by Jeff Hull
“Sorry,” he said, which meant roughly, she had come to understand, whatever.
Mikie went back to talking in what amounted, for him, to a rush. “Canada gave Manitoba to the Metis, but then they took it back—”
“How come?”
“I dunno. They made up some reason.”
“That doesn’t sound fair.”
“It’s history, dude. It’s not about fair. So anyway, Gabriel Dumont came out here and lived down in the breaks, kind of hiding out because he was a rebel and there was a price on his head.”
“Here?”
“In Canada.”
“Don’t be impatient.”
“Could you not tell me what to do?”
They had hit an impasse, a fairly usual one. Caroline knew her way around it, but let things sit for a moment, thinking of it as letting her message sink in. “Okay, there’s rice in his bed in Canada.”
Mikie conceded a snort of laughter, one quick bolt. “He came out here and was just living his life, farming and stuff, when he saw the same thing happening again.”
“What same thing?”
“Oh, the usual—whitey stealing the land.”
Caroline shuffled a warning look his way.
“So he got another army together and they tried to win again and get their own country in Saskatchewan. And he was, like, this brilliant, bad mo-fo general. They were totally outnumbered, but he kept beating the Canada army, bashing their brains in. But they lost and he escaped across the border into Montana and lived right around here.”
“That’s quite a story,” she said. “You make it up?”
“I learned it in history class.”
“All right, okay,” Caroline said. She jacked a cigarette out of her pack and lit it, took a deep hit. “I’m impressed. What do you think of that other big story at school?”
“That … woooo. That’s some nasty, gnarly stuff, man.” He almost laughed when he said it. “But I don’t put nothin’ past those guys.”
“Anything,” his mother said, and let it fall. “Do you see now why I wanted you to make an effort to reach out to Wyatt Aarstad?”
“Uh, no.” The are you crazy? conjugation.
“Wyatt could use a friend, Mikie. I bet he feels really lonely. I bet he can’t believe those guys would do something like that to him.” Then she let that fall away, too. She knew Mikie felt intense embarrassment over the way certain factions at school treated him and, though part of her thought it might be nice for him to be able to talk about it, she feared that talking to her about it would only intensify the shame. Caroline went about emptying the two plastic bags she had brought from work, canned vegetables and tuna, a box of spaghetti, a head of iceberg lettuce. “That your dinner?” she asked, meaning the cereal.
He didn’t answer, so she kept putting things away.
“Was my dad good looking?” Mikie asked.
This was as different as the gushing about history. She said, “About the best-looking man I ever laid eyes on.”
“So I must of got my looks from you.”
Caroline sat back, perplexed. In one sentence her son had managed to gut-punch her with the full fore of his insecurity. Kids. “You’re a very good-looking young man,” she said.
“Said his mom.”
“You are. Of course you are. You’ve got those nice high cheekbones”— she reached across the table and squeezed his face in her fingertips, shook it back and forth a couple of times, —“those deep, dark eyes.” She lowered her tone, falling into voice-over. “The beautiful girl peered into his deep, dark eyes. ‘I love you, too, Mikie,’ she said …”
He pulled his head away. “God, Mom, you’re setting new records for gross parental abuse.”
“I love it when you call me God Mom.”
They stared at each other and then Mikie couldn’t meet her eye and Caroline suddenly understood what was going on. “Mikie,” she said, “do you have a girlfriend?”
“No.” She might have been asking if he’d worn her underwear to school.
“You. Do,” she said. “Who is it?”
“You’re a dork, Mom. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“C’mon, spill it. Give it up. Who’s the chickie?”
“There’s no chickie.” Mikie got up from the table, carrying his cereal bowl to the sink. Caroline watched him walk away from her, saw his skinny hips and bony shoulders and thought, I’ll be goddamned—there’s a man in there.
“Well,” Caroline said, “your momma has one piece of advice.”
“Mother.” He clattered the bowl in the sink and turned to leave the kitchen. Caroline cut him off, hands on his shoulders to square him up.
“You respect her, Mike LaValle,” Caroline said. “Whoever this girl is, you respect her and listen to what she says.”
“That was two,” Mikie said.
“I thought maybe you could use the extra,” Caroline said. Something about her son entering the misery of teenaged love made her feel giddy. “Don’t be impatient with her. Respect her. And listen to her.”
“Now that’s three.”
“A woman knows what a woman wants.” She held up a take-note finger.
“I don’t think they do,” Mikie said. “I don’t frankly think they have any fucking idea what they want. You don’t.”
Caroline whipped her head quickly, as if trying to see something zipping around the room. “See that?” she asked. “Bounced right off.”
“God, are you a fifth-level dork,” Mikie said, using his hands to knock hers off his shoulders and twisting away. “I got homework to do.”
“You have homework to do.”
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
“Not in my native tongue,” she countered.
“In mine,” he said. “Metis.”
And then he was gone, squirming down the short hall toward his room. Behind him, Caroline started swishing around the kitchen, singing to the Ricki Lee Jones tune, “Mikie’s in love …”
* * *
Wednesday evening, Tom ran a half-hearted practice. He saw Matt Brunner eyeing him warily. At one moment he caught Alex Martin standing, hands on hips, staring at him with barely contained impatience. The players jogged through drills. He stuck it out, called the plays, but spent more time watching the blue-black line of clouds coming from the west—a hundred miles off but visible as one long low rampart stretching the entire horizon.
Cold air filled the wind and seemed to suck his breath away when he exhaled. Standing on the sidelines, whistle clenched between his teeth, he thought he should feel worse about what was happening. But there was no emotion. It was just a line he realized he had crossed. He remembered Sophie’s email: I feel bad about so many things. After the team left the field, Tom stopped in the film room, gathered some thumb drives, and drove home. He let the dog out, fed her, turned on the TV for background sound, then settled in with his laptop and popped in a thumb drive with film of last year’s semifinal game against Wibaux.
But before he could click on the file, he caught a splash of the Havre news channel on the TV. He didn’t want to watch long, and didn’t have to before he felt an awful recognition about the establishing shot. There stood a young blonde reporter in front of the high school in Dumont, desperately seeking the proper angle to point her face so that her hair blew clear of it. The reporter—she couldn’t have been much older than the kids who went to his school, Tom thought, twenty-two, twenty-three at the most—gestured at the school behind her.
“Getting the real story is difficult here, in this small, close-knit farming community,” she said, “but what we do know is that, during a hazing incident that took place on a school bus on the way home from a high school football game last Saturday, a young boy was humiliated and, some sources say, sexually assaulted.”
Sexually assaulted? Who told her that? Unfortunately the reporter, who had the impossibly unlikely name of Penny Meriwether, wasn’t going to fill him in. The screen filled
instead with the face of Jon Aarstad, a particularly broken-down version of that clan and Wyatt’s father. Jon’s teeth jostled the front of his lower jaw, even while they gapped on the upper. One eye seemed higher on his cheekbones than the other. His pallor lent the appearance of someone who had chain-smoked their entire life, from birth.
“Those boys assaulted my son on that bus,” Aarstad was saying, his mouth hooked in a snarl of disgust. “That wasn’t no kind of hazing, it was an assault. They held him down and they did things to him that were obscene. They humiliated him. They humiliated me, just being related to it. They ought to go off to jail.”
Tom watched as the reporter proceeded to wheedle five “no comments” out of Dave Cates. Next she waylaid a sequence of teenagers trickling out of school at the end of the day. Most of them said they didn’t know anything about it. The reporter asked one girl what she thought of hazing and the girl replied, “It’s, like, whatever, you know? It happens, but it’s not, like, an epidemic or anything.” The girl laughed at the end.
The next student Penny Meriwether stuck the mic in front of was Mikie LaValle. Mikie glanced around as he replied and produced the overall impression that he wasn’t sure if he should be saying any of this out loud. He said, “It sucks, man. Some people can get away with anything in this school.”
“Which people do you mean?” Penny Meriwether asked.
“Football players,” Mikie said. “Athletes.” He was already starting to lean out of the frame, ready to bolt the moment he had a chance. The reporter put her hand on his upper arm and pulled in closer to him.
“Is hazing a significant problem at Dumont?” she asked.
An editor muted the Hell that began the next sentence, so Mikie LaValle’s lips started moving before he spoke, “—yes. There’s all the time stuff going on with the jocks. If you’re not in the right crowd, life can be …” and the editor muted a shit.
In its way, it was remarkable work. Penny Meriwether had managed, in very brief period, to portray his football team as a wilding pack of vicious rogues, his school as an enterprise fraught with peril, and his town as primarily the home of feral idiots. He wanted to call someone in the hopes of being assured that it hadn’t been as bad as he thought it was. Dave Cates was the right candidate, but Tom wanted not to talk to Cates for a while.
The person he did want to talk to was Jenny. He thought he shouldn’t call her, though. She might want some distance from him right now, or he wanted it from the embarrassment in her kitchen the night before. She’d certainly not been in touch, and he’d been too ashamed. So instead he switched over to the laptop and started the game film. He fast-forwarded and slowed only to watch play after play of Jared Frehse running, the way he leaned into his speed, the way he pumped his arm with the ball. Tom loved when Jared made the cuts that left defenders grasping air.
He loved the fleet footwork, the flutter of steps that let Jared’s body move from one place to another only inches away, but out of reach. Tom’s son could do that when he was only ten—the spin move that whirled him a yard to the right and left a linebacker lunging at nothing but his own momentum. The plays Tom watched and rewatched were the speed moves, the moments when Jared outran everybody to a spot, then cut upfield and outran everybody to the end zone.
There was nothing simpler in sports than that—one player faster than all the others, understanding angles and using them in combination with his innate awareness of his own velocity. Watching the film, Tom felt odd about his place in the world, how suddenly it had all changed. He had had a son, a good boy who he had wanted to teach things to. A boy with his own remarkable velocity and preternatural control over his own body. Everything had centered around that boy.
Tom’s life had tilted, pointed in a specific direction. And then, suddenly, that was all gone, leaving everything in front of him blank. He had an ex-wife more alive to him in dreams than she’d ever been in real life. He had an email on his computer that he still hadn’t answered. He didn’t know if he was a football coach anymore—he’d find that out later in the evening. Down the road in town, there was a woman he’d tried to kiss the night before, a woman he’d thought had wanted him to kiss her, and now had no idea about. He flicked off the television.
Scout lay curled on the floor, bored. It was time to go to town, to the school board meeting, and find out what was going to happen to him. He looked around his little home, just an old beat-up farmhouse that he liked because it sat in the middle of thousands of acres of wheat fields. It held no stories about him or his life. If he wasn’t going to be the Dumont football coach, chances were the house wouldn’t even be home for much longer. Tom left Scout inside, using his foot to block the door to her when he left to drive to town.
* * *
When Marlo Stark had left Great Falls that afternoon, the blizzard was just getting underway there, blanking out the distance and churning up the sky with slashing white snow. She had hoped to leave town hours before and beat the weather. Then the day ran away from her and her best bet became a race against accumulation. Fifteen minutes outside of town, she felt in it for the long haul. Chet had seemed genuinely unhappy about her leaving for the night, which warmed her heart and cranked up a little guilt. She didn’t want to spend the night in Dumont, by any means, but she still felt a little guilty about dropping it on Chet so suddenly. But it was her job, and he had to deal with that. She made a pretty little penny representing school boards around the state—a niche practice that only a couple other attorneys occupied and none to the degree Marlo did.
She wasn’t going to give that up for Chet or anybody else, no matter how inconvenient it could sometimes be. Ah, Chet. What was she going to do with sweet, handsome, adorable-like-a-Labrador-retriever Chet? Marry him, she guessed, since she was engaged to him—although the only way she’d managed to stay engaged so long was to allow herself to believe, every day, that before the wedding day something would happen to blow the whole thing up. Until then she would be good to him, and love him, because she did love him. But she already wondered if, eventually, she would not be faithful to him.
She’d never been faithful in a relationship, ever. She’d never loved anybody the way she loved Chet, either. So maybe there was hope. She could hold onto that. Or maybe, when she knew she had to step outside the bounds of the marriage, she could manage it in such a way that he would not be hurt. Marlo spent a lot of time thinking about this as she drove through the snow without even the benefit of a horizon line to aim for.
She wondered what was wrong with her, why she couldn’t be happy with one person, but consoled herself by thinking that knowing something so important about herself was better than pretending she didn’t know it, and inviting disaster to explode at unexpected moments. She could manage it, she told herself again. Her hands hurt from gripping the wheel. The radio stations fizzled quite early, long before Big Sandy, and she didn’t pick up new ones until she was almost to Havre.
The weather was too dicey to text and drive. Instead, she sang loudly to old Indigo Girls songs played on her phone as the only viable option for staying distracted from the snow, which came at her windshield like the stars on the old Star Trek programs when they shifted the Enterprise into warp speed. She stopped in Havre for a tuna sandwich at the Subway, and discovered that her hands were curved in an arthritic arc. Three hours later, woozy from staring at snow in her headlights, Marlo pointed her car off the road and into the parking lot of the Sportsman Motel in Dumont. A sign on the door said, “No gutting animals inside.”
She had planned to arrive in plenty of time to review the case and ready herself for the meeting, but a late start and the heavy snow cost her hours, and now she dumped her belongings in her room and stalked a few steps across the dirty carpet to duck into the cramped bathroom. She started to splash some water on her face, to wash the stress lines out after the drive, but the stench of alkalinity rose from the sink and drew her attention to the white deposit crusting the faucet.
She
didn’t need to check the showerhead to know that each individual nozzle bore its own white buildup. Deciding against using tap water to rinse her face, she wondered if people who showered daily in the alkaline water had tiny white deposits ringing their hair follicles. She had brought bottled water for drinking—a necessity she had learned long ago on her trips to eastern Montana—but she cracked the cap on a bottle and splashed some on her face, then smacked her cheeks with her palms and gave them a little pinch.
Back in her car, now saturated with the reek of stale tuna from the leftover half of the sandwich, Marlo drove the four residential blocks of Dumont to the downtown modular unit that housed the sheriff’s and mayor’s offices and the conference room used for most civic meetings.
She felt strung out and harried and entirely unprepared for the night. Then she noticed the trucks. Her previous visits to Dumont had taught her that, at night, the downtown block never saw more than a knot of three or four outfits parked outside Pep’s and another four or so across the street outside the Longbranch. Marlo was not prepared for the welter of pickups swelling the streetside. She parked against the already deep ridges of snow that had been plowed against the berm.
This meeting had all the important hallmarks of a very bad idea. When David Cates had called her and described the hazing incident, she recognized immediately the potential for sexual assault implications and the lawsuit that would inevitably follow. Her advice had been to accept the coach’s resignation, reassign him to classroom duties, suspend the boys involved, let the sheriff’s office investigate any criminal wrongdoing, and just sit back and see what happened—in effect, the legal thinking was to force anybody who wanted to file a suit to make the first move, rather than provide ammunition. She had also advised Dave to submit his own resignation to the board.
Put it in their hands. Calling a public meeting to discuss the incident without first knowing the investigative facts was volatile and not-thought-through, and she had told Cates so. But people in town wanted to get to the bottom of things, and they put the kind of pressure on the school board members that only small towns can exert. Marlo had had no time to even conduct rudimentary phone interviews with the involved parties. She knew virtually nothing about what had happened until she spoke a second time with Dave Cates, and felt fuzzy even then. Dave and the coach clearly hadn’t understood the legal subtleties that could have guided their questioning of the boys.