Broken Field Read online

  Every Class C coach he faced knew he’d run it. Sometimes he ran it over and over, with slight variations, daring the other team to stop it. He understood that he had built the play into something bigger than it was, a personal touchstone of sorts. In the Dumont playbook, the play was called 85 Look Left Veer Option Right.

  The boys just called it “Six.” Six was Jared Frehse’s number, and six points was how the play often ended. At the snap, Matt Brunner took two steps to his left. Behind him Frehse did exactly the same thing. The entire defense, their anger and shame pricked by a halftime scalding from their coaches, poured in that direction. Then Matt Brunner planted his left foot, pivoted to the inside, and pitched the ball back to Jared, who had also planted and reversed direction, heading right.

  Frehse caught the pitch in mid-stride. From there his job was to out-sprint the defense around the right corner. Tom waited for Jared to plant his right foot and make the corner because, in that physical gesture, no other boy he’d seen in over two decades of playing and coaching football had ever reminded him so much of his own son. For a brief moment, Tom could be transported to another wind-scraped town where sun and winter peeled paint from the boxy little houses, watching another young boy race along a sideline like he might run all the way to the never-ending horizon. None of the fans standing around this field in Plentywood, not the home team nor his Dumont people, knew anything about Derek Warner, but by the time Derek had turned thirteen, Tom understood that his boy had been gifted with physical talent far greater than any Tom had ever possessed.

  By the time Derek was fourteen, he was gone. Now, Tom watched Jared Frehse fly across the backfield, then plant a flicker-quick right foot and launch upfield, slapping away the grasping hands of an overpursuing linebacker. Tom had never coached a better broken field runner.

  Jared’s hips tucked under him, the ball cradled and pumping back and forth in his arm, the helmet leading forward, his legs blurring. Tom squinted his eyes so he could see another boy, and for a moment felt a sweet jag of connection to a past that was nowhere as wrecked as his present. After Jared scored, even the least athletic of his two dozen players saw action—even twiggy little Wyatt Aarstad, who could barely fill his uniform, ran onto the field, where he was run over by someone on every play. But, Tom noticed with a snippet of pride, Wyatt got up every time with something to say.

  That the kid got his ass beat play after play but still seemed excited to be on the field seemed like as much a success as any score. As the teams walked toward their locker rooms after the game, Tom jogged ahead of them, feeling a twinge of guilt for not lingering to enjoy the congratulations of Dumont fans who had come so far to watch the show. He knew he should say something to Jenny Calhoun and maybe even wanted to. But he retreated to the locker room with Slab Rideg—whose actual name was Bill—and watched to make sure none of his players were disguising injuries, or faking them. He tried to talk to his team, tried to manage egos, tried to tell them that beating Plentywood 56–13 did not mean they’d played their best.

  It was clear they did not exactly believe him. They were teenagers in cut-off T-shirts and Under Armour compression shorts and they were, at times like these, undeniable. Waiting for the boys to dress, Slab held onto the bill of his ball cap and moved it around on his head, which Tom knew meant he wanted to talk.

  “Undefeated,” Slab said.

  “Lot of teams been undefeated before the last game,” Tom said.

  “Undefeated and number one, Tommy.”

  “Number one on our side of the bracket,” Tom said.

  “Lot of Dumont people out there,” Slab said. “This team means a lot to them. Would it kill you to be a little happy about it?”

  “I’m happy. I said I am.”

  “Shit, everybody was here,” Slab said. “Be a good time to go on a crime spree back in Dumont.”

  “What would you steal?”

  “Carrie Ann came over,” Slab said, and that was where this was going. Slab had married Carrie Ann, an enormously exuberant woman, three weeks before. And now she had driven five hours just to stand on the grass and watch her brand-new husband coach eight kids playing defense for an hour and a half.

  “Why don’t you ride back with her,” Tom said, certain this was Slab’s hope all along and that it also included a detour down through Billings or at least Lewistown, trying to snatch a little honeymoon activity in a hotel that had a pool and a salad bar and slushy pre-mixed cocktails like pina coladas or strawberry daiquiris. Tom didn’t want to think more about it than that. He liked Slab fine, admired his ardor and dedication as a coach, but did not want to imagine him smiling goofily across a table at his recent bride after a drink too many.

  “What about the bus?” Slab asked.

  It was against school policy to have only Tom and the bus driver as adults on the bus. But Dumont was the kind of town where policies were more suggestions until things went really wrong. Tom said, “Krock O’ and I can handle it. Go. Have a time.”

  * * *

  There were things worth knowing about her history and things not worth knowing. Josie Frehse lay on the foot of a bed in a hotel room in Havre. Her mother sat propped up against the headboard of the bed. For most of the season, the volleyball team traveled with the football team, played a game wherever the boys played, saved money on transportation. But now football had shifted into playoffs and volleyball had turned to the district tournament, which put Josie in Havre with her mother, while her father had gone to Plentywood to watch Jared play. Why Josie found herself in her mother’s hotel room after dinner thinking about discussing sex was less explicable.

  “Anything you want to tell me, you know you can, right?” Judy Frehse had just said out of the blue. The tournament was in Chinook, but there was only one hotel in Chinook and eight teams traveling there. So the Dumont girls drove two and a half hours to Chinook, played their games, then traveled the twenty miles to Havre for the night. They had lost the day before and then lost again in the play-back round.

  They’d go home the next day and start thinking about basketball season. Judy Frehse sat against the headboard, legs stretched on the bed, facing the TV but tilted toward Josie. She wore jeans and a plaid blouse and a button-up cardigan. At her feet on the bed was an open pizza box. Josie reclined on her back, knees up and apart, absently scrolling through her phone, still in sweats from the game.

  First her mother had said, “Your dad called. The boys won big time, 56–13. Jared had four touchdowns.”

  “Matt?”

  “Threw for two and ran for one. Or threw for three. He did good.”

  And that made Josie happy. The girls’ volleyball team losing made her unhappy, but the football team losing was a bad time for everyone. It had only happened three times since Jared and Matt and Alex Martin started playing together as freshmen. They’d lost to Malta in the first round of the playoffs that first season. They lost to Wibaux in the state quarterfinals their sophomore year.

  And Wibaux had beaten them again last year in the semifinals. All three losses had been awful for days. It meant a sullen big brother and an upset father and a moody boyfriend and everybody at school pretending there was nothing to be excited about for at least a week.

  And then her mother said, “How are things with you and Matt?”

  What her mother was really asking was, Are you and Matt having sex? Is he going to make you pregnant?

  Which was funny, because she’d gone to her mother’s hotel room in the first place partly because she was wanting to talk about Matt. Normally she would be with her teammates, her girls, Snapchatting, texting boys with probing if not outright flirtatious exchanges, taking endless selfies until they captured the look they most wanted to project to the world. Josie wouldn’t necessarily be doing all of that, but she’d be there to support it.

  Josie was in what, by all high school standards, was a serious relationship. She might throw the occasional selfie on Instagram, but never directed at anybody specific, exc
ept Matt. The other girls on her team were considerably more reckless. They’d all grown up in Dumont, gone to school with the boys in their class since the time they were in kindergarten. Hardly anybody dated anybody in the old-school sense. You were always somebody’s little sister.

  Or the cute boys were your cousins. New boys were rare—this year there was one, but he was the strange and silent half-Indian boy who had given her a ride when her grain truck broke down, and he didn’t do sports, so nobody knew yet where he was going to fit in. Or if he would at all. But Josie had the quarterback. The guy everybody wanted. He’d not been afraid to make his feelings for her clear, even though her brother was one of his best friends.

  Which made her feel lucky. That she didn’t have to take preening, duck-faced selfie or shots of her legs from the bikini bottoms down and send them to boys in Hingham or Glasgow or Whitewater—boys she’d maybe met at a basketball camp in Bozeman or a track meet in Great Falls—made her feel luckier. Last year, a senior girl had invited as a prom date a boy she’d met who lived in Alaska! They Skyped and Facetimed and Snapchatted for months after meeting, and his parents had flown him down so they could dance in Dumont’s tiny gymnasium and make out in her daddy’s borrowed pickup truck parked in a wheat field and rocked by the wind.

  And that girl had moved to Alaska after she graduated and lived there with him today. Matt Brunner was a lot more perfect than other options. Matt’s father was a wheat farmer, although not as successful as hers, and that maybe wasn’t fair because her dad and his brothers owned several of the biggest farms in northern Montana, pieces of land put together by four generations of leather-soled homesteaders and their resilient offspring and held together by luck and lack of imagination through the Dust Bowl and the eighties farm crisis and other impossible times for dryland farmers.

  And they teamed up, worked together, her father and his two brothers, to improve economies of scale. That’s how her dad always explained how they managed to come out ahead so often. Josie didn’t always love how her dad talked about Matt’s dad, as if Gary Brunner just wasn’t lucky, or didn’t have something it takes to be a good farmer. Her dad liked Matt enough, though, or liked the certainty of Matt in his daughter’s life.

  For a long time, Josie had liked that, too. Sunrise, sunset, Josie and Matt. Except for when she felt contained by Josie and Matt, contained by the expectations that other people seemed to have for her. More and more she chafed when her friends spoke with certainty about her following Matt to college.

  She hated when her mother’s friends hinted about some eventual marriage, as if that was something she should race toward before she got pregnant and became an unwed mother. Which was exactly what her mother was talking about now, in her absolute but vague way. And what was funny was that Josie and Matt had been having sex for over a year now. After a certain while with him, after enough long drives down dirt roads that ended in abandoned farmsteads, homesteader shacks leaning and bending toward the earth in a slow surrender to frost heaves and wind, after enough ardent tomfoolery in the backseats of extra-cab pickups while the sunset tangled in the branches of Russian olive shelterbelts, after enough handholding on the four-block walk between the high school and Pep’s bar, where the kids sometimes met after school for cheese fries and the special pizza with jalapeno, peanut butter, and pepperoni, after enough lap-sitting at parties and—she guessed this was really it—after figuring out that the whole business of being a couple wasn’t just fooling around, sex had seemed sort of inevitable.

  There had been a time—too short, in retrospect—where she signaled Matt to convince her, but she’d gone into it resigned to the notion that she would be convinced. It seemed like something everybody did. Josie still believed that her mother couldn’t know anything about that. Her mother had grown up in the eighties, which in Dumont was like the fifties, getting malts at Mo’s diner with their boyfriends, riding in big groups to dances in other towns and coming back home in big groups. Goodnight kisses and waiting until marriage. That was the life she imagined for her mom. Her mom couldn’t know that Britnee Mattoon had sex even before Josie had—she’d done oral with several different guys and the full thing with at least two.

  Ainsley Martin had also done oral if not the actual intercourse, but had engaged in behaviors far more lurid, to Josie’s thinking, prancing around in front of the computer screen bare-breasted in lace and animal print underwear she bought at Victoria’s Secret in the Missoula mall for some guy in Spokane she’d met on Tinder. Josie had toyed with the notion of remaining a virgin until college, but then thought, what would be the point? It was such an arbitrary deadline. Why not have her first experience with someone she knew well and trusted? Matt, for all his failings, was reliable. Or predictable.

  She knew what she was getting. He wasn’t going to stray. He wasn’t going to pick up a venereal disease. He wasn’t going to get some other girl pregnant. He wasn’t going to—what was the phrase Britnee had used? Hump and dump. He didn’t take off after she gave in. Josie kept her face turned to her phone, but peeked at her mom trying to make a casual move out of picking up another piece of pizza, then, as if it were nothing, saying, “You know you can talk to me anything, right, Jos?”

  “I know, Mom.”

  “Is everything going okay?” her mom asked, now watching the local news on the TV. The weather report was on. Nobody watched the weather like farm families. Josie tapped on her phone, liking a Snapchat video Britnee Mattoon had just posted. Britnee was a cheerleader and had gone to the Plentywood football game. They must be passing through somewhere with reception for her to post the snap. The video was her running onto the field after the boys won. Josie could see Jared—because Britnee had a hell of a crush on Jared, though it always got her nowhere—and then Matt.

  The boys with their helmets lifted over their heads, roaming around the field, looking for the next person to tell them how great they were. Josie always though they looked stupid doing that. Win and walk away. Unless it was something big. Unless it was the state championship. Because that’s what this team should win.

  “How did you know?”

  “What?” her mom asked.

  “How did you know that Daddy was the one?”

  “The one for what?”

  Oh god, Josie thought, the sex preoccupation. Her mother feared pregnancy with the active vigor that other people feared terrorists or hippies. Maybe she should just tell her mom and get that over with.

  “That you wanted to be with him,” she said instead. “Like, forever.”

  “Well,” Judy Frehse said, and then she thought for a little while. “You know when I was a kid we didn’t have Facebook and all those things. You only knew who you knew.”

  “Uh-huh,” Josie said, hoping her mother wasn’t about to say that she didn’t have many choices.

  “And your dad came from a big family that was really close. I liked that, how close they all were. And everybody knew them. You know. We weren’t like you and Matt. He was older, and he went away and did his military service and when he came back he just made it pretty clear that I was the one he wanted. I was senior in high school and that’s what you did then when you graduated high school. You got married and had a family. You were considered lucky if you did that.”

  “Couldn’t you have married anybody? Why Daddy?”

  “Well, your dad back then, he was a really handsome guy. And he was funny and charming. I know you probably don’t see that in him now. But he was. He made us all laugh. He and his brothers and they ran around with Hal Hartack, who was a big sports star, and your dad was the funny one. And he was a great dancer. And he had this souped-up Camaro he used to drive around. We all thought that was the coolest thing ever, because, you know, it wasn’t a farm truck. Meanwhile, his dad liked to kill him when he bought it, but we didn’t know that. All we knew was he liked to drive fast and play loud music and have a good time and to us … I mean, he was a catch, your dad was.”

  Because you didn�
�t have many choices. It was him or his brothers or cow-faced Hal Hartack.

  “Are you worried about something with Matt, Jos?”

  “I don’t know,” Josie said. She sat up, swung her legs over the edge of the bed so she was sitting and facing her mother, the heels of her hands pressing into the mattress beside her. “I should probably go back to my room.”

  “What are you worried about?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just … hard to know. How do you know? I don’t know.”

  “What don’t you know? You’ve been with Matt a long time. Has something changed?”

  “I don’t know. Matt’s going to go off somewhere next year. I’m still here.”

  Her mother allowed an indulgent chuckle. “It wouldn’t kill a girl to be faithful to her boyfriend for a year. You’ll get to go to college, too. Probably you can go where he goes if you want.”

  It was the laugh that told Josie how much her mother had missed the point. “What if I don’t want?”

  “Why would you not want to?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the thing. Matt’s the only boyfriend I’ve ever had. What if, just say hypothetically, I meet somebody better for me in college?”

  “Well,” her mom said, eyebrows raised as if to say, there’s the risk you run. “Josie, a whole lot of girls out there would give a lot to have the kind of relationship you’ve had with Matt.”

  Now, Josie thought, you’re talking about yourself. “It was different for you, Mom. You knew. I don’t know if I know. And I see all these people out there, and what if one of them is really cool and really perfect for me? What if that’s who I’m supposed to be with?”

  “I do think it’s hard for you kids living in this world with all your Snapchats and those apps. When you spend so much time thinking about how things could be, it’s hard to see how they really are. I think that’s how your dad and I have gotten along so well. We didn’t go into it with a bunch of big ideas we read from people we didn’t know about how things should be.”