Broken Field

by Jeff Hull

  “Dominance. Control,” he said. “They’re pretty deeply seated impulses. Those developing psyches …”

  “Why does it not happen in some places?”

  “I think it comes down to the adults in the room.”

  Marlo smiled, thinking about the adults she’d been in rooms with in the past day. She felt herself step back, an imaginary shaking of her head, frustrated. If he had made any sort of move, she could have found herself reacting, and instead they’d had this long conversation about teenaged boys. She was tired now, facing another tedious day. She sat up, gathered herself.

  “Time to go?” Tom asked. He seemed surprised, and she wondered if he thought he had all night.

  “Yeah, sorry. Just tired. Long day and another one tomorrow,” she said, then tried to turn on a little charm. “Thanks for keeping a gal company.”

  “It’s been a long time since I talked so much to someone who was older than seventeen.”

  Poor lonely bugger, she thought, then, and wanted to stay again. The dog was probably in danger of getting the hair petted right off it. Marlo pressed her lips into a tough little grin. “It was interesting,” she said. “I liked it. You’re interesting.”

  Tom stood and clearly didn’t know where to space himself vis a vis her. He said, “Since you’re going to be around a couple days with nothing to do, if, you know, you want to do something just, uh, you could give me a call. If you want to do something. Get out. You know.”

  “All right,” she said, chipper enough to bounce to her feet and start across the room. This was awkward, but the trick was to keep moving through it. She wasn’t sure it was finished, though this installment seemed to be. She would have to not let it bother her to just keep moving across the floorboards, no matter how they felt underfoot.

  * * *

  In the morning the snow lay like a denial of everything that had happened before it. But that, Tom knew, was temporary. He coughed in the cold as he stepped off the porch, sputtering gouts of steam. Scout ran in bounding circles, lifting herself clear of the snow before plunging back down, her nose high. The dog seemed to be enjoying the thrill of this new surface. Tom felt the cold in his eyes making his eyelids feel too short to close. His fingers felt fat, wouldn’t curl down into fists. What, he wondered, had happened here last night?

  Such an odd time to be fascinated with someone new, someone from so far away. And on top of that, he had to worry about just how much of a fool he’d made of himself. But she had come out here, hadn’t she? Well, she gave him a ride. And then she came in, and sat and drank and talked.

  Anyway, she was about to be married, and that was enough. Meanwhile, he knew he had to talk to Jenny, which was why he was dressed and ready, once the dog did her business, to jump in his old truck—the one he kept for elk hunting—and head into town. He let Scout back in the house and drove. Tom worked the wheel to keep the tires in the ruts, already hardened into icy grooves.

  The sun dazzled across the snowfields, glittering beneath a sky of taut blue purity. The brightness assaulted him, heightening the tangy sense of guilt he felt in his stomach. When his attention turned to this feeling, part of him rose up in protest, arguing: I don’t owe her anything.

  But he did. Their story was an uncomplicated one, consisting almost entirely so far of her unselfish and his unfinished gestures, reaching a strange anticlimax when he tried to kiss her in a rush over a pizza. But even that implied a legitimacy and provoked assumption, the coin of the realm among righteous gossips and moral guardians. And most other folks just felt like something was going on. If they lived in Great Falls, he wouldn’t have to do this; but here, he owed her a visit. No, it wasn’t that.

  It wasn’t Dumont. It was him, what he was learning about life and other people in it. When you allowed people to feel things, encouraged, or at least failed to discourage, those feelings, you fell into their debt. The same was true with his team. He owed them something he wasn’t going to be able to own up to. They had not betrayed him—they had been kids growing up in a way they had learned was okay.

  He had let them down.

  He would have to know that again every time he saw them. And while for a brief moment leaving seemed like an answer, Tom had come to understand that he had left before because it was easy. Staying away was hard, but leaving was the easiest thing he knew how to do.

  If anything else was going to come together for him, leaving couldn’t be the first option anymore. He parked in front of Jenny’s house and walked around the front bumper and up the path cleared in the snow to her front door. The snow squealed under his feet, the sound of painless agony. Tom’s eye felt smaller than usual and he had a clear sense of the bags under them. He waited for a few moments after knocking before Jenny’s oldest daughter, eight-year-old Erin, opened the door.

  “My mom’s in the kitchen,” Erin said shyly. She squirmed a bit, then simply walked away.

  “Jenny?” Tom called as he stepped into the house.

  “Back here,” came the reply, and he moved back through the hall and into the kitchen. He stood for a moment, staring at her back as she made sandwiches on the counter. She glanced over her shoulder and said a simple “Hi,” leaving him almost nothing to go on. He wondered if he should sit. He looked at the harvest table, over which he lunged only a couple nights before, trying to kiss her, and decided to stay standing.

  “How are you?” she said, and he caught in her tone an annoyance that she should have to start the conversation.

  “Good, fine. How are you? Listen, I wanted to apologize about last night,” he said.

  Jenny turned, used her wrist to wipe a strand of hair from her eye. “No need,” she said. She frowned and finished it with a slight head shake.

  “I was coming over, and then my tires got slashed …” He held his hands palm up.

  “Are you going to take your coat off? I just have to get the kids ready for school. I didn’t expect you.”

  “Sure,” Tom said, feeling back on his heels.

  “How’d you get home?”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Last night. How’d you get home with no tires?”

  This was a test. By now she might know how he got home.

  “That lawyer from Great Falls, the schools’ lawyer. She gave me a ride.”

  “Oh” Jenny said, a simple little “oh.” He had no idea what the “oh” meant. It occurred to Tom that, after years of “hello” in the hallways and idle chatter in the teacher’s lounge, then months of an admittedly one-sided courtship, he didn’t know much about this woman. Jenny cleared matters up somewhat by following with, “So you were out with her?”

  “No,” he said. “No. I was having a beer with Krock O’ at Pep’s while that meeting went on. She came in for some pizza after. We were talking about what happened.”

  Jenny’s eyebrows shortened her forehead while her gaze turned downward. She nodded, pushing her lower lip out just enough to be noticeable as different from the normal set of her mouth.

  Nobody said anything. Tom wondered if he was being evaluated for veracity. He wondered if adding some more detail might make her tend to believe him more. But he wanted this part to be over, so he didn’t say more from fear it would only prolong the conversation.

  Finished assembling the sandwiches, Jenny snatched a knife and cut them. Then she started chopping carrots. She did not look up from her work to say, “I’m not sure what you want, Tom.”

  Neither was he. He said, “I just wanted to apologize for not coming over last night. And to talk about what we were going to talk about.” Although the truth was he didn’t want to talk about that now. He wanted to leave that frozen for its moment in time until he could sort some other things out, then maybe come back to it. That’s what he wanted to say, I’d like to get back to you on this.

  “No, Tom, I’m not sure what you want,” she said again. “That’s the thing.”

  “I’m the one who tried to kiss you, if you’ll remember,” he said
, hearing the defensiveness he wished he could choke from his voice. Jenny was looking at him, her face beautiful in its simple openness, its frank lack of complexity, her features smooth, untensed, her eyes accessible. The weight of her honest expectation triggered again the rise of the defensive reflex he hated in himself and before he could stop himself, he had said, “You were the one who held back.”

  Jenny’s eight-year old daughter Erin took two steps into the room at that moment, stopped in stride, one foot just plopped onto the floor, the whimsical flight that had carried her into the kitchen suddenly redirected. The girl looked at Tom, reading him to make sure he had said what she thought he had. Her hair flipped as she looked at her mother, puzzled. “Why is Coach Warner trying to kiss you, Mom?” she asked.

  “He was just giving me a good-night kiss, honey,” Jenny said, slicing a look at Tom.

  “How come you didn’t want to give him a good-night kiss back?”

  “Can we talk about this later, honey?” Jenny asked her daughter. “What did you come in here for? Is there something I can get for you?”

  “Well, no. I just wanted a glass of juice. And, um, Jonathan is hitting me.”

  “Are you giving Jonathan any reason to hit you?” Jenny asked.

  “No,” came the quick reply.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Jonathan always hits me.”

  “Do you want me to come and ask Jonathan why he is hitting you?”

  “He’s just doing it, Mom. He’s just, like, hitting me.” Erin was staring at Tom now, fascinated and repulsed. “Do you kiss Coach Warner good night?”

  “A lot of times adults just give kiss each other to say goodbye and hello.”

  “In Europe, everybody does,” Tom said. “That’s how you say hello to people, you kiss them on the cheek.”

  “Like air kisses?” Erin said. She’d heard of this, or seen it on TV.

  “Exactly.”

  “What kind of juice did you want, honey?” Jenny asked, and moved to pour her daughter a glass of anything she named.

  “Grape.”

  “Drink it down here,” Jenny said, handing her the glass. “Don’t take it upstairs.”

  “Okay.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “If you promise not to give Jonathan any more reasons to hit you, I promise to come and talk to him about it. And I’ll come and talk to you about other stuff as soon as Coach Warner goes home. Okay? And brush your teeth as soon as you’re done with that juice. We’re going to be leaving in twenty minutes.”

  Erin agreed to that bargain, but couldn’t tear her deeply puzzled gaze from Tom even as she stalked from the room. Amazing, Tom thought, that at that age, already she knew he wasn’t being straight with her.

  “Have you ever been to Europe?” he asked Jenny.

  “No,” Jenny said.

  “Where have you been?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Outside of Montana. Have you gone places?”

  She seemed to know why he was asking. “I have an aunt in Nebraska. We used to go there. Outside Lincoln. I went to Las Vegas on my honeymoon. Have you been to Europe? Do you want some grape juice before I put it away?”

  “No, thanks,” he said. “I’ve never been anywhere, except for road games in college. But for those you just fly in, go to practice, go to the hotel, get up, go to the game and get back on the plane. It never felt like being anywhere.”

  “Are you planning a trip?”

  “No.”

  “All this sudden interest in Europe,” she said.

  Any real response to that led down seven paths to trouble, so Tom sat back in his chair and said, “I don’t know.”

  Before either of them could imagine a comfortable angle back into the conversation they’d been having, Jonathan, the five-year old, stomped into the kitchen and burst into tears. Tom couldn’t help but notice the sequence.

  “Erin’s being mean to me!” Jonathan wailed.

  “We can talk about Erin as soon as you stop crying,” Jenny told her son.

  Jonathan shrieked and began some tortured declarations, from which Tom was able to make out something about a phone his sister had taken from him.

  Jenny squatted down to his eye level and said, “We can talk all about that, just as soon as you stop crying and calm down and tell me exactly what happened.”

  “But she’s …” the rest was stretched beyond meaning by a resurgence of wails.

  “I don’t know what you’re saying, Jonathan,” Jenny said. She held his gaze with a marvelous determination. “I can’t hear you because you’re crying too hard. As soon as you stop crying, you can tell me and we can try to fix it.”

  The boy, who already had his arms raised and flailing, took a slap at his mother and screeched louder, a long, hysterically undulant rendition of “Nooooooo.”

  Jenny snatched his arms, held them by their thin wrists, thrust her face inches from his and said, “You do not hit your mother.” She pointed to another room and said, “Time out for you.”

  Unbelievably, the boy’s shrieks gained in intensity. Jenny picked him up and hauled him to the other room. Tom was not uncomfortable watching her handle her children, and she reacted as unselfconsciously as she would have had he not been there. That was one of the things admired about her. Adored, actually.

  She was always herself. Jenny reentered the room, walked to the sink, and poured herself a glass of water. Looking out the window, she pushed her hair from her face with a free hand, then tilted her head back beneath the glass. Tom saw the hard morning light from the snow outside gleaming on her throat as she drank. He waited until she had collected herself and turned to look at him.

  “Maybe this isn’t the best time for a real heart to heart,” he said, trying to sound hopeful that there would be a better one, and that they still had a need for a heart to heart.

  “Probably not, although the fact that we started talking about it at all makes me not want to stop. But …” she waved her hand toward the hiccupping cries in the other room.

  “When can be a good time for you? Maybe you can get a sitter. Maybe you can come to my place and we can be uninterrupted?”

  “I’d like that,” she said. “Let me ask around. I’ll call you.”

  “I’ll be home after school. Time on my hands,” he said. He stood, wondering if he should walk all the way across the distance that separated them and kiss her. He decided that of course he should. She saw it coming this time, and waited, and gave him a smooth expanse of pear-smooth cheek to come down softly upon.

  * * *

  Later that same morning Marlo went to the high school and sat in the teacher’s lounge—a room full of wooden chairs and a couple of tables—and interviewed football players. The moment Marlo saw Wyatt Aarstad, she felt an instant adoration for him. He looked more like twelve than fifteen.

  His ears stuck out and his hair held to his head in wiry, uncontrollable cowlicks. Wyatt was accompanied by only his father, who Marlo had seen so much of the night before. He wore the same stained jacket and she smelled the mustiness she knew she would in it, the stale bar stench combined with a cocktail of body odor, garage grease, diesel exhaust, and the moldy fug of years of cigarette smoke. Marlo introduced herself and invited them to sit. She felt Jon Aarstad eyeing her.

  “What are you going to do to satisfy me?” Jon asked, enjoying the double entendre a tad too much.

  “You may be confused,” Marlo said. “I’m not here to satisfy you.”

  “What are you going to offer to make this go away?” Jon said. “I want Wyatt to be set for life. So you tell me, how far you’re going to get toward that goal.”

  “Mr. Aarstad, I think you’ve been watching too much TV. I’m not going to discuss the settlement of a suit that hasn’t even been brought yet, but I’ll tell you that, as an experienced attorney, I don’t see any big windfall for you here.” Marlo didn’t believe that for a moment. A civil jury might decide a
nything. But she doubted any attorney in their right mind would let it get to a jury. And if there were damages, if the report of sexual assault proved out, Wyatt was going to be a wealthy little farm boy. And that’s what she would very carefully have to tease out in the next hour or so.

  “If you don’t mind, Mr. Aarstad, I’d like to ask Wyatt some questions.”

  Jon Aarstad stuck out his hand like it held a serving platter, offering his son up. Marlo started asking Wyatt about playing football, why he did it, why he liked it.

  “It’s great. It’s fun,” Wyatt said, his voice a cheery peep. “All my friends do it.”

  “Are the guys on the team your friends?” Marlo asked.

  “They’re my dawgs,” Wyatt said. He beamed, begging her to be impressed with his street accent.

  “Even after what happened?”

  “Aw yeah, they didn’t mean nothing by that. It was just goofing.”

  “Did they manhandle you to get you up on the rack?” Marlo asked.

  Wyatt paused for a minute and scrunched his face to the side. He swung a glance at his father, who was too busy glaring at Marlo’s breasts to notice. Wyatt’s hesitation signaled to Marlo that what came next would be a lie. Still, she didn’t care. She couldn’t help thinking he was the cutest little guy she’d ever seen.

  “Just whatever it took,” Wyatt said, and he let it go at that.

  “So they, like, grabbed you and wrestled you up there?” Marlo asked. “Did you struggle?”

  “You gotta struggle a little bit or everyone will think you’re a pu … sissy.”

  “Did you ask them not to do it?”

  Now she could see Wyatt calculating, wondering if she’d heard something different from someone else. “No,” he said at length, the disappointed admission of someone whose lie has been revealed after so recently being minted. Now his father’s attention swerved toward him and Wyatt seemed to flinch. “They just said they were gonna beat my ass if I didn’t go along.”