Centuria Books · Tape and Teeth
Tape and Teeth — Read the First Chapter
The one person who treats the team’s enforcer like a man instead of a weapon becomes the lever the front office reaches for.
Chapter 1
Two minutes left in the second period, and the Garden was already on its feet for a fight.
Lena watched it from the tunnel mouth with her arms crossed, the way you watch weather. Volkov had a fistful of the Tampa winger’s jersey and was working the body, short hooks under the ribs, the kind that don’t make the highlight reel but fold a man at the diaphragm. The crowd loved it. The crowd always loved it. There was a particular pitch to the noise, somewhere between a cheer and a scream, that meant a Vanguard player was hurting someone, and the building made that sound now, twenty thousand throats finding the same note.
The linesman peeled them apart. Volkov skated to the box with his jersey half off one shoulder, his right hand hanging in a way Lena cataloged before she could stop herself.
“He’s holding that wrong,” she said.
Renata, beside her, didn’t look up from her tablet. “Holding what wrong?”
“The hand. Index finger’s out of line with the rest. He dislocated it on the kid’s helmet.”
“He didn’t say anything.”
“He won’t.”
He sat in the box for his five and got up at the end of the period like nothing was wrong, which was the tell. A man with a healthy hand doesn’t keep it that still. He keeps it loose. He moves it because moving it is free. Volkov skated to the bench with the hand cradled against his thigh, fingers curled away from the world, and Lena was already moving down the tunnel because that was the job and the job did not wait for anyone to ask.
The room emptied around her as she came in. It did that. Twenty-three men in various states of undress and tape, and the volume dropped the second she crossed the threshold, conversations folding mid-word, somebody killing the speaker that had been thudding bass into the concrete. Eddie Park raised a towel like a flag. Cap nodded at her. The others found somewhere else to look. She’d stopped taking it personally years ago. A med tech in a locker room was a coroner at a wedding. Everybody got quiet and hoped it wasn’t for them.
It was for Volkov.
He sat at his stall with his elbows on his knees and the right hand turned palm-up on his thigh, studying it like a problem he was choosing not to solve. Up close the finger was worse than the tunnel had let her see. The proximal joint of the index, dorsal dislocation, the bone riding up over the knuckle and tenting the skin pale. His tape was still on his wrists, the over-under wrap he did himself, two layers, the second laid against the grain of the first so it locked. She’d watched him do it a hundred times without naming why she watched.
“That’s coming out tonight,” she said.
He lifted his head. He had a cut over the eyebrow that someone had butterfly-stripped between periods and a smear of blood drying brown on the white tape at his wrist, his own or the kid’s, no way to know.
“It’s fine,” Volkov said.
“It’s pointing at your thumb. Fingers don’t point at thumbs. That’s not a structure I’m willing to call fine.”
“I have eight minutes before third.”
“You have a dislocated proximal interphalangeal joint and you are not taking another shift until I put it back, so we can do this the easy way or you can sit there being brave at me and we’ll do it during intermission anyway. Your call.”
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. The acknowledgment of one, withheld. “The room is watching.”
“The room is leaving.” She didn’t raise her voice. “Renata, can you—”
“On it.” Behind her, Renata started herding bodies, that’s the tour, gentlemen, find a hallway, and the stalls cleared out in a low shuffle of socked feet and someone’s muttered Jesus and the door to the players’ lounge sucking shut. Cap stayed a beat longer, one shoulder against the wall, eyes on Volkov, the captain’s silent question — you good? — and Volkov’s silent answer, a flick of the chin, and then Cap was gone too and it was the two of them and the hum of the lights.
Lena dragged the rolling stool over and sat so her knees nearly touched his. She snapped on gloves. She cracked her own knuckles first, the left thumb, the index, one at a time, a small percussive line, and his eyes tracked the sound.
“Habit,” she said, before he could ask.
“I know.” Two words, flat, and underneath them something she didn’t have time to look at. “I’ve watched you.”
She let that go past her like ice spray. “Give me the hand.”
He gave her the hand. That surprised her, a little — that he just laid it across her gloved palm, heavy, the swollen knuckles like a row of marbles under skin, the new injury hot and wrong above them. The hand of a man who hit other men for a living, and he set it down in front of her like something he was handing over for inspection at a border.
“Tell me what I’m looking at before I touch it,” she said, because she always asked, because the body lies and the man on top of it lies worse, and the only truth you got was the one you took before they had time to compose it. “When did it go?”
“Second fight. His cage.”
“You hit a helmet with a bare hand.”
“I hit a face. The cage was after.”
“Of course it was.” She turned the hand toward the light. The skin over the joint had gone the gray-white of a thing losing blood supply, and under her thumb the displaced bone shifted, just slightly, just enough. “Okay. The good news is it’s clean. Dorsal, no rotation, the volar plate’s probably intact, which means I can reduce it right here and you keep your stupid finger. The bad news is it’s going to feel exactly as bad as you think.”
“I don’t think anything about it.”
“No,” she said. “I’m getting that.”
She found the base of the finger with her left hand, thumb and forefinger bracketing the joint, and took the tip with her right. He didn’t pull back. Most of them pulled back — a flinch, a tightening up the forearm, the body voting against you before the brain could override it. His forearm under her hand stayed slack. His pulse was the only thing that moved, a fast tap she could feel through the glove at the radial wrist, the body telling the truth the face wouldn’t.
“I’m going to hyperextend it first,” she said. “Then traction, then I push it back over the joint. It’s three seconds. Don’t help me. Don’t brace. If you brace you’ll fight the muscle and we’ll be here all night.”
“Do it.”
“Look somewhere else.”
“No.”
She glanced up. He was looking at her. Not at the hand, not past her shoulder at the door, not at the ceiling the way the tough ones did when they were busy not being tough. At her face. Steady, unblinking, the eye over the cut already darkening toward a bruise, and she had the brief unwelcome sense of being the thing under examination on the stool, not him.
“Suit yourself,” she said.
She extended the finger up and back, increasing the deformity, and his pulse jumped under her fingertips and his breath went out through his nose, slow, controlled, but the rest of him gave her nothing. She pulled — steady traction, lengthening the joint, feeling the bone unhook from the lip it had ridden up over — and then she pressed the base of the finger down and forward and the joint went home with a small wet thunk she felt more than anything else, the unmistakable seating of bone into the place bone belonged.
The man didn’t make a sound. His jaw worked once. That was all.
“There it is,” she said, and let go of the tip, and his finger lay along the others where it should, swelling already, but straight. She put her thumb to the joint and tested it gently through a small arc of flexion. “Move it for me. Slow. To pain, not through it.”
He curled the finger. Made a loose fist, opened it.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s seated. You’ll buddy-tape it to the middle finger and you’ll ice it for twenty after the game whether you want to or not, and you’ll come see me tomorrow so I can splint it properly and check the volar plate didn’t tear when you decided a face was a reasonable thing to punch.”
“It’s a contact sport.”
“It’s an assault with witnesses and a referee.” She reached for the buddy-tape on her cart, peeled a strip. “Hold still.”
She taped the index to the middle finger, two anchor wraps and a figure-eight, snug but not strangling, and the whole time she was aware of him watching her hands. Not in the way men sometimes watched her hands, which she had a long and tedious filing system for. This was flatter than that. Closer to the way he’d studied the dislocation, like she was a problem he’d decided not to solve. The blood on his wrist tape had dried to rust and she could smell him, sweat and cold iron and the cedar of the room, and she breathed through her mouth and finished the wrap.
“Done.” She rolled back six inches on the stool, reclaiming the air. “You’re cleared, medically, which I will be telling Renata and the bench so don’t get creative about the timeline.”
“You’re the only one.”
She was peeling off her gloves and stopped. “The only what.”
“In the building.” He flexed the taped fingers, watching them, and then looked back up at her with that same level patience. “Who isn’t.”
“Isn’t what.”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. She’d watched the room empty around her like a tide going out, the way it did, the way it had since her first week here when she’d walked into a celebration and killed it just by being the person who knew which men were lying about their heads. She knew exactly what he meant. They were afraid of him. The Tampa kid getting his ribs filed in was afraid of him. The linesman who’d peeled them apart had done it carefully, the way you handle something that bites. The room got quiet for her and quiet for him and those were two different quiets and the only person in this building who treated him like a hand and not a hazard was sitting on a rolling stool with rust-colored tape in her lap.
She wasn’t going to give him that. She made it a policy not to give them anything that wasn’t load-bearing.
“I’m not paid to be afraid of you,” she said. “I’m paid to keep you skating. Those are different jobs and I’m bad at the first one.”
“I know what you’re paid for.” He stood. He did it slowly, the way big men did when they’d been hit a lot, the body taking inventory on the way up. He stood and he was in front of her and then he stepped back, one full step, like he’d taught himself to, like he knew exactly how much room a person needed not to feel hunted and he gave it to them up front, every time, a tax he paid on his own size. He stood in the half-light at the edge of his stall and didn’t crowd her and didn’t leave. “Tomorrow. What time.”
“Renata’s got the schedule. Eight, probably. Eat first or you’ll go gray on me.”
“Eight.”
She gathered her cart. Snapped the gloves into the bin. Capped the tape. He watched her do it, and she let him, because telling a man to stop looking gave the looking weight it didn’t deserve. At the door she paused with her hand on the frame, because there was a thing she said to all of them, the same thing, the load-bearing thing.
“Hey. Volkov.”
“Sasha.”
“Volkov.” She didn’t look back. “Your hand. The chronic stuff, the knuckles, the swelling that never goes down — that’s going to cost you a finger you actually need someday if nobody manages it. You keep punching helmets and I keep gluing you back together and one of us is going to lose. Just so you know it’s not free. None of it’s free. They let you think it’s free.”
The room was quiet in the way of a room with one person breathing too quietly in it.
“I know it’s not free,” he said.
She left. The hallway swallowed the noise of the building back up, the bass returning, men filtering past her in the corridor and not meeting her eyes, and she walked toward the trainer’s room popping her knuckles one at a time, thumb, index, middle, the small line of sound she made before hard conversations and after them too, because the hand always wanted putting back in order somehow, and behind her, in the stall, Volkov sat down again and reached for the ice without thinking, the way he always did, pressing it to a hand that had stopped expecting anyone to ask whether it hurt.
Chapter 2
The ice goes soft in eight minutes. He counts.
The bag sweats through the towel against his knuckles, and the cold has stopped being cold — it’s just a dull pressure now, a thing pressing back at the thing that hurts. He keeps it there anyway. Forty-one seconds since her footsteps went quiet down the corridor. He counts those too. He has always counted the wrong things. Exits in a building. Steps between his stall and the tunnel. The number of times a man can put his weight on a leg before the leg quits — that one he learned at fourteen, in a barn outside Magnitogorsk, his father’s stopwatch clicking like a tooth.
She popped a knuckle before she told him the hand would cost him. He has watched her do it three times now. Index, middle, ring — she goes in order, like she’s loading something. He files it the way he files everything: which way a man drops his shoulder before he throws, which linesman blinks first. A tell. Everybody has one. Hers is that she counts too.
He shouldn’t know that.
The corridor outside the trainer’s room hums. Old fluorescent, the ballast going, a sound like a wasp trapped in a wall. Down past the players’ lounge somebody’s stick clatters into a rack and a janitor’s cart wheels squeak on the rubber matting, and under all of it the building exhales — the deep machine-breath of the refrigeration plant keeping the sheet frozen two floors below. He lives inside that sound. He has slept in it. Has put his back against the boards in an empty arena at one in the morning, the Zamboni doing its slow flat circles, and let the cold come up through his jacket until his teeth ached, because that is the only quiet a man like him is allowed. Out there nobody asks anything of him except the thing he is built to do.
In here, she asked if it hurt.
He didn’t answer. That was the right move. You don’t show a body where it bleeds.
The split in his lip has scabbed. He works it open again with his tongue, slow, and the copper floods up the back of his throat, familiar as spit. Tonight’s fight — Gendron, the Pittsburgh kid, six-three and dumb with want — went four punches before the kid covered up. Volkov keeps the tally: two to the temple that did nothing, one to the jaw that turned the kid’s eyes loose, one that caught crown of the skull instead of soft cheek and shoved his own finger out of its socket. That last one was greed. He knows it. He chased the highlight when the work was already done, and the joint paid for it.
She’d set it without asking him to count to three.
He drops the ice bag in the bin and stands.
He stands in the doorway of his stall. Not in it. Not out. The frame holds him up the way doorways always do — you can see the whole room from a doorway, and nobody can get behind you, and you can leave. He learned that from no one. He learned it from rooms that turned dangerous. The locker room is empty now except for the slow drip of a shower somebody left and Eddie Park’s gear hung wrong on the next hook, pads facing out like the goalie wants to scare the wall. Tape balls on the floor. The reek of liniment and rink-rot and the body spray the young guys drown themselves in. Home, if a man wanted to call it that. He doesn’t.
What he has instead is a schedule.
He knows hers. This is the part he keeps in the dark place behind the boiler, the file he doesn’t open in daylight. Her first week with the club, last September — Solis introduced the new physio at the start-of-camp meeting, Lena Moreau, soft tissue and rehab, you’ll be sick of her by Christmas, and the room half-listened the way it half-listens to anything that isn’t a roster move. Volkov listened all the way down.
He learned that she gets in before the strength staff, by the cones already out when he comes off the early ice. That she takes her coffee from the machine in the medical hall, not the players’ one, and lets it go cold while she works because she forgets it. That she wears the same two pairs of trainers and tapes a hot spot on her left heel the way he’d tape a wrist, over-under, neat. That she does not flinch. Guys come off the ice with their faces opened up and she puts gloved fingers in the mess and asks them to track her penlight and her hands don’t shake. He clocked that day one, the way you clock a fighter who isn’t scared of you and decide whether that’s a problem.
She was a problem.
He learned the worst thing on a Thursday. There’s a boy. Five, maybe. Black hair, a counting habit — Volkov saw him once in the family room during a charity skate, hauled up against the glass, calling out the number on every goalie’s pads as they cycled drills, one, two, three, four, like the pads owed him an accounting. The kid loves the Zamboni the way some kids love dinosaurs, total and loud. Volkov stood in that doorway too, half a hallway off, and watched her crouch to the boy’s level and answer every number like it mattered. He carried that out of the building. He doesn’t know why. He has carried worse and let it go.
So. He broke a rule.
The rule is old and it has kept him alive. Nothing on staff. Not trainers, not the equipment guys’ daughters, not the PR girls Coyle parades through for the cameras. Staff are levers. A man like Pryce — and there is always a Pryce — finds the soft thing near you and squeezes, and then you skate where you’re told and fight who you’re told and sign what you’re told. His father taught him the principle without the words: love the dog and they’ll break the dog to break you. So you don’t love the dog. You don’t love anything that can be reached.
He broke it the first week, watching a woman tape her own heel.
He didn’t touch the rule again until he had to.
The shower drips. He counts the drops — eleven, twelve — and stops, because counting drops is a thing a man does when he’s avoiding the other count.
One night. Months back, before the season, a charity thing in a hotel ballroom Coyle made them all wear suits to, and afterward a bar that wasn’t on the team’s approved list, dark booths and a bartender who didn’t know him. She was there. Civilian clothes, her hair down, no gloves, no clipboard, a woman and not a wall. He’d had two drinks, which is one past his number. She’d had more than that. Somebody she knew had done something to her — he could read it in how she held her shoulders, the careful way she set her glass down like the table might move. He didn’t ask. She didn’t tell. They talked about nothing. Linesmen. The terrible ballroom chicken. She did the thing with her knuckles, popped them one at a time under the table, and he caught it because he catches everything, and she caught him catching it and didn’t look away.
He doesn’t replay the rest. He tells himself he doesn’t.
He replays it constantly. The cab. Her hand flat on his chest in the elevator, not pushing, measuring — like she was reading him for damage. The way she said his name once, the Sasha, not the Volk, and the floor dropped out of him the way it does when the ice opens under a heavy guy and he goes down through it. Her room. Her hands, which do not shake on torn men, shaking once on him and then deciding not to. She had agency in every second of it; she ran it; she decided. That is the part he cannot get rid of. He has been decided about his whole life — by the father, by the league, by the men who fill out the lineup card with his name on the bottom because somebody has to be the thing the team breaks on purpose so the skilled boys stay clean. Nobody ever chose him. She did, for one night, and then they both agreed with their silence the next morning that it hadn’t happened.
It hadn’t happened. He’s told himself so for months. He told himself so tonight while she set his finger and called him forty-four and looked at his hand like it was the only part of him in the room.
Except.
His tape.
He sits down again because his legs have stopped being interested in holding him.