A Short Move

by Katherine Hill

  The NFL parties every Sunday, but it’s always better after a win. He’s got his brothers with him, and they’re pointing at him every minute, marking him as their own. The club is darker than any house they ever lived in, but it’s the kind of dark that makes everything beautiful, not the kind that makes things sad. Wilk hasn’t come, though he’d grinned when D invited him. “Have fun, man, you earned it. Just don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  Remembering this, D tries to act like a Christian. When a perfect ten approaches him, he’s charitable, buys her drinks, praises her. She’s got one of those forest animal necks, like a deer, and one of those asses, too. She’s creamy coffee toned and smells like magic wrapped in rose petals with a smooth candy shell.

  “Don’t worry,” she says, absolving him, light speckling across her skin. “I’m on Depo.”

  Even so he wears a condom. He’s learning in this arena, too.

  ~

  The next week, there he is in Sports Illustrated, screaming, holding his pick to heaven, while the quarterback sits on the ground behind him like a kid who doesn’t want to go to sleep. “INT by 53!” was what he’d been saying, “I! N! T!” though there’s nothing about that in the caption. He cuts out the page and tapes it in his locker.

  “You see me?” he asks Wilk before practice, nodding at the photo.

  Wilk gets funny all of a sudden. He puts his face up close to the image and peers at it, like he’s an old man beyond the help of corrective lenses. “That isn’t you,” he finally says, pulling back and straightening up.

  D emits a protective sizzle, a sound like water on a skillet. “Sure is.”

  “It is?” Wilk crouches down again, really studies the thing. He blinks. He’s taking forever, and D starts to move around behind him, feeling weird.

  “See, 53,” he says.

  “That’s your number,” Wilk agrees, as though this might not be a relevant fact.

  “Bro, it’s me. That’s my face in there.”

  “It’s a picture of you.”

  D shrieks. “Damn! Quit it! Same thing, right?”

  “It’s not the same. This”—he jabs D in the sternum—“is you. That”—he jabs D’s sternum on the page—“is your picture. You. Your picture. You. Your picture. See what I’m saying?”

  “Not really.”

  Wilk sighs. For the first time he seems not angry but genuinely disappointed. “Then I can’t help you.” His beard looks grave and fatherly in his disappointment, and D wonders if that’s why he rides him, if he thinks they’re somehow alike because neither one of them had a dad.

  “All right, all right, I’m not my picture. That’s deep. But look,” he says, trying a different tack. “I’m gonna have a son. I can’t wait to show him this.”

  And then, like he does, all of sudden, Wilk explodes. “So he can think his daddy’s a football player, is that what you mean?” He swings around with his Gatorade, which he spikes, to stay sharp, with caffeine. “That’s your job, bro. It’s not your purpose. But you are so lost in the world you can’t even see that. You can’t even see how tiny you are. I know you think you’re permanent, some kind of once and future king, but you’re not. None of us are.”

  He’s not sure he’s ever heard Wilk say this many words in a row. “Chill, bro. Why you telling me this?”

  “Why am I telling you? That’s your problem, you don’t listen! Not to God and definitely not to me.”

  “Jeez, I’m here. I’m listening to you.”

  “You’re listening.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But do you hear me?”

  “Yeah, bro.”

  “Then get rid of that corny picture.”

  D hears. He actually always hears Wilk, even when he makes no sense. He picks provisionally at the taped edge, but it’s already adhered. Stalling, he turns around, making sure to block it with his body. “You really think that’s my future? King Mars?”

  Wilk flaps a gnarly hand, which means, I forgive you, but also, Don’t push it.

  The truth is it’s something D thinks about more than he should. The future. Not Kowalczyk’s or their opponents’, but his own future, the world’s. It’s so invisible to him; that’s what’s scary. Nothing at all like an developing play. If he had to describe it, he’d say his future world would probably be a lot smaller and darker than the world he looks at now. Confined, somehow, like a photograph, instead of the boundless thing itself. Except when he sees kids; then he thinks differently.

  “I mean, I hear what you’re saying about the job,” D says. “But I really don’t think prayer’s the answer for me. If that’s what you’re trying to say.”

  “That’s because you haven’t known adversity, bro. You’ve been so lucky this season. Everything you could hope for and more. And I’m telling you, that’s the most dangerous feeling in the world. It’s deceptive.”

  What Wilk is saying is so tone-deaf, D feels an obligation to correct him. “I haven’t known adversity? Am I not a rookie? Am I not a black man in America? Come on, man, don’t be ignorant. You went to the U.” He turns back to the magazine page, tries to unpeel it as carefully as he can, but even so, the long edge rips. Whatever, he can always buy another.

  When he turns back he notices Wilk sweating, a halo of perspiration ringing his forehead. “You know what I mean,” Wilk says. “I just mean it’s easy to be in the NFL and see nothing but the NFL.”

  D understands putting pictures of himself in his locker is weak, but he can’t understand Wilk’s edge. The man’s thirty and at the top of his game. He’s been in SI countless times. Even if the NFL were the only thing he saw, he’d have seen a lot more than most.

  “Yeah, man,” D says. “It’s a short move no matter what. But that’s true if you’re a garbage man or playing garbage time.” He isn’t sure why he even has to say these things, what it is they’re fighting about.

  Wilk blinks wildly. “A short what?”

  “A short move, baby.” D takes a little step to the side. “From your mama’s womb to your final tomb. Whatever your religion, that’s the only truth there is.”

  Wilk shakes his head. “Wise man, all of a sudden. Kowalczyk should put that on one of his signs.”

  D pictures his mama’s catch phrase next to STAY IN YOUR LANE and DO YOUR JOB over the door to the players’ lot. Kowalczyk is the kind of coach Wilk believes in, inspirational signs and all. He’s played for lots of coaches, guys who love the players too much, guys who hate the players too much. Kowalczyk’s the autistic kind: out of shape but not quite fat, eight steps ahead, obsessive, clean. He has those permafrost eyes, and is actually pretty unlovable, but anything can be tolerated as long as you win. So Wilk says.

  “IT’S A SHORT MOVE,” D says, holding up the ripped magazine page as a stand-in for his imagined sign.

  “It’s also a long season,” Wilk concedes. Another Kowalczyk line. “I don’t know. He’d probably disagree.”

  By December, the cheerleaders are wearing Santa hats and muffs, and everybody on the team is worn down. It’s just a physical condition, but it feels like one that’s been with D always, as regular as hunger, as taking a shit, as sleep. Anyway, they continue to win, drinking chicken broth between drives on the sidelines. Wilk is right that the NFL has not been hard for him; with a few months’ hindsight, D can see that now. All the advice he’s been given—how to conduct himself, how to play smart, how to show respect—none of it has really mattered, because at the end of the day, he’s had the athleticism and the willingness to develop the skills.

  Somewhere along the way, despite their gap in age, he has become Wilk’s best friend. He isn’t quite sure how that happened, or if he’d even grant Wilk the title in return, but he guesses he might, and he guesses it has something to do with the conversations they have, which often start with film, but easily move on to all sorts of other things, like Wilk’s understanding of God as a coach who loves him, who he can talk to and laugh with in his mind, or how much they both hate
Tom Brady, who only Wilk has met. He discovers a lot of surprising similarities in the course of these conversations, like how they both got bit by dogs growing up, which really shouldn’t be a surprise, because every country kid has been bitten by a dog, because that’s the ordinary violence of growing up in the boonies, a fact that’s probably significant, because it’s the same violence that conditioned them for this game. He enjoys these conversations, the way they don’t really end when practice ends, but pick up again, elastically, back at Wilk’s place, where they’ve taken to watching film on the giant L-shaped couch, and then the next day, back at practice, and then the next day, and then the next. He enjoys the way Wilk encourages him, increasingly, despite his old habit of bossing, to not be weak, to be a man, to speak his mind. And it occurs to him, when Wilk mentions a retired guy named Hardy for the fifth or sixth time, that Wilk has not played for this team much longer than he has, and it’s possible all his real friends are elsewhere, and what a funny idea that is, a real friend, as though what they have right now is fake.

  Even so, Wilk sometimes tells him to leave him alone. “We’re just co-workers,” he says one day when he decides he’s not in the mood.

  “Oh, I see,” D says. He dusts himself with baby powder, half of it evaporating like the rookies from camp. “Now you ain’t gonna talk to me.”

  He pretends to be a mage, casts some powder in Wilk’s direction, which Wilk answers with a spell of his own. He just stares, and it is dark, and after all the brow-beating, and then all the commiseration, and all the conversation, and all the—honestly, there’s no other word for it but—love, Wilk’s stare threatens to black it all out.

  It hurts at first. But D’s lost scholarships and friends and relatives; he’s used to love being withheld or withdrawn. He decides he does not care. He can stare right back. He, shirtless and black, in a room made for shirtlessness and blackness, can stand there, rubbing cayenne pepper into his arms for extra heat, and he can look murder straight into Wilk’s mind.

  You are outnumbered here, says his murdering look. You are not permanent. Your days are numbered, too.

  Sometimes D thinks about how much all this football stuff costs. The shoes alone. They’re complicated, and he gets a new pair just to practice in each week. He’s lacing his latest, freshly barnacled with molded bottom spikes, and he’s finally beginning to appreciate his solitude when Wilk comes around, fickle man, and invites him to his house again to study. Just like that.

  “You know I don’t watch film anymore,” Wilk says under his inflated ceiling, the mahogany rafters peaking like a private church.

  “How’s that. What are we doing right now?”

  “After ten years in this league, I’ve seen it all.” He’s drinking a shake Lori’s made him, eating a sandwich he’s made D buy. “There are only so many plays that can come out of any formation. It’s instinctive. I just go to the ball.”

  “But what are we doing in the present moment, bro?” D gestures at the wall-mounted plasma. He wonders what it costs. The rafters, too. “Ask yourself. Be honest.”

  “You’re watching film. I’m just spending time with my rook, helping keep him on the straight and narrow.” A sling of meat hangs off his lower lip. “Thanks for the sandwich, by the way.”

  “Not like I had a choice.”

  “I do, though. And I am choosing to say thanks.”

  “You’ve seen it all, huh.”

  Wilk licks his lip. “All of it and more. Stuff I’d rather just forget.”

  “How you mean?”

  “I’ll tell you how I mean.” He gets fatherly again, leans forward over his knees. D thinks of Wilk’s babies sleeping upstairs and tries his best to look serious.

  “I’ve been in the game so long,” Wilk says, “that when I look at guys now to size them up, I practically look inside them. I see the surgeries, the anti-inflammatories, all the weak parts.”

  As he talks, his expression fades from sober to nonexistent, and for a second D doesn’t know if he’s forgotten who he is or what.

  “You go for those parts,” Wilk goes on. “You don’t want to admit it, but you do. You don’t want to admit it because you’re taped and sutured and gauzed up, too. Those are your weak parts. It’s your body you’re attacking. It’s like cancer; it’s, what’s the word, it’s self-defeating.”

  He gets quiet and once again D thinks he might have blacked out. He’s on the verge of nudging him when Wilk resumes speaking, even more soberly than before.

  “This is a zero-sum game,” he says. “Everything you get, you take from somebody else. But you take it from your own self, too.”

  ~

  The zero-sum idea is a powerful one, and D enters the postseason thinking hard about football math. Week in and week out, it’s did you win. For half the league, the answer is yes. For half the league, it’s no. Then you get to the end, and suddenly there’s only one team that gets to say yes. This is logical. This is something everyone knows. But it’s a pretty fucking cruel piece of logic, because winning is also the norm, the thing everyone thinks they should be able to do. But one winner, thirty-one failures: what kind of norm is that?

  They are on the cusp of their own failure when it happens—Packers, playoffs, and D has been talking all game. To Brett Favre. To various fat linemen he beats out to Favre. There’s a ferocity to every communication, even the play calls, every one of them a threat of costly things to come. This kind of talk has substance. It congeals, forms a necessary future. On game day, D completely lives in that future, the one in which every play succeeds.

  He is in it now, even now, down two TDs in the fourth, when, on the heated bench, Wilk tells him, “Keep talking. Keep it up.”

  He’s been flying around, knocking receivers unconscious—not literally—and saying some unadvisable shit. He’s been warned once already by the ref, for chatting down to a leveled receiver just a few moments too long. It wasn’t his fault the guy just lay there on the ground, wincing. Wasn’t his fault the guy figures heavily in Green Bay’s game plan, and is small for his position, and a diva. He’s Jackson, E-Jacks, the Cali kid with the girlfriend whose number D is proud to know by heart.

  “It’s getting to them,” Wilk says. “I can see it.”

  Woodson, the strength coach, squirts water into D’s open mouth. He swallows. “I’ll get fined,” D says.

  “Fuck it.” Wilk grins. “It’s a short move.”

  D’s so flabbergasted to hear Wilk swear that he hardly registers the rest. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a short move, right?” Wilk says again, and D is filled with a warm memory of himself. “You can afford it.”

  D nods automatically. “You know what.” He does the side step. “I can’t wait to pay that fine.”

  So D keeps talking, and the Packers keeping stalling, and the wincing slot receiver, E-Jacks, keeps jabbing him with his needly elbow every time they intersect.

  D talks to him again about his girlfriend. About his facial hair. About his bling.

  “Imma take your hat off, Princess Ice,” he says. “Imma steal those diamond studs.”

  But E-Jacks just looks past him, like there’s something much more striking in the mesh of white lights and green jerseyed fans that encloses the playing field. He’s not reacting like he did before. He’s keeping his cool.

  “You better run,” D says.

  “I’m running.”

  “Not for office,” D says, liking this stroke of cleverness. “Not for office,” he repeats. “This ain’t no debate. You ain’t got no podium to protect you, son.”

  “Pssh. I get all the votes.”

  “Fuck no!”

  E-Jacks shrugs, flashes smug, Cali teeth behind his mask. D can almost see the diamonds through his ear holes. “I’m the hero, man. You the one they love to hate.”

  They head uphill to the line of scrimmage, which crowns, the field rising slightly in the middle to help it look flat on TV. E-Jacks’ jersey is streaked with grass and paint and
it appears to have been restitched at the sleeve. D pictures a Packers seamstress bent lovingly over the work, and the irritating thought of this makes him want to shove E-Jacks’ face in the dirt. Jacks who? He ain’t no president. D feels sharp on his feet.

  The next down, E-Jacks cuts and the ball comes his way but D is right there to slap it with his hands. “Vote for this!” D screams. “Vote for this!” He gets shoved backing away, and whistles blow, but then he shoves back so the penalties offset. E-Jacks limps daintily to the sidelines, leaving the bellies of the offensive line to defend his honor. One of them, Duckworth, is the old mustachioed dude, the one D has never liked. He swings at D, calls him a thug, and probably goes on to say something even worse. D has no idea because every sense in his body is at that moment exploding as Wilk literally holds him back. “Naw, man, you the thug!” D shouts from Wilk’s embrace. “E-Jacks ain’t no president, he’s a puppet!” Dancing back to the huddle, he mimes a marionette on strings.

  It’s soon after this that it happens. A run play, a run play that in hindsight, they might have called just for him. He’s swooping, headed for the ball carrier unblocked, when out of nowhere one of those same offensive bellies bears down on him, and it’s Duckworth, of course it is. He’s ugly and yelling something about his precious baby E-Jacks, and he cuts D right at the knees.

  Every hit is louder in the winter cold, but this one is so loud it practically silences his mind. He cannot even recall how it sounded before, because all he can hear is the tear in his knee.

  “The fuck!” he shouts. “You can’t go for my head like a man? You can’t go for my head like a MAN?”

  Then he screams, not in fear, but to cause it. He hopes that fat-ass can hear him. Hopes he knows his revenge will be worse. When he gets him again. When he gets up. Though D’s pain right now is no picnic. He screams again, pounds his fists on the ground, sees the concerned faces of Wilk and the medical staff above him, hears the guilty crowd look away, thinks who the hell are these people, thinks Wilk, you motherfucker, thinks there are so many people, so many motherfuckers, thinks he can see three fingers, thinks he’s fucked.