The Bust

by Jamie Bennett

  “That’s what the coach said.” He’d sent me an email, saying he’d been shocked when he spotted my name on the tryout roster and that he would be happy to see me on the field again. I wasn’t sure he was going to be so thrilled with what I had to show him tomorrow.

  Rami looked at his phone. “Shit, I’m late. I have to pick up my kids at my mom’s house. See you,” he said, and jogged off the field.

  I followed, but a lot more slowly since I didn’t have any energy left to run. If I had been that guy, that Rami, I probably would have taken a swing at me for daring to try to take his place as the starting quarterback. In fact, that had been exactly what I’d done when the Rustlers had drafted that asshole out of UCLA and he’d come trotting down the sidelines to meet me, all excited about trying to steal my job. I’d hit him so hard that I’d had to get x-rays on my hand, my right hand. My throwing hand. I shook my head. So stupid, when I thought back on it—me, I meant, not him. He was just eager, like a big, dumb puppy.

  I wondered what had happened to that kid. He had already moved on when I’d also been released from the Rustlers and got sent to purgatory, playing for one season in Portland before I’d wandered into Kylie’s house. And speaking of Kylie—

  “How did it go? Was it hard?” She jumped out of the front seat of my car where she’d been waiting for me. “Did you know anyone there? Did you make any friends? Wow, it lasted forever! I had to run the heat a few times but I tried not to use a lot of gas because I think you’re almost out of money now, right?”

  “You don’t need to yell that.” I certainly didn’t need all the other guys standing around this wreck of a field to hear that I was poor. As far as they knew, I was trying out for this team because I was bored and wanted to kill some time, not for the money. I got into the driver’s side and she hopped back in, too. It was pretty cold inside the car, but she had insisted on coming. “I told you to keep it warm in here,” I told her.

  “The gas,” she explained again. “So, tell me all about it! You look wiped.”

  “I’m fine.” I drove forward and the car lurched over a giant rut in the parking lot. This place was worse than my high school field, worse than my middle school field. Worse than where I’d played peewee football, for sure, because my dad had donated the money to returf that and build a new lot. He had coached that team and wanted only the best for himself.

  “Well?” Kylie prompted.

  I relented. “Ok, yeah, I’m tired. It was hard.”

  “Tell me all about it,” she demanded, so I did. I went through every drill we’d run, how high I’d managed to get myself in the vertical jump, my best time in the dash.

  “None of those things matter,” I finished. “It’s all going to be about tomorrow, when I throw.”

  “And you’re worried about that, because you haven’t done it in so long, and the last time you played, you were high and messed things up.”

  “Yeah, thanks for summing it up for me.”

  She sat back and tapped her finger against her lip. “Well, you won’t be messing up now that you’re sober, so your biggest problem is that you’ve been out of the game for a while. But I think it will be just like riding a bike! For people who know how to ride bikes.”

  “You never learned how to do that, either?”

  She just shrugged an answer. “Why don’t we go practice together? I can probably catch if you throw it to me. Or, I have an idea! Does anyone ever set out targets and throw at them? That way you could practice your aim. Good aim must be really important.”

  “Aim is key, and targets aren’t a new concept.” But I happened to look over at her face, which fell from excitement into…like, she was sad or something, like she was deflated. “Yeah, I should do that,” I heard myself say. “Targets would probably help me.”

  “Really?” Her smile came back. “Maybe you could work out at my house while I’m at the bar. Emma could use the exercise, too.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” I realized I was smiling back at her and turned to look out through the windshield. Sure, I could hang at her house and throw a few in the yard. She’d said that there was poison ivy and “some other stuff” under the snow, but I’d been out there a few times and it was ok. The dog wandered out sometimes and she was all right in the open air, where her “tummy issues” got blown away by the wind. I’d also taken Emma for a walk once or twice before, which was only her getting pissed about a leash and then licking up some snow for about a block until she sat down and decided not to take another step, or turned and tried to drag me home.

  We were actually getting into a pattern with things together. I’d been driving Kylie to work for the past few days and Roy had been faithfully driving her home, but I’d also been keeping my phone ready next to my bed, just in case he fell through again. According to Kylie, his guilt over leaving her out to freeze had made him a reliable ride, but I had the ringer turned up. Just in case.

  “I read another letter last night. I brought it in my bag to show you, it was so good!” she said, and filled me in on the latest between her great-aunt and the guy in college. Apparently they had both spent a hundred percent of their time either scribbling or buying stamps, because the letter-writing was endless.

  “‘Dear sweetheart,’” Kylie read aloud, and sighed. “Isn’t it good so far? Wouldn’t it be cool to have someone to call you ‘sweetheart?’ When was your last serious girlfriend?”

  “How did we start talking about me?”

  “I was just curious. ‘Dear sweetheart, I picked up your last letter on my way to my neurobiology exam, and it was just what I needed.’”

  “What’s neurobiology?” I interrupted.

  “I don’t know. He’s pre-med, so something to do with doctors. What was your major in college?”

  “Uh…” I had to think about the answer. “Sports management,” I finally remembered.

  “What does that mean?” she asked, and I just shrugged. I hadn’t gone to many classes and my knowledge of sports management was scant at best. My school had paid a lot of tutors to get me through so I could keep playing football. “If I went to college, I would be an English major,” Kylie informed me. “Then, I’d probably want to work in a library. You can get a master’s degree in that, in library sciences. I spent a lot of time at the Ortega Branch Library in San Francisco talking to the people who worked there and I’d love to have that job.”

  “So do it.”

  She shook her head. “No, I’d have to finish high school, then do college, and I’m already so old. I’d be practically dead by the time I finished!”

  I looked across the car. “How the hell old are you?”

  “Twenty-two. How about you?” She tilted her head, very interested.

  “Older.”

  “I already know you’re twenty-seven, because I read all about you,” she told me. “You’re a public figure, remember?”

  “Yeah, I sure do. The guys today let me know how they remembered me playing crappy for the Woodsmen, playing crappy for the Rustlers, playing even worse for Stumptown after that.”

  “That was after the Rustlers made you leave?” she asked, nodding. “They cut you because of your drug abuse and bad behavior, right? And you had to go play for some team named after a smelly animal…was it the Polecats?”

  “Thanks for bringing it up,” I answered. “It was actually the Skunks, but yes, the Rustlers cut me for not showing up for practices, for disrespecting my coaches and teammates, for general poor play. That was what they told me when they called me to the stadium and took back my playbook. I was lucky to get a short-term contract in Portland and then I blew that up, too.”

  “But those problems were because you were a drug addict,” she said, as if that excused everything away. “Although, I guess you would say that you still are, right? A drug addict and an alcoholic. Isn’t that for life, even if you aren’t currently using? I read about it before. I told you that we had to study addiction in science class, right? I was there for that part.
”

  “Can we talk about something else?”

  “Yeah, sure. I was very curious about your last girlfriend, but you didn’t answer that question,” Kylie said.

  I actually groaned. “No girlfriend. None, ever, never wanted one. Ok? What about you?”

  “No, nobody too special. Nobody special at all,” she said, and heaved out a huge sigh. “Don’t you wish it was like The Knight’s Broken Lady?”

  That was the latest book she’d loaned to me, about a woman with all kinds of family problems and the guy who rode in—literally, rode into her castle on his horse—to rescue her. “No, I really enjoy antibiotics and running water,” I said.

  “Not that! I don’t mean that I want to go back in time, because of course everyone likes a toilet. I mean, don’t you wish that you could find that one, perfect person, the person meant just for you and it would work out magicallly in the end? Just like it was for Sir Aubrey and Lady Lilac.”

  “Do you really believe that, that there’s one person meant for you?” I heard the disbelief in my voice and Kylie frowned hard at me.

  “No, not really.” She sighed again. “I guess you don’t either, since you just said you never wanted a girlfriend, not ever. I guess you just screwed around a lot.”

  Jesus. “Yeah, maybe you could say that.” You could definitely say that. “That’s why you never stayed with someone, because he wasn’t the perfect knight or whatever?” I looked over when she didn’t answer right away. “Kylie?”

  “I had a lot to do, also.”

  I laughed. “Like what? Or are you talking about your dog chores again?”

  “My mom was sick,” she said, very quietly. “For a long time, my mom was sick. I helped her and I never had much time for boyfriends or other things.”

  “What was wrong with her?”

  “Lupus. It’s a disease where your body kind of attacks your body, and she had a lot of flare-ups, which means that she had a lot of problems with it. Not everybody does, but she did.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “That sucks,” I told her and shit, that wasn’t what I meant for her to know. “I’m sorry about that.”

  Kylie shrugged. “It was bad for her,” she agreed. “So I wasn’t running around looking for my Sir Aubrey, if he happened to be in San Francisco. I also haven’t looked very hard since then for my perfect ending. I don’t actually think I’ll find it.”

  “You mean there’s no lord or knight guy in the tavern?”

  “Well, he definitely isn’t Roy himself,” she said, and made a face. “He’s pretty far from knightly behavior.”

  I was glad to hear that the little shit who had locked her out in the cold wasn’t her Sir Aubrey, but then I had a thought about his lack of knightly behavior. “Wait, do you mean that he’s trying stuff on you?”

  “Roy hitting on me? Coming onto me?” She sounded shocked. “That’s abominous.”

  Good. “Maybe there’s a knight coming to drink there tonight,” I said. “Another Sir Aubrey.”

  “Maybe,” she shrugged. “Maybe the guy who keeps crawling into the dumpster. I’ll keep an eye out for him,” she told me, and laughed, but I was thinking about what she’d said about her perfect ending. I wondered if it was possible at all, but I wasn’t counting on the guy in the dumpster. A nice girl like Kylie deserved something more.

  ∞

  Kylie

  I saw Roy’s frowning face in the window when we pulled in, right underneath the repaired neon sign that said “Roys” with the S lit up again. I gave myself a pat on the back for the glass finally being clean enough to see through it, which had meant a lot of hard work and had also been potentially dangerous. I’d come upon several hidden razor blades stuck in the sill from a fight that had happened before my time and also, my boss had casually mentioned that the “Roys” sign could short and electrocute me if I touched it by mistake. I’d cleaned very, very carefully.

  I turned to Kayden. “He’s here to let me in. Thanks for the ride.”

  “Yeah.” He glared at where Roy’s face had appeared in the glass, a white blob in the dark interior of the bar. “He’s like some kind of goblin in there.”

  “Goblin? I always thought of a bandicoot. But that gives me such a good idea!” I exclaimed. “I’m not sure if you’ve ever read any supernatural romances…no, probably not,” I decided. His literary background was very limited. “Let’s see, there was Ella’s Elfin Escapade, Look Under a Toadstool for Love…I’m going to try to remember some more of those titles. You might really like them.”

  “Maybe. I’m not so into those books,” he told me, and got out of the car when I did to stand and scowl more at the window. Kayden and Roy had held a discussion about my boss leaving me in the parking lot, with Kayden telling him that he was a real bastard for doing it and he should kick his ass, and Roy saying right back that he didn’t need any direction from a bust of a football player who still had white dust around his nose. Roy definitely won in the insult competition, but I’d stepped between them because if Kayden had taken a swing, it probably would have been the end of my boss, the human bandicoot.

  “I’ll call you if he leaves me again tonight, but I don’t think he will,” I said. Wind whipped past me and I shivered. “Good job at your tryout. That’s really brave of you to start back with football, Kayden. I’m very proud.”

  His eyes shifted to me, and he got a funny look on his face. “Go inside,” he said, but his voice was funny, too. When I looked back over my shoulder, he was still standing outside of his car, watching the bar. Maybe watching me, but I wasn’t creeped out like I’d been in Winnemucca, Nevada when I’d walked out of my motel room and—

  “You need a written invitation?” Roy threw open the door and frowned at me.

  “I’m right on time. My shift starts at exactly this moment,” I told him.

  “Get in here and stop letting the heat out. We have a guest.”

  “A guest? Oh!” I realized who he meant and I waved once to Kayden as I rushed into the dark bar. It smelled slightly lemony and definitely less like vomit than it ever had, and I congratulated myself again. “Did your son get here?” I asked my boss. “Does he appreciate how we’ve cleaned? Did you tell him my suggestion about updating the jukebox so that the songs don’t all predate 1980? Do you think he’s going to want to take over now that we cleared the light fixtures of that spider infestation? Is he afraid of rats so that—”

  “Roy?” A man walked out of the office, and if I squinted a little in the dim lighting, I could almost see that he might be Roy’s son. He was taller, not goblin-sized, and he didn’t have the frown that Roy always wore, and his hair wasn’t cut in that strange duckbill style that his father favored. Plus, it was a brownish red, not dyed jet-black like Roy’s, and he wasn’t wearing a western shirt with fringe and rhinestones, and from what I could see in the lighting, he had blue eyes instead of brown and he wasn’t missing any teeth when he smiled. But he was certainly a man, so this could have been the son I’d been waiting to meet.

  “Dexter?” I guessed.

  “I am,” he answered. “And you are?”

  “I’m Kylie, but Roy must have told you about me.”

  “No, I didn’t. Why would I?” my boss asked, but I ignored him.

  “We’re so glad to have you visiting the tavern!” I said to his son. “I’m the head server and floor manager.”

  “She’s the waitress,” Roy put in. “That’s it.”

  “For now, but I keep my eye on my options,” I said. “When I worked for the pest control company in Texas, I went from being the girl who unloaded the poison from the trucks to the woman in charge of scheduling. Of course, that was partially because they didn’t want me to rat on them that no one had an actual license…oh, rat on them! Get it, because it was an extermination company? That’s funny.”

  Dexter was staring at me and Roy was rolling his eyes. “She never stops,” he mentioned to his son.

  “We get along great,” I al
so mentioned. “Except when he leaves me—”

  “He don’t want to hear that bullshit,” my boss said, and stomped away into his office.

  I got out one of the towels that Roy didn’t like to wash and started to wipe down the bar top so the customers’ glasses wouldn’t stick to it and break off their bottoms. “Can I get you anything?” I asked Dexter.

  He sat at a stool across from me. “I’m not much of a day-drinker.”

  I set him up with one of our limited non-alcoholic options, old tonic water that didn’t have a lot of fizz left and a very shriveled lime wedge, all set on a napkin that said “Roys.” The “o” had a dot in the middle of it so that it looked like a boob with a nipple—Roy had told me that it was a printing error, but I didn’t buy it. “So, what do you think of the bar?” I asked.

  “Honestly?” He looked around. “It’s…dark. Depressing.”

  I also glanced at the dim, empty room with the scarred tables, stained floors, and chairs with the sliced seats spilling out old foam. “I guess it is,” I acknowledged. “It’s much more fun when it’s full of people. You don’t notice the holes in the walls half as much when people are singing or dancing to the old, old, old songs on the jukebox. You’ll see tonight, because we start to get busy on Thursdays.”

  His lip curled slightly. “I just can’t imagine being here all the time, watching a bunch of sad old men drink themselves to death.”

  Oh, lordy. “It’s not quite that bad! And you wouldn’t have to be here every night, not if you didn’t want to. You could hire someone, like a bar manager. You know, how I was saying that I would be someday.”

  “Me, hire someone?” He looked so confuddled that I knew that Roy hadn’t discussed passing down the tavern to him, if that was actually the plan.

  So I added, “I was saying ‘you,’ but in general sense. I was trying to explain that the owner doesn’t have to be at the place every night as long as there’s a good manager on site.”

  “Are you angling for me to give my dad a recommendation for your promotion?” Dexter smiled at me and wow, he really looked nothing like his father except that they were both men and had the normal number of facial features, except for Roy’s missing teeth. I had never, ever seen my boss with a totally pleasant expression like the one his son wore now.