When no one answers she shrugs her shoulders, “I’ve watched all your games from last season, so I know you’re completely useless at pretty much everything. It would really help me to know what you’re good at.”

Someone tries to mumble a joke—“drinking and fucking”—but not even that raises more than a stifled grunt from the rest of the group. Then someone suddenly starts to laugh, not at the remark but at something happening on the ice behind Zackell. Bobo is skating out from the bench, over two hundred pounds of him, wearing a skirt he’s stolen from the figure skaters’ storeroom. He performs three pirouettes in a row and is met by applause and cheering from the older players at the center circle. Elisabeth Zackell lets him carry on, even though they’re no longer laughing at Bobo but at her.

But when Bobo is halfway through his fourth pirouette the cheering suddenly stops, and before Bobo knows what’s hit him everything goes black. When he opens his eyes, he’s lying on the ice, he can hardly breathe. Elisabeth Zackell is leaning over him expressionlessly and says, “Why hasn’t anyone taught you to skate properly?”

“Huh?”

“You roll like a ferry, but I’ve seen you pull an ax from the hood of a car. If you could skate properly, I’d never be able to knock you down that easily. And then you wouldn’t be utterly worthless as a hockey player. So why hasn’t anyone ever taught you?”

“I . . . I don’t know,” Bobo gasps, still lying on his back with his chest aching as if he’s been run over rather than tackled.

“What are you good at in Beartown?” Zackell asks seriously.

At first Bobo doesn’t answer, so Zackell gives up and skates back to the center circle. The young man slowly crawls up from the ice, pulls off the skirt, and says, in a voice that sounds both angry and humiliated, “Hard work! We’re good at hard work in Beartown. People can say a lot of shit about this town, but we know about HARD WORK!”

The older players squirm. But no one protests. So Elisabeth Zackell says, “Okay! Then that’s how we win. We work harder than all the others. If you need to be sick, do it in these. I’ve heard the GM doesn’t like mess, so I daresay he doesn’t want vomit on the ice. I take it you’re familiar with how to skate lengths?”

The players groan loudly, which she interprets as “yes.” She sets out the buckets she brought with her. The rest of the practice consists of excruciating fitness exercises. Skating at top speed between the boards, then darting sideways, wrestling, work, work, work. Not a single bucket is empty by the time they’re done. And the only player still standing at the end is Amat.

At first the older players try to stop him, not obviously but by little tricks that look like accidents: a sharp elbow in the corner, pulling his jersey when he’s about to take off, a discreet skate nudging his to make him lose his balance. Most of the players on the ice are fifty or sixty pounds heavier than Amat, so just leaning on him is enough. It isn’t Amat’s fault that they’re doing this, he’s not trying to show off or draw attention to himself, he’s simply too good. He makes the others look slow, and they can’t tolerate that. Time after time they trip him, and time after time he gets up. Skates faster, fights harder, digs deeper inside himself. The look in his eyes gets blacker and blacker.

No one knows what the time is; Elisabeth Zackell shows no sign of having finished with them. One after the other the older players crumple and collapse. As they stare down at the ice, Amat carries on skating. However many times Zackell orders him to skate from board to board, she can’t exhaust him. His jersey is black with sweat, but he’s still standing. Bobo is lying on the ice, almost unconscious, and is filled with both pride and envy as he watches his friend work, work, work.

* * *

Amat is the youngest on the team. As he stands in the shower after the practice, his thigh muscles are shaking so much that he can barely keep his balance. When he drags himself into the locker room with his towel around his waist, he sees that his shoes have been filled with shaving cream.

* * *

And then it’s all worth it.

* * *

When Elisabeth Zackell walks through the rink long after the end of practice, one lone player is sitting in the locker room. Bobo is the size of a dairy cow, yet still as small as a frightened hedgehog. His eyes are moist, staring at a pair of shoes that no one has filled with shaving cream. The only thing the older players roared when he emerged from the shower was “Thanks very much for the fitness training, you little shit! ‘We’re good at hard work’! How the hell could you say something so completely stupid to a hockey coach?”

Amat tried to comfort him. Bobo laughed it off, and Amat was too exhausted to persist. After he and all the others have gone, Bobo is still sitting in the same place, smallest in the whole world.

“Turn the lights out when you leave,” Zackell says, because she’s not one for this whole business of emotions.

Bobo sniffs. “How do you get respect?” he asks, and Zackell looks extremely uncomfortable.

“You’ve . . . you’ve got snot everywhere,” she says, gesturing toward her face with her hand.

Bobo wipes himself, and Zackell looks as though she feels like curling up in the fetal position.

“I want them to respect me. I want them to put shaving cream in my shoes, too!” Bobo says.

Zackell groans. “You don’t have to be respected. It’s not as important as people think.”

Bobo chews his lips. “Sorry I showed you my cock,” he whispers.

Zackell stretches herself to smile.

“In your defense, it wasn’t much of a cock,” she says, measuring a few measly inches between her thumb and forefinger.

Bobo starts to laugh. Zackell sticks her hands in her pockets and gives him some quiet advice: “You need to be useful to the team, Bobo. Then they’ll respect you.”

She walks off without waiting for him to ask any more questions. Bobo will lie awake at night wondering what she meant.

* * *

He stops off at the supermarket on the way home and buys shaving cream so his dad won’t be sad. When Hog sees the ruined shoes in the hall, he gives his son a hug. That doesn’t happen often.

21

He’s Lying on the Ground

Sune is walking slowly through the rink, breathing hard through his nose. He misses his coaching job every second, but he can hardly get up the stands anymore. Hockey gets younger while everyone involved in it gets older, and when it’s done with us it discards us without any sentimentality at all. That’s how it develops and stays alive, for the sake of new generations.

“Zackell!” Sune calls out breathlessly when he catches sight of the woman who’s taken his job.

“Yes?” she responds, heading for the locker room.

“How did today’s practice feel?”

“?‘Feel’?” Zackell asks, as if it were a foreign word.

Sune leans against the wall and smiles weakly. “I mean . . . it’s not easy to be a hockey coach in this town. Especially not if you’re . . . you know.”

He means “if you’re a woman.” So Zackell replies, “It’s not easy to be a hockey coach anywhere.”

Sune nods sadly. “I heard that one of the players showed you his . . . genitals . . .”

“Hardly,” Zackell retorts.

Sune coughs awkwardly. “He hardly showed you his genitals?”

“It hardly counted as genitals,” Zackell corrects.

“Oh, that’s just . . . you know, guys, sometimes they . . .” Sune says, staring down at his knees.

Zackell looks annoyed. “How did you know someone showed me his genitals?”

Sune misinterprets that to mean that she’s upset about the genitals. “I can talk to the guys if you like, I can understand that you feel offended, but—”

“You’re not to talk to my players. I talk to my players. And the only person who decides if I’m offended is me.”

Sune raises an eyebrow. “I’m guessing you don’t often feel offended?”

“Feeling offended is an emotion.”

Zackell looks as though she’s talking about tools when she says the word. Sune sticks his hands in his pockets and mutters, “It’s not easy being coach in Beartown. Especially if things start to go badly. Believe me, I had my job a whole lifetime before you got here. And there are people in this town who won’t be happy with a coach who . . . who looks like you do.”

The old man looks deep into the woman’s eyes and sees a characteristic that he always lacked: she doesn’t care. Sune always cared, deep down. He wanted the players to like him: the fans, the old men and women in the Bearskin. The whole town. But Elisabeth Zackell isn’t afraid of opinions, because she knows what all successful coaches know: they’ll like her when she wins.

“I’m going to get something to eat,” she says, managing to sound neither friendly nor unfriendly.