The bass player assumes that means “sorry” in these parts. He’s noticed that they like communicating through the medium of drink.
“I have no intention of settling down here,” he promises.
“No one does. They just get stuck here,” Benji says, hopping into the room.
He doesn’t ask about the violin. The bass player likes that, the fact that Benji’s the sort of person who isn’t surprised that someone can be more than one thing.
“If I play, you can dance,” the bass player offers, moving the bow gently across the strings.
“I can’t dance,” Benji replies, without realizing it was a joke about his crutches.
“Dancing’s easy. You just stand still, then stop standing still,” the bass player whispers.
Benji’s chest muscles are shaking with exhaustion. That helps. It makes his insides feel calm by comparison.
* * *
Ana is woken by the phone. She snatches it up from the floor but it’s not hers ringing. It’s her dad’s. She hears his voice; he’s talking as he gets dressed, fetches the dogs and the key to the gun cabinet. The sounds are like a familiar tune to her, a childhood lullaby. She waits for the finale. The front door closing. The key in the lock. The rusty old pickup starting up. But they don’t come. Instead, a gentle knock. His voice, tentative, her name, a question through the door:
“Ana. Are you awake?”
She’s dressed before he finishes the sentence. Opens the door. He’s holding a rifle in each hand.
“There’s a search, up by the north road. I could call some good-for-nothing in town, but . . . seeing as I’ve already got the second-best hunter in Beartown in the house . . .”
She feels like hugging him. Doesn’t.
* * *
The boys are lying on their backs on the floor of the rehearsal room. The bottle is empty. They take turns singing the worst drinking songs they know. Roar with laughter for hours.
“What is it with hockey?” the bass player asks.
“What is it with violins?” Benji counters.
“You have to switch off your brain in order to play it. Music is like taking a break from yourself,” the bass player replies.
The answer is too quick, too straightforward, too honest for Benji to retort with something sarcastic. So he tells the truth.
“The sounds.”
“The sounds?”
“That’s the thing about hockey. When you go into a rink. All those sounds you only recognize if you play. And . . . that feeling when you walk from the locker room to the rink, that last inch when the floor turns to ice. The moment when you glide out . . . you have wings then.”
The boys say nothing for a while. They daren’t move, as if they were lying on a glass roof.
“If I teach you to dance, will you teach me how to skate?” the bass player smiles eventually.
“Don’t you know how to skate? What the fuck’s wrong with you?” Benji exclaims, as if the bass player has just said he doesn’t know how to make a sandwich.
“I’ve never seen the point. I’ve always thought that ice is nature’s way of telling people to stay away from the water.”
Benji laughs.
“So why do you want me to teach you, then?”
“Because you love it so much. I’d like to understand . . . something you love.”
The bass player touches Benji’s hand. Benji doesn’t pull away, but he sits up and the spell is broken.
“I have to go,” Benji says.
“No,” the bass player pleads.
Benji goes anyway. Out through the door without another word. The snow falls with his tears, the darkness takes him, and he gives up without a fight.
* * *
When a window breaks, a room can be filled with such an astonishing amount of broken glass that it seems impossible that it all came from a single pane. Not entirely unlike the way a small child can turn a carton of milk upside down and flood an entire kitchen, as if the liquid expands to infinity the moment it leaves the carton.
The person throwing the stone was close to the wall, almost right next to it, and threw the stone as hard as they could to get it to fly as far into the room as possible. It hits a chest of drawers and lands on Maya’s bed. The glass follows, raining so gently, light as a butterfly, as if it were ice crystals or tiny, shimmering fragments of diamond.
Peter and Maya hear it above the guitar and drums. They rush out from the garage and into the house. Freezing wind is blowing into Maya’s room, and Leo is standing openmouthed in the middle of the floor, looking at the stone. BITCH has been written on it in red letters.
Maya is the first to realize what the real danger is. It takes Peter a few more seconds to figure it out. They rush for the front door together but it’s too late. It’s wide open. The Volvo has already pulled out of the drive, Kira at the wheel.
* * *
There are four of them, two on foot and two on bicycles, and the ones on bikes have no chance. The snow is still ankle-deep on the sidewalks, so they can only cycle on the plowed furrow in the middle of the road. Kira presses the accelerator to the floor of the Volvo so hard that the big car lurches out onto the road behind with a howl, and she’s caught up with them in twenty yards, and her foot is nowhere near the brake. They’re only children, thirteen or fourteen at most, but the mother’s eyes are empty. One of the boys turns around and is dazzled by the headlights, and throws himself, terrified, off his bike at speed, and crashes headfirst into a fence. The other boy just manages to do the same before the front bumper of the Volvo smashes into his rear wheel and the bicycle flies across the road.
His pants are torn and his chin grazed when Kira stops the car, opens the door and gets out. She gets one of Peter’s golf clubs from the trunk. Gripping it with both hands, she marches toward the boy on the ground. He’s crying and screaming, but she doesn’t care, doesn’t feel anything.
* * *
Maya rushes out of the house and down the street in just her socks. She hears her dad call her name but doesn’t look back. She hears the crash as the car hits the bicycle, sees the body sail weightless through the air. The Volvo’s red brake lights jab at her eyes and she sees her mother’s silhouette as she gets out. The trunk opens, a golf club is taken out. Maya is slipping on patches of ice in her soaking-wet socks, her feet are bleeding, and she screams until her voice is nothing but a croak.
* * *
Kira has never seen anyone so frightened. Small hands grab the golf club from behind and wrestle her to the ground, and when Kira looks up Maya holds her tight and screams, but at first Kira can’t hear what. She’s never seen such terror before.
The boys on the road crawl to their feet and limp away. Leaving a mother and a daughter, both crying hysterically, the mother still clutching the golf club in her clenched fists, the daughter soothing her over and over in her rocking arms:
“It’s okay, Mom, it’s okay.”
The houses around them are still dark, but they know that everyone in the street is awake. Kira feels like standing up and bellowing at them, throwing stones at THEIR windows, but her daughter holds her tight and they just sit there in the middle of the road, trembling as they inhale each other’s skin. Maya whispers:
“You know, when I was little all the other parents at preschool used to call you ‘wolf mother,’ because they were all scared of you. And all my friends wanted a mom like you.”
Kira sniffs in her daughter’s ear:
“You don’t deserve this damn life, darling, you don’t deserve . . .”
Maya holds her mother’s cheeks and kisses her forehead softly.
“I know you’d have killed for me, Mom. I know you’d have given your life for me. But we’re going to get through this, you and me. Because I’m your daughter. I’ve got wolf’s blood.”
* * *
Peter carries them to the Volvo. First his daughter, then his wife. He reverses the car slowly back along the street. Home.
* * *
>
The bicycles are left lying in the snow; the next day they are gone. No one who lives on the street will ever talk about it.
41
Morning comes to Beartown, unconcerned about the little lives of the people down below. A sheet of cardboard has been taped up on the inside of a broken window; a sister and a brother are sleeping, exhausted, side by side on mattresses in the hall, far from any other windows. In his sleep Leo curls up close to Maya, the way he used to when he would creep into her room when he was four years old and had a bad dream.
* * *
Peter and Kira are sitting in the kitchen, holding each other’s hands.
“Do you think I’m less of a man because I can’t fight?” he whispers.
“Do you think I’m less of a woman because I can?” she asks.
“We have to get the kids away from here,” he whispers.
“We can’t protect them. It doesn’t matter where we are, darling, we can’t protect them,” she replies.
“We can’t live like that.”
“I know.”
Then she kisses him, smiles, and whispers:
“But you’re not unmanly. You’re very, very, very manly in lots of other ways. For instance, you NEVER admit that you’re wrong.”
He replies into her hair:
“And you’re very womanly. The most womanly woman I’ve ever met. For instance, you can NEVER be trusted with rock-paper-scissors.”
They laugh, the pair of them. Even on a morning like this. Because they can, and because they must. They still possess that blessing.
* * *
Ramona is standing outside the Bearskin smoking. The street is empty, the sky is black, but she still sees the puppy from a long way off, even though the weather is bad. She starts to cough hoarsely as Sune rolls out of the darkness; it might have been a chuckle if she’d smoked less. Forty or fifty years less.
Sune calls out, and the puppy totally ignores him. It jumps up at Ramona’s jeans, eagerly demanding attention.
“You silly old fool, have you got a puppy now?” she says with a grin.
“A disobedient little shit, too. I’ll be filling my sandwiches with him soon,” Sune mutters, but his love for the furry creature is already obvious.
Ramona coughs. “Coffee?”
“Can I have a splash of whisky in it?”
She nods. They go inside and stamp their feet and drink while the puppy very methodically sets about eating one of the chairs.
“I assume you’ve heard,” Sune says sadly.
“Yep,” Ramona says.
“Shameful. Shameful, that’s what it is.”
Ramona pours more drink. Sune stares at the glass. “Has Peter been in?”
She shakes her head. “Have you spoken to him?”
Sune shakes his head. “I don’t know what to say.”
Ramona says nothing. She understands that all too well. It’s both easy and difficult to offer someone coffee.
“The club isn’t your job anymore, Sune,” she murmurs.
“I haven’t formally been dismissed yet. They seem to have forgotten about that in the midst of all this. But, sure. You’re right. It’s not my job anymore.”
Ramona pours more whisky. Tops it up with a splash of coffee, sighs deeply.
“So what do we talk about, then? An old bag and an old bastard, sitting here babbling. For God’s sake, just spit it out instead.”
Sune gives her a wry smile.
“You’ve always been a bit of a psychologist, you have.”
“Just a bartender. You were always too cheap to pay for the real thing.”
“I miss Holger.”
“You only miss him when I’m shouting at you.”
Sune guffaws so loudly that the puppy jumps. It lets out an irritable yap before getting back to chewing the furniture.
“I really just miss you shouting at Holger.”
“Me too.”
More whisky. A touch more coffee. Silence and memories, withheld words and suppressed sentences. Until Sune eventually says:
“It’s shameful, what Kevin did. Utterly damn shameful. And I’m worried about the club. It’s been here almost seventy years, but I wouldn’t like to bet that it will be here next year. I’m worried people will try to blame the boy’s actions on hockey, if he gets found guilty. It’s going to be all hockey’s fault.”
Ramona slaps him so quickly and hard across his ear with the palm of her hand that the fat old man almost falls off his barstool. The angry old bag on the other side of the bar snarls:
“Is that why you’re here? To talk about that? Sweet Jesus . . . you men. It’s never your fault, is it? When are you going to admit that it isn’t ‘hockey’ that raises these boys, it’s YOU LOT? In every time and every place, I’ve come across men who blame their own stupidity on crap they themselves have invented. ‘Religion causes wars,’ ‘guns kill people,’ it’s all the same old bullshit!”
“I didn’t mea . . . ,” Sune tries, but has to duck when she tries to slap him again.
“Keep your trap shut when I’m talking! Fucking men! YOU’RE the problem! Religion doesn’t fight, guns don’t kill, and you need to be very fucking clear that hockey has never raped anyone! But do you know who do? Fight and kill and rape?”
Sune clears his throat. “Men?”
“MEN! It’s always fucking men!”
Sune squirms. The puppy curls up, shamefaced, in a corner. Ramona adjusts her hair, carefully and thoroughly, empties her glass, and admits to herself that perhaps it isn’t so complicated after all, this business about coffee.
Then she fills both their glasses, fetches a bit of salami for the puppy, goes around the bar, and sits down next to the old man. She sighs deeply and reluctantly admits:
“I miss Holger too. And do you know what he would have said if he was here?”
“No.”
“That you and I already know what’s right. So there’s no need for him to tell us.”
Sune smiles.
“He always was a smug bastard, that man of yours.”
“That he was.”
* * *
In another part of town, Zacharias creeps out of his family’s apartment without waking anyone. He’s carrying a bag on his back and a bucket in his hand. Headphones in his ears, music in his whole body. He turns sixteen today, and all his life he has been teased and rejected. About everything. His looks, thoughts, manner of speech, home address. Everywhere. At school, in the locker room, online. That wears a person down in the end. It’s not always obvious, because the people around a bullied child assume that he or she must get used to it after a while. Never. You never get used to it. It burns like fire the whole time. It’s just that no one knows how long the fuse is, not even you.
* * *
Jeanette is woken by a call from her brother telling her that the alarm has gone off again. Bleary-eyed and annoyed, she drives to the school. Searches the whole building with her flashlight without finding anything. She’s just about to tell her brother it’s time to give up, thinking it must have been snow on one of the sensors again, when she puts her foot down in something wet.
* * *
The second-best hunter in Beartown is washing the elk blood off the back of a rusty pickup truck. The girl and her dad followed the trail all night, until they found the badly wounded animal lying down; it had dragged itself deep into the darkness of the forest. They gave it a humane and painless end. Ana closes the tarpaulin over the bed of the truck and gets the two rifles from the cab, and checks them with the practiced hands of a far older hunter.
A few boys of about seven or eight are playing hockey farther down the street. One of the neighbors, a man in his eighties, is standing by his mailbox. His rheumatism makes movement painful, as if he were dragging invisible blocks of stone behind him as he reaches for his newspaper. He’s on his way back to the house when he suddenly stops and looks at Ana. They have lived next to each other all Ana’s life. The neighbor used to go hunting
with her dad until just a few years ago; when she was little he used to give her homemade toffee at Christmas. Neither of them says anything now, the man just spits derisively on the ground in front of him. When he goes back into his house he slams the door so hard that a green flag just outside with a bear logo on it sways on its hook.
The boys playing hockey look up. One of them is wearing a jersey with the number “9” on it. They look at Ana with expressions that reveal what their parents are talking about at home. One of the boys spits on the ground as well. Then they turn their backs on her.
Ana’s dad walks over and puts his hand on his daughter’s shoulder. He feels her shaking beneath his fingers, and doesn’t know if it’s because she’s about to cry or scream.
* * *
For almost half his life, Zacharias has thought about ending it. He has been through the details time and time again in his head. Somewhere they can see it. Force the bastards to live with that image of him. “You did this.” You don’t need much: a rope, a few tools, something to stand on. A stool would be good, but an upside-down bucket would do just as well. He’s holding it in his hand. He’s got everything else he needs in his backpack.
The only thing that’s stopped him from doing it earlier, several years ago, was Amat. One single friend like him—that can be enough. Lifa and Zacharias were never friends in the same way, only through Amat, so when Amat was moved up to the juniors and chose a different life, everything disappeared for Zacharias.
Amat was the reason he stayed alive. Amat was the one who told him, on all the darkest, hardest nights: “One day, Zach, you’ll have more money and influence than all those bastards. And then you’ll do great things. Because you know how much it hurts to have no power. So you won’t hurt them, even though you could. And that will make the world a better place.”
Never again do you have the sort of friends you have when you’re fifteen. Zacharias turns sixteen today. He breaks into the school without caring if he sets the alarm off. Puts the bucket down on the floor.
* * *
Jeanette looks down at the floor with her heart practically bursting out of her chest. It’s a large puddle, spreading out slowly in front of her. She standing close to the entrance, near the rows of lockers belonging to the high school students. There’s an acrid smell; it catches in her nostrils. Her brother comes closer; two flashlights point in the same direction.