Broken Field

by Jeff Hull

  “What happened on the bus?” an audience member called, provoking spontaneous approval and applause.

  A confusion of disapproval burned through the crowd. Brad Martin again raised the mic to his mouth and said, “I’m going to have to ask you all to speak in turn or be removed from the gym.”

  Then a silence settled in. Martin started again. “We are still actively investigating the events that occurred on the Dumont High School bus on the way back from the Plentywood game last Saturday. We know you want answers. But come on. We all know each other. We all know we’re doing our best. There’s a process that has to play out and we have to let it.

  “Now, there is something we have to settle tonight. We all know something happened on that school bus and some of us think one way about it and some of us think another way, but whatever we think, we know that it was serious enough that we’re forced to examine people’s roles. School district has a clear policy that any school bus used for extracurricular transportation requires two adults on board at all time. Coach Warner, by his own admission, dismissed his assistant coach to ride home with his wife. Which, according to technical, legal definitions, is maybe a problem. That’s according to our legal counsel.”

  Brad turned and held an arm out toward the woman seated beside Principal Cates, and Josie’s attention suddenly focused on her. Josie liked the way she dressed, a charcoal calf-length skirt. She looked smart, the way her eyes and face moved, taking everything in, undaunted by the surroundings. Josie wondered what it would feel like to be a woman like that. Again, she thought about college, how that must be the thing that changes people from girls in small towns, or even wives in small towns, to people who go and do things in the world. Then the mic was opened to the public. Principal Cates took the first turn, talking about how much faith he had in Coach Warner.

  “Coach Warner is a builder of men. I know that if Coach Warner knew what happened on the bus that night, he would have stopped it in its tracks,” he said.

  A few football players’ parents followed. A sophomore on the team took the mic and said he had wanted to play for Coach Warner for years, that it meant a lot to him. Cody McClain said that for a hundred goddamned years boys had been horsing around—which earned him a warning from David Cates about language—and that it was natural and normal and how they sorted things out and how they learned to work as a team and it was about the stupidest god … and he caught himself before finishing by saying about the stupidest thing he’d about ever heard of to fire a coach and shut down a team for boys horsing around and just doing what teenaged boys do.

  Krist Hager stood and said, “I don’t know if anybody realizes this, but our team is about to play for the state championship. Do we really want to bench our coach when these kids have a chance to do something that special?”

  But Mrs. Labuta got up and said, “I got an eighth-grader. You’re telling me I should let him get on that football bus next year after what I know happened last weekend? I don’t think so.”

  And then Charlie Warzel said, “Now listen, we’re not going to take away these kids’ opportunity to do something that hasn’t been done here since 1994. We’re not. It’s stupid to even think so.” He glared at the school board. “Am I right?”

  And Josie felt he really was. It was just the way he said it. She’d gone back and forth all night, and then she felt like it had been settled for her. So when Brad Martin cut the process off and said they had to vote or they’d be there all night, and then board quickly voted 3–2 in favor of reassigning Tom Warner to classroom-only duties, Josie was shocked. No more coaching this year.

  Only Josh Danreuther had voted with Brad Martin. Then the discussion about Dave Cates took everybody by surprise, which meant only a few people were prepared to come to his defense. The board voted the same way, 3–2 in favor of suspending him without pay pending further investigation. Brad Martin led a hoop-jump during which the board formally decided to allow Marlo Stark to investigate any wrongdoings on the bus, in order to determine disciplinary action. The board would reconvene in two days to announce their decision. Then Brad said, “Regarding the suspension of players …” and Josie felt Matt’s hand flex in hers. She saw Jared’s head tilt up.

  “Principal Cates and Coach Warner have presented evidence to the board that four Dumont football players and two cheerleaders were primarily involved in the incident on the bus last Saturday. Now, again, we don’t know what happened. And the sheriff and our legal counsel will continue to investigate. But our legal counsel has advised us that we need to decide about any short-term action against any of these players.”

  “What’s the evidence?” Gary Brunner bellowed. Josie had been feeling his frustration boiling, itching, and sensed some sort of outburst was inevitable. Not so bad, she thought. A fair question, at least.

  Brad looked up toward Gary Brunner and laughed a short, funny-you-asked chortle. “Well, about that”—again he swept a hand toward the attorney—“we are not allowed right now to say what’s in that report, because our legal counsel says … she will be doing more investigating. So we’re going to have some interviews and have that meeting on Friday and we’ll let you know what we learn.”

  Boos spattered the crowd as they began to understand they were not going to learn what they had come to find out. Gary Brunner booed and then put his hands beside his mouth and yelled, “What about the playoffs?”

  Dotty Lantner, a woman Josie had always thought of as sort of gross in the way she tried to be overtly—there was no other way to say it—sexy at an age beyond that kind of display, said, “Law and morality don’t care about the playoffs.”

  Dotty Lantner sat looking at Brad Martin with a burlesque of ridicule. The thing was that while it was hard to disagree with what Mrs. Lantner said, Josie did.

  * * *

  Three or four beers in, Tom could let his focus go soft and still see the images from the film he had watched before he came to the meeting. Well, the bar. He could close his eyes and see the players converging like a moil of insects locked in some tiny struggle, an occasional leg waving loose. And then a figure in crimson and blue breaking free, reeling along the top of the screen, faster than the other images now drawn in behind it. Jared Frehse popping loose on another of his gallops down the sideline, making an open field cut—the quickest little stepover, but enough to thump the safety down on his ass—and remembered how athletic competition purified the beauty of small moments. He could see it in his head when he watched Jared Frehse in mid-stride swiveling his hips, crossing his right foot over his left, and, without the slightest loss of momentum, angling anew, alone on the field with nothing but grass in front of him: That’s how Derek would look if he were still … if he were, still.

  Tom could see the little boy in baggy pants with a helmet that made his head threaten to topple over. He remembered the first time a bigger boy ran right through his son, Derek flattened, the crying after. He missed that comforting, and then the instruction, how to dip in the knees, how to tilt a shoulder, how to meet velocity with vector. He had started to teach Derek those things and now nobody would ever teach Derek those things.

  Derek’s light had gone out so quickly. A blown bulb. For Tom, the lights had dimmed in a long slow tease. He had been a big star linebacker and fullback on an eight-man team in the middle of nowhere. He had heard people talk about him, seen people look at him. Adults who paid no attention to his friends walked across gravel parking lots to speak to him.

  Tom’s scholarship offers came from regional Division II schools, and he had taken the shot at the University of Montana, a quality program that was consistently ranked and always pointed toward the national playoffs. Players from the Grizzlies made the NFL; it happened every year. But Tom realized when he got to the first practices what he was up against. Everybody on the field was faster, bigger, stronger. After the first days of contact practice, he was beaten, a physical wreck. He was nowhere near fast enough to play in the offensive backfield and knew he
would have to make the team as a linebacker.

  He wasn’t that big. He would have to outwork all the other linebackers to play. So the lights dimmed a little. They didn’t shine on him as a player his freshman year, but the team played in the national title game, and that light burnished them all. He was part of something amazing, a flight to Chattanooga—Tom had never been in a plane. He had never been outside of Montana’s borders except for the interstate game between high school all-stars from Montana and North Dakota. In Chattanooga there were reporters with microphones at their practices, the crowd screaming for them and at them, the ESPN cameras on the sidelines.

  They had not won, but just being in those moments seemed like more than he had ever hoped for. Tom’s sophomore year he worked hard, lifted hard, ran hard, played hard on the scout team, but never played in a game. That year the team went back to Chattanooga and this time they won the national title. The light was brighter yet, warm and glowing enough for all of them. Two of his teammates were drafted into the NFL and two others joined pro teams as free agents. On campus, girls he didn’t even know wanted to drink shots of tequila with him, because he played for the Griz.

  Some of them went home with him and did things he didn’t know real girls would do. That off-season Tom worked even harder, gut-busted every sprint, studied film for hours. Now the Grizzlies had recruited even faster, stronger young men in the wake of two championship appearances. He knew he would have to outsmart them and out-gut them. By his junior fall, Tom sweated his way onto the field for short yardage situations.

  He collected twelve and a half tackles on the season, and made a few plays that he still remembered in his nerve endings. He made a clean stick of a rolling Northern Arizona quarterback for a loss on a second and goal. He collided with a Montana State ball carrier to cause a fumble. In a playoff game, he separated a receiver coming over the middle from the ball he’d just caught on a critical third down. He could hear that one, could feel the crack of pads, remembered how the back of his hand smacked against receiver’s shoulder pads and hurt for four days.

  All three of those plays had brought crowds of 18,000 people to a full-throated roar. Those moments—the crowd thundering, the band playing, his screaming teammates whacking his back and shoulder pads and helmet—allowed him to forget the two years of knowing that he was in over his head. His senior season Tom started at outside linebacker. He made a few nice plays during the first two games, but then he got hurt—the stupidest thing, a turf toe, but he was already slower than everybody else, and the injury dragged him enough that the coaches began to sub in another player, a transfer from a juco in Texas named Jason Jackson, a big kid with running back speed.

  Jackson was hungry for the lights and the cheers, too, and worked hard and played hard and, soon, Tom was back to coming in for short yardage downs. He nursed his toe, making it hurt more than it did, giving himself an excuse to be on the bench, but the truth was, the other kid was just better. Up and down better in almost every aspect of the position. The coaching staff let Tom start the last home game of his senior year, against the Bobcats. By the second series, though, Jackson was on the field. Tom traveled for the playoff game, but didn’t play. The Grizzlies lost in the first round.

  And that’s how it was over. The clocked ticked down to all zeros and everything he had thought was important for so many years was, in the space between 00:01 and 00:00, over. Tom’s attention came briefly back to the bar. He wondered when Hal Hartack would come and lecture him about character or something.

  But Hal ignored him. Other people had come into the bar, and they ignored him too. Jared Frehse, that cut. Derek. Derek. Derek. The Wibaux playoff game from last year. Tom recalled, then, the week after the Wibaux loss, a dinner with Dave and Liz Cates and Jenny Calhoun. He had been pretending for a really long time it had just been a convenience, but supposed he should admit it was the first fix-up.

  Another thing that didn’t seem to matter anymore. These were the thoughts that sometimes stood in the way of looking at every day with enthusiasm. The kiss he had laid on Jenny had felt inevitable yet fraught with peril even as he had leaned from his chair to start it. And then, of course, her reaction, or lack of one. When he caught himself trying to think about it, he whisked it away.

  Now, sitting in the bar, fired as a football coach, he couldn’t imagine how he could beat it back again. He saw Jenny’s nose, not long but straight, leading down from the pools of her dark brown eyes to the mouth he had wanted to press his to. Her upper lips held a curl as if sliced on a short angle, leaving it always almost parted. He remembered wanting to see that face—wanted to see it now—melting into some expression that was not polite laughter, or gentle empathy, something more selfish and reckless at the same time. He wanted not only to see that transformation but to cause it.

  He couldn’t see how he ever would. But then he pulled himself around, tried to think a different way. He could do something as simple as going to her house, talking to her about what she thought now. He took his cell phone from his pocket, looked at it, thought, Here’s a bad idea. But he couldn’t imagine how it could matter, or make things worse. He tapped out her number. When she answered he said hello and listened for clues that she was pleased he had called. He spoke carefully.

  “I’ve been meaning to call you. So much has happened the last couple days, but there was that thing with us that happened first, and I wanted to talk to you about it,” he said.

  “Uh … well, okay,” she said, “Yeah, I guess we could talk about that.”

  “You going to be around this evening?”

  “Um, sure. I’ll be here.”

  “Can I swing by?” he asked. “Would that be okay?”

  “A little bit later is better,” Jenny said, “after the kids are in bed.”

  Tom felt, for a moment, happy. At least whatever happened between them wouldn’t be because he let things go so long that the choices were made for him. And then Tom felt a hand on his shoulder. Turned to see Krock O’.

  “Bad year for not drinking beer,” Krock O’ said. “What’d you find out?”

  “Done,” Tom said. Shrugged.

  Tom suddenly noticed the other people in the bar. At the Keno machines he saw a woman he recognized but couldn’t place and a tall, gangly boy he knew from school—Mikie LaValle, who had recently expressed what seemed like a genuine interest in academics. He had borrowed one of Tom’s history books. That was the woman, he realized, Mikie’s mother, the cook at the school cafeteria. He lifted a hand and smiled at her when she looked up from the machine, and thought she brightened and waved back.

  Mikie’s glance was too quick. Hal Hartack noticed Krock O’s arrival and started making his way toward their end of the bar, stopping to set up a pair of men among the half dozen or so slumped on their stools.

  “They let you quit on us?” Hal asked.

  Tom pressed his lips together.

  “Would it have mattered if I quit or they fired me?” Tom asked.

  Hal tilted his head to one side as if he hadn’t thought of that angle. He shrugged. “Not to me,” he said.

  “Hell, I never quit anything in my whole life,” Tom said. The cool assessment in Hal’s expression made Tom look around the room. Even Caroline at the Keno machine was watching.

  “Divorced, aren’t you?” Hal asked.

  It hit Tom like a slap, and he felt his eyes flare. For a moment he felt like he might reach across the bar and smack Hal, maybe jump over the bar and keep pummeling him. But what followed the anger was a flush of shame, a dampening as thorough as anything he’d ever known. Tom just squeezed his beer more tightly, made an effort to relax the bundle his jaw muscle had bound into.

  “Let me provide you with a soothing alcohol balm,” Hal said.

  He came back with a double whiskey and plopped it on the bar with another beer. He brought Jimmy the customary Bud Light and tended to other customers. Tom sipped the whiskey at first, but that turned to longer swallows and then it w
as gone. Hal caught his eye, without speaking a word asking about another shot. Tom, feeling like he now owed Hal something—at least some relief from petulance—nodded.

  “You ever get so you want someone to tell you you’re doing the wrong thing?” Krock O’ asked after Hal dropped the next shot off.

  “You trying to sign me up for a father figure?” Tom asked back. He left the edge off when he added, “I may not need the things you need.”

  “I’d think you’d want to be careful, telling an old man about the difference between the things you think you need and the ones you think he needs.”

  “You aren’t that old,” Tom said.

  “I’m not talking about quitting, you know,” Krock O’ said.

  Which made Tom sit back and try to figure out what Jimmy was talking about. He thought everything around here had been reduced to his being let go and the season coming to a halt. In fact, since last Saturday, he couldn’t think of any one person talking to him about anything that wasn’t on some level about it. He couldn’t remember anybody even mentioning that it had snowed a foot and a half in just a few hours, for instance.

  Jimmy threw him a line. “I mean going into a hole. Quitting on everything else. I’d hate to see you dig yourself so deep you can’t ever come back to any of it. Don’t quit on these kids.”

  Tom hadn’t thought about any of that, really, hadn’t been able to see down the road. That’s exactly what losing a child does to you, he thought. It takes away your feel for the future.

  And then Marlo Stark was squeezing around the heavy wooden door of the bar. He didn’t recognize her at first, wondered who this woman could be, someone he didn’t know, blinking in the darkness of Pep’s. But she saw him and smiled and flapped up a quick wave, then tromped straight toward him, and he recognized the skirt, and then the hair, and then her face as she came closer.

  “I hear this is the best pizza in Dumont,” she said.