to every loose puck, blasting shot after shot at the opposing net, but if their own goalie then lets in a shot that everyone in the rink knows a blind man could have stopped, the game can change as suddenly and unforgivingly as if the teams had traded jerseys. A goaltender never wants to give up any kind of goal. But when I played in the net, there were nights when I would rather have faced the other squad’s best skater on a breakaway than a tumbling puck sliding toward me from a hundred feet away.

Nobody in Starvation Lake was saying it out loud, because the softies surrendered so far by Taylor Haskell had come late in games, with the Rats enjoying comfortable leads. But there were whispers nonetheless. About the high one against Muskegon that he seemed to lose in the lights. The weak backhander that dribbled between his skates against Panorama Engineering. The one from behind his net that bounced in off of his butt against Compuware. The titters and the whispers became nervous little jokes that Taylor was so impenetrable that he had to actually let other teams score once in a while.

The night Compuware scored off of his rear end, Channel Eight was waiting in the arena lobby when Taylor emerged from the dressing room. Usually his parents whisked him out a side door to their idling SUV, but tonight Laird and Felicia had gotten intercepted by Elvis Bontrager, and they weren’t about to cut off the chairman of the town council. By the time they reached Taylor, he was standing in a ring of teammates and their moms and dads, bathed in camera light and speaking haltingly into a microphone held by Tawny Jane Reese. I happened to be there, standing behind a gaggle of girls getting up on their toes for a glimpse of number 19.