“I heard you won today. What are you doing here?” his sister asks.
“I’m celebrating, you can see that,” he replies bitterly, and she leans forward and kisses the top of his head hard.
“Did you go to see Dad?”
He nods. Her beloved little brother—she can see why all the girls fall for him. “Sad eyes, wild heart, nothing but trouble lies ahead for that sort,” their mother says, and she knows from experience. Katia has never been to their father’s grave, not once, but she thinks of him sometimes, and how it must have felt to be so unhappy and not be able to tell anyone. It’s a terrible thing to have to keep a big secret from the people you love.
When Benji is angry with something he shows up at his youngest older sister, Gaby’s, and plays with her children until he gets over it. When he wants to be quiet and think, he goes to see his eldest sister, Adri, over at her kennels. But when he’s feeling bruised, he comes here. To Katia. So she pats his cheek gently instead of yelling at him.
“If you can watch the bar for a bit, I can sort things out in the office. Then you can come back to my place with me. The guys will sort out the moped thing,” she says, nodding toward the bouncers.
First thing tomorrow morning two men you really wouldn’t want to get into an argument with will return the moped to its owner, explaining to him that “he must have left it in Hed by mistake.” When it gets taken to the garage to be repaired, the garage will do the work free of charge. That’s pretty much all anyone needs to know around here.
“And don’t touch the damn beer!” Katia orders.
Benji goes around the bar and waits until his sister has gone into the office before opening a bottle of beer. The band onstage are playing covers of old rock songs, because that’s what you have to play if you want to play in Hed. They look the way you’d expect: overweight and undertalented and distinctly average. All but the bass player. There’s nothing average about him at all. Black hair, black clothes, but he still stands out. The others are giving it their all, but he looks like he’s just playing. He’s standing there, squeezed into one and a half square yards between an amp and a cigarette machine, but he’s dancing in his own little kingdom. As if this barn weren’t at the end of the world but at its beginning.
The bass player notices the young bartender with the messy hair in the silence between two songs. And at that moment the rest of the room might as well have been empty.
*
Ana comes out from the bathroom. Lyt is standing right outside the door. He leans his bulky frame toward her and tries to bundle the two of them back through the doorway. If he weren’t already drunk he might have succeeded, but Ana slips nimbly out of the way and darts out into the hall as he grasps for the sink to keep himself upright.
“Come on! Fuck it, I got an assist today, don’t I get anything for that?”
Ana backs away, glancing instinctively to her right and her left along the narrow hallway, like an animal in the forest evaluating escape routes. Lyt holds his arms out and slurs heavily: “I saw the way you looked at Benji. That’s fine. But he won’t be coming back here tonight. He’s a pothead . . . right? So he won’t be back on this PLANET tonight! So forget about him and fosus . . . fosuc . . . foscus on ME instead! I got a fucking ast . . . astist . . . fucking ASSIST tonight and WE WON!”
Ana slams the door in his face and runs toward the kitchen, looking for Maya. She can’t see her anywhere.
*
Benji is pouring beer at the bar. The band has stopped playing; Katia’s put some country music on instead. Benji turns toward the next customer so quickly that he almost hits him in the face with a glass. The bass player smiles. Benji raises his eyebrows.
“Wow, a musician in my bar. What would you like? It’s on the house.” The bass player tilts his head.
“A whisky sour?”
Benji’s grin stretches from ear to ear.
“And where the hell do you think you are? Hollywood? You can have a JD and coke.”
He mixes the drink as he talks and slides the glass across the bar with a practiced hand. The bassist gives it a long stare without touching it, then admits: “Sorry, I don’t even like whisky. I was just trying to sound like a rocker.”
“Whisky sour isn’t all that fucking rock’n’roll,” Benji informs him.
The bass player runs his hand through his hair.
“I met a bartender once who said that if you stand on that side of the bar long enough you start to see everyone as a type of drink. Like some warped version of that ‘spirit animal’ thing fortune tellers go on about. Know what I mean?”
Benji laughs out loud. He doesn’t often do that.
“Well, your spirit animal isn’t whisky, I can tell you that much.”
The bassist nods and leans forward discreetly.
“I’m actually more interested in something veiled in smoke than drowned in coke. I heard from someone that you might be able to help me with that?”
Benji downs the bass player’s drink and nods.
“What did you have in mind?”
*
Amat and Bobo never actually decide to go out into the garden. It just happens. They’re both bad at parties, they don’t know what to do, so it’s natural that they should seek out something that they do understand. Something they know how to do. So they end up standing in the garden, each clutching one of Kevin’s sticks and taking turns firing pucks at the goal.
“How do you get to be so fast?” Bobo asks drunkenly.
“You spend a lot of time running away from people like you at school,” Amat replies, half joking and half serious.
Bobo laughs, half properly and half not. Amat notes that he shoots harder than you might think, when he can stand still and calmly take aim.
“Sorry . . . I . . . You know it’s just a joke, don’t you? You know . . . it’s a thing . . . the A-team shit on us and we shit on you.”
“Yeah, yeah. Just a joke,” Amat lies.
Bobo shoots harder. Full of guilt.
“You’re in the first line now. You get to throw my clothes in the shower from now on, not the other way round.”
Amat shakes his head.
“You smell far too bad for me to want to touch your clothes, Bobo.”
Bobo’s laughter echoes between the houses, genuine now. Amat smiles at him. Bobo suddenly lowers his voice.
“I need to get quicker before autumn. Or I won’t be allowed to play anymore.”
This is Bobo’s last season before he gets too old for the junior team. In other towns there are junior teams that go up to twenty-one, but not in Beartown, where there aren’t enough young men left in town after they graduate from high school. Some move away for school, others for work. The best players move up to the seniors, the rest get left over.