The Winners, page 38
“Six HOURS?”
“One way.”
“But I’m in a hurry to get home!” Peter lies, and feels ashamed, because if he was, he wouldn’t be here in the first place.
“The papers are in the back, if you feel like having a look,” Zackell offers without giving the slightest indication that his opinion will make any difference.
Peter considers trying to pretend that he has enough ego left to ask her to turn the car around, but that would be pointless. So he sighs and reaches for a folder on the backseat, opens it, sees a picture, and raises his eyebrows.
“Hang on, I recognize this guy. I went to look at him a few years ago, he was… no, hang on… this guy’s name is ‘Aleksandr,’ so it can’t be him. The other guy’s name was…”
“It’s the same guy. He’s changed his name,” Zackell informs him.
Peter leafs through the folder. She’s right, it is the same guy. Five years ago, when he was fifteen years old, he was one of the brightest talents in the whole country. He was the same age as Beartown’s golden generation, led by Kevin, so Peter kept a close eye on all the competition back then. He and Tails even had a grand plan to try to persuade the kid and his dad to move to Beartown, so they traveled to a tournament to watch him play. That turned out to be a waste of time because the boy never showed up. His team said he was injured, but Peter heard from the general manager of another club that that was a lie: “They left him at home. A God-given talent, strong as an ox, can take any amount of beating! But he can’t be coached, that one. Bit of a diva, discipline problems too. Misses training, argues with his coaches, refuses to pass the puck, won’t take instruction, can’t play on a team. Huge shame, he’s going to throw away his entire career.” The general manager was proved right, during the years that followed the boy was thrown out of three different junior teams, and he argued and moaned his way out of every opportunity until the phone stopped ringing. He’s twenty years old now, and already a has-been. Sadly there are a number of players like that in every generation, Peter knows that from experience, they live off their innate talent until they hit their teens, but as soon as demands start to be made of them they kick back.
“I remember him as… something of a troublemaker,” Peter says cautiously to Zackell.
“The season starts one week from now. If he wasn’t a troublemaker he wouldn’t still be available,” she replies.
Zackell never builds teams, she builds gangs of bandits. Peter recognizes the headache he’s starting to get now, because he had it every day when he was general manager.
“I wouldn’t advise you to recruit him, but you won’t pay any attention to that, so perhaps you can tell me what you see in him?” he therefore says wearily, expecting Zackell to fire back some sort of pithy retort as usual, so her reply surprises him:
“There’s a common misconception that hockey players follow leaders. They don’t. They follow winners.”
“And this… Aleksandr? Is he a winner? Has he even been in a club long enough to win anything? He seems to have been thrown out of every club he’s been in, but you think we can change him?”
Peter feels ashamed of saying “we,” because he can hear the hopefulness in his own voice.
“No. Players can’t change. But there’s nothing wrong with Aleksandr, he’s just misunderstood,” Zackell replies.
“In what way?”
“All his coaches have tried to fool him into thinking that hockey is a team sport.”
* * *
Tails takes great care to make sure that all his staff see him arrive at work each morning. He walks through the storeroom, asking questions and making jokes, shaking hands and slapping backs, talking loudly and laughing louder. He may be the boss, but he’s never been the sort of man people naturally follow, hockey was merciless when it taught him that lesson, he became the team captain’s best friend, but never team captain himself. So he has to fight for his authority, has to be seen and heard and remind everyone who he is, even if some of his employees maybe laugh behind his back when he leaves. What matters is that they know who he is.
He goes to his office and waits an hour. When he finally sets off for his meeting, he sneaks out the back way. The light in his office is still on, his jacket is hanging from its hook, his phone is still on his desk, as if he’s just popped out to the bathroom. His car is still in the parking lot, the window still smashed above its Beartown Hockey sticker. He’s still hoping, with increasing desperation, that this will provide a topic of conversation for the locals, as well as a distraction for the newspaper. If he can just get everyone talking about Hed’s hooligans instead of Beartown’s accounts, maybe there’s a chance that he can sort out all his problems.
He rolls his shirtsleeves up and sets off on his old bicycle toward the smart houses. The supermarket and warehouse have grown so much in recent years that it takes him several minutes to escape their shadow. He used to take pleasure in that, but for a while now he hasn’t been able to see his life’s work for what it is, only for what it could become. And, more than anything, how quickly it could be lost. The only business secret he has ever possessed is his optimism, but that’s looking pretty shaky right now. One of his contacts in the council has called to tell him which documents the editor in chief’s father has gotten hold of. Tails isn’t an idiot, he was aware that this might happen, but he wasn’t prepared that a local reporter would be so smart. Or so persistent.
Hardly anyone really knows what the word “corruption” means, but Tails has actually looked it up: “Abuse of public influence for private gain.” He’s often repeated that silently to himself. People often accuse him of not having a conscience, but he can’t help thinking that he’s nothing but conscience. Sure, maybe he has abused “public influence” and massaged a few rules, but has he gotten any private gain from it? No. Quite the opposite. He loses money every day by sponsoring Beartown Hockey. Everything he does is for the good of the club and the community. His moral disclaimer is as simple and effective as that.
Hardly anyone knows what the word “success” means either. They think it’s a mountain summit, but Tails knows better, there’s no summit, just a never-ending climb. Either you continue to claw your way upward, or you get dragged or kicked down. If you stop for a moment to enjoy the view, someone stronger and hungrier will appear from below and take your place. That’s how the world of business works, that’s how communities work, and that’s how hockey works. A new match, a new season, a new battle for promotion or relegation. The fight never ends. You always have to find thousands of little ways to stay ahead of everyone else.
So when is it enough? When do you finish? Why do you keep going? Possibly never, possibly not before your own funeral, possibly just because you want your life to have had some meaning, and this is the only thing in the world you have ever felt you could influence.
“Those bastards, they’ve never loved anything,” Ramona once said when they saw the supporters of the big city teams on television, clearly more interested in eating hot dogs and popcorn than in the hockey game down on the ice. “They don’t care, they never lose control of themselves because nothing means that much to them, they don’t hold anything sacred except their own reflection,” she said, and obviously Tails knows that plenty of people in Beartown regard him the same way. Perhaps Ramona did too. Most days he just accepts that, someone has to take on the role of bad guy, just like when he used to play hockey and would scrap by the boards so that Peter and the other stars could shine out on the open ice. But some days, when he feels that all he gets for all his work is ingratitude, he wishes that someone would ask what he personally has risked to save Beartown Hockey. So he could answer: “Every-thing.”
He has the two sets of the hockey club’s accounts on the back of his bicycle, the one that was handed in to the Tax Office and the other one, the one that only Tails and a few other people know exists. Now, for the first time, he’s going to show it to an outsider, and once she’s seen everything she could make all the politicians unemployed, put the club on the brink of bankruptcy, and send powerful men to prison.
Her own husband, first and foremost.
* * *
“Okay, we’ve got plenty of time, explain to me why hockey ISN’T a team sport?” Peter chuckles.
Zackell lights another cigar and replies as if she can’t believe he doesn’t already understand:
“It isn’t a team sport until a player is grown-up and plays in an A-team. Because that’s when games mean something. But up until then? In the junior team? Who cares who wins those games? The only thing that matters at that age is that the best players become as good as possible. Aleksandr has had coaches who yelled at him not to be selfish, to pass the puck, but what for? So that a mediocre teammate could score a goal? So that a mediocre coach could win some meaningless tourna-ment?”
Peter has to admit to himself that he’s never even thought of hockey in that way.
“So you mean, if there’s a star on a junior team, the coach and all the other players should only exist to serve him, so that he can become as good as possible? Even if that means they lose games?”
“Of course!”
Peter laughs. He doesn’t know how to tell her that she’s simultaneously the least empathetic and the most empathetic coach he’s ever met.
“Why did the kid change his name to Aleksandr? I didn’t even know he was Russian.”
“Half-Russian. That means that one of his parents is…,” Zackell begins, as if Peter were a very young and very foolish child.
“Thanks! I know what ‘half-Russian’ means!” Peter sighs.
“First you want me to explain everything, now you don’t want me to explain anything…,” Zackell mutters in surprise.
Peter rubs his eyebrows.
“So if Aleksandr doesn’t want to play for anyone, what makes you think he’ll want to play in Beartown?”
“You.”
“Me? I thought you said you didn’t need my help.”
“I didn’t say that, did I? I said I didn’t need your advice.”
Peter groans so loudly that some saliva ends up on the wind-shield.
“It’s as if my mom has been reincarnated as a hockey coach…”
“What does that mean?” she wonders.
He rolls his eyes.
“Oh, nothing…”
“You speak in riddles sometimes, has anyone ever told you that?” she points out.
“I speak in riddles? Bloody hell…! Are you serious? So what were you thinking I might say that would make this guy want to play in Beartown?”
Instead of replying, Zackell merely says:
“Things must be going very badly between you and your wife at home.”
“Sorry?”
She nods.
“The fact that you haven’t asked that question before now suggests that you were really looking for a reason to get away from home.”
Peter loses his temper and snaps:
“Why did you actually ask me to come with you?”
She replies, as if the answer was obvious:
“Because you aren’t a winner.”
He stares at her for half a cigar.
“So why am I here, then?”
With all the patience she can summon up, Zackell replies:
“I need to recruit a winner, because hockey players follow winners. But do you know what winners do?”
“No?”
“Winners follow leaders. That’s why you’re here.”
* * *
Kira has compost on her fingers when she opens the terrace door. Peter has gone off with Zackell, Leo is at school, Maya evidently has more days off from college for the funeral seeing as the dean down there appears to think that Beartown is in another country, so she’s off somewhere with Ana. The house is empty. Even so, Tails makes his way through the yard instead of coming to the front of the house, and they eat Peter’s freshly baked bread in the kitchen with the blinds drawn.
“How are things otherwise? How are the children?” Tails begins, and Kira rolls her eyes.
“Please, Tails, you crept in here like a spy, we’ve known each other long enough for you not to have to start this conversation by lying that you care about the children.”
“Lying? When have I ever lied to you?” he exclaims, horrified.
“Only all the time, nonstop, every time we’ve met since the very first time I met you around twenty years ago…” She smiles, and he starts to laugh.
This is his greatest asset: he laughs easily, loudly, and infectiously, always pushing forward.
“Okay, okay, Kira. No bullshit! Like I said: we need a lawyer on the committee. We’ve got a few problems with the local paper. I don’t know how much they’ve uncovered so far, but I need… well, you need… we should be prepared for the worst. I need to know how deeply we’re in the shit if certain things… come to light.”
She shakes her head wearily and pours coffee.
“Do you want an honest response, Tails? You don’t represent the club, you’re not on the committee, you’re just a sponsor. You can’t commission me on their behalf.”
He waves his fingers dismissively, almost knocking his cup over without realizing.
“Let me worry about that. Just take a look at what I want to show you, okay?”
He dumps the accounts down on the table and Kira can’t help feeling worried. At the start of the conversation she’s angry about how differently she and Tails see the world, but at the end she’s going to hate herself because of how little difference there is between them.
61 Smoke
The editor in chief and her father are shivering as they sit on cheap folding chairs on the dirty roof of the building that houses the newspaper’s office. It isn’t a very tall building, but it’s located on a hill so you get an unexpectedly good view of the town. The day is barely halfway through but the daylight is already starting to fade and the cold is determinedly gnawing away at whatever warmth anyone may have absorbed from the sun.
“What are you laughing at?” the editor in chief wonders.
“When you were little and I asked where you wanted to live, you said New York. This isn’t exactly New York, kid,” her dad replies.
Lights are starting to go on in the buildings, a few cars are rolling through the streets, they can hear chain saws in the forest as a memory of the storm. But nature has started to recover, the people too, and the editor in chief has difficulty suppressing her curiosity at the resilience of both of those. She glances at her dad, he’s smoking his pipe, she remembers that smell from when she was young, always a sign that it was a good day. He only smoked his pipe when he wasn’t planning to drink.
“Thanks for not drinking, Dad,” she says quietly.
The corners of his mouth twitch, not without some effort.
“I can’t drink and work at the same time anymore. Not well, anyway. I’m too old to go into a fight drunk, you know.”
She smiles.
“I know you think I inherited all my worst characteristics from you…”
“That’s certainly what your mother thinks,” he mutters.
“No. She knows I inherited some of the good ones as well.”
He lets out a hoarse laugh.
“You’re a damn good editor in chief, kid. I’d never have been any good. You have to care about people to do that job. You’ve got all that from her.”
She closes her eyes and breathes in the pipe smoke. He missed large parts of her childhood. They never understood each other back then, but they do now. As a child she missed her dad, but as an adult she has gained a friend. A comrade. She wonders if she would have exchanged one for the other if she could do it all again.
He shuffles irritably on the folding chair.
“What’s making that banging noise? Sounds like a damn gull has gotten caught in an air vent…,” he mutters and half stands to see, but the chair is too unsteady and his body too old to allow that sort of nonsense, so he sinks back down again resignedly.
“It’s just the kids down in the street firing balls at the garage,” his daughter replies, well used to this.
He pricks up his ears and listens, guesses that they’re of middle-school age, one of them yells “4–4”, and another shouts furiously: “No it’s not! You’re CHEATING! It’s 4–3!!!” The next bang is the sound of them fighting and their small bodies crashing into the garage door.
“This place… I don’t know if I’ve ever been anywhere where everyone competes the whole time the way they do here…,” he says with a grunt.
His daughter smiles.
“That’s what I said. The people around here are like you. You can’t live without a fight either.”
He coughs to hide a laugh of agreement.
“No idea what you mean. I’m the embodiment of peace and calm.”
She reaches over and pats his arm, very briefly, but that means everything to someone who thought he had burned all his chances of being a dad again. Then she gestures toward the community below the building and explains sadly:
“It was you who taught me this, do you remember? To seek out the highest point in a town, because you learn something from seeing the whole place at the same time.”
“And what have you learned about Hed?”
She points:
“There’s a school over there. I walk past it each morning, it reminds me of the one I went to, do you remember? In the middle of town. Kids from McMansions mixed with children from public housing. Some turn up on ramshackle bicycles, others get dropped off by parents in expensive SUVs.”
“Are you trying to say you were poor because you cycled to school? We lived five minutes away from…”
“No, no, be quiet! You’ve got the wrong end of the stick! I’m trying to say that you and mom did a good thing: my friends came from all different parts of society. It’s not like that anymore, the rich parents saw to that, now my old school is full of kids in designer clothing who go on skiing holidays. And they’re trying to do the same thing here. There’s a smart residential area in Beartown called ‘the Heights,’ with the most expensive houses in the whole area, and the parents up there are trying to set up their own school so their kids won’t have to socialize with the poor kids. If they succeed, it won’t be long before the same thing happens here in Hed.”
