PART 2 — THE RINK
Kevin kept his arm around his teenage sons shoulders and pulled a folded fire department report out of his coat pocket.
Two Februarys ago, he said to his brother Bradley, my boy was at a youth hockey tournament at the Roseville arena. An ammonia line burst under the building. That gas can kill you fast, and the alarms had not even gone off yet.
One man smelled it before the sirens. The Zamboni driver. He went room to room through the locker rooms and herded sixty kids out the doors and into the parking lot before a single alarm sounded. The report says if he had waited for the alarm, children would have died.
The man Bradley mocked for driving a big ice cleaner in circles had cleared sixty kids out of a gas leak before the alarms went off, and one of them was Bradleys own nephew.
My son was in that locker room, Kevin said quietly. He is standing here tonight because of the man you just called a joke. Then he looked at Eric.
Bradley, the corporate lawyer, could not meet his brothers eyes.
Eric just passed the lefse and said he only smelled something wrong and got the kids moving. But Kevin shook his head and said smelling it is one thing. Running into it sixty times is another.
My son makes the ice shiny, his son-in-law had joked. One February he smelled a gas leak and carried sixty children out before the alarms. That is the man on the Zamboni.