* * *
2–2. Maggan Lyt is already down banging on the door to the scorekeeper’s cubicle, to make sure that William is credited with the assist.
* * *
David nods silently to himself and taps Amat’s helmet. Lars’s pupils widen in pure disbelief when he realizes what’s going on.
“For God’s sake, David, you can’t be serious.”
David is as serious as a stray bullet.
“Lyt is one change away from needing oxygen, and two from needing a priest. We need pace.”
“Lyt just made an assist!”
“He was lucky. We don’t play on luck. AMAT!”
Amat just stares at the coach. David grabs hold of his helmet:
“At the next face-off in our zone I want you to take off. I don’t give a shit if you’ve got the puck or not, I just want them to know how fast you are.”
He points toward their opponents’ bench. Amat nods hesitantly. David doesn’t break eye contact.
“Do you want to be something, Amat? Do you really want to show this whole town that you can be something? Now’s your chance to show them.”
At the next defensive face-off Benji lines up on one side of Kevin, Amat on the other. Maggan Lyt is now standing with both hands against the glass of the team bench, shrieking that NO ONE pulls her son from a semifinal and goes unpunished. Lars looks at David.
“If we lose this game she’s going to castrate you.”
David leans nonchalantly against the boards.
“Winners have a tendency to be forgiven in this town.”
* * *
Out on the ice, Benji does as he’s been instructed—he gets the puck and fires it out of the zone, and it glides toward the opposing team’s end. Amat does as he’s been instructed: he takes off. He gets hacked by one of the backs as he’s only just starting to skate away, and by the time he pulls free there’s no point chasing the puck. He goes after it anyway. A gasp runs through the spectators who understand hockey. A deep sigh passes through the ones who don’t. The opponent’s goalie calmly skates out and plays the puck to his defense, who move it up the ice, where their forwards fire a shot at Beartown’s goal. When the referee blows for another face-off back in Beartown’s end, Amat is standing alone in the opposing team’s zone two hundred feet away. The other sponsors are muttering, “Does that one need a compass, or what?” But Tails can see what David sees. What Sune saw.
“Quick as a wolverine with mustard up its ass! They won’t catch him!” he smiles.
David leans over the boards and catches Amat by the shoulder when he’s on his way back.
“Again!”
Amat nods. Kevin wins the face-off, but Benji doesn’t even manage to get the puck out of the zone, but Amat sets off at full speed toward the opponents’ goal anyway, and doesn’t stop until he reaches the boards at the far end. He can hear booing and mocking laughter from the stands: “Are you lost? The puck isn’t anywhere near you!” but he just looks at David. The Beartown goalie smothers the puck, another face-off. David makes a brief circular gesture in the air. “Again.”
The third time Amat races across the ice it doesn’t matter where the puck is, because there’s one person in the rink who sees his pace and realizes what’s going on. The coach of the opposing team snatches a sheaf of papers from his assistant and roars:
“Who the hell is that? Who the hell is number eighty-one?”
Amat looks up at the stands. Maya is on the steps just below the cafeteria; she sees him. He’s been longing for that since the first day in primary school, and now she sees him. He loses his concentration so much that he doesn’t hear Bobo yelling his name until he’s right next to the bench.
“AMAT!”
Bobo is hanging over the boards, and grabs him by the collar:
“Fake inside, skate outside!”
For half a second they look each other right in the eye and Bobo doesn’t need to say anything to prove how much he would have liked to be on the ice himself. Amat nods in acknowledgment, and they tap each other’s helmets. Maya is still standing on the stairs. At the next face-off Kevin and Benji circle the zone, stop in front of Amat, and lean toward him.
“Have you got any strength left in those little chicken-legs, then?” Kevin grins.
“Give me the puck and you’ll see,” Amat replies with bloodshot eyes.
Kevin wouldn’t have lost that face-off even if his hands had been tied behind his back and he had a pistol held to his head. Benji shovels the puck along the boards and chases after it. Tomorrow his thighs won’t even let him get out of bed but he feels nothing now, and knocks down two opponents with one hit. Amat feints inside but chips the puck off the boards instead, then blasts past the defenseman on the outside, so quickly that one of the two players covering Kevin has to let go of number nine and chase number eighty-one instead. That’s all Beartown needs. A stick hits Amat’s lower arm so hard that he thinks his wrist is broken, but he manages to pull the puck from the boards and skate around the net. He has one breath in which to look up, wait until the blade of Kevin’s stick hits the ice, then release the puck at the same instant he’s knocked to the ice. Kevin gets the puck two inches off the ice, and that’s twice as much as he needs.
* * *
When the red light goes on behind the net, adults tumble over each other in the stands. The sponsors send each others’ cups of coffee flying across the rows of seats as they try to do high fives. Two fifteen-year-old girls bounce around a cafeteria in delight, and up at the back of the stand an old A-team coach who never laughs does so today. Fatima and Kira hug each other until they’re lying on the floor and aren’t really sure if they’re celebrating or crying.
Outside the rink, alone in the snow, Ramona stands and feels the sound wave hit her. “I love you,” she whispers to Holger. Then she turns and walks home on her own with a smile in her chest. It is a moment shared between people and hockey, between a town whose inhabitants want to believe and a world that has spent years telling them to give up. There isn’t a single atheist in the whole building.
* * *
Kevin turns and heads straight for the bench, swatting away every teammate who tries to hug him, climbs over the boards, and throws himself in David’s arms.
“For you!” the boy whispers, and David holds him like he was his own son.
Twenty yards away Amat crawls to his feet from the ice. He might as well be in a different rink altogether seeing as no one is looking at him anyway. A moment after his pass, the defenseman’s stick and elbow hit him in the neck with all his weight behind them, Amat’s head hit the ice as if he’d been knocked into an empty swimming pool, and he didn’t even see the goal. By the time he gets to his knees every Beartown player is following Kevin toward the bench, everyone in the stands is watching number nine. Even Maya.
Number eighty-one—the number he chose because his mother was born that year—stands alone by the boards and looks at the scoreboard. It is simultaneously the best and worst moment he has experienced in this rink. He adjusts his helmet and skates toward the bench in a few lonely strides, but someone swings around behind him and taps him twice on the helmet.
“She’ll notice you when we win the final,” Benji smiles.
He’s already skated off and is standing by the center line before Amat has time to reply. Lyt is on his way over the boards but David stops him and calls to Amat to stay on the ice. As Kevin skates out to take the face-off at center ice, they nod briefly to each other, number nine and number eighty-one. Amat is one of them now. It doesn’t matter how many people up in the stands actually realize that.
* * *
Peter loses his bearings after the final whistle; one moment he’s bellowing in an embrace, the next he’s tumbling headfirst down an entire section of the stands, and gets to his feet with his ears ringing from all the people shrieking in and around them. Old people, young people, people who love this game, and people who don’t even care. He has no idea how it happened,
but all of a sudden he finds himself in the middle of a wild, singing embrace with a stranger, and when he looks up he realizes that the man he’s dancing with on the steps is Robbie Holts. They stop and look at each other, then start laughing and can’t stop. For this one evening they’re seventeen years old again.
* * *
Hockey is just a silly little game. We devote year after year after year to it without ever really hoping to get anything in return. We burn and bleed and cry, fully aware that the most the sport can give us, in the very best scenario, is incomprehensibly meager and worthless: just a few isolated moments of transcendence. That’s all.
But what the hell else is life made of?
19
Adrenaline does strange things to the body. When the final signal sounds, it makes moms and dads jump over the boards, respected entrepreneurs and factory managers slide around on the ice on slippery shoes, hugging each other like overtired toddlers in diapers. When Kevin drapes himself and Benji in a huge green flag and starts skating a lap of honor, the stands are already pretty much empty. The rink has filled up with the entire community. Everywhere people are jumping, slipping, tumbling, laughing, celebrating, crying. Childhood friends, classmates, parents, siblings, relatives, neighbors. How long will the town remember this? Only forever.
* * *
When you lose in hockey it feels like having your heart scalded. When you win, you own the clouds. Beartown is a heavenly town this evening.
* * *
Peter stops by the boards in one corner. He sits down alone on the ice and just laughs. All those hours in the office, all the arguments, the sleepless nights and angst-ridden mornings, they’re all worth it now, every last one of them. He’s still sitting there when the rest of the town, one inhabitant at a time, leaves the ice. Robbie Holts comes and sits down next to him. They just grin.
Adrenaline does strange things, especially when it leaves you. When he was a player, Peter kept getting told how important it was to “control your adrenaline,” but he never understood that. For him, his complete, unquestioned focus and concentration out on the ice, his ability to live absolutely in the moment, came quite naturally. It was only when he had to watch a game from the stands for the first time that he realized how close adrenaline is to panic. What rouses the body to battle and achievement are the same instincts that instill mortal dread in the brain.
During his career as a player Peter used to think of the final signal at the end of a game as a roller coaster that’s come to a halt: Some people think, “Good, that’s over.” And some think, “Again!” His first wish after every game was always to be allowed to play another one. Now, as GM, he needs migraine pills just to be able to function normally afterward.
When the last supporters, parents, and sponsors, delirious with victory, finally leave the rink over an hour later and spill out across the parking lot, chanting, “WE ARE THE BEARS, WE ARE THE BEARS, WE ARE THE BEARS, THE BEARS FROM BEARTOWN!” Peter, Robbie, and their memories stay behind.
“Do you want to come up to the office?” Peter asks, and Robbie bursts out laughing.
“Bloody hell, Peter, this is our first date—I’m not that kind of girl!”
Peter laughs too.
“Sure? We can have some tea and look at old team photos?”
Robbie holds out his hand.
“Say hi to your lads from me, okay? Tell them a proud old soldier was here watching them this evening.”
Peter squeezes his hand.
“Drop around for dinner one evening. Kira would love to see you too.”
“Sure!” Robbie lies, and they both know it.
They part. We only get moments.
* * *
The locker room is empty. After the adrenaline, after the singing and dancing and jumping on benches and banging on walls, after having just been packed with young and old men alike with bare chests and beer in their hair, it’s now numbingly silent. Amat is the only one left, he’s going around picking up scraps of tape from the floor. Peter walks down the corridor and stops in surprise.
“What are you still doing here, Amat?”
The boy reddens.
“Don’t say anything okay? About me doing a bit of tidying up? I just want to deal with the worst of it.”
Peter’s throat starts to tighten with shame. He remembers when he used to see the boy collect empty cans from the stand so that Fatima could afford to buy hockey gear for him for the first time, when he was eight or nine years old. They were too proud to accept charity, so Peter and Kira had to place fake adverts in the local paper so that every year some cheap, secondhand equipment in Amat’s size would just happen to show up. Kira built up a network of people all the way to Hed who took turns pretending to be the sellers.
“No, no . . . of course not, Amat, it would never even occur to me to say anything to the other players,” he mumbles.
Amat looks up, baffled. Then he snorts.
“The players? I don’t give a shit what you say to the players. Don’t say anything to Mom! She gets really pissed off if I do her job!”
Peter wishes he could say something to the boy just then. Something about how incredibly proud he made him out on the ice that evening. But he lacks the words for that; he doesn’t know how to go about it. And feels like a bad actor when he does try. Sometimes he gets so envious of David’s ability to make these young guys love him that it drives him mad. They trust David, they follow him, worship him. Peter feels like a forlorn parent at the playground watching some jokey mom or dad farther away who manages to get all the kids roaring with laughter.
So he says none of the things he’d like to say to Amat. Just smiles and nods, and manages to say:
“You must be the only teenager in the world who gets told off by his mom for cleaning too much.”
Amat hands him a grown man’s shirt.
“One of the sponsors left this.”
It smells of alcohol. Peter slowly shakes his head.
“Look . . . Amat . . . I . . .”
Words fail him. All that comes out is:
“I think you should go out into the parking lot. You’ve never gone out of this rink after a match like this. I think you should, it’s quite an experience, one not many people get to have. You can walk through that door as . . . a winner.”
* * *
Amat doesn’t really understand what that means until he actually packs his equipment away, heads out into the corridor, and pushes through the outside door. Grownups cheer and applaud when they see him, a few of the older girls from school shout his name, Bobo gives him a hug, Benji ruffles his hair, and everyone wants to shake his hand. Farther away he can see Kevin being interviewed by the local paper. Then he writes autographs for a sea of children while their mothers nag him to let them take two photographs each: one of Kevin and the child, and one of Kevin and the mother.
Amat bounces around between the hugs and pats on the back, and hears himself join in a shouted rendition of “WE ARE THE BEARS FROM BEARTOWN!” so loudly that his chest stings, and he hears the others singing louder because he does, because they want to feel that they’re participating in what he represents now.
The rush lifts him up, his endorphins are bubbling, and afterward he will remember thinking: “How can anyone possibly experience this without thinking he’s a god?”
* * *
Kira is cleaning the cafeteria. Maya and Ana emerge from the washroom; they’ve changed and put on makeup, and are full of laughter and expectation.
“I . . . I’ll be staying at Ana’s tonight. We’re going to . . . study,” Maya smiles.
Her daughter is lying, of course, and her mother is lying when she pretends not to understand that. They’re balancing on that defining moment in life when they’re each equally concerned about the other. The teenage years offer a brief period of equality after childhood, before the balance shifts and Maya becomes old enough to worry about her parents more than they do about her. Soon Maya won’t be Kira’s little girl
anymore, and then Kira will become Maya’s little old mom. It doesn’t take a lot to be able to let go of your child. It takes everything.
* * *
Peter steps into the president’s office. It’s full of grown men stumbling about, already very, very drunk.
“That’s what I’ve been looking for!” Tails yells, and comes staggering toward Peter, bare-chested, and grabs his shirt from Peter’s hand.
Peter glares at him.
“I never want to hear that you’ve taken alcohol into the players’ locker room again. They’re kids, Tails.”
“Pah, they’re not KIDS, Peter, give it a rest! Let the boys celebrate!”
“I let the boys celebrate, I just think that grown men ought to have their limits.”
Tails waves his words away as if they were persistent little insects. Two men behind him, clutching cans of beer, are engaged in a heated debate about the club’s A-team players. One forward is described as “so fucking thick he can’t even go and buy a loaf of bread without someone to hold his hand,” a goalie is “soft in the head; you can tell because he married a woman everyone knows slept with half the team before him, and probably the other half afterward.” Peter isn’t sure if the men are sponsors or just part of Tails’s group, but he’s heard remarks like that a thousand times and still hasn’t gotten used to the hierarchy in these rooms. The players can talk crap about the referee but never the coach, the coach can criticize the players but never the GM, the GM can’t criticize the president, the president can’t criticize the board, the board can’t criticize the sponsors. And at the very top are the men in suits in this office, talking shamelessly about the players as if they were racehorses. Products.
Tails tweaks Peter’s ear affectionately to lighten the mood.