A Short Move

by Katherine Hill

  They got through it, somehow, Joe uttering something like an apology, Mitch shrugging it was no big deal. He felt grateful to be in his own front yard, no phones, no intercoms, everyone speaking through their own real bodies. Then the ball came out, and they threw it back and forth, and pretty soon everything was fine. It stayed fine when Tim pulled up with Mitch’s grandparents. He walked over from his truck rubbing his hands together. Tim and Joe punched each other on the arm, called each other Maniac. Joe kissed his grandma’s cheek and shook his grandpa’s hand. Then everyone turned their attentions to Mitch. If it was not one of them throwing him the ball, it was another: Tim, Mom, Grandpa, Mom, Joe, Tim, Joe. He ran to the farthest points of the yard, diving for touchdown passes.

  “You can’t catch me!” he said, after one really excellent catch, and took off running down the street. It was a mistake, but an exhilarating one, because the brothers soon came pounding down the asphalt behind him, two pairs of grown man legs running loud as a motorcycle in his brain. He heard them approaching, and that’s when he made his second mistake: He looked over his shoulder and saw their straining necks and chests, and the next thing he knew they had passed him on either side, neither one of them even tagging him, and then they were in front of him and he was looking at their heels kicking up dust, and again it didn’t matter, because they were his and they were fast and that meant that he was fast, it was just that he was young.

  They got to some endpoint and stopped. He had also stopped and he could see them in the distance, down by the Boatwrights’ mailbox. They were bent over with their hands on their knees and talking, then standing upright, then walking back, Tim flapping his arm at Joe, who was a couple of paces behind. Pretty soon Tim broke into a trot.

  “Come on!” he called. Tim came up to where Mitch had stopped, still clutching the football, and Mitch could sense that the game had changed; it wasn’t going to be about him catching passes anymore. “We’re having a do-over and we need you to officiate. You’ll stand out there and hold your arms out. The winner’s the one who tags you first.”

  “Who won that time?”

  “That’s what’s in dispute!”

  “Come on, Tim,”Joe said, coming up behind him. “We don’t need to do this.”

  Tim panted like an actual maniac. “You’re so sure you won the first time. Don’t think you can do it again?”

  “I did win. Any fool could’ve seen it.”

  “So you won’t mind racing again for the ref.”

  “I want to race!” Mitch cried.

  Joe laughed. “You’ll lose, kid.”

  “I get a head start! I want to race!” The brothers looked at each other and he could feel them working something out between them.

  “All right, fine,” Tim said. “You can race. Cindy!” He called to her through cupped hands. “Come ref!”

  She came over, not as quickly as Mitch would’ve liked, her arms folded in front of her chest. Once the terms of the contest were negotiated, Mitch tossed the ball to the side of the road and went back to the starting point with his father and uncle, where he lined up between them and a little ways ahead, to wait for his mother’s count.

  This time, they seemed to overtake him immediately. He didn’t care, though, he kept going, and for a moment or two he could feel himself closing the gap, pumped forward by some power deep inside him, which he’d never before had the need to use. He was chasing them and they were men, and the power he felt was the man already within him, telling him his time would come.

  “Tim!” his mom shouted as the brothers slapped her hands. Tim let out a whoop and ran on, weaving back and forth across the road, then looping back toward the finish with his arms out. Mitch was there by then and he got to see up close as Tim flung his arms around Mitch’s mom and kissed her on the mouth. When she stepped away, her face looked smudged, like she was trying to erase it.

  Joe was nearby, hunched and gasping, looking more like the used-up voice Mitch remembered from the phone. He wondered if she’d been rooting for him. After himself, he didn’t know who he’d been rooting for. He guessed he’d been rooting for them both. He went up to Joe and put his own hands on his knees and panted along beside him.

  “We lost,” Mitch said.

  Joe looked at him.

  “That’s right, baby!” Tim crowed, punching air.

  “No way,” Joe managed, shaking his head. He looked at Mitch’s mom and shook his head again. “No way.”

  She shrugged. “Fair’s fair.”

  “That’s what you get for drinking your youth away!” Tim said. He came up behind Joe and shook him by the shoulders, then offered him his hand. “Great race,” he said, and Joe took it. Mitch went to his mom and hugged her and her face kicked its blankness away. Then they all walked back to the house where it was almost time to eat.

  For a while after that everyone got along fine. Mitch showed Joe his army men and a few other things he liked in the house. While Tim stood by, Joe showed Mitch his bike, how to start it with the key, all the different ways he could turn it off. He told Mitch a bike was a good thing to have when you’d traveled as much as he had, lived as many different lives with as many different people, and even though he was settled now, he thought for sure he was settled in Montana, the bike was still a good thing. A bike gave a man the world. It gave him a chance to be free. Then Mitch’s mom called them in and they all sat down together at the kitchen table while his mom and grandma brought out the food.

  “Who wants a beer?” his mom asked from the fridge.

  His grandpa nodded, and Joe said, “I’ll take one,” and then she looked at Tim. But Tim wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at Joe and he was smiling. Only it wasn’t his usual smile, the one that made Mitch feel better about pretty much everything. This one made him feel worse.

  “You sure about that?” Tim asked Joe.

  “Come on, Tim,” his mom said. “It’s just a beer.”

  “Not to him it’s not.”

  “Maybe today it is,” Joe said.

  “I’d be surprised if ‘today’ was a concept that had any meaning to you.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?” Joe said. “The ref says you beat me, right? Let me have my beer.”

  “So now it’s your beer.”

  “Easy, man. Easy.”

  “I’m not the one making it hard.”

  “Just take it easy, Tim,” Mitch’s grandpa said.

  “I’m straight, aren’t I?” Joe said, starting to sound like a maniac, too. “I got myself in order and I came out here to meet the kid. Like she wanted. And so I’m here, and now she’s offering, and so, thank you, I’ll take my beer.”

  It all happened so fast after that. Tim was out of his chair and the chair was on the ground and so were several forks and spoons. He slugged Joe in the face and dragged him into the yard and everyone shouted to stop it but none of it did any good. The brothers wrestled for as long as they could keep their grips before Mitch’s mom and grandpa got in there to pull them apart, which only worked for a minute before they escaped and went at it again. While it was happening it was awful. It felt like something final, like they all might disappear into their own violence, leaving nothing but the yard and the house. But once it was over and no one seemed to have won, Mitch found himself feeling the way he always did when things happened to him too fast.

  He wanted to do it again. Do it better. A great tightness gripped his head.

  He wanted Joe to get a better shot at the beginning, and not just take it until Tim had him on the ground and had basically forced him to fight. He wanted Tim to say what he really meant and not, “You want a beer, do you? You want a goddamn beer?” which were the words he used, but which had to mean something else, because a beer was only a grown-up drink, and Tim had them himself all the time. He wanted a more decisive ending. He wanted Tim to win, for sure this time he wanted Tim to win, but he wanted Joe to show a little life, and he wanted them both to be fighting for him.

  Most o
f all he wanted his mom to repeat her strange moment of power, when she had hair in her mouth, and her face was anything but blank, and she said, “You can’t have it both ways, Tim! You can’t be your own man and be the man of this house!”

  When she said, “I am the man of this house, do you hear me? I am the man.”

  The church floor was hardwood, laid out in long planks running from entrance to altar. They went most Sundays and every Christmas Eve to remind themselves of God, and this Christmas seemed especially important for reasons having to do with Tim. He hadn’t been to their house since the fight. Mitch missed him, and though a part of him wanted to ask why Tim wasn’t allowed to come over anymore, another part understood that it wasn’t really about what wasn’t allowed. His mom had been quieter, like she was studying for something. If he didn’t know better, he’d even say that she’d been sad.

  Tim was joining them for the candlelight services though, and this was a relief to Mitch. He had so many questions. “You really don’t like your brother, do you?” he asked as they filed into their pew.

  “Shh,” Tim said. “Your timing’s terrible.”

  Mitch ducked his head and looked at the floorboards. In services he mostly looked down, so that he appeared to anyone glancing about to be praying, or at least in deep contemplation of the Lord. But really he was living in his mind, which was an increasingly elastic place. Today that place included the floorboards, which he counted as far as he could see.

  Once they’d been sitting a few moments listening to the organ, Tim leaned over and whispered something else.

  “It’s not really about liking him or not liking him,” he said as Mitch stretched his mind to include Tim’s face. “He’s made a lot of mistakes. I’m trying to forgive him for that.”

  Mitch took in the glowing heads of the altar candles and he thought his timing was actually just right. “I want to do that, too,” he said.

  “Sure,” Tim said. “That’s good. But you have to remember, he’s still a shirker. He’s not someone you need to know.”

  He thought about his father losing to Tim in the rematch race and getting pummeled by Tim at dinner. Joe had closed his eyes at one point, when Tim had him by the neck, and this seemed to Mitch like an effort to escape, to somehow disappear. Was that shirking? He wasn’t sure. What he was sure of was that Tim was his favorite person after his mom. He had a way of saying things that made Mitch want to move, and now Tim was saying he didn’t need to know his dad.

  That seemed right. It seemed like something that would please his mom, who was sitting to his left and tapping her finger to her lips, then tapping it to her ear.

  He looked down again and tried to listen to the pastor, a serious man who told stories about God and television, or God and fishing, and in doing so repeated certain phrases like, See, I am making all things new.

  This was another thing Mitch tended to hear: a repeated phrase. He’d key in on it, like it was his own name, and soon enough, it was repeating itself, indefinitely, in his head.

  See, I am making all things new, the pastor said. See, I am making all things new.

  The words themselves hardly registered except as sounds tapping within his veins. But they gave him a drumbeat, a tempo, and on this night of floorboards and forgiveness and the people he needed and the people he did not, he came to think of that tempo as God’s rhythm. For it had a rightness to it, a sense of purpose—onward and upward, and here we go—a rhythm some other being was setting for him, a rhythm that was himself.

  3. TIM, 1983

  His third season as coach of the Pee Wee Monacan Jets, Tim Williams started carrying a calendar.

  “Well, Tim,” Cindy said when she saw it. “Guess you’re a grown up now.”

  She was his ex, and had reason to doubt him, but about this, he was dead serious. He was thirty-two now, with responsibilities. He had to mold the characters of twenty young boys, her own son Mitch included, and he needed to see the weeks laid out in order, to make sure he did his job.

  Mornings he worked at the college, the other family business, mowing lawns and carrying ladders, to cover the classes he took there at night. He was what they called a non-traditional student, the first man the little women’s college had ever made an exception to enroll, though in every other way, he was proud to say, he was thoroughly traditional. A homeowner, a surrogate father to Cindy’s kid, his promising nephew Mitch. He hadn’t gotten married yet, but that would come: everything in its time. For now, he was focused on being Coach.

  Pee Wee was ages nine to twelve, those yeasty, carefree years before your nose was sharp enough to know you smelled. When Tim was that age, they’d been the Little Warriors, after the high school team, which everyone hated, though they’d worshipped the high school guys. Sometime while he was away there’d been a petty revolt, and now they were the Jets, for the NFL team. Also known as the Flyboys, which was different from “little,” because even men were often called boys, especially when they were doing something serious, like tagging cattle or dropping bombs.

  Flyboys. Well. Their minds were flying anyway.

  “This is common sense,” he told them in practice. “This is not rocket science.” They easily won their first two games. At the end of the second, Ricky Franklin did a front flip to score the final touchdown, sealing it, 28-0. Good form, bad decision. The boy needed guidance.

  “Get over here,” Tim shouted after the game.

  “What’s up, Coach?”

  “Don’t be risking your neck like that. I need you to be smart.”

  “Aw, I was just celebrating, Coach!”

  “Celebrate after. Go to La Pizzeria with your friends or whatever the hell it is that you do.”

  Ricky bounced on the balls of his feet, lit by the manliness of Tim’s casual hell. “I ain’t got time for La Pizzeria, Coach!” He danced away, laughing, and Tim tried to keep from laughing, too.

  I ain’t got time was something Ricky often said when he was feeling bored or just plain defiant, and like almost everything else that came out of his mouth, it couldn’t have been further from the truth. Tim had driven by his house, seen him loafing about with the assortment of kids and adults who came and went from his mom’s double-wide, drinking tasty desperations that were either made of sugar or made of alcohol, depending on if you were a kid or an adult. Kid had nothing but time, and no clue how to use it.

  They were all idiots, nine- to twelve-year-olds, his nephew included, but the black kids seemed to give him the most trouble. They were the ones who fought. He wanted to treat every kid equal, but that was easier said than done. The truth was, by the time kids were ten and eleven, the world had already decided who was who. Tim had had a drunk dad. He’d been to Vietnam for fuck’s sake. He could understand why you might be angry. But you had to control yourself. You had to look around and notice it wasn’t much fun for anyone else either, yet everyone else was mostly making do. Really he was thinking of Ricky. Jason Booker was a good kid, quick. An obvious talent. He’d make it to college anyway. Ricky was the one who looked at the world like a plate of food he could only have if he stole it.

  Tim was a believer in systems. His hero was Paul Brown, of the Cleveland Browns, the first to time his players in the forty-yard dash, to enforce team dinners and curfews the night before a game, to make his players actually write down their plays. This season, in tribute, he made his Flyboys do the same.

  He was tough on them because he knew what they were like. He’d been an idiot himself when he was young, and he’d let it go too far. Summer of ’69, he and Robbie had joined up together, two brothers with low numbers and a hostile father at home. They were draft bait, no one would hire them, so they figured they may as well enlist, choose their own deployments, maybe in Europe or the palm-rimmed Caribbean. Why they thought they’d have this option was a mystery to him now, one of many in the world, and in his own being, that he’d been made aware of since. They were separated immediately, Robbie to Fort Jackson, Tim to Fort Dix, then s
hipped to Nam in different divisions, on different days even, seeing each other only once in the course of their twelve-month tours, when they were flown home together with PanAm stewardesses to attend their mother’s funeral.

  That was hard. Even harder was when Robbie died. Tim got himself transferred to Germany after that, where he worked a meaningless desk until his tour was up. After his discharge, he couldn’t come home. Not when his dad was the only one left, and nastier than ever by the sound of it, Joe having split for who knew where. So Tim went to L.A., where he played semi-pro with a guy he knew from Da Nang. Between games, during which he felt, if not good, then at least all right, he did odd jobs, sat on the gritty beach, and hated himself for having no good reason to live.

  He wanted to save these kids that kind of pain, scare the stupidity out of them, set goals for them, make them into men without anyone having to get killed. There were probably a lot of ways to go about this in the world, but he was a Virginia boy and a former receiver, and football was the way he knew best.

  Fortunately, the kids took to it, craved it, even in practice gripping their collars with pride. They’d come up the hill from the elementary school y’alling and nuh-uhing, shepherded by a handful of overeager dads. The Warriors had zero tolerance for dads at practice, but these were children, they needed rides. As long as the dads respected his style, he didn’t mind if they watched. Practice always started with stretches and jogging so the boys could warm themselves up. Then they reviewed and ran their plays and coverages, each one in sequence until it was right. No wind sprints. No crushing leg-raises. No drills just to prove he was Coach. He knew who he was and so did they, and drills only wore players out.

  Still, he liked to talk. He had his coachisms, his general coachiness. He appreciated a little theater, a little religion. “What’s going on in your head?” he liked to demand, tapping his knuckles on someone’s hat, never actually wanting an answer.

  “Devote yourselves,” he also said.