Becca smiled and said, “No, no boyfriend, muscle-headed or otherwise. You’ll see this isn’t a great town for singles, though it’s fun to swipe through Tinder sometimes to see who’s cheating on their wives. What about you? Is there a lucky lady waiting for you back in the islands? Or do you just date groupies these days?”
“No,” I said. “No lucky lady. Or groupies, for that matter.”
Rome’s Marching Legion wrapped up their halftime show, and both teams returned to the field, and Becca said, “I’d better get back to my seat. God forbid I let Mom and Dad’s hotdogs get cold. We can make room for you though. Come sit with us.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I need to get home and check on Mom.” This wasn’t true, but the last time I’d seen Becca’s parents it had been, well, awkward to say the least, and I didn’t relish the thought of sitting next to them for the next ninety minutes.
“Oh, of course,” she said, grabbing my hand. “But hey, next week’s game is at Hornby, so if you’re free, maybe we can have dinner and catch up?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’d love that.”
Then I walked home, smiling like the fool I was.
“The fear, when a songwriter spills this much blood, is they’ve none left to spill.”
—Pitchfork, 10.0 review of Dear Brutus by Dear Brutus, November 23, 1997
Chapter Seven (1994)
“You guys coming to Macedonia tomorrow night?” Jackson asked Silas and me as we played Bill Walsh College Football ’95 in Silas’s parents’ garage. I was losing, 35-7 in the second quarter, because Silas was already tinkering with the hurry-up no-huddle vertical passing game he’d one day perfect. Silas and I looked at each other, then at Jackson, and shook our heads no in unison.
There is an image, often propagated by film and television, of entire towns following their high school team’s bus past the city limit sign and down some winding country road toward a distant foe, but that image is a lie. Sure, some Rome fans went to road games, and fans from other towns came to Rome, but unless the game was between close rival schools, visiting crowds were typically sparse and composed mostly of parents and girlfriends.
“Fine,” Jackson said, knocking the controller from Silas’s hand and allowing me to cut his lead to three touchdowns, “it’s not like I visited you in Children’s Hospital after you were diagnosed.”
“Yeah, because my nurses were off the hook,” Silas said, flipping Jackson off.
“That’s true,” Jackson said then turned to me and asked, “You’re not going either?”
I shrugged and said, “I don’t even know where Macedonia is.”
“It’s near Glencoe.”
“That doesn’t help.”
“Fine,” Jackson said, grabbing an iron from Silas’s dad’s golf bag and making practice swings, “but I plan to pick off another pass tomorrow night, and this time, I’m definitely going to high-step, and you’ll both miss it.”
“We’ll see it on SportsCenter,” Silas said, and Jackson knocked the controller out of his hand again, but this time, I couldn’t take advantage.
“What the hell are you two going to do if you don’t go to the game?” Jackson asked.
“We could go to Main Street,” I said to Silas, who shook his head and said, “No one goes on Friday nights.”
“My sister heard they’re shutting Main Street down,” Jackson said.
“Bullshit,” Silas said. “That rumor starts every fall.”
Jackson shrugged and Silas said, “I can’t speak for Brinks, though I assume he has an evening of masturbatory delight planned, but my folks are taking me to tour Newberry College.”
“Newberry College?” Jackson barked.
“Yeah, it’s in South Carolina,” Silas said.
“I don’t care where it is,” Jackson said. “We’re supposed to go to Alabama together.”
“Calm down, Beavis,” Silas said. “We’re still going to Alabama. Mom and Dad met at Newberry, and they’ve always wanted me to see it, that’s all. It’s no big deal.”
“Fine,” Jackson said, “are you visiting a college too, Brinks?”
“No,” I said. Truth was I hadn’t given much thought to college. My mom was an accountant, she went to Auburn on scholarship, and up until sophomore year, she’d pushed me hard in school. But the whole Dad leaving for his secretary thing messed her up, and she no longer excelled at the finer points of parenting. I knew I wanted to go to college, preferably one far away from here, but how that would actually happen I did not know.
“Then why can’t you go to Macedonia?” Jackson asked, and it took me a moment to realize he was still talking about his stupid football game.
“I’m going to hang out with Mom,” I said. “She’s been acting weird lately, because of the divorce I think.” I knew Jackson wouldn’t give me shit about wanting to spend time with my upset mother, and he didn’t.
“Yeah, that’s fine,” Jackson said, like I needed his permission not to drive to Macedonia and watch him ride the bench, then he knocked the controller from Silas’s hand again, but this time, I somehow gave up a touchdown in the process.
~ ~ ~
“I don’t feel like cooking tonight. Where do you want to eat?”
It was Friday evening, and I’d been lying on my bed in boxer shorts playing Mortal Kombat II since school let out three hours earlier.
“I don’t know,” I said to my mom, who hadn’t cooked since we’d moved to Rome in July but apparently did want to eat, which I took as an improvement. “Taco Bell?”
“Marcus, when someone asks where you want to eat, they’re assuming you won’t suggest Taco Bell,” Mom said then looked on in horror as Kung Lao used his hat to slice Johnny Cage in two. I put down the controller and said, “Fine, you pick a place.”
“I will,” she said. “We’re leaving in ten minutes. Oh, and put on some pants. The nicer places around here require pants.”
She picked Morrison’s, a cafeteria-style restaurant in the Riverton Mall, where we were the youngest customers by at least sixty years. I ordered meatloaf, the first green vegetables I’d eaten in over a month, and a plate of jiggling blue Jell-O. Mom paid and I found a table and we ate in silence for a few minutes until she asked, “How’s school going?”
I’d just finished my tenth day at Rome, and this was the first time she’d bothered to ask how things were going.
“Fine,” I said, because that’s all I ever said when she asked questions like that, which might explain why she rarely bothered to ask them.
“Just fine?” she asked.
“Yeah. I mean, everyone is football crazy, but no one is picking on me or anything.” This was a lie, but the last thing I needed was her calling the school to narc on Deacon Cassburn for occasionally shoving me in the hallway.
“They were football obsessed when I went there too,” Mom said. “Is Mrs. Sulla still teaching?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Mr. Ruga?”
“No. No Mr. Ruga.”
My mom graduated from Rome twenty-six years ago, and odds were none of the teachers who taught her were still around, but she listed seven or eight more anyway. Then she delved into a story about her and some friends throwing eggs at houses one Halloween and how a policeman pulled them over, found ten dozen eggs in the trunk, but let them go because the mayor’s son was driving the car. I’d stopped listening to her halfway through though, because that’s when I noticed Becca Walsh and her parents having dinner across the room.
My mom laughed. “It was so stupid. We could have gone to jail for—Marcus, who are you looking at?” She turned and looked behind her, and before I could beg her to stop, Becca looked up from her plate and saw us both staring her way. “Shit,” I said, and my mom slapped my hand. Then to my horror, Becca said something to her parents and walked our way while I prayed for an extinction-level asteroid.
“She’s coming this way, Mom, so be cool. Okay? Please.”
My mom winke
d in a decidedly uncool fashion just as Becca reached our table and said, “Hello, Marcus.”
“Hey Becca,” I said, and Mom coughed until I added, “This is my mom, Beverly Brinks. Mom, this is Becca Walsh. She’s in my class at Rome.”
“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Brinks,” Becca said. “Your son is my Friday night boyfriend.”
Mom raised an eyebrow and said, “Well, what are you doing here with me, Marcus? Shouldn’t you two be on a date?”
I gave Mom my best please-shut-up look then turned to Becca who, much to my surprise, said, “Yes, we should be. You can pick me up at that table in five minutes. I drove separately, so I can take you home later. Nice to meet you, Mrs. Brinks. See you in five minutes, Marcus.”
After Becca left the table, Mom looked at me and asked, “Why didn’t you tell me you had a girlfriend?”
“Because it’s a joke, Mom. She dates the quarterback, and he’s busy on Friday nights, winning football games and stuff.”
“Well,” Mom said, less than discreetly looking back at Becca's table, “I think she likes you.”
“Yeah, well, you thought Milli Vanilli were good singers.”
Mom laughed and handed me a ten-dollar bill and said, “Have fun on your fake date.”
~ ~ ~
“Relax your eyes.”
“I’m trying!”
Becca and I left Morrison’s, and we stopped at Riverton Art to stare at their display of 3D posters. Becca swore she saw all sorts of things in the images. I did not believe her.
“You have to look through the poster.”
“You keep saying that, but what does it even mean?”
“Pretend you’re looking at something behind the poster, something in the distance.”
“That’s what I’m doing. I think.”
“And you don’t see the waterfall? It’s right there.”
“You’re lying,” I said.
“You’re hopeless,” she said.
We walked on, wading through hordes of pre-teen guys at the mall for a baseball card show, and Becca said, “How cool are we, by the way, eating dinner with our parents on a Friday night.”
“The coolest,” I said, following her into Camelot Music. Becca took a pair of headphones off the new release tower and listened to a band called Toadies. She bobbed her head a little then said too loud, “This is really good, listen,” but instead of handing me the headphones, she just pulled one side off her face and had me lean in close enough to hear.
“Wait, is this about vampires?” I asked.
“I kind of hope so,” she said. “If not, it’s a little disturbing.”
She smelled incredible, and I closed my eyes, not so much to enjoy Toadies, who were good, but because I might never be that close to Becca Walsh again, and I wanted to relish every second. However, by the time Toadies were asking if I wanted to die for the third time, I lost balance and stumbled backward into a CD rack, all but ruining the moment.
I used half my ten bucks to buy us both an Orange Julius, and we sipped them on our way to Aladdin’s Castle, the mall’s arcade, where I spent the rest of my money trying and failing to win Becca a stuffed cow from the claw machine.
“It’s the thought that counts,” Becca said, as the useless claw lifted the cow six inches before dropping it for the last time.
Later, after we spent ten minutes in the bookstore finding Waldo, we stopped to see one of her friends who worked at Hibbett Sporting Goods then sat on a bench under a ficus tree near the center fountain and people watched.
“Why didn’t you go to Macedonia?” I asked her.
“Because there’s nothing in the world I hate more than watching football,” she said.
“But you’re dating the quarterback.”
“Not tonight,” Becca said and leaned her head on my shoulder. I knew then I was going to get myself killed.
She kept her head on my shoulder and said, “I tell Deacon my parents won’t let me drive that far, and I tell my parents I want to spend time with them. Deacon is none the wiser, plus I score some points with Mom and Dad. Besides, I’ll see him later tonight, and he’ll tell me all about the game in excruciating detail. Then he’ll tell me all about it again on Saturday, then on Sunday, and Monday.”
The mall closed at nine, but we stayed on the bench because Becca wanted to see if they’d lock us inside. A security guard walked over and begged us to leave though, so we did. Becca's red, two-door Saturn waited outside Morrison’s, and we left the mall, driving aimlessly through Riverton, passing street after street of beautiful old homes.
“I’d love to live in an old house like that one day,” Becca said.
“In Riverton?”
“No, not in Riverton. Other cities have old houses too, you know.”
“They’re so big though. They’d take forever to clean. And can you imagine the upkeep?”
“Keep your practicality out of my dreams, Marcus.”
We crossed Main Street, which was empty as promised, before winding our way up the mountain toward something called Winona Falls.
“Have you ever been here?” Becca asked as we parked.
I shook my head no, and she explained, “Legend has it, a Cherokee girl named Winona wanted to marry a boy from another tribe, but her father, the chief, wouldn’t allow it, so in overly dramatic teenage fashion, she jumped off the falls to her death.”
“That’s terrible,” I said.
“I’m pretty sure it didn’t happen,” Becca said as we walked through the entrance toward the falls, where a larger-than-life statue of a Native American woman stood, forever frozen mid-leap, “but it makes a nice tourist attraction.”
We crossed the bridge over the creek and sat on a bench listening to water rush over the hundred-foot falls. “So,” Becca asked after a moment, “how do you like Rome so far?”
“It’s okay, I guess.”
“Yeah, it sucks,” Becca said, and I laughed.
“This is nice though,” I said, motioning toward the falls but hoping Becca knew I meant the night in general.
“This has been nice,” she said. “If it were always this nice, I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to leave for college.”
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Becca said. “My stupid sister went to Jacksonville State and lived at home. Of course, Mom and Dad worship the ground she walks on, so I can see why she didn’t want to leave. I’m going somewhere far away though.”
“Silas is visiting some Lutheran college in South Carolina this weekend,” I told her.
“Way farther away than South Carolina,” Becca said, and I got the feeling she didn’t think of college so much as further education but education farther away.
“What about you?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but far away doesn’t sound bad.”
Becca glanced at her watch, and I glanced at mine. It was a quarter past ten. “Well, Friday Night Boyfriend,” she said, “I’d better get you home. Deacon expects me at the field house when the bus gets back. God, I hope they won. If not, he’ll be in a shit mood.”
I hadn’t thought about Deacon in a while, and hearing his name reminded me I was not out with my girlfriend, but someone else’s, and my mood darkened. Then I shouldn’t have but asked, “Why do you date him? He’s kind of a dick.”
Becca looked at me for what felt like a full minute before finally smiling and saying, “He can be kind of a dick. And Rome kind of sucks. But he does worship me, and socially speaking, there are some benefits to dating the starting quarterback. I sort of figure, if I’m going to live in this hell hole, I might as well be the queen. Does that make me a terrible person?”
“Yes,” I said, and she stuck her tongue out at me, and when I smiled, she touched my arm and said, “Thanks for a lovely evening, Friday Night Boyfriend,” then she kissed my cheek.
We drove home, blasting Green Day and singing along, and she even walked me to my door. But there was no second kiss
, just a hug and a promise to talk to me on Monday.
A promise she broke.
Chapter Eight (2017)
“Son, I do appreciate the gesture, but you don’t have to wear cologne for my benefit.”
My mother looked like a child in the king-sized bed she’d slept in mostly alone for the last twenty-three years. She was sixty-seven, not old, but she wouldn’t see her sixty-eighth birthday next summer. Her doctor told me privately not to count on Christmas.
“Wait, can you smell my cologne?” I asked Mom, straightening my tie in her dresser mirror. “It’s not too strong, is it?”
“Not as strong as middle school, when you’d take baths in Drakkar Noir,” Mom said and coughed out a laugh. “Marcus, do you have a date?”
“I might,” I said, and with considerable effort, she sat up to scrutinize my clothes.
“You could lose the tie,” she said. “And you really might want to dab off some of that cologne.”
I pulled off the tie and tried to soak up some of the cologne with a damp washcloth from her bathroom. “It’s been a while,” I said. “This is my first date in ... wow, three years I think.”
“Jim Morrison never had trouble finding women,” my mother teased.
“Yeah,” I said, “and he died at twenty-seven.”
Mom shrugged, and I asked how she felt.
“Never better,” she lied. “If your date has a brother, maybe we could double.”
“A sister,” I said. “But seriously, you’re feeling okay? You don’t mind if I’m out for a few hours?”
“Marcus James Brinks, are you asking if I think I might die while you’re out gallivanting around town?”
“What? No. I—”
“Marcus, stop lying; you’re terrible at it. Of course that’s what you’re asking, and if you’d like an honest answer, I feel shitty. But I’ve felt shitty for months now, so I’ve no reason to believe the next three shitty hours will do me in.”
Rita Bell, a former classmate of mine at Rome, and one of my mother’s hospice nurses, entered the room, and Mom added, “But if I do, I’ll make sure Rita doesn’t call and ruin your dinner.”
The Rome of Fall Page 6