“You’re . . . you’re kidding, right?” someone eventually asks.
“I don’t think so. I’ve been told I’m no good at humor,” Zackell informs them.
Then another player stands up. He puts his helmet down on the ice, then pulls off his jersey and pads until his top half is naked.
“Will this do, or do I have to get my cock out as well?” Benji asks.
“That’ll have to do,” Zackell replies, and fires a pellet of paint that just misses his neck.
All the other players hunch up, but Benji doesn’t hesitate; he just takes off and skates straight at the net. The first time he touches the bar, Zackell manages to hit him twice; the second and third times, she manages to fire twice as many pellets. According to the man in the shop, the pellets move at a speed of three hundred feet per second, so Zackell is strongly advised to fire only at people wearing protective clothing from at least thirty feet away. Benji’s skin is bare. Zackell manages to land one shot on his back, and he jerks with pain as the paint dribbles down his shoulder blade.
The older players look on, at first as if they can’t quite believe their eyes, then with increasing fascination. In the end someone yells out a number; no one remembers if it was “eight” or “nine,” but after that the whole team counts each time Benji touches the bar. Eventually they are roaring the number of beers he’s won. FOURTEEN. FIFTEEN. SIXTEEN. Zackell reloads the gun, and Benji sets off again. No normal person would behave like that. That’s the point. Zackell doesn’t want a normal team captain.
At one point Zackell hits Benji right on his collarbone and sees in his eyes what he’s capable of. “I can win anything with this one,” she thinks to herself. He doesn’t stop skating, and she doesn’t stop firing until he’s earned a whole crate of beer. She fetches it from the bench. As she gives it to him she says, “Anyone who feels responsibility isn’t free, Benjamin. That’s why you’re scared.”
For someone who’s bad with feelings, the woman’s not so bad with feelings after all. Benji walks to the locker room, bruised, stinging, and spattered with paint. There he shares the beer with all of his teammates. Even Amat drinks; he wouldn’t dare turn it down.
Benji goes and showers on his own. For a long time. When he comes back, the beer is all gone and his shoes are full of shaving cream.
* * *
Peter Andersson stands behind the boards while Zackell picks up her ropes.
“You have very . . . interesting coaching methods. Do they really make the players better?” Peter asks as diplomatically as he can while he tries his very best not to hyperventilate at the sight of the splats of paint all over the ice.
“Better? How should I know?” Zackell replies, unconcerned.
“You must have some reason for using these methods?” Peter says.
He has a migraine. Richard Theo promised him “complete control” over this club, but it really doesn’t feel like it.
“Hockey coaches don’t know as much about what we’re doing as we pretend; most of it’s guesswork. I assumed you knew that,” Zackell replies.
Peter feels the muscles in his back tighten. “You have an . . . unusual view of leadership.”
Zackell shrugs. “If the players think I’m an idiot, they’ve got someone to talk to each other about. Sometimes a team needs an enemy to unite them.”
Peter watches her as she walks off. He could almost swear she was smiling slightly when she made that last remark. Then he goes and fetches cleaning materials and spends several hours scrubbing and wiping the paint off the ice.
Perhaps he should have gone home instead, to drink wine with his wife and fall asleep in their bed. But he and Kira haven’t quite made up yet; they’ve just stopped arguing, and that’s not the same thing. They’re not yelling at each other, but they’re not really talking, either. The whole family is getting quieter and quieter, like a room that’s become such a mess that it feels less bother to brick up the door than get to grips with the problem. Peter realizes he’s trying to make work for himself, so he goes home, getting there after everyone has gone to bed.
* * *
Then he lies awake half the night reading the instruction manual of a coffee machine instead of calling the daughter who gave it to him and confessing that he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing anymore. Or for whose sake he’s fighting.
* * *
The A-team coach in Hed is named David. His red hair hasn’t been cut in months, and his face is chalk white because even on a fine summer’s day the sun doesn’t reach into the video room inside the rink. He’s giving the job everything he’s got; he has to. His girlfriend is pregnant, and Hed Hockey is his career trampoline to a higher league, if he wins.
He never wanted to coach this A-team, he wanted to coach Beartown’s. He fashioned a group of small boys all the way until they were juniors, when they were lined up to win the national championship and become the core of the A-team: Kevin and Benji on the ice, David on the bench. That almost happened. But only almost.
David didn’t leave Beartown because he wanted to defend rape. At least that’s not how he sees it. He doesn’t even know if Kevin is guilty. The boy was never convicted of any crime, and David is neither a lawyer nor a police officer; he’s a hockey coach. If hockey clubs start to punish players for things that not even a court would punish them for, where would that end? Hockey needs to be allowed to be hockey. Life outside the arena needs to remain separate from life inside.
So David didn’t leave Beartown because of what Kevin was accused of but because Peter saw to it that the boy was arrested on the day of the final. Which meant that the whole team was punished, not just Kevin. David couldn’t accept that. So he switched clubs and took almost all of Beartown’s best players with him.
He doesn’t regret his decision. The only thing he regrets is Benjamin Ovich. That boy symbolized everything David wanted from a team, but when it really mattered, David wasn’t able to get through to him. Benji stayed in Beartown when all the others switched to Hed, and back in the spring David saw him kissing another boy. Benji doesn’t know that David knows, and evidently no one else knows either. If David is honest, he can’t help hoping that no one else ever finds out, either. This isn’t the sort of place where he’d wish a revelation of that sort on any hockey player, not even if he’s coming here as an opponent this autumn.
Is David proud of himself? Definitely not. So why doesn’t he just go see Benji and tell him the truth: that he is ashamed of having been such a poor leader that the boy didn’t feel safe enough to tell the truth about himself. Why doesn’t David just apologize? Probably for the same reason that all of us commit all our stupidest mistakes: it’s hard to admit that we’ve been wrong. And the bigger the mistake, the harder it is.
David never imagines that he’s a good person, but he does believe he does all he can for the good of hockey. He puts the team, the club, the sport first. He’s never going to let it get political. Not even now.
There’s a knock on the door of his office. William Lyt is standing in the doorway. “Have you heard that Benji’s been made team captain of Beartown?” the huge forward roars.
The coach nods. “This is Hed. Not Beartown. Don’t worry about what they’re doing.”
William is quivering on the threshold of the room, unable to bring himself to leave even though the look on his coach’s face indicates that that’s the end of the discussion.
“Is anyone in our team going to wear number sixteen this year?” William asks. He doesn’t mean it as an accusation; he’s just asking his coach to love him. And that’s the problem: love is like leadership. Asking for it doesn’t help.
“That’s not your concern,” David says coldly.
Sixteen was Benji’s number in Beartown. David is refusing to give it to anyone in Hed.
“Who’s going to be our captain?” William asks jealously.