Edges

Brandon Yule was by far the most experienced player on our team, the most seasoned of all the veterans. And yet his age hadn’t slowed him any. Soft hands and hard slapshots, and a seemingly intuitive view of the entire ice surface, a panoramic awareness: such were the attributes that had won him seven championships, and such were the attributes he continued to display each day.

“What’s the deal, Bran?” I asked him after practice one morning. The other players had already left the dressing room. “You on steroids or something?”

He raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. Brandon didn’t like me; this much I already knew.

“I mean, aren’t you like forty-two now?” I was half his age and, according to some, too arrogant by far. I was also a mite pissed off that he hadn’t retired yet, that the torch hadn’t been passed down to me. The old fart scores a hat-trick and the stands go ape-shit; I score one and all I get is a smattering of half-hearted claps between sips of beer. Bullshit. Total and complete bullshit.

“Forty-five,” he corrected me, and winked. He actually fucking winked.

But I kept my cool. “Yeah, must be steroids,” I said. “Gotta be. Maybe I should make a phone call--drop an anonymous tip. Get you a blood test, hmm? How ‘bout that?”

Brandon shrugged. “Go ahead,” he said. He stood up, pulling his hockey bag with him.

I blocked him at the door. “I’m serious. Something’s not right and I’m gonna find out what.”

He narrowed his eyes, and for a second I could have sworn there was movement inside them, a patch of darkness across his irises, a shadow in the blue. “You won’t like it,” he said to me, his voice oddly inflected.

I let him by, watched him go, and wondered what the hell he was talking about. Wouldn’t like what, exactly?

I didn’t confront him again until a few games later, mostly because things had taken a sharp turn towards the weird. I’d been outscoring and out-checking Brandon both, and he didn’t even seem to care. I noticed he was favouring his left leg a little, and that beneath each of his eyes was a bruise-coloured pouch, sagging with the weight of exhaustion. The coach was so pissed at him that he wouldn’t even make eye contact.

I’d been waiting for the guy’s age to catch up with him, but this was ridiculous. It shouldn’t have happened all at once; didn’t really make sense, as far as I was concerned.

“I was right, wasn’t I?” I said. “About the steroids, I mean. You stopped taking them and now you suck. Am I right, or am I right?” We were alone in the dressing room again. Brandon was always the last one out of the dressing room, come to think of it.

He rolled his eyes. He looked tired. “I was just like you,” he said. “Just like you for a long, long time. Didn’t really realize it until you showed up, though. You’re like a mirror that follows me around. Always fucking there, right fucking there.”

I laughed out loud. Annoying Bran was a sport I enjoyed almost as much as hockey--so much the better if I could succeed at it without even meaning to.

“That’s right,” said Bran. “Get your laughs in now, ‘cause you won’t be laughing later.”

“Yeah?” I said. “And why’s that?”

“You’ll get old, slow, but you won’t really feel it because it’ll be so gradual. You’ll tell yourself you feel the same as you did yesterday or the day before, so why can’t you find the puck now? Why can’t you avoid that hip-check you know damn well is coming? Doesn’t make sense. Nothing has changed, yet everything’s different.”

He paused for a moment to look around the dressing room, and it seemed to me that what he was seeing probably wasn’t the same thing I was. The years rolled back in his eyes, the names changed upon the lockers. Nostalgia. Regret.

He took a deep breath and got to his feet, wincing. “Someday the coach’ll call you in and offer you an edge. When he does, say no.”

I narrowed my eyes. “What the fuck you talking about?”

“I’m dying,” he said. “Fading fast. That’s what happens when you stop, when you finally come to your senses. You end up losing everything you gained, but it’s all at once and it’s tenfold. Remember that.”

“Stop what?” I asked him. “What do you mean?”

“You wouldn’t believe me,” he said. “But you’ll see. You’ll see.”

And that was the last time I ever saw him. The torch passed to me without the slightest bit of flourish. Kind of disappointing, to be honest, and a little unfair as well; much as I disliked the guy, Bran deserved to go out with accolades, with fanfare. God knows he’d earned it.

He died less than a month later. An aneurysm, they said. I didn’t believe it, but I pretended I did. I hung my head and grieved in front of the press, then set about establishing a charity in Brandon’s name. I figured that’d be the quickest way to ingratiate myself with the fans.

Boy was I right. By the time playoffs came around, I was sharpshooter numero uno, and a veritable chick-magnet and media-darling both. Everywhere I went I was winking and smiling for the flash, with autograph-seeking tykes pulling at my pant-legs, pens in their hands and their eyes full of worship.

The years that followed were lightning fast and gunpowder crazy, a whirlwind that swept me up and spun me around and around, making me dizzy and making me rich. But as they say, time moves quickly when you’re having fun, and soon enough the fun was declining.

It happened exactly as Bran had said it would: I felt the same, yet I wasn’t the same at all. After five games without a single point, the coach called me into his office and sat me down, and before him on his desk was what appeared to be a can of sardines.

The coach was a hard-nose kind of guy, middle-fifties and grey around the edges, but still as intimidating as all get out. “You’ve lost your step,” he said to me. “You’re slowing down.”

I shook my head even though deep down I knew he was right. “Just a slump,” I assured him. “I’ll rise above it.”

“Not without an edge, you won’t,” he said. And he slid the can of sardines towards me, after which I peeled back the tin and almost vomited.

They looked like...little women, but with transparent wings slicked up against their sides. There must have been fifteen or twenty of them in the can. Naked. Tiny. The smell was indescribable.

“What the fuck?” I said, and got to my feet, my heart pounding. “What the fuck?”

The coach smiled. “What’s the matter, don’t believe in magic? In fairy tales?” He picked one up and sucked it clean of flesh and meat, like someone enjoying a hot wing. He licked his fingers. “Better than steroids,” he went on. “And entirely untraceable. Try one.”

I shook my head, backed up another step, and then I was running, down the halls and into the parking lot, where I fell to my knees and was sick.

I had nightmares for three nights consecutive, and ended up missing the next two games due to an unwillingness to leave my condo. I couldn’t stop thinking about those tiny transparent wings, those miniature wrinkled hands. And of course there was Brandon Yule, the magic in his eyes turned to guilt.

The phone began ringing off the hook, and soon enough the press was banging on my door, wondering what the hell had happened to me. Where was their superstar? Where was the role model for thousands of kids?

“Gone,” I wanted to tell them. “Aged beyond his prime.”

But the cameras were mesmerizing, and in my ears arose the sound of thirty thousand cheering fans, all of them chanting my name, their beers dropped to the floor, forgotten. It was too much to give up so easily, and besides, I wouldn’t have to eat the...the things regularly. Just once or twice, extend my career by a little, and then I’d quit, still healthy, still good.

I smiled. “He’ll be back,” I assured them. “He’ll be back."