The Winners, page 44
* * *
That afternoon the editor in chief of the local paper stops to get groceries from the supermarket. She wants to surprise her dad with his favorite dish. While she’s looking for the ingredients she can’t help noticing two young men several times. They’re never right next to her, but they’re always near. When she pays they’re farther back in the same line, and when she walks across the parking lot she thinks she sees them out of the corner of her eye, but when she turns around they’re gone. When she gets in her car another vehicle drives past, a little too close and a little too fast, making her jump. She doesn’t have time to see the license plate, but she could swear that the driver was wearing a black jacket.
When she gets home it’s started to get dark, and she sees shadows everywhere. That night she wakes up when it sounds like someone is trying the handle of the front door to see if it’s locked. The next morning a young man on a moped follows her all the way to work. To start with she thinks she’s imagining it. Soon she hopes that she is.
69 Leaders
Zackell is sitting in the stands in the ice rink, the caretaker is sitting beside her, he glances at his watch and grins:
“Getting the A-team to train this late is a good way to wind them up.”
She doesn’t respond. The caretaker emits something midway between a cough and a snort. After Hed started using the ice rink she changed the schedule so that Beartown’s A-team trained last of all the teams. Everyone else interpreted this positively, as if she wanted to set a good example and show that all the teams are of equal value, but the caretaker could see what Zackell was really doing. The same as always. Testing her team.
“Have you decided who’s going to be captain this season yet?” he asks, and of course she doesn’t answer that either, but he imagines he can see a trace of a smile seeing as he’s asked the same question every day of preseason.
There are plenty of big words that get repeated on a hockey team, but perhaps none gets trotted out as much as “leadership.” The problem is that it means different things in different places, because not all leaders can lead every team, there are so many different ways to take a group with you, and most leaders only know one. “What’s it called when you go out into the forest and other men follow you? Leadership. What’s it called if the same man goes out into the forest on his own? A walk.” He told Zackell that joke once and she smiled then too, but not as if she thought it was funny. The caretaker could never figure out if it was because she didn’t understand the joke, or because she thought he was the one who didn’t get it.
“Should I lock the doors?” he wonders. She’s wanted him to do that recently to teach the players to arrive on time.
But Zackell shakes her head.
“No. We’re waiting for one more.”
Then she gets up and goes down to the locker room. The A-team is only half ready, and there’s a lot of moaning and whining about the late training session. It’s ridiculously easy to unbalance a group of grown men, you just have to disrupt their routines. Zackell has never had any difficulty understanding that all wars are started by men, but if any of them ever managed to win one it was nothing but a miracle.
Bobo yells at the players to shut up when she comes in, and they quiet down just enough for her not to have to raise her voice when she says:
“We’re sharing the ice with the juniors today.”
“What the…,” the players begin, and the cacophony of grown men feeling sorry for themselves starts up.
The team has slowly gotten used to Zackell’s peculiar training ideas, or has at least accepted them. All players do that if something works. Winning cures everything. But this business of only training on half the ice is still driving them crazy. Not long ago Zackell read a newspaper article about a small hockey club down in one of the big cities which, despite a lack of time on the ice and a general shortage of resources, year after year nurtured players who got drafted to the NHL. When the chair of the club was asked why he thought that was, he replied that perhaps it wasn’t despite the lack of time on the ice, but because of it. Two or three of the youth teams always had to play at the same time, so everyone had to get used to playing on a small area, and it turned out that this made them better players. “Ice hockey isn’t really played five against five,” the chairman said, and until Zackell showed Bobo the article, Bobo had never thought about hockey that way. There are ten players on the ice during a game, but at any given moment hockey is only played on the square yard where the puck happens to be. Having to train in confined spaces turned out to be an advantage, and that’s all hockey is: a series of slight advantages. A margin of a few inches.
So Zackell doesn’t listen to the whining, she just leaves the locker room. Bobo lets everyone sigh and groan and swear for a few more minutes before he smiles secretively:
“I know you hate sharing time on the ice. But today we aren’t sharing the ice with the juniors to train, because we’re going to play… A PRACTICE GAME!”
The atmosphere changes in the space of one breath and a deafening cheer breaks out, because some things never change: everyone in here was once a scrawny junior who had to play a practice game against the men on the A-team and got crushed, and the reward for that is that if you train for enough years you will one day be an A-team player yourself and get the chance to crush the next generation.
“Can we play in our old tops?” one player asks eagerly.
Bobo shakes his head apologetically.
“No, sorry. You have to wear the white ones with your names on them,” he says, and the players mutter unhappily at that, as usual.
Last winter the sponsors printed new training jerseys for every player, one white and one green, the club had never had names and numbers on training tops before but now all of a sudden it was important. No one understood why until Tails turned up at a training session with a photographer, who stood in the center circle and started taking pictures in the middle of the session. Tails wanted pictures for his advertising brochure and he wanted them taken from the ice in a way he couldn’t manage during a game, so this was his solution. The players realized pretty quickly that the photographer was only focusing on one player, so one of them grunted to Tails: “Wouldn’t it have been easier to print Amat’s name on all the tops, then the photographer could have gotten pictures of any of us?”
Tails didn’t even seem to notice the jibe, but that was how he got them all to hate those tops, and that’s why Zackell is making them play in them today. She wants them annoyed. Bobo looks at the clock on the wall, goes out into the corridor, goes back in, looks at the clock again, and is about to give up hope when he hears the outside door creak and Amat tumbles in, breathless and flushed. Bobo’s heart forgets its rhythm and his feet trip over themselves, and he only just manages to stop himself from running over and hugging his friend. Because that too is a test.
Amat wishes everything was so easy that a hug could resolve things. He walks toward Zackell over by the boards, she pretends she hasn’t seen him, he stands there, overweight and pale and can’t even summon up the courage to look her in the eye. She says nothing, forcing him to speak first.
“Can I… can I train today?” he manages to say.
“We’re full,” she replies coldly, nodding toward the ice where Aleksandr has just skated out.
Amat looks at him. He’s big and strong, at least a head taller than Amat, and he moves with the natural self-confidence and privileged arrogance that Amat has always lacked. “The complete package” as the old guys in town usually call that sort of talent. That was what they used to say about Kevin.
“Okay… can I… I mean, can I use the gym? If I won’t be disturbing anyone?” Amat asks, and notices to his own annoyance that he’s fighting back tears.
Zackell doesn’t even look at him when she replies:
“We’re playing a practice game against the juniors. There’s a space on their team if you want to play.”
Amat nods down at the floor with a head so heavy it’s a miracle he can stand.
“Great. Thanks,” he whispers.
“You can pick up your green training top in our locker room and get changed with the juniors,” Zackell instructs him blankly.
So first Amat has to go to the A-team locker room, which falls totally silent when he steps in seeing as no one has seen him since the spring, to fetch his green jersey. Then he has to go across the corridor and into the juniors’ locker room, which also falls totally silent, but for completely different reasons. The juniors are only a few years younger than him, but that doesn’t matter, in this context they’re just kids and he’s an idol. One of them leaps up and offers him his place on the best bench with the most space, but Amat shakes his head sadly and sits down in the corner right by the bathroom. That’s where you always put “the worm,” the youngest and worst player on the team. That was where he had to sit the last time he played on the junior team.
“Are you playing with us?” one of the other boys eventually plucks up the courage to ask.
Amat nods and a happy murmur spreads around the room. Then they all fall silent again and Amat feels fear cut from his stomach to his throat when he realizes they’re all watching him. He doesn’t want to take his clothes off, definitely doesn’t want to talk, but these guys are evidently expecting him to say something. He suddenly wishes that Benji was here, because he would just have stood up and said “Come on, let’s go out and slaughter them!” or something, and they’d all have leapt up and cheered and followed him. But Benji is Benji, and sadly Amat is Amat.
“Sorry!” the player next to him says just as he’s thinking this, his fingers slipped as he was tying his boots and he hit Amat’s leg.
Amat sees that the boy’s hands are shaking.
“Nervous?” he asks quietly.
The boy nods.
“We’re playing the fucking A-team! They’re going to crush us!”
Amat has no answer so he says nothing. He gets undressed and the silence around him is like insects under his skin. When he picks up his training top he sees that the boy next to him is looking on enviously. The juniors have similar tops, but they don’t have their names on the backs, for the A-team those names may have been a PR stunt, but for the juniors they are a status symbol. If you get your name on a training jersey that means the club isn’t thinking of dropping you.
“Has anyone got a knife?” Amat asks quietly.
The others look confused.
“A knife?” one of them repeats.
“I’ve got one,” a small boy in the opposite corner says, because you can always rely on the fact that in a Beartown locker room there’ll be at least one hunter, and they always have a knife.
It gets passed from hand to hand around the benches and when it reaches Amat he grabs it and starts unpicking his name from his top. Letter by letter until his looks like all the others. Then he stands up, passes the knife back, and says:
“I’m not good at giving speeches and shit like that. And you’re right, the A-team is going to crush you today. They’re bigger and stronger.”
He clears his throat and falls silent, just long enough for someone to say:
“Great pep talk!”
The whole room bursts out laughing, Amat included, and something loosens up inside him. Something that has been there a long time. So he starts talking without knowing where he’s going.
“I… well, I read about a figure skater. Don’t remember her name. But she was in the world championships and she was the big favorite, so her coach told her to remove all the difficult jumps from her opening program, just do the simple things but do them perfectly: that way she’d win. So she went out… and fucked everything up. She fell on things she’d never fallen on before. Couldn’t do anything. By the time she’d finished she was bottom. Worst moment of her life. So she went into the locker room and sat there on her own and thought… ‘fuck it,’ pretty much. So she went out and did the next round and landed all the most difficult jumps, the ones none of the others could do. She moved from last place to bronze. Do you see? Because… well… I don’t know what the hell I’m trying to say, I’m no good at this sort of thing, but…”
The room is silent and everyone is waiting for some sort of point. He hasn’t got one. It feels like giving a talk in school and realizing you’ve misunderstood the whole task. Amat is about to try to sink through the floor when the boy next to him says:
“I read about her too. The figure skater. I think she said afterward something like she can’t skate easy programs because then she thinks too much. She’s only good when she challenges herself…”
One of the other guys exclaims:
“Like my mom always said when I was little and moaned about us playing good teams: ‘It’s SUPPOSED to be hard!’ ”
Several of the other players burst out laughing.
“My mom too! Classic Beartown-mom stuff!”
Amat sits back down and joins in the laughter, ties his skates, and gets up again without thinking of the consequences. Then the rest of them get up. When he walks toward the corridor they follow him, and when they storm onto the ice it’s a moment every junior behind him will remember and boast about for the rest of their lives: the day we played with Amat.
The letters of his name are left on the bench in the locker room, so that everyone knows that he isn’t playing for himself this time.
* * *
Beartown Hockey’s A-team didn’t exactly start out as Sunday-school preachers, but it’s been a long time since they swore this much during a training session. They have to skate themselves sweaty and bloody just to keep up, every junior excels himself in every change of line, they give everything they’ve got for Amat, who seems to be everywhere. He may be overweight and slower than he has ever been, but still no one on the A-team can keep up with him. So they do the only logical thing: they swipe and hack and tackle him hard. A couple of times he takes such ugly slashes that he’s sent flying, but when Bobo looks over to Zackell to see if she wants to call a penalty she just shakes her head. She wants to make him mad, she wants to know what he can do with his anger. A couple of times Amat flies up and looks like he’s about to lash out, but he manages to control himself, even when he hears the A-team players laughing and making fun of him. He gets a stick across the back but sees it coming, so he steps aside and pulls free and takes the puck back, flies past two opponents with a frenzy no one has seen in this rink since he was the best here last winter. His top is sitting more tightly around his stomach but the longer the game goes on, the more he starts to look like the old Amat. The unstoppable Amat. The only reason he doesn’t score ten goals in the end is that Zackell keeps pairing him against Aleksandr, who might be slower but plays much smarter. No matter what Amat comes up with, Aleksandr manages to reach it with his stick, time after time, knocking the puck out of the way. In the end the two of them are almost only playing against each other, hunting back and forth across the ice like shadows. Several times Aleksandr is left standing with his hands on his knees during breaks in play, gasping for breath, and Amat throws up at least twice in the players’ bench. It’s a hell of a game, really one hell of a game, Bobo feels sorry for everyone who isn’t there to see it. The juniors score four goals, three of them from Amat. Aleksandr only scores two, but the A-team scores six in total and wins the game. It doesn’t matter. When Bobo eventually blows his whistle for the end of the game the A-team players stay on the ice and applaud the juniors. Only briefly, hitting their sticks on the ice a few times, but that means the world to the teenagers.
They gather in their respective locker rooms, but Amat can’t even drag himself there and slumps to the floor in the corridor. Aleksandr is the last player to walk past, he stops for a moment, prods Amat’s skate with his stick, and says:
“I look forward to playing against you when you’re in shape.”
Amat smiles.
“Me too.”
It’s a small challenge, they both need it. She’s not stupid, Zackell. Aleksandr goes into the A-team locker room and Amat forces himself to his feet to limp to the juniors’. He hears a rumbling laugh behind him and knows who it is without even having to turn around.
“Shut up, Bobo, I know I’m walking like an old woman…”
“I haven’t even said anything!”
“No, but I know what you were ABOUT to say so I’m saying shut up! And don’t touch me, I hurt everywhere already…”
Bobo roars with laughter and wraps his huge arms around him mercilessly.
“Didn’t I say? You’re like those lupines!”
“Thanks, mate,” Amat grunts.
It hardly ever strikes him these days, but there and then it occurs to him that most people really never change, but some change entirely. Bobo used to be the biggest bully and tormentor when they played on the junior team, not that anyone would believe that now. Possibly just as little as anyone would believe that Amat used to be an elite sportsman.
“What do you think she’d have said about you today?” Bobo sniggers, nodding toward the photograph of Ramona on the wall.
“She’d probably have said I was a fatso,” Amat smiles.
Bobo pats his stomach contentedly.
“She’d have looked at me and said that now the big fatso has shit out a little fatso!”
Amat laughs so hard that his whole body hurts. Then he shuffles toward the sound of jubilant juniors farther along the corridor.
“Wrong way!” Bobo calls out, not as a friend but as the assistant coach.
Amat turns around as if he thinks he’s the victim of a cruel joke.
“Really?” he struggles to say.
“Really! Zackell’s counting on you for the first game against Hed this weekend! So run, fat boy, run!”
