by Jeff Hull
“Resigning from the team—this team, at this time—sends a pretty strong message,” Cates said. He seemed impressed with it, although not in a particularly copacetic way. “Some people would want a piece of you for quitting.”
The two men looked at each other for a moment. Tom felt as if each were trying to understand what the other was going to struggle with. He didn’t think he needed anything from Cates, no permission or approval. He supposed if he were being completely honest he wouldn’t mind some underlying empathy.
Or sympathy. He’d gotten himself so twisted he’d confused the two. Should he really resign? Would Cates even accept the resignation? That would put Tom in a pickle. What if he offered and Cates forced him to honor his contract and they ran through the state championship game, knowing a few things he wished he didn’t know? He didn’t know if he had enough boys-will-be-boys in him, or if there was enough victory champagne—more likely Miller, the champagne of beers—to flush the bad taste away.
He could ride the momentum to another coaching job at a bigger school—Class C championships at three different schools had never been accomplished in Montana football history; job offers would come—and leave the memories of this place to languish in the mean wind and the dust of his wake. Sometimes he did think like that, although he didn’t always like it later.
“I’m sorry, Dave,” he said. “I really am. Christ, I got off the bus to stretch my legs, talked to Krock O’ like I always do. Went inside to check the restrooms like I always do. Brad Martin was there going on and on and we stayed out a little longer than usual maybe—I remember thinking Krock O’ could probably use a little longer break. It was a long drive and late. But I just had no idea. When it comes down to brass tacks, I just … I have no defense. Slab was there, one of us would have stayed on the bus or got back on earlier.”
“Tom, you know you don’t have to explain yourself to me,” Cates said. “But I think we should hold onto horses here. Let’s start by you telling me what you know and when you knew it.”
Tom did, starting with how he had fallen asleep, then got off the bus, got back aboard, what he had seen, what he failed to see. Cates listened without interruption, a feat he was known for. Then Cates spent a pensive few moments of silence steepling his fingers against his lips. He wriggled and restacked his spine in a perfect upright posture, before speaking.
“I think,” Cates said, “this could blow over if we wanted to let it.”
That caught Tom by surprise. “Do you want to let it?”
“It’s … delicate. Obviously,” Cates said, creaking out a smile. “The Aarstad boy hasn’t complained to anyone. There’s a certain willingness, I think, to see a certain level of misbehavior as youthful indiscretion. We were all young once, and we all made mistakes …”
“I never did anything like this,” Tom said.
Cates indulged the interruption with a nod, then continued, “But you knew people who did, and you didn’t hate them for it, and you didn’t ruin their future athletic and academic careers over it.” Cates raised eyebrows, inviting Tom to challenge that version.
“This might be a first time for you, but it’s not for me,” Cates went on. “At any school in any year, kids make mistakes that could have serious impacts, but don’t, because somebody decided not to let youthful indiscretion ruin young lives.” He took a strategic pause, coming from a new start. “You know, ultimately, this school belongs to the town.
“What I don’t want is some emotional brawl that makes my students, and their parents and people in town, stake out sides. What I do want to do is sit tight at this moment. We don’t know enough yet. If we’ve got some jacks to stuff back in their boxes, I’d like to spend a little time getting a feel for which way the wind is blowing in town. If you’re comfortable with that.”
Tom was not, but didn’t feel like he’d actually been asked a question. He wanted this part to be over, wanted to blunder into the next bit of drama with at least the roles clearly defined: him, poor supervisor of out-of-control athletic powerhouse, shoddy character builder, failed father figure to a group of hapless teenagers, falling on his sword. But so little in his life seemed to proceed the way he expected it to.
When, he wondered, was that going to change? He’d thought he’d been making good choices, moving to Dumont alone, getting away from Winnett—where professionally he’d reached his greatest triumph and personally everything had gone wrong. He’d thought he had been thinking things through. He’d thought he had been starting over by building a strong foundation, trying to make connections in the community.
He’d thought he’d been trying to assemble a solid football program that featured what he thought of as his hallmark, the teaching of teenaged boys to harness their aggression, to focus it on very specific situations on the football field, to leave it there. He’d thought he had been teaching kids to remain levelheaded in emotional situations. He’d thought he was pretty fucking good at it.
Now this. He left Cates’s office feeling like a dog lunging against a short leash, just wanting off though not particularly sanguine about which way he wanted to run. Tom viewed his own coaching as a crusade to teach small-town boys to be decent human beings first and accountable teammates second. Only after he’d managed good progress on these two fronts did he endeavor to sharpen their athletic skills and talk about hard work and dedication.
Now he felt disloyal to his own rhetoric. Before going to the practice field, Tom went to his classroom and sat at his place in the front. He looked at the empty desks before him. He liked teaching in the classroom as much as he liked it on the field. He liked teaching history, subscribing to the old view of history as first tragedy and then farce. Witnessing the opening of a young mind was one of the most powerful experiences he had ever known, and he got to see it happen every year.
That several of the minds he faced in any given year seemed impermeable at a premature age was a fact he found neither daunting nor discouraging. Depressing sometimes, yes. But sometimes he could stick a shim in even the most seamless blockheads, could find a hairline fracture that the right sliver of knowledge might pry into. Sometimes the victories were merely temporary, but which ones weren’t, in the grand scheme of things?
The challenge of the hunt alone was worth the chance of failing. If he resigned his football job and turned out to be only a history teacher, well, there were worse things. Tom felt he should not go to practice today, should let Slab run things. Slab might need to get used to that.
Walking out of his classroom, Tom saw Josie Frehse in her volleyball practice gear, lingering in the hallway, talking to a tall, lean kid Tom didn’t recognize. Then he did—Mike LaValle, new kid in school. He was in Tom’s American history. Josie talked to everybody; Tom liked that about her. She didn’t hold herself above anyone.
Jared was the same way. Tom wondered about this Mike, what he was like. He couldn’t tell much about the kid as a student, though truth be told, he usually honed in on his students a little more once football season was over. LaValle did his work on time, but didn’t do anything extra. He sat silent in class. Josie looked over her shoulder, saw Tom approaching, and her posture changed. There was something furtive in her stance. The conversation ended before Tom reached them and Josie loped down the hall and into the gym. Mike LaValle watched Tom walk past.
“Mike,” Tom said.
“Coach,” Mike said.
Nothing more. And then Tom was pushing through the door and back out into the day.
* * *
The voice that severed Caroline Jensen’s reverie early Tuesday morning was a usual one, her coworker and nominal boss, Pearl Aarstad. “You got that sauce going yet?”
Caroline had already opened four massive cans of acrid tomato sauce and poured them into the vat squatting atop the blackened industrial stove. She had drained the canned sliced mushrooms and plopped them into the soupy red liquid, and was now dicing and adding a dozen onions. Caroline couldn’t imagine that Pearl wasn’t
smelling the greasy brown odor that streamed from the platter-size frying pan filled with sizzling ground beef, and therefore known that Caroline had started the sauce, but Caroline wasn’t convinced Pearl’s question was for her anyway. So many of Pearl’s voicings were mental notes, which she apparently possessed no mechanism for fencing into her own skull.
“We’ve got lunch in two hours and fifteen minutes,” Pearl sang out. “Get that sauce going and the green beans on. I’ll start setting up desserts.”
Pearl passed by her, looking geriatric and hygienic at the same time—stooped over a stained apron, hair hidden in plastic netting.
“What are you hearing about your nephew?” Caroline asked.
“I’ve got seventeen nephews, Caroline,” Pearl said. “Which one do you want?”
Caroline made a nervous titter. “Wyatt,” she said. She didn’t say, Which one do you think?
“I don’t know what to think about that,” Pearl said.
“I hope he’ll come over soon,” Caroline said. “I could make him some dinner. Mikie said he’s keeping to himself.”
Caroline had always imagined that’s what having friends would be like for her son, and for her—making dinner for Mikie and some boys who sat around in his room pretending to do homework, maybe eavesdropping to learn a little teen-boy scuttlebutt. It had never happened.
In Great Falls, Mikie LaValle’s friends had hung out on street corners with skateboards and graduated quickly to tattoos and piercings, just a few criminal skills away from meth habits. Most of them had carried knives, though that had seemed elaborate at the time. Which was why Caroline had moved to Dumont.
Since they’d moved earlier that summer, almost all of Mikie’s friends were, in fact, invisible, part of some online “community” in bedrooms around the country and world, kids who threw themselves for hours into disturbing role-playing quest games.
Pearl said, “I don’t know why my nephew Wyatt does or doesn’t do anything. I know he usually asks for what he gets.”
Though she didn’t know exactly what had happened, Caroline felt sad for Wyatt Aarstad. She felt sad for her son, who seemed to be Wyatt’s only real friend. She was not allowed to call her son “Mikie” to his face in the school building. For years she had, just for fun and a little projection of her hopes for him, called him Mighty Mike.
Mighty Mike LaValle. She had given him his father’s surname, back during the hopeful six-month period before Mighty Mike’s father took off in a car with two other men and a woman in a red tube top and a thong showing from her too-low jeans and never come back. Mighty Mike had seemed cute when he was a little boy, but few teenagers inspire notions of might—least of all a gangly kid with such searing eyes and a mop of raven-black hair all raked into his bony face, one who insisted on wearing black jeans and motorcycle boots to school every day and some piece of metal in his nostril.
And so she’d altered her pet name, told herself it wasn’t a sad day when she understood that Mighty Mike had become Mikie LaValle. In the high school, she’d recently found out, the boys called him Mikie LaVagina, among other things. Proximity to the reservation hadn’t brought the succor, either, that Caroline had imagined just looking at a map. Which made her realize—without irony or judgment—that she was a dumb white woman for thinking it would. She had hoped Dumont, scraping up against the Fort Miles reservation, might harbor other kids with mixed Indian blood, which she had hoped might ease Mikie’s late adolescence identity issues.
Dumont, meanwhile, could hardly be more white. The only Indians in town straggled in from the rez to the bars, where they sat in huddled clusters, blowing smoke in the air like sour breath they wanted to get rid of. Even when the Indians felt confident and loud, when they won at Keno or danced and had fun in Pep’s—they almost never ventured into the Longbranch, where it was made obvious they weren’t welcome—the Dumont patrons did their level best to imagine that no Indians were sharing the room with them.
On top of that, Caroline had not been steeped in tribal dynamics when she found herself steeped in Mikie’s father. He had been from Browning, a jarringly handsome wolf-eyed Blackfeet man—at least Caroline had thought so when he swept up to a backyard barbecue in Great Falls in his battered green pickup and she had first laid eyes and, regrettably quickly, hands on his lanky form on the bench seat of that pickup parked in the lot behind the La Quinta hotel—which meant that in addition to being looked down upon by the whites in Dumont, Mikie, half-Blackfeet, was shunned by the Assiniboine or Gros Ventre kids he might encounter from the Fort Miles rez. She didn’t talk to Pearl about the boys again for a while.
Later, as the lunch crowd breached the cafeteria doors, Pearl worked the vegetables and garlic bread. Caroline felt a subdued mood permeating the room today, not the usual febrile shedding of morning energy. Mikie stood in line with the only kid besides Wyatt Aarstad she had ever seen him eat with—Arlen Alderdice, a sophomore boy as skinny and purposely unkempt as her son. The boys from the football team, Matt Brunner and Jared Frehse, Waylon Edwards, and Alex Martin, always first through, had filled their trays and were looping back against the line, moving to their regular table, closest to the food window to minimize effort when they invariably came back for seconds. They would pass by Mikie, as they did every day.
As she did every day, Caroline hoped that passage occurred without incident. Sometimes Matt Brunner stopped at Mikie, fronting him close enough that his tray might bump Mikie’s chest, and he would say things. Caroline had no idea what Brunner said—she couldn’t hear, and Mikie would never tell her. But they clearly caused her son shame, a crimson blush that flooded his face with such vividness she could almost feel the heat on her own skin.
When Mikie came through the line today, Caroline spoke softly to him. It was his rule that she not address him too overtly in front of his schoolmates.
“How’s your morning?” she asked, a ritual question.
“Fine,” he answered, the most profound thing he’d ever said about his morning. His stringy hair draped his face, obscuring his eyes.
“Hey Mike,” she said, alerting him that next she was going to transcend their usual exchange. His head jerked up and his eyes, now shimmery pale blue, leapt to hers, filled, she saw, with raging paranoia about how she might humiliate him. She kept her voice low. “Why don’t you guys sit over there with Wyatt today?”
“Right,” Mikie said, bundled with a look close to pure spite, discolored only by a hint of confusion at how an adult person could be so stupid. He checked the students on either side of him in the line, making sure nobody was paying attention to this.
“There’s an empty seat.”
“You really have no idea how this cafeteria works,” Mikie shot back. He pulled out of line, failed to have green beans or garlic bread slopped onto his plate. Mikie rushed in a shuffle across the floor, headed for the far corner of the room, where he and Arlen Alderdice—and sometimes Wyatt—sat in near-exile every single day. But Caroline saw that, coincidentally, Matt Brunner rose from the table where he sat with his teammates. She knew something was going to happen when, as Brunner stood, she noticed the Frehse boy deliberately look out the window and gently shake his head. Brunner headed toward the service window as if he’d forgotten something. Caroline wanted to call out to Mikie, whose path Brunner seemed on a collision course with. She wanted to warn him just to get his head out of his ass, to step to the side.
She wanted to shout Dodge! But it was Brunner who, at the last minute, dodged, pivoted, lifting his arms as if he were the one trying to avoid contact. In doing so, he tapped the bottom of Mikie’s tray from underneath with such a quick, casual stroke that a plateful of spaghetti splattered her son and the floor in equal measure. Once the plate was done clattering against the linoleum, Mikie stood looking down at the mess like a dog that knows what comes next.
“Damn, boy!” Matt said. He stood with his palms open and arms hung in victim’s span. “You ruined my shirt.”
Carolin
e wanted to vault the counter, grab that prick by the hair, and swat his face back and forth until she got tired of it—it took every effort to stand silently, her heart knocking at her epiglottis, her head bowed as if she could, honestly, be just glancing up momentarily from her work. She scanned the room, hoping David Cates, the principal, who usually ate his own lunch during this period, would arrive on the scene and arbitrate quick justice. Cates was nowhere to be seen today. The teachers hadn’t come in from smoking outside yet, and Pearl only glanced up briefly to locate the source of the disturbance, then headed for the mop.
“I’m sorry,” Mikie was saying when Caroline looked back. Kids in the lunchroom brought food to their mouths without taking their eyes from the drama playing out before them.
“What was that?” Matt asked, hands down around hip level but no less outstretched. “Was that a pip I heard squeaking?”
“Is this really the best time to be a jerk, Matt?” a girl’s voice said.
Mikie said, “I said I’m sorry, man.”
Matt pointed a long, burly finger at him. “You better watch yourself, man. I’m about done letting you slide.”
Mikie bent to collect his splatter and, in what seemed an oddly inappropriate move to Caroline, Matt stepped closer, glowered down at her son. Then another boy from the football player’s table, the Edwards kid, stood and moved to Matt and looped an arm around his shoulders, talked in a low voice into his ear. Matt made a bluster of not wanting to go, but whatever Edwards kept saying to him allowed Matt to be drawn back to his table, where he and his friends continued glaring at Mikie while several of the other boys whispered intensely at him.
Then a glaring sort of laughter broke out. Mikie weathered the stares of his collected peers by pretending to ignore them, though tinges of disgust turned the corners of his mouth in. Caroline noticed his friend, Arlen, had managed to scurry as far from Mikie as was possible in the geometry of the room, and now settled quietly down at their usual table, lowering himself to the chair as if too much weight too soon might detonate a bomb.