Broken Field Page 5

  It was what he had come back to. After his divorce, he’d had sex with a few women. His first outing had been with a younger woman who wore fishnet stockings at a bar in Great Falls, a woman who sank her teeth deeply enough into his shoulder to leave mirrored blue archipelagos of contusions. He had felt alive at the time, because she made him feel something toward a woman he hadn’t felt since Sophie had left, something sharp and vivid that wasn’t anger.

  There had been a woman he liked, a pretty woman who worked in a flower shop in Havre. She wore jeans and a flimsy top over barely harnessed breasts and had the word “peace” tattooed on her left wrist. She felt straightforward and heartfelt on the first two dates, to the point that he started to not want to have sex with her before he ever did, afraid to come too close too soon to something so genuine.

  But she convinced him it was something she needed. After making love to her on their third meeting, he had gone into the bathroom of the hotel room and wept as quietly as possible, because she was wonderful but not the one person he wanted her to be. After that, Tom had gone without sex, made it one of those things you don’t have—love, money, a new four-wheeler, a double-barreled shotgun, the attention of your parents, sex. Things you could pretend to not crave as you moved along, though you could live without them, as many people proved.

  When he wanted to feel emotions that approximated the feelings love could spark off, he spoiled his dog or reduced himself to recycled imagination of a love long lost, like his waking dream on the bus. It wasn’t like he had an abundance of choices. Dumont was Dumont. Any amorous activity he might fire up would likely happen in Great Falls or Billings or Havre or Missoula.

  Until Jenny Calhoun got divorced and spent some time alone and decided she didn’t want to be alone anymore. In Dumont, Tom was the available man, and she was the available woman in the thirty-five-and-up age bracket. Only she was also a real person with feelings and real life involving real children and, almost certainly, some leftover dreams.

  Also she knew everybody who knew him. They both taught at Dumont High, he history, she English. His excuse to not engage with her in recent weeks had been the time-suck of football season, a not-disingenuous assertion to make to oneself. But the pies kept coming every Friday. Delicious as they were, the pies required no immediate reciprocity—even if there was a lingering taste of attachment in every bite. He coached, and tried to treat the pies like the same kind of thing everybody in town did for the football team. Wolfpack players got free ice cream and pizza at Pep’s, free sodas from Hannah Alderdice at the IGA, where they also could have free movie rentals. The Booster’s Club grilled a steak dinner for the boys at the high school on Friday evenings. Pearl Aarstad and her sister Ida prepared box lunches for the team’s bus rides to away games.

  Everybody in town, it seemed, wanted to keep the boys wallowing in boosterism and starchy carbohydrates. Which made Tom look down his chest at his gut while giving it an exploratory pat. There was too much to slap there. He tried to imagine what a woman might think of him naked, and didn’t like what sprang to mind. He was going to have to step up his workouts, start running outside of practice, maybe go back to the sit-ups and push-ups. Today he might walk five or six miles, and that might burn some of the pie breakfast. He pulled his shotgun from the closet and slipped into his hunting coat.

  Scout, his three-year-old springer spaniel, whined and whined and spun in tight circles, threatening to break her ankles off. Just after he loaded her into the truck, but before he climbed into the driver’s side, Tom heard his house phone ringing, a highly unlikely event at 7:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning. He had no intention of answering it, but did walk back to the house, opened the door to listen if a message was being left. One was.

  “Coach Warner? This is Marilyn Mattoon? My daughter Britnee is a cheerleader? Anyway, she took the school camera to the game yesterday because she’s also on yearbook? Mrs. Calhoun—oh, I guess it’s Ms. Calhoun, although that’s not really right either, is it? Anyway, Jenny lets the yearbook kids take the camera to school events. Anyway, this morning I was just sort of looking through the pictures, which I do a lot of times because I can’t make it to the games? I think you’re going to want to see some of these pictures, Coach Warner. I wonder if something really, um, inappropriate might have happened on the bus.”

  Although he recognized his responsibility as high school teacher and football coach to respond to certain concerns, Tom suspected a lot of inappropriate pictures got taken on buses heading home from football games across the state. Whatever Marilyn Mattoon found so inappropriate could wait until Tom had a chance to make his head right. He drove the nine miles to town and then on through it: past the high school, then through the one-block downtown.

  Two bars faced off across the street from each other. The grocery store and Wells Fargo bank squatted on opposite corners, anchors of commerce. The town hall—a former double-wide added onto and opened up to create space for the sheriff’s office—was the only building with lights on. He passed one other vehicle. On the far side of town in the onslaught of empty countryside, he listened to the crunch of gravel popping under his tires and the occasional ping of rocks ricocheting off the truck’s undercarriage.

  He liked it when he could feel the wheels swim a little in the loose stuff piled around the occasional ninety-degree turns necessitated by the old section roads running into someone’s broader holdings. Usually during this time he did not think for a moment about his team, or wonder where the boys were, or what they had done after the bus spilled them into the parking lot in front of the school late the night before. Usually he didn’t worry about whether they were contemplating backside containment, or whether they were thinking about beating up a kid who looked at a particular girlfriend for too long.

  He didn’t care, for this brief period, if they were being respectful to their elders or nursing hangovers. Or he did, but he didn’t make himself think about it. He allowed himself this break, every Sunday, and it usually held until at least noon. Eventually wonderings would creep in like roaches, unobtrusive at first, lingering while they tickled some appendage, until he noticed them and they became skittle-quick, scurrying for deeper cover.

  Today they were already all over his mind. Tom drove until the road dipped down into a broad coulee, then pulled off onto a tractor path and parked in front of a barbed wire gate, an almost silly barrier set against the scope of so much grassland beyond it. The dog began a frenzied dash around the interior of the pickups’ cab. Tom had long since quit trying to calm her and instead reached across and punched the passenger side door open, allowing Scout’s kinetic energy to eject her into the daylight. Tom stepped into the brisk air of a late fall morning before sunrise on the plains, when a gray wash filled the sky and the flatness made the landscape seem manageable.

  Once sunlight flooded the scene, it would accentuate the world with shadow and contour and the aching hallmarks of distance. The wheatfields and grasslands visible at the far edge of the horizon would seem to spin, a vertigo caused by the shortcomings of parallax in the face of such vast stretches of open land.

  Your eyes would need to be a mile apart for any meaningful grasp of this sort of expanse. Tom followed his dog across a field until the earth tilted steeply down and they dropped into the coulee bottom, land owned by the family of a boy who had played for him two seasons before, on which he had a standing invitation to hunt. They walked thick, tangled buckbrush and rosehip patches, dense in the oxbows of a dried-up stream.

  The coulee snaked between the breaks hemming it on either side, wrapping against declines eroded into scooped walls. Scout ran fast and furious, nose scribbling across the grass in front of her, sketching a map of where birds used to be. Her stubby tail wiggled on her butt. When Tom saw her nose begin to jerk her head around while she ran, he quickened his pace, and within a few dozen yards a hen pheasant blew up from the brush in front of her. The dog quick-footed like she was being hauled to the birds by scent, her paws scramb
ling to keep up.

  More pheasants burst from cover, hens, their frantic wings a staccato chatter in decrescendo from the moment they leapt into the air. Scout started running in circles, doubling back on the scent of all the birds that were no longer hidden in the grass. Tom watched her carefully and moments later heard the whistling chatter of a rooster bursting toward the refuge of the open sky and he shot it. They worked up the coulee for a couple of hours. Tom shot another rooster that Scout almost ran over before it went airborne.

  He knocked a Hungarian partridge out of a covey that leapt into the air in front of him like a flock of exclamation points. Then Tom hiked up the steep slope of the coulee onto the flat wheat fields for the long walk back to the truck, and that’s when his mind began to stick on the phone call. Sure, farmers rose early, but why would anybody be so upset by photos from a bus that they would call him before 7:00 a.m.?

  The walk was long, and Tom quickly started to ignore Scout, who kept thinking she was hunting, while he let anxiety start eating into his gut. What had his boys done? There was always enough to feel bad about within easy reach, if he let his attention turn that way. The boys on his team—on all the teams he’d ever coached in his career—comprised a swirling pastiche of emotional states. Sometimes it was simple pimply adolescent anxiety. Some kids experienced the profound, ongoing effects of physical and emotional abuse and neglect.

  Some suffered the lingering ravages of a century of inbreeding and the attitudes it creates. All of them had the potential to be affected by the sort of insular depression that plagued small towns in huge, unforgiving landscapes. And they also had the potential to be bright and hopeful and helpful and championship-caliber young men.

  They were day to day. Every season the ramifications erupted in a sort of rhythm, like the boiling of a viscous liquid, the burn rate of which determined how much he enjoyed his work. Tom loved to win and hated to lose, but he felt far more satisfied when, at the end of the season, he’d done something to help each of the boys be more prepared for the practice of life than they had been coming in.

  He wanted to believe he had shown each of them a way of thinking they had not considered before. Which was why this team disconcerted him so. Tom was, when he cared to parse through it all, alone in the world and, as he grew older, a bit of a crank: divorced, survivor of a deceased son, three years past forty. He had chosen a career in which job security was as solid as the weekly performance of hormone-addled teenagers, the least consistent people on the planet. And so sometimes he went to the bar.

  As a social strategy it was far superior to drinking alone. He realized that’s where he was heading next. Pep’s bar was the least likely place for him to escape thinking about this new pressing concern. But rolling his ankles over the frozen clods of plowed dirt on the long walk back through the stubble field, by the time he reached his truck, a cold beer had grown to near mythic proportions in his mind. He drove back through town to drop Scout off at home, and while he was in the house, he dialed Marilyn Mattoon’s number. The call went to voice mail. He drove again to town, thinking he would swing by the Mattoon farm after getting a beer and some lunch. Tom stuck to Pep’s because they served the kind of sandwiches you could find in more civilized portions of the state, and some of the best pizza he’d ever had.

  He avoided the Longbranch, where the less fastidious drunks hung out, and tried to confine his Pep’s visits to Sunday afternoons, when HDTV and NFL games could be trotted out as excuses. Tom allowed himself to characterize these appearances as a sort of deliberate penance—or the small-town equivalent of a press conference.

  It kept him humble, appearing before his collected critics once a week, absorbing their best shots face to face—although he was not so foolish as to assume that any of them saved their best shots for his face. This year so far it had been a relatively easy ride. Occasionally someone griped about the play-calling. More regularly he heard about this or that boy not getting enough playing time.

  But when the team was 10–0 and averaging a double-digit margin of victory, even the most focused critics had their busywork cut out for them. It was just after noon by the time Tom pulled up in front of Pep’s. The moment he swung open the heavy door, the acrid stench of stale cigarettes and diesel oil and the funk of unclean clothes blanched all the morning’s fresh air from his nose. It took his eyes longer to adjust from the vast brightness of the wheatfields to the murk of the bar. The room’s brown linoleum floor and dark wood wall panels soaked light from the atmosphere.

  The extravagant glory of the back bar, carved in the day when cattle was king and the people who ran cattle periodically exploded in inexplicable fits of fanciness, importing finely crafted objects of beauty by railroad, was muted by not enough light to distinguish its filigrees from its curlicues—that and a draping of soft porn beer posters covering leaded glass cupboards, along with mimeographed quipperies like “We don’t have a town drunk, we just take turns” and the display tree of blaze orange camo Pep’s ball caps, gallon jars of pickled eggs, and racks of Ruffles potato chips rising in front of it.

  A dozen people sat at or stood near the bar in loose collections, all of them men. Brad Martin and Jimmy Krock sat next to each other where the bar made a graceful, inverted L swoop, and Tom, feeling like he needed a goal, stepped amid them.

  Krock O’ looked at him and asked, “Get any?”

  “A couple roosters and a Hun down on Danreuther’s place.”

  Neither Krock O’ nor Martin—nor, for that matter, anybody else in the bar—cared. Nobody who still worked on a farm would admit to having the time to walk around the fields shooting at birds. Carrying a rifle on the combine to knock over some pale-faced antelope or mule deer you happened to bump into, maybe. Bird hunting bordered on uppity-ness.

  “That dog of yours turning out any good?” Krock O’ asked.

  “She’s a genius,” Tom said.

  “I had a good dog once. Got hit by a car and broke its leg,” Krock O’ said. “He must have figured it was just one of those crazy goddamned things that happen, because no sooner than he healed up, he wandered right back out in the road and got killed.”

  “I had a dog,” one of the farmers at the end of the bar piped up “I trained it not to eat. Almost got it trained up, then the damn thing died.”

  Nobody laughed, on purpose.

  “See the films yet?” Brad Martin asked.

  Tom could have pointed out that it would be virtually impossible to arrive home at one a.m. Saturday night/Sunday morning, hunt until noon Sunday, walk into Pep’s just after noon, and somehow squeeze three or four hours of breaking down game film into his day.

  “No,” he said, instead.

  “When you do, count how many passes Hovland drops,” Brad said. “That kid couldn’t catch the clap in Reno.”

  Tom said he’d make a note of that, but he didn’t need to watch film to recall that Carson Hovland had dropped two passes—exactly how many Alex Martin, Brad’s son, had dropped in the same game. Then he noticed that Carson Hovland’s father, Greg, sat four stools down with a pile of paper money on the bar in front of him to signal that he planned on being there a while.

  “Why, I hope you fall through your own asshole and break your neck,” Greg Hovland said to Brad. He always made Tom happy. Greg Hovland knew nothing about football. Tom doubted he knew how many games were in the playoffs. But his son, an only boy among four daughters, had gone out for football, and now Greg was trying to pay attention.

  Consequently, he was thrilled by any good thing that happened, and had to be convinced when something bad had. So far this was all friendly banter, everybody chuckling, but Tom sensed inside its warm bubble some searing edges. None of the men in this bar were afraid of swallowing too much beer or whiskey and getting on the fight. Tom overheard Greg Hovland say, “I got Coach,” and then Hal Hartack, the bartender who also owned the joint, arrived with a bottle of beer.

  “We’d give you the keys to the town after that win
Saturday,” Hartack said, “but it ain’t really the kind of place you lock.”

  Tom smiled and nodded at the beer. “Finally,” he said to Hal. “I was wondering what I’d done to piss you off.”

  Hal forced a hard little grin to indicate he found Tom cute, but not funny. “If you could get a beer here every time you wanted one,” he said, “I’d feel bad about myself. Nice game yesterday.”

  Tom knew Hal hadn’t seen it, had no idea whether the game had been nice or not and really meant, “nice win yesterday.” A one-man wrecking crew when he had played fullback and linebacker on the fabled 1989 team—Dumont’s one and only state championship squad—Hal doubled as a sort of quality control officer and unofficial keeper of the myths.

  Hal lingered in front of Tom. “You going to keep starting that Hansen kid?” he asked.

  “He’s doing fine,” Tom said, knowing that this was more ribbing than criticism. Dave Hansen had, the previous week in front of the home crowd, been beaten a couple of times by a very good defensive end from Scobey, and Matt Brunner had been spectacularly crushed on a couple of those failures. But Brunner had bounced right back up, patted Hansen on the butt, barked at him to pick it up a bit, and Dave had done his best.

  “He plays his guts out,” Tom said.

  “Sure looks like he’s got plenty of gut left over,” Brad Martin said.

  “He could hit the weight room,” Tom conceded.

  “He could hit just about anybody on the other team, make me happy,” Brad said.

  “We gonna beat Wibaux this year?” Greg Hovland called down the bar.

  “We’re going to take them one at a time,” Tom said, in a tone that indicated it was ridiculous he should even have to say it. “If that’s okay with everybody.”