Chapter 49 Everyone Gets a Stick. Two Goals. Two Teams. #3
It’s coming from the other end of the rink, from the other standing area.
The red-clad fans are chanting it. All of Hed’s fans have grown up hating Beartown Ice Hockey, and tomorrow they’ll do so again.
They’re not going to stop fighting each other, the world isn’t going to change, everything is going to carry on as usual.
But today, one single time, their sad voices rise up to chant their opponents’ song as a mark of respect:
“THE BEARS FROM BEARTOWN!”
It’s a single, brief token of respect. Just words.
The ice rink is quieter than ever afterward, and then it feels as though it never will be again.
At first there’s no noise, and then it’s impossible to hear anything but an explosion of pride and love as an entire town tries to tell everyone that it’s still here, that it’s still standing tall, that it’s still Beartown against the rest. When the people in the green stands containing the black jackets start to sing, they sing loud enough for it to be heard all the way to Heaven.
So that he knows how much they miss him.
And then we do what we always do around here. We play hockey.
Maya’s mom gives her a lift to the train station. She waits by the entrance as her daughter goes up the steps and looks along the platform until she sees what she’s looking for. He’s sitting on a bench.
“Benji . . . ,” she says quietly from a distance, as if calling an animal she doesn’t want to startle.
He looks up, surprised. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you,” Maya says.
“How did you know I was here?”
“Your sisters told me.”
He smiles radiantly. “They’re very untrustworthy, my sisters.”
Maya laughs. “Untrustworthy as hell!”
The sleeves of her jacket are slightly too short; she’s gotten taller this year without her jacket realizing it. Two fresh tattoos are visible on her lower arms. One is of a guitar, the other a rifle.
Benji nods. “I like them.”
“Thanks. Where are you going?” she asks.
He considers his reply for a long time. “I don’t know. Just . . . somewhere else.”
She nods. Hands him a piece of paper containing a brief handwritten text. “I got into music school. I’ll be moving in January. I don’t know if you’ll be back here before then, so I . . . I just wanted to give you this.”
While he reads it, she starts to walk back toward her mom’s car. When he’s finished, he calls after her, “MAYA!”
“WHAT?” she shouts back.
“DON’T LET THE BASTARDS SEE YOU CRY!”
She laughs with tears in her eyes. “NEVER, BENJI! NEVER!”
Perhaps they will never meet again, but she wrote all the biggest things she feels for him on that scrap of paper:
I wish you courage
I wish you rushing blood
A heart that beats too hard
Feelings that make everything too hard
Love that gets out of control
The most intense adventures
I hope you find your way out
I hope you’re the kind of person
Who gets a happy ending
The sun will make its way up over our town again tomorrow. Incredibly.
A young woman named Ana will dig deep enough within herself to find the strength to go on living.
Because people like her always do, somehow.
A few months from now, a long way away in a big city, she will compete for the first time in her sport.
Jeanette kisses her forehead in the locker room.
Maya stands beside her, punches Ana’s gloved hands with her own clenched fists, and whispers, “I love you, you idiot!” Ana smiles sadly and replies, “I love you, you moron.” She has the same tattoos as Maya on her lower arms: a guitar and a rifle.
Ana’s father is standing outside the locker room. He’s still trying.
When Ana steps into the ring to confront her opponent, a section of the audience stands up, as if on command. They don’t shout out, but they’re wearing black jackets, and they all put one hand very briefly on their hearts when she looks at them.
“Who are they?” the referee asks in surprise.
Ana blinks up at the roof. She imagines the sky beyond it. “Those are my brothers and sisters. They stand tall if I stand tall.”
When the fight begins, Ana has just one opponent in the ring. It doesn’t make any difference, she could have been facing a hundred of them. They wouldn’t have stood a chance.
And the sun rises. Tomorrow, again.
A boy from the Hollow, a boy named Amat, a boy everyone thought was too small and weak to be really good at hockey, will run all the way along the main road to the NHL.
He becomes a professional on the ice, and his childhood friend Zacharias from the next block becomes a professional in front of a computer screen.
Some of the girls and boys they grew up with will take the wrong path, some will pass away too soon, but some will find their way to lives of their own.
Big, proud lives. None of them ever forgets where they came from.
A dad named Hog goes on repairing cars in a garage, fighting for his children, taking each day as it comes.
They visit Ann-Katrin’s grave each morning.
His eldest son, Bobo, who can pull axes from car hoods but has still never really learned to skate well, gradually becomes good friends with a hockey coach who’s bad at emotions.
Zackell makes him her assistant coach. He does a hell of a good job at it.
Ramona rebuilds her pub. When it reopens, everyone in Beartown and a fair few of the bastards from Hed line up for hours to go in and buy a beer and leave their change in an envelope with the words THE KITTY written on it.
Beartown’s hockey coach eats her potatoes free of charge for the whole of the next year.
But she has to pay for her beer; this isn’t a damn charity, you know.
In one corner sit five old women. At the bar sit four old men. It isn’t always easy. But if you say that to them, they’ll reply that it’s not supposed to be.
Alicia, four and a half years old, will turn five. She’s in the ice rink every day, but she will still stand in an old man’s garden from time to time and slap pucks into the wall next to his terrace, and one day she will be the best.
When spring comes, three grown men meet one Sunday afternoon in the parking lot outside the supermarket.
Peter, Tails, and Hog. They have slightly less hair and slightly larger stomachs now than when they last played together twenty years ago, but they have their hockey sticks and a tennis ball with them.
Their wives and children carry out one net, laughing and shouting cheeky challenges to their dads as they carry the other.
Then the families start to play, as if nothing else mattered.
Because it’s a simple game if you strip away all the crap surrounding it and just keep the things that made us love it in the first place.
Everyone gets a stick. Two nets. Two teams.
Us against you.