The Bust

by Jamie Bennett

  “I’ve moved around some, too,” he said. “A few different teams.”

  “That’s how I knew you,” I told him. “From when I lived in Oklahoma. You were the quarterback for the football team and you came in one night to the place where I was a barback. Everyone freaked out. I’m not much of a sports fan, but it was exciting to have a famous person there.”

  “Yeah, a famous person.”

  “You were wearing a purple fur coat, a really fluffy one,” I said. “I was kind of in awe of it. You looked—”

  “I know how I looked,” he broke in.

  “Do you still have that coat?” I asked curiously. Today, he wasn’t very purple fur-ish. No, his outfit was much more sub…sub…it was sub-something, but I couldn’t pick out the word I was looking for.

  “I don’t wear that anymore.” Kayden stood up suddenly and dislodged Emma, who growled. She really didn’t like having her sleep disturbed. He strode toward the exit, avoiding the boxes, and I watched his back. His coat, now just a black one, was smudged with grey dust from the couch.

  Subdued! That was the word I’d been trying to think of. He looked much more subdued. Purple fur wouldn’t have worked at all with the grey shirt and jeans he had on. I liked the black coat better, even if it did show the dirt a little bit.

  When he got to the door, he paused. “Thank you for accepting my apology,” he said, very stiffly. “I appreciate that.”

  “Sure,” I agreed. “Good luck with everything. With whatever you’re doing next, I mean.” I followed him out into the rain, which did seem to be lessening. His car was parked on the side of the dirt road and was splattered with mud from going over the washboard of bumps on Rosewood Trail. Even so, it was the biggest, fanciest car I’d ever seen close up. He didn’t look back at me as he got into it and took off down the road, bouncing and rattling. I watched until the car disappeared and then went back inside.

  “Well, that was unusual,” I remarked to Emma. She still seemed annoyed at being woken when Kayden jumped up to leave. “I certainly didn’t expect to have Kayden Matthews in my house again. I didn’t actually expect him the first time, either,” I admitted. “I think he’s genuinely sorry, don’t you? And I love his car. I could get to Roy’s in no time at all in that thing!” Emma made an angry sound. She hated when I went to Roy’s Tavern to work, because she was alone for so long.

  “We’ll probably never see him again,” I said. “That’s too bad. We don’t know that many people here. Maybe it would have been a little awkward, though—you know, us being friends with the guy who broke into our house. He probably has a lot of football player friends, too, and we wouldn’t fit in. We’re not football players,” I reminded her.

  I put the piles I’d cleared off the couch back onto the cushion in order to recreate the path through the living room. As I did, I thought back to when I’d seen Kayden when I’d worked in the bar in Oklahoma. He’d been the center of a pack of people, and they spent more on our expensive liquor in a few hours than we’d usually taken in for a whole month. In fact, I’d had to run down to the basement more than a few times for gold-wrapped tequila, extra vodka in the silver boxes, and an armful of the dusty bottles of scotch that were kept way at the back of the storage room because usually no one ordered it (at twenty-five bucks for a one-finger pour).

  “Speaking of getting to Roy’s, I do have to go,” I told Em, and she was definitely annoyed to hear that. I went to the bedroom to put on the bright pink shirt that announced that “I drink at Roys” and dug a sweatshirt and raincoat out of the closet to head off to work.

  “What do you know about Kayden Matthews?” I asked my boss during a lull that night. It was quiet since the heavy rain was keeping a lot of the bikers at home.

  “Asshole,” Roy told me briefly. “Reach down those glasses for me.”

  I towered over Roy and I’d never understood why he kept everything on such high shelves. “Why do you think he's an asshole?” I asked as I passed him the glasses. “Didn't he play for the Woodsman? I thought everybody around here loved them.” That was one of the first things I’d noticed when I moved to this place: they were crazy about the football team. It felt almost like the religious fever—fervor?—of where I’d lived in Montana, except, of course, that the people here probably had heat in the winter. And I hadn’t seen a yurt yet.

  “He played only one season for the Woodsmen,” Roy told me. “Came in when Davis Blake got hurt.”

  Oh, I’d heard a lot about that Blake guy. He was the Woodsmen quarterback who was apparently considering retirement to hang with his growing family. There was a lot of worry around the bar about who would replace him.

  “And?” I hinted to Roy.

  “And nothing. Matthews was crappy, Blake healed up. Matthews has started in the league for the last few years but he’s never any good. A bust.”

  “He had to be pretty good. I don’t think he would have been a starter for a professional football team if he was terrible!” I protested.

  “If you already know everything, why are you asking? Get back to work,” Roy snarled, but his bark was worse than his bite. I patted him on the cheek and he hid his smile with a horrible scowl.

  I did cover the two tables we had that night, but I was mostly thinking about Kayden Matthews. When I took the break that I had forced Roy to give me, I went into his dank little office, moved an ashtray and a pile of invoices out of the way, and looked up Kayden again on the old computer.

  His big smile was the first image that popped onto the screen. I studied his grin and smiled back at him. Didn’t he seem so happy? It was an old picture, because his jersey had the name of his college on it. His face was fuller, less angular, and…yeah, mostly it was the happiness that made him look so different. Right next to that picture was his booking photo from when he’d been arrested after getting dragged out of my house, and that was one of the saddest things I’d ever seen. He looked totally discompopulated—hang on. I opened another window to look up that word and make sure I had it right.

  Ok, he looked totally discombobulated and confused in the picture from the jail, like he still wasn’t sure where he was or what was happening. He was also pale with big smears of purple under his eyes, which were filled with giant, dark pupils. He looked sick.

  He’d been better when he’d been at my house today, I thought. Not like he was actually going to fall over, ill, not exactly. Now he looked so tired. Exhausted. And sad. The sadness on his face, the emptiness…

  Pounding on the office door made me jump. “Am I paying you to paint your nails in there?” Roy hollered.

  “Do we have customers?” I yelled back, grinning at the scarred door.

  “Break’s over!” I heard him mutter about lazy employees as he walked away.

  Yeah, the break was over. I went back to the bar, where we didn’t have any new customers but Roy was frowning angrily and asking if I’d enjoyed my spa day.

  “You and I should go to a spa,” I said, studying his pores in the faint light. It would have been gloomy inside the tavern on the sunniest day, but it was for the best. Nobody needed to get a clear view of some of the things that went on in this place. “You know, your skin would look a lot better if you quit smoking.” His pores were one thing, but his coloring was even worse. He looked almost ill, like Kayden in his booking photo.

  “You think I give a single shit about the condition of my skin?” He patted the cigarettes in his front pocket to assure himself that they were still there, then pointed to one of the taps. “Check the coupler on that keg.”

  “Why don’t you do it?”

  “I don’t want to ruin my manicure,” he told me, and was already drawing the pack out of his pocket. “I’m taking my break too, since we all have to have them.”

  I stood behind the bar and idly wiped the counter with a dirty towel. I wondered where Kayden Matthews had driven off to in that fancy car, and what he was doing tonight. Not hanging out in a place like Roy’s, that was for sure. I h
oped he was getting some rest, but I wondered what he would think about when he closed his eyes. My mom had always wished me sweet dreams when she kissed me goodnight, but I had a feeling that Kayden’s dreams weren’t very sweet at all.

  Chapter 2

  Kayden

  “Yes? Can I help you?”

  The woman at the desk eyed me and then recognition showed on her face. That was the reaction that I got a lot around here, since I’d had that one shit-sandwich season starting for the local football team. Before, I’d liked the moment when their eyes had widened and maybe they had started to smile, but now…

  “Kayden Matthews?” she ventured. “That’s who you are, right?”

  “Yeah. I’m here to meet, uh…” I checked my phone, searching through the emails to find the one about my volunteer assignment, my court-ordered community service. One of the lawyers or lawyers’ assistants had sent me the information and I’d arrived at this ugly little building behind the county recycling center at nine AM, earlier than I’d been up in months. Funny enough, it was close to Rosewood Trail, the hoarder house I’d vandalized, where that woman lived with her friendly dog. “Uh…” I repeated, and kept scrolling through my inbox. I’d never really been in charge of my schedule before, because I’d had a whole team of people who kept my life going the way it was supposed to. They’d tried, anyway. “Uh…”

  “I think you’re here for Jamison Kelly?” the woman suggested. “He’s in our schedule for a meeting but the name of his Helping Hand adult is blank. I guess they were trying not to publicize that you were coming this morning.” Now her eyes lit up, and I was pretty sure that she was going to start publicizing it herself.

  “Yeah, Jamison Kelly,” I parroted. The name did sound a little familiar, like maybe I’d glanced at it in the email about me starting my community service and reminding me that I’d better get myself there on time because the parole officer was watching this case very carefully. I’d pretty much read that email, but I was still having trouble focusing on stuff, especially when I didn’t give a shit about this kid or being his Helping Hand. But I’d shown up anyway, because that brief experience of being locked up was worse than I could have imagined, one of the worst experiences of my life. Anyway, the days were long in my apartment, so this was something to fill one of them.

  “Jamison is a great kid,” the receptionist told me. “Eleven years old and really friendly. You’ll like him.”

  “Yeah,” I said again. I didn’t care if I liked him. I was here for the required number of hours, and completing them was all I was interested in—but that thought did remind me that I had no idea what I was actually supposed to do with him. I looked around the dingy building, home of “Helping Hands of Northern Michigan.” As stupid and potentially perverted as it sounded, I was now a “Helping Hand” myself, the adult who was supposed to be some kind of mentor for an unloved kid whose parents had made him come to this sad place on a Saturday morning.

  Me, a mentor. It was some kind of a sick joke on the kid, what’s-his-name. Jason. Jeremy. “What’s supposed to happen now? We just hang out in here all day?” I asked.

  “Um, you might ask Jamison what he wants to do. Most mentors have a plan or a project in mind, something fun, but he may have homework or other school stuff.” Her eyes slid over to an office with the lights off inside. “Our program director is out right now because her dog had to go to the emergency vet, otherwise she’d be here to meet you and introduce you to Jamison. He’s a great kid.”

  “So you said.” I checked the time on my phone. Two minutes of community service were already up. “Will the director be back to sign off on the papers to prove that I was here today?”

  “Yes, she’ll do that. She’s almost always at her desk but her dog is elderly and he ate some leaves…” The woman kept talking about animals vomiting as she stood and led me down a hallway toward a lot of noise happening in a back room. It wasn’t much cheerier than the front of the building, empty of light but full of beat-up furniture and piles of crap. It reminded me again of the house on Rosewood Trail where I’d gone to apologize and of the woman who lived in the midst of all the shit in there. I remembered her opening the door and then smiling at me, like I hadn’t been the one who’d terrorized her last summer.

  Kylie. She had that friendly dog, an elderly dog like the one who was sick from the leaves…Emma. That was its name. I realized I was smiling slightly myself when I thought of how it had tried to get on the couch with me and the woman, Kylie, had to get up to lift its old ass onto the cushion.

  While I was busy thinking about that woman and her dog, two boys catapulted around a table and one slammed into my chest. He flew backwards and onto his own ass on the floor. Hard.

  “What the fu—” I didn’t complete the word. It got very quiet in the room and all the other kids and the grown men who were the “Helping Hands” stared at me.

  “Oh, there you are,” the reception woman said, and reached out to the kid on the floor. “Jamison, this is your new mentor! Meet Kayden.”

  “Kayden Matthews?” I heard someone whisper across the room and I ignored my urge to shoot that person the bird and say no, I was just a lookalike who happened to have the same name.

  The kid let the woman haul his skinny butt off the floor and I looked at him. I’d thought she’d told me that he was eleven, but there was no way. I’d been that size when I was seven or eight, and my brother had probably been taller when he was in kindergarten. Ben had always been big and strong. “He’s eleven?” I asked the receptionist doubtfully, but the kid answered me himself, when he stuck out his hand for me to shake.

  “I’m Jamison Kelly and I’m eleven years old and in sixth grade,” he announced at full volume, and waited, palm extended.

  “Yeah, sure. Kayden Matthews.” I shook a little gingerly because I’d always had the impression that kids were pretty dirty. But a while back, I’d spent some time around my niece, and she’d been ok. I stopped thinking about her before I remembered why I was no longer able to see my niece or her father, my brother.

  “Miss Margulies told me that you’re a football player,” he said, his voice still way, way too loud.

  I didn’t bother to correct that I used to be a football player. “Who the hell is Miss Margulies?” I asked instead, and his eyes got huge. Yeah, probably better not to swear.

  “She’s the director of Helping Hands,” he told me, and then went into the whole fascinating story of how her dog ate leaves and again with the puking. I got to hear more details this time about chunks and foam.

  “Great, sure,” I interrupted him, and walked to the back, into the darkest corner, where I’d spotted an empty table. At one point in my life, I would have loved to have stood in the middle of a room to command all the attention, but I didn’t need these people staring at me like I was a freak show act. They were the real freak shows: kids who nobody wanted or cared about because they left them at this place, and adult men who either had nothing to do on their weekends or were sickos and trying to get at the kids. Or, more than likely, they were stuck here on probation like I was, forced into community service by a judge who was deluded into believing that contact with children was somehow going to make us change our evil, law-breaking ways.

  Jamison slid into the chair across from me. “I know you have to be here,” he told me matter-of-factly. “Miss Margulies told me that, too.”

  “Yeah? She’s, like, the expert on everything around here?” I took my phone back out. Reception in this building sucked.

  “She’s the director!” he repeated, as if that meant something. “Like she’d be the head coach of the team, if you want a football analogy. We were just working on analogies at school because we have to take the MISL test next week. I don’t mean ‘missile,’ it’s an acronym. We learned about those too. I have a really good teacher.”

  “Huh,” I grunted.

  “MISL stands for Michigan Standards of Learning. Every sixth grader in the state has to take it
. I’m in sixth grade, even though I’m only eleven. Most of the people in my class are twelve already. It’s kind of advanced, right?”

  “Huh.” I checked the latest sports news and read about the quarterback situation for the Woodsmen. They were looking for a backup for Davis Blake, who’d managed to negotiate a short but sweet contract for himself so he could get paid a shit-ton and end his career as a Woodsmen. The guy was lucky. Luck helped a lot in the United Football Confederation, but I’d never seemed to have it. Last spring, the Woodsmen had drafted a kid to be the second-string QB but as I looked at an interview with my brother, the new offensive coordinator, I could tell that it wasn’t working out with the new kid. I could read between the lines of what Ben was quoted as saying and it sounded like—

  “Do you want to tell me about your playing career?” the kid interrupted my thoughts.

  “I don’t have one,” I told him. “No more football.”

  “Really? Is it because you got arrested and have to do this community service?” he asked eagerly.

  “No, I quit. Where’s the john?” I stood up and the chair scraped, and everyone looked at me again. Fucking great.

  The kid pointed and stood up too, like he was going to come along with me, but then he sat back at the table. I took a while, and even made a lap of the building to kill some more time, but he jumped right onto the same topic when I sat down.

  “So, you said you quit football? Why?”

  “Why are you here?” I asked, turning the tables. “Why do you have to come to a place like this on a Saturday? Don’t you have practice or a game or something?”