Broken Field

by Jeff Hull

  “Let me bring a pizza. I’m already inconveniencing you. What do you like on it?” he asked.

  “Oh, I ate with the kids a long time ago.”

  “Humor me.”

  “Anything but olives. And sausage. I don’t like their sausage. It’s too gritty.”

  He loved olives and she was probably the wrong person to take this out on, but the prospect of a night alone with droopy-eyed Scout seemed too daunting. Tom felt a depression coming on, like the cold fronts that sometimes moved across the autumn sky, a density of purple-gray cloud as far as you could see, slowly closing out the light. There was no way to flee out from under it. He needed to be with someone, and Jenny was the person who seemed most interested in talking to him about things in his life. Well, the only one.

  “This thing going on about the bus, it’s a mess,” Tom said, when they sat at the oak harvest table in her kitchen. He had never been in her house before, but felt like he had, felt like the timeworn furniture and practical functionality of everything in the kitchen was exactly what he expected, the dishtowels folded neatly, the appliances tucked away, the cleared counter space. Her six-year old son and eight-year old daughter were both in bed by the time he arrived, and he and Jenny talked in hushed voices, adding a façade of gravity to a situation that Tom secretly felt was already more grave than a lot of people knew. He had started in on his first piece of pizza and relished the way the still-warm but not flesh-burning cheese felt against the roof of his mouth.

  “Did anybody get hurt?” Jenny asked.

  Tom thought about that while he chewed. “I think somebody always gets hurt in these situations,” Tom said.

  “How bad?”

  “Maybe not go-to-the-hospital bad. Maybe down-the-road bad. Although, I hear people talking and there seems to be a whole bunch of folks who think not a damned thing happened worth worrying about.”

  He finished the piece of pizza and began prospecting the box, looking for the next candidate. He had no idea he had been so hungry. “I’m thinking I’ll offer my resignation.”

  “I heard that,” she said. Jenny drained her wine glass, which drew his attention to her. He could tell she wanted more details but wouldn’t push for anything he didn’t feel comfortable volunteering. She never did. “I just want you to know I’m pretty good at keeping my mouth shut about private things. I managed not to tell anyone for two whole years that my husband was sleeping with a cocktail waitress in Lewistown,” she said and smiled, so he did, too. Then the levity evaporated like cold steam and his eyes fell.

  “There were some girls involved, too. Cheerleaders who were on the bus when we stopped to get gas.”

  “Cheerleaders are a bit more aggressive than we were in my day,” Jenny said.

  “You were a cheerleader?”

  “Crimson and blue, all over you,” she said, moving her fists in a parody of tiny cheer pumps.

  “But not aggressive?”

  She pressed her lips together. “Way too self-conscious. I just did it because I thought that’s what the cool kids did.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  “Not really. The really cool kids, I found out later, were at home helping their folks around the farm. Or they were in the library reading Paul Bowles and Jack Kerouac.”

  “You know, I never liked Jack Kerouac,” Tom said. He wanted that third piece of pizza, but didn’t want to sit and feed like a hog. He wanted to ask her to have a piece, but now found himself in a conversation for the first time, he realized, in—what? Years?

  “He wrote about football,” Jenny floated.

  “He wrote about Neal Cassady, not so much about football. He never got it about football, which made me realize he didn’t get it about a lot of things. It was really all just his filter that people bought up.”

  “Football can mean different things to different people.”

  “Sure.”

  “I think I could have guessed you wouldn’t be a big Kerouac fan. Though, true confession: I used to fantasize about that Neal Cassady.” She seemed to make herself blush a touch. “When I was a lot younger.” She watched him looking at her. “Well, come on, Tom, there wasn’t a lot for teenaged girls in Dumont to fantasize about.”

  For a moment Tom felt a different portion of his brain stimulated. He felt sly and clever, as if he were a lot younger and flirting with a pretty girl, a girl who seemed to be telling him something about herself that she wanted him to know for a reason.

  “You can’t imagine a jock who reads, huh?”

  “That’s not it at all,” she said. “Some of our best students play sports. I just didn’t pick you for someone who read a lot of Kerouac. You don’t seem the type.”

  “Assignments in college. Back in the day …”

  “Back in the day,” she said, too.

  “Funny thing, back in the day something like this thing that happened, probably nobody says anything about it.”

  “Oh, a lot of bad things happened back in the day didn’t get talked about,” she said. “Domestic violence. Sexual assault. Child abuse. There are really good reasons those days are on their way out. It’s important to keep them shuffling out the door.”

  “Yeah,” he said and nodded, then felt dumb sitting there nodding. He wondered how many people in dusty little towns like Dumont were trying to forget things that happened to them twenty or forty years before, things so awful they told only one person or nobody about, things they knew nobody would want to listen to them talk about.

  “I think people should talk about this one,” Tom said.

  “So you’re going to make them?” Jenny asked. She kept looking at him and when he had no answer she said, “I’m not arguing. I just want to know if you’ve thought through how it’s going to go. Might get a little rough.”

  “Oh, you know … shit. I mean, look at my life,” he said, but this seemed to bother her. So he said, “I can make my life be okay one way or the other. This kid … he’s just a kid. He didn’t get to choose.”

  “You’re not giving him a choice now, either. He’s going to be humiliated when this is all over town.”

  “It’s all over town now.”

  “Not the way it’s going to be. Not out in the open where Mom and Grandma and Aunt Pearl know all the clinical details.”

  “What happened to keeping those days shuffling out the door?” Tom asked.

  “You wanted someone to talk to. I assumed you meant ‘to’ and not ‘at.’”

  “I did.”

  She reached over and rubbed her palm against the knob of muscle on his shoulder. She let the hand rest there, which made him look at it, until she dipped her head so he’d look at her eyes. “I’m not on a side,” she said. “I’m just trying to be here in the middle, with you. Feel what it’s like.”

  Her hand still rested on his arm, and he could not ignore the weight of her warmth. He knew he could, if he could concentrate, identify a reason she would want to touch him like that, but it felt beyond his reach at the moment. He wondered if this was what it felt like to have a nervous breakdown, this detachment from things you knew you could pin down, if only you could funnel the appropriate amount of attention to them. But getting a handle on the attention was like trying to tackle an imaginary friend. When he asked, the sound coming from his throat felt empty in the middle. “Why?”

  She took a moment to form a response. “I think you’re a good man in a bad spot. And I think you could use a friend.”

  A friend, he thought. Was that what he needed? Tom couldn’t remember the last time he’d made a new friend. He had plenty of pals, but friends? It made him again try to switch his focus, which was disappointing, because for a moment there, for the first time in a very long time, he had thought that what he truly needed was a woman, a compassionate figure of flesh and languid movement, a throat to confide his dry lips on, the curve of a waist to rest his stiff, weary hands along.

  A woman other than his fantasy conjurings of his former wife. Of course, Jenny had be
en right. Desire was not an appropriate driver in this moment—or if it was, any attempt at follow-through would end in comedy, not romance. A friend, she had said. Maybe he had misread the pies all along. Maybe they were part of football fever. Or its tradition, its form. She had never encouraged him to come to her house—or anything else for that matter. Her reputation as a good listener and a kind person to others in her community was well established. He had probably read all of this wrong, perhaps subverted her motivations to fit his subconscious needs. At this moment, complicating his life with desire was a bad idea, anyway. But who plans these things?

  Who has such a firm handle on what they want? Not Tom Warner, not sitting in Jenny Calhoun’s kitchen and feeling the blue gaze of her eyes, feeling the warmth of her palm on his shoulder, not when he felt like the rest of his world was losing its familiar shape. He reached for her, leaned across the table to do it, dragging his shirt through the pizza box, in a move that looked more lurch than love. He cupped his hand behind her head and pulled her face to his, probably with more urgency than he should have. His lips pressed against hers, found them feeling lush against his, pliant even, but not eagerly anticipating his arrival.

  Not exactly matching his ardor. He kissed her for a moment, waiting for her to catch on, but she didn’t and then he noticed that her head maintained its pressure against his hand—she wasn’t pulling back, but she sat in the same posture she had when he’d made his move, only she had stiffened a bit. He dropped back in his seat.

  “Aw, damnit all. I’m sorry,” he said. “I … I got carried away. Misread …”

  “So sudden,” she mumbled, her fingers lightly combing hair back into place.

  “I shouldn’t have. I didn’t mean to …”

  After an awkward pause she said, “No. I just … really didn’t expect … tonight, like that … that’s not how I expected it to happen.”

  “That was inappropriate, I’m sorry,” Tom said. Jenny was the kind of woman who expected to be courted a bit, he suddenly understood, and the clarity of that realization hit home because he’d just treated her like some woman he’d met in a bar. Show up half drunk with a pizza. She had kids in the house. “Overwhelming. I didn’t mean to be overwhelming. That’s not how I am. I don’t want you to think that’s how I am.” There followed a long awkward pause. To Tom, Jenny seemed confused and suddenly inaccessible. She sat and stared at the doorway with her eyebrows arched, one of her wrists turned so her half open palm was up. She looked like she was hoping an explanation might drop into it.

  “I should maybe go,” Tom said. “I’m going to go.”

  Though of course he wanted her to argue and stop him from leaving, Tom saw her sitting up straight in her chair, looking disheveled and a touch puzzled, and it was too much for him. “I’m really, really sorry,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “You don’t have to go.”

  But he did have to go, now. He’d convinced himself. He needed to escape his embarrassment, and there was no way that could happen in this kitchen. He found himself caught in one of those momentary internal debates about irrelevant details: should he take the rest of the pizza home with him or leave it for her and the kids? It was his pizza and he was still hungry, had only eaten the two pieces.

  “I don’t know what got into me.”

  So many things to feel bad about. The urge to flee overcame all feeding concerns and he left, his last glimpse of Jenny revealing a woman staring at his pizza with a small baffled smile on her face. Tom hurried to his vehicle and let the engine rev while absentmindedly leaving his foot on the gas pedal.

  He failed to cool the rpms down and the vehicle jerked when he dropped it into reverse. His drive home took him through downtown, where the lights of Pep’s bar still glowed. Horrified by the prospect of lying in his bed, staring at the ceiling, his heart kicking, his body still awash in a throbbing cocktail of lust and shame, he pulled in. He barged through the door and ordered a whiskey ditch, saw Hal Hartack’s eyebrows arch, then remembered the alkalinity of the Dumont water supply.

  He changed it to a straight shot, upped it to a double, and asked for a beer back. Hal poured the drinks without comment, moved on down the empty bar a ways, and pretended to polish beer mugs with the dish towel always draped from his waist. Two Aarstads Tom barely knew sat at the other end of the bar, talking loudly to each other, although Tom didn’t tune in.

  Hal waited until Tom had choked back the shot and taken a long soothing swallow of the beer, then said, “See that Monday night game?”

  Tom glared at him, then understood the question. He shook his head.

  “Doozy. Packers won right at the end. That goddamned Rogers, he can throw a tomato through a brick wall.”

  Tom let Hal talk to him about the game for a while. Then a second shot glass came and went and a second beer and he started to lose track of the story of the game. The tension and frailty he’d felt coiling around him all day began to unwind, and he found himself perversely enjoying the sensation of a true falling apart. This, he thought, must be the way the dissolute drunks do it. He was looking at all sorts of hell to pay in the morning, but couldn’t imagine how that would be any different if he let himself go tonight. He skipped the third whiskey but had another beer.

  “Odd night for a bender,” Hal said. “You don’t seem the type.”

  “You’re the second person tonight to suggest I don’t seem the type,” Tom said.

  “It’s an insightful town,” Hal said.

  “Or a judgmental one,” Tom said.

  “We’ve just been here a while,” Hal said, grinning.

  Tom wondered how much that mattered. He suspected they knew how they were, all six hundred or so of them having grown up together, continually under each other’s influence and sidelong eye. And yet there were always surprises. The autumn before he had been driving around the spare tablelands, looking for places to hunt birds, when he’d pulled into a farm yard and met a rancher who’d named his dogs Biko and Biafra. Tom had assumed the references were to musicians, but the rancher, a man almost exactly his age, who had attended the University of Montana during the same period Tom had and remembered him from the football team—a stunner in itself, since Tom had hardly played and nobody remembered his presence—told him that while music had drawn his attention, the dogs were named in honor of a man and a struggle.

  Though he admitted that he let his kids call the second dog, simply, Bia. And there was Jenny with her Neal Cassady fantasies. Tom liked to believe a guy like Hal knew hardly anything at all about him, even if he had grown up in a plains town even smaller than Dumont.

  Hal wouldn’t suspect his predilection for chai tea, or Spanish goat milk cheese you could get in Missoula, or, probably, that his favorite books were by Richard Ford and Alice Munro, because both writers seemed able to vitalize the significance of small moments in the wide-open bleakness of life on the vast rural plains. He doubted Hal would know under what circumstances he intended to use the fake punt he’d been practicing with the team.

  “I suppose,” Tom said, because everybody seemed to know these things, “you heard I’m quitting.”

  “The hell you say,” Hal said, moving down the bar to grab the whiskey bottle again. Coming back now. “Whatever those boys got up to, that shit goes on every year on every team in every town.”

  “It doesn’t. It happens in some places and not others. Why do you think that is, I wonder?”

  Hal didn’t look like he wanted to think about that. He looked like he wanted to grab Tom by the collar. He sort of swaggered to stop in front of Tom. “We did some horsing around when I played,” Hal said. “I don’t remember any big tragedies because of it.”

  “This got a little out of hand, Hal.”

  “Things do get a little out of hand from time to time,” he said. “That’s why they call it ‘life’ instead of ‘the part where everything is always in hand.’ That don’t mean you quit. You pull your team together and tough it through. You don’
t let it ruin the whole season for all those boys.”

  “You sure you’re not talking about ruining the whole season for somebody else?” Tom was thinking: like you.

  Hal seemed to take stock for a moment, then leaned his forearms on the bar so he was closer to Tom’s face. Anybody watching might find the gesture casual, even friendly. When he spoke, Hal’s tone was tight and contained, some surprising blend of confession and thoughtful, if unsolicited, advice.

  “The truth is a slippery fish, Tom. I’ll tell you something—people think I care about how the football team does, think it’s a big deal to me. And it doesn’t hurt me any to play along. But hell, I’m sixty-seven years old. I got a boy that died just like yours did. Mine was twenty. Got in a highway accident. Never got to know him as a man. My daughters gave me four grandchildren. They’re what I live for. Football doesn’t mean shit to me.

  “But I do care about this town. You said I might be thinking of someone else you’d ruin the season for, and you’re not wrong. I think about those boys on the team and how this might be their one shot at something like glory, ever, in their whole lives. Look at me. You think my life got a lot more glamorous after winning that state championship? It’s a Tuesday night, and I’m sitting around talking to a dumbass quitter.”

  Hal slapped his palm lightly on the bar, then closed a fist and wrapped his knuckles on it. “So yeah, all those little old ladies baking the boys pies, and the divorced gal down the street from me who never went to a football game in her life since high school, but she’s got a crimson and blue flag flying in her front yard this fall. Pearl Aarstad, who wouldn’t set foot inside this bar, but she corners me whenever I see her at the grocery and wants to talk about how the boys are doing, do I think they’re going to win this Saturday. You should see the light in that woman’s eyes. Yeah, I am thinking about what it might ruin for some folks. Maybe you should. Maybe you should think yourself clear, and make sure you’re not using one little incident as an excuse to punish somebody else.”

  “Punish who?” Tom asked, offended.