by Eric Kester
“Wyatt, get your ass up,” Coach Crooks said, waddling over to me. “No one sits on my field.”
I scrambled to my feet, and a team manager handed me a water bottle. I squirted it onto my cut because it seemed like a badass thing to do. It stung like a mofo, but I held back a wince. Showing pain was expressly not allowed on the Grayport football field.
“I don’t think you can just wash off bird herpes,” Ranger said.
This was all getting very overwhelming. “I’m fine. Really.”
Coach Stetson had arrived now and he crouched next to the seagull with my dad. He called for Coach Crooks, who hobbled over and squatted his stiff body down next to the two crouching men. My dad had taken out his fishing knife and used its point to gently lift up one of the bird’s wings.
“Coach, you ever seen anything like this?”
Coach Crooks looked at the seagull’s underwing and froze. Thin, bright red lines, like veins, spider-webbed across its pink flesh. A thin film of red goop covered the skin.
Crooks rose slowly to his feet and, without saying a word, limped over to the stands in the back end zone.
My dad watched him warily. “You alright, Coach?”
But Crooks said nothing as he climbed the wooden planks of the stands. When he reached the top, about twenty rows up, he looked out onto the ocean. The wind howled. The rain was picking up. A tingle shot down my spine when I saw the expression on Crooks’s face, an expression I never thought I’d see from him: fear.
Coach Stetson looked nervous, another emotion you just never saw on the Grayport football field. “We’re calling it a day, boys,” he said quietly, still looking at Crooks.
We all stood there confused. This was unprecedented. In Grayport, calling off football practice was like the Church calling off Christmas.
Stetson sensed us all standing around. “Did I stutter?” he snapped. “Let’s go! Hit the showers. Especially you, Wyatt. I don’t know what killed that bird, but you should wash off quick as you can.”
“But, uh, but … I got Dummy Duty.”
“Forget it today. Shower up with your teammates.”
Trunk has the type of presence you can feel even when he’s standing behind you, and I instinctively flinched a split second before I felt his giant hand clomp down onto my shoulder.
“Come on, Wyatt,” he growled. “Let’s hit the showers.”
CHAPTER
EIGHT
I know you’ll hardly believe this, but I should confess that I was, in fact, a little scared of the communal shower. And by “a little” I mean I’d rather die of bird herpes than set foot in there with Trunk & Co.
When I got to my locker I pulled off my shoulder pads, dabbed my bird wound with a towel, plopped down on the chair, and pretended to have trouble untying my cleats. I waited until the majority of guys had disappeared into the shower room before getting naked myself. First I peeled off my wet T-shirt. Then in a single, carefully planned motion I pulled down my girdle, snatched up the towel I had positioned by my feet, and quickly wrapped it around my lower half.
A picture of my dad from his Grayport football days hung alongside a dozen other grim faces on our locker room’s Wall of Fame, and he watched me as I walked the plank to the block of heavy steam that marked the entrance to the shower room.
The air wafting from the showers was hot and sticky and smelled like Axe body wash—you know, that sickly-sweet soap that comes in scents called “Alpha Downpour” or “Midnight Pulse for Badass Dudes with Extra Sensitive Skin” and whose glowing colors are so neon that a single drop on your skin will ensure all your future children will have nineteen toes and three very jacked arms.
My towel came a few inches short of wrapping all the way around my waist, so I had to use both hands to hold it together. I was squeezing the life out of it as I stood at the threshold of the steam listening to the guys inside chat and blurt out their fucks and faggots and cunts over the hot hiss of the showers. I was waiting for an ideal time to enter, as if the group would suddenly break into a conversation about how chicks love dudes with chest hair that sprouted only around their nipples, and then I’d roll in all arrogant, like here comes Mr. Steal Yo’ Girl.
Spoiler alert: That’s not how it went down. I did overhear the conversation turn to me, though.
“No but seriously, how crazy was that bird hitting Wyatt?”
Ranger’s voice. I had to really concentrate to make it out over the loud patter of the showers. Man, I was really choking the hell out of my towel.
“The thing kamikazed right into him!” someone added.
“Like it was aiming for him.”
“Naw”—this was Trunk, no mistaking his gravelly rasp—“it was sucked outta the sky. Wyatt’s gut is so big it’s got its own gravitational pull.”
In my alternate timeline as Thor, God of Thunder, Taker of No Shit, this is when I stroll into the shower room and say, “Trunk, you sure know a lot about physics for a guy who’s failed it twice.” But I’m just Wyatt, God of Stalling, Needer of Wider Towels. I kept idling by the shower entrance, out of sight.
“Hey, have you guys considered”—here was Ranger’s voice again—“that maybe—and I’m just throwing it out there—that maybe, judging from Crooks’s reaction and all, that the gull died from, like, you know, that what killed it wasn’t bird herpes or whatever, but maybe, if you think about it—”
“Range, what the fuck are you blathering about?”
“Yeah, man, you’re rambling like Crooks on a bender.”
Ranger’s voice took a sudden sharp edge. “Oh, come on, do I really have to say it? Fine. That bird died from red tide, and all you assholes know it.”
No retorts, no jokes, no vocal response at all—just the heavy patter of shower water hitting ceramic tile. Ranger’s words wafted through the air and were inhaled like poison deep into our cores, where long buried memories of red tide waited to erupt at the slightest disturbance.
It’d been eight years since red tide last hit our shores, eight years since rumors that the ocean had magically changed colors spread through the halls of Grayport Elementary, prompting us all to sprint eagerly from school to Grayport Field, where we climbed the bleachers so we could see in the far distance the enormous blob of bloodred water oozing toward the beach. The girls made faces and said “gross” but we guys said “awesome” and awaited the red blob’s landfall eagerly, naively, stupidly.
I remember using my street hockey stick to poke the first dead seal that washed in with red tide. I was so excited I practically needed my inhaler. I poked the second dead seal, too. But then came the third, the fourth, the fifth. That’s when I realized the red algae that had colored the bay bright crimson wasn’t amazeballs or awesomesauce or even the tits—it was an outbreak. The poisonous microorganisms were unstoppable, ruthlessly killing everything that swam in them. At night Brett and I had to sleep with our window closed because the rotting flesh of the seal carcasses, now numbering in the hundreds, smelled worse than death. Our shore was littered with thousands and thousands of fish decaying in red slime.
Grayport Harbor shut down, and our town, poor even before red tide, had to survive three months without fishing earnings, which would be like asking you to survive three months without oxygen. A few of the businesses that closed then have since reopened, but most of them, like my mom’s old shop, called Fudge by Anna, are still boarded up now, eight years later. During red tide the only store with a line at the register was Hal’s Liquor Emporium. And I’d need a whole ’nother book to describe the devastating rise of drug use. Heroin became a big effing problem because apparently it was dirt cheap compared to other drugs. Heroin was red tide’s tentacles reaching from sea to land, snatching up the unemployed, the broken, and the hopeless.
Ranger, taking the room’s tense hush as tacit agreement that the dead gull probably meant the return of red tide, was the first to break the silence. “If red tide is really back, do you think they’ll cancel Friday’s game?”
This was an absurd idea—the only disaster that could devastate the town enough to cancel Grayport football would be, well, the cancellation of Grayport football, which is to say it’s invincible. But the somber mood of the room held the guys back from giving him shit. Plus there was definitely some communal sympathy for what red tide had done to Ranger’s big brother, a former Grayport football player who’s currently living at a heroin rehab facility that his family can’t really afford.
* * *
Every guy in the shower room had his own never-discussed story about what red tide did to his family. Brett’s is the same as mine, obviously, but he and I have never talked about those months so I wonder if he’d tell it the same way as I would. To me our red tide story starts two weeks after Dad’s fishing boat had to shut down operations. This left Mom and her Fudge by Anna store as our only means of income. Things were a little tight (my parents’ favorite phrase), so one afternoon Dad went out to sell our shabby car to a scrap metal business a couple of towns over. He returned after dark, and with no explanation he unplugged the TV in our living room and carried it up to the attic bedroom that Brett and I shared. Almost every night for the next six weeks my parents would come into our room, turn the volume way, way up on SpongeBob and his square pants, then head back downstairs to argue about money in the kitchen, always forgetting in half a second that they were trying to whisper.
The accusations came fast, furious, and loud: Mom telling Dad that there must be work somewhere if only you’d look a little harder; Dad saying I may not have a job but goddammit at least I’m not losing us money, which is the case with you and your goddam fudge shop, a real drain, that thing, your most expensive decision since Wyatt; Mom saying speaking of drains, that’s where your stash of whiskey—there seems to be plenty enough money for that, by the way—is headed if you don’t shape up and start acting like a man; Dad saying it’s not whiskey I’m drinking but actually a magical antidote to your constant nagging, which, by the way, sounds just like THIS:
And he’d smash a plate or glass against the wall.
Then there’d be silence if we were lucky, Mom crying if we weren’t, followed by the sound I began to dread most, the one I still fear, the slow creak … creak … creak of Dad limping his damaged hip up the squeaky stairs to our attic room, where, even if we quickly turned off SpongeBob and pretended to be asleep, he’d aggressively shake Brett’s shoulder. Then, in a whiskey breath I could smell from my bottom bunk, he’d order Brett to get outta bed so they could review some Pop Warner game film. They’d sit in front of our little TV for hours rewinding and rewatching all of Brett’s incompletions. With each errant throw Dad would curse and take a long swig of whiskey until finally the remote slipped out of his hand and he passed out snoring on our cold hard floor with nothing but a pillow that Brett would tuck under his head.
The day Mom moved out was the same day that her fudge shop closed for good. That was week ten of red tide. I would’ve been sadder if I’d known that she’d never live with us again, that the divorce papers were already filed, but I believed the “it’s only temporary” bullshit separated parents say. Dad never talked about Mom or asked how she was doing whenever Brett and I got back from visiting her at Aunt Jackie’s house. In fact, Dad didn’t mention her once in five years. If it weren’t for the ghost of Mom’s shop still haunting Main Street—everything boarded up other than the FUDGE BY ANNA sign eroding in the salt air—it would’ve felt like she had never lived with us in Grayport at all.
Then, the day after my thirteenth birthday, we got a phone call from Sheriff Murphy, an old football teammate of Dad’s. It was snowing like crazy that night, I remember. It must’ve been like two or three A.M., so Brett and I crept downstairs to listen to Dad through his bedroom door.
“Okay … yes … alright. Thanks for the heads-up, Murph. I’ll take care of it.”
Dad hung up without saying goodbye, then flung open his door. He didn’t even flinch to find us standing right there, staring back at him.
“Get dressed, both of you. We’re going to Mom’s shop.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
Vandalism is common in Grayport, especially since red tide left a shit ton of frustrated and bitter people with too much time on their hands. Still, it was pretty jarring when we trudged two miles in the dark to Mom’s shop and saw her sign covered in spray paint. Everyone in town (except Dad) loved Mom and her little fudge store. Grayport needed all the sweetness it could get. I saw nothing but hate, though, as I looked through the night snow at the crude black letters sprayed onto Mom’s FUDGE BY ANNA sign. The vandal had crossed out the BY and added a few letters. The sign now read: I FUDGED ANNA.
Dad, Brett, and I didn’t say anything the entire night—didn’t want to, didn’t need to. We just got to work setting up the two ladders we had lugged with us. We had a bucket of paint and about four hours until sunrise. Nobody was going to know about I FUDGED ANNA except us, Sheriff Murphy, and the asshole who did it.
The funny thing is, as I write it now, I’m realizing that this is a weirdly happy memory. Well, maybe not happy—but reassuring, in a way. I dunno, there was something kind of nice about the atmosphere. Like, the air was so cold that not only Grayport but also time itself seemed frozen still. Brett and Dad sat perched atop each ladder with their paintbrushes while I stood watch on the ground and supported each ladder with outstretched arms, the tips of my fingers numb ’cause Mom wasn’t home to tell me to wear mittens. All three of us were working together and freezing our balls off until dawn, when the sun finally rose up to warm our red faces and melt the black ice that had crusted over Main Street. It was an act of love, what we did that night, maybe the last one our family’s ever had.
If you asked Brett, I bet he’d say it was an act of duty. But I’m starting to think that a deep sense of duty toward someone is about the most raw and sincere form of love there is. You gotta believe that, anyway, or else you’ll spend your whole life wondering if certain guys love anything at all.
* * *
Here in Grayport we’re not so hot on things like love and the touchy-feelies. But if there was one scrap of positivity that rolled in with red tide, it was a general uptick in empathy. At least, that’s the mood I was hoping for in the shower room when I took the red tide conversation as a (relatively) safe opportunity to creep in.
Of course, a guy my size creeps like a crack of thunder whispers. Amazingly, though, no one seemed to notice me when I first shuffled in, head down and both hands clutching my towel like it was the edge of a cliff. On muddy days (which in Grayport means most days) the two drains in the middle of the room get clogged with muck and grass clippings. The water on the floor was already an inch deep, which wasn’t so bad since normally by the time I finished Dummy Duty I’d be slushing through a soup of dirty water and soap suds up to my cankles.
The wall immediately to the right of the entrance was covered in green tiles and lined with towel hooks. I lingered by the hooks for a moment as my eyes adjusted to the sting of the hot, soapy-sweet steam. Then I scanned the room, praying that one of the corner showers was free so I could implement my “shower and cower” technique that I had just invented in my head.
No dice. In fact, all the showers were taken.
Wait, never mind: I had overlooked a free showerhead right over ther—
Oh crap.
Crapcrapcrap.
Next to the lone open shower was Trunk’s hulking frame. Huge, thick, and firm in all the places where mine sagged, Trunk’s body faced the showerhead, revealing a massive back smeared with a collage of bruises, gashes, and seething red zits.
At least Brett was on the other side of the open showerhead. I’d be safe with him there.
Trunk spun around to rinse off his back. He was facing me now so I stood perfectly still. Predators have movement-based vision.
But I forgot they also can smell pheromones of fear. Trunk immediately locked eyes onto me.
“We
ll, well, well,” he boomed. “Look who graced us with his presence. The man of the hour: Wyatt Porker! Shit, sorry—I mean Wyatt Parker.”
Trunk let loose a deep, loud chortle. But as he laughed I saw him subtly glance sideways at Brett. It wasn’t a nervous glance, I don’t think. It was more of an investigative one, like he was gauging whether Brett would be bothered by the shot at me. The entire room was also looking at Brett for a cue on how to react. Permission to laugh, really.
Brett was expressionless. He casually reached for the soap dispenser. A cream-colored liquid shot into his hand and he began working it into a lather.
Permission granted.
Trunk’s lips curled into a sneer as he looked back to me. “There’s an open shower right here, Wyatt baby. Whaddya waiting for?”
There was nothing I could do now except hang up my towel and walk the longest ten yards of my life.
CHAPTER
NINE
You know how some people, usually stoners smoking pot or preppy kids eating red velvet cupcakes, talk about having an out-of-body experience? This was the exact opposite. I’d never been so in my body. As I sloshed naked through the inch-deep water to the showerhead, I felt every crevice, hair, stretch mark, and appendage being scanned by a small army of devastating-joke makers. The problem wasn’t that I was the only player on the team who carried extra weight; the problem was how I carried it. Gravity was everything. See, while other linemen on my team also had big stomachs, love handles, and even stretch marks, their extra padding was solid and sturdy. Mine was soft and droopy. Theirs fought back against gravity, holding firm, bolstered by underlying muscle. Mine gave in to gravity, surrendering to its whims with each bounce and jiggle. Their weight was strength. Mine was weakness. That was the difference.
Take it from me: It’s possible to be in a room with twenty-five guys who aren’t wearing clothes, yet still be the only one who’s naked. Worst of all, this was my fault because I didn’t go into the shower room the first day of preseason with everyone else. Yeah, there might’ve been a couple wisecracks slung at me, but it would’ve ended there. Instead I avoided the shower room to the point where my daily absence became notable, which in turn made my entrance right now an event.