Dewey Marchon faced a very black and white decision: bloodshed or a continued non-confrontational life of silent humiliation and disappointment. He leaned heavily toward the former, but the latter had so thoroughly ingrained in him an indecisive ambivalence that his wife, Karrie, had taken to occasionally calling him a pussy, a habit that started at dinner on their first date when a sharply dressed but obviously bored man was being loudly berated by his overserved date for buying her the platinum Audi instead of the rose gold, and Dewey flagged down the waiter for the check.

“You’re not going to do something!?” Karrie hissed.

“I am. We’re getting out of here.”

“Oh my god. Tell her to knock it off,” she leaned at him, gripping the table. “What an entitled little bitch. She’s embarrassing him!”

As they made their exit, his wife put her hand on the man’s shoulder, giving him her best “I’m so sorry” pout. Between her body, deep hazel eyes, and cookie-cutter Smith College looks, the man was struck dumb and the explosive response from his date could be heard even after Dewey and Karrie were outside. In the car, she said, “I didn’t realize you were such a pussy,” and didn’t talk to him the rest of the drive to deposit her at her apartment.

Given the auspicious start, he was floored when she texted the next day asking when she was going to see him again. Dewey knew she was aware of his Tufts pedigree and family money. Smith girls are like divining rods for wealth. Even so, in that moment he knew he was sunk. He also knew his parents, especially his mother, also a Smith girl, would be giddy with their son’s brilliant luck.

After that evening and into their marriage, anytime Dewey didn’t assert himself in a manner manly enough for his wife’s taste, even letting someone pull out of a grocery store parking lot in front of him, he could expect the passive-aggressive assessment as sure as death and taxes afterward.

Dewey wasn’t altogether unfamiliar with being demeaned in such a manner, though. From a very young age, his father, Jake Marchon, referred to his only son as “the runt of the litter” around other parents at youth sports events and prefaced him as having “potential potential” anytime they hosted Jake’s clients and their wives for barbecues at their home.

After a short and unremarkable stint at JP Morgan out of college, Dewey joined his father in western New York as a marginally successful independent money manager. His success was due in large part to his father’s client list, built over his thirty-year career. Even though Dewey would inherit his clients, Jake believed making Dewey sweat a little for his commissions now would wake some sort of hunger or hustle in him.

The fact that clients had any trust in him whatsoever was based on his father’s bullish reputation for making them an inordinate amount of money and the fact that Jake was able to point to his son’s national championship ring, “just like his old man,” as proof of his earlier potential potential prediction.

The truth of the matter was, while his father was a running back for a crushing Nebraska Cornhusker football team in the 90s, Dewey was the backup goalie for the Tufts University men’s lacrosse team and had played enough minutes during the season when they were blowing out opponents to earn a ring when they beat Lynchburg his senior year for the Division 3 crown.

Lacrosse was what his father called “a niche sport,” unlike the hard-nosed gridiron of his Omaha youth. Having settled in western New York, the birthplace and perpetual hotbed of this Native American-created game called lacrosse, rivaling his beloved football, Jake resigned himself to the presence of lacrosse sticks, hard rubber balls, and broken windows on the side of the garage from wayward shots on the regulation goal in the backyard. After Dewey gravitated toward goalie, arguably the least active position on the field, occupying a 6-foot diameter circle around the goal, compared to the constant movement afforded the rest of the players that roamed the 120-yard turf field, his father would return home with his son visibly exasperated after games, and mutter to his wife, “At least there’s hitting.”

Another truth was, as much as Jake wished his son were more like him, Dewey wished it more, even at 31 years old. All his life, no matter how hard he tried, he wrestled with figuring out how to step out of the shadow of his father’s disappointment and into the sunlight of beaming fatherly pride.

Then Torin Foster showed up and blew on a heretofore nonexistent ember of goddamit, I’ve had enough that’d been tucked in some previously unexpressed base pair of inherited paternal DNA. Dewey suddenly looked at risk-reward in an entirely foreign, almost euphoric way. Trusting himself to actually commit was now the challenge at hand.

***

In addition to landing a gig at JP Morgan after graduation, thanks to a good word from his father, Dewey also went in a late round of the National Indoor Lacrosse League draft as a goalie for a professional lacrosse team in Buffalo. The call from the coach, Paul Jacobs, was as much a surprise to Dewey as it was to his parents, since he didn’t know his name was even on a list of possible draftees.

For ten seasons, Dewey split starting duties with a revolving door of other goalies. Over those seasons, the team stayed solidly middle of the pack. Aside from one angry Canadian who looked like he was chiseled from granite and lived for hitting people hard enough to part them from their helmets, they had a weak defense that left their goalies shellshocked from a near constant barrage of shots. The offense had talent but no finisher. In a perfect storm of injuries and team morale that was no longer circling the drain but had raced from the toilet bowl altogether, they finished at the bottom of the league two seasons earlier.

Attendance at home games had dropped below the numbers high school volleyball drew to local gymnasiums and consisted largely of fans of the opposing team. Even though she had stopped attending after his first season, Karrie regularly reinforced her unvarnished vaginal-focused opinion when her husband came home with angry purple welts on his body from shots landing between his abundant pads.

“How can you just stand there and let people chuck the ball at you like that?” Further screwing her face as though she’d opened an overly ripe garbage can, “I mean, if you grew a fucking pair and belted someone with that giant stick, they might think twice.”

Because of their last-place finish that season, they struck gold in the draft with a second anchor defenseman, a couple fast transition guys, and a kid who could not be kept from scoring. They also picked up another goalie, Torin Foster, who was fresh off a national title at Virginia and was known for throttling attackmen who camped out in front of his cage. A style that Dewey had been coached against from his first time putting on an oversized chest protector and picking up a goalie stick as a kid. He always stayed in the cage and let the game come to him.

Dewey was initially happy to see that a third body would be joining the sacrificial ranks in the net, but it became evident during the first pre-season practice that was not the intent of management, the coaches, and, least of all, Foster.

They finished the season with two losses — one mid-season and one in the NILL championship game — both against Toronto, the team that had won the title the last three years behind Shep Thompson, a 6-foot five-inch, 240-pound Six Nations legend who moved like water and was known as The Sniper for his scoring ability and also his game day ritual of unleashing his first shot directly at the goalie’s head. Something Dewey had been the recipient of at least twice every season. The shot was a brutally effective tactic for, as Thompson once put it in a post-game interview, “getting in their head.” Thompson tallied eleven goals in their first meeting but was held to two in the championship. Foster seemed to have his number.

Even with falling short of the title, it was a comeback story for the ages. Foster almost single-handedly electrified the team and the crowd. He made mind-blowing saves, sent a raft of opponents to the locker room for concussion assessments, broken bones, and torn ligaments, and even scored six goals on the season.

Foster jerseys, home and away, sold out as fast as seats in the arena. Pre-game tailgating became a thing for the first time ever. A rowdy contingent of several hundred parents and their kids started traveling to away games in support of their team. Sports segments on the news were dominated by locker room interviews with Foster or of him visiting a local youth team’s practice. A local car dealership, a pizza shop chain, and a personal injury attorney paid big money to have him star in their commercials.

Dewey had never seen anything like it, and he never saw the floor except from the bench. A position he brought deep experience to, but found himself tolerating less and less. He stewed on this newfound angst with growing intensity as the off-season dragged on through summer and fall, owing to the fact that Foster added hawking for a local bank to his repertoire as well. “The only guy better than checking and saving is Torin Foster!” the morning host punned during a commercial break from their sports talk radio show.

Two weeks before the official start of pre-season workouts, coach Jacobs called Dewey to his office at the arena. The team had released the other backup goalie.

“Foster’s caught fire.” His coach laughed, took off his ball cap, and scratched his head. “Don’t worry, though. You’re staying on.” He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “There’ll be a lot of games that aren’t close this year.”

Something snapped in Dewey. He didn’t think he reacted outwardly, but it was evident enough that his coach cocked his head and asked, “You OK, pal?”

Anger welled in Dewey as he thought darkly to himself, “If I had the team in front of me that we have now over the last nine fucking years, you asshole, I’d be as hot as that cocksucker and wouldn’t have had the hell pounded out of me every week.”

“Yep. When do we hit the turf?” was the extent of his response.

***

Dewey sat on a bench in front of Foster’s locker with Foster’s helmet upside down between his knees. A towel lay spread under his feet. He ground the triangular file against the horizontal and vertical intersections of the facemask on the inside. Their cages were bright silver, so Dewey knew the grooves he was making wouldn’t be readily seen.

The sound produced a high-pitched itching sound that was dampened by the wood locker bays and rubberized flooring but reverberated in the shower area off the other end of the room. No one would be in the practice facility locker room for at least another half hour, and the cleaning crew made their pass long after everyone had left for the night. He finished his task, rolled up the shavings in the towel, and stuck it in his gear duffel.

Dewey rubbed his fingers over the grooves, which weren’t very deep, certainly not yet deep enough to undermine the strength of the facemask, and hung the helmet back in its hook. “Patience,” he said to himself, trying to calm the roiling nerves in his chest. He walked to his locker bay on the other side of the room and started laying out his gear for practice.

***

They were 4 – 0 heading into their first meeting with Toronto and the inevitability of Thompson. Neither team had dropped a game to that point, and the tidal wave of fan support for Foster had grown to almost tsunamic proportions. Dewey had carried out three more pre-practice acts of sabotage by the time they took the floor for one final half-speed mid-week practice in preparation for the weekend game.

Dewey’s scheme, in his mind, was foolproof. He knew Thompson would fire his usual headshot at Foster. The weakened crossbars would cave when the shot found its mark and probably mean a few stitches and a blow to his confidence that would impact his game, which would open the door for Dewey to step in and finally get the due he felt deserved — including a championship and, more importantly, his father’s approval.

For weeks, Dewey had been increasingly high on criminal adrenaline and was much more aggressive in the goal during practice than he’d ever been, at times drawing the ire of teammates he’d blindside while in front of the goal.

“What the fuck, Marchon?!” they’d say, getting up from the turf. “You want your ass beat?”

Coach Jacobs would laugh and shake his head to his assistant coaches. “Looks like Foster’s rubbing off on him.”

Toward the end of practice during a controlled scrimmage, Dewey rushed from the crease into a loose ball scrum and was immediately hit by one of his teammates, completely buckling his knee in a direction the joint was not made for. He went down in a scream of pain that sounded more animal than human. “You like that?” came from somewhere out of the stars that blanked his sight.

When Dewey came to in the emergency room, Foster was sitting in the chair next to the bed scrolling through social media.

“What happened?” Dewey croaked.

Foster looked up, “There he is. You tore up your knee pretty good. You’ve been out for a few hours.”

Dewey realized this was the first time he and Foster had actually spoken directly with each other, other than “Good work” when the team bumped fists with each other after practices or games for a season and a half. He was surprised at how empathetic his voice sounded. Not a trace of cockiness or dude or bro that seemed to be a requisite part of the vernacular of guys his age.

“How long have you been here?” The thinnest glint of guilt pinged Dewey’s stomach.

“Not sure. A while.” Foster shifted in the chair as though he was trying to find a comfortable position, but couldn’t. “I wanted to make sure you were ok.”

The heart rate monitor’s steady beep, low hum of the ventilation, and quiet talk from the nurses’ station on the other side of the curtain were the only sounds in the seemingly empty ER. Dewey wasn’t sure if he should say thanks or feign toughness in the face of his abundantly immobilized leg.

“Actually, I’m not doing so hot,” Foster exhaled. “I’m worried about the game.”

“Worried?” Like, how?”

“I play the way I play because I know you’re there if I take a chance and things go sideways.” Foster leaned forward on his knees, wringing his hands. “I watched you play once. A bunch of years ago, when our club team came to a game. I was playing goalie, but I was always afraid of hard shots. You guys got beat up, but you never flinched. I didn’t want to flinch anymore either.” Foster sat back in the chair and put his hands in his lap. “I’m worried I’m gonna flinch Saturday.”

The glint of guilt turned into a knot and started to rise to Dewey’s throat. His heartbeat thuddingly filled his ears, and the pace of the beep from the machine reacted accordingly. His wife’s disdain-filled face appeared. Pussy. Then his father’s, full of abject disappointment.

“Nah, I’m sure you’ll crush it like you always do. You’re Torin Foster.” Dewey felt like he was going to puke and rang for the nurse.