Chapter 13 So They Gave Him an Army #2
Tails’s eyes open wide. “He’s a smart bastard, that Theo. Everyone knows the Pack voted to let you stay on at the meeting in the spring. So if you distance yourself from them in the paper it will be . . . more effective.”
“And Richard Theo gets everything he wants: the factory, jobs, the hockey club. He can take the credit for everything and won’t be blamed for anything. Not even the Pack will hate him, they’ll just hate me. And we’ll be giving him everything he needs to win the next council elections.”
“You can’t do it, Peter. The Pack will . . . you know what they’re like . . . there are some crazy bastards in that gang, and hockey’s the only thing some of them have got!” Tails says.
He knows because a few members of the Pack work in his warehouse.
They work hard, and they make sure everyone else on their shift does, too, and if there’s ever a break-in at the store, Tails never has to call a security firm, because it gets taken care of.
In return, Tails arranges their shifts so they never have to take holiday in order to go to Beartown Ice Hockey’s away games, but if the police show up a week later their names still appear on the rota, at precisely the time when the police are trying to prove that they were involved in “hooligan-related violence.” “Hooligans? There are no hooligans working here,” their employer exclaims uncomprehendingly. “Pack? What Pack?”
Peter wrings his hands. “What’s the alternative, Tails? Richard Theo only cares about power, so putting the fate of the club in his hands and those of a bunch of utterly unknown investors is madness. But being realistic, if we don’t, the club will be dead anyway in three months.”
“I can sell another store or take out a loan on this one,” Tail suggests.
Peter puts a heavy hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I can’t ask you to do that, Tails, you’ve already done more than enough for the club.”
Tails looks insulted. “The club? The club’s you and me.”
Peter’s stern face cracks into a gentle smile. “You sound like Sune, the way he used to go on when we were little: ‘We are the club,’ ” he says, imitating the old coach.
Tails and Peter used to hate summer when they were children, because the hockey rink was closed.
They became best friends in an empty parking lot, along with Hog and a few others, children who didn’t care about swimming in the lake or playing war games in the forest. They used to play hockey on the tarmac with battered old sticks and a tennis ball until it got dark, then drag themselves home with scraped knees and ten World Championship wins in their hearts.
They’re sitting in that very same parking lot now, because that’s where Tails built his first supermarket.
He puts his hand on an old team photograph on the wall and says to Peter, “I wouldn’t be doing it for the club, you idiot, I’d be doing it for you.
When we won silver twenty years ago and you got the puck at the end of the game to take the last shot, do you remember who made that pass? ”
Does he remember? Everyone remembers. Tails made the pass, Peter missed the net.
Tails may feel that they won silver, but Peter just thinks they lost gold.
It was his fault. But Tails wipes his eyes with the back of his hand and says quietly, “If I had a hundred chances to do it again, I’d pass the puck to you every time, Peter.
I’d sell all my stores for you. That’s what you do when you have a star in the team: you trust him. You give him the puck.”
Peter stares at the floor. “Where can a man find friends as loyal as you, Tails?”
Tails flushes with pride. “On the ice. Only on the ice.”
An ancient man shuffles into the Bearskin alone. Ramona has never seen him without the other four of the five “uncles.” He looks as though he’s aged half a lifetime, as if the years have hit him all at once.
“Have they been here?” he wonders, meaning the friends he’s spent every day with for as long as anyone can remember.
Ramona shakes her head and asks, “Have you tried phoning them?”
The old man looks miserable. “I haven’t got their numbers.”
Year after year, day after day, the five uncles have either been in the stands to watch hockey or here in the Bearskin pub to talk about hockey. They’ve all used the same calendar, where each year starts in September. Why would they need one another’s phone numbers?
The old man stands for a while at the bar, lost. Then he goes home. He and his friends: five men who sat in a bar every day to talk about sports. They’re not about to become five men who sit in a bar every day and just drink.
The youngsters around the fires have fallen silent. In a very short space of time Lifa has grown from a nobody to the sort of person nobody here messes with. He doesn’t even have to raise his voice.
“Anyone who gives Amat another beer or cigarette will never enjoy another barbecue here. Understood?”
Farther down the slope Amat coughs as he gets to his knees.
Zacharias is standing a short way behind him with melted cheese on his shirt.
When Lifa came around to his apartment a short while ago, saying he’d heard that Amat was up on the hill, Zacharias tried to persuade Lifa to come inside and have a toasted sandwich instead, but Lifa just stared at him until Zacharias grabbed a pair of pants and decided to keep his mouth shut.
“I’m partying, Lifa! Mind your own business!” Amat manages to say.
Lifa raises his fist but doesn’t use it. He just walks disappointedly toward the apartment blocks. Zacharias helps Amat to his feet and mutters, “This isn’t like you, Amat . . .”
“What do you mean, ‘like me’? There isn’t a ‘me’! I haven’t even got a team to play for!”
Amat is aware how pathetic he sounds. Lifa comes back up the hill, trailing a group of kids with sticks in their hands. Lifa prods one of the kids on the shoulder. “Tell him who you are when you’re playing!”
The boy clears his throat shyly and looks though his bangs at Amat when he says, “I’m . . . you.”
Pieces of grit fall from Amat’s hair. Lifa pokes him in the chest. “Are you feeling sorry for yourself?”
“I’m not—” Amat starts to say, but Lifa interrupts and points at their apartment block. “Zach and I played hockey with you in that yard every day, and how much do you think we enjoyed that, all the damn time? Don’t you think Zach would rather have been playing computer games?”
“Much, much rather,” Zach confirms, gently brushing cheese from his shirt.
Lifa’s eyes are blazing. “We played hockey with you every evening because we could see how crazy good you were, Amat. What you could become.”
“I haven’t even got a team now, I—” Amat whimpers, but Lifa cuts him off.
“Shut up! You’re going to get away from here, and you know why?
Because whether you give up or not, these kids here are going to do what you do.
So you need to get training! Because when you’re playing in the NHL and get interviewed on TV, you can say you came from here.
You came from the Hollow, and you did something with your life.
And every kid in these blocks will know that.
And they’ll want to be like you, not me. ”
Tears are running down Lifa’s face, but he makes no attempt to hide them. “You selfish bastard! Can’t you see what everyone else here would give to have your talent?”
Amat’s hands are shaking. Lifa walks over and hugs him as though they’re eight years old again. He kisses his hair and whispers, “We’ll come running with you. Every mad sod here will come running with you all summer, if that’s what it takes.”
He’s not joking. Lifa runs up and down along the road beside Amat that night until he collapses, and after Amat has carried his friend home on his back, Zacharias starts running in his place.
When he can’t run anymore, others kids show up.
Two dozen certifiable lunatics who promise Amat not to smoke and drink as long as he needs someone to train with.
In ten years’ time, when Amat is playing hockey professionally, he won’t have forgotten this.
Some of the guys here will have died of overdoses, others will have died violently, some will be in prison, and some will just have made a mess of their lives.
But some will have lives—big, proud lives.
And they will all know that here, for just one summer, they were running for something.
Amat will be interviewed on television in English, and the reporter will ask where he grew up, and he will say, “I’m from the Hollow.
” And every single bastard here will know that he remembers them.
He had no team. So they gave him an army.