“There’s no way she got the job on her own merits, this is to meet a quota!” another snaps.
“Have you heard she’s a lesbian?” Bobo blurts out, a little too loudly.
The older players ignore him. But one of them says, “Definitely a rug muncher. You can tell just by looking at her.”
“Huh? What’s a rug muncher? Oh, hang on . . . I get it! Lesbian, right? I get it!” Bobo yelps.
No one reacts. The older players just go on, “Can’t a hockey team just be a hockey team? Does everything have to be political? It’s only a matter of time before they replace the bear on our shirts with a goddamn rainbow!”
As if struck by lightning Bobo exclaims, “And force us to play in, like, ballerinas’ tutus!”
He stands up and does a clumsy pirouette, stumbles into a bench, loses his balance, and falls flat on his back on top of two hockey bags. Then something happens. A couple of the older players laugh. At him rather than with him, but as long as they’re looking at him he devours their attention. He gets to his feet and does another pirouette, and one of the older guys pretends to be serious and says, “Your name’s Bobo, right?”
“Yes!” Bobo nods intently.
The other players grin expectantly, aware that the older man is teasing the boy.
“You ought to show her your cock,” he says.
“Huh?” Bobo says.
The older player points at him demonstratively. “The new coach. She’s a lesbian. Show her your cock! So she can see what she’s missing!”
“Let the anaconda out of the cage, Bobo! You’re not chicken, are you?” another player cries, and soon they’re all shouting, as if he were getting ready to attempt the long jump.
“But she . . . won’t she be . . . angry?” Bobo wonders in confusion.
“She’ll just think you’ve got a decent sense of humor!” one of the older players replies eagerly.
In hindsight it’s easy to say that Bobo’s crazy, but when you’re eighteen years old in a locker room full of grown men who are suddenly cheering you on, “no” is the hardest word in the world.
So when Elisabeth Zackell walks past in the corridor, Bobo leaps out of the locker room as naked as the day he was born. He’s expecting her to be shocked. Or at least jump. She doesn’t even raise an eyebrow.
“Yes?” she asks.
Bobo squirms. “I . . . well . . . we heard you were lesbian, so I . . .”
“BOBO WANTED TO SHOW YOU HIS COCK SO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE MISSING!!!” someone shouts from the locker room, followed by two dozen men giggling hysterically.
Zackell puts her hands on her knees and leans forward in interest toward Bobo’s crotch.
“That?” she wonders, pointing curiously.
“Huh?” Bobo says.
“Is that the cock you’re talking about? Wow. I’ve seen women with bigger clitorises than that.”
Then she turns and walks toward the ice without another word. Bobo has turned bright red all over when he steps back inside the locker room.
“It’s . . . okay, she said . . . a clitoris can’t get this big, can it? I mean . . . how big can a clitoris get? Roughly?”
The locker room is rocking with mocking laughter. At him, not with him. But Bobo is still smiling sheepishly, because sometimes any attention at all can still feel like validation.
* * *
Amat is squirming inside his gear as he looks at Bobo, already thinking that this is going to end badly.
* * *
When the practice begins, the players gather around the center circle at a very leisurely pace, demonstratively arrogant, to show Elisabeth Zackell that she’s not welcome. She doesn’t seem to pick up the hint at all, just comes out with six buckets under her arm.
“What are you good at in Beartown?”
When no one answers she shrugs her shoulders, “I’ve watched all your games from last season, so I know you’re completely useless at pretty much everything. It would really help me to know what you’re good at.”
Someone tries to mumble a joke—“drinking and fucking”—but not even that raises more than a stifled grunt from the rest of the group. Then someone suddenly starts to laugh, not at the remark but at something happening on the ice behind Zackell. Bobo is skating out from the bench, over two hundred pounds of him, wearing a skirt he’s stolen from the figure skaters’ storeroom. He performs three pirouettes in a row and is met by applause and cheering from the older players at the center circle. Elisabeth Zackell lets him carry on, even though they’re no longer laughing at Bobo but at her.
But when Bobo is halfway through his fourth pirouette the cheering suddenly stops, and before Bobo knows what’s hit him everything goes black. When he opens his eyes, he’s lying on the ice, he can hardly breathe. Elisabeth Zackell is leaning over him expressionlessly and says, “Why hasn’t anyone taught you to skate properly?”
“Huh?”
“You roll like a ferry, but I’ve seen you pull an ax from the hood of a car. If you could skate properly, I’d never be able to knock you down that easily. And then you wouldn’t be utterly worthless as a hockey player. So why hasn’t anyone ever taught you?”
“I . . . I don’t know,” Bobo gasps, still lying on his back with his chest aching as if he’s been run over rather than tackled.
“What are you good at in Beartown?” Zackell asks seriously.
At first Bobo doesn’t answer, so Zackell gives up and skates back to the center circle. The young man slowly crawls up from the ice, pulls off the skirt, and says, in a voice that sounds both angry and humiliated, “Hard work! We’re good at hard work in Beartown. People can say a lot of shit about this town, but we know about HARD WORK!”
The older players squirm. But no one protests. So Elisabeth Zackell says, “Okay! Then that’s how we win. We work harder than all the others. If you need to be sick, do it in these. I’ve heard the GM doesn’t like mess, so I daresay he doesn’t want vomit on the ice. I take it you’re familiar with how to skate lengths?”
The players groan loudly, which she interprets as “yes.” She sets out the buckets she brought with her. The rest of the practice consists of excruciating fitness exercises. Skating at top speed between the boards, then darting sideways, wrestling, work, work, work. Not a single bucket is empty by the time they’re done. And the only player still standing at the end is Amat.
At first the older players try to stop him, not obviously but by little tricks that look like accidents: a sharp elbow in the corner, pulling his jersey when he’s about to take off, a discreet skate nudging his to make him lose his balance. Most of the players on the ice are fifty or sixty pounds heavier than Amat, so just leaning on him is enough. It isn’t Amat’s fault that they’re doing this, he’s not trying to show off or draw attention to himself, he’s simply too good. He makes the others look slow, and they can’t tolerate that. Time after time they trip him, and time after time he gets up. Skates faster, fights harder, digs deeper inside himself. The look in his eyes gets blacker and blacker.
No one knows what the time is; Elisabeth Zackell shows no sign of having finished with them. One after the other the older players crumple and collapse. As they stare down at the ice, Amat carries on skating. However many times Zackell orders him to skate from board to board, she can’t exhaust him. His jersey is black with sweat, but he’s still standing. Bobo is lying on the ice, almost unconscious, and is filled with both pride and envy as he watches his friend work, work, work.
* * *
Amat is the youngest on the team. As he stands in the shower after the practice, his thigh muscles are shaking so much that he can barely keep his balance. When he drags himself into the locker room with his towel around his waist, he sees that his shoes have been filled with shaving cream.
* * *
And then it’s all worth it.
* * *