Gut Check

by Eric Kester

  The pack of girls, the vendors, Nate, Mr. Cliff—everybody—rushed toward the ramp leading up to the field. In the commotion I discreetly plunked Poncho’s head back on.

  At the mouth of the tunnel, one of Haley’s friends yelled at her to hurry up.

  “Coming!” she shouted back. Then, in a quick movement that I might’ve subconsciously wished into existence, Haley pulled off her T-shirt.

  Painted on her stomach was a big red 7.

  Brett’s number.

  Haley unfolded her see-through poncho and slipped it on, then rushed to join her friends, disappearing up the ramp without looking back.

  “Hey, Poncho, you coming or what?” Mr. Cliff shouted at me as he joined the mass of bodies funneling into the ramp toward the field. “We need your magical powers out there!”

  * * *

  Stepping into the open air of our stadium is like diving headfirst into the deep end of Grayport’s soul. Perched delicately on a rocky bluff overlooking the ocean, the stadium pulses with a raw and invigorating danger. My favorite part is the sound of the waves crashing into the stone embankment and how you can hear the water crest then slam into rock with a steady whhh-thunk whhh-thunk that echoes through the stadium like our communal heartbeat, a reminder that we’re still here, defiant and surviving despite it all.

  At 6′2″, I could easily see the field over the crowd of vendors huddled at the ramp opening, but I had to tilt my head back slightly to get a better viewing angle out of Poncho’s nostrils. After two short runs and a quick slant pass that got stuffed for two yards, our offense was facing a fourth-and-one from the six-yard line. The crowd stood as one, but held a tense silence so the offense could hear Brett’s play call over the whipping rain and wind.

  Brett broke the huddle and strode to the line of scrimmage. I always found that watching him play football was mesmerizing, inspiring, and depressing all at once. It was mesmerizing to see how confidence and athleticism radiated from every one of his movements; inspiring to know there are actually people out there like this; depressing to know that this would never be me.

  Still, I liked to imagine what it was like to be Brett, what it’s like if you’re at center stage, not some sideshow in a costume. I wanted to be down there on the field as the salty mists rolled in from the shore and enveloped the stadium in a thick cloud that gives the bulbs on the old light towers their fuzzy orange glow, like little halos floating in the dark sky. I wanted to take that exhilarating walk up to the ball as the booming waves spoke on behalf of the entire hushed town, who you can’t even see through the fog, but who you can just feel all around you, rooting for you, getting soaked with you, practically bleeding with you because this moment right here, fourth-and-one in the rickety fishing town of Grayport, is all we really have.

  “Hut, HUT!”

  The shotgun snap was low but Brett easily plucked the ball off his shoelaces. He tucked it and took off on a QB keeper, off-tackle right. By stacking the line on the left, Blakemore was daring us to take it right, directly at their all-league outside linebacker, Derek Leopold.

  Leopold easily threw aside his blocker and met Brett with an electrifying collision about one yard behind the line of scrimmage. He had Brett wrapped up and was driving him back. That was it, game over.

  But just as the entire town groaned—a whole season lost on opening night—Brett somehow spun free from Leopold’s claws. Now Brett stumbled backward a couple of yards and, regaining his balance, he rolled out in an angled sprint toward the sideline, right where the first-down marker was planted. The Blakemore cornerback on that side read Brett’s trajectory and raced to meet him at the marker, while Derek Leopold also chased Brett from behind. At the marker, the cornerback crunched into Brett with a perfect form tackle, but Brett’s momentum was too much as he bowled his opponent forward. When the two of them hit the ground, they were a few feet beyond the first-down pole.

  The whistle blew and the crowd erupted in a deafening cheer that suddenly muffled into a silent panic as we watched Derek Leopold hurtle recklessly toward Brett. Everyone could see Leopold’s target: Brett’s left arm, which was planted firmly in the muddy turf as he pushed himself off the ground and out of the tackle. Leopold dove like a 250-pound missile aimed at the exposed limb.

  * * *

  My great-uncle Wyatt passed down his asthma to me, and I was wheezing by the time I ran my Poncho ass down to the ambulance zone outside the stadium. The snap of Brett’s bone had made a deep, hollow klok sound, like a wooden bat connecting with a fastball, and it was still echoing through the stadium when my feet instinctively took off for this spot. Haley and her friends were among the dozens of others who had the same idea to wait for Brett at the ambulance. The outcome of the game didn’t matter anymore.

  The rain had stopped, and moonlight filtered through the fog and drenched us all in a weird, almost supernatural glow. After a couple minutes the group’s concerned murmurs were cut off by medics shouting to clear the way. A gurney whirred toward the ambulance. Brett lay upright in the back, holding his arm. Incredibly, he didn’t look to be in pain—he just lay there with a vacant stare, which was way worse.

  A few onlookers screamed at the sight of blood spurting like a leaky hose from the spot where Brett’s bone, so pristinely white, broke through the skin. The sight made me feel like puking. But that feeling, which was located high in my throat, wasn’t nearly as bad as the wrench I felt twisting deep in my stomach. As they loaded Brett into the ambulance, I was leveled by the realization that this was going to change everything. What “everything” entailed, I couldn’t yet say. And looking back now, there’s no way I could’ve predicted the epic shit-storm that this event would bring to the town—and to me specifically. But I just had this feeling, this dread. Usually when the king goes down, the game is over for the pawns. For me, though, everything was about to begin.

  Peering into the ambulance, I noticed that Brett’s empty stare had shifted slightly, had taken on some life.

  He was looking at me. Looking at Poncho Pete, that is.

  Without thinking, I removed my head. I gently placed it on the ground, walked over to the back of the ambulance, and climbed in.

  A paramedic planted a stiff-arm into my chest. “Whoa there, kid,” he said. “Immediate family only.”

  “It’s okay,” Brett murmured from the stretcher. “That’s my brother.”

  One year later.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  For the longest time I was a floater. I never committed to a major goal or quest. It’s hard to be pumped about the future when, like most guys at Grayport, you’re already destined for a lifetime of mopping decks on fishing boats. Sure, after a few decades of slopping up fish guts you might be named “first mate” or whatever, but the more realistic hope is that your mopping zone gets upgraded from the stern to the bow. With the view up front you can at least pretend you’re sailing forward into an infinite horizon. Still, deep down you always know the truth: that you’re drifting, and that every journey ends by anchoring back in Grayport.

  But that changed after Brett’s injury. I finally had a mission.

  It all started in the ambulance, where the paramedics assigned me the job of distracting Brett while they jammed his bone back in place. This was pretty important, as far as side quests go, and I totally blew it. I just stood there like a fool, fumbling for words that never came. I couldn’t think of anything to say to Brett. We’d shared bunk beds in our tiny attic room for my entire life, but somehow we’d never had a meaningful conversation.

  It’s not that Brett disliked me, necessarily. I think he always viewed me as a curious but mostly useless expansion, like when your iPhone requires a ridiculously large iOS update just to add a taco emoji. I swear some nights it felt like there was nothing more between us than a stale fart that had escaped my sheets and floated up to my big brother, who’d catch a whiff and not laugh at me, not yell at me, not do anything at all other than roll over and face the wall in a t
hick, awkward silence.

  I thought we’d be tighter after sharing the traumatic ride to the hospital. Stuff got intensely real in the ambulance. It was a total frenzy of shouting and blood and shiny machines that beeped like crazy. But over all the chaos, over all the flashing lights and sterile needles and space-age devices, one item stands out the most in my memory: an ordinary stick of rubber. It was the size of a Snickers bar, and the paramedics placed it between Brett’s clenched teeth so he wouldn’t accidentally bite off his tongue in agony. When life is stripped of all its fluff, it can be pretty raw and brutal.

  I guess that’s a tough lesson everyone learns eventually. But I thought maybe a special bond forms when you learn it alongside someone else. Like it becomes a secret between the two of you. Granted, anyone visiting the poncho booth in the following weeks could see Brett’s maroon bloodstains spattered across my mascot costume. But those people weren’t there when the blood was bright red. Only Brett and I shared that.

  Not that I expected us to suddenly become #bffs or #bros or hashtag anything at all. Brett was quiet around everyone, and I knew nothing would change that. I was just hoping we could reach a level of comfort that allowed conversations only longtime siblings could have. You know, the kind that start with “Hey, remember that time when…” and are answered by your brother with a nostalgic chuckle or, if it was a bad family memory, a quiet acknowledgment like “Yeah, man, I remember—that was pretty fucked up.” And then just like that, neither of you is holding the weight of the past by yourself.

  But we never got there. Not even close. For an entire year, Brett was focused solely on rehab and staying in shape. When he actually did talk to me it was nothing new, just typical blah questions like “What’s for dinner?” and “Can I borrow your phone charger?” and “Did you know your shirt’s inside out?”

  The only—and I mean only—people Brett was close with were his teammates. So my mission for the following school year was clear: make varsity football. I’d been cut from the team the previous year, so this was my last chance to play with Brett before he graduated and disappeared to some big D-I college where he’d have a new roommate, a guy who’d probably be funny and cool and not a taco.

  So my quest log was updated easy enough. Now all I had to do was make a nationally renowned football team that was essentially an army of highly trained athletic specimens. Easy as pie.

  I spent the year preparing: I cut a little weight. I stopped eating pies and tacos and Snickers. It’s no piece of cake going cold turkey on something you love, but that’s how the cookie crumbles. I gained a little bit of strength, too, mostly doing body-weight exercises like push-ups and squats and pull-ups, because when you’re a guy my size, those exercises are plenty difficult. In fact, I even went from being able to do zero pull-ups to being able to do two of them, which is technically an improvement of infinity percent.

  So I actually went into my sophomore season feeling slightly optimistic. At the very least, I figured that the experience would be good for me. It would make me less soft, inside and out. After all, a football field is a lot like the inside of an ambulance. It’s where life is distilled down to its most primal elements. Pain. Instinct. Survival. It’s high-stakes chaos where you have no control over anything other than your response to the madness. You can discover a lot about yourself on the football field. You can learn what you’re capable of. But what if you learn you’re capable of terrible things? Now that’s something I wasn’t prepared for.

  * * *

  It happened about halfway through a preseason practice, though technically it was still tryouts for nonreturners like Nate and me. Actually, calling it “tryouts” is too generous. Preseason was more like a Hunger Games battle of survival where at any moment for any reason you could be mercilessly slaughtered or, even worse, cut from the team. Over the first few weeks the roster had been trimmed from eighty-five to forty-three, and somehow both Nate and I were still there. At first I was shocked we’d made it that far, but then again maybe this was proof that great rewards wait at the intersection of talent and determination.

  “True, true,” Nate agreed between squirts of water at our mid-practice break. “Though we can’t discount the possibility that we haven’t been cut because the coaches have forgotten we even exist.”

  That’s why I hated being friends with a science nerd like Nate: He had a major hard-on for dumb things like facts and reason. But he did have a point. We likely weren’t there because of football talent, but because of a skill we’d inadvertently demonstrated at every party and school dance: being invisible.

  I snatched the water bottle from Nate and took a swig. “Well, I hope Trunk Greenhammer forgot I exist. I accidentally stepped on his foot at practice yesterday and he glared at me like I had just texted him a dick pic.”

  I nervously glanced over at Trunk at the far end of the water station. His massive chest heaved up and down as he ripped the cap off a bottle and poured water down his gullet.

  “Did Trunk say anything to you?” Nate asked nervously.

  “He said that if I ever stepped on his foot again, he’d go ‘bitchcakes’ on me. Whatever that means.”

  Nate furrowed his bushy eyebrows in deep thought. Even in his oversized shoulder pads, he always looked more like a professor than a football player.

  “‘Bitchcakes,’ eh? Probably involves Trunk pounding you into shapes once thought anatomically impossible. I gotta say, I’m pretty impressed that such a creative term escaped from the cobwebs of his skull.”

  We laughed quietly, but it soon fizzled into an uncomfortable silence.

  “Are we stupid, Nate?” I said after the pause. “Thinking we could possibly compete with these guys? I mean, Trunk practically sweats creatine.”

  “Nothing is stupid,” Nate said emphatically. “It all comes down to simple physics. Force equals mass times acceleration, right? So to hit with the same force as Trunk, you just need better acceleration to go with your mass.”

  That’s why I loved being friends with a science nerd like Nate: To him, your weight is your mass and nothing more.

  “Newton’s third law for the win!” I said, extending a fist for what was definitely the dorkiest pound in the history of mankind.

  Nate sighed and gently pushed down my fist. “Newton’s second law, actually. The third law states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. For example, in physics last week, when you should’ve been paying attention to this stuff, you were instead sitting behind Haley and creepily breathing on the back of her neck with a strong force that was equal and opposite to her feelings for you.”

  “See, that’s where you’re wrong,” I said, grinning. “Because we can’t discount the possibility that she forgot I even exist.”

  Nate started to respond but was interrupted by the shrill of a whistle. It came from Coach Crooks, our offensive line coach who was about infinity years old and who played Grayport football even before our granddads. Coach Crooks had only, like, seven teeth and even less patience, so Nate and I joined the herd of other linemen and ran over to him, buckling our chin straps on the way.

  As we gathered around Crooks in a semicircle, I strategically positioned myself on the opposite end of Trunk. Nate slipped in behind me. A moment later I heard the usual snap as he unbuckled his chin strap. Nate had apocalyptic acne and the chafing of his chin strap must’ve been absolute torture. Every chance he got, Nate would unbuckle his chin strap, even if it was for just a few seconds of relief.

  It tore me up inside, seeing Nate do this again and again. Trust me, I have always known what it was like to have a physical flaw on display for the whole world to see. But at least my weight problem was my own stupid fault. Nate’s acne was bad luck, plain and simple. He was super sensitive about it, too. Like, Nate and I could joke about anything, but I’d never in a million years mention his acne.

  Coach Crooks was standing next to a tackling dummy and staring down our group. His bony hands were on his hips and his thum
bs were hooked under the waistband of his way-too-short gym shorts that I’ll probably be describing to a therapist someday.

  Crooks flicked his head toward the tackling dummy. “You all see this dummy?”

  This was a rhetorical question, but Trunk said yes aloud.

  “Well, it ain’t a dummy anymore. From now until we play Blakemore, it’s that son of a bitch Derek Leopold. We’ve cooked up a few tricks for that bush-league bastard, starting with a heavy dose of double-teams.”

  Trunk clapped his hands together in excitement and shouted something that was less English than it was gurgle.

  I turned slightly toward Nate and whispered, “I think Trunk was bitten by a rabid animal as a child.” This game of wisecracks was dangerous, but Nate and I couldn’t help it. Making fun of Grayport’s macho football culture distracted us from how badly we wanted to be part of it. Nate responded with a snicker that was a little too loud.

  Coach Crooks snapped his glare over to us. “Something funny over there?”

  White-hot panic washed over Nate’s face. “Oh … uh, no, Mr. Coach Crooks, sir.”

  Crooks leaned forward and spat brown tobacco juice between his front teeth. “Change of plans, fellas. No more dummy. Today we’ll be using live bait. Let’s go, Zitty Pimpleson—get your butt over here.”

  Nate glanced at me nervously.

  “Told you the coaches know who you are,” I said quietly. Not my best joke, but I don’t think Nate heard anyway. He buckled his chin strap with a wince and ran to the front of the firing squad.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  The double-team drill was efficient, cold-blooded, and hard to watch. We formed two lines, and on Coach Crooks’s whistle the two guys up front exploded into Nate with vicious smashes that easily crumpled him like an empty soda can.