by Jeff Hull
“I think that’s right,” Tom said. He didn’t know what else to say.
“Mind if I sit down here?”
“Oh, heck, no.” Tom shifted the stool in front of her, though it didn’t need to be shifted. “Sit right down.”
Marlo did, and she asked him what the best pizza to order was, so he told her he liked the jalapeno, but she’d probably prefer mushroom pepperoni. Hal appeared and said, “You must be the little lady that fired our football coach.”
“Well,” Marlo said, “that would be your school board that fired your football coach, but I’m the one who told them it would be a real good idea, legally speaking.” Tom felt Marlo’s hand on his shoulder, warm and humid at first, then the lightest squeeze when she said, “Sorry.”
“Too bad the law and common sense always seems to butt heads these days,” Hal said, “What can I get for you?”
Tom said nothing, stared into his reflection in the mirror behind the bottles of the back bar. He saw himself raise his eyebrows, purse his lips, considering, then drank from his beer. Marlo’s hand fell away, leaving a sensation of coolness where it had been. Her voice assumed a different tone while she ordered a pizza with mushrooms and pepperoni and a bottle of Fat Tire. “You’ll eat some of my pizza, won’t you?” she said to Tom and Krock O’. “There’s no way I can eat all of it.”
“No, no,” Tom said, “I have to get home here pretty quick to feed my dog.” Now he was sorry he had drunk whiskey. He felt fuzzed and heavy-headed. He didn’t know Marlo at all, only that Dave thought highly of her. Earlier she had made Tom feel outsmarted, which made him uncomfortable even when there wasn’t an oily layer of booze on top of everything else. Tom struggled to assemble sentences that sounded civil and friendly and polite.
“Know Jimmy?” he asked.
She had not been introduced to Krock O’, so he did that. Neither seemed likely to follow up.
“So you’re still here,” Tom said.
Marlo made big nods. “I’m going to be here for a little while, I think. Interviewing players tomorrow. It’s too much driving to go all the way to Great Falls and then turn around and come back here a day later. Especially with the snow. I can just work in my hotel room over the weekend.”
“Oh heck, you don’t want to be stuck in your room all weekend,” Tom said.
“Well, the upside is I make vacation pay. It’ll be lucrative.”
“At our school board’s expense,” Tom said, just for commentary, although he then thought it was a stupid thing to have said. Beside him, Jimmy Krock was pushing back from the bar. Tom didn’t want to lose Krock O’. They’d been talking about serious stuff and now there was this woman who made him nervous on the other side of him. But Krock O’ was rolling his shoulders to bring his coat forward so he could zip it.
“Hey don’t go,” Tom said. “I owe you a round.”
“I’m pushing off,” Jimmy said. Tom was thinking Krock O’ was bailing out. Jimmy didn’t have a real destination, he was going to stumble across the street to the Longbranch and plop down there for several more hours. But Jimmy was gone before Tom could muster any sort of reasonable objections, leaving him sitting with the lawyer lady from Great Falls. He looked at her hand, saw her engagement ring, realized he’d seen it before, realized he’d checked, actually, the first time he’d seen her. “Your fella gonna come out for the weekend?”
Marlo pursed her lips and shook her head in a tight waggle. “I don’t think so.”
“Heck, tell him to come out. He a hunter? I’ll take him bird hunting.” Tom realized he was doing a thing he hated, a holdover from football—filling space just because he’d spotted the gap. But if history was any judge, once he started in with nervous jabber, his hopes for curtailing it exceeded all known evidence of his ability to do so.
Marlo said, “Not really a bird hunter type.”
Is there a bird hunter type? he wondered. Is that a bad thing?
“What type is he?”
She smiled. “The handsome businessman type. The don’t-get-your-new-shoes-dirty type. Don’t get me wrong, I love the socks off the guy. He’s just not a stomp-around-in-the-dirt kind of boy.”
“Huh,” Tom said, unable to avoid contemplating whether or not he’d just been insulted. He thought probably not, but then why did it feel so much like it? He mulled it over for a while and Hal brought a pizza and slid it on the bar in front of them. It looked so good Tom wanted to rub his face in it. He wanted to taste each individual piece. Tom began to feel an inexplicable rise of something like panic, keyed by the notion that he’d been quiet for too long.
“Dave said you went to UM Law School,” Tom said.
She nodded with her mouth full of pizza.
He said, “I went to school in Missoula too.”
She swallowed enough to speak. “Really? When?”
“Oh, hell, when the dinosaurs were still there,” he said.
“Fun town,” Marlo said, and bit into more pizza.
“Sure was. Boy, I had a ball there. Used to hang out over at the Rhino bar a lot.”
“The law students always hung out at Sean Kelley’s,” Marlo said.
“That wasn’t there when I was there,” Tom said. “Missoula, gee, Missoula was a whole new world for me. I came from a place where I could walk five miles and still be on my dad’s land. My aunt ran the only restaurant for fifty miles in any direction. The mayor refereed high school basketball games. You could watch your dog run away for three days. Missoula felt like the big time.”
“Did you just say ‘gee’?”
“I think I did,” Tom said.
Marlo lightly pressed her fingertips on his forearm to tell him, “I came there from Boston, so it wasn’t so gee. But I fell in love with the place.”
Tom tried hard not to look at where her fingertips had just left his arm. “Huh. Well, yeah. I’ll bet it was. Different like that.”
“Eat some of this,” Marlo said, and gestured with a wedge of pizza toward the rest of the pie. “There’s no way I can finish all that.”
“Don’t you want to save some for tomorrow?”
“I’m not eating anything that spent the night in the Sportsman Motel,” Marlo said.
“Fair enough,” Tom said, and reached for a piece of the pizza.
Another beer went by and Tom felt like he had settled down during a long exchange of stories concerning things they liked about Missoula. Marlo started comparing Missoula to other places she’d lived in or been to—Madison, Wisconsin; Austin, Texas—which then launched her on a long list of places she loved—Mystic, Connecticut; Yachats, Oregon; Cortina in Italy—none of which he’d been to and most of which he’d never heard of.
“Paris doesn’t have a thing on Fort Miles,” someone said, and Tom looked past Marlo to see Caroline Jensen leaning against the bar. She put her cigarette to her mouth and squinted while she took a quick huff, then laughed a smoky exhalation. Her voice was rimed with smoking.
Tom smiled, genuinely amused at Marlo’s reaction, which was to be taken aback, followed by an immediate playing along. Marlo said, “Fort Miles almost certainly has less dog shit.”
“Marlo, Caroline,” Tom said. “She works in the … at the school.”
“Are you a teacher?” Marlo asked her.
“I could teach folks a few things,” Caroline said. She twisted her mouth and shot a long stream of smoke out the side, away from Marlo. She was leaning on the bar with one elbow. “But no.”
“Oh,” Marlo said.
“Bummer about what happened, Coach,” Caroline said.
Tom let both hands fall open. “Something had to give.”
“Fair enough,” she said.
Tom didn’t know what to say next, but Caroline didn’t seem to be leaving. She seemed a bit drunk. Then her son, Mikie, strode over and said, “C’mon, Mom. We gotta go home.”
“Just came in to get a pizza,” Caroline said. “Play a little Keno. The kid loves the Keno.”
“Right,” Mikie said. He
wouldn’t look at Tom, kept his face turned to his mother and his back angled to the others. “I got homework.”
“Really?” Caroline said. “You’re concerned with homework now?”
“Mom.”
“All right, Mighty Mike, you’re the boss man.” She dug into her jeans pockets with one hand, sinking it to the wrist.
“Mother.”
Caroline held out a jangling set of car keys. “Go warm her up for your momma. Don’t want my bones to get cold.” After Mikie had stalked out, she leaned in and said, “He loves your class. Always talking about history and Dumont and all kinds of things he learns in there.”
“That’s nice to hear,” Tom said.
“He’s a good kid. A really good kid. Well, he’s mine.”
Mikie was back and dragging his mother out of the bar by a belt loop. She laughed. “He’s a funny goddamned kid, isn’t he?”
She laughed harder. Marlo held her eyebrows in a high arc while pursing her lips, then fell back to eating. Tom had more pizza until it was mostly gone. He guessed it soaked up some of the alcohol in his system so he didn’t feel so swimmy. He remembered that he was supposed to talk to Jenny Calhoun now, and that bolt of recall was softened by the following thought that it would be better to talk to her with food in his belly, a less drastic sense of swirl in his head. Then remembering Jenny made him think of Scout.
“Oh hell, I’m going to have to go, too” he said, rolling his hip to slide up his wallet and then thumbing bills from it. “Hey, it was really great getting to talk with you.”
“You, too,” Marlo said. She flipped over the bill for the pizza and started digging in her purse. “Here, I’ll walk out with you.”
Outside the cold air stabbed right into the bottom of his lungs and he coughed, but then breathed deeper. The snow squeaked underfoot. Tom walked to his truck and Marlo tagged along, heading to the Subaru parked on the other side of him. But in looking at her vehicle his eye caught something odd about his, and he spent a long moment examining the truck before he realized what it was. All four tires were flat. He knelt beside the closest one, and saw the slit. He didn’t need to look at the rest.
“Wow, that’s shitty,” Marlo said behind him.
“I’ll be go to heck,” Tom half-whispered. What he meant was, I’d like to wring some little fucker’s neck … To Marlo he said, “Think you can give me a ride?”
“Sure. What else do I have to do?”
“Let me report this to the sheriff.”
He walked down the block to the municipal building.
* * *
When the meeting broke up, Matt and Josie had walked out together, Matt holding Josie’s hand. She noticed how he seemed unable to meet anybody’s eye, how he kept his own eyes looking at his feet, head ducked and angled like he was walking through wind. As soon as they cleared the building and stepped out into the still-driving snow, Matt had said to Josie, “Come with me.”
Josie thought both of them had arrived with their parents and couldn’t imagine what vehicle they would drive. She said, “What do you mean?”
Matt had tightened his grip on her hand. “Don’t say no to me right now.”
So she hadn’t. “I have to tell my parents,” she said.
It turned out he had his truck, and they drove from town and talked briefly about where to go. He drove her to his house, ten miles west of town. He swung off the paved road and drove between two quarter-mile-long shelter belts of stunted Russian olive trees. The headlights shone on the lime-green clapboard walls of the house. But Matt didn’t park there, instead wheeled past a long green Quonset building. His father had plowed the snow already before coming to the meeting, so there was a lane leading to a combine, tractor, and three grain trucks, all three dusty looking even in the snow, parked behind the Quonset. They had spent a great deal of time in this pickup parked in this very spot, a sort of no-go zone that Matt’s parents let them have.
Josie had lost her virginity in the pickup’s back seat here the spring before. Matt doused his headlights, but left the truck engine running so they could have heat. He cradled the steering wheel, staring out at the white streaks of snow lasering continually across the windshield in the dark, then looked at her. Stared at her. His eyes looked big, sad. She knew better than to look away.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said, though she wasn’t sure that was true.
“How is it going to be okay, Josie?”
“Things will work out,” Josie said. “They always do.”
“I’m gonna get totally fucked,” Matt muttered. He picked at a flaw on the leather wrap on his steering wheel.
The radio played classic country songs, Loretta Lynn now, and the dashboard lights glowed greenish on Matt’s face. Josie heard the sound of the fan pumping heat from the engine and tried to imagine how she would say something to make Matt feel better. She couldn’t think of a thing.
“You guys are getting made an example of,” Josie said. She was not sure she believed this, either. Her palm made long strokes on his thigh. “It’s not fair.”
Matt was silent for a long time, his arms cradling the steering wheel, his chin close to resting on it. Josie could see tears welling in his eyes. Then he said, “I’m done, Josie. I’m done. What am I gonna do?”
“You’re not done,” Josie said. “Nothing’s been decided yet. And even if … I mean, there’s basketball. There’s college.”
Matt’s face swung toward her. “Goddamn, Josie, how can you be so blue skies and butterflies?”
“A lot of people go to college without sports,” Josie said.
“With my grades? Where?”
“You can go to Northern …” she said. She held one of his hands in one of hers, and rapidly stroked the back of it with her other fingers.
“Are you going to go to Northern?” Matt asked.
“Matt, sweetie, even if all the worst things happen, you have the farm. There’s always that,” Josie said.
Matt’s hand jumped from hers. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he said. “The farm?”
“I just mean …”
“Jesus, Josie. Jesus.”
“Matt,” Josie said. “You can do so many things. You have options. That’s all I meant.”
“How many of them include you?”
Josie didn’t like what she was going to say next, but she had said it so many times before that it must in some way be true. “Wherever I go there’s a place for you. You know that.” She had probably even meant it, for a while.
Matt turned from her, looked out at the snow. Josie sat with her hands pressed between her legs, not sure what to do next. Johnny Cash sang “I Still Miss Someone.” Well, I never got over those blue eyes … sounded like a message sent back from a future she couldn’t imagine.
Then Matt said, “You don’t know what it’s like to be me.”
“I know it’s hard for you,” Josie said.
“I’m, like, a public figure in this town.”
I’m not? Josie thought. She was an athlete as much as he was. And everybody knew her business. But she knew better to say any of it. Instead she said, meaning to suggest they all labored under a common curse, “We’re in the fishbowl.”
Matt stared through the windshield now, and Josie had the sense that he was voicing dialogue he’d turned over in his head many times, but never had the opportunity to say out loud to somebody who might be predisposed to feeling sorry for him. “You’re sweet, Josie,” Matt said, and Josie couldn’t help hearing it as though that might not be the best thing to be. “With you, everybody likes you ’cause you’re sweet. With me, everybody likes me because of what I do. On the field, on the court.
“People don’t like me for me. There are guys who graduated a couple years ago who want to fight me. I’ve never done anything to them. They just want to fight me to show me something. Put me in my place. That’s what my life is like. I make one mistake, and everybody wants to jump on it.”
“I know,” Josie
said, though she did not know. He seemed a little grandiose, but his sense of himself had always scaled differently.
Then Matt shifted in the seat, opened his hips more toward her, leaned back against the driver’s side door, and started talking to her through hooded eyes, which, Josie could see, were full of tears.
“Do you know what it’s like to fail in front of him?” Though his head was against the window, he rolled it quickly to indicate the direction of the house, unseen in the blowing snow.
“I know that part is hard,” Josie said.
“You think you do.”
“I know what I see and what you tell me.”
“I remember the one time in my entire life that he hugged me,” Matt said.
“That can’t be,” Josie said. She hadn’t meant to say it out loud.
“It was a hot day in the summer. I was seven. I was playing out here, by the shed, just on the other side.” He lifted his chin in the direction. “All of a sudden I turned around and there was this big fucking rattlesnake, all coiled and ready to hit me. I have no idea where it came from. I just froze. Panicked. Couldn’t move. I was pinned against the shed and this big goddamned snake just flicked his tongue out and rattled his rattle, and I was so scared.
“I started to cry. Then all of a sudden my dad—I don’t even know where he was or where he came from—he boots the snake away and grabs me up and carries me away. And he hugged me.” Matt stopped and made sure she was seeing him, then spoke slowly. “He hugged me. I could feel his arms around me, tighter than they needed to be just to carry me. He was hugging me. I still remember how good that felt.” Matt’s head tilted like he wanted to hear something in his own voice. “I’ve been waiting for it ever since. But that was the one and only time.”
Josie looked at the big, rugged boy she’d spent her entire first love on, and she felt something deeper for him, something more stirring than what they had been calling love. “I’m so sorry, Matt,” she said. She reached out to grab his hands and try to pull him closer to her. “Come here.”
But Matt held back.
“Some people just aren’t very good about showing people how they feel,” Josie said, thinking—and not liking that she was thinking it—like you.