Broken Field Page 4

  “But there’s a difference between how things should be and how things could be,” Josie said. What is versus what if. The new paradox she liked to spend time thinking about.

  Her mother held silent for a moment. Maybe they had had about as much grown-up talk as either one of them could handle for this one time. Because what came next was her mother putting a ribbon on it.

  “All I know …” and when Judy Frehse started a sentence with All I know, you knew you were approaching bottom line territory. So Josie stood up. “All I know,” Judy said, “is the world is stocked full of other things. You can spend every moment thinking about all those other things. Happiness is wanting what you have.”

  Josie made a nod and said, “Breakfast at seven tomorrow? Bus rolls at eight.”

  “Have fun with your friends. You guys played hard today.”

  Josie said, “Thanks, Mom.” But she was already out the door.

  * * *

  When he would think about it later, Tom, who was no believer in fate, would think that you could point to that moment, right there when he let Slab Rideg go, as the start of how things got so crooked and crossed. He could pick a lot of other spots, too—the day his son died, the day his wife left him, the day he moved to Dumont, the way he’d treated this team the previous year when they’d lost a playoff game they should have won by four touchdowns.

  He’d opted for tough love, and maybe that had been wrong. What happened next, after the Plentywood win, was that Tom became dreamy, a curse he’d always borne. Hours after the game, deep in the night, on a yellow school bus as it rolled down the dark two-lane, exhausted from coaching a big win, exhausted from coaching a whole season and managing the egos and emotions of twenty-four teenaged boys, exhausted from knowing that the most exacting coaching was now to come—the quarterfinals, the expectations of the boys but also of a whole town—exhausted and unguarded, Tom let dreaminess infest him.

  He always sat behind and across the bus from the driver, his team all behind him. Tom let his head fall against the window, feeling the cool glass plane on his forehead—a clear delineation between an endlessly stretching November night on the endless unseen plains outside and himself, enclosed in a metal box with a collection of excited and excitable teenaged boys. Sometimes on these longer return trips, the boys would tire late in the night, watch DVDs, play games on their smart phones, the talk simmering down to girls in school, or women on TV, or girls they’d never actually met but knew from social networks and webcams.

  The bus tires hissed on the narrow highway like a continual unpeeling of tape. While he rested his head against the window, Tom thought again about the son he once had, the way he ran, his beautiful stride. Which led him to think of Sophie. Sometimes Tom allowed a waking dream of Sophie to run through his imagination. It often started with something that had actually happened, though pretty quickly he invented events the way he wished they might have gone. And then, seeking a perfection that never existed, if he thought of a better way for the imaginary sequence to unfold, he backed up and started all over from the beginning.

  Sometimes this led to sleep. A couple hours into the bus ride, he was nearing the imaginary perfection of a moment that had started as a snatch of remembered dialogue:

  Sophie: This goddamned wind …

  Tom: It’s the same old wind it always is.

  Sophie: I’m starting to feel like it’s coming right through the walls.

  Tom: Good reason to roll a little closer.

  In real life, most of what had come before the snatch of dialogue about the wind had been the cracklings of a long-smoldering fight. In this sense, imagination was only a swift feint, a juke he let himself bite on. Still, in his semiconscious state, he found himself tweaking and tuning, plugging in other segments from a past in which he and Sophie spoke adoringly to each other—as if what they had said might still shape the way their lives were now. The net effect was that Tom found himself drawing deliciously close to again feeling what he had loved about Sophie.

  The scene in his mind now—the dark bedroom, the minor-key moan of the wind, the rumpled ridgelines of covers, her moonlit blue cheekbones and forehead—felt so close. But then he fell asleep. He woke to the grainy grind of the bus’s brake drums and the artificial haze of the gas station, the vapid fluorescent light etching a bubble of clarity in the endless sea of dark.

  The bus door hissed open and Jimmy Krock, the driver, called into his rearview mirror, “You got fifteen minutes here, boys. Take a whiz and get your fizz. Fifteen minutes, or we’ll leave you here for the Indians to boil you for dinner. They don’t waste any part of the carcass.”

  Had he been paying closer attention, Tom would have noted the slight hitch in the flow of sound from the boys in the back of the bus. Instead, he winced at Krock’s comment, a reference to the Fort Miles reservation that stretched, unseen in the darkness, for hundreds of square miles to the south. Nothing seemed to spook boys who grew up in Montana’s small prairie towns like evocations of reservation Indians—catchall bugaboos propagating the worst of racial stereotypes. Tom, still groggy and trying to bookmark where he’d lost control of his Sophie dream stood and addressed the boys already jostling to file forward. “This is a fine town, full of fine people, but be back on the bus in fifteen minutes.”

  He shot a glance at Krock, who reflected a who the fuck you kidding grin. This was an ongoing skirmish. Tom stood and ducked down the bus steps, feeling the cool slap of wind on his face, its rippled vectors fingering through his hair. He could taste soil, dulcet and dusty in the air, blowing from the cut hay fields that lay invisible under the night all around them, a comforting odor to him, even mixed with the rancid stench of gasoline. A Chevy Suburban pulled into the station behind the bus, carrying the cheerleaders. The girls bounced out of the rig.

  Some climbed the steps up onto the bus, where several of the boys remained. Tom walked across the pavement into the convenience store, the fluorescent light striking his eyes like a whiff of ammonia. He hurried his purchase of a Diet Pepsi, poured a coffee, and took it outside to Krock, who huddled around the corner of the building just outside the wash of light, sensitive that the kids might see him smoking, even though they all knew he did.

  Everybody called him Krock O’, even the kids. Now in his seventies, he had been the school’s maintenance man since sometime in the 1980s. He loved to drive, knew the roads, and Tom was happy to have him behind the wheel. The chitchat was fine as long as they could veer away from ingrown and festering xenophobia.

  “My parents grew up not far from here,” Krock O’ said. “By Canada. North Country.”

  “Really?” Tom said.

  “Yeah. Out to hell and gone. Shit, the stories they told,” Krock O’ said. “Plowing hundreds of acres behind mules, then the hail would wipe out their crops and they’d eat oats and potatoes all winter. Drinking water came from a little reservoir that the cows shit in. It’s a wonder any of them lived. My granddad’s brother shot his own wife through the neck because she wanted to go to town for a dance.”

  “Are you kidding?” Tom asked.

  “Not even a little.”

  “What happened?”

  “Everybody was so goddamned tough back then,” Krock O’ said, flicking an ash that skidded and sparked red against the asphalt. “She turned out fine. He skeedaddled. My people never saw him again, but they heard he holed up in the Bear Paws for a while, stealing horses.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Tom said. He sniffed the air and considered his social life, a Saturday night at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, he and a septuagenarian bus driver huddled beside the cinderblock building, hours from home and scoured by wind.

  Then the boys on the bus engineered some teenage triumph that sent underclassmen whooping and scurrying into the convenience store to be the first to spread the news to their shopping teammates. Tom stood with Krock O’ in the darkness and said, “That sound bad to you?”

  “How the hell would you tell?�
� Krock O’ replied.

  Tom grunted. “How’s the driving?”

  “Nothing to it but the wind,” Krock O’ said. “You took a little snooze.”

  “Naw,” Tom said.

  “About an hour.”

  “Really? Wow.”

  Krock O’ shrugged. He couldn’t imagine much meaning less to him.

  “Anything happen?” Tom asked.

  “Oh, shit, who knows? If it ain’t coming up in my side mirror, everything behind me is yours,” Krock O’ said.

  “That’s a wildly irresponsible philosophy,” Tom said.

  “My gift,” Krock O’ said and shrugged.

  The parent who drove the cheerleaders’ vehicle, Brad Martin, shuffled over and hunched to spark a cigarette of his own. Brad’s daughter Ainsley was on the cheer squad; his son Alex, a senior, a wide receiver and cornerback. Brad Martin had injected himself into his children’s academic career by, among other things, getting himself elected to the school board, and he never missed an athletic contest involving either of his kids. His willingness to drive meaningless hours over the vastness of the Montana pains to see Alex play football meant the Dumont Wolfpack always had cheerleaders, and that Tom didn’t have to put up with the girls riding on the bus, being wooed and harassed, often in consecutive moments, by his hormone-addled football players. This allowed Tom to sometimes see Brad Martin as a minor hero. Though that burnish often dulled once Brad started talking out loud.

  “Solid W,” said Brad, a man who seemed to lean into everyone, inspiring everyone he had a conversation with to take a step back. He shook his head and pursed out a tight smile meant to let Tom know that nobody was surprised by this, or Tom’s integral role in it, or expected any less. “Boy, but I want to grab that Hansen kid and kick his ass around until he throws a decent block.”

  Tom considered a collection of replies he could have deployed, then shrugged. First of all, his guess was that, had Brad grabbed the Hansen kid, he’d find himself flat on his own back, staring at the sky and breathing in careful, round breaths. Just to not be provocative, Tom issued a could be sort of shrug. The Hansen boy had played neither particularly well nor particularly badly for a kid who, until the summer before, had spent most of his young life driving tractors and grain trucks and pushing cows around. He was big and strong and good with his hands and relatively light on his feet and wanted to learn and was having a good time trying.

  Effort was not his downfall. But the culture of small-town athletics often drove parents to fits of incivility far more than actual in-game performance merited.

  “He cannot play that sloppy in the quarters,” Brad said.

  Tom tried to neither express concern nor dismiss Brad’s. Dumont had just opened the playoffs by winning a game by forty-three points, and the following weekend they would enter the quarterfinals as the prohibitive favorite to blow out whichever team they faced. Any given kid probably could play sloppy in the playoffs.

  On this team, they historically had at inopportune times. A shout pealed from the bus, then a group hushing. Tom wondered if he should walk back to the bus and check what was going on. Brad Martin kept talking about players and how they had performed or failed to. He liked his son’s blocking, but felt Alex had struggled with the ball and yards-after-catch.

  “No surprise,” Brad said, “He never gets in rhythm.”

  This hardly veiled criticism of Tom’s play-calling never surprised Tom but couldn’t make him give a shit, either. Fortunately Brad found valor in his son’s defense, which, he opined, had been rock solid.

  “That side of the ball,” Brad said, “is where the boy’s going to make a living.”

  Tom didn’t have the heart to tell Brad, leaning against a wall at this particular gas station in the middle of so much nothing, that his son was not going to make a living on either side of the ball. He was, truly, a fine Class C wide receiver and decent defensive back, but Tom himself had been an outstanding Class C player, and had received no scholarship offers, had been forced to walk on at 1-AA University of Montana, and on the first day of practice understood with a startling clarity just why: outstanding as he had been against farm boys, day one revealed how much less athletic he was than every single other player on the Montana team. Truly hard work could sometimes carve out a niche for a player, but hard work was not Alex Martin’s strategy of choice.

  Alex was almost certainly going to make his living working at Brad’s family’s implement dealership. Or maybe he’d flee to a city where there were things like restaurants and bars and theaters and lots of other young people that he could meet and drink with and make out with and make love to and marry. As a policy, Tom tried to be candid with parents concerning expectations of their children’s athletic futures, but only when forced into a corner about it.

  Beside him, Krock O’ pinched the coal from his cigarette, tossed the filter onto the ground, and, without a word, leaned into the wind and started stiff-legging his way to the store for his habitual pee-before-driving-again. Tom used this as a signal to check the convenience store. He swept through the restrooms to make sure they were empty. Brad Martin stood just outside the store door as if Tom had asked him to wait there. They walked in the direction of the vehicles.

  “Wanna swap?” Brad asked, smiling his put-upon smile as he hesitated before committing to the Suburban. Tom couldn’t see any harm in allowing Brad to believe that riding several hours with a busload of high school football players would be more meaningful or less stupefying than the same trip with high school cheerleaders.

  “That’d be about the end of me,” Tom said, which was enough to let Brad peel off toward his vehicle feeling vindicated.

  As Tom drew near the bus door, just as he was lifting a foot up onto the first step, a fluttering of activity spooked him. Two girls scurried from the bus practically right underfoot. They broke into laughter when they hit the pavement and began running toward Brad Martin’s Suburban.

  Well, Tom thought, his heart momentarily thumping, a little shocked by how much they’d surprised him. He would come to always remember this moment, remember those two girls, Ainsley Martin and Britnee Mattoon, as the sorts of ciphers that arise in and around moments that matter in a life, obtuse actors that elude attempts to assign cause and effect and yet remain embedded in eventual outcomes.

  Then Krock O’ climbed aboard and slid into his seat and the bus engine coughed up and the bus turned onto the highway and the wheels slipped deeper into their long kiss with the asphalt. Tom tried to return to the fantasy he had been cooking up before he’d fallen asleep: the wind, Sophie, the bedroom, blue night. He tried to start again at the beginning and remember all the altered responses that had infused him with such fondness, tried to remember the pretend words he had assigned to Sophie, mixed with real memories of the glint of her eyes, the way she held her mouth, her upper lip peaked and crested in a sort of sexual challenge.

  He tried again to pretend that after he had said, “Good reason to roll closer,” Sophie had not said, “Good reason to move to San Diego.”

  And that he had not bristled and sulked. And that the air had not come to feel close and rancid so that he welcomed the wind and its metaphoric rinsing of invisible foul particles from around him.

  He tried instead to see her again, moonlight from their one bedroom window lighting her raised edges, leaving most of her washed in curved pools of shadow.

  * * *

  Tom woke as always at 5:30 a.m., a bit woozy, still strung out from the bus ride. He felt he could eventually have creaked out a hundred push-ups and two hundred sit-ups, like he used to do every morning, but walking across the room to make his morning coffee seemed like a wobbly proposition.

  Also, he felt a burble of misgiving about something that had happened the night before, something he’d missed, something that was going to affect his boys. These seniors—Frehse, Brunner, and Martin—had, since their freshmen year, starred on teams more talented than almost every opponent they’d faced,
and still they lacked coherence. Confidence they did not lack. It was the follow-through to confidence that seemed absent, the thing that turned confidence into results in combination with other players.

  Determination, maybe, was what that was. Waylon Edwards had it—and he was the junior, the one player from the group Tom would get another chance with. Jared Frehse had it sometimes, but dropped into inexplicable lapses. Brunner and Martin … they seemed to believe that if they showed up, things should go their way. He had been unable to solve the puzzle and knew this was his failure.

  You can’t coach speed or strength, but you can coach antidotes to complacency, some means of directing cockiness. These thoughts plagued him early Sunday morning as he waited in the doorway for his dog Scout to do her business. Then he stood at his kitchen counter and bent back the crinkled foil on a pumpkin pie that Jenny Calhoun had brought to him after school the Friday before, walking it across the parking lot to the field where he had stood discussing formations with Slab Rideg.

  Jenny had started bringing him good-luck pies weekly since the first game of the season, though he doubted she meant them to comprise his complete Sunday morning breakfast fare. She was courting him, or inviting him to court her, however that worked. Tom found it convenient to pretend he didn’t know that. But Jenny—with her tall, erect spine and a bosom exactly as ample as you’d expect to find on a woman raised on the plains and raising two children—was hard to ignore in his world.

  Tom wished he could fall in love with Jenny, because she was on so many levels the kind of person he long ago believed he could spend his life with—until he had met Sophie and her urban slinkiness, her intense interest in appearance and reaction, her worldview piercing far beyond Montana’s high plains. Separated from his wife for five years, divorced for the last four of those, Tom was, in theory, not averse to starting to love someone like Jenny Calhoun. He saw her as sweet and pretty from the ground up, with smooth features that were lovely in their very plainness, and he felt comfortable admiring her sturdiness.