Broken Field

by Jeff Hull

  “Why was that person not with you on this trip?”

  “I gave him permission to ride home with his wife. She made the long drive …”

  “He’s a newlywed,” Dave Cates interrupted. “The wife drove five hours to watch him coach. You can’t begrudge him that.”

  “Begrudge, no,” Marlo said. “David, you don’t seem to understand. I don’t begrudge anything. I’m trying to keep your school from going bankrupt.” To Tom, she said, “Do you know of other instances where your players engaged in what could be interpreted as hazing?”

  “I don’t,” Tom said, speaking like he knew his explanations were inadequate. “At the beginning of the season we make them sign a form. By signing the form they acknowledge that they know what hazing is and they pledge not to do it. And they knew that hazing would get them kicked off the team.”

  “Why?” Marlo asked.

  Tom looked at her quizzically.

  “I’m asking, Coach Warner, because the very act of having them sign that form would indicate that you might have some prior knowledge of hazing events or of some predilection toward hazing. Is that the case?”

  “In the high school I went to, there was a lot of hazing. I remember that and remember it was destructive to the team, and I didn’t want to see that happen here. When I came in here, I heard—well, I saw—that there was a bit of that tradition here. I didn’t want it interfering with the team chemistry I was trying to build.”

  “If I might,” Dave interrupted again, “Tom came to me with the idea for the form at the beginning of his first season with us. I was aware of other incidents around the state, and I thought the form was an excellent idea, even though at the time I was not aware of any hazing activity going on in Dumont high school or on our sports teams.”

  “That’s not what my nephew says,” Dotty Lantner said, as if talking to Amy Sibra seated beside her, but speaking loud enough for all to hear. “Or your buddy, Brad.”

  “Look, the man clearly wasn’t aware of any wrongdoing,” Brad Martin said. “Why punish him for something he was completely unaware was happening?”

  Even Tom looked askance at him.

  “The issue here is negligent supervision,” Marlo said. Seeing Warner’s reaction, she quickly said to him, “If the school district regulations say there must be two supervising adult on the bus and you failed to have two supervising adults on the bus—and you fell asleep—I don’t care if you’re riding with Mary Poppins and her kid sister, it’s negligent supervision. I mean, how can parents legitimately feel it’s safe for their kids to get on a bus for a sports trip when you’re the supervisor?”

  “So I think she’s telling us we pretty much have to fire him,” Dotty said.

  “My capacity is strictly advisory,” Marlo said, “but I can tell you that when something happens to a student who’s under the supervision of a school system employee, the school system has legal exposure. Without acting, you’re a sitting duck for civil liability. And if it looks like you tried to cover anything up”—this last said while meeting Brad’s eyes—“you’ll be killed in court.”

  She held Brad’s glare. His jaw worked in what Tom assumed were gurgling responses, none of which he could find a convincing form for. The writing was pretty much all over the wall—Tom was already convinced he needed to be punished, and he was dragging Dave down with him—and everybody but Brad knew it. Or Brad knew too, but felt he could overcome reality with a force of will.

  He seemed to be assessing the four other board members, two men and two women. Tom tried to guess which board members Brad thought were his. Dotty Lantner was clear in her position. Nathan Merrill seemed willing to be led by Marlo Stark. The other man, Josh Danreuther, a truck driver who had once played football at Dumont High, seemed likely to fall toward Brad. Amy Sibra seemed distraught, a wild card.

  After a long silence Tom asked, “Am I done with questions?”

  The lawyer said, “Does anybody else have any questions for the coach?”

  Nobody answered. She shrugged. “The formal vote will take place in the public forum.”

  “Okay,” Tom said. He stood and moved to the bar. There seemed no reason not to.

  * * *

  Marlo found herself tracking the coach as he walked to the bar—admiring the cords of muscles and tendon swinging beneath the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt, his broad tanned hands—and then shocked by the slap of Brad Martin’s hand on the table. Brad was beseeching Josh the truck driver. “Josh, you played football. You know what it’s like,” Brad said.

  “He’s right. It’s funny,” Josh said and laughed in a way that acknowledged a lot of people wouldn’t find it funny. “You should have seen some of the things we did. We probably hurt some of those kids back then.”

  “Only difference is there weren’t any cameras around,” Brad said, as if cameras were exactly the root of the evil here.

  “So you think we should encourage that?” Dotty Lantner said. Her drink was empty and she had become less judicious about where she spouted her smoke streams.

  “I think these boys probably had some of it done to them, and so they thought it was just what you do,” Josh said. “Tradition.”

  “That sounds like so much happy horseshit to me,” Dotty said.

  “You don’t have to be mean, Dotty,” Josh said. “I’m just telling you what I think.”

  Marlo knew she had to turn this, head them off at the pass and focus them on David Cates. They would have a firestorm waiting for them at the high school. For the record, Marlo led Dave through a series of questions meant to establish what he knew when. He’d had the opportunity and responsibility to act before anybody else, and hadn’t—aside from questioning the players. Marlo had been Dumont’s school lawyer for over a decade, and she liked Dave fine, but now realized just how ineffectual he planned to be. Her questions laid a legal blueprint for everybody present to follow, though she knew they might not.

  “I’ll tell you something between you me and the fencepost,” Marlo said, when she was done asking Dave questions. “If it turns out that what happened to that boy was anything that could be interpreted as a sexual assault, be prepared to hand over the keys to the bank vault.” Marlo’s entire legal practice comprised school board dynamics, and a majority of it consisted of far-flung rural towns. She knew how to appeal to the fiscal sensibility of hard-nut farmers and ranchers. “So, from here, you need to deliberate,” she said. “Then you need to go down to the gym and announce your findings.”

  “What should we do?” Nathan Merrill asked.

  “That’s up to us,” Brad said.

  “Lawyer lady?” Dotty Lantner said. She held her cigarette near her cheek and Marlo felt herself sized up. She knew Martin hated her for being a woman with as much power as he had, but also understood how rural women sometimes hated her for having the nerve to upstage their men. She didn’t get that from Dotty, though there was a separate and equal disdain.

  “From a strictly legal perspective,” Marlo said, making sure she caught Dave Cates’s eye, “and you have to remember I’m only here to advise the school board on their legal position and not to defend any one person, but I would recommend that, at a minimum, you reassign Coach Warner to classroom-only activities. He clearly violated district procedures, so that’s a no-brainer.

  “But I would also recommend that you strongly consider suspending him and Mr. Cates without pay, pending formal review. As to the students on the team, I don’t even know who they are yet, but I will be happy to interview students tomorrow to help you decide how to handle their cases.” She gave them her hard news frown. “If what I learn confirms what we think we know so far, I’m probably going to recommend suspending the primary actors from extracurricular activities for the rest of the year. And I would allow the sheriff’s department to handle the formal investigation.”

  “Sheriff will take weeks, “ Dotty Lantner said. “I want to know what happened on that bus. As the body that operates the school, I thi
nk we deserve to know what happens on our property.”

  “That,” Marlo said, “is perfectly within your purview. But you have no investigatory experience, which is why I recommend allowing the sheriff to handle it.”

  “You know how to investigate, don’t you?” Dotty shot back.

  Marlo nodded.

  “Then you do it.”

  Amy Sibra finally spoke. “The sheriff’s only going to be asking about criminal stuff, right? Don’t we need to be able to make judgments about moral issues?”

  “We’re not in charge of morals in this town,” Brad said.

  “We’re the goddamned school board,” Dotty said. “That’s exactly what we’re in charge of.”

  “Look, we don’t have time for all that,” Brad argued. He was working up to a storm. “These kids have a future at stake. They’ll have marks on their school records. They have to know if they can get back in school and get on with their lives. You should all know,” Brad said, staring down Marlo, “that I’ve spoken to a group of parents prepared to go to court over this.”

  Marlo scanned the room to gauge how that went over. A silence ensued in which the board seemed locked in visibly displaying their exhaustion to—and with—one another. Dotty Lantner let her head drop back and blew outward, straight into the air. Marlo could smell the exhaled booze.

  And the worst was yet to come. When they gathered themselves to leave and face the crowd at the high school, Marlo noticed that Dave Cates was not quite so eager to walk close beside her as had been earlier. She swung over to the bar where the football coach sat.

  “Coming to the show?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  She waited until he swung his face toward hers. “It’s nothing personal. You know that, right?” she said, making sure he was meeting her eyes.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “I’d like to talk more …”

  “I bet you can find me here when the other thing is over. Or …” He waved a hand. “I’m not too hard to find.”

  And Marlo knew again, looking at this rough, handsome man—a man whose career she might ruin, who yet seemed so unconcerned—that she would never be faithful to her husband-to-be.

  * * *

  Josie came with her parents and Jared. Matt arrived with his parents. The two families gravitated toward each other and found themselves clumped in the bleachers along the gym, waiting for something to start. And Josie let Matt hold her hand. A long time had passed, and she tried to glean from the people around her what was happening. She also tried not to talk, felt this was an occasion when she was best silent. But what was going on? The gym was more crowded than she’d ever seen it—if a quarter of these people came to one of her basketball games, she’d have been thrilled.

  Josie had seen the way her parents sat at their kitchen table with Jared an hour before, an untouched glass of water in front of each of them, the light bright overhead, the conversation not a conversation at all but a sputtering series of declarations.

  “This is your future, son.”

  “I can’t remember anything like this happening before in my whole life.”

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen if you get suspended.”

  “Could be the end of a lot of dreams.”

  “Things seem funny at the time when they’re really not.”

  Jared had clearly had no idea how to respond to any of it. He had started with proclaiming relative innocence—he didn’t do any of the things the other guys did, he said—then glommed on to the “everybody always does this stuff; it’s not a crime” party line. But Josie’s parents were pragmatists, not moralists.

  Whether it was right or wrong, they focused on what would happen next, how to reconcile fact with future. Jared and Josie had never been told that they would have to win scholarships to go to college, but early on both of them set along that trail athletically and academically—both of them had 4.0 GPAs—and assumptions started to follow. When they walked into the packed gymnasium, Jared was clearly bowed. He and Matt were used to being looked at in a crowd, and Jared was a kid whose face, in repose, fell into a broad smile shape.

  Josie thought it was an idiot grin, but she witnessed over the years how it made people react to Jared with warmth. It helped that his eyes were bright and people said they twinkled. Whereas Matt stood more aloof. He let people approach him, but there was always that sense of obeisance in the transaction. Even with adults, there was always a sense Matt was doing you a favor by letting you into his glow. That served him well tonight. The noise in the gym ratcheted steadily up.

  On the gym floor, two news camera crews had set up and were interviewing anybody who was willing to stand under the lights. Between interviews, the reporter combed the crowd, saying hello in the stiffly polite way that meant she had no business being here. What kind of guts did it take to be a stranger and come into this gym amid so much hostility and do your job? Josie couldn’t really see it now, but wondered if something would happen to her in college that would give her that kind of courage. If she did, she would certainly have a better hair outfit when she did it. That frumpy silk blouse and huge gold square-linked necklace?

  Porn stars wore better accessories. Josie was both anxious for the meeting to start and anxious about it starting. She worried about Matt’s father and what kind of scene he might make if things went badly. Though to all outward appearances he seemed to like and approve of her, Matt’s father scared Josie. She knew things Matt had told her, things that happened when nobody else was around. And she sensed Matt’s same anger simmering beneath his father’s skin, boiling behind his eyes.

  She’d seen it in Matt on a couple of occasions, almost always when he was drunk. This was, she knew even as it was happening, one of the first big moments of her life. She knew she was sitting in a moment that would change a lot of things she had taken for granted about how the world worked. An hour later, her father said, projecting several rows around them, “To hell with this. If they don’t start soon, I’m leaving.” Josie had already noticed people leaving, though some came back. She suspected they were going to the bar and sneaking drinks. Or just smoking outside. She doubted her father would leave.

  “This is seven colors of bullshit,” Gary Brunner said. By then the rumor had already rippled through the crowd that the school board was meeting in private before the public performance. “What the hell takes so long to cover up?”

  But then Brad Martin walked into the gym, head high, lips pressed together, gazing at the crowd as if they were all assembled to witness some performance he had planned. He gave his head a little shake, as if to say, By damn, I did my best. And just from that one look, Josie’s sense of the evening soured. Matt’s hand interlocked with hers, dropped between her knees, and she squeezed it. He looked down at her, and she looked up and smiled and hoped he understood how much she cared, right this moment, about what happened to him.

  And then things happened quickly. Later, Josie would think of it as a movie or a play, the way things just started spinning by. The room seemed even brighter than before, as if someone had found extra lights to turn on. Josie watched the TV reporter break off in mid-interview, turn and say something to the camera, then move to the front of the room. Scattered hoots and catcalls popped from the bleachers; others attempted to hush the malcontents.

  One voice yelled, “Star chamber!” which Josie didn’t understand. The board members hadn’t even settled their fannies in their seats before Wyatt’s father, Jon Aarstad, was up on the gym floor, striding toward the row of chairs where they sat, an arm raised and a finger scanning to point inclusively at the group of them. He stopped a few feet in front of the microphone that had been set up for public comment. There his arm-sweeping turned to jabs on the more emphatic points of what he said: “You people cannot meet in some secret, behind-the-doors meeting to decide what’s going to happen here. Not in the America I live in.”

  He went on while Brad Martin stood and said, without the aid of
a microphone, “Mr. Aarstad …”

  “Who do you think you are?” Aarstad said.

  “Jon, please …”

  “This is a public school. These students are our sons and daughters …”

  “Jon, if you would settle down, please, we’ll …”

  “I am not going to settle down until you tell me what the hell is going on …”

  “… try to get started with the public discussion …”

  “… You can’t lock parents out when you’re talking about our kids.”

  “We will have a public discussion period for everybody to participate in, Jon. Jon …”

  Brad quit arguing, his body language slumping to announce defeat in every way save literally throwing his hands up. His retreat left a silence that Jon Aarstad’s voice filled with, “My boy was assaulted on that bus. Which one of you is going to make that up to us?”

  Aarstad, sensing that he had commanded the floor and thundered that last line free from refutation, seemed pleased with himself. He stood and nodded to people on both sides of the bleachers as if he had expected applause. But he saw a sheriff’s deputy take a couple steps off the wall behind the school board members, and Aarstad walked to the nearest bleacher and, before anybody could scoot to make room, sat on the bench’s corner.

  “Could somebody perhaps,” Dave Cates said to the silenced board, “move to open the public portion of the meeting?”

  Somebody did and Brad stepped up and grabbed the microphone, taking it back to his seat with him. “Now, if the audience would let us, I mean, if that’s the way you plan on behaving tonight, we can pack this thing up and do it another time,” Brad said, his tone petulant. “Okay, if you’ll let us, we’re going to open a discussion concerning the resignation of Tom Warner as football coach for Dumont High. The board has already convened an executive meeting and heard from Coach Warner and our legal counsel. We’d now like to open the meeting up to public comment. Anybody who has anything to say about the matter should approach the board.”