There’s a stranger sitting in a Jeep, watching the road silently and intently through sunglasses, inhaling deeply from a cigar and letting the smoke roll out from the open window. The Jeep is parked in the shade of some trees and is rusty and nondescript enough for no one to pay any attention to it. The list of names is in the glove compartment. “Peter Andersson” is written at the top. When Peter gets into his car and drives off, the stranger follows him.
6
If There Isn’t a War, They Start One
The eighteen-year-old man in the forest takes off his backpack, puts it down on the grass, and climbs up into a tree. Summer has started to make his long hair fairer and his skin darker around the bear tattoo. His name is Benjamin, but only his mom and sisters call him that, everyone else knows him as Benji. His name is rarely associated with memories of a positive childhood—ever since preschool people have been saying that the boy would end up in prison or the cemetery. Hockey was both his salvation and damnation, because all his worst characteristics off the ice made him admired on it. Kevin was the star, Benji his protector. Brothers. The town loved Kevin’s hands, but they worshipped Benji’s fists. Whenever anyone in Beartown tells the old joke “I went to see a fight, and suddenly an ice hockey game broke out,” they’re always telling it about him.
So the town was shocked when Kevin was accused of rape, but it was shocked almost as much when Benji took Maya Andersson’s side against his brother. He stayed in Beartown rather than move to Hed Hockey Club. Benji Ovich did the right thing. And for what? Mocking text messages from anonymous senders arrive one after the other, telling him that his club is dead now. He made the wrong choice. He’s got nothing. A few months back, he was playing alongside his best friend in one of the best teams in the country. Now he’s sitting alone in a tree, smoking and getting high, and is on his way to proving everyone who doubted him right: “Sooner or later that boy is going to do himself or someone else some serious damage.”
* * *
Every time Kira Andersson looks at the pictures of Peter, Maya, and Leo on her desk this summer, she feels endlessly ashamed at the fact that when she’s here at work it’s easier to imagine that they’re a normal family. That the four of them aren’t burning to ashes inside, that the house they share hasn’t long since fallen silent because none of them has any words left.
Maya asked her family to stop talking about the rape. They were sitting at the breakfast table at the start of the summer, and she said it without any drama: “I need to move on now.” Peter and Kira tried to smile and nod, but their eyes bored holes in the parquet floor. You have to be supportive, you can’t grab hold of your daughter and yell that we need to talk about it, that it’s her parents who feel scared and abandoned and . . . selfish. Because that is what they’re being, isn’t it? Selfish.
Kira knows people don’t understand that she can go on working or that Peter can go on caring about hockey, but the truth is that sometimes they’re the only things they have the strength to care about. When everything else is collapsing, you throw yourself into the only thing you know you can control, the only place you feel you know what you’re doing. Everything else hurts too much. So you go to work and hide there, the way mountain climbers dig holes in the snow when a storm hits.
Kira isn’t naive, but she’s a parent, she’s been trying to see a way forward. Kevin is gone; the psychologist said Maya was making progress in her treatment for the trauma, so perhaps everything could still be okay. That’s what Kira has been telling herself. Peter was going to meet the council, the club would get the money it needed, everything would sort itself out.
But now she hangs up on the moving company that has received an order for packing boxes in her name. She reads the text that has just arrived. It’s from a journalist: “We’re trying to get hold of your husband for a comment about Beartown Ice Hockey going into liquidation.” The next text is from a neighbor, saying “Didn’t know you were moving??” There’s a screenshot attached from a real estate agent’s website, where someone has put the Anderssons’ house up for sale. The photographs are very recent. Someone has been in their yard that morning.
Kira calls Peter, but he doesn’t answer. She knows what’s going to happen now; if the hockey club collapses, it won’t matter whose fault it really is, because some people in this town have already started to look for scapegoats. It will be Peter’s fault. Maya’s fault. The general manager’s. The slut’s.
Kira calls Peter again. Again. Again. The last time she tries, the call doesn’t even go through. Her colleague backs away when Kira slams her fist onto her desk as hard as she can; she hears her fingers crunch but goes on punching with all the strength the hundred different women inside her can summon up:
* * *
BANG. BANG. BANG-BANG-BANG.
* * *
Benji curls up, smoke seeping from his nostrils. He’s heard people say that drugs lift them up into the skies, but for Benji it’s the sea: he doesn’t fly, he just floats. Drugs keep him on the surface without his having to make any effort, and the rest of the time he feels he has to swim for his life the whole time.
As a child he always loved the summer, when the foliage lets boys hide in trees without being seen from the ground. He’s always had a lot to hide from, as anyone does who’s different in a locker room where everyone learns that you have to be a single unit, a clan, a team, in order to win together. So Benji became what they needed: the wild one. So feared that once, when he was wounded, the coach put him on the bench anyway. He didn’t play a single minute, but the opposing team still didn’t dare lay a finger on Kevin.
Benji taught himself some of that hardness: he climbed trees in a way that his coach used to laugh and say made him “half tank, half monkey,” and he chopped wood out at his sister’s boarding kennels and punched the stack of wood into shape to harden his knuckles. But some of the hardness was just there inside him, it couldn’t be injected or driven out, and it made him unpredictable. One winter when he was little, some of the boys on the team called him “sledge,” because he wasn’t driven to training by his parents but came on his bike with his hockey bag on a sledge behind him. The nickname lasted a few months, until one of the boys went too far and Benji came into the locker room with the sledge in his hands and knocked out two of his teeth. There weren’t many nicknames after that.
He’s sitting quietly in the tree now, but inside him everything is chaos. When a child gets a best friend, it’s like a first infatuation; we want to be with them all the time, and if they leave us it’s like an amputation. Kevin and Benji came from such different parts of town that they could easily have been different species, but the ice became their dance floor. Kevin had the genius and Benji the violence. It took a decade before everyone realized that there was a bit of genius in Benji, too, and a lot more violence in Kevin.
How much can you forgive your best friend for? How can you know in advance? One night back in the spring Kevin stood shaking in the forest, not far from here, and asked Benji to forgive him. Benji turned and walked away from him. They never spoke again.
That morning three weeks ago when Kevin left town, Benji was sitting in the same tree as he is now. Hitting the back of his head against the trunk, harder and harder. Bang. Bang. Bang. He’s high on drugs and heavy with hatred; he hears voices and at first isn’t sure if he’s imagining them. Then he sees them, they’re coming closer, he sees them through the trees. His muscles tighten.
* * *
He’s going to hurt someone.
* * *