The Best American Sports Writing 2013

by Glenn Stout

  At the halftime buzzer, people started pushing down the aisle. I stepped back to my seat, where Padeen was already leaning through the bench of players to reach me. I flew into her arms. She dropped me hard to the wood floor and marched across the slick court, pulling me behind. She hit the spring-loaded metal bar on the big gym door without breaking stride, and I flinched to see my father waiting on the other side. Padeen pushed me into him, where I was stung by the sudden shift from heated gym to chill parking lot.

  “How was it?” Dad said, turning me around and holding on.

  “Take her,” Padeen said, shaking her blond, backlit hair so it shone like a halo around her face. Behind her was the silhouette of a bucking mustang above a sizable crucifix. “She’s a brat.”

  I stared at the wall, not looking at either of them. My chest hurt.

  “How’s that?” Dad said, big hands heavy on my shoulders.

  Padeen glanced back at the mass of people swarming across the stands. “How she acts,” she said. “Just everything.”

  “They clapped,” I said.

  Padeen rolled her eyes. “They think you’re a brat,” she said, her face even with mine so I’d get it.

  “I was being like you,” I said.

  She stood straight and took a cheerleader-like backward march into the gym. “You’re not me,” she said. “You’re . . .”

  I waited, hopeful. What was I?

  “If you can’t act like a big girl, you can’t go places,” Dad said, steering my shoulders away from the gym and toward the dark parking lot.

  I pulled back, facing Padeen. “I was acting like a big girl,” I said, “just like you.”

  “See what I mean?” Padeen said to Dad, then grabbed the door bar and yanked the door closed between us.

  After her freshman year, Padeen left Central, where homework was placed in a little basket at each class door like donations tossed anonymously into a collection plate. When she did not tithe adequately in algebra, Dad said he’d be damned to pay for Cs from someone as smart as Padeen, and she was sent to public school.

  Charles M. Russell High was all the way across town, a well-lit, modern building on a sprawling campus with an indoor pool, big theater, and manicured track. It opened just a few years before Padeen started there. Where Central had the fading head of Christ painted above the front doors (so like my brothers and their friends: gentle young features obscured by facial hair), CMR had a six-foot stone bison skull out front, with cowboy artist Charlie Russell’s signature etched across it. Russell was our town’s secular saint, a painter whose work captured the last days of the real frontier like an illustrated gospel of how God intended things to be.

  CMR had nearly 1,500 students—a town by Montana standards—and a hard-driving reputation for excellence. A girl used to smaller and less might have struggled there, but not Padeen. She left cheerleading and made varsity swimming. She wrote for The Stampede and won awards for her columns and editorials across four states. She made editor, which got her the Silver Key of Journalism, given annually to a single Montana student. She was one of four CMR girls invited to the leadership conference at Girls’ State. She was vice president of her class, Key Club Sweetheart, Thespian of the Year. One cold season, I sat in the CMR theater with my parents watching Padeen play Miep in The Diary of Anne Frank. Miep was the young woman who risked everything to do what her heart told her. She saved the diary but not the Franks, which didn’t impress me much.

  “I don’t get it,” I said when the lights went up.

  My mother put her red hair next to mine and said quietly, “Anne died.” She pulled a wadded Kleenex from under her cuff and wiped her nose. Dad was already gone. He’d fought in the war, lost two brothers in Europe, and once Padeen was offstage he’d cleared out.

  “If I was Miep,” I said, “I would’ve saved Anne.”

  “Sometimes that’s just not possible,” my mother said, taking my hand. I let her pull me past empty plush seats and up the wide center stairs, but I couldn’t believe she was right.

  Padeen was a snowball princess at the winter formal, where her prince was Rory Bosch. They were soon inseparable. Rory quarterbacked for the Rustlers in the fall and was on varsity track in the spring. His family had come from Croatia a generation or so back, and with his curly dark hair, a deep cleft in his strong chin, and an athlete’s easy grace, Rory breathed a fragrant air of Mediterranean glamour onto our dry plains.

  Padeen was taking me to swim practice one chill spring day after school, and we swung by CMR first to get something from her locker. She left me hunched in my mud-stained ski jacket by the track, watching Rory practice the pole vault. Frost laced the ground, but the sun was warm on my face. Nearby, a meadowlark trilled endlessly for an answering mate.

  Rory was all elbows and knees and shuddering horizontal pole as he sprinted down the straightaway, like a warrior on an antique vase. When he shoved the pole toward the track all forward momentum stopped, then he was floating upward, a graceful comma interrupting endless blue before falling back to earth again. Rory sprang from the mat, smiling, and waved my way. I grinned back and started to raise my hand when I realized he was waving at Padeen, who’d come up behind me. I yanked it down, hoping they hadn’t noticed.

  Rory leaped from the mat and bounded toward us. He grabbed my jacket sleeve and pulled me against him, hugging hard, sweat and chlorine puffing up between us, then tugged Padeen, cherry and vanilla and herbal shampoo, into our huddle. “You are the luckiest girls I know,” he said.

  “Because we have you?” Padeen laughed, but looked like she might believe it.

  “Naw,” he said, hopping foot to foot in his shorts and singlet, cleats crunching on the frosted grass. “Because you’ve got each other.”

  Everyone knew about Rory’s older brother, Kerry, who’d also played football for CMR until he crashed in a Camaro at 18. The other three boys in the car died on impact, but Kerry lingered in a coma for nearly two years before his heartbroken parents removed life support, 28 days before his 20th birthday. Twenty-eight days before he turned 20. I heard that so many times later, I just wanted people to stop saying it.

  “And you have us,” Padeen said, touching Rory’s shoulder where his singlet met skin.

  “Hey,” Rory said, “hang out and I’ll come with you.” Rory lived on the other side of us, farther down Route 2 South outside of town.

  “We can’t,” Padeen said, “she’ll be late for swimming.”

  “Don’t you want to wait for me?” Rory said, holding his hand palm-up for me to slap.

  “Yes,” I said, giving it a hard whack.

  Padeen hooked her hand under my armpit. “I’ll be right back,” she told Rory.

  “I’ll freeze by then.”

  “Put on a jacket.”

  “Don’t have one,” Rory said, hugging his shoulders for effect.

  “Then run,” my sister said.

  Rory nodded seriously, then took off doing high knees across the grass. He glanced over his shoulder to see if we were looking, and we were. “You’re coming back?” he shouted.

  “Maybe,” she yelled, smiling to herself even as we walked away.

  Padeen had started teaching Brendhan and me Spanish when we were in the car. “Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco,” she began, as we pulled out of the high school parking lot.

  She was fired up about Spanish because the previous month she’d gotten a bicycle trip for her birthday. Come summer, she was supposed to go with other Catholic kids to France, where they’d pick up bikes and ride a medieval pilgrimage road south, then over the Pyrenees and due west on to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Padeen was actually on the waiting list, but the tour company said Assume she’s in, since no one had ever missed going. She got her passport, bike shorts, and panniers before the letter came saying there wouldn’t be room. Missing out on Spain would prove the opening blow, after so many charmed years.

  Padeen rolled down her window and waved to Rory, who stood midtrack, watchin
g us drive away. “Hasta pronto!” she trilled with Latin vigor, then rolled up the window against the cold.

  “Are you going to marry Rory?” I said.

  “Cuántos años tienes?” she said.

  I counted in my head in Spanish. “Ocho?”

  “Muy bien!”

  “Are you?”

  “Cómo?”

  “Stop it.”

  “You can love someone,” Padeen said slowly, “and not marry them right away.” She raked her hair away from her face, and her broad forehead was clenched, serious. “You can wait.”

  “Chris and Sue didn’t wait,” I said. The previous summer I’d worn a purple halter dress and a shoulder-to-fingertip cast on my right arm when Chris and Sue got married in our big backyard. Our neighbors who owned the dairy, the Mitchells, came to the wedding, but that very morning my mother had stood at the window watching the manure spreader inch along our perimeter fence. “You’d think it could wait just this one day,” she said, to no one in particular. She sighed, not deeply, and went back to the kitchen. None of us expected the world to adjust itself on our account.

  “What are you waiting for?” I said, because I really didn’t know.

  “You sound like Rory,” Padeen said, clicking on the radio and turning it up.

  Padeen’s senior year, Rory waged a campaign to keep her in Great Falls. He wrote letters, poems, songs for her, all variations on the theme of her staying.

  He knew what it meant to lose someone, and he didn’t want to lose her. He issued no ultimatums, no threats, but he hoped she’d choose the good reality of him over a vague dream of college. Padeen compromised. With her grades and awards she might have gone anywhere, but she chose the University of Montana, just three hours—two and a half if you gunned it—from Great Falls.

  In late September 1975, John drove Padeen to Missoula with her stuff rolling around the back of his pickup in a couple of black garbage bags. At the corner of Arthur and Daly, he slammed to a stop and cranked the emergency brake. He left the driver-side door hanging open, engine running, and jumped out to haul her bags onto the sidewalk. Padeen stepped into the street, zipped up her jacket, and took a long look at the big buildings receding toward the mountains. It was starting to snow. She walked slowly around the back of the truck. “Where do I go?” she said.

  “Hell if I know,” John said, grinning. “It’s your school.” He pointed toward the cluster of buildings across the street. “Over there somewhere,” he said, then jumped into his truck and took off. Padeen hauled her own bags across the street and onto the big gray paths of campus, pioneering two broad drag marks behind her in the fresh snow.

  In just days she’d made fast friends with the girls on her floor, knew the secret back ways of campus, and was one of the first to speak out in her classes, even the big ones. She took to all of it like a fish to water.

  A few weeks after Padeen started school, I rode home with Mom and Brendhan from a swim meet in Helena. The plains were dark as lead but for pinpricks of stars above and the rare flash of headlights coming the other way. For once I wasn’t annoyed with Brendhan, already asleep next to me, head propped on the seat divider and mouth open, snoring. His bad ears and tonsils kept him from swimming much, but he was often hauled to practices and meets.

  My mother said the rosary softly from the front seat. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. I closed my eyes, faking sleep, not wanting to do anything holy in that way. I fingered the ribbons in my lap, only one of them blue. My hero was Mark Spitz, the swimmer who never seemed to lose. Even at the Munich Olympics, where 11 other Jews died in a deluge of bullets, Spitz snatched fame from doom, taking gold seven times. I thought about luck and fate, and what part skill might play in salvation. I rubbed each ribbon between my fingertips, seeking a difference in the blue, but they felt alike.

  I opened my eyes. My mother’s voice grew louder when she caught sight of me in the rearview mirror. I joined in, but so quietly I could barely hear my voice above the tires. Blessed art thou amongst women. A strip of winking red lights appeared between the highway and the stars; the big smokestack was coming into view, meaning we were nearly home.

  That same night Rory and three CMR buddies were at a bar on 10th Avenue owned by a former teacher turned barkeep. The drinking age in Montana was 18 then, and Rory, Ryan, Scott, and Tom had been going to bars together since high school. There was nothing delinquent about it, or wild. Rory had a few beers, so did his friends. Typical night.

  But Rory missed Padeen; he could hardly shoot pool for talking about her blond hair, her wicked laugh, her Spanish and books and big ideas. By midnight the other guys had had enough. “Jesus, Rory, go see her already.”

  Scott’s Camaro was parked out back and they all piled in. They headed west on 10th, crossed first the Missouri and then the Sun, outgunning the falls and smokestack and smelters as they headed out past Fort Shaw, past Square Butte and the ancient Ulm buffalo jump out there somewhere in the dark, before turning south and climbing the Continental Divide. Roger’s Pass was in bad shape already in October—it had been snowing at that elevation for weeks—but they made it through just fine. The long drop into Lincoln should have been the easy part.

  One by one they fell asleep in the warm hum of the Camaro, until even Scott at the wheel drifted off. Their car skidded sideways along the highway some 800 feet before it left the road, taking out a utility pole a hundred feet beyond that. The car flew on for another hundred feet before sticking fast in the Lander’s Fork of the Blackfoot River. When the maintenance man from Montana Power showed up that morning, tragedy stretched the length of a football field from first skid marks to where they found Ryan’s body, 135 feet downriver. Rory and Scott were thrown nearly as far. It’s conceivable that Tom, the only one of them wearing a seat belt, might have survived the crash, but water filled the small car within minutes.

  Clocks in Lincoln stopped at 3:50 A.M., October 4, 1975, 28 days before Rory would have turned 20. He died at the same age as his brother, from an accident in the same make of car, alongside the same number of friends.

  John came back for Padeen just three weeks after he’d dropped her off. He took along a six-pack of Rainier, and they drove all the way to Great Falls that way, silent and drinking. When Padeen edged near the end of a bottle, John balanced a fresh one between his thighs and cracked it one-handed with the opener he kept on the dash. It was the best he knew of chivalry, and solace. He kept a slow beer going for himself as well. The boys in the Camaro were John’s friends too, and a decade on he’d name his first child after Ryan.

  Most of the town had turned out for the memorial service at the CMR theater. Long-haired girls staggered and wept, boys with shoulders so naturally broad that they looked suited up for the front line turned their chiseled faces to the ceiling so tears couldn’t escape. White-faced adults held balled-up Kleenexes and whispered in little clumps on the landings and near doors. Padeen was cried out. She sat dry-eyed and hunched next to Rory’s mom in the front row. Mrs. Bosch, a mother who offered comfort even from her own hell, kept Padeen’s narrow hand in hers. She nodded to the stage, where a big photo of Rory in his football uniform was propped against a folding chair alongside his friends. “I believe you two are spiritually married,” Mrs. Bosch said, squeezing hard on Padeen’s hand to make sure she took it in. “You were destined for each other.”

  I sat alone with Brendhan while our older brothers served as ushers. Diane sat two rows behind Padeen with her girlfriends, their faces streaked with running mascara and concealer. Mom and Dad were taking condolences in the crowd, their exact position in things confusing for everyone. All around Brendhan and me the same conversation thrummed in slight variations around the same theme. Marked for death . . . As if neither Bosch boy could live a day beyond that one . . . Same age, same make of car, same number of dead . . . Chosen by God, but why?

  I tried not to hear. It scared me that the world could hold such horrible s
ymmetries, or that destiny could mean tragedy as much as fame. I concentrated on my sneakers—I’d refused to wear a dress or nice shoes, with no one in any mood to struggle—which were grabbing at something sticky on the floor. I turned to Brendhan, who hunched next to me, his blond eyebrows pinched to nearly touching. There were dark slashes under both his puffy eyes, making him seem even paler than usual. White as a ghost. I wondered if I looked like that.

  “There’s snot under my shoe,” I said to him. Brendhan giggled. Heads whipped our way, and I heard someone hiss Quinns. A tall woman nearby shook her head, her thin lips pinched white against leathery skin. I turned my back to her, shielding both of us as best I could, and went on mashing my sneakers into the mess.

  A few days after Rory’s funeral, I was playing on the spiral staircase leading up to my sisters’ rooms. I slid sidesaddle down the twisting banister and jumped where it ended, landing hard on both feet, then flinging my arms up like Olga Korbut. The floor shook, rattling the skeletal stairs, until Padeen came to the landing and asked what I was doing.

  “Playing,” I said.

  Padeen started down. “Sometimes it really seems like you don’t care,” she said. I was mid-staircase, but she kept walking, her face partly covered by one hand, a small duffle bag in the other.

  “What should I do?” I said, and it was a real question.

  Padeen stopped a few steps above me. “Nothing,” she said after a pause. “This, I guess.”

  “I can balance all the way from the top,” I said as she edged past. She didn’t answer. Her hair was loose and stringy around her face. Her jeans were worn to white threads in one knee, and she had on hiking boots that we called wafflestompers, like some backpacker heading into the wilderness. Padeen glanced up to where the staircase met the landing and sighed.