Starvation Lake by Bryan Gruley

the puck was in front of me, big as a pancake, and I started to reach out with my stick to poke it away. The next second, it was gone. Soupy drew it back to himself like a blackjack dealer and spun around on his blades, a full 360-degree spin-o-rama. I lost the puck in his whirling skates. Then I felt its dull weight glance off my left instep and heard it thud against the back of the goal. It was the perfect dangle. Everyone watching whooped and whistled while I whacked the puck out of the net and Soupy glided away.
    “Holy shit, Carpie,” Boynton shouted. “Put your dick back in your pants.” They all laughed, except Soupy, who slid slowly along the boards across from Boynton, glaring. I turned around and grabbed my water bottle. I wasn’t really thirsty, but there was nowhere else to hide.
    “Carpie!” Boynton shouted. He stood with the puck at his feet, ready for his last shot. “Looks like Coach is back from the dead. You think he heard
you
were back from the dead and wanted to see if you still sucked?” I heard some of the others chuckle. “Brings back memories, huh?”
    I barely had put the water bottle back when he leaped out and drove hard right at me. Usually that meant a shooter was going to try to deke rather than shoot, but Teddy, whose puckhandling wasn’t nearly as nimble as Soupy’s, almost always shot. He loved to aim between the legs so I pressed my leg pads together and kept the bottom of my stick hard against the ice as I moved backward with his strides. Just inside the blue line, he veered slightly to his left, my right. Yeah, here comes a shot, I thought. The puck was on his forehand. I scrunched my head down and stiffened. Teddy veered farther to my right. I slid around in that direction, squaring myself to the puck. He wound up for a slapshot. As his stick blade reached back, he said, “Hooper.”
    Hooper.
    I couldn’t help myself. It threw me so badly that I took my eye off the puck and glanced up at him. He wasn’t looking, though. He was aborting his shot and snatching the puck away and cutting hard to his right. When I looked down again, the puck was gone. Off balance, I kicked out my left leg, sprawling, and flailed at him with my catching glove. But he was by me. Over my shoulder I watched his backhander snap the mesh in the upper left corner of the net. He stopped next to the goalpost and stood over me, gloating. “Thanks, Carpie,” he said. “Good old Hooper.”
    “Fuck off, Teddy,” I said.
    Billy Hooper was the star winger for the Detroit Pipefitters who had scored the winning goal on me in the 1981 state final.
    “What the fuck was that, Trap?” It was Soupy, who’d skated up behind me. I stumbled to my feet and saw he was angry.
    “You can go to hell too,” I said
    “Jesus, Trap, Helen fucking Keller could’ve stopped that.”
    “Then next time get Helen fucking Keller to play goal.”
    “Whose side are you on?”
    “Whose side are
you
on?” I dropped my catching glove and grabbed him by the jersey. I told him what Boynton had done. At first he looked at me blankly. Then he turned and stared across the ice at Boynton, who was laughing it up again with the other guys. “Goddamn it,” Soupy said. He turned back to me. “Goddamn it, Trap.”
    “Soupy, what the hell is going on?”
    Ignoring me, he scooped up a puck with his stick, flipped it into the air, and caught it in his left glove. Then he stopped and, assuming a baseball hitter’s stance, tossed the puck up over his head. As it came down, he took a hard, fluid swing at it and connected with a solid
thwack
. The puck flew haphazardly at Teddy Boynton. He saw it at the last second and ducked. It missed his head by a couple of inches. “What the fuck was that?” he yelled, digging toward Soupy. “I’ll be wearing the Stanley Cap this year, fuckhead.” The other players grabbed him, laughing, while Soupy skated off the ice.
     
     
       Pine County sheriff Dingus Aho’s office smelled of gunmetal