A Short Move

by Katherine Hill

  She looked at him now with her own athlete’s face: a mixture of victory and pain. The shrewdest of all his bosses, the one who made his world. She put a hand on the back of his neck. “’Course I’m coming. I already bought my plane ticket home. Now get yourself fed before you upset me all over again.”

  He released his grip on her seat and somehow found her burgers in the fridge. They were bulging with inner pink and blackened on the edges, fogging the Tupperware with their expiring breath. At the table, his family resumed their drowsy chit-chat while he found the tomatoes she’d sliced, and the lettuce and cheese, the buns in their clear plastic bag. She had to do a lot on her own, and she usually missed something, the house a permanent mess, the tag of her shirt sticking up. It embarrassed him sometimes that she had to do the job of two people, a hardship visible to anyone who looked. But more often than not he was proud of her. His mother, the superhuman, who routinely acted like it was no big deal. That night while he was out, she’d hauled herself up from the couch, changed her clothes, gotten everyone together, and even found the time to make his favorite home-cooked food. The least he could do was eat it. He found a grill pan, clicked on a burner, and got ready to enjoy burger #2.

  5. MITCH, 1990-1992

  He didn’t practice the first day; he fought. One offensive player after another: fuming in pads and helmets, gnashing mouth guards in his face. He’d tangle with one, get separated, and then before he knew it, he’d be shoving and swinging at someone new. Guys hadn’t even introduced themselves, except to say, “Fuck you, freshman. Think you’re hot shit?” His implicit answer being, “Fuck yeah, and fuck you, too.” He didn’t know them but he knew he had to step up.

  This was Miami. You did not fuck around. He’d heard stories, but he figured it ended with practice; as a team you had to leave it on the field. He sat by his locker after, freshly showered, clean undies, picking at a scab on his knuckle.

  A fellow mastodon approached and flicked him with a towel. “Looking forward to a good night’s sleep, Rook?” It was Gaines, a glistening defensive end, with three inches and forty pounds on Mitch, a trophy case of muscles that actually worked. He was naked but he was smiling. The least Mitch could do was smile back.

  “You know it,” he said.

  “That’s great. I hope you enjoy it.” He slapped him on the back with a foot-long hand. “I’m gonna stab you in your sleep.”

  No one stabbed him, but it felt like someone could. It felt possible at Miami, where, per pregame tradition, they’d all come to do three motherfucking things.

  “Hit! Stick! And bust dick!”

  “And what else?”

  “Talk shit!”

  In the beginning, he called his mom every day and lied to her while his roommate Mike Garrison mimed a blow-job from his bed. Mitch told her people were nice, they were treating him well, he was learning. The last part was true enough, but not because anyone was nice.

  There was a way of being black here that was new to him, not like the mildness of Monacan, the yes-sir blackness that just wanted to live. This blackness was furious. He’d expected that, of course. He wasn’t a fool, he knew about the U. But expectation and experience were different things, and in his experience it was about ownership here. Owning yourself, owning the game, and humiliating anyone who tried to take it from you. That was how to play, it was obvious to him, and even though he was white, he was lucky, because he got to own it, too.

  He learned other things. How to claw guys’ necks above their pads, where to vomit inconspicuously in the facility and in his dorm, which professors would be like Mrs. Murray, passing him along without the work.

  In Miami, the trees never lost their color, except when they were sick. Forget Virginia pines, palm trees were the true evergreen. He got rowdy one night and tried to pull one straight from the earth. He had clobbered it, he had it in his arms, and he was giving it all his strength, but it was eternal, it wouldn’t budge, and the guys were hooting “Oh, shit!” and “Nooo, dude!” so he took out his humiliation on a bench. A gift from Linus Peabody, ’51, it was toast, merely bolted with metal into concrete. Impermanent, manmade, unable to withstand the wrath of Mitch.

  The trees, they were beautiful. The girls, too. Miami made looking beautiful seem like the easiest thing in the world. Hard to say how many of them actually were beautiful, as in really, underneath the hair and makeup. But like the trees they knew just how to plant themselves: tits high, eyes lined, legs tan. Like the trees they landscaped his life and were for the most part a lot easier to pick up. He was a white guy on a black team on a white campus, an extremely favorable situation.

  “You asshole,” Caryn told him, the first time she found out about a girl, which was not the first time, just the first time she found out. “You’re so hard now. Miami’s made you so hard. It’s turned your heart to fucking stone.”

  She was angry but she was crying, and the mix of those emotions on her face did something devastating to him. It made him panic. It made him grab her.

  So did her choice of word: hard. When she said it, he got hard, the same way he did pretty much every time she entered a room, even the times he wasn’t looking. His crazy dick was like some kind of Caryn sensor, alerting him every time she was near.

  She was worth the panic, though. If anyone was, she was. She wasn’t like so many local girls, who grew small on the college stage. Caryn could compete. He lifted her and she came right off the ground, and he told her how sorry he was, because in that moment, he was sorry, and nothing he’d done or would ever do could change a single thing about how he felt.

  In high school, he only hooked up between girlfriends. This, he was pretty sure, made him a monogamist—fundamentally, at heart.

  But college had taught him something about fucking, namely that it didn’t change the world. The cock went in, and he felt everything, even terror, even weakness. The cock came out, and he reset, still himself, still evergreen. The whole experience was so detached from his mind and body, it was hard not to think of it as a hallucination, some trick of chemistry or light.

  He considered trying to explain this to Caryn, but managed to laugh himself out of it before he could even finish the thought. She would want to know if he really thought she was that stupid, when actually what he was hoping was that she might somehow be that smart. So he had to keep her from finding out, keep her from crying the way she did at all costs. It was just his cock, after all, not his heart. Everything that happened in there, he instantly forgot.

  It was not that way with other parts of his body. Things experienced in the feet stayed in the feet, same with the shoulder and the hamstring, and, especially in his case, the knee.

  He’d fought with Caryn that week, about another girl, another nothing that evaporated the moment it was over, but apparently not fast enough, because Caryn had seen the gum in the trash and smelled the freesia body mist when she dropped by a few hours later with his latest problem set. She’d called him a little boy. She’d asked him if he was doing it for Gaines and Mike and Devon, if he actually thought they’d respect him more if he fucked every woman who chewed gum. She’d asked him if he knew his balls had a spot on them that looked like the state of Vermont.

  He knew about the spot, of course, but he didn’t know how the gum had given him away. Because it was pink? Because only girls chewed pink gum? She kept her distance a couple of days, which was fine. After all, he had to focus on his game.

  And then that Saturday, he blew out his knee. He knew it was final the moment it happened, because he immediately wanted to take the motion back. Rewind the tape, get a better jump, and re-meet the runner straight on. Enforce his will. Walk away the same as he came.

  Instead, the guy burst into the hole, caught him off-balance, and yanked him around beyond the root of his feet. Reynolds, from BC—a pretty average back on a pretty average team. But quality had nothing to do with it, not when the pop in his knee was the sound of his sophomore season evaporating, faster than any gi
rl who chewed gum. Mitch was livid. That moment was everything. It stayed in his knee where it remade the world. And Reynolds, that fucking insect, crawled back over to say he was sorry, and if Mitch could’ve moved, he would’ve killed him, that fucking flat-footed bug.

  What followed was surgery and weeks of rehabilitation, the long, hard, boring work of reclaiming something he’d always had.

  Recovery meant more time to brood. He spent a lot of it on the couch and on the phone while Mike was out at practice or lifting or generally using his body the way he was supposed to be using it. He called his mom more. He called his dad once, and it went well enough, he guessed.

  The desire for a Cuban sandwich could give shape to an entire day. He’d be lying there on the couch, needing it, his tongue drying up and shrinking him from the inside because he wasn’t already eating those layers of roast pork and ham. He would call Caryn over and over, ten, fifteen, twenty times if need be until she came back from wherever she’d been, and when she answered she was always breathing fast and annoyed, like she was holding weights in addition to the phone, and he’d feel righteous, he’d give her hell, and she’d tell him to chill out give her a second she was coming, and then eventually she’d be there to collect him and drive him in his own truck to La Carretta. The moments they were sitting before the food arrived were torture, toasty buttery plates passing them constantly on their way to other people’s mouths, Caryn’s arms folded and boosting her chest, taunting him and making him hard. It was hard to look at her sometimes and not think this was all her fault.

  He called Joe a few more times, closing his eyes while the guy just talked. His voice was from a time before all this: the knee, Miami, Caryn, himself.

  At a party that season, he found himself talking to a blonde girl in cut-offs who was majoring in English. “The punts,” she kept saying. “They’re so poignant. I didn’t know a man could kick a ball so high. And then they just hang there. And then they fall. It’s agony.” She made an arc with the hand that was holding her beer, some of which sloshed over the side.

  It was idiotic. The punts. Some people had no idea.

  He saw her again later that night, and again she asked about the punter.

  “You have to introduce me,” she said, hanging onto his arm, almost knocking him off his crutches. She spoke at an embarrassing volume, like a man, though she was a girl with slim thighs and glitter on her eyelashes.

  “Gaines!” he finally shouted, calling for backup. “Help me set this girl straight. The punter’s shit.”

  “What’s his name—Chris?” Gaines boomed, asserting himself on the conversation.

  “You can’t hit him. He doesn’t even train with us. He’s only out there because the offense fucked up!”

  “Sounds like you got this.” Gaines winked and roamed away.

  “He’s cute, though,” the girl said.

  “Gaines?”

  “No—Chris.”

  “He’s barely a football player! I got a whole team of guys I can introduce you to, starting with the King. That’s Gaines. Or are you allergic to chocolate?”

  This offended her, and sometimes good offense was good defense. Maybe now she would leave him alone. “Fuck you, I’ve fucked a black guy.”

  “Give the woman a prize!”

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand where this hate is coming from. Do you want to fuck me? Is that it?”

  “You want to fuck Chris.”

  “One does not preclude the other.”

  He freed a hand to stroke her ass. “Have fun. I hear he’s very precise.”

  He fucked her, of course, and Chris didn’t. Injured or healthy, the job still had its perks. Because that’s what it was now, a job. Anyone who told you otherwise was fooling himself.

  He didn’t get paid in the normal way, with checks, the way he would eventually. But he got cash in white envelopes in his locker, at breakfast, and in the student lot. Fast, clever stuff, meant to disappear into clubs and bottles and plates and joyrides, which then disappeared themselves.

  By his junior season, he had healed, was better than ever, once again evergreen. And yet it was clear by now that college itself was not eternal. It, too, was fast and clever, like sex, like money, disconnected from everything past and future, unless you went out of your way to pin it down.

  Back from injury, he was seeking his titles while Caryn clung steadfastly to hers. His: All-American, National Champion. Hers: Caryn Fletcher, Wilk’s Girl. She’d come in with him, and she put up with him, so she got to wear the crown.

  They liked laying out in the sun together, whenever they could steal the time, he shirtless and in whatever shorts he was wearing, she in a bikini no bigger than two pairs of coasters, two up top and two below.

  It was in one such stolen moment, five o’clock by his watch, that she rolled onto her elbow and looked at him, smug with something he didn’t yet know. She’d been sick the past few weeks, but that afternoon she seemed to be feeling better, at least as far as her mood was concerned, her suit a wet pink to match the inside of her lip.

  “Mitch,” she told him. “I have news.”

  He looked at her body. It ran from the top of her head, down to her shoulder, across her stomach and through her legs to her toes. He took a long look. Was it already getting ahead of them? He imagined himself with that body for life.

  He wouldn’t get his national championship, but he did make All-American, and he won 48-0 over Temple in his final home game at the Orange Bowl. In three years, he’d never lost there, and though he had always liked oranges—they reminded him of the lunch bags his mom used to pack—he now considered them a sacred fruit. That thick, breakaway peel, crackling with mist, spritzing him with sweet victory juice.

  “Yo,” he told the guys that night. “Caryn’s pregnant.”

  It was nearing five a.m. and they had driven in a caravan to South Beach, where they’d hit the club and were now dug into the sand with a couple of joints, no chicks, in the shadow of a posh white hotel. His lungs buzzed and he popped up into the sky, which glittered with distant cold. His last joint for a good long while; he would declare for the draft the next week. He’d be a monogamist again. His fast times were coming to a close.

  “First it’s like tar or something,” Marcellus was trying to tell him, “but then it gets all carmel-y. Almost orange.” Marcellus was already a dad.

  “Man, that’s disgusting,” someone said. “I gotta eat later.”

  “He talking about diapers? He actually talking about poop right now?”

  “I’m just trying to help the man out,” Marcellus insisted. “He gotta know what he’s in for, you know?”

  “Psssssh.”

  “For real.”

  “Orange baby poop.”

  “Listen, y’all,” Mitch announced. They were going to like this one. He was sure they were going to like this one. “If I’m never gonna play here again, I’m gonna have to get some orange shoes.”

  Laughter came from everywhere: that magic sound.

  “Poop orange, baby?” said Devon, a strong safety, who loved to hear Mitch go on.

  “Naw, Dev, orange orange.” Mitch got to his feet before the group and swam his arms in a beastly hula. They were his boys. He was doing it for them. “I want shoes made of peels from the fruit.”

  “The fuck?!”

  “You hear me, y’all? I’m talking Florida superhero, I’m talking breakfast of champions, I’m talking healthy, get-your-vitamins shoes!”

  He’d never have a senior year, but that didn’t matter. He’d done college as well as anyone could.

  “Man, you buggin’!”

  “You trying to be OJ now?”

  Mitch laughed. He hadn’t thought of OJ. “Nah, man,” he said. “The fruit was mine before all this. I’m just being me.”

  6. CINDY, 1993

  “Hey. Hey, y’all! It’s Jimmy Johnson.”

  The first time Caleb said it, Mitch vaulted the arm of the couch and was on the t
elephone in an instant, faster even than he cut on the field. Cindy remembered when her son moved purely for the joy of movement. Not today. Today it was all about the draft. How high he would go, where he would go, and how much money he would get. Cindy watched him listening, bug-eyed, the receiver to his ear, and thought to herself, Dallas, okay yes I could live in Dallas. They’d just won the Super Bowl.

  But it was not Jimmy Johnson, the shellacked Cowboys coach who’d led Miami before Mitch’s time. It wasn’t anyone, just some automated recording Caleb had dialed when no one was looking. Come to think of it no one had heard the phone ring; they all just assumed that it had. Because this was one of those off-kilter, dream-come-true days when even unreasonable, vaguely magical things had to be taken seriously because everything that was happening was so different from anything that had ever happened before. And Caleb Campbell was preying on that; he was capitalizing on everyone’s innocence and hopes. He burst into hysterics—this was a boy who laughed like a little furry forest animal even though he was three hundred pounds and shorn—and Mitch slammed down the phone and hurled himself back on the couch.

  “Not funny,” he said. He’d washed his chin-length hair with some fragrant, feminine product of Caryn’s, and as it dried his whole dark mane had fanned out, soft as cat fur, a massive imitation of his wife. But it was too much hair, even for him, so he’d pulled it back with his usual elastic. All day he’d been patting the top of his head, trying to help it settle.

  “You shoulda seen yourself,” Caleb gasped, clutching his turbo-tread gut, once a force to be reckoned with on the Warrior O-line, now an extra weight he lugged to construction jobsites. “Oh! Jimmy! They ain’t picking till the second round, dumb nut.”

  “Think I don’t know that?” Mitch asked. Other people were laughing now, too, mostly out of relief. Cousins, supposed friends, even Caryn was smiling coquettishly.

  “Cut it out, Caleb,” she said. “I’m sure the Cowboys would love to have Mitch. It’s just too bad for them he’s not lasting that long.” She sat next to Mitch with her feet on a special ottoman, perimeters of white on each toenail in a style she’d casually proclaimed was French. When Caryn had left for the salon that morning, Cindy had promised herself she’d admire her daughter-in-law’s nails no matter what color she chose. She was prepared for something audacious—Miami orange with sparkles or Barbie pink with polka dots—so when this muted arrangement of European piping returned, a style so classy Cindy hadn’t even known it existed, she didn’t quite know what to say. “Matchy,” she’d finally managed, neutrally, looking from fingers to toes.