by Holly LeCraw
But I was better today. Better than yesterday, that is. The clouds helped.
“Did you see there are recruiters here? Looking at Zack?” May said.
“Isn’t it a little late for that?” I said.
“I guess not if you’re not getting money. Maybe recruiter is the wrong word. But look, down there. With Booker.”
I was beginning to think the Air Force Academy application was a myth, but I held my tongue.
People went for coffee; others joined us; we rearranged ourselves, huddling for warmth. Around us the students were rowdy, oblivious to the cold. I saw Celia near the front, in a clutch of girls. We scored— Zack scored—and then in short order Scooter Lewis, the quarterback, was at the thirty again and was nearly sacked, but his arm with the ball flashed up just in time; and Zack was there, suddenly arcing away separate, the ball too an arcing missile, then caught two-handed somewhere in the air and for a moment cradled to his chest like his heart had flown away and returned, and then it was crooked in one arm, small and safe, and a path created itself in front of him and we scored again.
I remembered Nicky doing exactly the same thing—what seemed like the same thing—when he was very small, three or four. Hugh had thrown a ball, a tennis ball I think, and I was about to say I usually throw the big red rubber one to him but then Nicky’s arm went out and the ball flew straight into his hand, like it was flying home.
In the end zone, Zack never celebrated. He’d shoot across the line and then stop, his body suddenly loose and unconcerned, his head down. He looked like a sprinter who’d been practicing starts, the same absorbed nonchalance, like the race hadn’t even begun. That one didn’t count. And as everyone cheered around us I thought of little Zack in the driveway of our old house, practicing baskets, and how I’d lower the goal for him, and he’d enjoy the sudden ease but for only a little while. I remembered his face, his soft furrowed brow as he’d aimed, again and again.
Huddle, then it broke; a businesslike crouch, zigzag pushoff, and he was lost in the scrum. The whistle bleated for some offense I didn’t understand and even that sounded sodden.
I heard Nick say, “So why did you come back?”
I stood up. “I’m getting coffee,” I said. “Anyone?”
“I’ll wait for the toddies,” Cletus Maxwell, the chaplain, said. I squeezed past knees and out of the row and was halfway to the stairs when I heard, “Charlie.” I pretended at first not to hear. Was there a name for mingled annoyance and pleasure? Probably some useful Yiddish word. But when May called again, I turned around and waited for her.
The little green concession stand was at the far end of the field, near the long-jump pit. We walked for a minute or two in silence. The low gray sky made the world small. I didn’t feel the need to make her comfortable, or I shouldn’t. Finally she said, “You should have seen them all over him yesterday.”
I said, patiently, “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Nick. At dinner. With all the kids. Girls, but the boys too.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“But he’s very graceful about it. It’s not like he’s holding court. He is just purely engaged.”
They were out of coffee so I got hot chocolate. It was like drinking chocolate-flavored soapsuds. May bought a bottle of water. We had to smile at Amy Maxwell, Cletus’s wife, running the concession, and say how lucky she was to have a roof over her head. May’s dimple flashed. I stepped away the first moment it was decent, and waited.
“What’s the deal?” I said, when May rejoined me. “Is something about Nick worrying you?”
“Not at all. He’s just really good with them. I wanted you to know.”
“I’ve heard.”
She was having trouble unscrewing the cap with her gloved hands. I took the bottle, opened it, and handed it back. She accepted it silently and then said, “Why’s he here?”
“He needed a place a little calmer than Afghanistan.”
“When did he—”
I stopped. “May, look, you can ask him. I’m not his manager.”
“Of course not.” Her face closed.
I started toward the stands again. “Ask him anything. I don’t mind.”
“Oh. Well, thank you.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” I said. “What I meant was, he can tell you his own story.”
We passed a trash barrel and I threw in the half-drunk hot chocolate. The wind was picking up. Jesus Christ it was cold. I couldn’t even remember why I’d felt the need to come to this game, Zack wouldn’t have cared, no one would have, woe was me. I wanted to be at home, in my house, in front of my fireplace, maybe barricade myself for the winter, not emerge till the world was washed clean in the melting snow. And I thought maybe I could tell May; maybe she’d come with me; we’d be two little souls lost in the wood, brother and sister who couldn’t find the breadcrumb trail out. I thought about this and for a moment it was like I was dreaming on my feet it seemed so utterly possible.
“Charlie, stop it,” May said sharply. “You can’t look at me that way.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m dead. Or a figment of your imagination.”
“Well, you most certainly aren’t,” I said.
Cheers rose up again and May said, “I’m glad for Zack. He’s really good. I didn’t expect that. How good he is. I wonder why he wasn’t already recruited.”
“May, you don’t have to make conversation.”
I could almost pretend my annoyance was genuine. Because it was exhausting, holding myself away.
She put her head down against the wind, walked ahead of me, did not look back.
I nearly turned around and walked to my car but I had to not care so I went back to the cold metal bleachers and sat down on Nick’s other side again and cheered and joshed and told Divya that the thought of toddies was the only thing keeping me upright. And there was May, ignoring me, good, with her straight shoulders and her surprising, carrying yell (Brothers, I heard her say to Nicky, had to hold my own) and if I glanced to my left and caught them both in profile—my God look at them, look at them. He was light, she dark, and oh their matched fineness. Divya saw me looking and I shrugged: Didn’t she see it too? Fact? The two of them, the tall beauty of them together, a fact?
It had begun to rain for real but they wouldn’t call the game, not now. We hunched into our hoods. Nicky was getting soaked, wouldn’t listen to protests. People began to file down off the bleachers to the sidelines, not because they were leaving but because they were putting up umbrellas and didn’t want to block the view. We were a polite bunch. A considerate bunch. The sidelines filled, and this reflexive kindness and the colors of the open umbrellas lifted my spirits suddenly and strangely. Something was going to happen. Maybe all would be well, and all manner of thing—
It was a rout. We were twenty-one points ahead. There was a rush on the field—it was a third down—and grunts and the thudding of bodies, and the band oompahed away, and in the middle of it the whistle. For a few seconds the air was still loose and happy and then it changed and thickened, the players hanging back. “Someone’s down,” Cletus said. He was an alum, one of my first students, Cletus was. Dogged. Oddly calm, even as a teenager. I wasn’t at all surprised he became a priest.
The pause tipped. Some muffled mystery came over the loudspeaker. Then I saw Booker moving onto the field, through air slanted with rain, Booker and his eternal blue cap, and he was walking purposefully but fast and then he gave up and broke into a jog. May stood up. “I’m sure he’s fine,” I said. She seemed not to hear me. Celia hung over the barrier at the front of the stands, her friends already petting her, solicitous.
Then Nick was moving. “Nicky, wait,” I said.
“Charlie,” May said behind me.
“Nicky. Wait.”
He didn’t turn around. He pushed his way through, down the stands, and I followed him. Once I felt May’s hand on my coat behind me. Is he moving? Is he moving? The stilln
ess of the crowd eerie in the rain. Then something else on the field, beyond the knot of people around Zack, where the two teams had been slowly edging in, slowly mixing—and there was a swaying contraction, a darting dispersal, and then all at once they were on each other.
There was a collective gasp and seemingly on its strength we lurched forward. “He moved. Zack’s moving,” I said. But no one was listening. Everyone was watching the scrambling knots of bodies now. Players were throwing off their helmets and rushing in.
Then right in front of me Nick found a space in the crowd at the rail—seemed to conjure it—and then he was leaping sideways over the bar, up and over with that ridiculous grace, and he was running across the eight lanes of track to the field. “Charlie!” May cried. She grabbed my arm.
And I turned to her, right into her face, her eyes, and shouted, “I cannot do anything about him!” Then I yanked my arm away, squeezed under the railing, and dropped to the ground.
Nick had shouldered his way in and was peeling Abbott guys away, pulling them close, whispering as if passing a signal, or a spell, his arm briefly around each neck, and then he’d push them down the line, and it was up to someone else to herd them and that was me, and Cletus, who was suddenly beside me, because everyone else was still with Zack.
All those years of hyped-up bad blood with Essex, the rain and mud and merciless scoring, kids needed some drama, fucking testosterone, and then I saw an enormous Essex kid land a blow on Nick’s face—and Nick was exploding, and I was running, swearing, the kid under him, Nick’s arm a piston up down up down.
“Goddammit, Nicky, Nicky, it’s me, Nicky stop, it’s me, it’s Charlie, Charlie.” I had his arms. He was so thin. I looked around, wild, and met Cletus’s eyes, and then I sensed them, Abbott boys circling us like a fence, and together Cletus and I held Nick and tried to pretend that wasn’t what we were doing and those boys stood around us, sentries looking out, streaked with mud and rain and their heads small and lost coming up out of the shoulder pads, their eyes solemn, and I said, “Shh, Nicky, Nicky Niccolo, shh, it’s me, you’re with me, you’re at home, shh,” until he finally stilled and whispered, “Sorry. Sorry. I’m sorry.”
In the middle of it all, they were lifting Zack onto the backboard. I saw him move arms, legs, in fact I saw other hands pressing him down, gentling him too. I was unaccountably furious with him, lying there in a neck brace, covered with mud and soaked with sweat and rain. There was blood too on the shearling collar of Nicky’s jacket but nevertheless I wanted to knock both their heads together, once more, a blinding, ringing blow; I wanted to save them both.
Fourteen
By Monday Nicky’s eye was still magnificently black and only partly open.
He’d insisted on coming to school. Sunday night, at his apartment, I’d said, “You’re going to make everyone cringe.”
“Is it really that bad?”
“Yes it’s that bad. Jesus. And it’ll be worse tomorrow.” I winced, only partly for effect. And yet I kept wanting to touch it, whether to confirm its existence or to magically smooth it away, I didn’t know. I felt my fingers tingling toward his face, like the old hypnosis trick where your arm rises of its own accord. “It just—it’s like a car wreck,” I said. “You want to look away, but you can’t.”
“Well, great.” This was the first argument that seemed to give him pause, but after a moment he said, “I just don’t want them to have to get a sub. I’m fine.”
“We know you’re a hero, Nicky. We get it.”
“I am not a fucking hero. That is not the fucking point!”
“I’m kidding,” I said. “I know.”
“I am not the point!”
“I know, Nick, I know. Look.” And I waited until he looked. “Does that happen often?”
His green eyes were bleak. “Every now and then,” he said. “If someone comes from behind. I thought it was better.”
“You should have told me,” I said. “You don’t know how lucky you are.”
But at school, sure enough, the waters parted before him; whispers and murmurs billowed behind. Fist bumps, high fives. He was abashed. “I’m fine,” he said, “I didn’t do anything,” over and over, batting at the air in front of him as though he were beset by flies. Several players from the fight had been benched for the next game, and the general feeling seemed to be that they were the unlucky ones Mr. Satterthwaite hadn’t stopped in time.
He often sat with students at lunch, but that day he beat a retreat to the teachers’ table and sat with Divya and me. “Oh, Nicky, Nicky, Nicky,” Divya purred, and I watched her hand rising.
“It’s nothing. It’s fine,” he said, and waved away at the flies.
The dining hall, the most modern building on campus, held its usual brightness, from the clerestory windows high in the roof ridge. It was a boon on a day like this, gray and wet with the last of the storm that had finally moved in for real on Sunday, blowing branches bare, plastering the leaves to the brick paths on the quad. The light was flat, full spectrum, honest. It shone without mercy or comment on Nick’s eye. I could see the shadings of color, from blue black to the healing greenish yellow at the edges.
Behind Nick, Adam Salter was approaching. He raised his hand to clap Nick on the shoulder and I barked, “Don’t!”
Nicky’s eyes widened, fastened on me for dear life, and Salter’s hand stopped in midair. “Not from behind,” I said, and sat down again. “He’s a little jumpy. You can imagine.”
Salter’s eyebrows knitted slightly and then the look was gone. “All hail the conquering hero,” he said, pulling a chair catty-corner from the table to face Nick and sitting on it backward. “You saved their asses, Nick. We’d have had to suspend the whole team.”
“S’what I figured,” Nick said.
“What I want to know,” May said, “is what you said to them.”
“I don’t really remember.”
“Well, it worked!” Salter said. He reached across to Nick and completed the proprietary gesture he couldn’t be dissuaded from making, patting him hard on the shoulder, attaboy attaboy, but in Nick’s full view this time. “Natural leader,” he said. “Leader among men. Hey, so Zack Middleton is out for a couple of weeks. You heard that.”
“Yes.” I’d been aware all morning of Zack’s absence. There was a strange lightness to the student body—all, of course, in my mind. We were starting All the King’s Men this week, and he was going to miss it.
“Just waiting for the dizziness to go away. He’s champing at the bit. Angela’s making him stay home.”
“I should hope,” May said.
“He’s got to think about hockey season now. Probably done with football for the year. Wants to save up. But he’s fine. Had all the tests.” He looked at his watch. “Got a conference call,” he said. And he was off, navy blazer flapping in the breeze.
“Zack’s only playing football in the first place because of his dad,” Nick said.
Another pause, more complex. We all wanted to like Booker. “Who told you that?” I said.
“He did.”
“He did?” May said.
“I wrote him a recommendation for the air force.”
“The academy,” I said.
“Right, whatever. I made him talk to me a little, so I had something to go on. He said football’s like a job to him, but skating’s like flying.”
“He always loved to skate,” May said. “I remember him on Abbott Pond, pushing around a milk crate. When he was, like, two. Trying to keep up with B.J.”
“He asked you to write him a recommendation?” I said.
“Senior math teacher, it’s required or something. But I also tried to talk him out of it,” Nick said. “I told him there was a war going on. I told him the military is only gonna think of him as a body. Meat. Fodder.”
“Oh, God, Nicky.” I wasn’t even surprised. I was glad that Salter had gone. “What did he say?”
“Not much. He wasn’t going to listen.”
“You’re not going to sabotage him, are you? To save his soul?” May demanded.
Nick looked surprised. “No, of course not. I told him I’d write the rec. I wasn’t lying.” He grinned at her. “But that’s an idea.”
“I mean it,” May said. “Don’t do it.”
“I mean it too,” Nick said. “I won’t. It matters to him,” he said patiently, “so I won’t.” He looked at her, a little wide-eyed, for another moment and then his gaze shifted to me. “Besides, by the time he’s done there the war’ll be over, right?”
I shrugged. “They’ll think up another one.” Nearby I saw Celia Paxton get up from a table, with a phalanx of friends—Minnie, India, Marina. She was laughing, laughing so hard that her mouth was stretched wide. I’d never seen her so raucous. The four of them were collapsing on one another, bent double with their hilarity, and the whole cafeteria could hear them, but for the moment they seemed not to care, these girls who were pretty and smart but not at the top of the social order, not used to attention, to doing exactly as they pleased. Somehow in this moment, though, they felt an unusual freedom. They picked up their trays and sauntered off, tossing their hair.
I thought about how just a few days before I’d seen Zack steer Celia down the hall by the elbow, like they were long married and old, old.
“Well,” May said, laying her fork and knife neatly across her cleared plate, standing to leave. Divya rose too. “I suppose he can have visitors. I’ll go by and see him later. Maybe speak to Booker.”
“He’s like your little brother,” Nick said. “You really care about him.”
May smiled. “I guess you’re right. He was always my favorite. I used to rock him to sleep. But don’t tell him I said that.”
The limpid gray noon streamed down, the clearest light, casting no shadows; it shone on Nick’s cheeks, raggedy-edged rose, on the red-gold hair flopping in his eyes. He had no idea he was being watched; he was watching the girl.