A Short Move

by Katherine Hill

  More than a decade later, Joe claimed to be clean, but still, he hadn’t been there for the kid. He lived in Montana instead, a shirker, and the one sorry time he made an effort completely fit the pattern of destruction. It was after the old man had died, in that hectic year when Tim had come back to deal with the house, and fallen in love, somehow, with Cindy, and decided he might as well stay, and Cindy, in all her well-intentioned intensity, had basically forced Joe to show his face, belatedly high on the idea of family. He’d shown up at last, he’d played with the kid, and then there’d been another fight, right there in Cindy’s little kitchen, in front of her parents and Mitch. Tim couldn’t even recall who started it, because fighting with Joe was no longer a decision, just the language the two brothers spoke. What a catastrophe, what a mistake everything to do with Joe had been.

  Except for Mitch, of course. Now, having salvaged his family house, if not his family, Tim didn’t want any more mistakes, especially when it came to Mitch, who he could hardly believe had not been ruined, and who Tim would see to it now was not. He just had to keep at it: his third season coaching, his second-to-last semester of college. If he kept at it, if word got around, maybe the Warriors would even hire him up.

  The fifth win was a beauty. Jason kicked his first field goal and returned a pick for six. Everyone worked together to clear a lane for Mitch’s twenty-yard touchdown run in the second half. Even Ricky was happy. He did a back flip as the clock ran out and Tim didn’t chastise him. He’d heard it said that the pain of losing was far more intense than the joy of winning ever was. But whoever said that could not have lost much, not in the listless way he had before football saved his life. To Tim, winning had never not felt intense. It relocated him every time. He felt amazed with the world, its comedy, its colors. He’d stand there and watch the Flyboys smiling elfishly, swinging their emerald helmets over the grass like the pendulums of eternal clocks. Winning was intense in the way that living was. It was a job he loved, the cure itself.

  Next practice, it all fell apart. Twenty pre-adolescent noses, twenty foreheads, twenty haircuts. Twenty boys in practice gear, their helmets on the grass.

  “We ain’t playing,” Jason said. It was the Wednesday before the last game of the year. “We ain’t gonna practice unless you let us throw the ball.”

  “This is our chance to go undefeated,” Tim shouted back. It killed him how young they were. How young, and how wrong. They’d been born into a better world, on this point everyone agreed, but it was clear to Tim that this was actually a problem. Might even ruin them if he didn’t intervene. “Come on, now,” he shouted, “where are your heads?”

  They merely looked at him, defiant, overconfident from their wins.

  “This Sunday at three o’clock,” he tried again, “you’ve got a shot at the playoffs. The four best teams in the state. Don’t you want that?”

  “Not if it ain’t no fun,” Caleb said.

  Didn’t they understand he was trying to save them? Look at his father, look at Joe. When you stopped caring about succeeding, that was when you started to die.

  “You’re lucky I’m the coach,” he said. “You think you can go to high school and pull this shit? You think they put up with this in college? Hell, no.”

  “Let us throw it!” Ricky said. “Let Jason throw me the ball!”

  Mitch still hadn’t spoken, and here Tim had his chance.

  “Mitch!” he called. “Get over here.”

  His nephew flinched, and Tim took that opportunity to look at him hard, to look his message right into the boy’s spiraling soul. These fools are lost, is what that message said. Only one you can save is yourself. Mitch, for his part, did not flinch again. He looked at his comrades, then at the dads in the bleachers, then back again at Tim. Then the fatherless boy who had no one in the stands came forward to stand by his uncle. His helmet he left behind, on the grass with his team.

  “Are we going to the playoffs?” Tim prompted him, hoping to God he wouldn’t fail him now.

  Mitch squinted. There were murmurs from the team.

  “Yes, sir,” his nephew finally said.

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

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Damn right, we are. And will you tell these boys how we’re getting there?”

  “Win Sunday, Coach.” Mitch’s face was as hard as a book.

  “What’s that?”

  “WIN!”

  “And how’re we gonna win, son? How have we always won?”

  He was very close to Mitch now, his lip almost brushing his nephew’s cheek in his intense need to make these boys into men.

  “What’s our game? How do Flyboys fly?”

  Mitch’s eyes settled on his uncle’s and a sober knowledge filled his face. It was almost as though he had been there that day in California before Tim was Coach, and the lawyer had called, and told him that he, Timothy Williams, had been designated next of kin. His father had been found. He’d been near the sofa. That was all they would say, so he knew it had been much worse. He pictured the old man as he’d last seen him at Robbie’s funeral, his skin stretched tight over bloated cheeks and chest and belly, his arms the same arms he’d thrown with, his legs the same legs that were always driving to town for beer. In the end, his father had been found to be his father. At long last, there’d be no more mistakes. But no corrections either.

  There on the practice field, Mitch’s twelve-year-old eyes seemed to know all this. Like a calendar, he had it all worked out.

  What he said was, “We run the ball, Coach.” Then he paused and added, “We always win when we run.”

  That was the thing about saving yourself. Realistically, you probably couldn’t do it until you recognized all else was lost, until you understood that in the end, there’s nothing good that comes of fun. Tim almost wept. He and his nephew, the sole survivors. They saw the same limits, the same cruelties, the same victory awaiting them on Sunday at three p.m.

  4. MITCH, 1990

  By now Mitch’s mom knew how to treat his gear. There, on his bed, next to the team duffel the U’s athletic director had sent as a high school graduation gift—orange and green, for Miami, factory fresh, basically bulletproof—sat his white senior season pants, folded and ready to go. His new game day pants would be waiting for him in Coral Gables, along with all the swampy weather practice gear he could ever possibly need, but for now it was nice to hang on to his retired favorites. For luck. For old times’ sake.

  She used to just ball them up like socks after she washed them. He would find them in the plastic basket totally humiliated, all tangled and sticking to themselves. At first he let it go, but then sometime in the middle of his junior year, around the time the college letters started stuffing up the mailbox, he realized he’d had it with her sloppiness. She balked when he lit into her—she had no idea it mattered—but pretty quickly got with the program, each week laying his pants out flat along the seam, then folding them in thirds like a wallet.

  He wasn’t ready to pack them just yet. They needed to go on top, and there were probably other things still lying around that had to fit in the bag. Better to save them for last, after he’d stopped by the school, after he’d met up with the girl.

  On his desk was the corner-stapled paper—his final obligation to Monacan County High—well overdue and probably riddled with errors. But it was five pages, printed cleanly yesterday at the library where he’d written it, hunched at the computer in a monastic four-hour bender, starved for food and music and female company of any kind, the day so bright only the nerdiest kids were at the library, and even they had to interrupt him in a shy little group, to ask him to sign a crappy ball. The paper had at least one paragraph break per page, and every sentence started with a capital letter and ended with a period. So from a distance, it probably didn’t even look that different from any of the on-time A-papers Mrs. Murray red-checked her way through each year. Maybe she’d do him one last favor and grade it on
appearance alone.

  His mom was sprawled on the couch in nursing scrubs and a flower-patterned top, staring down a mahogany dining set on “The Price Is Right.”

  “I’m gonna buy you one of those,” he told her.

  “I’ll take it,” she said, blinking heavily, halfway down the slide to sleep. She’d worked an extra overnight shift in the NICU so she could drive with him to Florida tomorrow.

  “Turning in this paper first.”

  “Atta boy. Burgers tonight. Don’t forget, everyone’s coming.” Meaning his grandparents and Tim and Tracy. “One last family dinner.”

  “Don’t sound so morbid, nobody’s died.” And before she could respond, he’d burst out the door to his Bridgestoned pickup, his tall-man’s ride, his ship. She’d bought it for him last year, and it was gorgeous, half the size of the house, parked there with its tail hitched like a truck in a commercial, like he’d pulled the key in the middle of a donut and just sauntered on inside. The late summer sun beat down on him, bleaching the trampled grass of his lawn and the chewed-up cow pasture across the road, the sky itself, everything. Under his massive arms and along his hairline, he felt himself already beginning to sweat.

  As he bounced along the road to town, he thought about the local talent his buddy Jeff had scouted on his behalf. Her name was Caryn Fletcher; she lived in Charlottesville and she was also going to college at the U. They could’ve waited until they got there to meet. But Mitch had her number up here, and it made him feel almost psychic to call up a beautiful stranger who shared a future with him. They were Virginians, going to Miami. So, actually, they shared a past, too.

  As a kid, he’d never been the biggest, still well under six feet in eighth grade, but in other departments there were plenty of clues: his tall mom, his gorilla hands, his feet that kept outgrowing his sneakers. He played football because everyone did, and he was quick, but it wasn’t until ninth grade, when all of a sudden he was huge, and no slower, that he realized he had a special kind of power. Wasn’t that hard, people always had to ask him, playing football without a dad? He couldn’t understand the question. It never occurred to them that when you had gifts like he had, you didn’t need a father. Certainly you didn’t need some Montana hippie who talked in circles about the simplest things. You needed a coach, sure, and a mother to cook you mega-tons of ziti and meatballs, six-egg omelets with brick-thick stacks of toast, or whatever it took to keep you from eating shelves of Twinkies just to tame the hungry beast in your gut. But from Tim on up, he’d had no shortage of coaches. No shortage of ziti either.

  He was approaching the end of the straightaway now, where the prefab brick boxes got older and closer together as Spring Road curled into 29. He was hoping, as he always did, for open road, because whipping his truck around that bend, hopping the newer asphalt ledge and spraying gravel in his wake was one of the chief pleasures of his commute, and getting to do it on his final drive to school seemed lucky. Sure enough, the coast was clear, nothing but sky and trees and the old green interchange sign to scold him. He downshifted and gunned it until he felt the ass end start to break free, then rode out the drift until he was straight and responsible and a credit to his community once again.

  The high school reclined on a ridge overlooking the highway, the one place in town that would never go out of business, even when its business got stale. The first door he tried, by the gym, was locked. So was the second, by the auditorium. Finally, he made his way around to the front, where a banner stretched between two redbrick pillars reminded everyone that the Monacan County High School Warriors were the Division 4A State Runners-Up in Football. He averted his eyes from that damn tarp every time he drove by, and thanks to the placement of the student lots in back, he could generally avoid it on foot as well. But now here it was, almost a year old already, still cruelly commemorating the last time he’d donned the Warrior Red, all amped up and vibrating on the biggest stage, raring to smash guys in front of the hometown fans who’d driven the hundred miles to Blacksburg for State. He’d come away from that game puking in the locker room shower, tasting not the sweetness of a Gatorade-drenched championship, but bile. Straight, nasty, loser bile, spiced with a bitterness so concentrated, it seemed to predate his own beat-up body. The single worst loss of his life.

  He found a door that worked and went inside. His halls. Except, somehow, they weren’t. He’d roamed them empty after practice a hundred times, but this was different, and it took him a moment to register why: the doorframes had been repainted red instead of whatever color they’d been before. Gone, too, was the smell of sour mud on linoleum, the trash cans full of half-empty milk cartons and lukewarm fish sticks, odors he’d never thought he’d miss. Everything was clean and orderly and unoccupied. He’d entered a brand new school. Gripping his paper, he followed his feet to Mrs. Murray’s room, which faced the athletic fields, where he liked to imagine her watching football practice from her desk.

  Thankfully, that was where he found her now. She was bent over a giant spiral-bound planner, making notations in her tiny hand. Her husband was a professor at Briarwood, and Mitch spent much of his summer stint on the grounds crew avoiding jobs that would bring him near her house. What a relief to be done with that. He lingered in the doorway and rapped his knuckles against the frame.

  She looked up, and there was an uncomfortable moment, her bespectacled face on the verge of full expression, as though it had been many years since she’d seen him and she was trying to recall who he was. But then a smile broke free, and she stood.

  “Mitch,” she said, rubbing her hands together gamely. “What a nice surprise!”

  He staggered into the room wielding the paper, which had grown sodden and loose in his hand. “Last day of July, you said. Man of my word.”

  She wasn’t especially pretty, or even young. Her chin was sort of long, witchy even, and she had pale, reddish skin that grew redder when she got excited about a book. Her hair was either light brown or dirty blond or maybe more accurately just beige, and she always wore it in a braid that draped over one shoulder, with loose strands escaping near her face. What she did have was confidence. Whenever someone questioned the quality of a book, as some jackass always did, Mrs. Murray would fold her arms across her chest and level him with her stare. “J.D. Salinger created the teenage voice,” she would say. “What, Mr. Campbell, have you done?” Until her class, he wasn’t even sure he knew that books were written by actual people.

  She took the paper and flipped through it purposefully, as though hunting for specific words.

  “It’s about The Great Gatsby,” he said. “Want me to just sit here while you grade it?”

  She turned back to the first page. “I’m impressed. You didn’t have to do this.”

  He shrugged. “You said the only way you’d pass me was if I brought you my paper by the end of summer.”

  “But Mitch. Graduation was over a month ago. You got your D. You walked. There would be nothing I could do about that now even if you didn’t keep your promise.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that. He looked at the chalkless blackboard, cleaner than he’d ever seen it, as though it had been born in the factory that day. “Is that new?” he asked. The question seemed to confuse her, so he just plowed right on ahead. “So, wait a minute, you’re saying it didn’t matter?”

  “I took you at your word. I gave you the benefit of the doubt even though it meant giving up all my authority. Or so I thought. I have to tell you I’m glad you were still scared enough to do the right thing.”

  He held his hands out, feeling equally stupid and proud. “What can I say: you’re a scary lady. You know I worked at Briarwood all summer? But I hid every time I saw you coming.”

  This pleased her. She threw her head back and gave a short, loud slap of a laugh, an odd sound from a woman, but the sort of noise guys made in the locker room all the time. Then again, she was an odd woman. She had protested nuclear arms in New York City, and in the books they read for class
, she was always pointing out the sex. He’d had more than a few dreams about her, which he felt was entirely her fault.

  “Do you want me to read it?” she asked.

  “Only if you want to. It’s pretty awful.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “Hey, thanks!”

  They were laughing together now, which was unusual, but not unpleasant. She perched on her desk, allowing one leg to ride up while the other remained planted on the floor. He noticed for the first time that she was wearing shorts. “Let me have a look,” she said.

  He took his place in the front corner seat, his thighs bulging up into the gummy underside of the desk. That much, at least, hadn’t changed. “It’s just about how Nick is jealous of everyone for being good at sports.”

  “Do you think that’s true?”

  “I don’t know, I thought it said something like that. Is that wrong?”

  “No, it’s interesting. Do you think people are jealous of you?”

  “It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” He stretched his legs out, away from the gum, which pulled at the hairs on his quads. There wasn’t a person at the school who didn’t envy him. Three years on varsity, playing every side of the ball: tight end, linebacker, sometimes he’d even punt. Every year, he dated the prettiest sophomore, and in those short, in-between periods he had every other girl attacking him with blowjobs and cake. Nerds ripped on each other in public just to make him laugh. They all wanted to feel his power, to taste how it felt to be him.

  “Though I bet you can get jealous of them, too.”

  “Huh?”

  “Their freedom, maybe? Outside of school, most of them can do whatever they want whenever they want. You’ve been following orders for a long time.”

  “I don’t know, Mrs. Murray. I don’t think about it that way. That’s just how football works.”

  She smiled from her perch. “You can call me Laura now.”

  “Laura,” he repeated, trying out the word. He knew it was her name; he’d heard other teachers slip and use it. Laura Murray. It had seemed right enough then, as a name, had seemed enough like her. But now, in his own dry mouth, he wasn’t so sure. Laura was a completely different person, a chick at a bonfire. A girl who might bake him cake. He shrugged bashfully. “I don’t know if I can.”