Beartown Page 6

  * * *

  “You know he doesn’t come up with those jokes himself, don’t you? He’s not smart enough. He nicks them from the Internet,” Zacharias mutters, humiliated, as he shakes the snow from his clothes.

  Lifa picks up his cap and brushes the snow off it. Amat holds his hand out in an attempt to calm his friend down.

  “I know you hate Bobo, but next year we’ll be juniors . . . It’ll be better then.”

  Zacharias doesn’t reply. Lifa flashes him a look, somewhere between anger and resignation. Lifa stopped playing hockey when they were younger. He kept being told he had to be able to handle the “banter” in the locker room, which turned out to be a very useful argument, because when Lifa gave up, everyone could blame that. It was his problem, not hockey’s. If Zacharias’s parents hadn’t loved the game as much as they did, he wouldn’t have carried on playing either, and if Amat hadn’t been so good, even he might not have been able to summon up the enthusiasm to keep playing.

  “It’ll be better when we’re juniors,” Amat repeats.

  Zacharias says nothing. He knows very well that he won’t get a place on the junior team, and that this is his last year playing hockey. Amat is the only person who hasn’t yet realized that he’s about to leave his best friend behind.

  The silence doesn’t bother Amat, who opens the door and turns a corner in the corridor, after which he can only hear a muffled rumble in his ears. She gives him tunnel vision.

  “Hi, Maya!” he exclaims, a little too loudly.

  She turns around fleetingly, notes his presence, but nothing more than that. When you’re fifteen years old, no look can hurt you more.

  “Hi, Amat,” she replies distractedly, and is gone before she even gets to the end of his name.

  Amat stands there, trying not to look at Zacharias and Lifa, knowing they won’t be making much effort not to laugh.

  “Hiiii, Maayaaa . . . ,” Zacharias mimics, as Lifa giggles.

  “Fuck off, Zach,” Amat mutters.

  “Sorry, sorry, but you’ve been doing this since primary school and I was nice to you for the first eight years you were in love with her, so now I think I’ve earned the right to make fun of you.”

  Amat walks toward his locker, his heart sinking in his chest like a lead weight. He loves that girl more than he loves skating.

  8

  It’s only a game. It only resolves tiny, insignificant things. Such as who gets validation. Who gets listened to. It allocates power and draws boundaries and turns some people into stars and others into spectators. That’s all.

  * * *

  David enters the rink and goes straight to his office, the smallest one at the end of the corridor. He closes the door, switches his computer on, and studies videos of tomorrow’s opponents. They’re a brilliant team, an imposing machine, and—player for player—only Kevin really matches up against them. It’s going to take an immense effort for the team to stand any chance at all, but David knows that they do at least have a chance, and that every single one of his players will work themselves to death out there on the ice if need be. That isn’t what’s making him feel sick. It’s what he’s missing from the team. Speed.

  For several years the junior team’s first line has consisted of Kevin, Benji, and a third player called William Lyt. Kevin is a genius, and Benji a fighter. But William is slow. He’s big and strong, and not bad at passing, so David has managed to find tactical solutions to hide his shortcomings when they’ve been playing less impressive teams, but the team they’re about to face is good enough to shut Kevin down unless there’s someone else who’s quick enough to create space for him.

  David rubs his temples. Looks at his reflection in the computer screen, his red hair and exhausted eyes. He gets up and goes out to the bathroom. And throws up again.

  * * *

  In a larger office two doors away, Sune is sitting at his computer. He’s watching the same clips as David, over and over again. Once upon a time the two men always looked at events out on the ice the same way, thought the same about everything. But as the years passed, David grew older and more ambitious while Sune became old and stubborn. When David claims that fights ought to be permitted out on the ice because “there’d be fewer injuries if the guys knew they’d get beaten up for bad play,” Sune retorts, “That’s like saying there’d be fewer road accidents if you banned car insurance, because people would take better care of their cars.” When David wants to “increase the load” on the juniors, Sune talks about “quality over quantity.” If David says “up,” Sune yells “down.” When some of the other sporting associations recently proposed that little league games should no longer keep a tally of goals and points, and not have league tables until the age of twelve, Sune thought it sounded “sensible,” while David denounced it as “communism.” David thinks Sune should let him do his job. Sune thinks David has misunderstood what his job actually is. The two men are stuck in their own trenches, buried too deep even to see each other anymore.

  Sune leans back, rubs his eyes, and hears his chair creak under his weight as he lets out a sigh. He feels like explaining to David just how lonely the job of A-team coach can be, how numbingly heavy the responsibility gets. How you need to be ready to see the bigger picture, adapt, change. But David’s young, not ready to listen and understand. Sune closes his eyes and swears at himself. Because isn’t he just the same? One of the hardest things about getting old is admitting mistakes that it’s too late to put right. The worst thing about having power over other people’s lives is that you sometimes get things wrong.

  Sune has always refused to move young players to older age groups. The old man believes in the principle that players should develop alongside their peers, that being given opportunities too early stifles talent. But as he sits alone in his office watching these videos, he has to admit that he sees the same thing as David right now. Something that hardly anyone else understands: without a bit of pace, the junior team is going to die a death tomorrow.

  So even Sune finds himself wondering: what are principles worth, if you don’t win?

  * * *

  Beartown is just small enough for everyone to recognize almost everyone else, but just big enough to be full of people that no one really notices. Robbie Holts is a few years past forty. His beard has started to turn grey; he scratches it and pulls the collar of his old camouflage jacket tighter around his neck. When the wind blows off the lake at this time of year, it feels like your face is being torn by ghosts. He’s walking along the other side of the street, pretending to have important things to do, convincing himself that no one who sees him will realize that he’s waiting for the pub, the Bearskin, to open.

  He can see the roof of the rink from here. Like everyone else, the junior team’s game tomorrow is all he’s talked about every waking hour since they won the quarterfinal. It’s just that he no longer has many people to talk to anymore, not since the factory got rid of him along with nine other guys. There’s a good chance no one was interested in what he was saying before either, but that’s only dawned on him recently.

  He looks at the time. Another hour before the Bearskin opens. He pretends it’s no big deal. Keeps his hands in his pockets when he goes into the supermarket so no one will see them shaking. He fills his basket with things he doesn’t need and can’t afford, and puts the low-strength beer—the only sort the supermarket is allowed to sell—in last, to make it look like an impulse buy. “This? Oh, it might be useful to have a few beers at home, just in case.” He asks if he can use the bathroom in the little hardware store. Downs the beers. Goes out and chats to the sales assistant and buys a few very specific screws that he makes very clear he needs for an item of furniture that doesn’t exist. He goes back out onto the street, sees the roof of the rink again. Once upon a time he, Robbie Holts, was king there. Once upon a time he showed more promise than Kevin Erdahl does now. Once upon a time he was better than Peter Andersson.

  * * *

  Peter turns the c
ar around in the parking lot, pulls out onto the road, drums his fingers on the wheel. Now that the children have gone he becomes aware of his pulse again. It’s only a junior team game. Only a game. A game. He keeps repeating the mantra but his nerves are eating him up. His lungs seem to be drawing in oxygen through his eye sockets. Hockey is a simple sport: when your desire to win is stronger than your fear of losing, you have a chance. No one wins when they’re frightened.

  He hopes the juniors are too young to feel fear tomorrow, too naive to understand how much is at stake. Because a hockey crowd knows no nuances, only heaven or hell. Seen from the stands, you’re either a genius or utterly worthless, never anything in between. An offside is never a matter for doubt; every check is either perfectly clean or deserves a lifetime ban. When Peter was twenty and team captain and arrived back in Beartown after almost winning the final of the top league in the country, he was met by his dad’s voice from the kitchen: “Almost? For Christ’s sake, you can’t almost get on a boat. You’re either on the boat or in the water. And when all the other buggers are in the water as well, no one gives a shit that you were the last one to end up there.”

  When Peter got his contract with the NHL and was about to move to Canada, his dad told him in no uncertain terms not to think he was “anything special.” It’s possible that the old man meant it more gently than it came out, that he intended to say that humility and hard work would take the boy just as far over there as they had here. It’s possible that drink made his words sharper. It’s possible that Peter didn’t mean to slam the door quite as hard as he did. It doesn’t matter now. A young man left Beartown in silence and when he came home again it was too late for words. You can’t look a gravestone in the eye and ask its forgiveness.

  Peter remembers walking alone down all the small streets where he grew up and realizing that people he had known his whole life looked at him differently now. He remembers how they would suddenly stop talking when he walked in the room. He was relieved when that passed, when they stopped seeing him as a star and started to see him as general manager. Then, as the club went on tumbling down through the divisions and people told the GM what they really thought, he discovered that that part of him wished they still saw him as a star. Because a hockey crowd knows no nuances, only heaven or hell.

  So why does he carry on? Because he’s never considered any alternatives. It’s hard for a lot of people to remember the reasons why they started to love the thing they love, but it’s easy for Peter. The greatest reason for his love of hockey, from the very first moment he stood on a pair of skates, was the silence. Everything outside the rink, the cold and the darkness and the fact that his mom was ill and his dad would be drunk again when he got home . . . it all went quiet inside his head when he stepped onto the ice. He was four years old that first time, but hockey told him straightaway that it was going to demand complete devotion from him. He loved it for that. And still does.

  * * *

  A man who is the same age as Peter but looks fifteen years older sees Peter’s car pass through the town. He pulls his camouflage jacket more tightly around him and scratches his beard. When they were seventeen years old there was only one person in the whole of Beartown who thought Peter was more talented than Robbie when it came to hockey. “Talent is like letting two balloons up into the air: the most interesting thing isn’t watching which one climbs fastest, but which one has the longest string,” that old bastard Sune used to say. He was right, of course. The board and the sponsors forced him to move Robbie up to the A-team even though the coach insisted that the boy wasn’t ready mentally. Robbie kept getting hammered with hard checks, got injured, got scared, and spent the rest of the season hitting the puck into the boards rather than risk a fight. The first time the crowd booed him, he went home and cried. The second time he went home and got drunk.

  When he turned eighteen he was worse than he had been when he was seventeen, while Peter was better than anything this town had ever seen. When Peter was offered the chance to move to the A-team, he was ready. Robbie started to doubt himself every time he stepped out onto the ice, while nothing scared Peter. He went off to the NHL the same year Robbie started work at the factory. There are no almosts in hockey. One player achieved his dreams while the other now finds himself stamping his feet in the snow until the pub door finally opens.

  A short flight of stairs leads down to the bar, five steps. From down there you can’t see the roof of the rink.

  * * *

  Sune hears David leave his office. He waits until the bathroom door opens and closes, then the old man writes four words on a yellow Post-it note and stands up. He goes into David’s office and sticks it onto the screen of his computer. Sune isn’t a religious man, but at that moment he prays to all the powers he can think of that he’s not making a mistake. That those four words aren’t going to wreck another young boy’s life.

  For a moment he thinks about waiting until David comes back, then looking him in the eye and telling him the truth, as he sees it: “I hope you never stop arguing, David. I hope you never stop telling us to go to hell. That’s how you’ve made it to the top.” But he goes back to his own office instead and closes the door. Sports creates complicated men, proud enough to refuse to admit their mistakes, but humble enough always to put their team first.

  * * *

  When David gets back from the washroom he reads the four words on a Post-it note stuck to his computer monitor: Amat. Boys’ team. Fast!!!

  * * *

  It’s only a game. It can only change people’s lives.

  9

  All adults have days when we feel completely drained. When we no longer know quite what we spend so much time fighting for, when reality and everyday worries overwhelm us and we wonder how much longer we’re going to be able to carry on. The wonderful thing is that we can all live through far more days like that without breaking than we think. The terrible thing is that we never know exactly how many.

  * * *

  When the members of her family are asleep, Kira still goes around the house and counts them. Her own mother always did that with her children, Kira and her five siblings, counting them every night. Her mother said she didn’t understand how anyone could have children and not do that, how anyone could live without being terrified of losing them at any moment. “One, two, three, four, five, six,” Kira would hear her whisper through the house, and each child would lie there with his or her eyes closed and feel that they had been seen and acknowledged. It’s one of her most treasured childhood memories.

  Kira is driving from little Beartown to the larger town beyond the forest. Her commute to work takes longer than most people could bear, but it feels surprisingly quick to Kira, since she has the sense of having crossed the entire universe when she gets out of the car. Even though the larger town is many times smaller than the city where she was born, it’s a different world from the one among the trees. A larger world with colleagues to be spurred on by, friends to discuss culture and politics with, opponents to analyze and fight against.

  She is often told that it’s odd that a woman who doesn’t understand hockey ended up marrying a hockey player, but that’s not entirely fair. She finds the game perfectly logical, it’s just the intensity of the training she doesn’t understand. The adrenaline, the hunger teetering on the brink of fear, throwing yourself off the edge of the abyss and either floating or being swallowed up—Kira understands all that. She experiences it in the courtroom, in negotiations. Law is a different sort of game with a different set of rules, but you’re either a competitive person or you aren’t. Like they say in Beartown: Some people have the bear in them.

  Perhaps that’s why Kira, who up to the age of nineteen had never lived anywhere with fewer than a million inhabitants, has been able to make a home for herself among the forest-dwellers in spite of everything. She understands their love of the fight, she shares it. She knows that one of the funny things about fighting for success—and God knows, Kira fought her w
ay through her legal training alongside kids from rich families who never had to do the washing up in the family restaurant in the evenings—is that you never really stop fighting. You never stop being scared of falling from the top, because when you close your eyes you can still feel the pain from each and every step of the way up.

  * * *

  Peter already has a pain in his stomach when he steps into the president’s office. It’s messy, littered with old photographs and cups; there are some expensive bottles of drink on a table in one corner, golf clubs, and a half-open wardrobe containing a spare suit and clean shirts. They’re going to be needed—the president is sitting at his desk eating a sandwich the way a German shepherd would try to eat a balloon filled with mayonnaise. Peter tries to stop himself from wiping down both the desk and the president with napkins, and at least manages to stop before he gets to the president.

  “Can you close the door?” the president mutters as he chews.

  Peter takes a deep breath and feels his guts tie themselves in knots. He knows that everyone in the town thinks he’s naive, that he doesn’t understand where this is going. But he’s really just good at hoping. He closes the door and gives up on that.

  “We’re going to appoint David as coach of the A-team,” the president says, like a training video in how not to be diplomatic.

  Peter nods bitterly. The president brushes some crumbs from his tie.

  “Everyone knows how close you and Sune are . . . ,” he adds by way of an apology.

  Peter doesn’t respond. The president wipes his fingers on his pants.

  “Don’t look like that, for God’s sake, as if I just stole the presents from under your Christmas tree. We need to put the good of the club first, Peter!”

  Peter looks down at the floor. He’s a team player—that’s how he would describe himself. And the starting point for that is always understanding your own role, and its limitations. He’s going to have to tell himself that plenty of times today, force his brain to control his heart. It was Sune who persuaded him to become GM, and it was Sune’s door that was always open to him when things got tough.