Erdahl knocks his chair flying when he throws his arms out in exasperation. It might not have been intentional, but he makes no move to pick it up. He’s breathing hard through his nose, his eyes are hunting hers, he tosses a thousand-kronor note on the bar, and concludes, with equal measures of scorn and threat:
“You might own this bar. But you don’t own the building. I’d think about that, if I were you.”
He slams the door hard, making the windows rattle.
* * *
Ana and Maya go into the house, Ana gets the key to her dad’s gun cabinet and puts back the rifles they’ve been shooting with. Maya notes every detail, how they’re arranged, where the key is.
“What’s that?” she asks innocently, pointing to a double-barreled shotgun.
“A shotgun,” Ana replies.
“Is it hard to load?” Maya wonders.
At first Ana laughs, then she gets suspicious:
“Why do you ask?”
Maya shrugs.
“What are you, the cops? I’m just wondering. It looks cool; can’t we try shooting with that one sometime?”
Ana grins and nudges her shoulder.
“You can be the cop, you lunatic!”
Then she fetches cartridges and shows Maya how to break open, load, and release the safety-catch of the shotgun, because she loves the rare occasions when she’s better at something than her friend. She adds, patronizingly, that, “It’s so easy that even you could do it.” Maya laughs.
“How many cartridges does it hold?” she asks.
“Two,” Ana replies.
She breaks the gun open again and unloads it, puts the cartridges back, and locks the gun cabinet. The girls leave the cellar. Maya says nothing. But all she is thinking is: “I only need one.”
* * *
Tails is still standing in the Bearskin, and carefully picks up the glasses, one after the other.
“It’s just a . . . discussion, Ramona,” he whispers.
“Your father would have been ashamed,” she snaps.
“I’m just trying . . . not to pick a side.”
Ramona snorts.
“You’re doing it very badly.”
Tails turns, wraps his coat unhappily around himself, and walks out. A couple of minutes later he comes back. Stands on the floor in front of the bar like the unhappy little boy he once was, when he used to come in with Peter before they were even teenagers to fetch their drunk fathers.
“Does Robbie Holts still come in here?” he mutters.
“Almost every day since he lost his job,” Ramona nods.
Tails nods.
“Tell him to call in to the store and talk to my warehouse manager. I’ll see to it that he gets an interview.”
Ramona nods. They could have said more to each other. But they’re from Beartown.
* * *
Late in the afternoon Kevin is running along the jogging track around the Heights. Faster and faster, with his cap pulled down deep across his forehead and his hood pulled up. He’s even wearing bulky clothing with no bear logos, so that no one will recognize him. There’s no need, of course; everyone from the Heights has gone to the meeting at the rink to vote. But Kevin still feels like he’s being watched from inside the forest. Imagination, of course. He’s just being paranoid. That’s what he tells himself.
* * *
The sun has already gone down. Maya is standing in the forest shaking, but the trees hide her. The dark still leaves her panic-stricken but she’s determined to make it her friend. Her ally. She stood here watching Kevin move about inside the illuminated house; he couldn’t see her but she could see him, and that gave her a sudden sense of power. It’s intoxicating.
When he came out onto the jogging track, she timed him. One circuit took three minutes and twenty-four seconds. Another circuit: three minutes and twenty-two seconds. Another circuit. Another circuit. Again, again, again.
* * *
She writes down the times. Raises her arms as if they were holding an invisible rifle. Wonders where she ought to stand.
* * *
One of them is going to die. She still hasn’t decided who.
43
Fighting isn’t hard. It’s the starting and stopping that are hard. Once you’re actually fighting, it happens more or less instinctively. The complicated thing about fighting is daring to throw the first punch, and then, once you’ve won, refraining from throwing that very last one.
* * *
Peter’s car is still parked in front of the rink. No one has set fire to it, even if he suspects that one or two people have thought about it. He scrapes the windows and gets in, without switching on the engine.
He’s always envied good hockey coaches more than anyone; the ones with that ability to stand in front of a group and carry everyone with them. He doesn’t have that sort of charisma. He was a team captain once upon a time, but he led through his play, not by his words. He can’t explain hockey to anyone, he just happened to be good at it. In music it’s called “perfect pitch,” and in sports, it’s sometimes called “physical intelligence.” You see someone do something, and your body instantly understands how to do the same thing. Skating, shooting a puck, playing a violin. Some people train all their lives without learning, while others have just got it.
He was good enough that he didn’t have to learn how to fight. That was his salvation. He doesn’t have a philosophical position; he hasn’t reasoned his way to not believing in violence. He just doesn’t have it in him. He lacks the instinct.
When Leo started to play hockey, Peter got into a discussion with a coach who kept shouting and yelling the whole time. The coach said:
“You have to frighten the little buggers to get them to listen!”
Peter said nothing. But in the car on the way home he turned to Leo and explained: “When I was little, my dad used to hit me if I spilled my milk, Leo. That didn’t teach me not to spill things. It just made me scared of milk. Remember that.”
The parking lot around him gradually fills with cars. People are arriving from all directions. Some of them see Peter but pretend they haven’t. He waits until they’ve gone inside. Until the meeting has started. He considers simply starting the car and driving home, packing up his family and belongings and driving as far away from here as he can. But instead he gets out of the car, walks across the parking lot, opens the heavy door of the rink, and walks inside.
* * *
Fighting isn’t hard. It’s just hard to know when to throw the first punch.
* * *
Ann-Katrin is sitting close to Hog in one of the last rows of chairs. It feels like the whole town is gathered in the cafeteria of the rink. All the chairs are taken but people are still pouring in, lining up along the walls. Up at the front, on a little platform, sit the board members. In the first row of seats the sponsors and parents of the juniors. In the middle: Kevin’s parents. Ann-Katrin watches as people she’s known all her life go up to Kevin’s mom as if this were a funeral, as if they were offering their condolences for the terrible tragedy she’s suffered.
Hog holds Ann-Katrin’s hand tightly when he sees what she’s looking at.
“We can’t get involved, Anki. Half the people in here are customers of ours.”
“This isn’t a vote, it’s a lynch mob,” Anki whispers.
“We need to wait until we know what happened. We don’t know everything, Anki. We don’t know everything,” her husband replies.
She knows he’s right. So she waits. They wait. Everyone waits.
* * *
Tails is standing in the middle of the parking lot on purpose, not hidden in the shadows or behind a tree. The last thing he wants, obviously, is to appear threatening.
When the little car with the logo of the local newspaper on the door pulls into the parking lot, he gives a cheery wave. A journalist and a photographer are sitting inside it, and he gestures to them to roll the window down.
“Hello, hello! I don’t think w
e’ve met? I’m Tails—I own the supermarket!”
The journalist shakes his hand through the window.
“Hello, we’re just heading to the meet . . .”
Tails leans forward, scratching his stubble hard.
“Yes, the meeting, eh? I just wanted to have a few words with you about that. Sort of . . . off the record, if you get my meaning.”
The journalist tilts her head.
“No.”
Tails clears his throat.
“Oh, you know how it is. People sometimes get a bit nervous when a reporter shows up. What’s happened has been pretty traumatic for the whole town, as you obviously appreciate. So we’d just like to know that your article . . . well . . . that you haven’t come here looking for problems where there aren’t any.”
The journalist has no idea how she’s supposed to respond to that, but the way the huge man is leaning over her door as he says it makes her feel uncomfortable. Tails, of course, just smiles, wishes her a nice day, and walks off.
The journalist and photographer wait a couple of minutes before following him. When they open the door to the rink and start to walk down the hallway, two men step out from the darkness. In their late twenties, black jackets, hands in pockets.
“This meeting is for members only,” one of them says.
“We’re journalists . . . ,” the journalist begins to say.
The men block their path. They’re a head taller than the photographer, two heads taller than the journalist. They say no more; one just takes half a step forward and stops, a subtle indication of his potential for violence. The rink is poorly lit, and the part they are in is silent and deserted.
The photographer takes hold of the sleeve of the journalist’s jacket. She sees how white his face is. The journalist isn’t from around here, she’s only got a temporary contract with the paper, but the photographer lives in Beartown. He has his family here. He pulls her away and walks back to the car. They drive off.
* * *
Fatima is sitting in her kitchen. She hears the doorbell ring, but Amat insists on answering it himself. As if he already knows who it’s going to be. There are two huge boys outside. Fatima can’t hear what they’re saying, but she sees one of them put his index finger on Amat’s chest. When her son closes the door again he refuses to tell his mother what it was about. Just says, “It was to do with the team,” and goes into his room.
* * *
Bobo is walking a little way behind William Lyt. He doesn’t feel comfortable with what they’re doing, but doesn’t know how to object.
“Amat’s one of us, isn’t he, so why are you so angry?” he asked on the way here.
“He needs to prove that now,” Lyt snapped.
When Amat opens the door, Lyt jabs him in the chest with his finger and commands:
“There’s a members’ meeting at the rink. The whole team’s going to stand outside to show our support for Kevin. You too.”
“I’ll try,” Amat mutters.
“You won’t try. You’ll do it! We stick together!” Lyt declares.
Bobo tries to make eye contact with Amat before they leave but doesn’t succeed.
* * *
The meeting goes the way meetings like that always go. It starts hesitantly, then quickly gets out of hand. The club’s president clears his throat and asks for everyone’s attention, in a feeble attempt to calm the anxiety.
“First, I would like to clarify that only the board can dismiss the general manager. The members can’t start unilaterally getting rid of members of staff, that’s not how the statutes of the club work.”
One man flies up from his chair, forefinger raised:
“But the members can depose the board, and you need to be very clear that we’re going to do that if you go against the wishes of the town!”
“This is a democratic organization; we don’t threaten each other,” the president replies sternly.
“Threaten? Who’s threatening who? Whose children are getting dragged off the team bus by the police?” the man snarls.
A woman stands up with her hands clasped in front of her hips, and looks at the board with sympathy:
“We’re not after a witch-hunt, we’re just trying to protect our children. My daughter was at Kevin’s party, and now the police have called her in to get a ‘witness statement.’ For the love of God, these children have known each other all their lives, and suddenly they’re expected to be witnesses against each other? What on earth is going on?”
A man gets to his feet after her.
“We’re not trying to accuse anyone. But we all know that . . . what can happen . . . This young woman wanted to join the gang. Maybe she wanted attention. All I mean is: Why would Kevin do something like this? We know him. He’s not that sort of guy. Not at all.”
Another man remains seated, but speaks up anyway:
“Anyone can see she’s just some sort of attention seeker. There’s a groupie mentality around these guys—that’s perfectly natural. I’m not saying she did it on purpose; it must be something psychological. She’s a teenager, for God’s sake, and we all know what happens to their hormones. But if she gets drunk and goes into a boy’s room, then she’s putting him in one hell of a position, isn’t she? One hell of a position. It’s hardly that bloody easy for the lad to interpret signals like that!”
Maggan Lyt gets to her feet, and blinks sadly at everyone around her:
“I’m a woman myself. So I take the word ‘rape’ very seriously. Very, very seriously! And that’s why I think we need to raise our children to understand that that’s not the sort of thing you lie about. And we all know that she’s lying, this young woman. The evidence is overwhelmingly in the boy’s favor, and there’s not a shred of a reason for him to have done what he’s accused of. We don’t wish to harm the young woman, we don’t wish her family ill, but what sort of signal does it send if we don’t put our foot down here? That all girls can cry ‘rape!’ the minute their affections aren’t reciprocated? I’m a woman myself, and that’s why I take this very seriously. Because everyone in here knows that this young woman’s father is trying to play politics with it. He clearly couldn’t bear the fact that there might be bigger stars on this team that he hims . . .”
* * *
Peter is standing in the doorway. It takes a few moments for the first person to notice him, then in a flash everyone else turns around. A sea of eyes he has known his whole life. Childhood friends, schoolmates, teenage crushes, colleagues, neighbors, parents of children his children play with. At the back, along one wall, their very presence exuding menace, stand two dozen young men in black jackets. They’re not saying anything, but not one of them takes his eyes off Peter. Peter feels their hatred, but he stands there, defiantly straight-backed, as he looks at Maggan Lyt.
“Please, don’t let me interrupt,” he says.
The room is silent enough for everyone to hear when his heart breaks.
* * *
The journalist and photographer will talk to the editor-in-chief when they get back to the newsroom; the journalist will expect the editor-in-chief to send them straight back to the meeting. But instead he will mumble something along the lines of “I don’t know if we can really call it ‘threatening’ . . . People are just nervous . . . we have to understand that . . . Maybe we shouldn’t . . . you know . . .” The photographer will clear his throat and suggest: “Look for problems where there aren’t any?” The editor-in-chief will nod and say, “Exactly!”
The journalist won’t say anything then; she’s too young, too concerned about her job, but she will remember the fear in their eyes. And for a long time afterward, she will find it hard not to think of what Kevin Erdahl said to her when she interviewed him after the semifinal. What all sportsmen learn to say when a teammate has done something wrong. The feigned surprise, the stiff body language, the abrupt response. “What? No. I didn’t see that incident.”
* * *
Fatima doesn’t knock on her son?
??s door on this occasion, as she always does. When she walks in, Amat is sitting on his bed with a business card in his hands. She perches next to him and declares firmly:
“A boy is allowed to have secrets from his mother. But not if he’s this bad at hiding them.”
“It’s nothing. You don’t need . . . Don’t worry, Mom,” he replies.
“Your father would have . . . ,” she begins, but he interrupts her. He never does that.
“Don’t tell me what Dad would have done. He isn’t here!”
She keeps her hands in her lap. He’s breathing hard. He tries to hand her the business card. She doesn’t take it.
“It’s a job,” he manages to say, somewhere between a boy’s hopefulness and a young man’s anger.
“I’ve got a job.”
“A better job,” he says.
His mother raises her eyebrows in surprise.
“Oh? Is it a job where they have an indoor rink so I can see my son practice every day?”
His shoulders sink.
“No.”
“Then it isn’t a better job for me. I have a job. Don’t worry about me.”
His eyes flash.
“So who is, Mom? Look around! Who’s going to take care of us when your back can’t take anymore?”
“I will. Just like I always have,” she promises.
He tries to press the business card into her hand but she refuses. He cries:
“You’re nothing if you’re alone in this world, Mom!”
She doesn’t answer. Just sits beside him until he starts to cry. He sobs:
“It’s too hard, Mom. You don’t understand how much I . . . I can’t . . .”
Fatima removes her hands from his. Stands up. Backs away. And says sternly:
“I don’t know what you know. But whatever it is, there’s clearly someone out there who’s terrified that you’re going to reveal it. And let me tell you something, my darling boy: I don’t need any men. I don’t need a man to drive me in a big car to the rink each morning, and I don’t need a man to give me a new job that I don’t want. I don’t need a man to pay my bills, and I don’t need a man to tell me what I can think and feel and believe. I only need one man: my son. And you’re not alone. You’ve never been alone. You just need to be better at choosing the company you keep.”