by Jeff Hull
“You don’t even know.” Matt sat up straight and leaned toward her. Josie pulled his head to her breast. She held onto his head while she felt him shudder and cry. He cried hard, then, let go, heaving sobs, and she held him tight. For a while his hands felt like anchors in her flesh, seeking anything to gain purchase, but his breathing became more regular and his hands changed. She felt his fingers flex, felt them move, felt them on her breasts, reaching for her ass.
“Oh, God,” Matt sobbed. He had shifted toward her, leaned into her, tilting her back against the passenger door. She tried to hold his head, run her fingers through his hair. She tried to do nothing to seem sexual, but Matt’s fingers dug into her wherever he grabbed, like he might tear a piece of her off. His head raised and his eyes, teary and bloodshot, held inches from hers. He looked right at her while his hands went to the fly of her jeans, lowered the zipper and unhooked the button. His palm pressed against her belly as his fingers pointed down.
“Matt,” she said.
“Don’t say no to me tonight. I can’t hear you say no to me tonight.” His words were ragged and full of holes, like wind through the shelter belts.
And so Josie didn’t say no. She lay back and hardly moved while he exercised what seemed to be some extreme need. It was over quickly, but in those short moments, Josie began to understand with a new, sharper clarity that whatever she had once dreamed about Matt and their life together was not what it was going to be like.
* * *
Marlo drove and, once they were outside of town, the snow glistened in her headlights like tiny diamonds brought to a boil. Even with the heater blasting, she felt aware of the cold surrounding the thin metal skin of the car. She sensed the greenish glow from her dashboard, could see it on Tom’s face. She thought, isn’t this the little adventure. She said, “I can’t believe someone would slit your tires. This town’s a little, uh, well, some rabble’s been roused.”
“Most people in town—and when I say ‘most people’ I mean most people who aren’t cretins—are probably okay with how things are being handled,” Tom said. “There’s just always a few who have to stir things up, and those people, when they reach their wit’s end, it’s been a short trip.”
Clear enough, Marlo thought. It was quite easy to sit in her office in Great Falls and feel critical about people who would support kids making bad decisions. But even her short time in Dumont had illustrated exactly how few the outlets for interpersonal expressions were here. Farming was an essentially solitary business, drawing usually from a family-based labor pool. The few merchants in town provided focal points for interactions.
There was the bar. And then there was the school, and the kids who went there. She knew it was facile for her to zip into town for a few days, make a group of judgments, and then leave. For Tom and Dave Cates, the rest of the school year was going to be long. Tom seemed down now. He had been cute in the bar, a little flustered, a little motor-mouthed. Nerves, which Marlo had felt flattered enough to assume was about her. He was not a man who took her breath away, but he seemed raw and powerful, a bare person who didn’t shrink from the lack of cover. His kept his hair sheared in a short part that was obviously not one of his major concerns.
His gesture was moving forward. He looked, in all the right ways to her, like a man. Just after checking in with the sheriff, Tom had made a phone call. It had been quick and quiet and, Marlo knew, it was to a woman. This made her reassess Tom, largely because she had not spent much time assessing him in the first place. She had, on first glance, assumed he’d be the married type, with a squad of kids being raised to eat up yardage and answer in prompt “yes sirs.” When she found out he was divorced, she assumed the size of the town, the dearth of age-appropriate single women, would mean he was not in a relationship. In her work, she’d run across plenty of small-town high school staff who wound up married to former students, but he didn’t seem that type. It was his isolation that clued her in, the tangible sense he exuded of being closed around the edges, drawn inward. Some divorced guys did that. Some went hog wild. You just never knew.
“Girlfriend?” Marlo had asked, when Tom had flipped the cell phone closed.
“I don’t have a girlfriend,” he’d said, and then he’d kept his trap shut.
Marlo didn’t know about that. These little towns were a blighted sort of gold mine for single women in the sense that the odds were good but the goods were odd.
She drove with him past a row of dead cottonwood trees, trunks ghostly white and scarred against the snow, their leafless branches suspended overhead in frozen grasps. She had no sense of what lay beyond them as the vehicle whizzed by, only fields and fields beneath vaguely undulant sheets of snow. He told her to turn onto a snow-blown road that she could feel against the tires was gravel, and then another, until her headlights caught the reddish brown fuzz of a shelterbelt, old shrubs planted a hundred years ago, perfectly even rows on either side of a long drive. The headlights drew the house from darkness as she approached.
“Casa Tom-o, eh?” Marlo said.
Tom made a low appreciative whistle. “Spanish, Australian, and Canadian in the same sentence.”
She liked that he was poking fun at her. She liked this. It felt like not being engaged, not about to be married.
“Come in, warm up before you head back to that posh hotel room?” he asked.
It was only eleven o’clock. She still felt a little lift from the two beers she’d had at Pep’s. Maybe he’d offer a drink. She twisted off the ignition and stepped again into the snow.
The dog was a surprise—not that Tom had one, but the unleashing of its energy in such tight, spiraled bounds. The sounds coming from it, moans twisted into yelps by the end, made Marlo laugh. The dog was clearly chewing Tom out.
“You could go on in,” he said. Awkward again, unsure of himself. He seemed to vacillate between prepossessed self-confidence and this complete inability to feel at peace inside his skin. “I have to stay out a minute until she calms down enough to do her business.”
“I’ll wait,” Marlo said.
They stood six feet from one another and watched the dog, Scout, as she quit leaping at Tom and began scurrying around the yard, nose to the snow, huffing scent. Then, from the darkness, a warbling yodel bubbled up, stretching to high whining yelps. Marlo thought something must be dying out there, but then said, “Coyotes.”
Tom nodded. “Song dogs.”
“Cool. I haven’t heard them in a long time.”
“They’ll come after her,” he said, tipping his head toward Scout, who had jerked to attention, staring into the floating sound. “That’s why I have to stay out with her.”
“She could hold her own against a coyote, can’t she?”
“But it wouldn’t be just one. How they do it, one coyote kind of appears, and the dog takes off after it, chases it over a little rise, and then a pack’s waiting. I’ve seen it.”
Scout finally squatted, and Tom said, “Let’s get inside.”
Inside the house was as plain as it was outside. Warped pine flooring underfoot tilted her sense of security as they walked through the kitchen, where she spotted on the bare countertops nothing that looked edible, nor any evidence—dirty dishes, scraps—of anybody ever having eaten here. The living area consisted of a sofa, worn atop the arms, and an ancient armchair sagging beside a table with a lamp on it. A boom box with a CD player sat on the floor against a third wall beneath a handmade set of shelves that also supported the smallest flat-screen TV she’d ever seen. The fourth wall was occupied by a space heater. A low coffee table stretched in front of the sofa. Books and magazines were stacked on top of and beside it. Here she spied a few crumbs, suggesting he ate at the coffee table while watching the little TV.
“Love what you’ve done with the place,” she said.
Tom ducked his head. He waved a hand at the two pieces of furniture, inviting her to take her choice, and said, “Anything to drink?”
“Yeah, I’ll have
a Marlborough Sauv Blanc. Any label’s fine.”
“Bud Light, then?”
Marlo smiled.
“I do have some vodka …”
She smiled bigger.
She chose the sofa. She hadn’t felt this way in a while, but recognized it—a willingness to put herself in a situation and let things happen, suspending all the strictures and filters she mostly held herself to. It was the kind of thing that led her to smoke cigarettes, to try pot for the first time, and it had led to some incredible sex. She liked the old familiar feel of it, liked that she didn’t allow an impending marriage to limit her experiences. As long as she was true to herself.
In the end, that’s who she’d have to live with. Tom brought her a vodka tonic with—this surprised her—a real lime wedge, poured into a kitchen glass. He set it on the table in front of her, and then dropped into the arm chair with his own drink. They sat in the spillover glow from the kitchen. Tom’s dog leapt into his lap, and he let her, encouraged her with affectionate pats and a scratch between the eyes. The dog looked at Marlo as if to say, Don’t even think about it.
“So I’m guessing,” Tom said, “you didn’t go to high school in a place like Dumont.”
“God no. I went to school in Boston. All-girls school.”
“I didn’t even know they could have those anymore.”
“Sure you did. Us Catholics can get away with that stuff. Well, with the pope on our side. I actually went to the Vatican once. On a trip to Europe after college. I was so hungover I couldn’t even look up at all the fabulous art. The one thing I remember is right there in the Vatican gift shop, the gal working had a little CD player and she was listening to just the most thuggish gangsta rap—Tupac rapping nasty lyrics. Right under the pope’s nose.”
“I’ve never been to Europe,” Tom said.
“All the young people over there listen to rap. They have all the slang down. You’re in Prague and someone starts talking to you in a heavy Eastern European accent about”— she started imitating one—“I only listen to the West Coast rappers because they are keeping it so one hundo.”
“I don’t know anything about rap,” Tom said.
Then a silence settled in and Tom kept stroking the dog.
“We didn’t have anything like this where I went to school,” Marlo said. “This hazing stuff. I mean, girls were catty and awful, but nothing like this. And the guys we knew—we were sort of affiliated with an all-boys school—they never talked about this kind of stuff happening. We would have heard.”
“It’s not the kind of thing people keep quiet,” Tom said. “When it happens, kids seem proud of it. At least to each other.”
“Still, I think I can see why people in town are so angry about the season coming unraveled,” she said. “I’m not saying I agree, but I imagine some of them feel robbed of a big thing they were looking forward to.”
“Not a lot of other big things on the agenda,” Tom agreed. He sat back with the dog in his lap and looked at her. Marlo realized she had come here thinking she might sleep with him. He was so different than anybody she’d ever been with before, and she knew she was willing if he did anything to trigger it. But sitting here in his house now, she couldn’t imagine how she could fuck a guy who looked both so isolated and so content to be.
Maybe she wanted to be the person who got under that armament, pierced it, got a sense of who was really in there. But what if what she found was a disappointment and then she’d just waste all that guilt? She wondered if she could make him talk about something that would make her decision for her.
“Why’d you submit your resignation?” Marlo said. “If you don’t mind me asking. I mean, why didn’t you wait to see what the school would do?”
Tom made a subtle body move that encouraged the dog to slide down to the floor. He scooted to the edge of the seat cushion. With his elbows on his knees, he wrapped one fist in the other and rested his mouth against them. Then the hands dropped and he looked at her and said, “When I came here … well, no. Let me back up. When I started coaching I didn’t know much about it. I just wanted to win, keep close to that excitement from when I was playing. Still young. My first coaching job was in Great Falls, CMR, a big high school under a guy who had some real strong ideas about how to get kids to realize their potential. He did a lot of screaming, a lot of swearing, a lot of swatting, really encouraged a lot of aggressive behavior. He liked that the other kids in the school were afraid of the football players.
“I didn’t like that. I don’t know if it was coming to these small schools, being a teacher, too, and seeing those other kids in the class every day and just getting to know them all and remembering how interconnected you are with your community in a place like this, even at their age … I don’t know what it was. But when I got my first head coaching job—in a school about this size—I decided to try things a little different. And it worked, I think. We won a lot of games, and I think the kids were good kids. And then … things changed in my life, and I came here. And by then I just wanted to use processes that make the kids stretch without defeating them. I wanted these kids to set goals on and off the field.
“It’s why I made them sign that no-hazing agreement—which also covered agreements not to drink or take drugs or get in trouble in the community. Even if they didn’t reach all their goals on the field, I wanted to give them goals they could control, something they could succeed at and say they did. To me, this incident is partly about living up to your word. I know there’s a whole other side to it, but that’s what it came down to for me. They failed to live up to their word, but I failed to create an environment where living up to your word was more important than tormenting the freshmen kids.” Tom stopped, looked at the TV as if something were happening there.
“That seems a little hard on yourself,” Marlo said. “If you don’t mind me saying.”
“It was my job to make sure that kind of stuff didn’t happen—particularly on a bus where I was in charge. I let myself down. I let Wyatt Aarstad down. I let the parents of all those kids down.” He seemed ready to list more people he had disappointed, but then stopped and shrugged.
“Do you have kids?” she asked.
He nodded, his eyes glazed still from the thoughts he had started to lose himself in. “I did,” he said, his voice coming in from far away. “A son.”
Marlo felt something moving in her. “Is he … ?”
“He’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“He died.”
“Oh, shit. I’m so sorry. How did … ?”
“An accident. A car accident. I was driving …” Tom seemed then to run out of words and rubbed his face with both hands. Then he became artificially animated. “But you’re new at that marriage stuff, probably all full of enthusiasm. Ready to think about kids of your own.”
“Yeah, sure.” She smiled, and let herself slide into a luxurious slump on the couch. “We’re coming to it a little later in life, so our expectations are appropriately tempered.”
Her cell phone rang then, and Marlo instinctively dug into her purse to retrieve it. She glanced at the number glowing in the semi-darkness, then clicked it off. She saw Tom watching her and felt like telling him.
“Chet,” she said, and shook her head. “My fiancé. Probably just calling to say good night.”
“You don’t want to answer?” Tom asked.
“Well, no,” she said. “It would be a little hard to explain, don’t you think—almost midnight and I’m at the football coach’s house, drinking vodka?”
“Be harder to explain why you’re not in your room, answering the phone,” Tom said.
“I can just say I turned the phone off and went to sleep,” she said. “It’s no big deal.”
“Why lie?” he asked, and she could see he was thinking of that as one of those questions that tells you where everybody stands.
“Why put somebody through something for no good reason? There’s capital T truth, and then there’s the
truth that everybody can live with,” Marlo said.
Tom thought about that. “The old ‘If you must be honest, be beautifully honest?’” he said.
“Nice,” she said, not expecting Kahlil Gibran from the coach—even if he’d mangled it a little. “It’s not like I’m out banging some guy and not telling my husband because I want to stay out of trouble.” She took a long—longer than usual—swig of her drink. “I’m not dishonoring Chet. But would his life be better if I answered that call and told him where I was? Would he sleep better tonight?” She let a shrug drop. “I’m living a truth I can live with, and a truth that makes Chet’s life better. I don’t see the condemnation.”
“What if something were to happen that dishonored him?”
“Then I’d have to think about it differently.” She almost added, nothing’s going to happen to dishonor Chet, but for some perverse reason she couldn’t quite stick a pin through, she stopped short of that. Instead, she said, “Do you think we’ll ever reach some capital T truth about what happened on that bus?”
“Boys at that age are a mixed-up bunch of people,” Tom said, and she couldn’t tell if he sounded disappointed or let off the hook by the change in subject. But then he went on, “You’re a coach, you see the locker room, but you don’t hang around in there.” Tom’s voice sounded replete, as if he were on his last excuse and he wasn’t sure even he believed it anymore. “They did awful things at my school, too. I never did them, but I had some done to me when I was a freshman.”
“What the hell?” Marlo asked. “Why do they do that to each other?”
“Something like this happens every year. Big towns, little towns. It’s the big dog humping the little dog,” Tom said.
“But why?”
“Because they can,” Tom said. “Because we let them.”
“I know it’s pervasive,” Marlo said. “I represent a lot of school districts. I’ll let you in on a little secret—I’ve dealt with maybe a dozen hazing incidents in the past year, and yours isn’t even close to being the worst. One kid had a bar of soap shoved up his anus. It just didn’t go public. I mean, some unbelievable stuff happens. I don’t understand why boys feel like they have to do this to each other. It must be some power thing. Like you said, like dogs.”