Chapter 10 How Do You Tell Your Children? #3
Benji drinks his beer. For many years his mother had a way of punishing him for fighting in school by forcing him to read the newspaper.
He wasn’t allowed to go to hockey practice until she’d tested him on everything: the editorial, the foreign news, culture, politics.
After a few years that got too easy for him, so his mother started to use literary classics instead.
She could hardly read them herself, but she knew her son was smarter than he let anyone believe.
So his punishment for misbehavior was also a reminder: you’re better than this.
Benji sniggers at the man in the polo shirt.
“Were you expecting me to trot out ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ when you mentioned Nietzsche?
Or maybe ‘In heaven, all the interesting people are missing’?
Or . . . how does it go? ‘And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who couldn’t hear the music’? ”
“I don’t think that last one is Nietzsche,” the man replies cautiously.
Benji drinks his beer in a way that makes it impossible for the man to know if it was a mistake or a test. Then he says, “You still look surprised.”
“I . . . no . . . okay, to be honest, you don’t look like someone who’d quote Nietzsche,” the man says, laughing.
“There are lots of things I don’t look like,” Benji says.
The corners of his mouth are dancing again.
Bobo and his mother go for a long walk in the forest that evening.
She wants to tell him how hard is it to be an adult, how complex the world is, but she doesn’t know how.
All the while Bobo was growing up, she tried to teach him that violence was wrong, but this spring he found himself in the worst fight of his life and came close to being seriously injured, and she’s rarely been as proud of him as she was then.
Because he defended Amat. Got beaten up for his sake. He stood up for something.
For many years she was pleased that Bobo was such a softie.
Other boys were embarrassed when their mothers kissed them on the forehead in front of their friends, but not hers.
He was the sort of boy who would say, “Your hair looks nice today, Mom.” Now she wishes he was tougher.
Colder. Maybe he’d have been able to handle it better.
“I’m not well, Bobo . . . ,” she whispers.
Bobo cries when she tells him, but she cries more.
Bobo isn’t the little boy who used to jump up into her arms anymore; he’s big enough now to have space in his chest for the greatest sorrow and tall and strong enough to pick his mother up and carry her home after she’s told him she’s going to die.
She whispers against his neck, “You’ve always been the best big brother in the world.
You’re going to have to be even better now. ”
That evening she hears him read Harry Potter to his little brother and sister.
That night Hog makes some weak tea and Bobo comes into the bathroom and holds his mom’s hair when she throws up.
When she’s lying on her bed, her son wipes her cheeks and says, “Do you want to hear something silly? You know you’re always telling me I’ll never find a girlfriend because my demands are too high?
That’s your fault. Because I want someone who looks at me the way you and Dad look at each other. ”
Ann-Katrin presses Bobo’s big, dumb lummox’s head tight to her forehead. She would have loved to see him get married. Become a dad. Life is so damn, damn, damn tough sometimes that it’s almost unbearable. Even if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
Katia is almost finished with her paperwork when the bouncer comes running in.
She knows it’s already too late. None of the clientele of the Barn could be bothered to argue with Benji about his tattoo, but someone has called some men who don’t share the same tolerance of artistic freedom.
One of them has a bull tattooed on his lower arm.
As they walk through the door, Benji turns to the guy in the polo shirt and says, “Now would be a good time to move away!”
He grins as he says this, like a naughty child who’s left a whoopee cushion under the seat of a chair.
None of the men in the doorway is in anything like as good shape as Benji, but there are four of them and he’s on his own.
He bounces enthusiastically down from his bar stool as if he’s pleased that there are so many of them, to even things up.
They don’t rush at him; he’s the one who walks straight toward them, and it makes them nervous just long enough to give him an advantage.
The man with the bull tattoo grabs an empty beer bottle from a table, so Benji decides to tackle him first. But he doesn’t get a chance.
The man in the polo shirt watches Katia come rushing out of the office and throw herself into the group of men. She pushes the man with the beer bottle up against the wall and yells, “One single swing in here, and you’ll be drinking at home for a year!”
Then she spins around toward Benji and sees a very familiar look in his eyes. The same as their older sister Adri’s, the same as their father’s: if there isn’t a war, they start one.
“Benji . . . not here, not today, please . . . ,” she whispers.
She puts her hands on his chest, feels the beat of his heart. His pulse is calm, his breathing steady. Four grown men want to beat him up, and he isn’t even scared. Nothing frightens Katia as much as that.
Benji looks her in the eye. She has their mother’s eyes, and she doesn’t often ask her little brother for anything.
So he kisses her on the cheek and laughs scornfully at the four men in the doorway.
“Are you coming in or going out? I’m going home, so if you’re not too busy feeling each other’s dicks maybe you could get out of the way? ”
The men glance at Katia and the bouncers, and eventually they step back. The point has already been made: it’s no longer acceptable to show up in Hed with a bear tattoo. Beartown may have a “Pack,” but there are men here who are prepared to take a stand, too.
As Benji walks through the door, he lets out a loud laugh. The men he’s left behind are quivering with rage. One of them mutters to Katia, “It’s lucky for your brother that he’s got you. You just saved his life.”
Katia glares at the man. “You think? Really? You think I saved his life?”
The man tries to smile confidently, but his mouth is dry. Katia snorts. She goes and gets her things from the office, then fetches her car, but Benji has already disappeared into the night, where she won’t find him.
All sports are silly. All games are ridiculous. Two teams, one ball, sweat and grunting, and for what? So that for a few baffling moments we can pretend that it’s the only thing that matters.
That night Hog and Bobo clear the floor of the garage.
They’ve never talked much as father and son, and perhaps they’re both worried that they might take to the easiest alternative now.
There are bottles of drink in that house, as in everyone else’s.
So they choose a different option, drive the cars out, move the tools and machinery until the garage is empty.
Then they fetch hockey sticks and a tennis ball. They play against each other all night, sweating and grunting, as if it were the only thing that mattered.
When the door closes behind Benji, he walks alone a couple of hundred feet into the forest. Then he stops with his hands in his pockets and looks around.
As if he’s considering whether or not to try to find another way of complicating his evening or if he should pick a tree to climb and smoke weed in until he falls asleep instead.
The voice behind him is both expected and unexpected.
“I’ve never been in a fight, not once, so I won’t be much use if that’s what you’re after. But I’d be happy to have a beer somewhere else,” says the man in the polo shirt.
Benji looks over his shoulder. “Do you know any good clubs around here, then?”
The man laughs. “Like I said, I’ve only been living here for the past four hours. But . . . I’ve got somewhere to stay. And a fridge.”
He’s never done this before, asked someone home right away, it’s never worked that way for him before. But Benji has a way of encouraging people to be spontaneous. Foolhardy, too.
They take the path through the forest. The man is renting a cabin at a campsite on the outskirts of Hed, in the direction of Beartown, far enough away not to be within sight of either town.
They kiss for a long time in the hallway.
When the man wakes up in bed the next morning, Benji is already gone.
The man finds his book where he dropped it, between the front door and the bedroom. He leafs through it until he finds the quote he’s looking for: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
Some distance away a young man is standing in a cemetery firing pucks at a gravestone. He has scraped knuckles, and worse things are going on inside him. Alain Ovich is dead, and Kevin Erdahl may as well be. Benji is a man who loves men, and he loses everyone he loves.
It’s hard to have more chaos in oneself than that.