Someone Keeps Cutting My Perfect Ice

The ice was perfect at 11:40 last night, and by 5:15 this morning somebody had written all over it. Not vandalism — worse than vandalism. Handwriting.

My name is Walt Kovacek and for nineteen years I have laid down the sheet at the Birch County Community Arena. People think the machine does it. The machine does about forty percent. The rest is knowing how much blade to drop, how fast to take the corner by the penalty box where the concrete sags, how hot to run the flood water so it melts into what's already there instead of sitting on top like syrup. One hundred and forty degrees. Slow lap, outside in. When it's right, you shut the overheads off and stand at the gate and the whole surface goes the color of a held breath.

That's what I do at midnight. Then I drive home, sleep badly, and come back before six to check the boards.

And in January, somebody started ruining it.

The first time I figured it for a hockey dad who'd bribed a key out of somebody. Then I looked closer. Hockey leaves you a mess of hash marks and stop-sprays, ugly and honest. This was three concentric loops near the far blue line, laid down so evenly you could have set a compass in the middle. A long spiral that ran the length of the rink and curved off at the end like a signature. And at the top of the circle, a starburst of chewed-up ice where somebody had landed something and not landed it well.

I stood there with my coffee going cold and I'll admit the first thing I felt was not anger. It was the way you feel finding footprints in snow you thought was yours alone.

Then I got angry.

Dee Rasmussen runs the building. I found her in the office under a hill of sponsorship invoices.

"Somebody's on the ice at night," I said.

"Doors are locked."

"Somebody's on the ice at night," I said again.

She didn't look up. "Walt, the north camera's been dead since the hailstorm. Board won't fund a new one till the fiscal year turns over. Is there damage?"

"There's marks."

"Marks." Now she looked up, and she had that patient face people get with me. "It's ice, Walt. It's for skating on."

Which is the kind of thing people say who have never made anything by hand at midnight.

I ran my own investigation, since nobody else was going to. Monday I balanced a nickel on the latch of the loading bay door, the one with the bad strike plate that Dee's been meaning to get to since the last administration. Tuesday morning the nickel was on the floor and there were four beautiful arcs cut into the ice by the goal crease.

Wednesday I threaded a paper clip through the hasp. Gone.

Thursday I gave up on traps and left a note taped to the boards at the gate, printed large in marker:

PLEASE DO NOT SKATE ON FRESHLY RESURFACED ICE. — W.K.

Friday morning the note was still there. Underneath my printing, in pencil, in small round letters that slanted uphill:

Sorry. I'll use the old ice.

And she had. Every mark that morning was crammed into the northeast corner, the corner the Thursday-night beer league had already shredded into gravel, and she had done her loops in that ruined patch like a kid coloring inside a very small box. I stood there a long time. Something in my chest went sideways and I told it to behave.

Then I went home, slept four hours, and came back at two in the morning and sat in my truck in the dark with the heater ticking.

She came at 2:40, on foot, out of the parking lot of the medical park across the road, carrying a duffel bag nearly as big as she was. She got the loading bay door open in about six seconds — a credit card and a shoulder, God help us — and I gave her ten minutes before I followed.

The arena was black except for the exit signs and the pale wash of the vending machine in the lobby. She was already out there, skating in that dim red half-light, and she had no music, no coach, no lights, and she was very, very good.

I flipped the bank of overheads.

The sound she made was not a scream so much as a yelp, and she went down hard on one hip and slid into the boards. I was through the gate before I knew I'd opened it, sliding in my work boots, hand out.

"Don't call anybody," she said. "Please. Please don't call anybody."

Her name was Thea Barrientos. Fifteen. Her mother cleaned the three buildings of the medical park on the ten-to-six shift, and Thea came along because there was nobody at home to come along for, and she did homework in the breakroom until eleven and then she got bored. She'd skated at this rink since she was six. Group lessons, then private, then a coach in the city with a real jump program, and then her father left and the private ice went to eighty-five dollars an hour and that was the end of the arithmetic.

"I'm not stealing," she said. "Nobody's using it. It's just sitting there being perfect."

"That's the point of it."

"That's a stupid point."

I sat down on the bench with the gate open and my elbows on my knees, and I surprised myself considerably by telling her about Nan.

My wife ran the skate counter at this building for twenty-two years. Sharpened blades, matched kids to rentals by eyeballing their feet, kept a tin of butterscotch under the register for criers. She died three winters ago in March, and since then I have made this sheet of ice every single night it was needed and a few nights it wasn't. Perfect. Blank. Twelve thousand square feet of the only thing in my life that still stays exactly the way I leave it.

Thea listened with her chin on her knees.

"She'd have hated what I've turned it into," I said. "She used to stand right here and say, Walter, ice isn't finished till somebody ruins it. Drove me up a wall."

"She was right."

"She generally was. It didn't improve her."

Thea laughed — one startled honk — and then put her hand over her mouth like she'd broken something.

Here's what we worked out, because I am not a soft man but I am not an idiot either.

Dee got told the truth, or a serviceable ninety percent of it, and being Dee she found a line item nobody was using and signed Thea up as a volunteer rink monitor: forty minutes of ice, three nights a week, in exchange for helping me walk the boards and chase pucks out of the gutters. The insurance people were satisfied. The loading bay door got a new strike plate, finally, and Thea got a key on a blue fob and the small dignity of using it.

And I moved my flood. I run the machine at two now instead of midnight, slow lap, outside in, one hundred and forty degrees, so that when she comes through the gate the sheet is twenty minutes old and still setting up soft, which is the best ice there is and I'd been wasting it on nobody for three years.

The first night of the new arrangement I brought the overheads all the way up, full blaze, the way we light it for tournaments, and she stood at the gate blinking like something had gone wrong.

"That's a lot of light," she said.

"You've been skating by a vending machine."

She stepped out. Under her blades the fresh surface made that sound — that first clean bite, like a knife going into an apple — and I felt it in my back teeth the way I always do, nineteen years, and for once I didn't wince.

"Go on," I told her. "Ruin it."