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Just before practice, coach lost it on Booch.

I was standing at center ice, smacking lappers against the box. The pucks cracked when they hit the boards. My new teammates scraped in lazy circles around the rink. They checked their reflections in the glass and brushed their hair back under their helmets.

Coach was running Booch through goalie warm ups. He slapped his stick on the ice and yelled “Up! Down! Up! Down! Kick left! Kick Left! Up! Up! Our first game is in four days! Can you get up?”

Booch stayed down. He dropped his stick on the ice, shook off his waffle and pulled on the side of his leg pad.

“I think I broke another strap,” he said. “These pads are all screwed up.”

“You’re all screwed up!” Coach yelled. “Get in the damn goal.”

Booch’s leg pads were a problem. He had outgrown his old ones. We drove to Southboro with my mom to buy him a used pair. They were too big; stitches were popping out of the sides. The straps kept breaking. I helped him patch them together with duct tape.

Coach blew his whistle. “Two lines!” He yelled. We massed in two rows at the blue line. Booch turned to face the first battery of warm up shots. Richardson shot first. He launched the puck at Booch’s neck. Booch flopped backward and slammed onto the ice. “Up! Up!” Coach yelled. Richardson made a face to his laughing friends, then took his place in line behind me.

“Nice lapper, Dickie,” I said to him.

“The name is Richardson,” he said. He talked through his nose. He was a full head taller than me; a black mane flowed out of the back of his helmet. “You might want to keep it down, Dickie” I said. I spat on the ice in front of him. I stood up as tall as I could. “Booch’s a friend of mine.”

“He sucks,” Richardson shrugged. “Screw you, townie, and your townie friend.”

“Yeah, I might,” I said.

“Besides, coach called my friend in. Josh Fenton. He played goal with me at Manchester last year. He’s coming to practice tomorrow. So you’re friend Boochie’s headed for the Benchie.”

It was my turn to shoot. I let off a lapper at half-speed. It hit Booch’s leg with a dull thud and skittered harmlessly into the corner.

From as long as I could remember it was me, Booch and Dingy playing under the shadow of the Bruins. We played squirts together, then pee wee, then bantam. Booch’s dad Mister Bouche was the one who drove us to away games and tournaments. He found us used gear when we outgrew our gloves and skates. If he was working when we played, he slipped out to watch us for a few minutes. Somewhere in the second or third period we’d look up and see Mr. Bouche standing in the back row of the stands, in his worksuit covered with sawdust. He was a huge man with a buzz cut and a big smile. He’d yell “C’mon Booch! C’mon Dingman!” His booming voice filled the quiet spaces of the rink, between the woops and the drop of the puck.

When we were 11 the Bruins won the cup. Mr. Bouche cleared out his garage and turned it into a mini Boston Garden. He painted white boards, a blue line and a red crease. A yellow Stanley Cup banner hung from the roof. We spent hours recreating the famous goal. Dingy was Bobby Orr, taking flight over the fallen goalie, stick up in the air; Booch was Glenn Hall, sprawled on the ice in defeat; I was Doug Harvey, just a step too late for the great one. After working it in slow motion we got down to drills: ten shot, pepper shot, dekes.

One afternoon Dingy bent his plastic street hockey stick a little too far. His slapshot cracked off one of Booch’s front teeth. All three of us yelled. Booch started crying. Blood spurted onto the garage floor. His dad rushed out through the kitchen door.

“What’s the matter with you!” he said to his son.

“He knocked out my toof!” Booch yelled.

“Jesus Christ.” Mr. Bouche reached one of his huge hands into his own mouth. He pulled a set of dentures out. He grinned; there was a black hole where his front teeth used to be. Booch stopped crying. “Welcome to the team,” Mr. Bouche said.

Our fourteen and under team made it to the state semifinals. We lost to Manchester. Mr. Bouche drove us home that night. He dropped Dingy off at his house. Booch was asleep next to his dad. I leaned against the back of the front seat, trying to listen to the radio. The Bruins were getting beaten up by the Black Hawks. Orr was out with his bum knee again.

“You played real good today,” Mr. Bouche said to me.

“Dingy got both goals. Booch made some great saves.”

“Yeah but you know something?” Mister Bouche said. He popped open another can of beer. The sweet smell filled the car. “Dingy and Booch, they get the limelight. But you’re a real digger.”

“A digger?”

“Yeah, you’re always in the corners digging, kicking. You’re hard headed. You know what I think? I think you’re the one that’s gonna end up on the Bruins.”

“Me and Booch and Dingy,” I said. “We’re all gonna play for the Bruins.”

“Well, first you gotta make the sixteen and under team next year,” he said.

The highway’s two yellow lines drifted in the headlights from the left to the center of the windshield. Mr. Bouche eased the car back into the right lane. “It’s real competitive at that level. They bring in kids from up and down the shore, like those kids you played tonight. You got to get invited, you got to try out, you gotta work hard to make the sixteens first. Then we’ll see about the Bruins.”

Two weeks later, my mom shook me awake at dawn. I have some bad news, she said. Mister Bouche died last night. He fell asleep at the wheel driving home on the turnpike. Dingy and I sat behind the Bouche’s at the funeral, in a row of kids, all wearing our team jackets. A man got up and spoke. I’d never seen him before. He talked about Mr. Bouche, and then he turned to us. “You kids face a lot of difficult decisions at your age. When you need to make those decisions, I want you to think of Mr. Bouche and what he would have done. That will be the right thing to do.”

Nine months later, I got the letter invitation to try out for the sixteen and under team. Booch got one too. Dingy was long gone; his family had split up and he moved to Providence. Nobody’d heard from him since.

The day after my run-in with Richardson I was working on crossovers when the new goalie, Fenton, stepped onto the ice. His equipment was all brand new—white Bauers, cooper waffle and glove, spotless white tape around a brand new Sherwood. A blue and gold sunburst decorated his custom Higgins mask. He skated straight to the crease and started digging in at the net.

I skated for Booch, who sat on one knee on the ice, rewrapping a piece of tape under his skate. “What’s up Booch,” I asked.

“Hey,” he said. He gave up on the tape and started packing some stuffing back into the side of his other pad.

Coach blew the whistle two times fast.

“You better get in goal, Booch,” I said. “You know how coach is.”

“Yeah,” Booch said. I skated to my place in line. The new kid stayed in the net. I watched him move effortlessly, floating from one side of the net to the other, deflecting pucks away with little effort. His mother stood in the stands, clapping at each save. I put my first lapper in the upper left corner; at the last second he snapped his glove on it; then flipped the puck harmlessly away. Booch stood in the corner, chasing down the loose pucks and flicking them back out to the shooters.

As good as Fenton was, we lost our first five games. Near the end of the sixth I was on the bench, spitting up bubbles of blood. The bubbles made a series of pink rings on my white sleeve. I scraped a finger full of ice from my skate and held it up to my lip. I looked up and thought I saw Dingy in the stands. He was wearing an army coat. I’d never seen him in the winter without a team jacket. He had a big helmet of hair stuffed up under a Red Sox cap. He raised two fingers at me, like he was Christ. It was Dingy all right.

After the game, I stepped onto the carpet leading from the ice up to the dressing room. A gauntlet of parents waited for their kids. One of the fathers said ‘Chin up boys! Good show.’ At the end of the line Dingy held up an open hand. I smacked it with my glove. “Dingy!’ I said. “What the hell are you doing.”

“Visiting my Dad,” he said. His eyes moved slowly down my arm, past the blue and gold elbow stripes, to the blood on my shirt. “You guys got wooped.”

“We suck,” I said. “We’re 0 and 6.”

Dingy looked out to the ice, where Booch was skating around aimlessly. “Old Booch’s riding the bench huh?”

“Yeah, they got some dick from Manchester playing goal. They’re all dicks.”

“Booch was better than that guy. He finally lost it, huh.”

“He didn’t lose it,” I said. “They just haven’t given him a chance.”

Booch came up the ramp. “Hey Booch!”

“Hey Dingy,” Booch said.

“My mom’s picking us up in an hour,” I said. “You wanna hang out? Play a round of ten shot?”

“That all you ever think about? Smacking pucks around? Jesus.”

When Booch and I got our gear off, we found Dingy in the parking lot, leaning on a car, smoking a cigarette.

“You see some of the cars these kid’s parents drive? Jesus,” Dingy said.

I watched him take a drag. “Those things will cut your wind.”

“I don’t need my wind. Get off.”

“I might.”

Booch sat down on his bag next to us. He watched the last of the other kids climb into their cars with their fathers. I pulled my stick out, picked up one of the hundreds of balls of tape that littered the pavement, and zipped it at his head. “Cut it out,” he said.

I picked up another and aimed it at Dingy. “C’mon,” I said. I zipped it at his ear.

“Do you have a jock on your head? Are you a jockhead?” He asked me.

“I’m just kidding around,” I said. “What do you want to do?”

“If I had a doob I’d smoke it right here,” he said.

“How’s Providence?” Booch asked.

“It’s just one big party, man. You gotta come down and party with me, Booch.”

“You playing this year?” I asked him.

“You are a jockhead,” Dingy said. “I’m done with hockey.” He flicked his cigarette butt with his thumb and finger at a passing car. “I’ve moved on to the big leagues.”

A week later, on the road, we were down four to one early in the third period. A big kid from the other team took two steps from the blue line and launched a lapper at Fenton’s chest. A crack like a gunshot echoed through the rink. Fenton took four wild steps out of the crease. He dropped his gloves and ripped at his chest protector. He crumpled to the ice. His mother screamed. Coaches and referees rushed to get him up and off the ice, toward the locker room. Walking across the ice back toward the bench, coach waved a finger at Booch.

“Who, me?” Booch said.

“You! Get in there,” coach yelled.

Booch climbed over the boards. My line got on the ice with him. As he took his place in the crease, I smacked his pads with my stick.

“C’mon Booch,” I said. “You can do it.”

Booch looked up to the stands. He took a deep breath. “Yeah,” he said. I took my position in the slot. The puck dropped. Ice sprayed in all directions. The big kid picked up the puck at the point and fired a low, hard shot. Booch kicked it out, sprawled on the ice. Another kid picked up the rebound and backhanded the puck up high. Booch smacked it into the air with his wrist, palmed it and covered up. The kid poked his stick at Booch’s glove. I ran into him and gave him a leather sandwich.

“Break it up boys,” the ref yelled, blowing his whistle sharply. I pulled my glove out of the kid’s face and said: “don’t mess with my goalie.”

That night I called Dingy to tell him about Booch.

“He stopped 18 shots. Eighteen shots. They couldn’t stuff it past him. He was flopping all over the place. Coach kept yelling ‘get, up, get up! But he just sprawled over knocking down every shot, two, three in a row. Couldn’t believe it. Booch was back.”

“Yeah,” Dingy said. Loud music blared in the background.

“It was just like old times.”

“Old times, huh.”

“And the other guy’s out for a while,” I said. “Cracked ribs. So Booch is starting Saturday. At home. Against Weymouth. They’re undefeated.”

“The Boochman.” Dingy giggled.

“Can you come up? Are you doing anything?”

Dingy sniffed. “I got this party I was gonna go to.”

“C’mon, do it for Booch. We’ll get him fired up. Pepper him up at the garden.”

“Nah.”

“C’mon Dingy, you gotta come up. Just this once. Come up Friday night. We gotta help Booch. Do it for Booch.”

“All right, all right,” Dingy said. “I’ll see what I can do. I gotta go, jockman.”

That Friday night I hurried home, wolfed down dinner, grabbed my street stick from the barrel in the garage and rushed to the Bouche’s house. I walked the same route I’d walked for years, alongside the graveyard, past the church where they had Mister Bouche’s funeral. As I walked past the church snow started falling. Things were coming around, I thought. Booch was back in goal; Dingy was back in town. We were going to hang out in the garden, drink cokes and laugh. We were going to pepper Booch, shoot at him for an hour, get him all worked up for tomorrow’s game. Booch was going to be the hero again.

When I got to the Bouche’s driveway I heard something crash in the garage. Dingy’s laughter burst through the door. It was wild, out of control. I walked through the door and into a cloud of sour smoke. The street hockey goal and Booch’s stick lay shattered at one end. Dingy was spray painting something on the Stanley Cup banner. Booch was lying in the middle of the floor gasping. His shirt was off. Beer cans littered the floor. A long blue glass pipe stood in the center of the face off circle.

“Booch,” I said, standing over him, “what’s going on?”

He blinked up at me. “I see hundreds of tiny spackles,” he said. “Why do I see hundreds of tiny spackles?”

Dingy finished spray painting the words ‘dream on’ across the banner. He turned to see me standing over Booch. “Jockman,” he said. “The jockoe. C’mon, do a hit with my friend and me.”

“Booch, wake up, c’mon,” I said, ignoring Dingy staggering toward me. I grabbed Booch’s limp arm and tried to pull him up. I felt tears welling up in my eyes. “This is your big chance, Booch. We got Weymouth tomorrow.”

Dingy got right in my face. “You know what your problem is?” He asked me. I punched him in the stomach. He’d always been bigger and stronger than me, but he crumpled without a sound. He lay on the floor next to Booch, giggling and crying at the same time. Booch lay still, staring at the roof. I turned and left them there.

It was freezing in the morning; at noon I hurried to the rink. I was always the first one into the dressing room. But that morning Booch got there before me. He was sitting in the corner, white-faced. His hands were shaking so badly that he couldn’t tape his skates. He smelled like he’d just vomited. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

“It’s okay, Booch,” I said. I got down and helped him strap his pads on. “You’ll be okay. We’ll get out there and skate it off in the warm ups.”

On the ice I could see his legs shaking. He fell down twice during warm up shots and couldn’t keep his stick down. The buzzer echoed through the rink to start the game. Booch leaned up against the crossbar; he looked like he was going to get sick again. Then he got into position.

Soon after the first face off, Weymouth dropped the puck into our zone. Coach screamed at Booch to go get it. He stumbled in the corner and tripped. One of the Weymouth kids beat him to the puck and flipped it to a teammate in front of the net. A minute later, another kid wound up and shot from center ice. Booch swiped at it with his stick and missed; it clanged into the back of the net. When my line got on the ice, I skated over to

him. “It’s okay Booch,” I said. “Just keep your stick on the ice.” He looked down at his feet. On my shift I got knocked over trying to dig the puck out of our corner. Somebody banged my head hard against the glass. The rink started spinning. I lost track of the puck. One of their kids picked it up at the point and fired it at Booch. After the clang the rink went silent. Weymouth players started shooting from all directions. Four nothing, five nothing. The fans started screaming at Booch. “Wake up! Come on!” The kid who scored their sixth goal, 11 minutes into the first period, said something to Booch and laughed. He had the same long hair as Richardson. Coach called a timeout. He pointed to the new back up goalie, a small guy called up from the fourteens as an emergency back-up, to get into the goal. Booch skated back to the bench and climbed over the rail. He took one more look up into the stands, then lowered his head and started fidgeting with his pads.

My line got back onto the ice. The kid who taunted Booch was across from me. When I got the puck I dumped it slowly into the corner past him. When he turned his back I made a run for him. When I hit him he lost his footing; he slammed into the boards face-first and crumpled to the ice. The whistle blew. Players from both teams stopped and stared at me. The ref signaled me into the penalty box; ten-minute major misconduct. I skated by coach but he said nothing; didn’t look at me or yell at me or nothing. When the buzzer sounded and the period ended, I walked up the ramp to the dressing room. A group of parents from the other team yelled at me. “That was a cheap shot!” One said. “Chicken shit!” yelled another.

Booch came into the dressing room and sat down across from me. He kept his mask on. Richardson entered behind him. “You suck!” he yelled, standing over Booch.

“You suck!” I said, standing up to face him.

“Yeah, well, you suck worse,” Richardson said, turning back to his friends.

I was about to go after him when coach came in. He glared around the room at all of us. Then he spoke. “Apparently some people came to the rink today who didn’t want to play.” He paused, like he always did, giving it time to sink in. “Well, we got two more periods to get some of our self-respect back. So when we go out there for the second period, why don’t those of us who don’t want to play anymore just stay here, pack your bags, and go home. Because I only want players who want to play.” He turned and walked out of the room. We sat in silence until the zamboni left the ice. Richardson said ‘c’mon, let’s go.’ The team followed him. The new goalie was the last to walk out.

Booch didn’t move an inch; just sat staring blankly at the plywood in front of him. We sat across from each other until we heard the buzzer echo through the rink, starting a new period. Then we took our skates off together.

Me and Booch walked home in silence, past the graves and the church. I dropped him off in front of his house. Then I walked back to the church. I looked out at the rows of crosses, where Mister Bouche was buried, and hundreds of Mister Bouches were buried in long rows all around him. I lay my stick and my bag down gently, and I sat down on the church steps. I put my face in my hands, and I tried to think real hard of what to do next.

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