A Short Move

by Katherine Hill

  “That’s what you think,” Wilk says.

  Of course it is. What the fuck? To think anything else would be death.

  The first game of the season is on a Monday night, the first ever played in the state-of-the-art new stadium with its winged roof and its cup holders for all, and its blended grass-and-plastic turf. When D takes the field for eight o’clock warm-ups, half the city is already there, dressed in jerseys, just like him, like avenging ghosts from former teams. Back in the locker room for the laser show and fireworks, he can feel the entire structure quake. He pukes. He jumps, pulling his feet to shoulder height. He’s happy to be on special teams. Come kickoff, he will detonate.

  What goes down after that is pretty devastating. Four quarters, zero points: a shutout by the same corny team that ended their season the year before. In prime time, with all the league and nation watching. It’s a perfect humiliation, even for D, who hadn’t been there the last time, and has no personal need for revenge. Guys are angry. Stunned. Lucky is out with a broken finger, wideout Jennings has a hamstring tear. Carter, the special teams safety, is in all likelihood concussed. Kowalczyk’s perfect future is rapidly dissolving; the post-game atmosphere is something more than tense.

  All the following week D tries to feel integrated, as a part of the whole and as a whole in his own right. He thinks about his feet and his head and his hands, and he talks to keep himself up. He decides he isn’t going to be a casualty. On Sunday, he joins the pregame chatter circle in the locker room, trading lines with all the churchy guys who dominate the talk.

  “Live proud!” they shout.

  “Live tall!”

  “Live to fuck those motherfuckers up!” D adds, expletives being as godly as he gets.

  He can tell it bothers Wilk. Wilk, who technically doesn’t curse, but is vulgar all the same. He isn’t especially racist. He’s D-ist. He has something against him simply because he is D. It would be easy to be Wilk-ist in return. Wilk had messed around, wrecked his first marriage. It’s something everyone knows. But then he went and married a new girl, and just like that: clean slate. A wife and two babies smiling in his locker in a wooden frame that boasts “I can do All things through Christ.” Wilk attends Fellowship now and has no patience for immaturity. A natural leader: the kind of big-buck free agent who creates new realities everywhere he goes. Guys laugh for him when he jokes, and nod their heads when he speaks seriously. The kind of guy everyone silently agrees not to remind of his own immature past. And that seems a shame to D. If only they’d met when they were both young and wild, they would’ve gotten along fine.

  It’s hard enough after the first loss, but then they go and lose again, to Wilk’s former team at home. Everything that can go wrong does, starting with injuries and ending with mental mistakes, a team loss, through and through. But all that seems to matter to Wilk is that D hasn’t played his best. On the sidelines he’d been a goblin, hissing in his face and swinging his helmet to make his point, and when he arrives at the facility on Monday, his D-ism is ugly and overt.

  “We’re 0-2. Why are you smiling?”

  “I ain’t smiling.”

  “You won’t be smiling this afternoon. That’s for damn sure. Just wait ’til we run the film. Schmidt is gonna make an example out of you. He is gonna circle your ass and then he’s gonna break your ego and you are just gonna have to sit there and take it.”

  “Man, why’re you telling me this?”

  “I’m telling you so you can be prepared.”

  Like prophecy, like the future he never wanted, every single thing Wilk says, right down to the laser pointer circle and the anguish of sitting there and taking it, comes to pass. D sits in his chair and pulls his shirt up over his face, trying not to see himself miss the tackle that results in a punt return for six. He is small on the screen, but so is his man, and when the camera swings right to follow the ball carrier down the field, D can be seen lying flat on his stomach, heels up, head down, before he completely disappears from view. Again and again, Schmidt rewinds to the moment D leaps, a step behind, at the back of Marshall, the sprinting returner. “You see this?” Schmidt screams. “I see it,” D mutters. Again and again he slides off Marshall’s hips and down his legs to the turf, as though no other outcome were possible. “You see your feet?” “I see ’em.” “You see how they’re doing exactly what I told you not to do?” “I see it.” Leap, slip, fall, fail. Marshall streaking down the field, free. On film, it is foretold, it is unavoidable, it is all he is capable of doing. “Your body is my body!” Schmidt screams. “You make it move like I told you to move!” D watches himself get it wrong and thinks,fuck no, no more of this. He thinks about his feet and his eyes and his whole integrated body, and he thinks, fuck no, next time, not this.

  The bye week comes early. He flies home, winless, to see his family and Shawna, who’s paralegalling and studying for the LSAT and who chooses that dreary occasion to tell him that she’ll be having his kid in the spring. He doesn’t respond well at first, and she is hurt, which only makes him angrier. He feels himself glaring at her. He hears himself shouting. He’d been under the impression that she was on the pill! She is, she swears, she’s not happy about this either. She says they should’ve been using condoms as backup. She says she told him that a million times. But he’s always hated condoms, hates the way they dull sensation.

  “Well, that looks pretty selfish and stupid now, doesn’t it?” she tells him. “I can’t believe I listened to you.” He knows she’s right but he can’t hear it; his self needs every ounce of his attention right now.

  “Selfish ain’t all bad, you know! You could use a bit of it in you.” She won’t meet his eyes, and for the first time ever he feels older than her. “I thought you wanted to go to law school! I thought you wanted to do something with your life!”

  That brings the eye contact, all right. “Wait a second, you think I’m pregnant on purpose?”

  “I’m wondering.”

  She throws her prep book at him, literally. “Get the fuck out my house, you stupid, selfish dick.”

  The next week, they finally win. The week after that they win again. D gets his feet right, reads the knuckles right, and as a result he’s getting more defensive snaps, the weakside “Will” linebacker to Wilk’s middle “Mike.” Dropping back into coverage, he’s begun to think of his body as a vessel for Schmidt and Delahanty’s plans, for their future that’s already happened. Which is not to say that he’s found God, or is looking forward to being a dad, but rather that, over the course of endless practices, he’s simply begun to get it, just like in high school, and then in college, when each higher-level game demanded higher-level play. Piece by piece, in ways he can’t even remember, he’s mastered it, and everything his body is doing has become a little less new. Wilk hasn’t stopped yelling at him, but D has stopped caring so much when he does. He’s nearly skipping along; he’s automatic. Even his voice has returned.

  At Dallas, he sits in the tub, talking. It’s pregame and he’s just warming up his muscles and mouth. He’s going to rip heads, eat children, yank tears from mothers’ eyes. His own mother will be in the stands, along with his two oldest brothers and his aunt and nephew and niece. He’s the Martian: he’s here to cover your planet. The other guys in the tub with him are chuckling; they’re wearing headphones, but he knows they can hear him, even the back-up RB who’s studying his book. You try to beat him, he’ll fuck you up, he’ll run you down, he’ll blow your ass to Mars.

  He doesn’t. He plays okay, a little too hard maybe. He’d wanted his mother to see him. He’d wanted her to see how useful his anger had become. “I know you mad,” she used to tell him when he got thrown out of practice, or his middle brother got thrown in jail, or his cousin got shot on the ashy sidewalk in front of his cinderblock house. “But anger won’t get you anywhere.” He’d wanted her to witness his alchemy: how he’s made something bad he didn’t ask for into something gloriously good.

  But the bad is persisten
t, still with him. They lose again, falling perilously to 2-3. He punches things in the cramped visitor’s locker room: a wall, his pads, his head.

  She’s there to hug him after his shower, before he gets on the bus back to the airport. “I got to see you,” she says. “That’s all I care.” She inches him to the side as they embrace so the other guys coming out can get by.

  He doesn’t cry, but he asks her a question. “How long you think I got?”

  “You, baby? A whole career.” She looks up at him. “But you know however long that is, it’s short.”

  He likes this. He nods his head, working the words into his brain. “It is, though. The future’s near.”

  “That’s right, baby. It’s just another one of our short moves.”

  He pictures the little house she lives in now, with its porch, a new construction palace he bought her with his signing bonus. She lived in two different houses when he was in college, and three in the high school days, all of them dark with permanent stains on the windows or ceilings or floors, most of them not even houses, but apartments. Each is less than an hour’s drive from where they stand now, and each was a good decision at the time. She’s still got some of his things at her new place, boxes of old trophies and construction paper drawings, tights so tiny it’s hard to believe a living person could ever wear them. Short move is a good line; he’s going to use it. Just about everything good he’s got has been stamped on him by her.

  The next week, in New York, he’s talking in the tub once again.

  “Man, shut up.”

  The voice is Wilk’s, always lurking somewhere nearby.

  “I’m a universe of pain,” D says, pretending he hasn’t heard. He can’t respond to what he can’t see. “I’m the Milky Way that’s in your way, you best find another Earth.”

  “I said shut up, Mars.” Now Wilk is in front of him, showered, naked, his towel bunched up in his hand. “Mars, I said shut up.”

  “It’s my game, bro.”

  “And it’s my house. In case you hadn’t noticed, we keep a quiet one.”

  “Oh, it’s your house is it?”

  “You know it is.”

  “Last I checked we all on the roster.” He looks at his tubmates. “Y’all care if I talk?”

  They mutter non-answers, shift in the water, the whole situation too expensive for them.

  Wilk smiles, that nasty smile, the one that makes D want to kill him. “Now listen to me because I’m about to tell you something you need to hear. You know what the NFL stands for, don’t you?”

  “Please, like I never heard that before.”

  “Not for long,” Wilk says anyway.

  “Say it to yourself, old man. I’m doing me.”

  “You better stay in that tub. You better sit there. ’Cause when you get out I’m gonna cut off your tongue.”

  He doesn’t do that, exactly. But he can’t make false promises either. D goes about the rest of his pregame routine, getting taped, getting Toradol-injected, getting dressed, knowing the whole time that Wilk is waiting, gathering himself against him. During warm-up drills, they stand side by side in their position group, cock rock music blaring as they talk and occasionally knock heads, until the edge between them builds to a point so sharp, all D wants to do is bleed, and he’d bet his life that all Wilk wants to do is make him. Sure enough, back in the locker room, Wilk slams D into his locker and throws his chair at one of the laundry bins.

  “You shut your mouth,” he says. “You don’t talk until you’ve got game.”

  And then he’s off to the prayer circle, and D’s picking up his seat and gathering himself in return. D-Mars is the greatest there ever was. He’s gonna send someone’s ass to the grave.

  An hour later he’s shouting into the ear hole of Matt Henshaw, a dude the broadcasters like to call a leader, which is just another way of saying that he is a quarterback, and he is white. “Get off the field!” D screams. “You’re weak! Get off the field! You’re weak!” Wilk sent everybody in on the blitz, but it was D who chopped past his lineman fastest on his way to toppling the king. Oh, he’s a king all right, as in a mattress, a perfect cut of memory foam. “Remember me!” D insists. “Remember ME!” He pounds his chest and looks at the heavens and there he is on the Jumbotron, bringing his victim down to Earth again. All the rest of the game, whenever Henshaw’s eyes pass his way, D sees something fidgeting in his expression: a flicker of doubt, a second guess, an adjustment he doesn’t want to make. It’s working its way inside him: the very weakness D suggested.

  It’s usually not until the postgame shower that his body begins to hurt, when the burns and cuts start to blister and the bruises bloom beneath the spray. Flower after flower of pain, like the bouquets he’s been sending Shawna since the bye. This time, though, it’s the good kind of hurt, the kind incurred from a banner game: six tackles, that devastating sack. His feet burst and bleed into the water, like packets of Russian dressing swirling over the tiles.

  He begins to research his opponents. Where they’re from, what kind of car they drive, little things he can tell them on the field.

  “You’re a smart player,” Delahanty tells him. “Just keep on playing smart.”

  D knows smart goes beyond the body. Smart means reading, and reading others. It means converting every cold, dry piece of information into white-hot knowledge he can use.

  “Speak up,” he tells a taciturn running back, after he stuffs him at the line at Green Bay. “I know they taught you some words at A&M.”

  “Three-one-oh,” he sings to E-Jacks, a pretty-boy slot receiver whose girlfriend’s phone number was far too easy to find. “Nine-two-oh. Eight-seven, nine-seven.”

  “Knock it off, asshole,” a Packer lineman tells him, defending his boy.

  D sings the number again on the next possession.

  “Don’t you call her!” E-Jacks eventually screams. “Don’tyoudarecallmygirl! I’llfuckyouup!”

  “Now you did it,” the lineman says. His name is Duckworth and he’s got a mustache and trucker hair and pickle-shaped rolls under his titties, the perfect shelf for catching crumbs.

  D asks him, “Where you live, bro—the seventies? Don’t worry, I’ll find your number there. Send you a pizza, double extra large.”

  “Ooh, boy, you’re talking,” D’s mother says. “I see you out there on TV.” They’ve been winning, three in a row now, and he can hear the relief in her voice. He likes that she pays such close attention.

  “You always said I was born talking.”

  “We had a house full of loudmouths, yes we did. I think you knew you had to make yourself heard.”

  He’d grown up playing with his older, bigger brothers, getting shoved and tricked and angry before popping right back up for more. Again, he always told them, again, again, again. That the best you got? That the best you can do? For a long time, his mouth was his only weapon, and it stayed useful after his body found its form.

  “You know, I’m thinking out there, too, Ma.”

  “That right?”

  “I’m thinking about more shit to say! Naw, I’m just playing. I’m thinking about selling drugs. Naw naw naw, Mama, listen. I’m thinking about girls.”

  They are cracking up now, and it feels good.

  “When my grandchild comes, boy, I am stealing him away. He is living in a world of proper grammar and conduct. None of your lip to mess him up.”

  Wilk plays in a tense crouch, like he’s almost standing, like he’s almost arthritic. Which maybe he is. But he’s still got that odd tilting run that starts upright and ends horizontal as he brings down whoever has the ball. D watches tape in the meeting room after a Wednesday practice. He is supposed to be watching himself, then his opponents. But instead he finds his mind on Wilk. He knows how his own body looks when he works. The game, with its constant taping and reviewing, has ingrained that in him by now. But he hasn’t scrutinized Wilk as much, though he’s seen him play for years. He stands there in the middle, his ponytail peek
ing out of his helmet, his new beard visible behind his mask. He bounces a little, sensing, then torpedoes forward, his hips dropping almost imperceptibly as he lays out. It’s like he’s swimming at guys. He’s a freak! D studies him on play after play, and before long his legs are sparking, he’s feeling the ride in his own hips and feet.

  Then he watches his opponents. When Wilk comes in, sits down to see how he’s doing, he makes a game of it, calling the plays an instant before the snap. Seven out of ten, he gets.

  “Pretty smart,” Wilk says. He’s eating from a carton of blueberries with his fingers, like a friendly animal in a book for kids. “But that’s three plays you got your ass beat.”

  So Wilk. Always focused on the failures, even after a win.

  “Practice makes perfect,” D says.

  “No. Perfect practice makes perfect.” Wilk pops another pinch of berries into his mouth, his fingertips stained fuchsia. “Anything less, might as well go home.”

  “Psshhh.”

  “Your talking’s helping, though,” Wilk says after they watch a few more plays. “I hate to say it, but it is.”

  When Dallas comes to town, his whole family is there once again. He’s flown them in just for the occasion because they get such a kick out of rooting against the home team. He gets them the best seats he can wrangle, paying for all but two out-of-pocket, which he tells no one, because who would believe a starter has to pay for his own family to watch a regular season game? On the field he knows where they are, in the end zone, a few rows up, feels the heat of their eyes every time he runs out.

  Late in the fourth quarter he picks off a pass to author the end of the game. He won’t even need to see the tape later. He sensed it all happening right there in coverage, saw the future in the quarterback’s eyes: a crossing route, a drop-off spot in the open field. He got there well in advance, received the ball like a package he’d ordered and paid for himself. In the stands he pictures his family in ecstasy, jumping, shaking, a preview of the dance floor he’ll encounter later that night at the club.