Beartown

  She isn’t sure when he gives her the first alcoholic drink, but the second one isn’t anywhere near as repulsive. He keeps making bets with Lyt about who can finish their drink first, and Kevin wins every time, and Maya smiles indulgently and says:

  “Honestly! You hockey guys can’t even drink without turning it into a competition!”

  Kevin looks directly at her, as if they were alone, and seems to take her comment as a challenge.

  “Get more shots,” he tells Lyt.

  “Yes! Run, Lyt, I’ll time you!” Maya laughs sarcastically, clapping her hands.

  Lyt runs straight into a wall. Kevin laughs so hard that he’s left gasping for breath. Maya is fascinated by the way he always seems to be living in the moment. On the ice he doesn’t seem to think about anything but hockey, and off it he doesn’t seem to think about anything at all. He lives on instinct. She wishes she could be like that.

  She doesn’t know how much they drink; she can remember beating Lyt at drinking three shots in a row, then standing on a chair with her arms raised in triumph as if she were holding a giant trophy.

  Kevin likes the fact that she’s different. That her eyes never quite stop moving, that she’s always watching. That she seems to know who she is. He wishes he could be like that.

  * * *

  Ana stops drinking after the first shot. She doesn’t really know why, but Benji has disappeared and he was the reason she wanted to come. She’s standing in the kitchen with Maya, but people keep getting in between them. Ana can see the way the older girls look every time Kevin laughs at something Maya says, somewhere between derision and a death threat. She feels Lyt’s hands on the base of her spine and moves farther and farther into the corner. No matter how hard she sandpapers herself, how small she makes herself, she’s never going to fit in here.

  * * *

  Benji walks across the ice until he reaches the middle of the lake. He stands there smoking, and watches as the town goes out, one house at a time. The hard shell beneath his feet is rocking slightly; it’s late in the year to be this far out alone at night, even for Beartown. He’s always liked toying with the idea of falling through and disappearing into the cold darkness beneath, even when he was a child. Wondering if everything painful would cause less pain down there. Perhaps surprisingly, his dad’s suicide didn’t make him frightened of death, but the reverse. The only thing Benji doesn’t understand is why his dad felt obliged to use a rifle. The forest, the ice, the lake, the cold—this town offers thousands of ways to die a natural death.

  He stands out there until the smoke and sub-zero temperature have numbed him inside and out, then he walks back to the town, heads into one of the smaller residential areas, and steals a moped. He rides off toward Hed.

  * * *

  “Why don’t you like hockey players?” Kevin asks.

  “You’re not particularly smart,” Maya laughs.

  “What do you mean by that?” He seems genuinely interested.

  “You discovered the jockstrap seventy years before you invented the helmet,” she says.

  “We know how to prioritize,” he says with a big smile.

  They drink some more. When they have bets, he wins. He never loses.

  * * *

  “The Barn” is a poor name for a bar, possibly all the more so if it is actually in a barn. But, as Katia’s boss usually puts it: no one has ever looked at anyone in Hed and said, “You know what, you’ve almost got too much imagination!” A band is playing on the stage in front of a handful of spectacularly uninterested men in varying stages of middle age and intoxication. Katia is standing at the bar when the bouncer comes over to her.

  “Does your brother own a moped?”

  “No.”

  The bouncer chuckles.

  “In that case I’ll tell him to park it around the back.”

  Katia, the second-eldest big sister of the little brother who is bound to be the death of them all one day, merely sighs when Benji walks in. She doesn’t know if he goes looking for trouble or if it seeks him out, she just knows that you never find one without the other. Lucky for him that his eldest sister isn’t here, she thinks, because she’d have broken his neck by now. But Katia can’t be angry, not with him, she’s never been able to.

  “Calm down, I’m going to take the moped back,” Benji promises, and tries to smile even though she can see he’s in a foul mood.

  “I heard you won today. What are you doing here?” his sister asks.

  “I’m celebrating, you can see that,” he replies bitterly, and she leans forward and kisses the top of his head hard.

  “Did you go to see Dad?”

  He nods. Her beloved little brother—she can see why all the girls fall for him. “Sad eyes, wild heart, nothing but trouble lies ahead for that sort,” their mother says, and she knows from experience. Katia has never been to their father’s grave, not once, but she thinks of him sometimes, and how it must have felt to be so unhappy and not be able to tell anyone. It’s a terrible thing to have to keep a big secret from the people you love.

  When Benji is angry with something he shows up at his youngest older sister, Gaby’s, and plays with her children until he gets over it. When he wants to be quiet and think, he goes to see his eldest sister, Adri, over at her kennels. But when he’s feeling bruised, he comes here. To Katia. So she pats his cheek gently instead of yelling at him.

  “If you can watch the bar for a bit, I can sort things out in the office. Then you can come back to my place with me. The guys will sort out the moped thing,” she says, nodding toward the bouncers.

  First thing tomorrow morning two men you really wouldn’t want to get into an argument with will return the moped to its owner, explaining to him that “he must have left it in Hed by mistake.” When it gets taken to the garage to be repaired, the garage will do the work free of charge. That’s pretty much all anyone needs to know around here.

  “And don’t touch the damn beer!” Katia orders.

  Benji goes around the bar and waits until his sister has gone into the office before opening a bottle of beer. The band onstage are playing covers of old rock songs, because that’s what you have to play if you want to play in Hed. They look the way you’d expect: overweight and undertalented and distinctly average. All but the bass player. There’s nothing average about him at all. Black hair, black clothes, but he still stands out. The others are giving it their all, but he looks like he’s just playing. He’s standing there, squeezed into one and a half square yards between an amp and a cigarette machine, but he’s dancing in his own little kingdom. As if this barn weren’t at the end of the world but at its beginning.

  The bass player notices the young bartender with the messy hair in the silence between two songs. And at that moment the rest of the room might as well have been empty.

  * * *

  Ana comes out from the bathroom. Lyt is standing right outside the door. He leans his bulky frame toward her and tries to bundle the two of them back through the doorway. If he weren’t already drunk he might have succeeded, but Ana slips nimbly out of the way and darts out into the hall as he grasps for the sink to keep himself upright.

  “Come on! Fuck it, I got an assist today, don’t I get anything for that?”

  Ana backs away, glancing instinctively to her right and her left along the narrow hallway, like an animal in the forest evaluating escape routes. Lyt holds his arms out and slurs heavily:

  “I saw the way you looked at Benji. That’s fine. But he won’t be coming back here tonight. He’s a pothead . . . right? So he won’t be back on this PLANET tonight! So forget about him and fosus . . . fosuc . . . foscus on ME instead! I got a fucking ast . . . astist . . . fucking ASSIST tonight and WE WON!”

  Ana slams the door in his face and runs toward the kitchen, looking for Maya. She can’t see her anywhere.

  * * *

  Benji is pouring beer at the bar. The band has stopped playing; Katia’s put some country music on instead. Benji turns t
oward the next customer so quickly that he almost hits him in the face with a glass. The bass player smiles. Benji raises his eyebrows.

  “Wow, a musician in my bar. What would you like? It’s on the house.” The bass player tilts his head.

  “A whisky sour?”

  Benji’s grin stretches from ear to ear.

  “And where the hell do you think you are? Hollywood? You can have a JD and coke.”

  He mixes the drink as he talks and slides the glass across the bar with a practiced hand. The bassist gives it a long stare without touching it, then admits:

  “Sorry, I don’t even like whisky. I was just trying to sound like a rocker.”

  “Whisky sour isn’t all that fucking rock’n’roll,” Benji informs him.

  The bass player runs his hand through his hair.

  “I met a bartender once who said that if you stand on that side of the bar long enough you start to see everyone as a type of drink. Like some warped version of that ‘spirit animal’ thing fortune tellers go on about. Know what I mean?”

  Benji laughs out loud. He doesn’t often do that.

  “Well, your spirit animal isn’t whisky, I can tell you that much.”

  The bassist nods and leans forward discreetly.

  “I’m actually more interested in something veiled in smoke than drowned in coke. I heard from someone that you might be able to help me with that?”

  Benji downs the bass player’s drink and nods.

  “What did you have in mind?”

  * * *

  Amat and Bobo never actually decide to go out into the garden. It just happens. They’re both bad at parties, they don’t know what to do, so it’s natural that they should seek out something that they do understand. Something they know how to do. So they end up standing in the garden, each clutching one of Kevin’s sticks and taking turns firing pucks at the goal.

  “How do you get to be so fast?” Bobo asks drunkenly.

  “You spend a lot of time running away from people like you at school,” Amat replies, half joking and half serious.

  Bobo laughs, half properly and half not. Amat notes that he shoots harder than you might think, when he can stand still and calmly take aim.

  “Sorry . . . I . . . You know it’s just a joke, don’t you? You know . . . it’s a thing . . . the A-team shit on us and we shit on you.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Just a joke,” Amat lies.

  Bobo shoots harder. Full of guilt.

  “You’re in the first line now. You get to throw my clothes in the shower from now on, not the other way round.”

  Amat shakes his head.

  “You smell far too bad for me to want to touch your clothes, Bobo.”

  Bobo’s laughter echoes between the houses, genuine now. Amat smiles at him. Bobo suddenly lowers his voice.

  “I need to get quicker before autumn. Or I won’t be allowed to play anymore.”

  This is Bobo’s last season before he gets too old for the junior team. In other towns there are junior teams that go up to twenty-one, but not in Beartown, where there aren’t enough young men left in town after they graduate from high school. Some move away for school, others for work. The best players move up to the seniors, the rest get left over.

  “But then there’s the A-team!” Amat says brightly, but Bobo lets out a dry snort. “I’ll never make the A-team. This is my last season if I don’t get faster. Then there’s just repairing cars with Dad for the rest of my life.”

  Amat doesn’t say anything more; he doesn’t need to. Everyone who’s played hockey for as much as five minutes as a child knows that there’s no better sport. No greater rush. Amat takes a deep breath and says something he will never admit to anyone else:

  “I was frightened today, Bobo. I was terrified the whole way through the game. I wasn’t even happy when we won, just relieved. I . . . Shit, do you remember when you were little and used to play out on the lake? That was nothing but fun. You didn’t even think, it was just the only thing you wanted to do. It’s still the only thing I want to do. I have no idea what I’m going to do if I can’t do this; hockey’s the only thing I’m any good at. But now . . . it just feels like . . .”

  “Work,” Bobo concludes, without even looking at him.

  Amat nods.

  “I was scared the whole time. Does that sound sick?”

  Bobo shakes his head. They don’t say any more about it. They just fire their pucks without speaking. Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang.

  Bobo nods and grins. They’re fifteen and seventeen years old, and in ten years’ time they’ll remember this evening, when all the others were inside having a party, and they stood out here and became friends.

  * * *

  The night is clear and full of stars, the trees are still, and they’re standing behind the barn smoking. Benji never usually gets high with strangers, because most of the time it’s an intimate and solitary act for him, and he doesn’t really know why tonight should be an exception. The way the bass player made his own space on the stage, maybe. Like he was in some other dimension. Benji recognized it. Or longed for it.

  “What have you done to your face?” the bass player asks, pointing at the scar on his chin.

  “Hockey,” Benji replies.

  “So you’re a fighter?”

  His accent betrays the fact that he’s not from this part of the country. The question reveals that it’s probably his first visit.

  “If that’s what you want to know, you shouldn’t look for scars on people’s faces. You should be looking for scars on their knuckles,” Benji replies.

  The bassist takes some deep drags, blows his bangs from his eyes.

  “Of all the sports I don’t understand why anyone would play, hockey is the one I understand least.”

  Benji snorts.

  “Isn’t the bass what people who can’t play the guitar play?”

  The bass player laughs loudly, and the sound sings between the trees and hits Benji in his head as quickly as in his chest. Very few people have that effect. Very few people are tequila and champagne at the same time.

  “Have you always lived here in Hed? Don’t you get cabin fever in a town this small?” the bassist smiles.

  His gaze alternates between shy and greedy as it roams across Benji’s lips. Benji lets the smoke filter up over his cheeks.

  “I live in Beartown. Hed is big in comparison. What are you doing here?”

  The bassist shrugs his shoulders, tries to sound nonchalant, but all the hurt inside him shines out.

  “My cousin sings in the band. Their bass player went off to college somewhere and they asked if I wanted to move here and play for a couple of months. They’re really shit and we get, like, a crate of beer in return for playing, but I’d just . . . I was in a bad relationship. I needed to get away.”

  “It’s hard to get any farther than this,” Benji says.

  The bass player listens to the trees, feels tentative snowflakes land on his hands. His voice trembles in the darkness.

  “It’s more beautiful than I thought. Here.”

  Benji goes on smoking with his eyes closed. He wishes he’d smoked some more. Or was drunk. Maybe then he would have dared. But now he just says:

  “Not like where you’re from.”

  The bass player inhales Benji’s smoke. Nods down toward the ground.

  “We’ll be playing here again next Sunday. If you want to come. It would be . . . I’d like to get to know someone. Here.”

  His black clothes fall gently over his thin frame. His movements are soft and light, so free from exertion that he seems weightless. In a forest full of predators he stands above the covering of snow like some sort of bird. His breath is cold as it reaches Benji’s skin. Benji extinguishes the glow in his hand and takes two steps back.

  “I need to go in before my sister sees me standing out here.”

  “Big, tough hockey player, but you’re scared of your sister?” the bass player smiles.

  Benji shrugs his sho
ulders lightly. “You would be too. Who the hell do you think taught me to fight?”

  “See you next Sunday, then?” the bass player calls.

  He doesn’t get an answer.

  * * *

  Maya is standing in the kitchen when she suddenly realizes that Ana is gone. She goes to look for her. The guys see her leaning against the wall to keep her balance as the alcohol tosses her around inside, like a penguin on an unsteady piece of ice. Lyt leans closer to Kevin’s ear and whispers:

  “The GM’s daughter, Kev, Christ, you’ll NEVER get to fuck her!”

  “Want to bet?” Kevin grins.

  “A hundred kronor.”

  Lyt nods. They shake on it.

  * * *

  Afterward Maya will remember bizarre details, like the fact that Kevin had spilled a drink on his shirt and the stain looked like a butterfly. No one will want to hear her talk about that. The only thing they’ll ask about that night is how much she’d had to drink. If she was drunk. If she held his hand. Gave him signals. If she went upstairs voluntarily.

  “Lost?” he smiles when he finds her beside the stairs.

  By that point she’s been around the ground floor three times without finding the bathroom. She laughs and throws her arms out. Forgets Ana.

  “This is a completely crazy house. It’s like you live in Hogwarts.”

  “Do you want to see upstairs?” he asks.

  She’ll never stop wishing that she hadn’t gone with him up the stairs.

  * * *

  Katia’s car starts reluctantly on the eighth or ninth attempt.

  “You can sleep over at the kennels with Adri tonight.”

  “No, drive me home,” Benji says sleepily.

  She pats him on the cheek.

  “No, because you see, sweetie: Adri and I love our little brother. And if you go home to Mom smelling of beer and weed one more time, we won’t have a little brother anymore.”

  He grunts and shrugs his jacket off, and makes a pillow out of it against the window. She pokes him on his arm, just below the sleeve of his T-shirt, where the tattoo of the bear peeps out, and says: