Zamboni Thoughts #8

An installment series about driving an impossible vehicle

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Zamboni Thoughts is a serial column that attempts to explain what it’s like to accept a part-time job at a small-town ice arena without thinking it through first. You can read previous columns here.

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It was starting to feel normal, working a shift twice a week at the Northfield Ice Arena after I’d finished my day job. Less something I dreaded and more just something I did.

At 4:30 PM, I’d shut my laptop. Then I’d sigh as if I were carrying the entire financial load of our household on my back (instead of heading to a part-time job I’d voluntarily chosen to do for fun) and zip myself into a bile-colored, hole-dotted sweatshirt dress. Then I’d top it with my ugliest and warmest winter coat and drive to the ice rink in the 5 PM January darkness of semi-rural Minnesota.

It had been weeks since my first shift with Charlie. It turned out that Charlie and I shared most – nay, all – of our evening shifts. This was ideal for me, since I loved working with him. Charlie was always the captain of our night, driving the Zamboni after each hockey game finished and shooing me off to take care of the locker rooms at random intervals, all with a calculated eye towards us leaving early each night. I was his sidekick, keeping the Zamboni topped off with hot and cold water and dumping out the snow it collected and hosing it down in the garage like a groom in a stable. I spent my time laughing at Charlie’s off-color dad jokes and feeding him deliberately leading questions designed to make him spill all the small-town tea he knew. He was, I was discovering, a bottomless well of local gossip.

Someone was winning a little too often at the townie bar’s Bingo Night? WELL! Charlie would pause in his hallway sweeping, leaning against the push broom. It was all rumored to be a set-up, see? The bingo cards were picked ahead of time, was his guess, and the balls? well, they hadn’t worked out for sure how the balls were being marked yet. The regulars were in an uproar, demanding the bingo caller step down, and that guy wasn’t going quietly, since he’d been calling bingo for years. His wife was claiming innocence, too, and that was pretty interesting, Charlie said, because her friends had noticed she had a brand-new Coach purse and was suddenly getting her nails done. Let’s just put two and two together, shall we??? and Charlie’s eyebrows would bounce suggestively at me.

“How could they mark the balls, though?” I’d ask, flopping my steaming mop onto the rubber floor of Locker Room #6.

“Krista, it’d be the simplest thing.”

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There were ostensibly six other part-time employees at the ice rink, and I’d never met any of them. As January went on, I kept seeing my name on the schedule next to the name “Cody.” Cody was Charlie’s son. But each time I was scheduled to work with Cody, it would be Charlie who was waiting for me in the back office; Charlie in the Zamboni garage, ready with another story about who’d bought the winning Minnesota Lotto ticket and who had actually claimed the ticket.

“You’ll never guess,” he’d say, his eyebrows about to lift right off his forehead. “Never would have believed it myself if I hadn’t heard it from a guy who works at the Dundas Kwik Trip.”

And so we’d work another shift together, even though we hadn’t been scheduled to. I didn’t get any kind of creeper vibes from Charlie, though. In fact, I had never had any man at any job treat me the way Charlie treated me – like I was, from day one, genderless and instantly accepted. I was just a laughing pair of hands to Charlie, and as long as those hands were helpful and hard-working, I don’t think he would have cared or even noticed if I was an alien with waving tentacles coming out of my head.

And so, when I came in at the end of the month and saw Cody’s name rubbed out on the whiteboard schedule again, with Charlie’s name markered in again, I became suspicious. Charlie was subbing in for Cody’s shifts with me on purpose.

But why?

In February, I got my answer.

It was snowing as I pulled up to the ice rink, and, judging from the number of cars in the parking lot, it was going to be a busy night. As the sliding glass doors shakily whooshed open to let me in, I saw two kids clopping around in their skates and hockey gear, trying to throw popcorn into each others’ mouths. Charlie’s going to kill you both, I thought, smiling at them. Wait’ll I tell him.

I barged into the back office, tossing down my coat. “Charlie, you should go out front, there’s two Peewees throwing– oh.”

Charlie wasn’t there. Instead, a skinny guy with a goatee and a dirty red baseball hat was sitting in the rolling office chair. He looked up from the ancient computer screen, where he’d been looking at used snowmobiles on Facebook Marketplace.

“Hi,” I said, confused. “I’m Krista.”

“I’m Cody,” the guy said. He had hard grey eyes.

He turned back to the computer.

“You’re Charlie’s son, right?”

“Yep.” He didn’t look at me.

“Charlie’s great, I work with him a lot.”

Cody didn’t answer. I looked at the Pepsi clock. It was 5:07. We were going to be together all night.

“So, um, is the Zam all full? Like should I go fill it?” I asked the side of Cody’s head.

The was a pause. Then Cody sighed audibly. Tearing his eyes away from a used Arctic Cat, he said, “I already filled it.”

“OK. Are you OK driving it after the Peewee game? I’m still pretty new.” This was both true and not-true. I was not exactly new; I’d been training, several days a week, to drive the Zamboni since October, but John, my Zamboni driving trainer, had not yet cleared me to drive during practices or games.

“Looks like I don’t have a choice.”

Oh. Cody was openly hostile.

“I guess… I guess I’ll go check the locker rooms,” I said.

No response. I grabbed a broom and a stand-up dustpan and headed down the hallway. Heavily padded, shrieking children pushed past me, their exasperated mothers chasing after them waving forgotten shin guards. What was I going to do? I couldn’t work with Cody. Everything was fine when it was Charlie sending me off on chore-errands, Charlie explaining what we’d do next, Charlie cracking me up by doing an impression of his sister-in-law controlling the order and manner in which her grandchildren opened their Christmas presents.

But Cody? Cody was a silent, scary prick.

…who didn’t do any cleaning, it turned out. All the sweeping, all the mopping that was supposed to happen during the shift and after everyone went home for the night? Cody simply did not do it. At all. He drove the Zamboni for each game and practice. Period. In between Zamboni resurfaces, he watched hockey on the TV mounted on the ceiling in the back office.

Please understand: Cody was watching hockey games on TV during the hockey games that were happening in real life, at an ice rink whose entrance was ten feet away, and he was checking hockey scores on the computer all night. He barely spoke to me, and he did not help me clean the locker rooms at the end of the shift.

“They’re fine,” he said, his eyes never leaving the TV screen, where an enormous man in a maple leaf-embroidered jersey was pushing another man’s face into a glass wall.

“Have you seen them? They’re not,” I said.

Cody glanced at me. “Go sweep them, then. I want to get out of here on time.”

By now I was belligerent. “Are you going to do the stands?”

“Yeah.” He swiveled on the rolling chair and checked the hockey scores.

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By the time we were ready to leave, I was seething. Cody had barely swept the stands – he’d just picked up the obvious garbage – and watching him “mop” the front entrance had made me feel murderous. He’d literally just waggled the mop in a single, squiggled wet line down the center of the room.

“We’re good,” he said. “You get the lights. I’ll lock up.”

“I’ve never done the lights before,” I said. The lights were controlled with a special key, because you cannot – as I was learning – trust packs of feral children who’ve been set loose in an ice arena. “Can you show me how?”

“I’ll just do it.”

Cody turned the key and punched some buttons, and the ice rink went suddenly black, the only light a red EXIT sign shining dully across Cody’s face. We walked out the front doors, and he locked up, with me wondering who would ever give him the key to anything.

“Well, see you around,” I said. “Maybe the next time we work together, I'll be helping you drive the Zam.”

Cody snorted. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

“What?”

“Yeah. You’ve only been training for a couple months. You’re not gonna be driving this season.”

“WHAT.”

“It takes forever to learn to drive the Zamboni. More than a season, that’s for sure. You’re not going to drive. I’m parked on the side. See you.”

Cody turned on his heel and walked away. Hands thrust in my pockets, I headed toward my car, digesting the one piece of information I’d gotten from my least-favorite ice arena coworker that evening.

It took more than a season to learn to drive the Zamboni.

They were never going to let me drive.