Broken Field

by Jeff Hull

  “Can I come in?” she asked. Always the negotiation over space. It felt important, to Caroline, to be someplace where he could throw no barriers between them. It obviously felt important to him to maintain a certain distance. The bedroom might prove too confining.

  “No,” he said.

  “All right, then, will you come out?”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t care, Mike. I want to see your face when I talk to you. Why don’t you come into the kitchen.”

  “No,” he said, firmly. Because that was her territory.

  “Then let’s go in the front room.” Those were pretty much the two options when it came to two people trying to sit and talk in their house.

  “The hallway,” Mikie said.

  Caroline could see this was going to be a test. She asked, “This hallway?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” she said, thinking: close to the rabbit hole. “You come out in the hallway with me.”

  Caroline slid down the wall and sat on the floor, crosslegged. Mikie pulled the door open enough to slip through the space he created. He stood against the wall, arms crossed, watching the toe of his sock, worn nearly through, Caroline noticed, slide against the carpet.

  “You gonna sit?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “I like this better.”

  “Looks pretty stupid, me sitting here and you standing way up there,” Caroline pointed out. “Mikie, I’m on your side, baby. Sit down here with me.”

  “You’re not on my side, Mom. You’re going to try to get me to tell you a bunch of stuff I can’t tell you.”

  “Why can’t you tell me?”

  “Because I don’t know,” Mikie said, seemingly exasperated by the inanity of the question.

  “What don’t you know?”

  “How can I know what I don’t know?” These answers seemed to physically pain the boy.

  “You don’t know or you can’t tell?”

  “I can’t tell what I don’t know,” Mikie said. “And I don’t know what I can’t tell.”

  “Okay,” Caroline said, feeling like a new direction might improve the quality of communication, “why is Matt Brunner so mean to you?”

  “I just bumped into him. It pissed him off. That’s all.”

  “You just bumped into him?” But, Caroline remembered, Matt had said, I’m just about done letting you slide, as if there were some process in play. “Is it because you’re friends with Wyatt?”

  “It was an accident.”

  “I saw what happened, Mikie.”

  “It was an accident, Mom, all right? I spilled shit on him and he got mad.”

  Caroline let Mikie struggle under the weight of that big fat lie for a few moments. “Why’s he so mean to you, Mike?”

  Mikie glared at her. “Are you, like, new or something? He’s mean to whoever he wants to be mean to.”

  “He’s a bully,” Caroline conceded, “but lately he seems focused on you. Why is that?”

  Mikie took a long moment and glanced around at the hallway, as if the answer might be painted on the walls, or floating beyond them, in some great free wide-open space outside the stricture of the hallway. Then he said, “I don’t know. Because I’m new here. I don’t have any friends. Because you took me out of the school where I had friends and had fun and dragged me to this hellhole.” Instead of that last coming as withering accusation, it seemed to exhaust Mikie, and he slid down the wall until he, too, was sitting on the floor of the hallway, his long legs stretched parallel to her.

  “Yeah,” she said, “I know.” They’d gone round and round on this, and she retreated to rote phrases in something close to a singsong delivery to sum it up. “I thought it would be good for you. I understand that you don’t see that now, but I thought it would be the best for you. Did you ever do anything that Matt might think is a reason to be especially mean to you?” She was thinking now of the girl’s voice: Is this really the best time to be a jerk, Matt? Not Stop it, Matt. Not Back off, Matt.

  “Oh sure, Mom, blame me. That’s great. Fucking great.”

  “Don’t you talk to me like that.”

  “Don’t you talk to me like that. The one person who claims to be on my side and you’re blaming me for that prick being a prick. That’s beautiful.” Mikie made a lavish production out of “beautiful,” a telltale that the conversation was over. He lumbered to his feet and disappeared through the door slam.

  Caroline felt the slamming sound blast tension from her body. As if by slightly delayed reaction she toppled over, lying on her side on the carpet, which, she couldn’t help noticing from this close vantage point, was filthy. Another way she’d failed to manage even the simplest sort of life that other people seemed to lead with ease. Caroline wanted badly to sob, but felt too stunned and suddenly empty. She knew she could lie on the floor for the rest of the evening and Mikie would never peek out the door to notice, but she knew that to do so would be trading in just the sort of defeat he expected of their life together. So she stayed only a little while longer, trying to imagine how it had happened that her every little failure should have such ringing resonance.

  * * *

  Finished with volleyball practice, showered and feeling refreshed, Josie Frehse was home alone, trying to digest enough American history to complete the two-page study guide Coach Warner had sent home with them and resisting the twin lures of satellite television and the dinging text tone of her cell phone. Her father was gone, helping to excavate an irrigation dam for someone over sixty miles away.

  Her mom had gone to her sister’s house, “visiting,” a ritual Josie couldn’t wait to avoid—sitting around people you’ve seen nearly every week for seventeen whole years, listening to them talking about people you’ve also known your whole life, telling you things you’ve heard six times already. “Ruby went over to Spokane to see her niece last month,” followed by a long discussion about which of her siblings’ daughters that might be. “Mason’s hand got all stove up in the harvester,” followed by a litany of previous injuries Mason had incurred around the farm.

  “Harold drove his pickup off the Cow Creek road,” followed by a long familiar list of trucks slipping off gravel berms, and the relative damage caused by each. Josie much preferred to stay home and read a book, to have someone she’d never met tell her things she never knew. So she had begged off with homework. Her brother was in his room, and then suddenly wasn’t.

  He was walking down the hall and into the kitchen, where she sat at the table. With a lot of metallic clatter, he wrangled a soup pot from the cupboard, then filled it with scoops of barley from a burlap sack in the pantry. He added water and generous stream of salt and turned on the stove.

  “That seems like a lot,” Josie said.

  “Just pre-salting my bacon,” he said, turning to lean against the counter and look at her.

  “You’ll never do it,” Josie said.

  Jared took in a deep breath, sighed. “I’m gonna have to,” he said.

  “Nah.”

  “Dad’ll make me.”

  “Dad’s totally in love with them.”

  “I know,” Jared said. Josie always joked that his resting bitch face was a smile, but now a real grin stretched it further. “He likes to pretend they’re a pain in his ass, but I catch him out there feeding them treats.”

  “He bought them apples in town the other day!” Josie said.

  Jared had, the previous spring, begged permission from their parents to acquire a pair of piglets. His pitch was successful largely because, on his own initiative, he had staked out a piece of the barn and built an indoor-outdoor pen. Matt Brunner had come to help place the posts and Josie had pitched in with them, holding rails in place while Jared bolted them to the posts. “Bolts?” Josie remembered Matt saying. “Fancy.”

  It had been a fun project, time with her boyfriend and her brother, laughing and making fun of Jared and building something together. Jared engineered an automatic watering system, wh
ich Matt helped him build.

  Cal Frehse had scotched the pig idea initially. “We’re wheat farmers,” he said. “We don’t do livestock.” But watching all the industry happening among the kids, their father had allowed himself to be convinced. Jared originally sold the idea of just one pig, but when he and Josie and Matt had driven to Willow Creek to pick it out, the farmer who was selling them mentioned how social pigs were.

  “You’d better get two,” Matt had said. “You can’t have lonely piggies.”

  Jared had waffled, his grin growing comical. “One would be sad.”

  “Last thing you want,” Matt said. “Nobody wants sad bacon.”

  Jared had named the pink little female Carnitas and her brown mottled male littermate Chops. The idea he had pitched to their parents revolved around fattening the pigs all summer and fall and slaughtering them at the beginning of winter. Both the pigs were in excess of 130 pounds now. Whenever Jared was working around the yard, he let them roam free. They were getting obnoxious in their demands for attention and, if she didn’t see them coming, could knock Josie over when they leaned on her legs, angling for a head scratching.

  She sometimes found Jared sitting in the pen, the pigs lying beside him, one’s snout on his lap. Now that fall was tilting toward winter, Jared had taken to cooking hot meals for them. There was no way he was going to slaughter them. His latest strategy had been talk of breeding them, which always caused their father to lift an eyebrow. Jared stirred the pot on the stove.

  “What do you think’s going to happen?” Josie asked. “With the team.”

  “Well, they’re not going to kick Matt off,” Jared said. He moved to the refrigerator, opened the door, and started rooting through the shelves and drawers. He pulled some carrots from the crisper. “Not now.”

  “Why do you think?”

  “If they kick Matt off, they have to kick Alex and Waylon off, and then there’s just no way we can win.” He held them up, showed Josie how soft and bendy they were. She shrugged. He tossed the carrots into the pot of barley, greens and all.

  “Why would they have to kick off all three?”

  “Oh, just from what I heard. They all, like, did stuff.”

  “Maybe some did more stuff than others?”

  “Hey, Jos,” he said, raising the steaming ladle from the pot as he held both hands up in a surrender, “you know the deal—if you want to know something Matt did, get it from Matt. You can’t put me in the middle.”

  “You’d tell me if he did stuff that was really bad, though.”

  “He did stuff,” Jared said, raising his hands even higher, more denial of responsibility. “Whether it’s really bad isn’t for me to say.”

  “Well that’s not true, because you didn’t do that stuff, so you must have had an opinion about it. You didn’t even stick around to watch.”

  “I had to pee,” Jared said, which was also not true—or at least, she was pretty sure, not the reason he got off the bus. “And now I have to feed the piggies.”

  He stepped into the mudroom and grabbed a Carhartt coat and some heavy cowhide work gloves. Then he lifted the steaming pot from the stove and started out the door with it.

  “Don’t play with your food,” Josie said, meaning the pigs.

  He smiled, then said, “I’m heading over to hang at the Martins’. Waylon should be there. I’ll try to find out what the latest scoop is.”

  And then Josie was back at the books, with the house to herself. When Matt texted her a half hour later, he wrote, “practice sucked ass today the worst ever”

  “How come?” she tapped back, wondering if this meant he wouldn’t want to come over.

  “coach pissed about wyatt. punished us”

  “Y did u do that?” Josie texted.

  “I didn’t Y the big deal everybody pranks”

  Josie believed generally that when you wanted to find something out, you asked directly about it, but she didn’t want to launch a big discussion over text. Boys did things she didn’t understand the need to do all the time. She’d already told Matt during school that she’d probably be home alone this evening, which meant if things held to form, he was going to come over, suss out the situation, and want to have sex.

  Originally she had wanted him to come over so she could pin him down about what had happened on the bus. If anybody should know, she should, as close to all the people involved as she was. Jared was never going to say a word about it to her, because she was his little sister and he didn’t have to tell her anything. But she ought to be one of the people that other people could come to for the straight skinny.

  But then the bullshit Matt had pulled in the cafeteria at lunch spurred her to make an impulsive choice that had set something in motion. Now she didn’t want Matt stopping over, or at least not for very long. Josie wasn’t sure she wanted to have sex with him, given the fact that she might be breaking up with him any day now, depending on what she found out about what had happened on the bus. But even if she had felt like it was okay to have sex with him, now she didn’t want that kind of togetherness.

  She just wanted to be alone, to have some time to think about how she felt without somebody feeling her. When Matt knew her parents weren’t expected home for some while and he wanted to stop by, she knew that directly saying no would make him want yes. So Josie had texted, “Okay. Maybe we can watch Ghost?”

  Josie though Ghost was a truly stupid movie. But she knew that the best way to make Matt scarce was to offer him pretty much what he wanted, only on terms somewhat unpalatable to him. Watching Matt eat, for instance, gave her cramps. But she sometimes offered to cook for him when she didn’t actually want to see him, because he didn’t like any of the things she knew how to cook. It almost always worked. Her phone rang. It was him.

  “I’m pretty beat from practice,” Matt said. “I’ll stop over, but I don’t know about a movie.”

  Josie banged out most of the study guide answers in the next twenty minutes. Then Matt walked through the door without knocking, a standard practice. Josie had seen his pickup rumbling down the dirt road for almost a mile. She’d opened the console beneath the TV, as if readying the DVD player. She’d put a pot of water on the stove to boil, pasta and rice being her two culinary achievements to date.

  “Hey,” she said when he came through the back door and into the kitchen. “How’s my big sexy?”

  “Burning with cramps.” He grimaced while he reached down to remove his shoes before stepping into the room. “Coach damn near killed us.”

  Matt limped to the kitchen table and sat on a wooden chair there, his legs stretched out in front of him.

  “Why don’t you go lie down on the couch, and let me rub your legs a little. I bet I can get you feeling better,” she said.

  Josie crossed the room and sat on his lap—or his upper thighs, which were sloped with the stretch of his legs—facing him. His hand wrapped around her butt to keep her from sliding down.

  “They can’t do anything to me,” he said, as if she had asked him that question. “Are you kidding? They’ll probably suspend Alex and Waylon for a game. But there’s no way they’re gonna kick me off. Not now. Not if they want to win.”

  Josie let her fingertips rest on his chest.

  “Why do you guys do such mean stuff to each other?”

  “It’s nothing. God, it’s so nothing. You can’t even understand unless you had it done to you. It’s like tradition. Makes the team tighter. Builds character.”

  Josie wondered, Whose? Now she felt his hand begin to rub her buttocks, an almost involuntary act any time his fingers were near her. Tonight it felt mechanical, although she couldn’t say whether because of something in him or her.

  “Then why’d you knock Mikie LaValle’s tray out of his hands at lunch?” she asked.

  “That was a totally accidental thing.” He pulled his head away to get a wider perspective on how that was playing.

  She frowned, allowed a serious disappointment to ripple
over her face. “I saw it, Matt.”

  The movement on her butt ceased. Matt grew sullen and spoke down at his chest. “Why do you give a shit?”

  “What did he ever do to you?” she asked.

  “What did he ever do to you?”

  “Nothing,” Josie said. She pulled from his lap and stood. “He didn’t do anything to me or with me. God, Matt.”

  “You’re the one who’s all the time talking to him,” Matt argued.

  “I talk to everybody. I’m not a jock snob.”

  “Yeah, but you know he wants to get with you, and when you keep talking to him all the time, you let him think something might happen.”

  “Stop it. Just … stop,” she said quickly recognizing a potential shortcut to his departure. “I don’t even want to talk to you when you’re being this stupid. Why don’t you just”—she made a wipe-the-slate-clean sweep—“go home, and rest and feel better and call me when you’re not so dumb.”

  “I’m not—” He was whining, which signaled her opportunity to drive her momentum.

  “You’re tired and sore and worn out, so you have an excuse. But you’re being stupid,” she said. “You know I would never get with someone else.”

  “It’s not you I’m worried about.”

  “It’s me who makes decisions about who I talk to and who I don’t and what I do. You know I’m not your property and you don’t have to defend me, and I’m not going to talk about it again. Ever. That’s the deal.” He looked beaten and baleful, not even energetic enough to be defensive, and she felt genuinely sorry for him. “I think you’re just really tired.”

  “But we have the place to ourselves,” he said.

  “You know what? My mom and dad are going to Great Falls Thursday night and they won’t be back until really late. I’m supposed to go but I’ll just tell them I have to study.” She knew she was safe there. Matt never had sex that close to a big game. I’m not superstitious, he had told her once, just kind of stitious. That was when he had been charming a lot of the time.

  “That’s two nights before the quarterfinals,” Matt said

  “You’ll be fine by Saturday, big boy.” Might as well ride it. “I’ll go easy on you.”