1
Late one evening toward the end of March, a teenager picked up a double-barreled shotgun, walked into the forest, put the gun to someone elseâs forehead, and pulled the trigger.
This is the story of how we got there.
2
Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang.
Itâs a Friday in early March in Beartown and nothing has happened yet. Everyone is waiting. Tomorrow, the Beartown Ice Hockey Clubâs junior team is playing in the semifinal of the biggest youth tournament in the country. How important can something like that be? In most places, not so important, of course. But Beartown isnât most places.
Bang. Bang. Bang-bang-bang.
The town wakes early, like it does every day; small towns need a head start if theyâre going to have any chance in the world. The rows of cars in the parking lot outside the factory are already covered with snow; people are standing in silent lines with their eyes half-open and their minds half-closed, waiting for their electronic punch cards to verify their existence to the clocking-in machine. They stamp the slush off their boots with autopilot eyes and answering-machine voices while they wait for their drug of choiceâcaffeine or nicotine or sugarâto kick in and render their bodies at least tolerably functional until the first break.
Out on the road the commuters set off for bigger towns beyond the forest; their gloves slam against heating vents and their curses are the sort you only think of uttering when youâre drunk, dying, or sitting in a far-too-cold Peugeot far too early in the morning.
If they keep quiet they can hear it in the distance: Bang-bang-bang. Bang. Bang.
Maya wakes up and stays in bed, playing her guitar. The walls of her room are covered in a mixture of pencil drawings and tickets sheâs saved from concerts sheâs been to in cities far from here. Nowhere near as many as she would have liked, but considerably more than her parents actually consented to. She loves everything about her guitarâits weight against her body, the way the wood responds when her fingertips tap it, the strings that cut hard against her skin. The simple notes, the gentle riffsâitâs all a wonderful game to her. Sheâs fifteen years old and has already fallen in love many times, but her guitar will always be her first love. Itâs helped her to put up with living in this town, to deal with being the daughter of the general manager of an ice hockey team in the forest.
She hates hockey but understands her fatherâs love for it; the sport is just a different instrument from hers. Her mom sometimes whispers in her daughterâs ear: âNever trust people who donât have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.â Her mom loves a man who loves a place that loves a game. This is a hockey town, and there are plenty of things you can say about those, but at least theyâre predictable. You know what to expect if you live here. Day after day after day.
Bang.
Beartown isnât close to anything. Even on a map the place looks unnatural. âAs if a drunk giant tried to piss his name in the snow,â some might say. âAs if nature and man were fighting a tug-of-war for space,â more high-minded souls might suggest. Either way, the town is losing. It has been a very long time since it won at anything. More jobs disappear each year, and with them the people, and the forest devours one or two more abandoned houses each season. Back in the days when there were still things to boast about, the city council erected a sign beside the road at the entrance to the town with the sort of slogan that was popular at the time: âBeartownâLeaves You Wanting More!â The wind and snow took a few years to wipe out the word âMore.â Sometimes the entire community feels like a philosophical experiment: If a town falls in the forest but no one hears it, does it matter at all?
To answer that question you need to walk a few hundred yards down toward the lake. The building you see there doesnât look like much, but itâs an ice rink, built by factory workers four generations ago, men who worked six days a week and needed something to look forward to on the seventh. All the love this town could thaw out was passed down and still seems to end up devoted to the game: ice and boards, red and blue lines, sticks and pucks and every ounce of determination and power in young bodies hurtling at full speed into the corners in the hunt for those pucks. The stands are packed every weekend, year after year, even though the teamâs achievements have collapsed in line with the townâs economy. And perhaps thatâs whyâbecause everyone hopes that when the teamâs fortunes improve again, the rest of the town will get pulled up with it.
Which is why places like this always have to pin their hopes for the future on young people. Theyâre the only ones who donât remember that things actually used to be better. That can be a blessing. So theyâve coached their junior team with the same values their forebears used to construct their community: work hard, take the knocks, donât complain, keep your mouth shut, and show the bastards in the big cities where weâre from. Thereâs not much worthy of note around here. But anyone whoâs been here knows that itâs a hockey town.
Bang.
Amat will soon turn sixteen. His room is so tiny that if it had been in a larger apartment in a well-to-do neighborhood in a big city, it would barely have registered as a closet. The walls are completely covered with posters of NHL players, with two exceptions. One is a photograph of himself aged seven, wearing gloves that are too big for him and with his helmet halfway down his forehead, the smallest of all the boys on the ice. The other is a sheet of white paper on which his mother has written parts of a prayer. When Amat was born, she lay with him on her chest in a narrow bed in a little hospital on the other side of the planet, no one but them in the whole world. A nurse had whispered the prayer in his motherâs ear back thenâit is said to have been written on the wall above Mother Teresaâs bedâand the nurse hoped it would give the solitary woman strength and hope. Almost sixteen years later, the scrap of paper is still hanging on her sonâs wall, the words mixed up, but she wrote them down as well as she could remember them:
If you are honest, people may deceive you. Be honest anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfishness. Be kind anyway.
All the good you do today will be forgotten by others tomorrow. Do good anyway.
Amat sleeps with his skates by his bed every night. âMust have been one hell of a birth for your poor mother, you being born with those on,â the caretaker at the rink often jokes. Heâs offered to let the boy keep them in a locker in the teamâs storeroom, but Amat likes carrying them there and back. Wants to keep them close.
Amat has never been as tall as the other players, has never been as muscular as them, has never shot as hard. But no one in the town can catch him. No one on any team heâs encountered so far has been as fast as him. He canât explain it; he assumes itâs a bit like when people look at a violin and some of them just see a load of wood and screws where others see music. Skates have never felt odd to him. On the contrary, when he sticks his feet in a pair of normal shoes he feels like a sailor stepping ashore.
The final lines his mother wrote on the sheet of paper on his wall read as follows:
What you create, others can destroy. Create anyway. Because in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and anyone else anyway.
Immediately below that, written in red crayon in the determined handwriting of a primary school student, it says:
They say Im to little to play. Become good player any way!
Bang.
Once upon a time, Beartown Ice Hockeyâs A-teamâone step above the juniorsâwas second-best in the top division in the country. That was more than two decades and three divisions ago, but tomorrow Beartown will be playing against the best once more. So how important can a junior game be? How much can a town care about the semifinal a bunch of teenagers are playing in a minor-league tournament? Not so much, of course. If it werenât this particular dot on the map.
A couple of hundred yards south of the road sign lies âthe Heights,â a small cluster of expensive houses with views across the lake. The people who live in them own supermarkets, run factories, or commute to better jobs in bigger towns where their colleagues at staff parties wonder, wide-eyed: âBeartown? How can you possibly live that far out in the forest?â They reply something about hunting and fishing, proximity to nature, but these days almost everyone is asking themselves if it is actually possible. Living here any longer. Asking themselves if thereâs anything left, apart from property values that seem to fall as rapidly as the temperature.
Then they wake up to the sound of a bang. And they smile.
3
For more than ten years now the neighbors have grown accustomed to the noises from the Erdahl familyâs garden: bang-bang-bang-bang-bang. Then a brief pause while Kevin collects the pucks. Then bang-bang-bang-bang-bang. He was two and a half years old the first time he put a pair of skates on, three when he got his first stick. When he was four he was better than the five-year-olds, and when he was five he was better than the seven-year-olds. During the winter following his seventh birthday he got such a bad case of frostbite that if you stand close enough to him you can still see the tiny white marks on his cheekbones. He had played his first proper game that afternoon, and in the final seconds missed a shot on an open goal. The Beartown youngsters won 12â0, and Kevin scored all the goals, but he was inconsolable. Late that evening his parents discovered that he wasnât in his bed, and by midnight half the town was out searching for him in the forest. Hide-and-seek isnât a game in Beartownâa young child doesnât have to stray far to be swallowed up by the darkness, and a small body doesnât take long to freeze to death in thirty degrees below zero. It wasnât until dawn that someone realized the boy wasnât among the trees but down on the frozen lake. He had dragged a net and five pucks down there, as well as all the flashlights he could find, and had spent hour after hour firing shots from the same angle from which he had missed the final shot of the match. He sobbed uncontrollably as they carried him home. The white marks never faded. He was seven years old, and everyone already knew that he had the bear inside him. That sort of thing canât be ignored.
His parents paid to have a small rink of his own constructed in the garden. He shoveled it himself every morning, and each summer the neighbors would exhume puck-graveyards in their flowerbeds. Remnants of vulcanized rubber will be found in the soil around there for generations to come.
Year after year they have heard the boyâs body growâthe banging becoming harder and harder, faster and faster. Heâs seventeen now, and the town hasnât seen a player with anything close to his talent since the team was in the top division, before he was born. Heâs got the build, the hands, the head, and the heart. But above all heâs got the vision: what he sees on the ice seems to happen more slowly than what everyone else sees. You can teach a lot about hockey, but not that. Youâre either born with that way of seeing or you arenât.
âKevin? Heâs the real deal,â Peter Andersson, general manager of the club, always says, and he ought to know: the last person in Beartown who was as good as this was Peter himself, and he made it all the way to Canada and the NHL, matching up against the best in the world.
Kevin knows what it takes; everyoneâs been telling him ever since he first stood on a pair of skates. Itâs going to demand nothing less than his all. So every morning, while his classmates are still fast asleep under their warm comforters, he goes running in the forest, and then he stands here, bang-bang-bang-bang-bang. Collects the pucks. Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang. Collects the pucks. Practices with the junior team every afternoon, and with the A-team every evening, then the gym, then another run in the forest, and one final hour out here under the glare of the floodlights specially erected on the roof of the house.
This sport demands only one thing from you. Your all.
Kevin has had every sort of offer to move to the big teams, to attend hockey school in a bigger town, but he keeps turning them down. Heâs a Beartown man, his dadâs a Beartown man, and that may not mean a thing anywhere else, but it means something here.
So how important can the semifinal of a junior tournament be? Being the best junior team around would remind the rest of the country of this placeâs existence again. And then the politicians might decide to spend the money to establish a hockey school here instead of over in Hed, so that the most talented kids in this part of the country would want to move to Beartown instead of the big cities. So that an A-team full of homegrown players could make it to the highest division again, attract the biggest sponsors once more, get the council to build a new rink and bigger roads leading to it, maybe even the conference center and shopping mall theyâve been talking about for years. So that new businesses could appear and create more jobs so that the townspeople might start thinking about renovating their homes instead of selling them. It would only be important to the townâs economy. To its pride. To its survival.
Itâs only so important that a seventeen-year-old in a private garden has been standing here since he got frostbite on his cheeks one night ten years ago, firing puck after puck after puck with the weight of an entire community on his shoulders.
It means everything. Thatâs 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 ...