Beartown
“Thought Kia said you were going to drop it off yesterday,” he says, grinning at the car.
“I was,” Peter admits, doing his best not to think about the mess on his fingers.
Hog lets out a dry laugh, hands him a rag, and scratches his beard, which is so thick and unkempt it’s started to look like a shaggy ski mask.
“Annoyed?”
“Let’s just say she wasn’t exactly over the moon,” Peter confesses.
“Do you want coffee?”
“Have you got any fresh?”
Hog chuckles.
“Fresh coffee. Have you gone all soft now? There’s some instant and a kettle in the corner.”
“I think I’ll leave it.”
Hog pats his hand intentionally as he walks past, and Peter wipes it with an irritated smile. Friends for forty years, still the same joke. Hog grabs a flashlight and heads out into the yard, and Peter stands next to him shivering, full of the sense of inadequacy that only afflicts a man of a certain generation when he watches another man from the same generation repair his wife’s car. Hog straightens up and spares Peter any technical jargon.
“Piece of crap. Bobo can do it when he wakes up. You can come pick it up at nine.”
He goes back into the garage and absentmindedly picks up one of the Ford’s heavy tires, making it look about as challenging as it is for Peter to put paper in the recycling bin. Bobo has unfortunately inherited both his father’s raw strength and indifferent skating abilities. Hog was a terrifying defensive player in his day, but Sune always used to sigh: “That lad even manages to trip over the blue lines.”
“Maybe you could let Bobo have a bit of a rest today? Big game this afternoon,” Peter says.
Hog raises an eyebrow without looking up, then wipes his hand across his face to get rid of the sweat, leaving glossy streaks of oil in his beard.
“It’ll take two hours to fix your car. If you’re picking it up at nine, Bobo won’t have to start until seven. That’s a rest.”
Peter opens his mouth but says nothing. A game of hockey is a game of hockey, but tomorrow this family will have to get up and earn a living again. Bobo is a solid back, but nowhere near professional standard. There are two younger kids in the family, and the global economy waits for no man. Bears shit in the woods, and everyone shits on Beartown.
Hog offers him a lift home but he’s happy to walk. Needs to calm his nerves. He walks past the factory, which provides work for fewer and fewer people. He passes the big supermarket, which has put all the smaller stores out of business. He turns onto the road leading to the center of town, and then onto the main shopping street. The street gets shorter and shorter every year.
* * *
Ramona has survived long enough to get her pension, but one of the good things about owning your own pub is that no one can force you to stop working. The Bearskin has been hers since it stopped being her mother’s, and before that it belonged to her grandfather. It still looks much the same, but Grandfather used to smoke indoors and now Ramona smokes outside. Three before breakfast; she lights the last of them on the dying stub of the second. The boys who play billiards and drink beer on a tab here every evening affectionately call her “the Marlboro Mom.” She has no children of her own; Holger couldn’t have any, and perhaps never needed them either. The only family he wanted apart from Ramona was his sporting family, he used to say. Someone once asked him if there was any sport he didn’t like, and he replied “Politics. They should stop showing that on TV.” If the house had been on fire he’d have rescued Ramona first of all, but she’d have had to be clutching their Beartown Ice Hockey season tickets when he did so. It was theirs, that ridiculous sport. All his loudest laughter and warmest embraces had been left behind in the stands. She was the one who smoked, he was the one who got cancer. “I’m suffering from an ironic illness,” he declared breezily. Ramona refuses to let anyone say that he died; she says he left her, because that’s how she sees it. Like a betrayal. She’s been left standing in the snow like a bare tree trunk without any bark, unprotected now that he’s no longer here.
She has learned how to make the days pass. You just do. When the shift at the factory gets out in the afternoon, the Bearskin fills with young men she calls “the boys,” and whom the police and the hockey club call far worse things. They’re capable of a lot of crap, but they love Ramona the way Holger loved her. Maybe she’s a bit too protective of them. She knows that. Beartown nurtures tough people, and the way life has turned out hasn’t made her boys any softer. But they’re all she has left of him, as close to her memories as she can bear to go.
Death does strange, incomprehensible things to loving souls. She still lives in the apartment above the pub. Some of the boys who drive forklifts over in the supermarket warehouse buy food for her there now that the little store across the road has closed down, so the old woman no longer goes any farther than the ashtray outside the door. Eleven years have passed since Holger left her, and at every A-team game, even when the rink is sold out, there are always two empty seats in the stands.
* * *
Peter sees her from a long way off. She waits for him to get closer.
“Are you looking for something, sir?” Ramona asks.
She’s gotten older, but she’s like her pub: always the same. The people who don’t like the fact that the Bearskin offers a refuge to the town’s thugs each evening talk about her as an unpleasant, sociopathic old woman who’s losing her marbles, but even if Peter hardly ever sees her these days it still feels like coming home after a long journey each time he does.
“Don’t know yet,” he smiles.
“Nervous about the game?”
He doesn’t have to answer. She stubs her third cigarette out under her shoe, tucks the butt inside the packet, and says:
“Whisky?”
He looks up at the sky. Soon the town will wake up, and even the sun seems to be planning an early appearance. Everyone will wake up to the dream that a junior team game can change everything. Can it make the council turn its gaze toward the forest again? Set up a hockey academy, maybe even build a shopping center? Make it so people giving directions say: Stay on the road, past Hed, instead of: If you get to Beartown, you’ve gone too far? Peter has spent so long convincing other people of all that, he no longer knows if he believes it himself.
“A cup of coffee would be good,” he says.
She lets out a hoarse chuckle and maneuvers herself down the steps into the pub.
“That’s always the way with sons of fathers who liked whisky a little too much: you either drink it all the time or not at all. There’s no in-between in some families.”
Peter went to the Bearskin more times before he turned eighteen than he’s been since. He usually had to carry his dad home; sometimes he had to help him beat up a debt collector from Hed while he was at it. The bar looks the same now as it did back then. Smells a bit less of smoke, and considering what else a basement bar can smell of instead, that isn’t altogether a good thing. It’s empty now, of course. Peter never comes here in the evening; it isn’t a healthy environment for the GM of an underperforming A-team. The old men in the bar have always had a lot to say, but the younger men sometimes go further than harsh words these days. There’s a constant threat of violence hidden just beneath the surface of a certain type of person in this town that Peter never noticed when he was growing up, but which struck him all the more plainly after he came home from Canada. Neither hockey nor school nor the economy ever managed to find a way out for these people, and they emanate a silent fury. They’re known as “the Pack” now, even if no one ever hears them say that themselves.
The team’s official supporters’ club has always been called “Ursus Arctos,” and technically the men who hang out at the Bearskin belong to nothing but that, along with the pensioners, preschool teachers, and parents of young families in the seats in the stands. The Pack has no membership cards or T-shirts. The town is small enough for big secrets, but P
eter knows that even when they are at their strongest there are never more than thirty or forty of them, yet that’s enough to require extra police at A-team games in order to guarantee security. Players who have been recruited from other towns and are thought not to have performed well enough on the ice in comparison to their paycheck have occasionally shown up in Peter’s office out of the blue, wanting to tear up their contracts and move. Reporters from the local paper ask questions one day and are inexplicably uninterested the following morning. The Pack has scared their opponents away from coming to Beartown, but sadly the same thing applies to sponsors. The twentysomething men at the Bearskin have become the most conservative people in town: they don’t want a modern Beartown, because they know that a modern Beartown won’t want them.
Ramona pushes the cup of coffee across the bar, then knocks on the wood.
“Is there something you need to talk about?”
Peter scratches his head. The Marlboro Mom was always Beartown’s preeminent psychologist. Even if her standard prescription was usually, “Pull yourself together, there’s others have got it worse.”
“I’ve just got a lot on my mind, that’s all.”
He looks at the walls, covered with game jerseys and pictures of players, pennants and scarves.
“When did you last see a game, Ramona?”
“Haven’t seen one since Holger left me. You know that, son.”
Peter turns the cup between his fingers. Reaches for his wallet. When Ramona waves her hand dismissively he puts the money down on the bar anyway.
“If you don’t want it for the coffee you can always put it in the kitty.”
She nods appreciatively and takes the notes. The kitty is a box she keeps in her bedroom; she uses it to help when one of the boys loses his job and can’t pay the bills.
“The person who needs it right now is someone from your old line. Robert Holts has lost his job at the factory. He’s spending too much time here.”
“Oh shit,” Peter says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.
He had meant to call Robbie from Canada; he had meant to call him when he moved home. Good intentions don’t count. Twenty years is too long for him to know how to start the conversation now. Should he apologize? What for? How? His eyes roam across the walls again.
“Hockey,” he says. “Do you ever think about what a strange sport it is, Ramona? The rules, the rink . . . Who on earth would come up with something like that?”
“Someone who needed to give drunk men with rifles a less dangerous hobby?” the aged landlady suggests.
“I just mean . . . Damn . . . this might sound a bit crazy, but sometimes you can’t help wondering if we don’t take all this a bit too seriously. If we aren’t putting too much pressure on the juniors. They’re not really much more than . . . kids.”
Ramona pours herself a glass of whisky. Breakfast is, after all, the most important meal of the day.
“That depends what we want from the kids. And what the kids want from hockey.”
Peter clutches his cup tighter.
“And what do we want, Ramona? What can the sport give us? We devote our whole lives to it, and what can we hope to get, at best? A few moments . . . a few victories, a few seconds when we feel bigger than we really are, a few isolated opportunities to imagine that we’re . . . immortal. And it’s a lie. It really isn’t important.”
Silence settles between them, untouched. Only when Peter pushes his empty cup back across the bar and stands up to leave does the old widow drain her glass and grunt:
“The only thing the sport gives us are moments. But what the hell is life, Peter, apart from moments?”
* * *
The best psychologist in town.
* * *
Kira gathers together Leo’s pads and folds his laundry and packs his bag and puts it in the hall. He’s twelve, he ought to do his own packing, she knows that. But she also knows that she’s the one who has to drive him to practice and will have to come straight back to pick up half his things if he packs for himself. When she’s done she sits down at the computer for half an hour. When Leo was at primary school, his teacher once told them during a parent consultation what he had said when he was asked what his parents did: “My dad works with hockey. My mom writes emails.”
She puts the coffee on, ticks a number of things off her lists and on her calendar, takes several deep breaths and feels the heaviness in her chest. “Panic attacks,” the psychologist said six months ago, and Kira never went back after that. She felt ashamed. As if life wasn’t happy enough, as if she wasn’t content, how could she possibly explain that to her family? “Panic attacks,” what did that even mean? A lawyer, wife of the GM, hockey mom, and God knows she loves being all three of those, but sometimes she stops the car in the forest going one way or the other and sits in the darkness, crying. She remembers her own mother on those occasions, the way she would wipe the tears from her children’s cheeks and whisper: “No one ever said life was going to be easy.” Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that’s always too small. No matter how hard you try to cover everyone, there’s always someone who’s freezing.
She wakes Leo at eight. His breakfast is already on the table; she’ll be driving him to practice in half an hour. Then she’ll come home and pick up Ana and Maya, so that the three of them can do a voluntary shift in the cafeteria during the juniors’ game. Afterward Leo will need driving to a friend’s, and Maya to one of hers, presumably. Then Kira hopes Peter will get back from the office in time for them to have a glass of wine together, maybe some heated-up lasagna from the freezer, before he falls asleep from exhaustion and she sits up till midnight answering emails in an inbox that never empties. Tomorrow is Sunday, and there will be hockey clothes to wash and bags to be packed and teenagers to be woken. Then back to work on Monday, and work, quite honestly, has been shit recently. Since she turned down the offer of promotion the demands on her have, ironically enough, gotten worse. She knows she’s only allowed to arrive last each morning and leave first in the afternoon because she’s the best at what she does. But it’s been a long time since she felt she was the best she could be. She doesn’t have time. She’s not up to it.
When the kids were little she saw so many other parents lose control in the stands at the rink, and she couldn’t understand them, but now she does. The children’s hobbies aren’t only the children’s hobbies—the parents put just as many hours into them, year after year, sacrificing so much, paying out such huge amounts of money, that their significance eats its way even into adult brains. They start to symbolize other things, compensating for or reinforcing the parents’ own failures. Kira knows it sounds silly; she knows it’s just a silly game in a silly sport, but deep down she’s nervous too, as well as feeling nervous on behalf of Peter and the juniors and the club and the town today. Deep down she could also do with winning at something.
She goes past Maya’s room, picks up some clothes from the floor, and when her daughter whimpers in her sleep she puts her hand on her forehead. It’s hot. In a couple of hours Kira will be surprised by the fact that her daughter voluntarily and almost eagerly insists on going with them to the rink, regardless. She usually plays the martyr as hard as she can if she finds so much as a split end in order to have an excuse not to have to go to hockey.
* * *
In hindsight Kira will wish a thousand times over that she had forced her daughter to stay at home.
15
There are plenty of things that hurt people without people ever really knowing why. Anxiety can act as internal gravity, shrinking the soul. Benji has always been good at falling asleep and bad at actually sleeping. He wakes up early on the day of the game, but not from nerves—that’s never bothered him. He cycles away from home before his mom wakes up, leaves his bike at the edge of the forest, and walks the last few miles to Adri’s kennels. He sits in the yard patting the dogs until his other two sisters, Katia and Gaby, also show up. They kiss their little broth
er on the top of his head, then their elder sister comes out and slaps him hard on the back of the neck with her open hand and asks if it’s true that he called his teacher “sweet cheeks.” He never lies to Adri. She slaps him on the back of the neck again, then kisses him just as hard and whispers that she loves him and that she’ll never let anything bad happen to him, but that she’ll kill him if she hears he’s spoken to a teacher like that again.
The four of them eat breakfast surrounded by dogs, without saying anything much. They do this once a year, a quiet act of remembrance, always early in the morning so their mother doesn’t find out about it. She’s never forgiven her husband. Benji was too little when it happened to harbor any hatred, and his three sisters are somewhere in between. Everyone has their own struggle. When Benji gets to his feet he doesn’t ask any of them to go with him, and they don’t ask where he’s going. They just kiss his hair one after the other, tell him he’s an idiot, and that they adore him.
He walks back through the snow to his bicycle, then goes off to the cemetery, where he crouches down with his back against Alan Ovich’s headstone, smoking joints until the pain is soft enough to let his tears start to fall. The boy’s fingertips trace the worn lettering of the name on the stone. On this day fifteen years ago, early one March morning, Alan got out his hunting rifle before his family woke up. Then he took everything that hurt him and went straight out into the forest. It doesn’t matter how many times you explain it to a child. No one loses a parent that way without knowing that all the other grownups are lying when they say, “It wasn’t your fault.”