AFTER
Edge Work
Marek POV
This scene takes place after the final book of Blood Futures.
It was the ninth Saturday of the children's season, in a year I was not allowed to skate, and there were eleven pairs of skates on my bench, and none of them were mine.
A body my size learns young what everything costs to move. Two hundred and forty pounds on a stool built for a smaller man. A left knee that talks in the cold and had been talking since the stairs. The radiator had not won its argument with the window that morning, so I put on a second shirt instead of asking it to.
Weight, and cold, and eleven pairs of steel. That is how a Saturday adds up when there is no game at the end of it.
The room was as I keep it. One chair, a bare floor with a bar of grey lying across it from the glass, the bench under the window with the jig clamped to it where another man would keep his mail. The stone. The small bottle of oil. The rag, black for years and blacker now.
Everything squared, nothing extra. I have never owned a thing I could not carry down that stair in one trip, and the stair smells of cold and old paint, and I have climbed it a long time without thinking of it as mine.
The skates were.
They come in a box. Woody sends them over the bridge, and there is no name written anywhere on the outside of it, not theirs and not mine, and he has never asked me a word about that. That is the whole of his part in it. This box had eleven pairs and a coil of laces I had not asked for, because he had looked at the last lot and seen what I did not get to.
I laid them out by size, smallest at my left hand. That is how I read them.
Other men read a roster. I read a shelf of steel, and it tells me what is coming. The small ones go dull fast and go dull even, because a child skates flat and falls honestly. The bigger ones come back with one edge gone and the other barely touched, which means a kid has started turning hard on one foot and nobody has told him yet that he is doing it. You can see a season of somebody's ankles in a blade. The steel says it. Nobody has to.
There were no names on that box. I knew eleven sets of ankles by what they had done to the steel, and nothing else about any of them, and it was enough to do the work with.
The smallest pair would have fit a six-year-old.
I set one of them in the jig and it looked like a joke in my hand, and I stopped for a second, the way you stop when a thing is that small. Then I ran the stone.
My hands did the work and nobody had bought them.
That is a loud fact and I will say it once, plainly. For thirteen years, every ordered thing these hands did was paid for before they did it — a rider, a schedule, an incentive with a number beside it, and a body that had learned at sixteen to do what paper said.
Then last spring I put them down on live ice in front of sixteen thousand people. The year came later. I put every ordered fight under my own name first and handed the shelf of it over before anyone could hand it over for me, and the panel ruled on what I had signed. I received the year. It was fair.
Nine Saturdays into a season I could not play, my hands were doing the most careful work of my life, and there was no invoice anywhere in the world with that morning on it.
I used to keep a sentence for this, about what they rented and what they never touched. I did not say it that morning. I have not said it in months. It was built to hold two things apart, and there is nothing left standing on the other side of it, so it has gone quiet and I have let it.
She was on the floor with her back against the radiator, which is the warmest place in that room and the one she chooses.
Her coat was on the chair, squared, shoulders even, the way she sets everything down. Her pen was on the bench by my elbow — the chewed one, the timecode one, still chewed flat, though the wall of angles it was chewed in front of is gone and what she reads now she reads for herself.
She had come at eight with two coffees and had not said much. She drank hers. Mine went cold at my hand the way it always does, and she clocked that and said nothing about it either.
She was not measuring. I have watched her take a room from a doorway before she had her coat off. That morning she sat on my floor with her hands around a paper cup and let the light be light.
She still reads everything. She has stopped filing all of it.
Then two knuckles came down on the boards beside her hip. Twice.
I set the stone down and gave her two back on the bench, flat, and the room stayed exactly as quiet as it had been. We built that between us in a video room and have not had to explain it since. Two asks whether the line is open. Two says it is.
Then she asked out loud.
"Why the skates."
A dozen times in that room, near enough. She had looked at that rack on every one of them and kept her mouth shut about it. She had seen a child's skate in my bag in the worst week of the season and looked away from it on purpose — I knew she had. I know what she does with a thing she has decided is not hers. She had decided that about this and held it, and now she was asking.
So I told her. Not all of it; there is no all of it. There is only the true unit, and I gave her that.
"The kids they belong to. Nobody's rented them yet."
She did not say anything for a while, which is a thing I have always been able to sit inside with her.
"And a sharp edge," I said. "A dull one takes the fall for you. A sharp one lets you make the mistake yourself."
That was the whole of my answer, and it is the longest I have said about it to any person.
She got up off the floor and came to the bench and picked the smallest pair out of the row of the finished ones, and turned one of them over, and looked at the sole. She did not weigh it. She did not ask whose it was.
She held a six-year-old's skate in a cold room in Greenpoint and looked at it, and then she set it back exactly where it had been, square in the row. I watched her do that and said nothing about it either.
"Show me the stone," she said.
So I showed her the stone. The hollow was already cut on that pair; what was left was the finishing, which is done by hand and is the part that decides whether an edge comes out honest. I put the stone in her hand and put my hand over her hand, and we took one pass down the length of a blade together, slow, and I told her what to feel for, which is the place the steel stops arguing. That is the only way I know how to say it.
She has better hands than she thinks. She has spent her life reading things through glass at sixty frames a second, and it turns out the same eye works at the end of an arm.
She got it on the third pass, and I felt her feel it. She went still, the way she goes still when a thing finally resolves, and looked at the blade and not at me. "Oh," she said, once, quietly, which from her is a great deal.
We finished the last four pairs like that.
One thing more, and then I am done, because I do not build a thing out longer than it is.
For thirteen years I sorted my hands into two piles. The ordered work, which was bought. And everything else, which I kept in a room the paper could not reach and did not count as work at all. That was the arrangement. I made it at sixteen and I held it, and holding it was most of what I did with my life.
The stone had been on that bench the whole time. So had the rack. I had been doing this for a long while and filing it under nothing, because a thing nobody pays for did not look to me like a thing my hands were for.
They were never two piles. There was only ever one pair of hands, and the whole question was who was holding the other end.
Nine Saturdays. Eleven pairs. A woman on my floor with her back against a radiator that was losing, asking me a question she had been holding since the first time she stood in that room, and taking the answer without writing it down anywhere.
The box went back over the bridge that afternoon with every edge on it true.
End of Blood Futures
