He’s Going to Need Someone to Fight Tonight
Everyone who loves sports knows that a game isn’t decided only by what happens but just as much by what doesn’t. The shot that hits the post, the bad call by the referee, the pass that didn’t quite connect. Every discussion about sports dissolves sooner or later into a thousand “ifs” and ten thousand “if only that hadn’ts.” Some people’s lives get stuck the same way, year after year passing by with the same story being repeated to strangers at an ever more deserted bar counter: a doomed relationship, a dishonest business partner, an unfair dismissal, ungrateful kids, an accident, a divorce. One single reason why everything went to hell.
When it comes down to it, everyone has something to say about the life he should have had instead of this one. Cities and towns work the same way. So if you want to understand their biggest stories, first you have to listen to the smaller ones.
* * *
The council building is left almost empty after Midsummer as the politicians take their holidays or spend time at their regular jobs. If you want to understand how the local council is run, that’s where you have to start: politics here is a part-time occupation, and the salary of just a few thousand kronor a month makes it almost an act of charity when seen in relation to the number of hours worked. So most councillors are employed elsewhere or have their own businesses, meaning that they have customers and suppliers and bosses and colleagues. Naturally this makes it difficult to claim to be truly independent, but no man is an island, especially not this deep into the forest.
One single councillor goes on working eighteen hours a day in the council building throughout the summer, and he doesn’t owe anything to anyone around here. His name is Richard Theo, and he sits in his office in a black suit, making a stream of phone calls. He is hated by some and feared by many, and soon he will change the direction of one hockey club and two towns.
* * *
Several days of rain follow, and Beartown becomes a different place: the town isn’t as used to this sort of precipitation as it is to snow. People stay indoors, quieter and more irritable than usual.
The Jeep drives through the mud up into the forest, and the stranger stops outside a small garage beside a shabby-looking house. Cars are parked on the grass, waiting to be repaired. One of them is difficult to avoid: it has an ax sticking out of the hood.
The stranger sees an eighteen-year-old youth with fists the size of piglets jump up onto the chassis and pull the ax out of the metal, his shoulders so tense that his neck seems to retract into his guts.
A gruff-looking man in his forties, so similar to the young man that there’s no way the postman would ever have to take a paternity test, walks over to the Jeep and taps on the window. “Tires?” he grunts.
The stranger winds the window down and repeats uncomprehendingly, “Tires?”
The man kicks the front wheel. “They’re worn smooth, this one’s got grooves no deeper than an old LP, so I assume that’s why you’re here?”
“Okay,” the stranger says.
“?‘Okay’? Do you want new tires or not?” the man wonders.
“Okay,” the stranger says and shrugs as if the man was asking about ketchup on a burger.
The man grunts something inaudible and yells, “Bobo! Have we got tires for this one?”
The stranger obviously isn’t here to get the tires changed but to assess the quality of a defensive player. But if that’s going to require a change of tires, then so be it. So the stranger watches the eighteen-year-old, Bobo, whose efforts pulling the ax from the car hood remind the stranger of a cut-price King Arthur. He disappears into the workshop, where there are no pictures of scantily clad women in the walls, from which the stranger concludes that there’s a woman in the house whom the father and son are unwilling to cross. There are, however, pictures of ice hockey teams, new and old alike.
The stranger nods to them, then at Bobo when he comes back with a tire under each arm, and asks the father, “That lad of yours, is he any good as a player?”
The father suddenly lights up with the sort of pride you only have if you’ve been a defenseman yourself:
“Bobo? Yes! Toughest defenseman in town!”
His choice of the word “toughest” doesn’t surprise the stranger, because both father and son give the distinct impression of being the sort of men who can skate in only one direction. The father holds out a grease-stained hand, and the stranger shakes it with the enthusiasm of someone invited to take hold of a snake.
“People call me Hog,” the father grins.
“Zackell,” the stranger says.
The stranger leaves the workshop with an improved set of secondhand tires for a little more than the going rate and a scrap of paper: “Bobo. If he can learn to skate.”
* * *
The sheet of paper isn’t just a list. It’s a team sheet.
* * *
Amat runs alone along the road with his shirt black with sweat until his eyes are streaming and his brain is empty of all thought.
He’s one of the brightest hockey talents this town has ever seen, but no one realized it until this spring. He lives with his mom in one of the cheapest apartment blocks at the far end of the Hollow in the north of Beartown; he’s always played with secondhand equipment, and he’s been told he’s too small, but no one is faster on skates than he is. “Kill them!” his best friends usually say instead of “Good luck!” His speed is his weapon.
Hockey is the sport of bears around here, but Amat taught himself to play it like a lion. The sport became his way into the community, and he thought it could be his ticket out as well. His mother works as a cleaner in the ice rink in the winter and in the hospital during the summer, but one day Amat hopes to turn professional and take her away from here. Back in the spring he got his chance, with the junior team. He grabbed it. He showed everyone in town that he was a winner, and the path to his dreams lay open. It was the best day and the worst night of his life. After the game he was invited to a party that Maya Andersson was also going to, and the only thing Amat had ever dreamed of more than playing was being allowed to kiss her.
He was drunk, but even so he will never forget every detail of how he stumbled through room after room of drunk and high teenagers singing and laughing, went upstairs, and heard Maya calling for help. Amat opened a door and saw the rape.
When Kevin realized what Amat had seen, he and William Lyt and some of the other boys in the junior team offered Amat everything the boy had dreamed of—a place on the junior team, star status, a career—in exchange for keeping his mouth shut. Kevin’s father gave him money and promised to get his mother a better job. If anyone condemns Amat for giving the offer serious consideration, that person has lived a life where morality is easy. It never is. Morality is a luxury.
Kevin’s parents and the club’s sponsors called a meeting and tried to force Maya’s father out of the club. In the end Amat went to the meeting, stood up at the front, and told everyone what he had seen Kevin do. Peter Andersson won the vote of confidence and kept his job.
And then what? Amat is running faster now, his feet hurt more, because what the hell happened next? Kevin was never punished. Maya never got justice, and Amat left that meeting with hundreds of enemies. Lyt and his friends found him and beat him up, and if Bobo hadn’t changed sides at the last minute and defended Amat, they would have killed him.
Neither Amat nor Bobo is welcome at Hed Hockey Club now. Amat is a snitch and Bobo a traitor. And Beartown Ice Hockey? Soon it won’t exist anymore. Amat is on his way to becoming one of those people who sits at a bar counter in thirty years’ time with a story full of “ifs” and “if only that hadn’ts.” He’s seen them in the rink, shabby men with three days’ worth of stubble and four days’ worth of hangover, whose lives peaked while they were still teenagers.
* * *