“Thanks.”

She snorts. “Don’t say that. I’m only doing this because I’m frightened of your sisters.”

Benji smiles. “Everyone with any sense is.”

Ramona gestures toward the shelves on the walls. “We have two types of beer, one type of whisky, and the rest is mostly for decoration. You wash the glasses and clean, and if there’s a fight you don’t get involved, you hear me?”

Benji doesn’t disagree, which is a good start. He clears the backyard of a pile of wood and tin that’s been lying there for months; he’s strong as an ox and knows how to keep his mouth shut. Ramona’s two favorite character traits.

When it’s time to turn the lights out and lock up, he helps her up the stairs to her apartment. There are still photographs of Holger, her husband, everywhere. Him and Beartown Ice Hockey, her first and second loves, green flags and pennants on every wall.

“You can ask what you want to ask now,” Ramona says mildly, patting the young man on the cheek.

“I don’t want to ask anything,” Benji lies.

“You’re wondering if your dad used to come to the Bearskin. If he used to sit in the bar down there before he . . . went off into the forest.”

Benji’s hands disappear into the pockets of his jeans, and the years are stripped away from his voice.

“What was he like?” the boy asks.

The old woman sighs. “Not one of the best. Not one of the worst.”

Benji turns toward the stairs. “I’ll take the garbage out. See you tomorrow evening.”

Ramona takes hold of his hand and whispers, “You don’t have to become like him, Benjamin. You’ve got his eyes, but I think you can become someone else.”

* * *

Benji isn’t ashamed of crying in front of her.

* * *

Early the next morning Elisabeth Zackell sticks her head into Peter Andersson’s office. Peter is wrestling with an espresso machine. Zackell watches. Peter presses a button, and brown water dribbles out of the bottom of the machine. Peter panics and presses all the buttons at the same time while simultaneously reaching with an impressive display of acrobatics for a roll of paper towels while he balances in front of the leaking machine on one foot.

“And I’m supposed to be the weird one for not drinking coffee,” Zackell notes.

Peter looks up, still in the middle of some sort of modern dance interpretation of office cleaning, swearing in a way that Zackell has reason to believe is very unlike him. “For f— I’m so bloo— Shi—”

“Shall I come back later?” Zackell wonders.

“No, no . . . I . . . this damn contraption is a complete nightmare, but it was a gift from my daughter!” Peter admits, embarrassed.

Zackell offers no reaction. “I’ll come back later,” she concludes.

“No! I . . . sorry, what can I do for you? Have your wages been paid okay?” Peter wonders.

“It’s about rope,” Zackell says, but Peter has already launched into his defense. “The new sponsor, our contract isn’t quite in place. But everyone should have been paid by now.”

He wipes the sweat from his brow. Zackell repeats, “I’m not here about my paycheck. I’m here about rope.”

“Rope?” Peter echoes.

“I need rope. And a paintball gun. Can you buy those around here?”

“A paintball gun?” Peter echoes again.

Zackell explains in a monotone, but not impatiently, “Paintball is a war simulation game played on a specially designed course. Two teams shoot at each other with small pellets of paint fired from guns. I need one of those guns.”

“I know what paintball is,” Peter assures her.

“It didn’t sound like it,” Zackell says in her own defense.

Peter scratches his hair, getting coffee on his forehead. He doesn’t notice, and Zackell spares him the panic that telling him would probably trigger.

“They probably have rope in the hardware store opposite the Bearskin pub.”

“Thanks,” Zackell says, and is already out in the corridor before Peter has time to call out, “What do you want rope for? You’re not going to hang anyone, are you?”

Then he says it again, with genuine concern in his voice: “ZACKELL! YOU’RE NOT GOING TO HANG ANYONE, ARE YOU? WE’VE GOT ENOUGH PROBLEMS AS IT IS!!!”

* * *

Benji’s former coach, David, used to say that Benji would be late for his own funeral. If his teammates didn’t check that number 16 was out on the ice, he could easily be lying asleep in the locker room when the game started. Sometimes he missed practices, sometimes he showed up high or drunk. But today he arrives at the rink on time, gets changed at once, and goes straight out onto the ice. Elisabeth Zackell turns toward him as if she’s surprised that a hockey player has turned up for hockey practice. Benji takes a deep breath and apologizes, the way you learn to do if you’ve big sisters who hit hard: “Sorry I didn’t come to practice yesterday.”

Zackell shrugs. “I don’t care if you come to practice.”

Benji notices that there are five thick ropes lying on the ice, several yards long. Zackell is holding a paintball gun in her hand: the hardware store in Beartown didn’t have any, but the one in Hed managed to find one in the storeroom. A scattering of small paint spatters on the plexiglass at one corner of the rink indicates that Zackell has already practiced firing the hard little pellets of paint.

“What are you doing?” Benji asks, baffled.

“What are you doing here so early?” Zackell counters.

Benji looks at the time. He’s right on time for the practice, but the only other players on the ice are Amat and Bobo. He grunts, “My sister says you’re thinking of making me team captain. That’s a bad idea.”

Zackell nods without blinking. “Okay.”

Benji waits for her to go on. She doesn’t. So he asks, “Why me?”

“Because you’re a coward,” Zackell says.

Benji has been called many things in his life, but never that.

“You’re full of crap.”

She nods. “Maybe. But I’m giving you the thing you’re most terrified of: responsibility for other people.”

Benji eyes darken. Hers are expressionless. Amat is standing behind them, his skates twitching with restlessness, until he eventually loses patience and blurts out, “Practice is supposed to start now! Why don’t you go and get the others from the locker room?”

Zackell shrugs her shoulders nonchalantly. “Me? Why would I care about that?”

Benji squints at her, increasingly frustrated. He looks at the time again. Then he leaves the ice.

* * *

A lot of the older players in the Beartown locker room are only half changed when Benji walks in.

“Practice is starting,” he says.

Some people can make themselves heard without raising their voice. Even so, some of the older players misinterpret Benji at first and reply, “She doesn’t care if we’re on time or not!”

Benji’s reply is brief, but the silence that follows it is deafening: “I care.”

Power is the ability to get other people to do what you want. Every adult man in that locker room could have rendered the eighteen-year-old powerless by remaining seated on the benches. But he gives them thirty seconds, and when he walks back to the ice, they get up and follow him.

That’s not when he becomes their team captain. That’s just when they all—including him—realize that he already is.

* * *

Benji doesn’t want to lead his team, but he does so anyway. William Lyt is over in Hed, and he wants nothing more than to be told to lead his team, but he isn’t. It isn’t fair, but sports isn’t fair. The player who spends the most hours practicing doesn’t always end up being the best, and the player who deserves to be made team captain isn’t always the most suitable. It’s often said that hockey isn’t a contemplative sport: “We just count goals.” That isn’t strictly true, of course. Hockey counts everything, it’s full of statistics, yet it’s impossible to predict. It’s governed too much by things that aren’t visible. One term that is often used to describe talented players, for instance, is “leadership qualities,” even though this is an utterly immeasurable concept seeing that it is based on things that can’t be taught: charisma, authority, love.

When William Lyt was younger and Kevin Erdahl was made team captain, William heard the coach say to Kevin, “You can force people to obey you, but you can never force them to follow you. If you want them to play for you, they have to love you.”