Chapter 6 If There Isn’t a War, They Start One #2
Sune taught Peter what a club is. It’s not something you blame nor something you demand things of.
“Because it’s us, Peter, Beartown Ice Hockey is you and me.
The best and worst things it achieves demonstrate the best and worst sides of us.
” He taught Peter other things, too, such as standing tall both when you win and when you lose, and that the most talented players have a duty to elevate the weakest because “a great deal is expected of anyone who’s been given a lot. ”
That first evening, Sune walked home with the five-year-old.
They stopped a few hundred feet from the boy’s house, and the coach said that if the boy came around the next day, he could carry on shooting practice.
“You promise?” the boy asked. Sune held out his hand and said, “I promise. And you have to keep promises, don’t you?
” The boy shook his hand and nodded. Then the old man sat down on a bench with the boy and taught him how to tell time, so he could count the minutes until tomorrow.
Sometimes it doesn’t take anything at all for us to start loving something, just time. Young Peter Andersson dreamed about the same thing every night for several years, the sound of a puck leaving a stick and flying into the side of a house:
Bang.
Benji Ovich’s mother hardly ever talks about his father, but on the rare occasions when it does happen, she always closes her eyes and whispers, “Some people are just like that. If there isn’t a war, they start one.”
Benji has been told that he resembles him, his father, but he doesn’t know how.
Maybe more inside than out. He knows his dad was in pain, so much pain that one day he couldn’t bear it any longer.
Hunters in these parts never use the word “suicide,” they just say, “Alain took his rifle and went into the woods.” Benji has always wondered if he had been planning it for a long time or if he just suddenly did it.
He wonders the same thing when he sees pictures of lonely men who have done terrible things on the news: Why that day in particular?
Why not another day? Did you make a choice, or did it just happen?
Benji knows that grief and anger can reprogram a brain like chemicals and drugs do. Maybe there’s a time bomb inside some people’s heads the whole time, just waiting for a switch to be thrown. Maybe his mom’s right, some people are just the sort who start wars.
From the tree he sees Maya and Ana come through the forest. He will never be able to explain what happened to him then; it was just an instinct being awakened.
Something gets switched off, something else gets switched on.
He climbs down and picks his backpack off the ground, takes something from it, and holds it in his hand as he starts to move through the trees.
Stalking them.
Maya and Ana are walking aimlessly through the forest, slower and slower the farther they get.
They’re not talking; they already know everything each other might want to say anyway.
They’ve always known that Beartown isn’t an easy place to grow up in if you’re different, and one of the worst things about becoming an adult is starting to realize that perhaps nowhere is. There are bastards everywhere.
The two young women have never really had much in common, the princess and the child of nature, the musician and the hunter.
The first time they met was when Ana pulled Maya out of a hole in the ice when they were children.
Maya had only just moved here at the time, and Ana had never had a friend, so they had saved each other’s lives.
Ana used to tease Maya for never being able to walk quietly in the forest, saying she moved like an elk in high heels.
Maya used to joke that Ana was the way she was because Ana’s mom had had an affair with a squirrel.
She stopped saying that when Ana’s mom moved away.
In return Ana stopped teasing Maya about being dependent on decent Wi-Fi.
For a few years they were equals, but teenage years always change the balance of power in friendships between girls.
When they started high school, Ana’s knowledge of how to survive in the forest wasn’t worth anything, whereas Maya knew how to survive in the school corridors.
But this summer? They’re not safe anywhere now.
Ana is walking ahead, and Maya is following, looking at her hair.
She often thinks that Ana is simultaneously the strongest and weakest person she knows.
Ana’s dad is drinking again; it’s no one’s fault, that’s just the way it is.
Maya wishes she could take the pain away from Ana, but she can no more do that than Ana can take the rape away from Maya.
They’re falling into different chasms. Maya has her nightmares, and Ana has her own reasons for not being able to sleep.
She sleeps with the dogs on the nights her dad comes home late and rages about in the kitchen like a monster made up of sorrow and unspoken words.
The dogs lie in a protective circle around Ana without her asking them.
Beloved creatures. Her dad has never, not so much as once, raised his hand against his daughter.
But she’s still frightened of him when he’s been drinking.
Men don’t know their own weight, they don’t understand the physical terror they can instil in another person simply by tumbling through a door.
They’re hurricanes tearing through a forest of saplings as they get up drunkenly from the kitchen table and stumble from room to room without being aware of what they’re trampling on.
The next morning they don’t remember anything; the empty bottles have been cleared away and the glasses washed in secret, and the house is silent.
No one says anything. They must never see the destruction they’ve left behind them in their children.
Ana stops and turns around. Maya looks at her and smiles weakly. “God, I love you so much,” she thinks, and Ana knows. So she asks, “Forced to have an operation to have a pig’s snout or one to have a pig’s arse?”
Maya laughs loudly. This is their game, has been ever since they were little. Either-or. “Snout. That curly tail would be way too lumpy to sit on when I’m playing guitar.”
“You’re so stupid!”
“I’m stupid? Do you even hear the stuff that comes out of your mouth?”
Ana snorts. She looks off through the trees. “Okay, how about this one: Be unhappy and live for a hundred years or be happy for a single year and then die?”
Maya thinks in silence. She never gets to answer. By the time she reacts, Ana has already spun around, staring at the trees. She should have noticed sooner, but Ana is used only to tracking and hunting, not to being stalked.
A quick cracking sound, dry branches snapping under a solid weight. They’re far away from the town; this is a dangerous place to encounter an animal.
And those branches weren’t broken by an animal.
The rink in Beartown is closed and dark when Peter gets there.
He doesn’t switch the lights on; there are yellowing sheets of paper on the walls, and he knows what they say without needing any light.
Small words written in a loud voice: “Team before individual.” Farther away: “The only time we’re not moving forward is when we’re taking aim.
” Above that: “Dream—Fight—Win!” And nearest the door, in his own handwriting: “We stand tall when we win, we stand tall when we lose, we stand tall no matter what.”
People with logical minds might think notes like that are silly, but you don’t get to be best at a sport by being logical.
You have to be a dreamer. When Peter was in primary school, a teacher asked the pupils what they wanted to be when they grew up.
Peter said, “A pro in the NHL.” He can still remember the way the whole class laughed, and he’s spent his whole life proving them wrong.
People with logical minds realize it’s impossible for a small boy from little Beartown to play with the best in the world, but dreamers work differently.
The only problem is that you’re never finished, you can never prove enough, the people laughing just move the boundaries.
There’s a clock on the wall of the changing room; it’s stopped, no one will bother to change the battery.
It takes time to learn to love something but much less to kill it: a single moment will do.
Sports is merciless: a big star becomes a has-been during a ten-second walk from the ice to the locker room, a club that has survived more than half a century is condemned to collapse during a few minutes in a council building.
Peter wonders if they’ll demolish the rink now, build their conference hotel or some other crap the people with money and power dream about.
They never love anything, they just own things.
For them this is nothing more than bricks and mortar.
He goes up into the stands, stops in the narrow corridor outside the offices on the upper floor.
How many of his lives are in this building?
What are they worth now? There are framed photographs on the wall from the club’s biggest moments, the founding of the club in 1951, the magical season twenty years ago when the A-team became the second best in the country, and then the junior team that took silver this spring. A lot of the pictures are of Peter.
In one furious movement he sweeps them all off the wall. He starts at one end of the corridor and pulls every frame off every hook. Glass shatters across the floor, but Peter is already walking away. The rink is still in darkness when he slams the outside door.
The stranger sits in the darkness in the stands and watches Peter leave.
As he starts up his car out in the parking lot, the stranger goes up to the offices and looks at the destruction.
Sees the old photographs of Peter among the shattered glass, along with more recent pictures of the junior team.
Two players are in almost every picture.
The stranger pushes the glass aside with a sturdy boot and bends over an older photograph of the same boys, long before they came the entire town’s big stars.
An award ceremony when they’re maybe ten or eleven, arms around each other like brothers, their numbers and surnames on their backs: “9 ERDAHL and 16 OVICH.”
Best friends, a sport they loved, and a team they’ve given their lives for; what’s a young man capable of if you take all that away from him at the same time?
The stranger carefully draws a circle on the pad, around the name “Benjamin Ovich,” then walks back down the stand and out of the rink.
Lights a fresh cigar. It’s warm and there’s no wind, but the stranger still cups the flame, as if a storm were brewing.
Ana and Maya hear their hearts pounding as they turn around and see Benji walking between the trees. Not long ago a boy who loved his hockey team and his best friend, now a grown man with eyes in which the pupils have drowned. One fist is clenched, the other is clutching a hammer.
Ask anyone in Beartown, and they’ll tell you that that boy has always been a ticking time bomb.