“I think I’ll leave it.”
Hog pats his hand intentionally as he walks past, and Peter wipes it with an irritated smile. Friends for forty years, still the same joke. Hog grabs a flashlight and heads out into the yard, and Peter stands next to him shivering, full of the sense of inadequacy that only afflicts a man of a certain generation when he watches another man from the same generation repair his wife’s car. Hog straightens up and spares Peter any technical jargon.
“Piece of crap. Bobo can do it when he wakes up. You can come pick it up at nine.”
He goes back into the garage and absentmindedly picks up one of the Ford’s heavy tires, making it look about as challenging as it is for Peter to put paper in the recycling bin. Bobo has unfortunately inherited both his father’s raw strength and indifferent skating abilities. Hog was a terrifying defensive player in his day, but Sune always used to sigh: “That lad even manages to trip over the blue lines.”
“Maybe you could let Bobo have a bit of a rest today? Big game this afternoon,” Peter says.
Hog raises an eyebrow without looking up, then wipes his hand across his face to get rid of the sweat, leaving glossy streaks of oil in his beard.
“It’ll take two hours to fix your car. If you’re picking it up at nine, Bobo won’t have to start until seven. That’s a rest.”
Peter opens his mouth but says nothing. A game of hockey is a game of hockey, but tomorrow this family will have to get up and earn a living again. Bobo is a solid back, but nowhere near professional standard. There are two younger kids in the family, and the global economy waits for no man. Bears shit in the woods, and everyone shits on Beartown.
Hog offers him a lift home but he’s happy to walk. Needs to calm his nerves. He walks past the factory, which provides work for fewer and fewer people. He passes the big supermarket, which has put all the smaller stores out of business. He turns onto the road leading to the center of town, and then onto the main shopping street. The street gets shorter and shorter every year.
*
Ramona has survived long enough to get her pension, but one of the good things about owning your own pub is that no one can force you to stop working. The Bearskin has been hers since it stopped being her mother’s, and before that it belonged to her grandfather. It still looks much the same, but Grandfather used to smoke indoors and now Ramona smokes outside. Three before breakfast; she lights the last of them on the dying stub of the second. The boys who play billiards and drink beer on a tab here every evening affectionately call her “the Marlboro Mom.” She has no children of her own; Holger couldn’t have any, and perhaps never needed them either. The only family he wanted apart from Ramona was his sporting family, he used to say. Someone once asked him if there was any sport he didn’t like, and he replied “Politics. They should stop showing that on TV.” If the house had been on fire he’d have rescued Ramona first of all, but she’d have had to be clutching their Beartown Ice Hockey season tickets when he did so. It was theirs, that ridiculous sport. All his loudest laughter and warmest embraces had been left behind in the stands. She was the one who smoked, he was the one who got cancer. “I’m suffering from an ironic illness,” he declared breezily. Ramona refuses to let anyone say that he died; she says he left her, because that’s how she sees it. Like a betrayal. She’s been left standing in the snow like a bare tree trunk without any bark, unprotected now that he’s no longer here.
She has learned how to make the days pass. You just do. When the shift at the factory gets out in the afternoon, the Bearskin fills with young men she calls “the boys,” and whom the police and the hockey club call far worse things. They’re capable of a lot of crap, but they love Ramona the way Holger loved her. Maybe she’s a bit too protective of them. She knows that. Beartown nurtures tough people, and the way life has turned out hasn’t made her boys any softer. But they’re all she has left of him, as close to her memories as she can bear to go.
Death does strange, incomprehensible things to loving souls. She still lives in the apartment above the pub. Some of the boys who drive forklifts over in the supermarket warehouse buy food for her there now that the little store across the road has closed down, so the old woman no longer goes any farther than the ashtray outside the door. Eleven years have passed since Holger left her, and at every A-team game, even when the rink is sold out, there are always two empty seats in the stands.
*
Peter sees her from a long way off. She waits for him to get closer.
“Are you looking for something, sir?” Ramona asks.
She’s gotten older, but she’s like her pub: always the same. The people who don’t like the fact that the Bearskin offers a refuge to the town’s thugs each evening talk about her as an unpleasant, sociopathic old woman who’s losing her marbles, but even if Peter hardly ever sees her these days it still feels like coming home after a long journey each time he does.
“Don’t know yet,” he smiles.
“Nervous about the game?”
He doesn’t have to answer. She stubs her third cigarette out under her shoe, tucks the butt inside the packet, and says:
“Whisky?”
He looks up at the sky. Soon the town will wake up, and even the sun seems to be planning an early appearance. Everyone will wake up to the dream that a junior team game can change everything. Can it make the council turn its gaze toward the forest again? Set up a hockey academy, maybe even build a shopping center? Make it so people giving directions say: Stay on the road, past Hed, instead of: If you get to Beartown, you’ve gone too far? Peter has spent so long convincing other people of all that, he no longer knows if he believes it himself.
“A cup of coffee would be good,” he says.
She lets out a hoarse chuckle and maneuvers herself down the steps into the pub.