“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.
7
Start by Eating Lunch
There’s an old saying in Hed: “Tell a stranger you hate Beartown, and you’ll have a friend for life.” The smallest child in Hed is quick to learn that it’s important for Hed Hockey to do well but that it’s even more important that things go really badly for Beartown. Partly in jest, obviously. The stands are full of screamed threats about “hating” and “killing” each other, but of course they aren’t serious. Until all of a sudden they are.
When we describe how the violence between the two towns started, most of us will no longer remember what came first: the burning flags that twelve-year-old Leo filmed and posted online or another video clip that someone over in Hed posted almost simultaneously. Because nothing travels faster than a good story, and obviously no one who has grown up in Hed loving a red team and hating a green one can conceal his schadenfreude when the council, money, and power all pick a side.
So one member of Hed’s fan club stops a councillor on her way home from work and films himself asking, “Okay, so what’s everyone in Beartown who likes hockey supposed to do now?” The politician, a nervous middle-aged woman, doesn’t appear to know what to say. Unless she knows exactly. Because she replies, “They can start supporting Hed, can’t they?”
That night she is woken by a loud bang. When she walks out of her front door the next morning, there’s an ax sticking out of the hood of her car.
When she walks to the bus stop, a car drives past containing two men in black jackets. They don’t need to look at her. She knows she’s being watched anyway.
* * *
The Bearskin pub is where it’s always been, in the middle of Beartown. It’s the sort of pub that used to smell better when smoking was permitted indoors. Its owner, Ramona, has a face that resembles the floorboards: life has left its mark on her like the chairs being dragged back and forth too many times over the years, as well as all the cigarettes that earned her the nickname “the Marlboro Mom” from the young men who have made the Bearskin their second home, and sometimes their first. Ramona is past retirement age, but no one who values the shape of his nose mentions the fact out loud. She’s pouring herself a late breakfast in a tall glass when a stranger walks in. Ramona raises a surprised eyebrow.
“Yes?”
The stranger looks around at the empty bar uncomprehendingly. “Sorry?”
“Can I help you?” Ramona asks suspiciously.
The stranger has unkempt hair, jeans, a tracksuit top, and thick socks in the sort of heavy boots you wear if you regard temperatures above freezing as unnatural.
“This is a bar, isn’t it?”
Ramona’s lips curl warily. “Yep.”
“Does it come as a surprise for the bar to have a customer?”
“Depends on the customer.”
The stranger seems to agree that this is a valid observation.
“I’ve got some questions.”
“Then you’ve come to the wrong town.”
The door behind the stranger opens. Two young men walk in.
* * *
They’re wearing black jackets.
* * *