Those rainy days could have been a chance for emotions in Beartown and Hed to cool off, but William Lyt has sweated his way through them. His coach once said to him that he had never seen anyone play with “such a immense need for validation.” Maybe he meant it as an attempt to get William to talk about his complexes, but William took it as a compliment.
Throughout his childhood, William had fought to become Kevin’s best friend again. He used to be, when they were little, driving pedal cars outside Kevin’s house and playing hockey indoors in William’s basement. Then they started playing hockey, and suddenly Benji appeared. Kevin never stood next to William in team photographs after that. William did what he could to break Benji, teased him about his cheap secondhand clothes and called him “Sledge.” Until Benji whacked him in the face with the sledge, costing William both his front teeth and the respect of the changing room. William’s mother demanded that Benji be punished for the “assault,” but the club did nothing.
When they got older, William tried to outshine Benji by boasting about girls he claimed to have slept with, making himself out to be a better friend at parties than that tree-climbing pothead. He was lying, of course: he was a virgin longer than most of the team. But one day Kevin came into the locker room and shouted, “William! Your girlfriends are waiting for you out here!” Confused, William got up and went out. The corridor was empty, but there was a pack of ten thick white socks on the floor. Kevin was roaring with laughter: “That way your mom won’t have to do the washing every time you ‘sleep’ with one of your ‘girlfriends’!” William never forgot the way the team laughed at him. Especially the way Benji did. William has spent years playing with a desperate need for validation, so now what? Hed Hockey is a fresh start for him, a chance to finally become a leader. He’s never going to let himself be the guy with the socks again.
While it’s been raining this summer he has been weight training nonstop and watching the video online of his red Hed Hockey flags burning. Over and over again. He was hoping to find a tiny clue as to the identity of the cowardly bastard who had posted it, and eventually he thought he had spotted something: the hand holding the lighter in the video was small, a junior school kid’s, and when his sleeve slipped back over his wrist his lower arm looked as though it was covered with scratch marks.
* * *
William calls the biggest guys in his team. They buy cigarettes and set off for the beach.
* * *
The Matchstick
If there is a darkened room and you lock up a child who is terrified of the dark
If they are left there with their blackest fears because life is a bastard
If it was you in that room and you found a single matchstick in your pocket
You would light the match, even if the room smelled of gas
Only a few degrees separate rain from snow
All houses are built up but burn down
You have shown me things I fear more than death
So I am prepared to burn in here if I can do it with you
* * *
When the sun returns to Beartown, the beach once more fills with teenagers pretending not to stare at each other’s bodies. At first everything is cheerful and noisy, but soon a frightened silence creeps along the shoreline. Two youths climb into a tree and hang up new Hed Hockey flags. William Lyt is prowling between the towels, and he stops at every junior school kid and holds out a cigarette. “Have you got a light?”
No one looks him in the eye. He grabs hold of each boy’s arm and looks for scratch marks. It’s possible that Lyt himself doesn’t really know what he’s hoping to find, because who would dare to confess anything to him here? But he wants him to be afraid, if nothing else. So that he doesn’t challenge his team again. With each teenager who shakes his head as he stares down at the sand, William’s heart feels a bit lighter, he feels a bit bigger.
Then he hears a scraping sound. First once, then once again, immediately afterward, and a slight hiss as the flame ignites. A thin voice behind William says, “I’ve got a lighter!”
* * *
Leo’s fingers aren’t trembling. His sleeve slides up. The scars on his arm stand out vividly.
* * *
“What . . . what do you mean, you know a lot of things about me?” Peter managed to say the previous evening. Richard Theo replied in a carefree, almost cheery way, “I know that Beartown Ice Hockey is at most just three months away from bankruptcy, even if your friend Tails sells another of his supermarkets. And I know that your A-team coach, Sune, is ill.”
Peter just gawped at him. At the start of the summer Sune had started to have trouble with his heart: Adri Ovich had found him on the floor of his row house when he had failed to show up at the newly formed girls’ team’s skating class. Adri had called Peter from the hospital, but Sune had asked the pair of them not to tell anyone else. It was just a “little murmur,” and he didn’t want to be “some damn martyr.”
Naturally they kept quiet, but if Peter were honest, that was much for his own selfish reasons as for Sune’s sake: he couldn’t recruit a new coach without sponsors or money, he couldn’t persuade the team’s players to sign new contracts without a coach, and without players there was no way he could attract either sponsors or a new coach.
“As I said,” Richard Theo said quietly, “it’s my job to know things. I have friends at the hospital. I’d like to be your friend, too.” Then, very calmly and methodically, he went through his offer to Peter: the new owners of the factory would require political investment in order to rebuild the factory.
Theo could arrange that. But the owners also recognized that they “needed to have the support of local residents,” so he had persuaded them that “the quickest way to these people’s hearts is through hockey.”
Peter squirmed and did his best to hold his voice steady as he replied, “From what I’ve heard, the other parties don’t want to work with you. What reason do I have to believe that you can actually achieve all this?”
Theo replied serenely, “Yesterday the ice rink had a large, unpaid electricity bill, Peter. If you’d care to phone and check, you’ll find that it’s been paid. It that enough proof?”
Peter felt very uneasy. “Why our club? Why not approach Hed Hockey instead?” The politician smiled again. “Beartown is famous for being hardworking. And what you achieved twenty years ago, when the whole town lined up behind the club, there’s a lot of symbolic power in that. What was it you used to say? ‘Beartown against everyone else’?”
Peter grunted defensively. “I didn’t think you liked hockey.” Theo adjusted his cufflinks and replied, “My political stance will always be that taxpayers’ money should go to health care and jobs, Peter, rather than sports.”
Peter scratched his head and did his best not to look impressed when he said, “So you’ll let taxpayers’ money go to the factory instead, in return for the new owners’ sponsoring the hockey club? And that way you get to be the politician who saved both jobs and hockey in Beartown. As well as appearing to save taxpayers’ money . . . which can be spent on health care services instead . . . bloody hell. You’d win the next election on the back of that.”
Theo put his hands into his pockets, but without radiating any sense of smugness. “You know, we have a lot in common, Peter. We just play different games. And in order for me to play mine, I need to win the next election. In order for you to play yours, you need a club.”
* * *