Amat could have turned professional, his life could have changed, but instead he’s on his way to becoming a has-been at the age of sixteen.
* * *
His gaze is focused inward. He doesn’t even notice the Jeep behind him. When it passes him, he doesn’t know it was fifty yards behind him for several minutes, so that the stranger could make a note of how far he is from Beartown and how fast he’s running. The stranger writes, “Amat. If his heart is as big as his lungs.”
* * *
Benji is sitting with his back against his father’s headstone. His body is full of moonshine and grass, and the combination acts as a circuit breaker. He’s closing down. Can’t bear it otherwise.
He has three older sisters, and you can tell the difference between them if you mention his name. Gaby has young children; she reads them bedtime stories, goes to bed early on Friday nights and still watches TV programs on TV instead of a computer. Katia is a bartender at the Barn in Hed; she spends her Friday nights pouring beer and shepherding three-hundred-pound drunks through the door when they decide to try to relieve other three-hundred-pound drunks of their front teeth. Adri is the eldest; she lives alone at her boarding kennels outside Beartown, she hunts and fishes and likes people who keep their mouths shut. So if you say “Benji,” Gaby will exclaim anxiously, “Has something happened to him?” Katia will sigh and wonder, “What’s he done now?” But Adri will force you up against a wall and demand, “What the hell do you want with my brother?” Gaby worries, Katia solves problems, Adri protects: that’s been the division of responsibilities since their father took his rifle and went out into the forest. They know they can’t teach a heart like Benji’s, but they might be able to tame it. So when he lives like a nomad, staying sometimes at his mother’s, sometimes out in the forest, sometimes with one of his sisters, they fall into their old roles. If he’s at Gaby’s, she still gets up at night to check that he’s breathing, even though he’s eighteen years old. When he sees Katia, she still spoils him, lets him get away with way too much shit, because she doesn’t want him to stop coming to her with his problems. And when he’s staying out at the kennels with Adri, she sleeps with the key to the gun cabinet under her pillow. To make sure her little brother doesn’t do the same thing as their father.
There have always been adults in this town who have thought that Benji is a rebel. His sisters know that the exact opposite is true. He became precisely the person everyone wanted him to be, because a young boy carrying a huge secret soon learns that sometimes the best place to hide it is where everyone can see you.
As a child Benji was the first person to recognize that Kevin could be a star. In Beartown players like that are called “cherry trees.” So Benji saw to it that Kevin got enough space on the ice to blossom. Benji could give and take so much rough treatment that men in the stands used to say, “Now, there’s a real hockey player. This isn’t a sport for fags and weaklings, it’s for guys like Benji!” The more he fought, the better they thought they knew him. Until he became the person they wanted him to be.
He’s eighteen now. He gets up and leans on the headstone, kisses his father’s name. Then he takes a step back, clenches his fist as tightly as he can, and punches the same place with full force. Blood drips from his knuckles as he makes his way through the forest toward Hed. Tomorrow would have been Alain Ovich’s birthday, and this is the first time that Benji is celebrating it without Kevin. He’s going to need someone to fight tonight.
He never sees the Jeep. It’s standing parked beneath a tree. The stranger walks through the rain to the grave, looks at the name engraved in the stone. Back in the Jeep a pen scratches on a sheet of paper, “Ovich. If he still wants to play.”
* * *
Benji. Amat. Bobo. Inside every large story there are always plenty of small ones. While three young men in Beartown thought they were in the process of losing their club, a stranger was already constructing a team with them.
* * *
Richard Theo, the politician, is alone in the council building when evening falls. He looks younger than his forty years, a genetic quirk he used to hate when he inspected his impassively hairless testicles as he waited for the onset of puberty but from which he is now reaping the rewards as his contemporaries pluck gray hairs from their beards and curse the law of gravity every time they pee. Theo is wearing a suit. At best his colleagues wear jeans and a jacket, so he’s used to being mocked for “looking like a government minister even though he’s just a nobody from the provinces.” It doesn’t bother him. He doesn’t dress for the job he’s got but for the one he wants.
He grew up in Beartown but was never one of the popular kids, never played hockey. He went abroad to study, and no one noticed he was gone. He worked in a bank in London and was gone for years before he suddenly came home with expensive suits and political ambitions. He joined the smallest political party in the area. It isn’t the smallest anymore.
Not long ago Theo was the sort of face that former classmates would see in old school photographs and not remember his name, but that changed when the local paper shone a negative light on his politics. But how they learned his name is unimportant to Theo. As long as they know it. Opinions can be changed.
He wasn’t at the meeting where Peter was informed of the fate of Beartown Ice Hockey Club, because Richard Theo isn’t part of the establishment. All councils have a political elite that you either belong to or you don’t, and the establishment here has chosen to freeze Theo out. Naturally they claim it’s because of his politics, but he’s convinced that the real reason is that they fear him. He can get the people on his side. They call him a populist, but the only difference between him and the other parties is that he doesn’t need flags: they have their offices on the top floor of the council building and play golf with business leaders, whereas Richard Theo has his office on the ground floor. He collects his information from people who have lost their jobs rather than from the people firing them, from the people who are angry instead of the ones who are happy, so he doesn’t need flags to tell him which way the wind is blowing. While all the other politicians are running in the same direction, men like Richard Theo go the other way. And sometimes that’s how they win.
There’s a knock on his office door. It’s late, no one has seen the stranger arrive.
“There you are at last! Well? Have you finished thinking about it? Are you going to take the job?” Richard Theo asks without further ado.
The stranger stands in the doorway with a pocket containing the sheet of paper with the names of the team players on it, but Zackell’s reply is so apathetic that it’s hard to tell if it’s because of a lack of enthusiasm about the job, or life in general. “When you called me, you offered me the job of coach of Beartown Ice Hockey’s A-team. But the club’s going into receivership. And even if it weren’t, it already has a coach. And even if it didn’t, you’re still a politician rather than the club’s general manager, so unless I’ve seriously misunderstood the democratic process, you can’t offer me a job as a coach any more than you can offer me a unicorn.”
“Yet you’re still here,” Richard Theo says simply.
“I happen to be very fond of unicorns,” Zackell confesses in a way that makes it impossible to tell if the remark is supposed to be funny or not.
Theo tilts his head to one side. “Coffee?”
“I don’t drink coffee. I don’t like hot drinks.”
Theo jerks as if he’s trying to avoid a dagger. “You don’t drink coffee? You’re going to have trouble fitting into this town!”
“This town isn’t alone in that,” Zackell replies.