Gut Check

by Eric Kester

  The woman took a step toward us and stopped suddenly. The long, pointy heels of her black stilettos had sunk into Grayport’s soggy field.

  Nate turned to me. “Is that…?”

  “Yup,” I said with a contrasting mix of certainty and disbelief. “That’s Natalie Hyde.”

  I was convinced that Nate and I were now in a different reality, as though the Methane Mamba explosion was so powerful it tore a hole in the space-time continuum and we had fallen into a parallel universe. I’d been watching Natalie Hyde on TV since elementary school; she started her career as a sideline reporter for Monday Night Football, but soon left to produce and host a popular series of shows about youth football in America. When Nate and I contacted every ESPN executive, assistant, and intern whose email we could find, we never imagined it would actually make its way up the chain, and that Natalie herself would consider our proposal to slot a Grayport-Blakemore game in the network’s Small-Town America high school football showcase.

  The five of us started walking toward her.

  “She’s shorter in real life,” Nate said to me softly.

  “You think so?”

  “Naw, I just always wanted to say that.”

  Mayor Pickney, a tall woman in her fifties who was very warm and friendly (in periods free of red tide, at least), shook Natalie’s hand and welcomed her to Grayport. She introduced Coach Stetson and Principal Hobbs, then gestured to Nate and me. “And this is Mr. Parker and Mr. McConnell.”

  When Natalie looked at me, her perfectly manicured eyebrows shot up in surprise.

  “Oh,” she said with some discomfort. Then, after a short pause, “I-I’m sorry, you just look…” She shook her head. “Never mind, let’s get started.”

  We had very little time; earlier Mrs. Pickney had told us that a secretary at ESPN had called her saying that Natalie could “squeeze in” a twelve-minute meeting this afternoon to assess whether Grayport would be a good fit for the show.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said nervously, extending my hand for a shake. Natalie presented her hand, which was dainty and limp as a dead fish, and I clasped it awkwardly, wiggling it up and down.

  “The two of you really saved our butts,” she said to Nate and me. Her voice was as rich and silky in person as it was on TV. “We were all ready to air a game this Saturday between two powerhouse high schools in Arkansas, but the home team canceled the game after three players were killed in a car accident.” Natalie shook her head. “We were just about to refund our advertisers when my intern Johnny or Jimmy or whatever told me about this email he got from a little fishing town with an all-American quarterback. Honestly, we never even considered the possibility that New England would have two teams good enough to showcase for a national game. But we started doing some research, and the whole thing is just made for TV. I can picture the program description: A blue-collar town with a red tide problem: The story of a gritty community that unites and rolls up its sleeves to survive the trenches of football and life.”

  Natalie spoke that last part with the dramatic flair of a commercial announcer, then returned to her regular tone. “Seriously, when I first saw your beach from the helicopter, I was like, OMG, this is perfect. I couldn’t believe our luck. The water in your bay is literally red as blood. I can already imagine the opening segment before the game. Do you want to hear it?”

  The five of us looked at each other dubiously. It seemed as though Natalie would keep going regardless of our response, so Mayor Pickney nodded. “Please,” she said. “Go on.”

  “Okay, so the camera starts zoomed in on a mysterious black circle, right? And then we slowly pull back and see that it’s actually the eye of a dead fish lying on the shore. We pull back more, revealing ten, then a hundred, then a thousand dead fish all rotting on your disgusting beach. Everything is just oozing with despair. Then we pan over to that majestic wooden wall that protects the stadium from the ocean, and we pan up the wall to the row of old ship masts planted along the top. We continue up and up, and when the camera gets to the top of the masts, just before the fog is too dense to see through, we finally see all the state championship flags that, like the citizens of this humble village, are tattered, run-down, and still flying high. Then we switch the camera’s depth of field to focus on the green below, where preparing for battle is the Grayport football team, the last bastion of hope in this withering town.”

  Natalie beamed with pride. It was startling how white and flawless her teeth were. Nothing about her seemed real.

  “Trust me,” she added. “Audiences are going to eat this up. Our market research indicates that stories about poverty are very ‘in’ with the key demographics these days.”

  Mayor Pickney and Principal Hobbs had been politely nodding along to Natalie’s speech, but Coach Stetson just stood there chewing his gum with his arms crossed. I could tell what he was thinking: This New York lady has no freaking clue.

  And I mostly agreed. People here in Grayport know there’s nothing noble about being poor, no romance about going to bed hungry. Here the substance of your character is diluted—not strengthened—when prices force your family to switch from regular milk to cheap and chalky powdered milk. Despair doesn’t unite a community; it tears it apart and makes its people afraid and angry and suspicious because that knock on your door is more likely to be a bill collector than a neighbor bringing leftovers for your hungry kids. Here “rolling up your sleeves” is what you do at the blood plasma center, where you sit for two hours with a needle in a forearm vein as a loud machine slowly sucks out the custard-yellow fluid that contains the proteins and electrolytes you can sell to a hospital for a little cash. And when you’re done, when you’re drained of all that substance inside you, you take your money to the grocery store to buy your powdered milk, avoiding the judgmental glares of customers who wonder whether all those scars on your inner arm are from plasma donation or heroin use—and they might be right either way.

  “Of course,” Natalie went on, “the linchpin of the entire event is Brett. Contemporary sports entertainment isn’t about teams or even the outcome of the game—it’s about the characters. It’s about star appeal, and Brett is a budding star, an all-American quarterback who, inspired and mentored by his heroic single father, overcomes a gruesome broken arm and poverty to be one of the nation’s elite players.” She turned to me. “What kind of house do you live in?”

  I really didn’t want to answer. I looked down at my feet and mumbled, “I wouldn’t really call it a house.”

  “Perfect,” Natalie said. “We’ll shoot some good B-roll footage of your living conditions to include in the program’s cold open. The poverty is the main focus, but we also love the redemption and revenge angle with Derek Leopold.”

  “Hold on,” Coach Stetson interrupted. “You realize we just played Blakemore last week, right? We won’t be playing them again until the playoffs.”

  “Already taken care of,” Natalie assured him. “We spoke to the league commissioner and he agreed to bump the schedule back a week. This will be an exhibition game. Won’t count toward the standings.”

  Coach Stetson frowned. “Don’t love the idea of Leopold getting an extra shot at Brett, but I suppose we don’t really have a choice here. It’s either this or no football at all.”

  “Oh, and that reminds me,” Natalie added. “During the game we’ll have to give the cameras plenty of chances to zoom in on your scar, so you can’t wear long sleeves.”

  There was a confused silence as the Grayport contingent looked among each other.

  “Uh, you know this isn’t Brett Parker, right?” Nate finally said. “This is Wyatt, Brett’s brother.”

  Natalie brought her hand to her chest. “Oh, right. Of course. This is all making much more sense now.”

  Natalie glanced at her watch, and then rummaged around in her oversized handbag. She pulled out a thick folder.

  “I’ve seen enough here to know a Grayport game will draw big numbers,” she said, opening the f
older and handing each of us a heavy stack of papers. “Here’s a copy of the contract for each of you—look it over today and fax back a single, signed copy. I’ve spoken to Blakemore reps and they’ve already agreed. I think you’ll find the number on page seventeen to be more than fair.”

  With frozen fingers, each of us awkwardly thumbed to page seventeen. We found the number under Section 12: COMPENSATION & REMITTANCE, in Paragraph 2, Clause D. I don’t know which one of us—it could have even been me—let slip a soft, audible “Oh” in awe at how many zeros followed the dollar symbol.

  “I’ll read it over,” Mayor Pickney said. “But at first blush I can say that this is looking good. The compensation for the game will be an enormous boost to our economy and families in need. Maybe even lifesaving.” She then turned to Coach Stetson. “Coach, I’ll draft a press release and notify the town later this afternoon that we have a football game this Friday after all.”

  Coach Stetson nodded, and his mouth twitched faintly, the closest he ever got to a genuine smile.

  I felt a surge of adrenaline, too. Nate and I had done it. With this deal, we had helped Grayport get the two things it needed most: money and pride. But this conversation with Natalie also made me realize how naive I was. When Nate and I wrote our pitch email to ESPN, we didn’t consider all the things that Natalie had actually cared about. There wasn’t a single mention of “market trends” or “demographics” or “ad revenue.” We genuinely thought that Grayport was a good fit for ESPN solely because we were really, really good at football, and we foolishly assumed that this alone would be enough. I of all people should’ve known that most of the time, being really good at football isn’t enough to fix everything.

  Natalie Hyde snapped closed her leather-bound folder and stashed it in her handbag. “Well, I’d love to stay and chat, but the big city calls. Thank you for sharing your little town with me. Stay dry.”

  With that Natalie shook our hands and high-heeled herself back into her helicopter. The engine roared to life and the helicopter lifted into the sky, orienting itself due south toward New York City before hurtling off with desperate velocity. The five of us stood in our huddle and awkwardly waved as Natalie Hyde, the Natalie Hyde, escaped our little town and turned into a black speck on the horizon.

  * * *

  Principal Hobbs made Nate and me return to class, but it was impossible to concentrate the rest of the day. There still hadn’t been an official announcement from Mayor Pickney when afternoon classes ended, so I speed-walked home. I figured that if the ESPN game was a go, Brett would be one of the first to find out.

  Brett was hunched over at the kitchen table when I got home. The power to our apartment was still off, and it was cold. The only light came from a thin ray of sun that sliced through the kitchen window and skipped off the glossy pages of a history textbook that Brett had positioned on the table for readability.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Silence.

  Brett kept staring at his textbook, eyes open but unmoving. The sight of it made me sick in the pit of my stomach. I’d been monitoring him the past couple of days to see if he acted out of sorts. But Brett was almost always quiet and aloof, so it was tough to tell whether his recent behavior was unusual. He’d been spending a lot of time lying in the top bunk, going to bed around nine P.M. From how much he tossed and turned, I don’t think he was sleeping much.

  This wasn’t exactly unexpected behavior for a guy who thought his football season, and by association his chances of getting recruited, had just gone up in smoke. Whenever the canceled season came up in our short conversations over the last day, he just mumbled, “It is what it is.”

  “Hey,” I said again, loudly.

  Brett flickered back on and turned toward me. “Hey.”

  “You okay?”

  “The Jell-O keeps melting during the day and then congealing at night.” Brett grabbed the cup next to his textbook and poured down the remaining green juice like a dose of NyQuil.

  “Has Coach Stetson or anyone called you?”

  Brett looked at his phone.

  “Yeah, he called, but I didn’t pick up.”

  “Did he leave a voicemail?”

  Brett tapped his screen, and seeing a voicemail notification, lifted the phone to his ear. I leaned against the hollow fridge to watch his reaction. As Brett listened to the message, he squinted his eyes shut and held two fingers to his forehead. I could hear Coach Stetson’s deep timbre on the other end. Brett didn’t react one way or the other.

  When the message ended, Brett kept his eyes squeezed shut, phone to ear. When he opened them again, they were wet.

  He stood up and walked over to me. “Thank you.” He was standing so close to me, like he was about to hug me for the second time ever. I was super uncomfortable at the thought of it, but I also didn’t want him to turn around and leave.

  Suddenly the kitchen door crashed open, and Brett and I looked up to see the outline of Dad’s figure stumble across the threshold of outdoor light into the darkness of our kitchen. Once inside, he took an instinctive first step toward the fridge, but then, remembering that it was empty of everything, even of beer, he stopped.

  “Was downtown with the boys and saw the mayor on TV,” he said. “Game Friday night.”

  I waited for Brett to say something, and when he didn’t I spoke up. “Yup.”

  “This is because of you?”

  “Yeah, kind of. And Nate.”

  Dad slid over to the kitchen table and let out a pained grunt as he sat down across from Brett. His hobble was there, but I’d noticed a little spring to it.

  “Now listen, and listen good,” he said, looking at Brett. “They’re going to come at us with a lot of pressure, especially on edge contain, trying to funnel your scrambling back toward the center of the field. That’ll open the C-gaps for QB option. The pitch man will be contained by the outside backers so you’ll have to lower your helmet and grind through some hits in the muck. But the yardage will be there between the tackles—four, five yards a pop. I’ve also been thinking about those quick slants from shotgun—”

  Dad stopped short. “You listening to me, son?”

  I looked at Brett, who was staring blankly into his textbook.

  “Brett…,” I said.

  “Brett!” Dad snapped.

  Brett tilted his head up from his textbook excruciatingly slowly, like he was trying to balance an invisible plate on his head. “Huh?”

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Have you noticed the Jell-O keeps melting during the day and then congealing at night?” he asked.

  “You just told me that a few minutes ago…”

  Brett looked at me, confused. He rubbed his forehead and squeezed his eyes so tightly it was as though he were wringing out dirty suds from the sponge of his brain. “I need some aspirin,” he said, getting up. He walked slowly to the stairwell to our bedroom, placed one palm flat against the wall, and guided himself up the stairs.

  Left alone with Dad, I started to pull out my phone. But from the corner of my eye I could still see the sharp outline of his figure, a deep and endless black cut against the gray light, nothing showing except the pinks of his bloodshot eyes. I could feel him seething.

  “You did this to him,” he spat, cutting into me quietly like a dagger in the night.

  I kept staring down at my cracked phone screen, tears welling in my eyes. I wanted to leave, but I didn’t have anywhere else to go.

  “Christ, what’s taking him so long?” Dad muttered to himself. “Brett, hurry your ass up! And bring down the playbook when you’re done!”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  Dinner at Nate’s house was always a good time, but it used to be even better before the McConnells got their family cat. It’s not that I disliked Bonkers, necessarily, it’s just that he creeped me out big-time. First off, he had his own seat at the table, and he sat very upright as he delicately lapped up warm milk out of a little ceramic sau
cer on the table. He was dignified as hell, and you could tell he thought he was a big shot with his good manners and all. The most disturbing part, though, was how Bonkers always stared at me while he was licking up his milk. He wouldn’t blink his big yellow eyes, or glance around, or even look down at the milk he was drinking. He’d just lick lick lick his milk while staring straight into my eyes, straight into my soul. I’d make a menacing face at him, like “stop sipping milk and staring into my soul, you dumb cat,” but he was freaking relentless. Nate says I imagined all this and that, in general, it was a bad look to have a cat as your rival. But each of the McConnells had a soft spot for Bonkers, who they adopted a couple months ago after finding him scrounging for food in the dumpster behind the pharmacy Mr. McConnell owned. Basically, they were under his spell. They’d fallen for his shenanigans. But not me. I kept my distance from the shenanigans.

  “Bonkers sure loves his milk,” I said, avoiding his glare across the table as I slopped a heap of mashed potatoes onto my plate. Mr. and Mrs. McConnell were both great cooks—Mr. McConnell handled all the side dishes while Mrs. McConnell took care of the main course, which tonight was lemon roast chicken. They made a perfect team and the whole McConnell household made me jealous of Nate, who had stable parents and his own room in a decent-sized house that always seemed filled with the aromas of banana bread in the oven or garlic sizzling in a skillet or pinewood logs burning in the fireplace.

  “I just can’t believe how fast Bonkers is developing cognitively,” Mrs. McConnell said. She beamed proudly at Bonkers, who lapped up the last bit of milk in his saucer and excused himself from the table with a soft meow. “This afternoon while I was dressing the chicken, he discovered Mozart. I put Symphony no. 41 on the stereo and Bonkers sat in front of the speaker and just bathed in the melody.”