Us Against You Page 4
Kira sighs as if she were about to blow out the candles on her very last birthday cake. She holds up the plastic tub containing her lunch. Her colleague pretends to throw up.
“Very mature,” Kira says.
“What is that?” her colleague whimpers.
Kira bursts out laughing. She didn’t mean to, which makes it wonderful, a few seconds of normality. Her colleague has the eating habits of a teenager; she never asks “What’s good?,” just “What do you get the most of?” She reads menus as if they were declarations of war. Kira gestures encouragingly with her fork. “This is called ‘salad.’ It’s a bit like meat, but you don’t have to kill any animals. Here, try it!”
Her colleague flinches. “No way, it smells like something you dragged out of the ass of a corpse.”
“Oh, come on, seriously?” Kira says, disgusted.
“What?” her colleague asks in surprise.
“You’re like a little kid!” Kira says.
“You’re like a little kid! Shut up and send an invoice!” her colleague mutters, then lands on a chair as if she’d been thrown off a rooftop.
Kira is about to say something but gets distracted by the ring of the phone on her desk. She’s expecting it to be Peter, but the voice at the other end exclaims cheerfully, “Is that Kira Andersson? I’m calling from Johansson’s Movers, we’ve got an order in your name for fifty new removal boxes. Is it okay to leave them in your garden?”
Kira doesn’t even hear the end of the sentence. She just sees her colleague open her laptop, read something, and go white. The next moment Kira’s cell phone buzzes.
* * *
Peter gets up from his chair. Most of the politicians on the other side of the table don’t humiliate him by shaking his hand, they just walk out. But one of them stops and says with fake benevolence, “It was impressive, Peter, what you managed to do with the juniors back in the spring. A unique achievement, frankly, our lads from our little town putting up a fight against the big teams. If only they’d . . . won. Then maybe . . . you know.”
Peter knows. All too well. In a sport where Cinderella stories are under threat of extinction, where the big clubs’ hockey schools vacuum up all the talent from the smaller clubs, Beartown managed to get its best and brightest boys to stay and fight for their home team. They made it all the way to the final but had to play that game without their biggest star. So they almost won. And that’s not enough.
Beartown is a hockey town, and kids are raised with the philosophy “The stats never lie.” Either you’re the best or you’re everyone else, and the best don’t make excuses, they find a way to win. With all available means, at any cost. People talk about a “winner’s mentality,” because a winner has something that others lack, a special brain that takes for granted that it was born to be heroic. When a game comes down to the last decisive seconds, the winner bangs his stick down on the ice and yells to his teammates to pass to him, because a winner doesn’t ask for the puck, he demands it. When thousands of spectators stand up and roar, most people become uncertain and back away, but the winner steps up. That’s the sort of mentality we’re talking about. Everyone dreams about being the best, about being the one who fires the final shot in the last crucial moments of the season, but there are desperately few of us who actually dare to take the chance when absolutely everything is at stake. That’s the difference between us.
Just over twenty years ago, Beartown’s A-team could have been the best in the country. All season everyone in town kept repeating the same thing: “Beartown against the rest!” Journalists in the big cities thought Beartown had no chance. Their well-paid opponents underestimated the team, but when they came to Beartown something happened: when their team bus drove mile after mile straight through the forest, when they stepped into a shabby building and were confronted with stands that had been transformed into roaring green walls on all sides, the giants trembled. The rink was a fortress that season; the whole town would march there, the team played with an entire community behind it. No one cared if the big clubs had the money, because this was the home of hockey. “Beartown against the rest.”
But the very last game was an away game, in the capital. In the dying seconds, Peter Andersson got the puck. Deep in the forest lay an entire community that was going to live or die on the actions of his stick, and how tiny are the margins for a sports club at a time like that? The gap between the elite and the rest is immense in hockey: the teams at the top of the league get all the television money and the millions in sponsorship, while those lower down have to learn that “the best team always wins.” So when Peter got the puck it was more than a shot, more than a game; it was a chance for the little town to fell a giant. What a fantastic story that would have been. For one single evening, after all the crap the people in this forest had been through, Beartown finally had a chance to feel that its turn had arrived. It would have been the sort of story that makes everyone love sports: that the biggest and richest don’t always win.
So Peter took the shot. And missed. A town held its breath, and then it couldn’t breathe. The end-of-game buzzer sounded, its opponents won, the following season Beartown tumbled out of the top division and never managed to fight its way back.
Peter moved to the NHL and turned professional but got injured. His career passed as quickly as a dream. Then he came home and against all the odds built up a junior team that became the best in the country. Almost.
The politician in the doorway shrugs. “Winning cures everything, Peter.”
He might as well have said what he meant: “You’re not a winner, Peter. Because winners win. That’s how we know who they are.” Winners always get that last shot right. Winners don’t mix up what’s going on off the ice with what happens on it. Winners don’t ask the police to drag the team’s biggest star off a bus on the way to the biggest game. Winners know that winning cures everything in this community but that a second place doesn’t cure anything.
The politician pats him half-heartedly on the shoulder. “Listen, Peter, maybe you could see this as an opportunity? A chance to try a different job? Get a bit more time with your family!”
Peter feels like telling him to go to hell but instead walks in silence out of the council building. He walks around the building, stops below a staircase, and leans over a flower bed. When he’s sure that none of those bastards can see him standing there alone, he throws up.
His phone rings. It’s Kira. He realizes that the rumor is making the rounds but can’t bring himself to answer. He doesn’t want to hear the disappointment in his wife’s voice and is worried that she’ll hear the sob in his. She calls again and again until he switches his phone off. The problem with living your whole life for a hockey club is that he hasn’t got a damn clue who he is without it. He gets into the car and drives, his fingers clutching the wheel so tightly that blood starts to seep from his torn cuticles.
* * *
There’s a stranger sitting in a Jeep, watching the road silently and intently through sunglasses, inhaling deeply from a cigar and letting the smoke roll out from the open window. The Jeep is parked in the shade of some trees and is rusty and nondescript enough for no one to pay any attention to it. The list of names is in the glove compartment. “Peter Andersson” is written at the top. When Peter gets into his car and drives off, the stranger follows him.
6
If There Isn’t a War, They Start One
The eighteen-year-old man in the forest takes off his backpack, puts it down on the grass, and climbs up into a tree. Summer has started to make his long hair fairer and his skin darker around the bear tattoo. His name is Benjamin, but only his mom and sisters call him that, everyone else knows him as Benji. His name is rarely associated with memories of a positive childhood—ever since preschool people have been saying that the boy would end up in prison or the cemetery. Hockey was both his salvation and damnation, because all his worst characteristics off the ice made him admired on it. Kevin was the star, Benji his protect
or. Brothers. The town loved Kevin’s hands, but they worshipped Benji’s fists. Whenever anyone in Beartown tells the old joke “I went to see a fight, and suddenly an ice hockey game broke out,” they’re always telling it about him.
So the town was shocked when Kevin was accused of rape, but it was shocked almost as much when Benji took Maya Andersson’s side against his brother. He stayed in Beartown rather than move to Hed Hockey Club. Benji Ovich did the right thing. And for what? Mocking text messages from anonymous senders arrive one after the other, telling him that his club is dead now. He made the wrong choice. He’s got nothing. A few months back, he was playing alongside his best friend in one of the best teams in the country. Now he’s sitting alone in a tree, smoking and getting high, and is on his way to proving everyone who doubted him right: “Sooner or later that boy is going to do himself or someone else some serious damage.”
* * *
Every time Kira Andersson looks at the pictures of Peter, Maya, and Leo on her desk this summer, she feels endlessly ashamed at the fact that when she’s here at work it’s easier to imagine that they’re a normal family. That the four of them aren’t burning to ashes inside, that the house they share hasn’t long since fallen silent because none of them has any words left.
Maya asked her family to stop talking about the rape. They were sitting at the breakfast table at the start of the summer, and she said it without any drama: “I need to move on now.” Peter and Kira tried to smile and nod, but their eyes bored holes in the parquet floor. You have to be supportive, you can’t grab hold of your daughter and yell that we need to talk about it, that it’s her parents who feel scared and abandoned and . . . selfish. Because that is what they’re being, isn’t it? Selfish.
Kira knows people don’t understand that she can go on working or that Peter can go on caring about hockey, but the truth is that sometimes they’re the only things they have the strength to care about. When everything else is collapsing, you throw yourself into the only thing you know you can control, the only place you feel you know what you’re doing. Everything else hurts too much. So you go to work and hide there, the way mountain climbers dig holes in the snow when a storm hits.
Kira isn’t naive, but she’s a parent, she’s been trying to see a way forward. Kevin is gone; the psychologist said Maya was making progress in her treatment for the trauma, so perhaps everything could still be okay. That’s what Kira has been telling herself. Peter was going to meet the council, the club would get the money it needed, everything would sort itself out.
But now she hangs up on the moving company that has received an order for packing boxes in her name. She reads the text that has just arrived. It’s from a journalist: “We’re trying to get hold of your husband for a comment about Beartown Ice Hockey going into liquidation.” The next text is from a neighbor, saying “Didn’t know you were moving??” There’s a screenshot attached from a real estate agent’s website, where someone has put the Anderssons’ house up for sale. The photographs are very recent. Someone has been in their yard that morning.
Kira calls Peter, but he doesn’t answer. She knows what’s going to happen now; if the hockey club collapses, it won’t matter whose fault it really is, because some people in this town have already started to look for scapegoats. It will be Peter’s fault. Maya’s fault. The general manager’s. The slut’s.
Kira calls Peter again. Again. Again. The last time she tries, the call doesn’t even go through. Her colleague backs away when Kira slams her fist onto her desk as hard as she can; she hears her fingers crunch but goes on punching with all the strength the hundred different women inside her can summon up:
* * *
BANG. BANG. BANG-BANG-BANG.
* * *
Benji curls up, smoke seeping from his nostrils. He’s heard people say that drugs lift them up into the skies, but for Benji it’s the sea: he doesn’t fly, he just floats. Drugs keep him on the surface without his having to make any effort, and the rest of the time he feels he has to swim for his life the whole time.
As a child he always loved the summer, when the foliage lets boys hide in trees without being seen from the ground. He’s always had a lot to hide from, as anyone does who’s different in a locker room where everyone learns that you have to be a single unit, a clan, a team, in order to win together. So Benji became what they needed: the wild one. So feared that once, when he was wounded, the coach put him on the bench anyway. He didn’t play a single minute, but the opposing team still didn’t dare lay a finger on Kevin.
Benji taught himself some of that hardness: he climbed trees in a way that his coach used to laugh and say made him “half tank, half monkey,” and he chopped wood out at his sister’s boarding kennels and punched the stack of wood into shape to harden his knuckles. But some of the hardness was just there inside him, it couldn’t be injected or driven out, and it made him unpredictable. One winter when he was little, some of the boys on the team called him “sledge,” because he wasn’t driven to training by his parents but came on his bike with his hockey bag on a sledge behind him. The nickname lasted a few months, until one of the boys went too far and Benji came into the locker room with the sledge in his hands and knocked out two of his teeth. There weren’t many nicknames after that.
He’s sitting quietly in the tree now, but inside him everything is chaos. When a child gets a best friend, it’s like a first infatuation; we want to be with them all the time, and if they leave us it’s like an amputation. Kevin and Benji came from such different parts of town that they could easily have been different species, but the ice became their dance floor. Kevin had the genius and Benji the violence. It took a decade before everyone realized that there was a bit of genius in Benji, too, and a lot more violence in Kevin.
How much can you forgive your best friend for? How can you know in advance? One night back in the spring Kevin stood shaking in the forest, not far from here, and asked Benji to forgive him. Benji turned and walked away from him. They never spoke again.
That morning three weeks ago when Kevin left town, Benji was sitting in the same tree as he is now. Hitting the back of his head against the trunk, harder and harder. Bang. Bang. Bang. He’s high on drugs and heavy with hatred; he hears voices and at first isn’t sure if he’s imagining them. Then he sees them, they’re coming closer, he sees them through the trees. His muscles tighten.
* * *
He’s going to hurt someone.
* * *
If you want to know why people sacrifice everything for love, you have start by asking how they fell in love. Sometimes it doesn’t take anything at all for us to start loving something. Just time. All adults know, deep down, that hockey is make-believe, an invented game, but when you’re five years old your heart is fairly small. So you have to love with all of it at once.
Peter Andersson’s mom was ill, and his dad used to get so drunk that he would shout as if his son didn’t have ears and would hit him as if they were complete strangers. Peter grew up with a head full of voices whispering that he was no good at anything, and the first time they fell silent was when he pulled on a pair of skates. You can’t give a boy what he found in hockey classes and then take it away without there being consequences. Summer came, the rink closed, but five-year-old Peter marched around to the home of the A-team coach and banged on the door. “When does hockey start?” he demanded to know.
Sune, the A-team coach smiled. “In the autumn.” He was already an old man, and his stomach was so round that he could talk only in circular arguments. “How long is it until then?” the five-year-old asked. “Till the autumn?” The coach grunted. “I can’t tell time,” the five-year-old said. “It’s several months,” the coach muttered. “Can I wait here?” the five-year-old asked. “Until autumn?” the coach exclaimed. “Is that a long time?” the five-year-old asked. It was the start of a lifelong friendship.
Sune never asked about the bruises, the five-year-old never talked about them, but every blow he received at home
was visible in his eyes the first time he learned to shoot a puck in the coach’s small garden. The coach was aware that hockey can’t change a child’s life, but it can offer a different one. A way out and up.
Sune taught Peter what a club is. It’s not something you blame nor something you demand things of. “Because it’s us, Peter, Beartown Ice Hockey is you and me. The best and worst things it achieves demonstrate the best and worst sides of us.” He taught Peter other things, too, such as standing tall both when you win and when you lose, and that the most talented players have a duty to elevate the weakest because “a great deal is expected of anyone who’s been given a lot.”
That first evening, Sune walked home with the five-year-old. They stopped a few hundred feet from the boy’s house, and the coach said that if the boy came around the next day, he could carry on shooting practice. “You promise?” the boy asked. Sune held out his hand and said, “I promise. And you have to keep promises, don’t you?” The boy shook his hand and nodded. Then the old man sat down on a bench with the boy and taught him how to tell time, so he could count the minutes until tomorrow.
Sometimes it doesn’t take anything at all for us to start loving something, just time. Young Peter Andersson dreamed about the same thing every night for several years, the sound of a puck leaving a stick and flying into the side of a house:
* * *
Bang.