A Short Move

by Katherine Hill

  And, “It’s all about the fundamentals.”

  “It’s our year,” one of the dads said at Smokey’s after another Friday night victory for the Warriors. His own son would win again that weekend under Tim’s watchful eye, because Tim understood the fundamentals and knew how to plan for a game, but no one cared about that just now, not over beers on a Friday night.

  “These Warriors are playing Texas-level,” said another dad.

  “Fuck Texas,” Coach said. “I am so sick of Texas.”

  The dads nodded studiously. “You been there?”

  “Hell no, but it ain’t any better.” Tim clicked his jaw out and back. “California football. Florida football. Everyone says it. Well, you know what? This is Virginia football. And you know what else? It’s football.” He was starting to bore himself, but decided to put forth one final football just to bring the conversation to a close. “Football’s football,” he said, and everyone said, “Yup,” and “That’s true.”

  There wasn’t a better way to spend your life, which was a fragile thing, he knew that now, than on a playing field in a warm Virginia September executing the perfect game plan. It was an orderly game, football, it progressed in an orderly fashion, and it was because of democracy that he was free to make his plans, his perfect dreams, a series of plays for kids in motion, which it would benefit the kids to learn, and make them feel a sense of purpose, a sense of accomplishment, at having actually executed the thing he had dreamed.

  He told them as much when he gathered them for practice the following week, the Tuesday after their third consecutive win. Twenty boys, one Coach: the perfect ratio, forget insubordinate assistants. Jason was nodding, a serious little man with a Band-Aid on his finger. So were Jeff and Rusty and Ricky. Such a crew they were, those sixth graders, with their preponderance of J- and R- names. Caleb didn’t exactly fit the pattern, but he didn’t tend to fit anywhere, the fattest of the bunch, just barely made the Pee Wee weight limit, who if he had to be fat, figured he’d also be the fool. He was good at cracking jokes, at shaking his gut like a Slinky. The tallest was Rusty, the six-foot sixth grader, whose poor overgrown dome was so massive they had to borrow a helmet from the Warriors. He was the only Flyboy with a maroon hat in the season opener, and he was a starter, so he was out there all the time, abnormal, unmatching. The helmet was a muddy pine now, spray-painted under the shop teacher’s supervision, not quite the bright emerald of the rest of the team, but at least it was some kind of green.

  Mitch’s name stood out, too, and so did Mitch himself, if Tim was being honest, though it was possible this thing he called honesty was just an expression of family pride. His nephew didn’t yet have the build, but he was fast and he had good hands, plus he was smart, and old for his grade. He had desire and self-awareness but not self-consciousness, and he worked hard but thankfully not too hard: the factors all added up. It was this promising mix that Tim was sure of, the right combination that people sought, if not for football, then for something else. Football wasn’t everything. But it was definitely on the road there.

  “This one’s all about the blocking,” Tim told them, introducing a new short-yardage play. “This one’s all about the blocking. This one’s all about the blocking.”

  Jason’s Band-Aided hand was up. His quarterback, a good kid, always raised his hand. “We gonna learn more passing plays, Coach?”

  Tim held his mouth in its straight-line Coach formation but gave him the warm, smiling eyes. Authority you can trust. “Not this week, son. We’re a running team. We run the ball.”

  “I just think I got the arm, is all.”

  Tim chewed his teeth, sensing a teaching moment. He put his hands on his hips. “Now listen, I know you want to throw the ball. And I know the rest of you think you can catch it.” He could feel himself revving, his twang growing twangier and more truthful, his words piling up on each other, pleasurably and familiarly, forming a speech that sounded just like a speech, in the way a house was built to look just like a house, but with his own insight that was just now coming to him, ushered in with the words as he spoke them, and surrounding them all with a system of truth. “But there’s something you gotta understand,” he said. “That’s your future. Being a team that throws the ball is your future. I’m just trying to get you there. You’re gonna have to trust me on that one. And to get there, we gotta cover all the territory that comes before. You understand what I’m saying?” Some of them had begun to nod their heads, as was customary when Coach was talking. “This new formation? This isn’t Redskin ball. It’s not college ball. It’s not even Warrior ball. Those are all still in the future. This is Flyboy ball. This is now. This is a play run at Yale in 1900.”

  He paused. He looked at them gravely, let the weight of the past sink in.

  “1900?”

  “Coach!”

  “That’s old.”

  So they weren’t exactly converted, but they did line up on his whistle. They got to work positioning their feet, and angling their blocks to the left. And when Ricky Franklin jogged up at the water break and asked if they could practice something else, “Something more exciting,” Tim widened his eyes to act surprised. It was important to feign surprise when a kid dared make a request. That was part of establishing authority, make it scary to make a request.

  “Blocking’s boring,” Ricky said.

  “Thanks for your perspective.”

  “It is though! I want to catch the ball!”

  “Go on, son.”

  “Instead I’m just giving his ass a push, running right. I barely get to move!”

  “I’ll give your ass a push, son.”

  It was clear Ricky wasn’t happy, but football practice wasn’t about being happy, and as usual there was nothing to do but drop it and get back to work. Ricky dropped it. He practiced his blocks. Tim coached. And when time was up, they clapped, barked “JETS,” and dispersed.

  So he was genuinely surprised, Tim had to admit, when, after another Sunday win and then a long Monday shift at the college in which he’d been called in to deal with a flooded dormitory basement where the students stored their old rich-girl obsessions—cellos and camping tents that were so inviting to the now-drowned mice—he was genuinely surprised when he returned home to find his sixth graders, the Rs and the Js, Ricky and Rusty and Jason and Jeff, along with Caleb and even Mitch, in his drive beside a tangle of bikes.

  “Boys.”

  “We was hoping to talk to you, Coach,” Jason said. The poorest of the bunch, but the quarterback, the undisputed leader.

  “What’s up? Unsatisfied with the win?”

  “No, sir. Well, yes sir. In a way. We was hoping”—he tilted his head toward the rest of them—“if you think it can work, to have a little more fun out there. Try some more long passes, open it up a little, give everybody a chance to move.” Tim looked at Ricky, who was nodding seriously. “Since we seem to be beating everybody so easy with the run.”

  He’d been wrong to use the word unsatisfied. He saw that now. Tim frowned and continued to say nothing, because nothing Jason had said really warranted a lecture. The boys stood together with their hands in their pockets, a gesture new to them, a gesture demonstrated and suggested by the dads and other men, and they looked very much like a group, a team, some kind of warm and willing collective. He looked at them: Rusty’s pimply head, Caleb’s gut, Ricky’s mouth. Someone needed a shower. He looked at Mitch, his nephew.

  “So…?” Jason finally asked.

  “Who put y’all up to this?”

  The question seemed to startle Jason, who wiped his palms on the legs of his jeans, his finger healed, the Band-Aid gone. “No one. Us. It was our idea.”

  “Your idea?”

  “Yessir.”

  They had ideas. In those warm young bodies of theirs, sweating spontaneously in ways they didn’t understand, they were somehow cooking up ideas.

  “I’ll take it under advisement,” Tim said.

  “Okay, but like—”


  “I said I’ll take it under advisement.” Repetition, he was finding, was not boring. Repetition was his friend.

  There was some standing, and a waft of ripe manure smell so common to his part of the world, and after a time, the boys seemed to understand that this was the end of the conversation, and so as a unit they picked up their bikes and peddled off down the long gravel drive, having done what they came to do, and Tim went into his house and opened himself a beer, his intention being to forget.

  But Tim could not forget. They had talked about him when he wasn’t around. He knew that, of course. Hoped for it, even. But they had talked about him and decided to band together.

  “Mitch!” he called at the next practice when the boy appeared at the top of the field. His nephew jogged over.

  “Yessir,” Mitch said. He was such a ragged lawn rake of a kid, not yet grown into his bones.

  “How’re your boys doing?”

  “All right, I guess. Ready to play,” he added, hopefully.

  “They still talking about those long passes?”

  Mitch looked at the end of the field, where the elusive long pass might drop. He waited a considerable length of time before answering, “I dunno,” as if hoping Tim and his question might grow impatient and disappear.

  “Well, you let me know if they do, will you.” He clapped his nephew on the back and sent him along to stretch.

  He had dreamed a perfect dream, and play by play, and win by win, the boys were making his dream a reality. Four consecutive wins now. Again and again, they had won. How could they not see the beauty of that? The rarity.

  He ran them through their newest formation, watched as Ricky’s cheeks puffed with rancor when he gave his lineman a nudge, watched their heads come together in the huddle, Mitch’s hand on Jason’s back, Mitch patting Ricky’s crown.

  Second half of practice, he made some adjustments.

  “Mitch!” he called. “You’re under center.”

  Jason stepped back from his crouch, a good kid, silent even in disappointment. He didn’t have to talk, because Ricky always would.

  “That’s a QB run play, Coach!” Ricky said through his mask.

  “Are you suggesting Mitch can’t run?”

  “I’m just saying why would you take out Jason?”

  “I don’t have time for these questions, son! Wilkins is QB. End of discussion.”

  After practice, he watched them pick up cones, the blue afternoon zipping toward autumn, his brow buzzing toward a change-of-seasons headache. He would have to blow the whistle less. He’d have to run them with a little less whistle.

  Mitch was the last to bring in his cones. One bendy, extra-tall stack, neatly done, orange rubber snout into orange rubber snout, just a slight puff in the middle where one had nosed in askew. Tim loved his nephew for this: careful, but not too careful, a boy built for systems with a little flair. The rest of the team was already halfway down the hill as he loaded them into the back of Tim’s truck.

  “Uncle Tim,” Mitch said when he was through. “Coach. I’m not sure I should play QB.”

  Tim grinned. “Sure you should, son. You’ve got the potential to play any position you want.”

  “I mean, yeah, I know I’m good enough to do it. But it’s Jason’s job. Ain’t it?” He squinted in the sun, which gave him the impression of looking craftier, and more suspicious than he was. “I mean, if I can be anything, why can’t I be something that doesn’t already belong to somebody else?”

  His innocent nephew. Tim placed a hand on his young head. “Some roles are better than others, and there’s only so many to go around.”

  “But Jason’s good.”

  Tim withdrew the hand to his hip. “Look, you won’t get anywhere turning down opportunities. Know that.”

  It was because of Mitch that he even coached this team. Hell, it was basically because of Mitch that he’d stayed in Virginia, reclaimed the old house from squalor, got himself into school. If his no-show degenerate brother couldn’t make more than the occasional phone call, couldn’t suck it up and be a man for this boy, he himself sure as hell would.

  “But if it makes you feel better,” Tim went on, “I’m planning on splitting the job between you. Trade-off. So both of you can learn. All right?”

  His nephew opened his mouth, closed it.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, out with it.”

  “It’s just.” He stroked the red clay with his toe. “I don’t know. Maybe you could just teach me at home. That way Jason can QB the Jets.”

  “Damn it, Mitch, always the same conversation! Did you not hear me before about opportunities? Did you not hear that?”

  “No,” Mitch said, backing away. “I heard it.”

  They needed stories was what they needed. He paged through the football histories, hunting for tales of valor and loyalty: Johnny Unitas throwing a game-winning touchdown while blood gushed from his broken nose.

  “Y’all just keep winning,” Cindy said the last time he paid her a visit. He had his books out and Mitch was with them in the kitchen, leaning over his shoulder, eating a Snickers.

  “Don’t poison yourself now,” Tim told him, trying not to see the smears of chocolate at the corners of his mouth. “We gotta keep it up.”

  “Go, fight, win,” Mitch said, through caramel, sounding just like his sarcastic mom.

  Tim closed his book. “Are we going to the playoffs?”

  “Yeah we are.”

  “I can’t hear you. I said are we going to the playoffs?”

  “Sir, yes, sir!” He mock-saluted. “You know Ricky eats like ten of these a day.”

  “Let him, if that’s what he wants to do. Any kid can eat a Snickers.”

  Mitch nodded, swallowed his final bite, and tossed the wrapper in the trash. They never quite fought—Mitch respected him too much for that—but occasionally these days, they came close. These days, it was a relief to Tim every time Mitch held himself in line. The kid was getting his own ideas. Who knew how long his deference would last.

  “I know you don’t want to be just any kid,” Tim said.

  “Nope. I wanna be the best. I want to keep winning.”

  “Attaboy.”

  “What must that feel like?” Cindy asked, after Mitch had wandered out of the room. “To never lose?” She offered the question like a piece of nature, one of those pine cones she collected that had no purpose but was somehow worth contemplating. Tim was grateful to still have her friendship after all the drama they put each other through.

  “Good,” he said. “It feels good.”

  She gave him one of her looks, and he felt a pang that he’d accomplished just about everything except being a husband to her. She had never really been his type—too strong-willed, and too emotional, loving him hungrily, but also shutting him out, especially when it came to Mitch. But he’d only noticed that after they’d rushed into romance, around the same time he noticed she still carried a torch for Joe. Even so he knew he hadn’t given her his best effort; that was his biggest regret.

  It was his biggest regret about Vietnam, too. When he’d shipped out, he’d harbored a vague hope for greatness, but by the time he arrived, even before Robbie died, the mood had soured. It was a hopeless war, and a boring war, and so why try, why be a hero? He ended up in the rear, fixing trucks, and only did what he had to do. In hindsight, he’d lost whole years of his life to that attitude, the great undertow of not trying hard.

  His little brother was losing them still. They’d gotten together his first Christmas in California and at that point it had been a few years, both of them having severed all ties with their dad, which made it a challenge to track each other down. Joe had hitchhiked all the way from Houston and he was a wreck. He’d missed Robbie’s funeral because no one knew where he was, and now, more than a year later, his surviving brother exemption secured, he was still bawling about it, convulsing on Tim’s shoulder before they’d even
said hello. The kid looked totaled, greasy hair to his shoulders, bags like an old man’s, practically purple, under his eyes, all kinds of buttons missing from his shirt. He said he was sorry many times. He told Tim about Cindy and Mitch.

  “A one-year-old son?” Tim couldn’t believe his ears. “What’re you doing out here?”

  “I don’t know. Getting something out of my system, I guess.” Joe slumped in the booth, ready for nothing. He didn’t even have an address. “I’m gonna go back there. I want to meet him.”

  He didn’t though. He got hammered that night, tried to steal a motorcycle outside the bar while Tim was in the head—You die on it, you buy it, read the sign over the unisex toilet—and it was only by some miracle that Tim overtook him, halfway down the road, and managed to pry him off and roll the bike back to where Joe had found it. He spent the rest of the night chasing and physically restraining his brother, eventually hauling him back to his apartment where he force-fed him whiskey, just to get him to pass out and be still. In the morning, Joe was gone, and so was the rest of Tim’s booze, plus the hundred dollars he had saved in a coffee tin.

  Joe called again a few months later, having relocated, not to Virginia, but to Santa Fe, apologizing, saying things were different. Again, they met up, this time on Joe’s turf, but things were not different, they could not have been more the same: Joe blubbering in a bar, the picture of weakness, getting drunk, then getting violent, punching a man he’d introduced as a friend. Tim got punched in the scuffle that ensued, by whose fist he wasn’t even sure, but whoever’s it was he was one hundred percent sure it was all his brother’s fault.

  Same thing the next time, more or less, and then the next time, and at a certain point you had to acknowledge that these weren’t flukes, they were the pattern. As kids they’d invented the Monacan Maniac, a lurching, irrational monster who took over the bodies of innocent boys, a figure that, in hindsight, probably had something to do with their dad. They took turns playing and slaying him, depending on their mood, and somehow this Maniac was exactly what Joe had become. He did not know how to drink and he did not know how to live and he didn’t know the first damn thing about being a decent man.