For a Little While

by Rick Bass

  In the days to come, the man would disassemble the truck and dry the parts in front of the stove at night and on his porch in the daytime, in the dry south winds of the coming spring; and later into the spring, the truck, cleaned and oiled, would be running once again. And for many years, the story of how the truck had been reclaimed would be told; it belonged to all of them now, not just Brandon, and it drifted through the village like dust blowing off the mountains, though over time it began to seem that the words would endure as long as the stones in the mountains themselves.

  After his father’s death, the villagers had referred to Brandon as the boy whose father drowned in the river, though never again. Now, instead, he would forever be the boy who rescued the truck from the river. While it wasn’t an even trade, his father for the truck, it was a start, and Brandon felt that he had moved some distance forward—though he could not explain the anger and confusion he felt whenever he saw the truck drive through town, newly polished and running fine.

  Coach

  It’s late in his career and Coach’s mother is ill. They have left their home in the eastern plains. There was another controversy this season, nothing too outrageous—Coach just got a little too carried away with a ref’s call, had a bit of a tantrum, hurled a chair, not in anyone’s direction, but the chair slid across the court, knocked the legs out from under an opposing assistant coach, or so he claimed; Coach thinks he took a dive. And so Coach was forced to seek a job in the mountains, where, for whatever reasons, the players are less talented, and less committed to the holy sport of basketball.

  The job in Placerville for which he has been hired is ostensibly teaching—he is a good teacher, but he’s a coach first. Forty-three years old and with his own flesh beginning to mortify, ravaged by hypertension, the survivor of thirty-five overtimes, fifteen double overtimes, four triple overtimes, and—it nearly killed him—a quadruple overtime, as well as numerous twenty- and even a couple of thirty-point comebacks, plus the run-of-the-mill heart-stopping one- and two-point victories at the buzzer, Coach has spent most of his adult life wondering if he is a genius or just someone who works really, really hard.

  When the genius is in him, he knows it for what it is, and is scoured, burnished by it—but when it leaves him, he feels ridiculously ordinary, vulnerable, exposed, undeserving of the responsibility he has dared to assume and pursue.

  This is the beauty of small-town high school girls’ basketball: there is almost never any game that cannot be won, almost never any game that cannot be lost.

  Basketball on the eastern side of the state—the windy prairie, where he has most often coached—is an entirely different sport: a steady-burning, year-round religion, Indian ball, dominated by hot-shooting, trick-passing, full-court-press teams from the reservations, teams filled with players who possess intimidating names like Mankiller and Bearpaw, girls who play every second of every game as if basketball is the only thing in life and yet also as if they have nothing to lose. Up in the mountains, however, the same sport can be a precise and careful game, one in which the focus is on the sustained avoidance of mistakes rather than daring flights of brilliance.

  And that’s okay; Coach knows how to win anywhere, with any kind of team. He would like to have stayed out on the prairie but got no offers there and had to take this job to keep his mother on his insurance. He was born when she was forty, which was when she first got sick. The doctors had told her not to have the child but she did anyway. She got better, but now she’s sick again, and has been for the last decade, battling the illness year after year, one day at a time, confined to a wheelchair. It’s too bad about his last job, not twenty miles from the family farm where he grew up; that was one he’d hoped would last, especially given his mother’s condition.

  But few coaches stay put forever. Their nights are haunted by memories of the shots that didn’t drop—shots that bounced two, three, four times before falling off the rim, or that swirled around before spinning out as if repulsed by a negative polarity. Memories of the girl who traveled in the backcourt with four seconds left; the girl who went glassy-eyed while inbounding and passed it straight to the defender, who then took one step forward for the easy, victorious layup; and the win, or loss, that extended one coach’s career but finished another’s—because no matter what the school board and principal and fans and parents say about building character, you have to win.

  In the poorer communities, winning is character—there is nothing else left, or so it seems to them. It’s a desperate lifestyle Coach has gotten boxed into, here in his forty-fourth year. Win or go home; win forever, or leave, banished from one’s community, one’s homeland.

  The first and foremost talent, Coach knows, is nothing less than being able to look into the souls of these girls and know what they are capable of, and then to tease it out over the four years you have with them—which is to say, you have to fall in love with them.

  You proceed with the secret knowledge that such love is temporal, and, in this sense, corrupted, susceptible to being diluted, or even dissolved, by one too many losses. It can be diminished even by something less final than a loss. A failed quarter, a failed inbounds play, a failed free throw—failure lurks everywhere, always seeking to destroy that condition of love. His own love is abiding, but the world’s, less so.

  Every gesture matters in those four years. One day that intensity, that attachment between him and the girls, will fade, and either they will graduate or he will be fired, spurned and abandoned by those whom he once loved, and sent to search for new love.

  Coach has been to the state championships only once. He lost, but it was the single most transformative event in his life. The season itself, intoxicating and transcendent, had been marked by scrap-and-claw jockeying for an upper-tier berth in his division—in his girls’ division—with setbacks and reversals, last-second blocked shots, long-range heaves at the buzzer, and titanic battles in the paint. His Lady Bearkats (how he hates the differentiating “Lady” moniker—why were the boys not called the Gentlemen Bearkats?) barely squeaked into the district playoffs, but then caught fire, clamping down on superior teams and winning one low-scoring game after another, with Coach making genius substitutions, creating matchups based sometimes on long nights’ scrutiny of game films for each opponent, and other times on intuition alone. More exhilarating than any drug was adrenaline, the sweetest chemical, chased second by heart-pounding second with boilermakers of desire, desperation, and pure and elemental hope.

  He had never known, and has never known since, anything more wonderful, has never felt more fully the incredible power of being alive, and of being able, through dint of will, to shape one’s world into the precise outcome one yearns for—all the more thrilling because everything is at risk, the deep and lightless abyss of failure attends one’s every choice, and consequence is compressed into every melting second on the game clock.

  To say that basketball for him is a matter of life and death is not to put too fine a point on it. Every day he can feel how big and yet how damaged his heart is. The cage that holds it is immense, though the heart inside grows less strong with each passing year. Sometimes it makes him think of a bird caught in an attic, fluttering against a dusty window, unable to find an exit. The only way out is to win—always and forever—and so again and again the bird hurls itself toward that window, scrabbling toward the light.

  At that long-ago state championship, having defeated teams thought to be their betters in both the district and divisional playoffs, the Lady Bearkats were finally—what sweet and temporary alchemy!—considered superior themselves. The entire town of Tiber, all five thousand people, chartered buses and traveled to the final in Bozeman, where, in the university arena, they stood together with the players’ relatives from all over the state roaring their passion for the courageous hearts and cunning of their team and coach. Pride radiated like a thermonuclear expansion. So much so that standing there in the elegant field house while the national anthem was being pla
yed, in that shining and suspended moment, Coach had the brief and blasphemous thought, lasting just half a breath, as he took his eyes off the flag to look up into the stands, that right then was as good as it would ever get. This was the pinnacle. Everything could and perhaps should end right here, he thought, before there was a winner and loser—for who needed more euphoria than this? Upon whom would one wish such heartbreak, following such ecstasy?

  The adoration of the entire town, for one long, focused, unified moment, and the pride of being your best self, beyond your best self—transcending your flaws and limitations, so that you’re in communion with some force you didn’t even know existed: Coach has known this feeling once, and would give anything to know it again. He wants it desperately for every girl he ever coaches, and for every town he ever moves to, in his wandering drift, in the repetitions of passionate and sustained failure, year after year.

  The interview in Placerville went well. The school board said all of the things boards always said, no matter where he interviewed—that a quality education was the key goal of the school district, and that there were singular challenges these days, particularly in underserved rural areas, to be competitive in the ever-changing global marketplace. And that with regard to sports, the board was more interested in building character than in winning per se. Their team had won only three games in the last two years while losing thirty-four, and in the abbreviated part of the interview that covered basketball, the school board stressed how their main concern was that the girls have fun and continue to learn good sportsmanship.

  It was what every school board said when they were losing, and it rankled Coach to hear it. Just once he longed to sit down in an interview in which his teaching credentials—Montana history and Native American studies—were given a cursory examination and then have the board tell him, Listen, we’re tired of losing. It’s bad for our school, bad for our girls’ spirit and self-esteem, and we want you to come in and do something about it.

  The truth was that losing all the time was no fun at all, while winning would be as much fun as anything these girls had known up to that point in their lives. But he never told school boards this. Instead he laid out his boilerplate twofold path to turning around a losing program. Number one: Family first. The parents must love their kids. I need to know, and the girls need to know, that someone besides me will always have their backs. Number two: I’ll stress academic excellence. Only when we establish those two things will athletic excellence return.

  Always, in these small schools, athletic excellence had been there at some point before; always the remnants of it hung in the hallway above the entrance to the dimly lit gymnasium, in the dusty, sun-faded photos of long-forgotten teams from thirty, forty, even fifty years ago, those past fleeting glories so distant as to mock the same passion with which the players, parents, and fans now pursued the game.

  In every interview, Coach mentioned his experience of the state championship, but only casually, for he knew that in their initial earnestness, the school board members believed what they were saying about wanting only for the girls to build character and have fun (as if there were anything fun about losing). Only after he began to win games for them would they yield to the temptation of putting winning first.

  For now, he dialed it way down; but even so, he could not completely squelch the incandescent fury he felt for the game and all its virtues. And in Placerville, as in all the other towns he had coached, the school board was at first amused—not yet captivated—by his passions, though they offered him the job immediately, after assuring him that his mother would be able to continue her health coverage under his state teacher’s policy.

  The interview had taken place over a Memorial Day weekend during which a snowstorm passed through, an unusual but not unheard-of occurrence for that time of year in the mountains. The first thing they took him to see, the very next day, after he had accepted the job, was the volcano, or what they called a volcano. Up in the mountains south of town was an old copper mine that, over time, had had so much ore gouged out of it that, following the big snows of 1963, the overburden of stone had collapsed like a fallen cake, and was still collapsing, the crater widening every year like some great beast gagging on the earth.

  In subsequent years wildfires burned across the rubble of the ever-deepening pit, igniting newly exposed strata of high-sulfur coal, which themselves burned down deeper into the mountain’s heart, issuing at almost all hours an acrid yellow-brown smoke with the scent of rotting eggs. The mist from those vapors was so acidic that the downwind drift of it stung the eyes and lungs of Placerville residents, and turned the lawns and maple leaves in town a speckled, mottled yellow, and dulled the luster and finish on the paint of Placerville’s cars and trucks so that, in time, all of the vehicles had the same appearance—as if they were a fleet owned by a single company.

  The school board members and town boosters rode up to the mountaintop with Coach in a caravan of four-wheel-drive vehicles, their tires spinning against the slurry of springtime runoff, the trucks slipping and fishtailing in snow that would be gone within the day. Already the late-morning sun was routing the storm’s residue. Slender branches heavy with snow catapulted skyward with the suddenness of traps being sprung as they shed their melting loads. All around them the woods danced and leapt in this fashion, and steam rose from the forest as if it were afire. Churning gravel thunked against the undercarriages, and the trucks bogged down, roared, then lunged forward again: an armylike procession.

  As they labored up the mountain, encountering the first burned-out scablands of lukewarm coal water and rivulets of toxic runoff from the old days of cyanide and arsenic heap leaching, past charred and broken mineshaft timbers protruding from the ground, Coach came to understand that his new employers were proud of rather than repulsed by the smoldering volcano.

  “The kids come up here to drink on weekends,” one of the boosters said. “We need to put a gate on it but haven’t gotten around to it.”

  They were still driving, close enough to the crater that no snow remained—even in deepest winter, they told him, the area around the crater stayed snow-free because of the slow-burning seams of coal. The creep of the smoldering coal occasionally encountered the roots of one of the sulfur-strangled trees killed in previous years. Then the fire would find the one thing it needed most, oxygen, within the tree’s hollowed husk, and the entire tree would burst into crackling flame. It could happen at any time, the boosters said.

  They stopped at the edge of the pit and got out. It was windy, and the acid stung Coach’s eyes and made him squint. Little flames and embers hissed underground, vapors rose from the dried-out soil, and did he imagine this, or was the ground on which they stood trembling? He detected a hollowness just below him, as though it might collapse.

  The rotten-egg smell was overwhelming, as was the burning in his eyes—tears streamed down his face. He wiped them clean with the crook of his arm, leaving a smudge on his shirtsleeve. He hadn’t noticed it at first, but there was another odor, too, intermingled with the sulfur and charred wood. Peering down into the gullet of the crater, where a few live coals flared like winking teeth in a jack-o’-lantern, he saw that it was being used as a town dump; that it was stippled with the carcasses of old televisions, recliners, blistered and smoldering car batteries and tires, couches, refrigerators, card tables, broken-down treadmills, and, poking through semi-melted plastic garbage bags, deer bones, watermelon rinds, banana peels, cereal boxes, corncobs, and seemingly all the other detritus of the century.

  Though there was a local no-dumping ordinance, the boosters admitted that people had been doing it for so long that there was really no way to stop them—it had become a tradition. They seemed almost to embrace its toxicity.

  Coach asked whether they’d tried to do anything with it. He’d read about various ways to turn this kind of mess to an advantage, he explained: methane gas capture, or even piping warm water down the mountain and beneath the streets and sidewal
ks in town to keep them free of snow in the winter.

  No, they said, nothing like that; and they glanced at one another, smiling, delighted with the deal they appeared to have gotten—all that useless extra firepower in Coach, all that spitting passion, the constant need for forward motion. He would wear himself out here in the mountains, where nothing ever changed.

  The stench permeated not just Coach’s clothes and his short-cropped, thinning hair, but also his skin. He could not wait to get back to his motel room to take a shower. He turned away from the pit, saying he was chilled, and went and got back in the truck, while the boosters lingered a while longer, admiring their abyss and listening to the faint subterranean cracklings.

  When they finally joined him back in the truck, the sulfur and garbage odors seeped from their woolen sweaters. Coach asked if they could go see the gym now and said he was eager, also, to meet the girls.

  The boosters smiled at one another again. What energy—what a bargain!

  Before coaching, he was in the army, where he loved the orderliness. Before that, there was only the windy prairie, in the farmhouse where he lived alone with his mother after his father abandoned them both, leaving his mother, still sick, to raise the then-six-year-old boy by herself. He has not seen his father since.

  Coach and his mother hired out when they had to, but in good years, when his mother was strong enough, they ran parts of the falling-down farm by themselves. It was his mother who instilled in him a love of all sports. They would listen to the radio in the evenings, following the nightly fates of whatever acoustic drift came their way, picking up occasional marquee events—heavyweight title bouts, World Series games, even the Davis Cup each September, when the cottonwoods were beginning to turn yellow and the summer’s terrible heat was finally leaving—but more regularly listening to the scratchy windstream of Pioneer League baseball, local high school basketball and football, hockey from Missoula, girls’ volleyball from as far away as Lewiston and Miles City.