Broken Field Page 2

  This boy and his love for going fast in his beater car was nothing new to her. What was different was the way he held off speaking to her.

  As if he had something to show her first. They tore across the gravel road. Josie knew how fast was safe; this boy wasn’t being safe. There had been something about him from the first glance that had told her he wouldn’t be safe. But she had wanted to come with him.

  Over every rise, Josie felt the lift in the her seat before the heavy sedan stomped on its springs coming down. The car slid in the loose gravel, and she could smell the chalky dust they raised. He tilted the beer can at her again. She waved it off.

  “What’s your name?” he finally asked, not looking at her.

  “Josie,” she said. She had to yell over the roar of wind through both open windows and the rabble of the tires racing over gravel. “What’s yours?”

  “LaValle,” he said.

  “What?” she yelled.

  “LaValle.”

  “That’s your first name?”

  “No.”

  Sitting next to this boy she should not be in a car with, they raced across the landscape she had known her whole life. Every second she was getting closer to where she was supposed to be.

  * * *

  Saturday, November

  BEFORE IT ALL STARTED, TOM WARNER stared down at his foot in a black Nike cleat. He coached in cleats because sidelines got muddy and slick and because it made him feel closer to the game, made him feel like he’d felt when he played. A guy had damned few occasions to wear cleats in his early forties.

  He loved the way they gripped the earth. He looked down at his cleat, toe planted on the mostly dead grass, heel resting in the white chalk of the sideline, and everything else fell away. Tom felt his weight on that foot. Thousands of steps a day without a thought, then comes one deliberate move, a plant, a push-off, a shift that alters direction. Without thinking, his eyes followed the point of his foot on the grass toward the goal line.

  As if he might run there. And then his attention opened to take everything else back in, the low autumn bronze and blue light, slanted all day this late in November, the Canadian chill edging the air. A ring of ranch trucks surrounded the rectangle of planted grass. Beyond them, the grasslands flowed toward an unbroken horizon, dolloped with tiny swirls of sage and small hills.

  All the lines raced under the sky far into the distance. Tom turned to see the ranchers and farmers and mothers and sisters behind him talking in cheery tones, expecting something. He heard the frayed chords of his players, their trying-to-be-husky voices resonating with the stakes of the moment. There was a lot going on at the field.

  Everybody there was excited. Twenty or thirty people, mostly the opponents, Plentywood high school and junior high kids, sat in a tiny stand of homemade, home-team wooden bleachers at midfield. Mothers and grandmothers brought lawn chairs and sat back from the sidelines with wool blankets over their legs. Ranchers and farmers stood in clusters, wearing feeding caps and irrigating boots, rocked back on their heels. Or they sat in their ranch rigs parked pointing at the field, spitting globs of tobacco-streaked saliva out rolled-down windows, ready to pop on headlights to illuminate the action if the game dragged too long into the short northern afternoon.

  It was just a moment, this taking in the swirl of the day, something he liked to do, and then his focus sharpened onto the field and his boys. Then came a crescendo he’d known his whole life as his boys chased their kick-off down the field, the action and sound leaping by him, the huffs of boys running as hard as they could, sidelines cheering, the clack and clatter of colliding pads. Teenaged boys from two tiny towns threw themselves at each other and clashed and bashed and shoved and drove. Tom Warner took in the grunts of effort, the smell of torn-up grass and soil, clots of mud flying from cleats.

  There was nothing else like it. Except in moments of extraordinary uncertainty, when Dumont was on defense, Tom let his assistant, Slab Rideg, do the coaching. Slab knew what he was doing and the autonomy kept him invested, and when he felt invested he coached with his hair on fire. On the first two plays, Tom stood on the sideline and quietly appreciated his team’s containment of the Plentywood offense. In eight-man football, the beginning was always a dance, jabs and pokes, probing and prodding, teams trying to figure out where the big weaknesses lay.

  When you only fielded eight boys on a side, there were always weaknesses. This early in a game, Tom liked to assess which of his boys had shown up to play—having their heads in the game had been Dumont’s big weakness in the past two seasons. Then the third play unfolded, and Tom had a clear cool sense of what was going to happen for the rest of the game. He watched the Plentywood quarterback take the snap and scurry down the line. The Plentywood quarterback was slight, even by Class C standards, but fleet.

  He was a wizard with ball fakes. A tailback trailed behind the quarterback and swung out toward the corner to set up the option. Tom saw everything happening from the first steps, saw the threads and seams and vectors. He watched his defensive end, six-foot-three, 180-pound Waylon Edwards, shuttle step to find the perfect angle and lower his shoulder to level the tight end assigned to block him, thudding the boy onto his butt. Tom glimpsed the instant of panic on the Plentywood quarterback’s face as Waylon Edwards appeared not only where he wasn’t supposed to be, but charged with a full head of steam.

  And then Waylon rammed most of himself into the quarterback’s chest, hacking his arm to guillotine the desperation pitch. Tom could hear the gut-crushed oooffff of air expel from the Plentywood boy’s lungs, saw the boy’s head whiplash as he flopped backward in a sudden heap. A plastic mouthguard spun through a sky bright blue, mottled with tiny white morsels of cloud. A helmet skipped and rolled ten yards back.

  Then it was hell among the yearlings. Tom could have closed his eyes and known exactly what was happening, just from the barking cheer of the Dumont sideline when the kids saw the football fly free, the somewhat meaner roar of the Dumont fans, adults who had driven five hours to witness this kind of unbridled aggression from their children and the children of their friends and neighbors. Tom did not judge them in the least.

  He loved the pure vicious intent of the play. A totally clean hit, but Waylon Edwards was announcing to all the people gathered around that little field that he’d taken the five-hour bus ride to Plentywood to blow people up. The ball twirled into the air, then fell and nose-tumbled through the backfield. The Plentywood tailback, trailing the quarterback, found himself wrong-footed, unable to shift quickly enough to dive on the errant pitch. Then he found himself thumped to the turf by a broadside blow from Dumont’s safety, Jared Frehse.

  A second wave of jacked-up cheers surged from the Wolfpack bench, resonating in the deeper-chested ranchers and farmers who’d sacrificed a day of fencing or tractor repair or winter wheat seeding or any number of chores that needed completing before the snow started flying to make a six-hundred-mile round-trip so they could shout about their boys outmuscling some other boys. Despite the energy he’d jolted into the Plentywood quarterback, Waylon Edwards remained upright and hyper-aware of the ball, which he chased, scooped up, stumbling to keep his feet under him as he rambled twenty-six yards untouched for Dumont’s first score.

  Part of Tom thought, woo-hoo and god T. damn! And for a good piece of a moment he felt alive, sizzling with the energy of that play. He fought hard to hold off what he knew was coming, fought to hang on to the joy of the boys, their savage woofing and adrenalized high-steps. But always, always, at the end of these things, it got hard to make more of what it was than what it was.

  Tom had coached Class C football in Montana for sixteen years, small schools, eight players on a team, eighty-yard fields. He knew there were tricks and peculiarities, but lots of games came down to who out-athleted whom. His job insisted he believe that you could coach will, you could coach teamwork, you could coach sustained effort.

  He had to think he could coach up those other guys, the avera
ge players and the small, slow, inexperienced boys, so that one of them might throw a block that would spring a run, read a coverage, jump a route—make a play nobody expected them to make—or else why would he be coaching? But a lot of it kept coming down to who the big guys were, who the fast guys were, who controlled their bodies in athletic ways and who didn’t. Who made mistakes and who didn’t.

  Who wanted it more. And then there was this team. The seniors he had on the field should have already won at least one state championship. If Tom were better at what he did, he thought, they would have won two. He had already won two, with two different teams from two different towns, and knew how it could be done. His Dumont team, far more athletic, far more skilled than any he’d ever coached, should be slathered in glory, or at least hungry to be. Sometimes they were.

  But sometimes they weren’t. It visited him every day that maybe it was his fault. Could anyone really coach the hunger, the want-to? Could he? When he’d played, he believed his coaches ratcheted up the want-to in him. When he started coaching, he believed one hundred percent he could inspire kids to want to run through walls, like they talked about on NFL broadcasts when the games were slow.

  Now, with sixteen years of experience and two state titles to his name, he honestly didn’t know. Sometimes he saw it. Today. Tom knew, before his somewhat famous offense ever took a snap, what was going to happen on this day on this field. Three plays in, and he knew the parents of Plentywood players and the longtime Plentywood boosters standing around the home field or sitting in their pickups alongside it were going to have to wake up in the morning viewing their team the way Tom viewed the prairie they all tried to live on: something capable of a surprise now and then, but most often the home of shrunken enthusiasm you should have seen coming.

  The Plentywood people were going to have to start reconciling how this game, and the bright season that led up to it, affected their sense of scope and emotional memory. That’s how sports were in the small towns scattered across the vast sweep of Montana’s high plains. Winning football mattered in a way that weddings and births and twenty bushels per acre and hundred-dollar beef and three-dollar wheat mattered—happy party times, points of focus for the collective memory of a group of people who independently arrived at decisions to occupy roughly the same space on a landscape that didn’t give one chilly shit about them.

  He knew that his own people were looking to plant a flag in the terra incognito of time, to fly a banner named “Dumont Wolfpack, State Champions” in future dialogues, a standard against years when rains don’t fall and equipment breaks down and disappointment at home threatens to elevate bitterness into a hegemony. The Dumont people wanted some personal mythology, and it was his job to goddamn deliver it.

  He caught Slab Rideg’s eye as his assistant coach stomped back to the sidelines after meeting the defensive players coming to the sideline, smacking their helmets, swatting their asses, screaming in their faces. A twenty-six-year old former Dumont defensive lineman who had come by his nickname during fitter days, Slab in so much motion always made Tom a little queasy. The kids now called him Flab behind his back.

  “You feel that?” Slab shouted at Tom. “That’s what we’re doin’ here!” Slab was lost in a how-do-you-like-me-now rage of enthusiasm, fodder for the boys.

  Tom watched his players come off the field after scoring the extra points—they always went for two—and watched white steam pour from their heads into the cool November afternoon when they pried their helmets off, saw in their smiles the real adolescent pride in being able to do what they thought they were supposed to be doing. He doubted they knew why they loved it—none of them would truly know why they loved it until years later, when it was all gone. The kids clapped high fives and barked, firing each other up. Across the field the boys on the other sideline were also hardscrabble ranch boys who bulldogged and castrated calves, slopped hogs and bucked bales, boys for whom physical strength and work shaped every day of their lives.

  Tom surveyed the Dumont fans who’d driven the five hours to watch the game. He saw Mike Latshaw, whose father had died when he put a car up on a lift and the lift collapsed, pinning the man against an air compressor. The valve had punctured him and injected forced air until he couldn’t keep living. He saw Ethan Miller, wiry in glasses and a black T-shirt and a brown Carhartt, Ethan who one night came in late from plowing and picked up a stray cat with a collar on at his front door, wondering what a cat could be doing miles from any other homes, only to have his wife point out that he was cradling a skunk with a canning ring stuck around its neck.

  And Katie DeSoto, shriveled and sunburned with barely enough muscle to move her joints, an old drunk who once, when her husband hid her car keys to keep her from going to town for booze, stole his ancient Farmall tractor and drove it twenty-seven miles overland to the nearest bar—then sold it to an Indian for $500 more than it was worth. He was surprised to see Jenny Calhoun—who had children in the school, but none of football-playing age—and also not surprised.

  Her long sandy hair hung loose for a change, luffing in the breeze. And then he was back into the game, watching Slab coach the defense to a three-and-out. Half of his boys played both ways, but they came to the sideline, lingering for an extra squirt of water. Tom found his quarterback and saw something on the boy’s face, a sneer of his short upper lip, a little too much light in the boy’s bright blue eyes.

  He snatched Matt Brunner’s jersey in his fist and thrust his face up against the boy’s facemask. He recognized in Brunner’s eyes an enervated sizzle.

  “Matt! Core offense,” Tom said. “If it breaks down, go to the next play. No hero. Okay? No hero.”

  “I feel you, Coach,” Brunner said. Tom could smell the onions from the burger Matt had eaten for lunch. Also, he knew Matt hadn’t really heard him.

  “Listen to me!” Tom hissed quickly. He jerked Matt’s facemask so close it bashed his own nose. Tom could feel the cut.

  He saw Matt’s eyes focus on the blood that welled quickly on the bridge of his nose, teetered and spilled to one side onto his cheek. Then Matt’s focus came back to his eyes. “Core offense,” Tom said. “You play smart, we win. No hero. You play smart, we win.”

  The novelty of Tom’s bleeding nose had burned off. Cool-boy recklessness smeared a grin on Matt’s face. He said, “We gonna huck it?”

  “Trust me,” Tom said. He pointed the facemask toward the field and let it go. “Go play like you know how.” He whacked Matt on the butt and the quarterback loped onto the field.

  Tom wheeled and yelled, “Frehse! Where’s Frehse?”

  Jared Frehse, already jogging toward the huddle, spun back and sprinted to his coach.

  Tom put his hands on his hips, looked at Frehse, looked at the field, looked back at Frehse, and tilted his head. He turned a bit away from the field, making Jared step with him and creating the sense of a private conversation.

  “Look around,” Tom said. “See that other team?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “See those fans on the other side?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What do you see?”

  “They don’t look happy, Coach.”

  “They are not happy,” Tom said. “And your job is to make them stay not happy today.”

  Jared looked up at Tom and said, “What happened to your nose, Coach?”

  “You know what I’m worried about?” Tom asked.

  “No hero,” Jared said, because this was not a new conversation.

  With even, deliberate spacing, Tom said, “Go win the game.”

  Jared’s smile faded and his mouth shrank into a small dash on his face. He nodded once, pivoted, and ran onto the field in steps that seemed to barely use the ground.

  Tom called three consecutive option plays and Jared Frehse—whose last name and ability to make defensive players look like they were standing still had long ago prompted the nickname “Mister Freeze”—skittered and scattered for seven or eight yards each p
lay. Even as Tom heard the Plentywood coaches screaming for their defensive backs not to crowd the line, to watch for the pass, he saw the safeties cheating up, focusing on Jared Frehse. So on the fourth play of the drive, Tom let Matt Brunner fake a pitch to Jared, bootleg opposite field and gun the ball down the sidelines to Alex Martin. Brunner threw a beautiful ball and Martin, who was embarrassingly alone out there, sprinted under it, then gamboled down the sidelines for Dumont’s second score.

  The Dumont fans and bench erupted again. A few players on the field bumped chests or slapped helmets, but his team was already coming back, getting ready to play defense. They were in it today.

  When they were in it, there were maybe two teams in the entire state of Montana that could stay on the field with them. Plentywood wasn’t one of them. Plentywood managed a first down on the next series, then Matt Brunner intercepted an ill-advised crossing route. Back on offense, Tom called a quarterback draw, watched Matt grin from the huddle, then watched him dig up the middle for thirty yards.

  Jared scored again on the next play, finding a seam at the line, and making the safety stumble so badly he had to put his hands down on the grass to stay upright. Jared cruised into the end zone with his head tilted back. The few boys who didn’t play both ways clustered near Tom on the sidelines, sweat streaking the dirt that covered their bare arms.

  Tom saw in their eyes an adrenaline stoke he knew from experience you could only legally find on a football field, the primal thrill of physically imposing your will on another person. Tom loved football more than any other form of competition, and the fast and feral Class C eight-man game more than any other kind of football. The placement of a contest so squarely amid the open land and sky he had grown up in always brought it all home.

  By halftime, the Dumont Wolfpack had built a thirty-five-point lead. It would have been mindbendingly difficult to blow such a lead, but Tom had seen his team do mindbendingly stupid things—the meltdown in last year’s state semifinal a thoroughly discussed example among Dumont’s chattering and drinking class, which comprised about everybody—and so on their first offensive play of the second half, Tom sent in a play he called at least once every game.