I did not skate away.
I cataloged the player. Number 17. Right wing. Six-foot-two, two-ten. He was laughing with a teammate, the satisfied laughter of a man who had thrown a grenade and was pleasedwith the explosion. He did not know that the grenade had landed at the feet of the wrong person.
The game started. I played my shifts. I waited.
In the second period, number 17 was on the ice during a line change. I was already on the ice, which was either coincidence or the particular form of patience that the hockey gods grant to men with a purpose. He had the puck along the boards. I closed on him, and the closing was not the routine closing of a defenseman pursuing a puck carrier. It was the direct, locked-on approach of a man who had decided that a specific human being was going to answer for a specific word.
I did not drop my gloves. This was not a fight. Fights require consent. Both players drop their gloves and agree to the transaction. What I did was deliver a hit so clean and so violent that the sound of the impact echoed through the arena like a gunshot.
Number 17 went down. Not gracefully. His legs left the ice and he traveled approximately four feet through the air before the boards introduced themselves to his spine, and the collision was the kind of collision that makes an arena go quiet. Not cheering quiet. Worried quiet. The quiet that means someone might not get up.
He got up. Slowly. His teammates helped him to the bench. The refs assessed me a two-minute minor for roughing, which was generous, and I went to the penalty box and sat down and felt nothing.
Not satisfaction. Not guilt. Nothing. The flatness that followed violence, the emotional void that I had been living in after fights for eleven years, except this time the void felt different. This time the void felt chosen. I had chosen to hurt that man. Not because it was my job. Not because Coach expected it. Because someone had said a word about two peopleI cared about, and I had responded with the only language I had ever been taught.
We won 4-1. The locker room was celebratory. Guys clapped me on the back. Jonah, whose wrist had healed, squeezed my shoulder and said "that hit was beautiful." Mik Volkov caught my eye and gave me the nod, the same nod he'd given me after the Gatorade incident, the nod of one silent man acknowledging another.
Cole found me at my stall. "You didn't have to do that."
"I know."
"But thank you."
"You don't need to thank me."
"I'm thanking you anyway. The word doesn't hurt me anymore. But it still hurts Mik, and you saw that, and you responded. That means something."
It meant something. He was right. But the something it meant was complicated, because the response had been violence, and violence was the thing I was trying to move away from, and moving away from something while simultaneously deploying it with maximum force was the kind of contradiction that I did not have the emotional architecture to resolve.
Luca was waiting in the equipment room. He was sitting on the counter where he always sat, legs swinging, but the swinging had stopped and his face was different. Not angry. Scared.
"That hit," he said.
"It was clean."
"I know it was clean. That's not what I'm talking about."
"Then what are you talking about?"
"The look on your face. When you were closing on him. Before the hit. I've watched you fight a dozen times and I've never seen that look. That wasn't enforcer hockey. That was personal."
"It was personal."
"I know. I heard what he said. I was in the tunnel and I heard it and I wanted to scream. But Wes, the way you hit him..." He trailed off. The legs started swinging again, a self-soothing rhythm. "I was scared."
"Of what?"
"Of the version of you that did that. Not because you were wrong. He deserved it. Maybe worse than what he got. But the coldness. The calculation. The way you just decided to destroy someone and then did it, like flipping a switch. I need to know that the switch can be turned off."
"It can."
"Can it? Because three weeks ago you told me in this room that fighting is destroying you. And tonight you fought harder than I've ever seen you fight. Not with fists. With your whole body. And the thing that scares me is that you did it for the right reasons, and the right reasons still left you sitting in a penalty box with empty eyes."
The accuracy of his observation was surgical. I sat at my stall and looked at my hands. They were not shaking. They were still, which should have been a good sign but wasn't, because the stillness was the void, and the void was worse than the shaking. The shaking was my body telling me the violence had a cost. The void was my body telling me I'd stopped feeling the cost, and a man who stops feeling the cost of violence is a man who has lost something essential.
"I don't want to be afraid of who you become on the ice," Luca said. His voice was steady but his eyes were not. "I love who you are in the kitchen. I love who you are on the couch. I love who you are when your hands are in dough and your guard is down and you're the person nobody else gets to see. But I need to know that person and the person who just tried to put a man through the boards are the same person, and that the kitchen person is the real one."
"They're the same person."