Us Against You Read online

  * * *

  Benji Ovich’s mother hardly ever talks about his father, but on the rare occasions when it does happen, she always closes her eyes and whispers, “Some people are just like that. If there isn’t a war, they start one.”

  Benji has been told that he resembles him, his father, but he doesn’t know how. Maybe more inside than out. He knows his dad was in pain, so much pain that one day he couldn’t bear it any longer. Hunters in these parts never use the word “suicide,” they just say, “Alain took his rifle and went into the woods.” Benji has always wondered if he had been planning it for a long time or if he just suddenly did it. He wonders the same thing when he sees pictures of lonely men who have done terrible things on the news: Why that day in particular? Why not another day? Did you make a choice, or did it just happen?

  Benji knows that grief and anger can reprogram a brain like chemicals and drugs do. Maybe there’s a time bomb inside some people’s heads the whole time, just waiting for a switch to be thrown. Maybe his mom’s right, some people are just the sort who start wars.

  From the tree he sees Maya and Ana come through the forest. He will never be able to explain what happened to him then; it was just an instinct being awakened. Something gets switched off, something else gets switched on. He climbs down and picks his backpack off the ground, takes something from it, and holds it in his hand as he starts to move through the trees.

  * * *

  Stalking them.

  * * *

  Maya and Ana are walking aimlessly through the forest, slower and slower the farther they get. They’re not talking; they already know everything each other might want to say anyway. They’ve always known that Beartown isn’t an easy place to grow up in if you’re different, and one of the worst things about becoming an adult is starting to realize that perhaps nowhere is. There are bastards everywhere.

  The two young women have never really had much in common, the princess and the child of nature, the musician and the hunter. The first time they met was when Ana pulled Maya out of a hole in the ice when they were children. Maya had only just moved here at the time, and Ana had never had a friend, so they had saved each other’s lives. Ana used to tease Maya for never being able to walk quietly in the forest, saying she moved like an elk in high heels. Maya used to joke that Ana was the way she was because Ana’s mom had had an affair with a squirrel.

  She stopped saying that when Ana’s mom moved away. In return Ana stopped teasing Maya about being dependent on decent Wi-Fi. For a few years they were equals, but teenage years always change the balance of power in friendships between girls. When they started high school, Ana’s knowledge of how to survive in the forest wasn’t worth anything, whereas Maya knew how to survive in the school corridors. But this summer? They’re not safe anywhere now.

  Ana is walking ahead, and Maya is following, looking at her hair. She often thinks that Ana is simultaneously the strongest and weakest person she knows. Ana’s dad is drinking again; it’s no one’s fault, that’s just the way it is. Maya wishes she could take the pain away from Ana, but she can no more do that than Ana can take the rape away from Maya. They’re falling into different chasms. Maya has her nightmares, and Ana has her own reasons for not being able to sleep. She sleeps with the dogs on the nights her dad comes home late and rages about in the kitchen like a monster made up of sorrow and unspoken words. The dogs lie in a protective circle around Ana without her asking them. Beloved creatures. Her dad has never, not so much as once, raised his hand against his daughter. But she’s still frightened of him when he’s been drinking. Men don’t know their own weight, they don’t understand the physical terror they can instil in another person simply by tumbling through a door. They’re hurricanes tearing through a forest of saplings as they get up drunkenly from the kitchen table and stumble from room to room without being aware of what they’re trampling on. The next morning they don’t remember anything; the empty bottles have been cleared away and the glasses washed in secret, and the house is silent. No one says anything. They must never see the destruction they’ve left behind them in their children.

  Ana stops and turns around. Maya looks at her and smiles weakly. “God, I love you so much,” she thinks, and Ana knows. So she asks, “Forced to have an operation to have a pig’s snout or one to have a pig’s arse?”

  Maya laughs loudly. This is their game, has been ever since they were little. Either-or. “Snout. That curly tail would be way too lumpy to sit on when I’m playing guitar.”

  “You’re so stupid!”

  “I’m stupid? Do you even hear the stuff that comes out of your mouth?”

  Ana snorts. She looks off through the trees. “Okay, how about this one: Be unhappy and live for a hundred years or be happy for a single year and then die?”

  Maya thinks in silence. She never gets to answer. By the time she reacts, Ana has already spun around, staring at the trees. She should have noticed sooner, but Ana is used only to tracking and hunting, not to being stalked.

  A quick cracking sound, dry branches snapping under a solid weight. They’re far away from the town; this is a dangerous place to encounter an animal.

  * * *

  And those branches weren’t broken by an animal.

  * * *

  The rink in Beartown is closed and dark when Peter gets there. He doesn’t switch the lights on; there are yellowing sheets of paper on the walls, and he knows what they say without needing any light. Small words written in a loud voice: “Team before individual.” Farther away: “The only time we’re not moving forward is when we’re taking aim.” Above that: “Dream—Fight—Win!” And nearest the door, in his own handwriting: “We stand tall when we win, we stand tall when we lose, we stand tall no matter what.”

  People with logical minds might think notes like that are silly, but you don’t get to be best at a sport by being logical. You have to be a dreamer. When Peter was in primary school, a teacher asked the pupils what they wanted to be when they grew up. Peter said, “A pro in the NHL.” He can still remember the way the whole class laughed, and he’s spent his whole life proving them wrong. People with logical minds realize it’s impossible for a small boy from little Beartown to play with the best in the world, but dreamers work differently.

  The only problem is that you’re never finished, you can never prove enough, the people laughing just move the boundaries. There’s a clock on the wall of the changing room; it’s stopped, no one will bother to change the battery. It takes time to learn to love something but much less to kill it: a single moment will do. Sports is merciless: a big star becomes a has-been during a ten-second walk from the ice to the locker room, a club that has survived more than half a century is condemned to collapse during a few minutes in a council building. Peter wonders if they’ll demolish the rink now, build their conference hotel or some other crap the people with money and power dream about. They never love anything, they just own things. For them this is nothing more than bricks and mortar.

  He goes up into the stands, stops in the narrow corridor outside the offices on the upper floor. How many of his lives are in this building? What are they worth now? There are framed photographs on the wall from the club’s biggest moments, the founding of the club in 1951, the magical season twenty years ago when the A-team became the second best in the country, and then the junior team that took silver this spring. A lot of the pictures are of Peter.

  In one furious movement he sweeps them all off the wall. He starts at one end of the corridor and pulls every frame off every hook. Glass shatters across the floor, but Peter is already walking away. The rink is still in darkness when he slams the outside door.

  * * *

  The stranger sits in the darkness in the stands and watches Peter leave. As he starts up his car out in the parking lot, the stranger goes up to the offices and looks at the destruction. Sees the old photographs of Peter among the shattered glass, along with more recent pictures of the junior team. Two players are in almost every p
icture. The stranger pushes the glass aside with a sturdy boot and bends over an older photograph of the same boys, long before they came the entire town’s big stars. An award ceremony when they’re maybe ten or eleven, arms around each other like brothers, their numbers and surnames on their backs: “9 ERDAHL and 16 OVICH.”

  Best friends, a sport they loved, and a team they’ve given their lives for; what’s a young man capable of if you take all that away from him at the same time? The stranger carefully draws a circle on the pad, around the name “Benjamin Ovich,” then walks back down the stand and out of the rink. Lights a fresh cigar. It’s warm and there’s no wind, but the stranger still cups the flame, as if a storm were brewing.

  * * *

  Ana and Maya hear their hearts pounding as they turn around and see Benji walking between the trees. Not long ago a boy who loved his hockey team and his best friend, now a grown man with eyes in which the pupils have drowned. One fist is clenched, the other is clutching a hammer.

  * * *

  Ask anyone in Beartown, and they’ll tell you that that boy has always been a ticking time bomb.

  7

  Start by Eating Lunch

  There’s an old saying in Hed: “Tell a stranger you hate Beartown, and you’ll have a friend for life.” The smallest child in Hed is quick to learn that it’s important for Hed Hockey to do well but that it’s even more important that things go really badly for Beartown. Partly in jest, obviously. The stands are full of screamed threats about “hating” and “killing” each other, but of course they aren’t serious. Until all of a sudden they are.

  When we describe how the violence between the two towns started, most of us will no longer remember what came first: the burning flags that twelve-year-old Leo filmed and posted online or another video clip that someone over in Hed posted almost simultaneously. Because nothing travels faster than a good story, and obviously no one who has grown up in Hed loving a red team and hating a green one can conceal his schadenfreude when the council, money, and power all pick a side.

  So one member of Hed’s fan club stops a councillor on her way home from work and films himself asking, “Okay, so what’s everyone in Beartown who likes hockey supposed to do now?” The politician, a nervous middle-aged woman, doesn’t appear to know what to say. Unless she knows exactly. Because she replies, “They can start supporting Hed, can’t they?”

  That night she is woken by a loud bang. When she walks out of her front door the next morning, there’s an ax sticking out of the hood of her car.

  When she walks to the bus stop, a car drives past containing two men in black jackets. They don’t need to look at her. She knows she’s being watched anyway.

  * * *

  The Bearskin pub is where it’s always been, in the middle of Beartown. It’s the sort of pub that used to smell better when smoking was permitted indoors. Its owner, Ramona, has a face that resembles the floorboards: life has left its mark on her like the chairs being dragged back and forth too many times over the years, as well as all the cigarettes that earned her the nickname “the Marlboro Mom” from the young men who have made the Bearskin their second home, and sometimes their first. Ramona is past retirement age, but no one who values the shape of his nose mentions the fact out loud. She’s pouring herself a late breakfast in a tall glass when a stranger walks in. Ramona raises a surprised eyebrow.

  “Yes?”

  The stranger looks around at the empty bar uncomprehendingly. “Sorry?”

  “Can I help you?” Ramona asks suspiciously.

  The stranger has unkempt hair, jeans, a tracksuit top, and thick socks in the sort of heavy boots you wear if you regard temperatures above freezing as unnatural.

  “This is a bar, isn’t it?”

  Ramona’s lips curl warily. “Yep.”

  “Does it come as a surprise for the bar to have a customer?”

  “Depends on the customer.”

  The stranger seems to agree that this is a valid observation.

  “I’ve got some questions.”

  “Then you’ve come to the wrong town.”

  The door behind the stranger opens. Two young men walk in.

  * * *

  They’re wearing black jackets.

  * * *

  Ana and Maya can feel their heartbeats pulsing in their necks. They haven’t considered Benji an enemy; he was one of the few who stayed in Beartown when Kevin and all the others went off to Hed Hockey. But if Ana and Maya have learned anything, it’s that loyalty around here can switch in an instant, and that they can never trust that a man won’t try to hurt them.

  But Benji stops a few yards away with the hammer swinging gently in his hand. He seems to be waiting for them to react. He’s always been muscular, but this summer has given his body something else, an aura of cruelty. Ana didn’t bring her rifle with her; she regrets that now. She’s seen Benji play hockey; she knows that what makes him better and more dangerous than the others is that he’s unpredictable. On the occasions when it has gone wrong and he hurt someone, no one ever saw it coming in advance.

  But his upper body is barely moving now. When he finally opens his lips, the words come quietly and jerkily from a larynx that sounds as though it hasn’t been used in weeks. He drops the hammer in front of Ana’s feet with a dull thud and says, “You’ll need this. I’ve got something. For you.”

  It will take a long time for the young women to realize that he had the hammer with him because he knew Ana and Maya would need to be armed before they dared go with him. It can be an unbearable sorrow for someone to know that he’s regarded as such a wild animal in other people’s eyes.

  * * *

  The men in black jackets stop inside the door, accustomed to their presence alone being enough to suddenly remind a stranger that he’s left his clothes in a machine at the laundromat or has to give blood at a medical center three or four hundred miles away. Over the next few months the stranger will realize that there are plenty of stories about the people who usually drink in the Bearskin, just not many people who are prepared to tell them. They have no symbols, no website; when it’s game day in Beartown, there’s no way to tell them apart from other men on their way to the rink. But the stranger will learn that “the Pack” make sure that no one runs their hockey club without their blessing or curse, and you don’t notice how many of them there are until they’ve become your enemies. The stranger seems either too smart or too crazy to care.

  “Are you a journalist?” Ramona asks.

  She isn’t sure if the stranger simply chooses to ignore her aggressive tone or has some sort of condition that prevents it registering. So she adds, “We’ve had a few journalists here before you with ‘questions,’ and they always go home with them unanswered. But they usually end up getting better home insurance.”

  The direct threat seems to fly straight over the stranger’s untidy hair; who calmly spins around on the barstool and looks at the decor, the walls covered with photographs and pennants and jerseys.

  “I don’t suppose you serve lunch here?”

  The men by the door don’t know if this is a veiled insult or a polite question. But Ramona suddenly starts to laugh. She makes a slight gesture, and the men disappear through the door.

  “You’re no journalist,” she declares to the stranger with her head slightly tilted.

  Then her tone shifts quickly to one of displeasure again. “So what the hell are you doing in Beartown?”

  The stranger’s hands settle neatly on the bar. “I thought I might start by eating lunch.”

  * * *

  Kira calls Peter again but gets no answer. Seriously? She’s had a feeling that something like this would happen, that the council would find a way to turn against Peter. He’s a romantic, but Kira’s a lawyer, and she figured out a while back that the easiest way for the council to bury the scandal would be to bury the club.

  The whole of the Andersson family, Peter and Maya and Leo and she herself, agreed at the start of the summer
that they were going to stay in Beartown. Stay and fight. But she is no longer feeling so sure. How long can you stay in a place that keeps trying to reject you like a hostile virus? And if Peter doesn’t even have a club here anymore, what have they got left?

  Her colleague is back, sitting quietly on the other side of the desk, but of course Kira can remember all the things she’s said about Peter. “He’s an addict, Kira. You might think addicts always drink or take drugs or gamble on the horses, but your husband hasn’t got a problem with alcohol or gambling. He’s got a problem with competitiveness. He can’t stop trying to win. He can’t live without that rush.”

  How many times has Kira lain awake wondering if that’s true? She calls again, again, again. Eventually Peter answers. Angry, even if that isn’t audible in his voice. Only to her. The tiniest little change in the way he says her name. She whispers, “I’ve been trying to call, darling, I . . . heard what happened . . .”

  He doesn’t reply. So she asks, “Where are you?”

  And then it comes: “In the office, Kira. I’m in a meeting. Let’s talk later.”

  She can hear from the noises in the background that he’s in the car. He always used to do that when he lost games as a player: get into the car and drive for hours. He never used violence against anyone else, only himself. So he would drive out into the darkness without considering that there was someone sitting at home waiting for him, someone who was terrified that this would be the evening when the phone rang and it wasn’t his voice at the other end. That a police officer’s voice would ask, “Are you Peter Andersson’s wife?,” and she would hear the voice take a deep, sympathetic breath when she whispered “Yes.”