Us Against You Page 18

  “It’s . . . okay, she said . . . a clitoris can’t get this big, can it? I mean . . . how big can a clitoris get? Roughly?”

  The locker room is rocking with mocking laughter. At him, not with him. But Bobo is still smiling sheepishly, because sometimes any attention at all can still feel like validation.

  * * *

  Amat is squirming inside his gear as he looks at Bobo, already thinking that this is going to end badly.

  * * *

  When the practice begins, the players gather around the center circle at a very leisurely pace, demonstratively arrogant, to show Elisabeth Zackell that she’s not welcome. She doesn’t seem to pick up the hint at all, just comes out with six buckets under her arm.

  “What are you good at in Beartown?”

  When no one answers she shrugs her shoulders, “I’ve watched all your games from last season, so I know you’re completely useless at pretty much everything. It would really help me to know what you’re good at.”

  Someone tries to mumble a joke—“drinking and fucking”—but not even that raises more than a stifled grunt from the rest of the group. Then someone suddenly starts to laugh, not at the remark but at something happening on the ice behind Zackell. Bobo is skating out from the bench, over two hundred pounds of him, wearing a skirt he’s stolen from the figure skaters’ storeroom. He performs three pirouettes in a row and is met by applause and cheering from the older players at the center circle. Elisabeth Zackell lets him carry on, even though they’re no longer laughing at Bobo but at her.

  But when Bobo is halfway through his fourth pirouette the cheering suddenly stops, and before Bobo knows what’s hit him everything goes black. When he opens his eyes, he’s lying on the ice, he can hardly breathe. Elisabeth Zackell is leaning over him expressionlessly and says, “Why hasn’t anyone taught you to skate properly?”

  “Huh?”

  “You roll like a ferry, but I’ve seen you pull an ax from the hood of a car. If you could skate properly, I’d never be able to knock you down that easily. And then you wouldn’t be utterly worthless as a hockey player. So why hasn’t anyone ever taught you?”

  “I . . . I don’t know,” Bobo gasps, still lying on his back with his chest aching as if he’s been run over rather than tackled.

  “What are you good at in Beartown?” Zackell asks seriously.

  At first Bobo doesn’t answer, so Zackell gives up and skates back to the center circle. The young man slowly crawls up from the ice, pulls off the skirt, and says, in a voice that sounds both angry and humiliated, “Hard work! We’re good at hard work in Beartown. People can say a lot of shit about this town, but we know about HARD WORK!”

  The older players squirm. But no one protests. So Elisabeth Zackell says, “Okay! Then that’s how we win. We work harder than all the others. If you need to be sick, do it in these. I’ve heard the GM doesn’t like mess, so I daresay he doesn’t want vomit on the ice. I take it you’re familiar with how to skate lengths?”

  The players groan loudly, which she interprets as “yes.” She sets out the buckets she brought with her. The rest of the practice consists of excruciating fitness exercises. Skating at top speed between the boards, then darting sideways, wrestling, work, work, work. Not a single bucket is empty by the time they’re done. And the only player still standing at the end is Amat.

  At first the older players try to stop him, not obviously but by little tricks that look like accidents: a sharp elbow in the corner, pulling his jersey when he’s about to take off, a discreet skate nudging his to make him lose his balance. Most of the players on the ice are fifty or sixty pounds heavier than Amat, so just leaning on him is enough. It isn’t Amat’s fault that they’re doing this, he’s not trying to show off or draw attention to himself, he’s simply too good. He makes the others look slow, and they can’t tolerate that. Time after time they trip him, and time after time he gets up. Skates faster, fights harder, digs deeper inside himself. The look in his eyes gets blacker and blacker.

  No one knows what the time is; Elisabeth Zackell shows no sign of having finished with them. One after the other the older players crumple and collapse. As they stare down at the ice, Amat carries on skating. However many times Zackell orders him to skate from board to board, she can’t exhaust him. His jersey is black with sweat, but he’s still standing. Bobo is lying on the ice, almost unconscious, and is filled with both pride and envy as he watches his friend work, work, work.

  * * *

  Amat is the youngest on the team. As he stands in the shower after the practice, his thigh muscles are shaking so much that he can barely keep his balance. When he drags himself into the locker room with his towel around his waist, he sees that his shoes have been filled with shaving cream.

  * * *

  And then it’s all worth it.

  * * *

  When Elisabeth Zackell walks through the rink long after the end of practice, one lone player is sitting in the locker room. Bobo is the size of a dairy cow, yet still as small as a frightened hedgehog. His eyes are moist, staring at a pair of shoes that no one has filled with shaving cream. The only thing the older players roared when he emerged from the shower was “Thanks very much for the fitness training, you little shit! ‘We’re good at hard work’! How the hell could you say something so completely stupid to a hockey coach?”

  Amat tried to comfort him. Bobo laughed it off, and Amat was too exhausted to persist. After he and all the others have gone, Bobo is still sitting in the same place, smallest in the whole world.

  “Turn the lights out when you leave,” Zackell says, because she’s not one for this whole business of emotions.

  Bobo sniffs. “How do you get respect?” he asks, and Zackell looks extremely uncomfortable.

  “You’ve . . . you’ve got snot everywhere,” she says, gesturing toward her face with her hand.

  Bobo wipes himself, and Zackell looks as though she feels like curling up in the fetal position.

  “I want them to respect me. I want them to put shaving cream in my shoes, too!” Bobo says.

  Zackell groans. “You don’t have to be respected. It’s not as important as people think.”

  Bobo chews his lips. “Sorry I showed you my cock,” he whispers.

  Zackell stretches herself to smile.

  “In your defense, it wasn’t much of a cock,” she says, measuring a few measly inches between her thumb and forefinger.

  Bobo starts to laugh. Zackell sticks her hands in her pockets and gives him some quiet advice: “You need to be useful to the team, Bobo. Then they’ll respect you.”

  She walks off without waiting for him to ask any more questions. Bobo will lie awake at night wondering what she meant.

  * * *

  He stops off at the supermarket on the way home and buys shaving cream so his dad won’t be sad. When Hog sees the ruined shoes in the hall, he gives his son a hug. That doesn’t happen often.

  21

  He’s Lying on the Ground

  Sune is walking slowly through the rink, breathing hard through his nose. He misses his coaching job every second, but he can hardly get up the stands anymore. Hockey gets younger while everyone involved in it gets older, and when it’s done with us it discards us without any sentimentality at all. That’s how it develops and stays alive, for the sake of new generations.

  “Zackell!” Sune calls out breathlessly when he catches sight of the woman who’s taken his job.

  “Yes?” she responds, heading for the locker room.

  “How did today’s practice feel?”

  “ ‘Feel’?” Zackell asks, as if it were a foreign word.

  Sune leans against the wall and smiles weakly. “I mean . . . it’s not easy to be a hockey coach in this town. Especially not if you’re . . . you know.”

  He means “if you’re a woman.” So Zackell replies, “It’s not easy to be a hockey coach anywhere.”

  Sune nods sadly. “I heard that one of the players showed you his . . . genit
als . . .”

  “Hardly,” Zackell retorts.

  Sune coughs awkwardly. “He hardly showed you his genitals?”

  “It hardly counted as genitals,” Zackell corrects.

  “Oh, that’s just . . . you know, guys, sometimes they . . .” Sune says, staring down at his knees.

  Zackell looks annoyed. “How did you know someone showed me his genitals?”

  Sune misinterprets that to mean that she’s upset about the genitals. “I can talk to the guys if you like, I can understand that you feel offended, but—”

  “You’re not to talk to my players. I talk to my players. And the only person who decides if I’m offended is me.”

  Sune raises an eyebrow. “I’m guessing you don’t often feel offended?”

  “Feeling offended is an emotion.”

  Zackell looks as though she’s talking about tools when she says the word. Sune sticks his hands in his pockets and mutters, “It’s not easy being coach in Beartown. Especially if things start to go badly. Believe me, I had my job a whole lifetime before you got here. And there are people in this town who won’t be happy with a coach who . . . who looks like you do.”

  The old man looks deep into the woman’s eyes and sees a characteristic that he always lacked: she doesn’t care. Sune always cared, deep down. He wanted the players to like him: the fans, the old men and women in the Bearskin. The whole town. But Elisabeth Zackell isn’t afraid of opinions, because she knows what all successful coaches know: they’ll like her when she wins.

  “I’m going to get something to eat,” she says, managing to sound neither friendly nor unfriendly.

  Sune nods. Smiles again. Leaves her with one last thought: “Do you remember that little girl, Alicia, who was firing pucks in my garden? She came to the rink today, seven times. She ran away from her preschool to watch the A-team train. I took her back, but she ran away again. She’s going to keep on doing that all autumn.”

  “Is it possible to lock children up?” Zackell wonders, possibly not quite understanding the point Sune is trying to make, so Sune clarifies: “Children take all the things they grow up with for granted. After watching you coach the A-team today, Alicia will take it for granted that women do that. When she’s old enough to play on an A-team, there may not be female hockey coaches. Just . . . hockey coaches.”

  That means something to Sune. Something important. He doesn’t know if it means anything to Elisabeth Zackell, because it honestly doesn’t look as though it does: she just looks as though she wants to go and get something to eat. But hunger is a feeling, too.

  Just before Zackell walks out through the door, something flashes in her eyes, something she does actually care about, so she asks, “How’s it going with my goalie? That Vidar?”

  “I’ll talk to his brother,” Sune promises.

  “Didn’t you promise that Peter was going to talk to Benjamin Ovich’s sisters, too?” Zackell wonders.

  “Yes?” Sune says in surprise.

  “So why didn’t Benjamin come to training today?”

  “He didn’t?” Sune exclaims.

  * * *

  It hadn’t even occurred to him that Benji might not have appeared for practice. Children aren’t the only ones who take things for granted.

  * * *

  In a cabin on a campsite sits a man in a blue polo shirt. He has lessons to prepare, a teaching job he has spent several years training for, but can’t get anything done. He sits in the little kitchen with a book about philosophy on the table in front of him, staring out through the window and hoping to see a young man with sad eyes and a wild soul. But Benji doesn’t come. He’s lost. Today the teacher looked him in the eye and told him he was a mistake, even though the mistake was the teacher’s.

  Everyone in this town knows that Benji is dangerous, because he strikes hardest. Yet few people seem to appreciate that everything about him does just that—strike hardest, beat hardest—the whole time. Including his heart.

  * * *

  Inside the Oviches’ home one of the sisters, Gaby, walks into Benji’s room. Gaby’s two children are playing with Legos scattered across the whole floor. Gaby can say many harsh things about her little brother, but there’s no better uncle in the world. Her children will grow up saying that this room in their grandmother’s house, their uncle’s room, was the safest place in the entire universe. Nothing bad could happen to them here, no one would dare do anything to them, because their uncle would protect them against everyone and everything. Once one of them said to Gaby, “Mom! There are ghosts in Uncle Benji’s wardrobe; they have to hide in there because they’re scared of him!”

  Gaby smiles and is just walking out of the room when the thought hits her. She spins around and asks the children, “Where did you get the Legos?”

  “It was in the presents,” the children reply, unconcerned.

  “What presents?”

  The children go into defense mode, as if they’ve been accused of theft: “The presents on Uncle Benji’s bed! They had our names on them, Mom! They were for us!”

  The doorbell rings. Gaby doesn’t walk to answer it. She runs.

  * * *

  Adri, the oldest sister, opens the door. Amat, Benji’s teammate, is standing outside. The boy doesn’t get worried until he sees how worried Adri gets, but she realizes everything all at once.

  “Is Benji home?” Amat asks, although he already knows the answer.

  “Shit!” Adri replies.

  Gaby comes rushing out into the hall, yelling, “Benji left presents for the children!”

  Amat clears his throat nervously: “He wasn’t at practice. I just wanted to check that he was okay!”

  He calls the last words after Adri. She’s already run past him, heading toward the forest.

  * * *

  Benji occasionally skips practices, but never the first of the season. His feet are too desperate to get back onto the ice, his hands miss his stick, his brain the flight across the rink. He wouldn’t miss the chance to play today, not when Beartown is playing Hed in the first round of games. Something’s wrong.

  * * *

  Ramona is standing behind her counter, the way she always has, with as little emotional disturbance as possible. She’s seen this town blossom, but in recent years she’s also seen it take a beating. People in Beartown know how to work, but they need somewhere to do it. They know how to fight, but they need something to fight for.

  The only thing you can rely on in all towns, big and small alike, is that there will be broken people. It’s nothing to do with the place, just life; it can beat us up. And if that happens, it’s easy to find your way to a pub; bars can quickly become sad places. Someone who has nowhere else to go can grasp a glass a little too tightly; someone who’s tired of falling can take refuge in the bottom of a bottle, seeing as you can’t fall much further from there.

  Ramona has seen fragile souls come and go here; some have moved on, and some have gone under. Things have gone well for some of them, and some—like Alain Ovich—have gone off into the forest.

  Ramona is old enough neither to jump with joy when things are going well nor to bury herself when things are going badly, and she’s knows how easy it is to have unrealistic expectations of a hockey team in an autumn like the one they’re facing now. Because sports isn’t reality, and when reality is hell we need stories, because they make us feel that if we can just be best at one thing, perhaps everything else will turn and start to go our way, too.

  * * *

  But Ramona really can’t say. Can things ever turn around? Or do we just get used to them?

  * * *

  The last thing Alain Ovich did before he took his rifle and went out into the forest was to leave presents for his children on their beds. No one knows why someone would get it into his head to do a thing like that, but perhaps he was hoping that that was how they’d remember him. That he could go far enough into the forest for them to believe he had just abandoned them, so that they could fantasize
that he was a secret agent who had been called away on a top secret mission or an astronaut who had gone up into space. Perhaps he hoped they would have a childhood, in spite of everything.

  It didn’t turn out that way. Adri, his eldest, will never be able to explain how she knew where he was. She just had a feeling about where he’d gone. Maybe that’s why dogs like her, because she has a heightened sensitivity to things that normal people lack. She didn’t shout “Dad!” as she moved through the trees; the children of hunters don’t do that, they learn that every man in the forest tends to be someone’s dad, so if you want to get hold of yours you have to shout his name as if you were just anyone. Adri never became just anyone, not entirely; she was born with something of Alain in her. He could never go far enough into the forest for her not to be able to find him.

  * * *

  A pub can be a gloomy place, because, taken as a whole, life always gives us more opportunities for grief than celebration, more funeral drinks than wedding toasts. But Ramona knows that a pub can be other things, too, from time to time: small cracks in the blocks of stone you carry in your chest. It doesn’t always have to be the best place on Earth, it just doesn’t always need to be the worst.

  The past few weeks have been full of rumors. It’s said that the factory is going to be sold, and Beartown has been through enough setbacks to know that this could just as easily mean bankruptcy. It’s easy to call that attitude cynical, but cynicism is simply a chemical reaction to too much disappointment. The young men in the Bearskin aren’t the only people talking about unemployment; everyone is worried now. In a small community the loss of any employer is a natural disaster, everyone knows someone who’s affected, until eventually it spreads to you.