Beartown

It is March in Beartown. People wake and commute to work, and in the background, they all hear a “Bang bang bang” (3). A 15-year-old girl named Maya is playing a guitar in her bed. Her guitar is her “first love” (3) even though she has been in love many times. Her father loves hockey, but she hates it. The town is “losing” in many ways, and “[i]t has been a very long time since it won anything” (3). The town is losing jobs, and the only passion anyone feels is for hockey, even though the team no longer wins. There is a hope that if the team improves, the town will improve.

A 15-year-old boy, Amat, sits in his bedroom, which is covered with NHL hockey posters. Every night, he sleeps with his skates by his bed. One wall of his room has a sheet of paper with parts of a prayer written on it. It is a prayer that a nurse whispered into his mother’s ear after Amat was born. He is small, but he is the fastest player on the team or any team they have played. Tomorrow, Beartown’s junior team is playing “against the best once more” (6). In the nearby town called “The Heights” (6), many affluent citizens don’t understand how anyone could live so far out in the forest like the people of Beartown.

The banging noise comes from Kevin’s hockey practice as he slaps pucks in the makeshift rink in the frozen family garden. Kevin is a hockey prodigy. During a game when he was seven, he scored 12 goals but missed a shot. That night he sneaked out and practiced the shot at the lake until he had frostbite.

Kevin is now 17. He spends every day running, practicing with two different hockey teams, and working out in the gym. He has turned down offers to move to bigger towns to play for bigger teams because it is important to him that he is from Beartown.

On the other side of Beartown (the side opposite The Heights) is an area of apartments called the Hollow. Amat lives here with his mother, Fatima. They take the bus together to the rink, where she cleans and Amat helps the caretaker prepare the rink for the day’s business. He dreams of making the junior team, then the A-team, then the NHL, and one day being able to take his mother away from her job. After his prep is done, the rink caretaker lets Amat skate for an hour alone. It is always the best part of his day.

Peter Andersson is the general manager of Beartown Ice Hockey. His wife, Kira—who is not from Beartown—does not understand why he is so nervous about the game. He tells her, “We’re a town in the middle of the forest. We’ve got no tourism, no mine, no high-tech industry. We’ve got darkness, cold, and unemployment, If we can make this town excited again, […] that has to be a good thing” (11). Down the hall, his daughter, Maya, is playing her guitar. She loves her parents, but they exasperate her. She thinks of her mother having a glass of wine some nights and then saying, “You can’t live in this town, Maya. You can only survive it” (12).

The president of the Beartown Ice Hockey Club is meeting with board members, sponsors, and local councilors. The narrative states, “He’s the sweatiest man in the whole town, constantly worried, like a child who’s stolen something, and he’s sweating more today than ever” (14).

Peter can’t find the keys to his Volvo. He gets a text from the club president that he needs to be at the office. His work as the General Manager (GM) takes up all of his time.

In the boardroom, people are irritated that Peter is not there. There is an old team photo on the wall featuring Peter in the middle; he was the team captain. In the photo, he stands next to Sune, the A-Team coach, who “persuaded Peter to move home from Canada with his family after his career as a professional player came to an end” (17). They joke that maybe Peter’s wife would be better suited to the job than he is.

While looking for his keys, Peter sees Maya’s friend, Ana, in the kitchen. He mentions that she has now slept over for four nights in a row. She says that all of her clothes are now in Maya’s room but doesn’t explain further. Upstairs, Kira listens to talk and says to herself, “I could have done something else with my life, you know” (20) as she puts the Volvo’s keys in her pocket. Downstairs, she reminds Peter that her car is in the shop and they had agreed that she would take the Volvo that day. They play Rock, Paper, Scissors for the car, and she wins.

The club president adjourns the meeting after they all discuss whether Peter will have a problem with them ejecting Sune, the A-team coach, from the club.

Sune is outside in his car. He watches the men leave, reflecting, “The fact that they want to fire him and replace him with the coach of the junior-team is the worst-kept secret in town” (25). The rich men who sponsor the team saved the town from bankruptcy, and Sune knows that they have leverage over the club. He believes that they want to replace him because he sees hockey as more than a game and tells his players the same. The junior coach tells his players only to win, and they do, but Sune questions the ethics of this approach.

As Kira drives, she thinks about the men in the town and how disappointed they are that she is not a traditional GM’s wife who thinks only of hockey. When she met the club’s president, he was surprised that she planned to keep practicing law instead of staying home with the kids so Peter could run the Hockey Club. She said, “I thought maybe you could take care of them. You have got bigger breasts than me, after all” (29).

She does not understand the people of Beartown, where “silence always goes hand in hand with shame” (30). Shame is why Peter will not let them move into a big house in the Heights, or why he is embarrassed when she orders expensive wine at dinner, although she can easily afford it.

Sune walks into the rink and thinks about how lucky he is to have been able to mentor two truly talented hockey players. The first was Peter Andersson. The second was Kevin Erdahl. Sune and Peter found him as part of the search party on the night he went to the lake to practice. When a 22-year-old man named David gave up on hockey because of injuries and a lack of talent, Sune convinced him to become the coach of the seven-year-olds team, and Kevin was one of the players. David told them to win, and they did. He is now the coach of the junior team.

Once, Amat heard that “[t]here are no former hockey players” (33). He now knows what it means. Even though his body is small, he practices relentlessly, believing that he can turn himself into an elite player. He cannot imagine not playing hockey. He does not see Sune come in.

Sune asks the caretaker who Amat is after watching him skate and practice shots for a couple of minutes. The narrative states, “Sune will remember this as one of the true blessings in his life: seeing the impossible happen in Beartown for a third time” (35).

Sune is being fired because he has refused to let Kevin Erdahl play on the A-team. He believes that Kevin needs more maturity before he begins senior hockey, even though the teen has talent. Sune’s motto has always been that the club comes first, before anyone’s ego, and now he is being punished for it. He is no longer certain that he has done the right thing.

David is doing push-ups at home. He is anxious about the game. He has the most disciplined players, and he has Kevin, but David cares most about winning. He is a master of strategy and has no interest in placating anyone who complains that his brand of hockey is not as fun for the kids as it could be. On his laptop, in between sets of push-ups, he watches a video of his player, Benjamin Ovich, who is punching an opposing player who was about to tackle Kevin from behind. He describes Benjamin (Benji) as “the heart of the team” (39).

Benji is 17 and his mother has to wake him up and force him to leave the house. He worries her more than anything else, with his sad eyes, handsome face, and fixation on the past. She married a man who was just like him, “and nothing but trouble lies ahead for men like that” (40).

David watches another video in which Benji attacked a player—this time with his stick—when the player was chasing Kevin. The benches cleared, and it took 10 minutes for the fight to stop. Kevin sat on the bench during the fight. David does not make excuses for Benji’s temperament, which is usually blamed on his tough childhood and his father’s death when Benji was very young. David does not believe that Benji fights in the games; he believes that the teen protects Kevin, the team’s investment because Benji knows how important the games are to the town.

On his way to Kevin’s house, Benji stops his bike and smokes a joint. He knows that he will never get punished if David finds out that he smokes marijuana, as Benji protects Kevin on the ice. At Kevin’s house, Benji thinks about Kevin’s parents; they spend a great deal of money on Kevin’s hockey career but never attend his games. They value success, perfection, and status, but Benji never sees them talk to Kevin about anything but planning for his future. Outside, Kevin tells him that he is nervous about the game. Benji lies down on a lawn chair and closes his eyes. Kevin, as always, is envious of Benji’s ability to truly seem not to care what happens.

Amat meets his friends, Lifa and Zacharias, in the parking lot at school. As they talk about video games, a bully named Bobo slaps the back of Zacharias’s head, pushes him down, and insults him while walking into the school. “Amat sees the silent hatred in Zacharias’s eyes" (49) and is concerned that one day his friend will "explode.”

When Benji and Kevin get to school, they “exert a magnetic pull as they move along the corridor” (50). Bobo and the other juniors flock to them and flatter them, and Kevin and Benji are used to the attention. Normally nothing on the day before a game can distract Kevin, but then “his eyes meet [Maya’s]” (50), and he stumbles. Ana sees the look that passes between Kevin and Maya and begins to tease her as Kevin walks away. Ana says that if Maya is going to start talking to Kevin, she has to introduce Ana to Benji.

As Amat tries to tell Zacharias that things will be better when they are juniors, Maya walks by. He tells her hello and is disappointed when she returns the greeting but does not stop to talk. Zacharias teases him, saying that he has been doing this for eight years and Maya is not suddenly going to want him. Amat listens, “his heart sinking in his chest like a lead weight. He loves that girl more than he loves skating” (52).

In his office, David watches videos of the team they will play and wishes he had a player with speed. They are not fast enough to beat the other team unless everything else goes perfectly. Elsewhere, Sune is watching the same videos, and thinking the same thing: without speed, they are going to have only the slimmest chance of winning.

Robbie Holts is a man in his early forties. He is outside of a pub called the Bearskin, waiting for it to open in an hour. He looks at the roof of the ice rink, reflecting, “Once upon a time he showed more promise than Kevin Erdahl does now. Once upon a time he was better than Peter Andersson” (55).

After dropping the kids off, Peter thinks about hockey, and how he hopes the kids on the team are not aware of how much is at stake. He thinks that no one can win when they are afraid. When he went to the NHL, his father told him to remember that he wasn’t “anything special” (56). Peter had slammed the door and left. His father died while Peter was away starting his career. He remembers that he loved—and still loves—hockey because of the silence. Everything “went quiet inside his head when he stepped onto the ice” (57).

Robbie watches Peter’s car pass by. When Robbie was 17, he was better than Peter and he was moved to the A-team. He got injured, got scared, and spent the rest of his short hockey career trying to avoid fights. He eventually became addicted to alcohol. Peter left for the NHL the same year Robbie started work at the factory.

Sune leaves a note on David’s computer that says “Amat. Boys’ team. Fast!!!” (58).

Peter steps into the president’s office. He tells Peter that they are appointing David as coach of the A-team. Peter says that he—and others—think that David is pushing the junior team too hard. The president says the pressure will turn them into diamonds. He tells David that after the junior’s semi-final, he will be expected to fire Sune unless the team loses. In that case, they will fire David as well and bring in someone from outside.

Kira worries that she is a bad mother because she is so competitive, even though it doesn’t transfer to hockey, and also because she works full-time. Peter learned to play the drums so he could play with Maya when she took up guitar. Kira loves and hates him for having “the sensitivity to learn” (62). In her office, she looks at a picture of her and Peter, when he was about to become a star and before he broke his foot in pre-season training. He had then played in the farm league and fought his way back up, only to break his foot again after four NHL games. Peter had grown so depressed after learning that he could not return to an elite level, physically, that Kira had contemplated asking for a divorce. They had a son at the time, and she was pregnant with Maya. She remembers a long night in a hospital with the son, and a doctor giving Peter bad news about him because no one felt they could tell Kira. They moved to Beartown and eventually had another son, Leo. But as far as her grief, “Kira still doesn’t know how to deal with it” (68).

Peter looks at himself in the team photograph, where he stands next to Robbie. He feels that he failed to protect their now-deceased son, Isak, and sometimes wishes he could die in the boy’s place.

Maya has grown up in the shadow of a dead older brother: “Children in that situation either become terrified of everything or nothing at all. Maya fell into the second group” (70). The first time she met Ana she was 6. Maya had fallen through the ice while skating on a pond, and Ana had pulled her out. They were inseparable after that. She describes Ana as a child of nature and as a “tornado, a jagged, hundred-sided peg in a community where everyone was supposed to fit into round holes” (77). As they have gotten older, Ana has wanted to be seen as normal, and Maya misses the old version of her friend.

Kira’s job is important and challenging, but is not as difficult as what she trained and studied for. Her boss at her prior firm told her that she was overqualified for the work she was taking near Beartown. Her best friend at work comes into her office and sees what she is working on. She also tells Kira that she is overqualified and that what she is doing before lunch would have taken anyone else a month. Then she tries to get Kira to tell her which man in the office she would sleep with if Peter were in a coma. Kira kicks her out of her office, laughing.

A teacher named Jeanette is trying to get the attention of the boys in her class. One is Kevin, who is typing on his phone and ignoring her. She has constantly been told she is too attractive and young to be taken seriously at her job. Bobo tells her to calm down and calls her “[s]weet cheeks” (74), then tells her she should feel lucky to be in the presence of the hockey team on the night before their big game.