When Elisabeth Zackell walks through the rink long after the end of practice, one lone player is sitting in the locker room. Bobo is the size of a dairy cow, yet still as small as a frightened hedgehog. His eyes are moist, staring at a pair of shoes that no one has filled with shaving cream. The only thing the older players roared when he emerged from the shower was “Thanks very much for the fitness training, you little shit! ‘We’re good at hard work’! How the hell could you say something so completely stupid to a hockey coach?”
Amat tried to comfort him. Bobo laughed it off, and Amat was too exhausted to persist. After he and all the others have gone, Bobo is still sitting in the same place, smallest in the whole world.
“Turn the lights out when you leave,” Zackell says, because she’s not one for this whole business of emotions.
Bobo sniffs. “How do you get respect?” he asks, and Zackell looks extremely uncomfortable.
“You’ve . . . you’ve got snot everywhere,” she says, gesturing toward her face with her hand.
Bobo wipes himself, and Zackell looks as though she feels like curling up in the fetal position.
“I want them to respect me. I want them to put shaving cream in my shoes, too!” Bobo says.
Zackell groans. “You don’t have to be respected. It’s not as important as people think.”
Bobo chews his lips. “Sorry I showed you my cock,” he whispers.
Zackell stretches herself to smile.
“In your defense, it wasn’t much of a cock,” she says, measuring a few measly inches between her thumb and forefinger.
Bobo starts to laugh. Zackell sticks her hands in her pockets and gives him some quiet advice: “You need to be useful to the team, Bobo. Then they’ll respect you.”
She walks off without waiting for him to ask any more questions. Bobo will lie awake at night wondering what she meant.
* * *
He stops off at the supermarket on the way home and buys shaving cream so his dad won’t be sad. When Hog sees the ruined shoes in the hall, he gives his son a hug. That doesn’t happen often.
21
He’s Lying on the Ground
Sune is walking slowly through the rink, breathing hard through his nose. He misses his coaching job every second, but he can hardly get up the stands anymore. Hockey gets younger while everyone involved in it gets older, and when it’s done with us it discards us without any sentimentality at all. That’s how it develops and stays alive, for the sake of new generations.
“Zackell!” Sune calls out breathlessly when he catches sight of the woman who’s taken his job.
“Yes?” she responds, heading for the locker room.
“How did today’s practice feel?”
“?‘Feel’?” Zackell asks, as if it were a foreign word.
Sune leans against the wall and smiles weakly. “I mean . . . it’s not easy to be a hockey coach in this town. Especially not if you’re . . . you know.”
He means “if you’re a woman.” So Zackell replies, “It’s not easy to be a hockey coach anywhere.”
Sune nods sadly. “I heard that one of the players showed you his . . . genitals . . .”
“Hardly,” Zackell retorts.
Sune coughs awkwardly. “He hardly showed you his genitals?”
“It hardly counted as genitals,” Zackell corrects.
“Oh, that’s just . . . you know, guys, sometimes they . . .” Sune says, staring down at his knees.
Zackell looks annoyed. “How did you know someone showed me his genitals?”
Sune misinterprets that to mean that she’s upset about the genitals. “I can talk to the guys if you like, I can understand that you feel offended, but—”
“You’re not to talk to my players. I talk to my players. And the only person who decides if I’m offended is me.”
Sune raises an eyebrow. “I’m guessing you don’t often feel offended?”
“Feeling offended is an emotion.”
Zackell looks as though she’s talking about tools when she says the word. Sune sticks his hands in his pockets and mutters, “It’s not easy being coach in Beartown. Especially if things start to go badly. Believe me, I had my job a whole lifetime before you got here. And there are people in this town who won’t be happy with a coach who . . . who looks like you do.”
The old man looks deep into the woman’s eyes and sees a characteristic that he always lacked: she doesn’t care. Sune always cared, deep down. He wanted the players to like him: the fans, the old men and women in the Bearskin. The whole town. But Elisabeth Zackell isn’t afraid of opinions, because she knows what all successful coaches know: they’ll like her when she wins.
“I’m going to get something to eat,” she says, managing to sound neither friendly nor unfriendly.
Sune nods. Smiles again. Leaves her with one last thought: “Do you remember that little girl, Alicia, who was firing pucks in my garden? She came to the rink today, seven times. She ran away from her preschool to watch the A-team train. I took her back, but she ran away again. She’s going to keep on doing that all autumn.”
“Is it possible to lock children up?” Zackell wonders, possibly not quite understanding the point Sune is trying to make, so Sune clarifies: “Children take all the things they grow up with for granted. After watching you coach the A-team today, Alicia will take it for granted that women do that. When she’s old enough to play on an A-team, there may not be female hockey coaches. Just . . . hockey coaches.”
That means something to Sune. Something important. He doesn’t know if it means anything to Elisabeth Zackell, because it honestly doesn’t look as though it does: she just looks as though she wants to go and get something to eat. But hunger is a feeling, too.
Just before Zackell walks out through the door, something flashes in her eyes, something she does actually care about, so she asks, “How’s it going with my goalie? That Vidar?”
“I’ll talk to his brother,” Sune promises.
“Didn’t you promise that Peter was going to talk to Benjamin Ovich’s sisters, too?” Zackell wonders.
“Yes?” Sune says in surprise.
“So why didn’t Benjamin come to training today?”
“He didn’t?” Sune exclaims.
* * *
It hadn’t even occurred to him that Benji might not have appeared for practice. Children aren’t the only ones who take things for granted.
* * *
In a cabin on a campsite sits a man in a blue polo shirt. He has lessons to prepare, a teaching job he has spent several years training for, but can’t get anything done. He sits in the little kitchen with a book about philosophy on the table in front of him, staring out through the window and hoping to see a young man with sad eyes and a wild soul. But Benji doesn’t come. He’s lost. Today the teacher looked him in the eye and told him he was a mistake, even though the mistake was the teacher’s.
Everyone in this town knows that Benji is dangerous, because he strikes hardest. Yet few people seem to appreciate that everything about him does just that—strike hardest, beat hardest—the whole time. Including his heart.
* * *
Inside the Oviches’ home one of the sisters, Gaby, walks into Benji’s room. Gaby’s two children are playing with Legos scattered across the whole floor. Gaby can say many harsh things about her little brother, but there’s no better uncle in the world. Her children will grow up saying that this room in their grandmother’s house, their uncle’s room, was the safest place in the entire universe. Nothing bad could happen to them here, no one would dare do anything to them, because their uncle would protect them against everyone and everything. Once one of them said to Gaby, “Mom! There are ghosts in Uncle Benji’s wardrobe; they have to hide in there because they’re scared of him!”
Gaby smiles and is just walking out of the room when the thought hits her. She spins around and asks the children, “Where did you get the Legos?”
“It was in the presents,” the children reply, unconcerned.