*
It means everything. That’s all.
*
On the other side of Beartown from the Heights, north of the road signs, is the Hollow. In between, the center of Beartown consists of row houses and small homes in a gently declining scale of middle-classness, but here in the Hollow there are nothing but blocks of rental apartments, built as far away from the Heights as possible. At first the names of these neighborhoods were nothing but unimaginative geographic descriptions: the Hollow is lower than the rest of the town, where the ground slopes away toward an old gravel pit. The Heights are on the hillside overlooking the lake. But after the residents’ finances divided along similar lines, the names came to signify differences in class as much as in districts. Even children can see that the farther away you live from the Hollow, the better things will be for you.
Fatima lives in a two-room apartment almost at the end of the Hollow. She drags her son out of bed with gentle force; he grabs his skates and soon they’re alone on the bus, not speaking. Amat has perfected a system of moving his body without his head actually having to wake up. Fatima affectionately calls him “The Mummy.” When they first reach the rink, she changes into her cleaner’s uniform and he tries to help her pick up the garbage in the stands until she shouts at him and drives him off and he goes to find the caretaker. The boy is worried about his mom’s back, and she worries that other children will see him with her and tease him. As long as Amat can remember, the two of them have been alone in the world. When he was little he used to collect empty beer cans from the stands at the end of the month to get the deposit back on them. Sometimes he still does.
He helps the caretaker every morning, unlocking doors and checking lights, sorting out the pucks and driving the zamboni, getting the rink ready for the day. First to show up will be the figure skaters, in the most antisocial time-slots. Then all the hockey teams, one after the other in order of rank. The best times are reserved for the juniors and the A-team. The junior team is now so good it’s almost at the top of the hierarchy.
Amat isn’t on the junior team yet, he’s only fifteen, but maybe next season. If he does everything that’s demanded of him. One day he’ll take his mom away from here, he’s sure of that. One day he’ll stop adding and subtracting income and expenditures in his head all the time. There’s an obvious difference between the children who live in homes where the money can run out and the ones who don’t. How old you are when you realize that also makes a difference.
Amat knows his options are limited, so his plan is simple: from here to the junior team, then the A-team, then professional. When his first wages reach his account he’ll grab that cleaning cart from his mother and never let her see it again. He’ll allow her aching fingers to rest and give her aching back a break. He doesn’t want possessions. He just wants to lie in bed one single night without having to count.
The caretaker taps Amat on the shoulder when his chores are done and passes him his skates. Amat puts them on, grabs his stick, and goes out onto the empty ice. That’s the deal: the caretaker gets help with the heavy lifting and tricky swing-doors that his rheumatism makes difficult and—as long as Amat floods the ice again after he practices—he can have the rink to himself for an hour before the figure skaters arrive. Those are the best sixty minutes of his day, every day.
He puts in his earphones, cranks the volume as loud as it will go, then sets off with speed. Across the ice, so hard into the boards at the other end that his helmet smacks the glass. Full speed back again. Again. Again. Again.
*
Fatima looks up briefly from her cart, allows herself a few moments in which to watch her son out there. The caretaker catches her eye, and she mouths the word “Thanks.” The caretaker merely nods and conceals a smile. Fatima remembers how odd she thought it when the club’s coaches first told her that Amat had exceptional talent. She only understood snippets of the language back then, and the fact that Amat could skate when he could barely walk was a divine mystery to her. Many years have passed since then, and she still hasn’t gotten used to the cold in Beartown, but she has learned to love the town for what it is. And she will never find anything in her life more unfathomable than the fact that the boy she gave birth to in a place that has never seen snow was born to play a sport on ice.
*
In one of the smaller houses in the center of town, Peter Andersson, general manager of Beartown Ice Hockey, gets out of the shower, red-eyed and breathless. He’s hardly slept, and the water hasn’t managed to rinse his nerves away. He’s been sick twice. He hears Kira bustle past the bathroom out in the hall, on her way to wake the children, and he knows exactly what she’s going to say: “For heaven’s sake, Peter, you’re over forty years old. When the GM is more nervous about a junior game than the players, maybe it’s time to take a tranquilizer, have a drink, and just calm down a bit!” The Andersson family has lived here for more than a decade now, since they moved back home from Canada, but he still hasn’t managed to get his wife to understand what hockey means in Beartown. “Seriously? You don’t think all you grown men are getting a bit too excited?” Kira has been asking all season. “The juniors are seventeen years old, practically still children!”
He kept quiet at first. But late one night he told her the truth: “I know it’s only a game, Kira. I know. But we’re a town in the middle of the forest. We’ve got no tourism, no mine, no high-tech industry. We’ve got darkness, cold, and unemployment. If we can make this town excited again, about anything at all, that has to be a good thing. I know you’re not from round here, love, and this isn’t your town, but look around: the jobs are going, the council’s cutting back. The people who live here are tough, we’ve got the bear in us, but we’ve taken blow after blow for a long time now. This town needs to win at something. We need to feel, just once, that we’re best. I know it’s a game. But that’s not all it is. Not always.”
Kira kissed his forehead hard when he said that, and held him tight, whispering softly in his ear: “You’re an idiot.” Which, of course, he knows.
He leaves the bathroom and knocks on his fifteen-year-old daughter’s door until he hears her guitar answer. She loves her guitar, not sports. Some days that makes him feel sad, but on plenty more days he’s happy for her.