Excerpt
Chapter One
SLOANE
The ice is eighteen degrees at 5:58 in the morning, which is two degrees warmer than I want and one degree colder than yesterday, so I’ll take it.
It’s Thursday, which means the navy truck won’t come. That’s the second thing I think every morning, after the slab temperature. I’ve been trying since March to make it stop being the second thing.
I read the slab probe with my flashlight in my teeth. Eighteen point one. The compressor behind the warming hut is making the sound it makes when it’s fine, a low steady grumble like a large dog that has decided not to get up. I write the numbers on the clipboard that hangs from a nail on the pavilion post, in pencil, because pen freezes. Then I turn off the flashlight and stand at the edge of my ice in the dark and let my eyes adjust: the steel roof first, then the posts and the scuffed white boards, then the ice itself, a flat gray sheet the size of a tennis court, holding what light there is.
This is my favorite minute of the day. I keep that to myself, because said out loud it would sound like a greeting card. It’s the minute when I can’t see anything yet and I know exactly where everything is.
You check ice the way you’d read a page: left to right, top to bottom, in lanes. You’re looking for cracks, soft spots, and anything that wasn’t there yesterday. I walk it in six lanes, heel to toe, with the flashlight pointed low so it throws every flaw into shadow. There’s a hairline along the north boards where the slab meets the dasher, which I’ve been watching like a mole since the ice went in. There’s a leaf. There’s a small dark shape near center that turns out, when I crouch, to be a moth that made a very poor decision at some point in the night.
I put the ice in on the twenty-sixth of September, nine days ago, which is earlier than anybody sensible puts ice in anywhere south of Kansas City. We’ve had highs of eighty-three since. The pavilion roof keeps the sun off, and the chiller I bought with a small-business loan when I was twenty-four does the rest, and some nights I lie awake doing the math on the electric bill and decide not to finish it. Every October I don’t expect it to hold, and every October it holds. I’m not a sentimental person, but I’m not made of stone either.
I write 18.1 / hairline N boards unchanged / moth on the clipboard, put the moth in my pocket, and go get the hose.
