Broken Field Page 6

  Silence followed. A few heads turned to Hal.

  “I don’t know,” Greg Hovland said, “I always try drinkin’ em all one at a time, and that often turns out badly.”

  The truth was, Tom wished they would talk to him about anything but football. He had grown up in a town very much like this one, albeit nearly 250 miles away, and though he understood it might be perverse to imagine that he wanted to sit in a bar and have grimy, unwashed men in overalls make disparaging comments about his wife leaving him—as opposed to his football team—that was, in fact, at the heart of it what he hoped might happen here on any given Sunday. There was something validating in knowing nobody was holding back anymore.

  In three years, it had yet to happen, and this Sunday wouldn’t break the stretch. When Tom finally made it home, the light on his answering machine blinked a menacing semaphore. The message said, “Coach Warner, this is Marilyn Mattoon again. I called this morning? I really think you should come look at these photos.”

  Although the parents of his students would not appreciate intoxicated phone calls from school staff, he felt like he could fake it enough to call her back.

  “Mrs. Mattoon,” he said when she answered. “I’m sorry. I got your call this morning when I got back from some bird hunting, and I tried to call you back. Would have been about noon, one o’clock, somewhere in there.”

  “That’s right, I had to run to the grocery.”

  “What the, uh, what’s bothering you?”

  “Somebody’s got to see these pictures from the bus ride last night,” Marilyn Mattoon said. Tom was trying to remember if she was always such a scold, but realized he didn’t have much experience with her.

  “It’s a little late tonight. I’ve got … things I have to do.”

  “I don’t know if I should show these to you or straight to the superintendent.”

  That lit a bulb in Tom’s mind. “Okay, look I’ll come over … half hour be okay?”

  “I’ll be here,” Marilyn Mattoon said.

  Tom headed for the bathroom to find a bottle of Scope.

  * * *

  By the end of first period Monday morning, Josie Frehse—rhymes with “breeze,” she liked to say, as in “Call me the …” which she knew from the Lynyrd Skynyrd LPs her dad sometimes played on his still-viable turntable, although the boys, when they were feeling mean, just called her “Frigid”—had heard four different things had happened to Wyatt Aarstad on the bus on the way home from the game Saturday night. Any one of them gave her reason to do some thinking.

  She might, at long last, have to make a move she’d been thinking about for a while. Her brother Jared had told her that one, it was all a big goof. Coach Warner had fallen asleep and Wyatt Aarstad had agreed to let the guys tape his arms with athletic tape. Then, when the bus stopped for gas, they were going to quickly tape him to the overhead rack where all the pads and helmets and shoes and other equipment was stowed for the drive. They thought this would be a funny picture for the yearbook. But, Jared had said, things got a little out of hand. Jared had bailed and gone into the convenience store—and that fact alone told her something not good had happened.

  When she pressed him, he said, “Ask your boyfriend.” Later, Josie had heard that Wyatt had, two, been taped, hung from the rack, but then had his pants stripped to his ankles, and that Ainsley Martin and Britnee Mattoon had taken turns posing for pics, smiling by his naked butt cheeks—which, Josie thought … yick. The third thing she heard—told to her by Britnee Mattoon herself, who’d after all been there on the bus for part of it and had heard the story firsthand for other parts—was that, while she personally had done no such yicky things, some yicky things had, in fact, happened to Wyatt Aarstad.

  Some of the guys had stood on a seat in front of him while Ainsley Martin swung Wyatt back and forth, forcing his face into the boys’ crotches. This one deeply puzzled Josie. She could not understand why simulation of gay oral sex would make football players feel more manly than they already felt after beating up another football team all day.

  The fourth thing she heard had happened—and this she lumped together as the fourth thing, but it actually came in flurries of texts and chats throughout the afternoon and evening Sunday and several variations and possibilities were brought to light so that she couldn’t point to one thing and say, Okay, this was fourth, but rather thought of the underlying horribleness of the basic act that was revealed to her as the fourth thing and the variations as endless and non-verifiable—was that different portions of what she’d already heard were true, but that additionally either (a) a broomstick (sort of unlikely on a school bus) or (b) a stick (possible), or (c) a pen (most probably, in Josie’s opinion) or (d) a candy bar (really?) was actually poked into Wyatt’s anus by either 1, some senior football players (though nobody was taking credit) or 2, a couple cheerleaders (which could include Ainsley Martin and Britnee Mattoon, one of whom denied it), all of which, it did not escape Josie’s immediate opinion, was sort of like rape.

  “Isn’t that, like, rape?” she said to Britnee Mattoon, standing huddled in the hallway with a clutch of girls discussing the situation in hushed but rapid tones before the next class period bell rang.

  “It’s not rape,” Britnee said. “I mean, guys can’t get raped?”

  “What about in prison?” Josie said.

  “That’s different,” Britnee said, her frown a dismissal. “They were just goofing. It wasn’t, like, rape. It wasn’t, like, serious.”

  “I don’t think it matters,” Josie said. “If someone put a candy bar in you … ?”

  “It’s different,” Britnee said.

  “How, really?” Josie asked.

  “Who knows if it even happened?” Britnee said.

  “Well, you were there.”

  “I didn’t put no candy bar nowhere,” Britnee said. “What happened before I got there or after I left I don’t know about.”

  Josie felt less sanguine. Poor Wyatt Aarstad, was all she had been able to think about it all so far; that and who were the shitsuckers responsible? Or, more to the point, was her shitsucker boyfriend Matt Brunner involved in some major way, and if so, would this be the thing that finally caused her to make the break and walk away? Was today the day she would have to make that decision and end the part of her life—the last two years, essentially, the only two that really had mattered much—in which she and Matt were a couple? She thought about it in those sweeping, dramatic terms: the end of her life so far. She had been thinking about what a breakup with Matt might mean for a while now.

  On the one hand, in a place like Dumont, there were not many Matt Brunners—quarterback, power forward, handsome in his way, well-liked by adults. And all by themselves, Matt and his friends, including her brother, were perfectly normal human beings capable of singing country songs and holding someone’s hand and rubbing a dog’s belly. But put two or three of them in a group and they could grow dangerously stupid and talk too much about things they didn’t even really know if they wanted, like certain rifles and anal sex. That was even more true when one of the two was Matt.

  Put any one of them with Matt, and stupidity was always the Third Musketeer. That could be fun when it was cliff-diving at the reservoir, or hooky-bobbing, or making a campfire lively and full of entertainment. When you were with Matt, everybody was paying attention to you—everybody except, usually, Matt. To get Matt to pay attention it was most convenient to cause some sort of pissed-off drama or to wind up semi-naked at the end of the evening. She had to admit that when she and Matt were alone together, it was not the sort of romance she had envisioned for herself.

  She found herself talking about things she had to work hard to feign an interest in—shotguns and video games and jokes that were funny or not funny and sometimes downright disturbing. She found herself listening to talk about coyotes in traps, or virulent strains of antipathy toward Indians from Fort Miles, the latter particularly disappointing since, to her knowledge, Matt had never actu
ally made the attempt to engage any one of these people in a conversation (How could you, was his retort, they’re always too drunk to walk, let alone talk). Not that he was incapable of sweetness.

  Not that he didn’t occasionally flash glimpses of vulnerability. And that’s what kept her in it, at this stage of the game, those moments when he admitted fear and doubt—when he told her he vomited before calculus tests; or that his knees literally went weak when he walked into his house after he’d had a bad game, for fear of what his father was going to say; or that, early on, he’d felt butterflies in his stomach, like pre-game jitters, every time he’d wanted to kiss her. Those confessions allowed Josie to hold out hope that he would keep revealing more and more of his tender places.

  Matt would go to UM or MSU and play football or basketball, and she would go to one or the other and play basketball, and one day he would leave behind the foolishness of team sports and feats of pickup truck derring-do and eventually most of what they did together would be to take care of each other. The boy would grow up.

  He would almost have to. Didn’t everyone? She felt like she was growing up every day, even when she didn’t want to. So she would stay levelheaded here. None of her information so far had specifically implicated Matt in whatever had really happened on the bus, and the information had flowed liberally, given that basically everybody in school was pouring it out liberally, whether they knew any facts about it or not.

  Which made her think poor Wyatt Aarstad even more acutely. Josie promised herself she was going to spend some time thinking about how Matt was involved as soon as things settled out and some sort of consistent story emerged. The thing was, it mattered. This seemed like the kind of thing over which you had absolutely no control, but that could change your life completely.

  This at a time when Josie had already embarked on another secret mission involving Matt and his propensity to make people feel like shit. In fact, during second period on Monday, enervated by the jangle of news about Matt and the others, Josie found herself seated in Coach Warner’s American history class, working on a note. A note-note. Not a text or a DM or a post.

  Handwritten. Trying to assemble the note dispelled her usual sluggishness—fatigue from the weekend’s volleyball tourney, early chores this morning—most notably because she couldn’t let anybody see her writing it. She started the note by writing “Matt,” surrounded by lots of hearts-and-clouds doodles on the top margin. She traced Matt’s name over several times, and surrounded it with an outward pointing halo of rays meant to simulate the sun or some radiance. But she had every intention of tearing that top section off before delivering the note to its actual recipient.

  * * *

  After school, Tom walked out to the field to tell Slab Rideg to run practice—just the usual conditioning, basic plays, nothing new, nothing fancy—and then meet him to look at film for the upcoming Absarokee game. The winds plowed up by the weekend’s low front had settled. It was something he first sensed—the way the magpies flew in straight arcs instead of rowing up and down rollercoaster trajectories; the pasty smell of wet clay allowed to build in his nose; clouds hovering in the pale blue sky as if they had been painted there; the fieldgrass standing upright, no undulant sway—and then understood.

  A huge flock of geese floated high overhead, rearranging themselves like a drifting musical score, black notes on blue. Instead of the violent leaning of the wind, Tom felt upright as the gravel crunched under his shoes. The high school stood almost empty, an aftermath scene, Tom felt, in the absence of the streaming of students who had just coursed it. He reentered the school’s side door, into the gymnasium, and immediately smelled athletics: the antiseptic used to clean the locker rooms, the wax on the basketball floor, the lingering odor of decades of sweat.

  He had always loved these smells. His footsteps echoed as he crossed the gym, making him feel suddenly larger than he was. From the ceiling hung three banners announcing Dumont’s Class C basketball state runner-up finishes in 1954, 1967, and 1988, and the big framed crimson and blue banner trumpeting the football state championship of 1989. He could add another one, and that thought should have comforted him, but instead he felt sick—yesterday’s beer like a cold wire coiled in his stomach on top of roiling dread.

  He went to his classroom, checked his personal email account on his laptop, saw the name in the inbox: Sophie Warner. SoLo he had called her for so long. There was a time when he had loved seeing that name pop up. Now he cringed. He stared at the bold font and thought for a long while. Nobody, he thought, is who they want to be after a divorce. He clicked on the email.

  Heard you’re still undefeated! I know that means a lot to you, so congratulations. I hope you’re happy. I wish we could just talk. I feel bad about so many things.

  Tom closed the email and looked away from the screen, thinking that a life is full of options and interests and they’re not always the same thing. The exclamation point bothered him more than anything. Tom had the gift of pouring trust into people who didn’t deserve it—as his football team was demonstrating—which created a sort of pissed-off optimism that he struggled to avoid. He battled not to confuse the profound with the abstract, but this email smeared all the lines and landed him flat on his ass.

  Sophie, of course, could not have known what was happening. She probably thought she was catching him on a high, the end of a winning season, and might be genuinely congratulating him. He wanted to believe, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, in her best self. He wanted to believe she had grown past bitterness and fear and left that terrible island of aloneness he had admittedly stranded her on—the only hope that kept her in the world of his mind. Maybe she had wanted to be in touch all fall, but had harnessed the impulse until there was the landmark, an undefeated season, a big playoff win. Maybe she was that sweet, waiting for something to praise him about.

  Maybe a thing he’d been thinking for a while could be true: maybe there was a difference between hypocrisy and unresolved contradiction. Outside of her relationship with her son, Sophie never had been able to handle prolonged emotional interaction. Sophie needed the mundane, chased the stupid sexy sidelong glance, anything to cheapen the notion that in loving something genuinely she might lose. Then, of course, she had. Tom gathered his papers and walked down the hall to the office of the high school principal, David Cates, who also happened to be the school’s superintendent.

  He had brought the camera here at the start of the day, on the way to his first class, and he knew Cates would be waiting for him. He rapped on the doorframe, ducking his head into the office. Cates nodded him in. The camera sat on the desk in front of him. Tom already knew the images on it, couldn’t get them out of his mind. There had been several of young, skinny Wyatt Aarstad, wrists and ankles taped to the rack that ran above the bus seats for storing books and backpacks. Wyatt, a scrawny freshman boy, proved a mystery to Tom, exerting concentrated effort on the field, though he seemed to expect defeat.

  And still he was mouthy as the day is long. In the first few images, Wyatt clowned, laughing, making faces. There followed a series of photos of naked buttocks, separated from context, suspended in imagination. A few seemed to be Wyatt’s, as evidenced by the suspended nature of the body and glimpses of the white athletic tape they’d used to secure him. In others, at least some boys had stood on the bus seats and held their own dropped-trouser asses to Wyatt’s face.

  In one photo, something brown protruded from buttock cheeks that must have been Wyatt’s, forever altering Tom’s reaction to the brand “Butterfinger.” In another, a boy stood in front of Wyatt with his pants unzipped in the front. Tom could see the base of a penis. There were more.

  After he collected the camera from Marilyn Mattoon the night before, he had thought about deleting the pictures. He could tell Mrs. Mattoon the boys had been pranking, had been mooning each other. Boys did that sometimes in the locker room. It didn’t seem crippling. She had told him she’d not taken a very close look at the
photos—once she’d seen what they were, she’d turned the camera off, disgusted, and called him. But a drearier reality dulled that impulse.

  But letting this go might mean that somebody else—maybe a teammate, maybe a classmate, maybe years from now a wife or a small child—would one day pay more dearly than Wyatt Aarstad. Bullying started young and rarely planed out. How serious was this case? The complicating factor was Wyatt himself, a kid who just wanted to fit in and thought braying like a mule would be the ticket.

  How could the laughing, goofing Wyatt in the early pictures reconcile with the few face shots from the later images—those Jackass movie looks of disgust, maybe, but certainly not surprise? Tom walked into Dave Cates’s office and sat down. A man whose once-black hair had gone silver and gained swept-back waves, Cates sat straight up behind his desk, doing his best to appear tall. Cates had never been an athlete. Like Tom, he had moved to Dumont from somewhere else in Montana.

  “Comes now the conquering hero,” he said, his voice nasal and in a high register. “Have the city fathers approached you yet about erecting a likeness in the center of Broadway? We’re thinking of calling it ‘Man, Unvanquished.’ Just you with that third-down scowl on your face, twelve feet tall against the sky.”

  “That was a Saturday idea. It’s a different Monday now.”

  Cates’s sigh telegraphed a slight disappointment that they were cutting straight to the chase. “The big thing,” Cates said, “is that it’s the school’s camera. That and Bill Rideg not being on that bus.”

  “Both my fault,” Tom said, and then made a statement that had been tangled in his mind since he’d seen the pictures but that he dreaded pushing past his lips. “I think I might have to submit my resignation.”

  “Quarterfinal game this Saturday,” Cates said. It sounded close to a question.

  “I didn’t pick the timing,” Tom said, a protest to head off a protest. “I’m not trying to tell you your job, but if it were me, I might be firing me. I mean, I wouldn’t blame you for sending a strong message here.”