Broken Field

by Jeff Hull

  “What’s the big deal? We shower together every day. We see each other naked every day.” Matt said. “People are always mooning each other. I mean, to us, it’s no big deal to stick your butt in someone’s face.”

  “Don’t you agree, though, that there’s a difference between seeing each other naked in the shower and what happened on the bus?”

  “Maybe you just have to be seventeen and a guy,” Matt said. “I get mooned all the time. If it bugs me I just push them away. It’s just not the big deal everybody’s making it out to be. Wyatt didn’t care. I mean, you have to know Wyatt. He’s the mouthiest runt alive. He wasn’t mad at us. I shot some hoop with him two days later. He’s always hanging around us. He doesn’t get upset.”

  Sensing a stymieing, Marlo switched tactics and flipped up a photograph of Wyatt’s face next to a pair of pants unbuttoned and partially unzipped. The base of a penis was apparent in the photo, amid a curling of pubic hair.

  Marlo stared directly at Matt while he took a quick enough glance to see what the picture was, then let his attention bounce out the window.

  “Is this you?” Marlo asked, daring him to make eye contact.

  “No,” Matt said. He was sitting with the backs of his fingers pressed against his mouth, not quite curled into a fist.

  “Lying isn’t going to help you anymore. The toothpaste is out of the tube.”

  Matt looked at her finally, and while she wanted to see confusion or fear, a hint of comeuppance, instead the closest redeeming quality she could identify in his expression was frustration and disgust. “What toothpaste?”

  Recognizing that it was probably too late to play Good Cop, Marlo tried to jigger the power balance in her voice so Matt could feel on a level. “I want us to work together on this, Matt. I understand how these things go, and I know you all agreed not to tell all the details. But everything has changed now. This is really about your future. I need you to give me a chance to work with you. Now I’m sitting here, looking at the picture, at the belt on the jeans in the picture, and I’m looking at you sitting there, wearing the same belt on your jeans now. That tells me you’re not treating me with respect, Matt. You think I’m stupid. You think all of this is stupid.” She stopped to let that settle in before adding, “I respect you, Matt. I respected you enough to ask for your side of the story. Work with me a little bit.”

  Marlo would wonder for a long time afterward if it was the business about respect, or just leveling with the kid. In either case, she witnessed a visible thaw overcome him. It started with him slowly chewing—almost kissing—the fingers at his mouth. His eyes welled, and his mouth gathered and twitched. She saw him slump, the rigidity of even his slouch melting out until he seemed in danger of sliding onto the floor in a puddle.

  “Okay, it’s me,” Matt said. He started to cry, almost simultaneously looking around the room to see if anybody was watching. His father’s eyelids dropped halfway. His mother took a sharp breath and held it, her mouth shrunk to the smallest pucker she could press it into. “I just want to play ball,” Matt said. “That’s all I want. It’s all I have. Don’t take it away from me.”

  “Do you feel like you did something wrong?” Marlo asked.

  Matt sobbed a long shaky inhalation. The sound he made could not be faked, and it hurt Marlo to hear it.

  “I guess,” he said, his voice warped and warbling. He looked at his father. “I’m sorry. It was all so stupid.” He turned to Marlo. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. All I want to do is play ball.”

  The voice that chilled Marlo was the father. He was not loud, spoke in a whisper with a searing edge, but laced with disgust. “Jesus Christ,” was all he said.

  * * *

  After his junior American history class, Tom was looking at his notes for the next class period and was surprised to notice a student standing in front of his desk, saying nothing. Tom looked up. It was Mikie LaValle.

  “Mike,” he said. “Can I help you?”

  “Um, yeah,” Mikie started. “Uh, I was wondering if you know some books I can read about Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont?”

  “Sure,” Tom said. He started digging around on his desk. “You bet. First, take this textbook.” It was a Canadian history textbook that Tom had special ordered.

  “Cool,” Mikie said. “I just want to learn more.”

  “Sure,” Tom said. “Makes sense.”

  “Because I’m, you know, like, Metis. Mixed blood.”

  “Right,” Tom said. “I get it. Yeah, heck, I’m glad to know you’re interested. There’s another really thorough book called just Riel, I think,” Tom said. “It’s Canadian.”

  “Oh,” Mikie said. “I’m not allowed to go to Canada.”

  “Why aren’t you allowed?” Tom asked, thinking the kid was young to already have a drug bust or DUI on his record, the usual reasons for people not being able to cross the border.

  “My mom won’t let me,” Mikie said.

  “You know, I think you can probably order it on Amazon.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Tom had observed Mikie in class, of course, but there Mikie cloaked himself in silence. Here now, one on one, Tom thought the boy might explode from nervousness. Mikie was digging at his cuticles so fervently Tom feared they might gush blood. The boy failed to meet his eye, looked at his fingers or across the room and out the window, like his gaze was hauling him toward some soothing respite on the other side of the distant horizon. Tom tried to think of something to say to help put Mikie at ease. He thought he remembered knowing the kid’s father wasn’t in his life. “How come,” he asked, “you don’t play any sports?”

  But that didn’t work at all. He could see Mikie burrowing deeper into his insecurities.

  “I mean, you look pretty athletic,” Tom tried. “Just the way you carry yourself and the way you move. I’m a pretty good judge of these things. You look like you could play some ball. You play hoops?”

  “Yeah,” Mikie answered quickly in a thick voice that sounded dumber than anything he’d said so far.

  “I bet you’re good at that,” Tom said.

  “Cause I’m Indian?” The kid seemed suddenly offended.

  “No,” Tom said. “No. You just look athletic. Do you run?”

  Mikie looked around the room. “I don’t know.”

  “I mean do you ever go for a jog, anything like that? To stay in shape?”

  “Yeah,” Mikie said, “Not that much.”

  “Because you might be good at that, too. And, yeah, a lot of Indian kids are good runners, especially distance,” Tom said. He thought he saw something light up in the boy—irritation, at first, at the heritage comment, which Tom threw in there to make sure Mikie knew he wasn’t afraid of it, but then a slower satisfaction—and that made him think he knew how to appeal to Mikie. “You can imagine the endurance and stamina those Metis people out on the plains needed. A lot of times, that makes for good distance runners.”

  Mikie seemed to be chewing this over. “Indians could run for days, man. I read about it,” he said.

  “You want, I can give you some workouts to do,” Tom said, holding his hands up quickly when he saw the flash of fright in the boy’s eyes, “You can do them all by yourself. I’ll just give you a schedule of what you should be trying to build up to. You can start running on your own, build up on your own. You feel good about it, maybe you can try out for track in the spring. Be good to see you on a track or a court or something.”

  “Ah, man, I don’t know about track,” Mikie said. He turned his head and looked at the floor.

  Tom had seen this work dozens of times, had seen the flattery of a coach reach a boy that nobody considered anybody’s idea of an athlete. Most of the time, they turned out not to be outstanding performers at all, but that wasn’t what Tom was after. He believed that no kid suffered from trying to get in better physical condition. It never hurt a kid try to compete, either, to learn about what competition could do for them, what it meant to work for somet
hing, as long as their progress and losses were carefully managed. It never hurt loner boys like Mikie to join a team—even if at first they found themselves harassed in the locker room, it never hurt them to persevere and win the respect of their peers.

  But most importantly, it never hurt these kids to think that somebody cared enough to watch them. Even though Mikie seemed shy and indecisive, his body language had already puffed up. He stood straighter and seemed able to hold his eyes in Tom’s direction.

  “You’d have to give up the smokes,” Tom said. He half laughed to let Mikie know he wasn’t judging him.

  “Aw … it’s not like a habit, or anything.”

  “Okay,” Tom said. “Easy enough then. Give it a shot. I think you’d find out something about yourself that you’d like.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Mikie said. “I’m not, like, the strong football type.”

  “There’s lots of different kinds of strong. Listen, let me tell you something about me, with the preamble that I realize going into it this may or may not be how you feel or what you want at all. But I can tell you that when I was a kid, I didn’t want to play sports for a long time because I was scared. I was afraid of what it might feel like to be tackled in football. I was afraid of making a fool of myself on the basketball court. I was afraid to come in last on the track. I was afraid a baseball might hit me in the face and break my teeth out. I was afraid of everything you could be afraid of. I was afraid the other kids would laugh at me, most of all.

  “Eventually I said to myself, Yeah, I’m scared, but I’m going to try it anyway because I think I’m missing out on something. And you know what happened? Every one of the things I was afraid of happened. I got drilled by kids who were bigger than me on the football field, knocked silly. I got the basketball stolen from me, had shots blocked, made a fool of myself on the court. Got hit in the face by a pop fly I failed to field—didn’t break my teeth but I bled like a stuck pig. And the other kids laughed at me. They called me Ten Thumbs Tom and Dork-o and other names I can’t repeat. But you know what I found out?

  “After the first couple times I got hit in football, I learned to lower my shoulders and lean into the contact. And after that first baseball smacked me, I wasn’t scared to get my glove up—what could happen that was worse? And pretty soon I learned when to pick up my dribble, and how to move my shot so it didn’t get blocked. And the kids who laughed at me? I figured out pretty quickly that they laughed at everybody. It wasn’t just me. That’s when the fun started.” Tom held his hands out. “I’m not saying that’s your life, or even that it might happen the same way for you. But I know that getting on a team, having teammates, playing for each other, that was something I wouldn’t have missed for the world, man. That was the greatest fun I ever had.”

  “I’m not a sports type,” Mikie said.

  “I know you think you’re not,” Tom said. “I thought I wasn’t either. Then I was. Life’s like that. You can be what you decide to be.”

  This last sentiment seemed to make more impact on the boy than everything Tom had said up to that point. Mikie looked at him quickly, off guard, as if to assess whether Tom was being flippant. Tom shrugged, said, “Think about it.”

  Then the moment of unguarded enthusiasm was gone and Mikie’s eyes hooded. He snorted. “Maybe I’ll just be a Metis.”

  “Sure, that too,” Tom said.

  * * *

  Brad Martin preceded his son into the room and showed the boy where to sit. Alex was a handsome kid with fluorescent blue eyes made more vivid by a frame of hanging dark hair. He was tall and rangy with the foot-flopping, slightly pigeon-toed walk of a kid physically coping with a growth spurt. He was nearly a foot taller than his father, and Marlo noticed that his mother, Sharon Martin, was also taller than Brad. Sharon started silently weeping almost as soon as they sat down and, without saying a word or sniffling or in any other way being present, continued to do so for the entire interview.

  Alex fessed up at once, admitting to owning a pair of buttocks in question when Marlo slipped the copy of the photo under his nose. “I shouldn’t have done it,” Alex said. “I know it was wrong. We just got carried away and … I made a mistake.”

  His words struck Marlo the moment she heard them as honest, the way only unscripted sincerity can.

  “Look,” Brad interjected, “you’re talking about a kid who has a 4.0 grade point. He has a great talent for basketball. He’s a good kid, a good citizen. He’s never been in trouble before. He got himself into a bad situation and made a stupid mistake—kids do that, Ms. Stark, they make mistakes.”

  “I appreciate all that,” Marlo said, and she had been perfectly willing to listen empathetically until he kept going.

  “Between you me and the fencepost,” Brad said, “that kid they taped up, that Aarstad kid? He’s not going anywhere. He’s got no future. My boy has a future. He’s a good student. He’s an outstanding athlete. He’s got the tools to take himself away from this town and make something of himself. So do some of these other boys. They’re going to get scholarships. Jon Aarstad is looking for a payday to balance out the fact that he never amounted to anything, and his kid will never amount to anything. We can’t let that come at the expense of our kids who worked hard to do well in school and excel in athletics.”

  Marlo pumped her brows to let Brad know she heard him and that he’d said a mouthful. She had a job to do, and she told him so. She wasn’t there to straighten out generations of relative success and failure. She was only there to find out what happened on the bus.

  “For years and years, you can talk to anybody, they’ll tell you that this kind of stuff has always gone on,” Brad said. He seemed wounded by the very implication that it could be anything else. “When I was in school there was something called a brown eye. Do you know what a brown eye is?”

  “No,” Marlo said, “do I need to?”

  “That’s when the senior guys, they’d hold you down and one of them would squat over you and start to … start a bowel movement. Only at the last second he’d try to pinch it back.”

  “Jesus, Brad,” Marlo said.

  “We … they still do it,” Alex chimed in.

  “The only reason I’m telling you this,” Brad said, “is because I know it’s been going on forever. I know what kids do and have done for decades. The only difference now—the only difference—is that there weren’t digital cameras back then. Now you can’t pick these kids and make an example out of them when I know this kind of crap has been happening since all of us were in school.” Brad sat back as if he’d just presented his case in a deal negotiation. Then, as if he couldn’t resist making one more point, he leaned quickly forward. “I can’t, in good conscience, let you ruin my son’s opportunities, his future, over something that every single male who ever played sports in this town has been guilty of.”

  “First of all, I’m not in charge of ruining anything,” Marlo said, “I’m the school board’s counsel. All I’m trying to do is sort out the legal implications.”

  Marlo left second of all alone. Second of all, Marlo thought there had always been a divide between who was squatting and who was being held down underneath them.

  Waylon Edwards was next and last on her list, scheduled so a parent could be present during the interview. But Waylon’s parents didn’t show up. Waylon claimed to have no idea where they might be—or, at least, where his father might be. His mother had left the family years before, bound for South Dakota with a railroad engineer. She had left Waylon and a sister with their father and his new girlfriend, who worked in a bar in Fort Miles. Waylon told Marlo he had informed his father of the interview, and had every expectation that his dad would show up. But it didn’t happen.

  Marlo wouldn’t interview him without an adult present. A parent was ideal. She had thought for a bit about calling in Dave Cates, but given his pending suspension, she thought it best not to involve him. So she’d been faced with a dilemma. The school board had promised
the community a full report the next day, Friday. There was, after all, a playoff game on Saturday that the assistant coach was preparing the team to play. Everybody wanted to know who was going to take the field.

  Marlo left the school building, walked out into the cold, heading across the parking lot to her vehicle. Though there were a few hours of light left, she could already feel the day tipping toward darkness, calling it quits early. She tugged her cell phone from her purse to call Chet.

  Next she drove to the Farm and Fleet store on the edge of town. She purchased a Carhartt overall suit, quilt-lined, one-piece, and as warm as she could hope to stay. Oddly she found herself liking the way she looked in the brown jumpsuit, though it did nothing to flatter her.

  It felt like the right thing to be wearing in Dumont—too new, too clean, but at least she was in the right label. She bought a pair of insulated gloves and a brown Carhartt stocking cap, too, and wore them all, along with her Sorel boots, out of the store. If she was going to be here for a couple days, she might as well look like it.

  * * *

  That late afternoon, the sun shouted off the aluminum paint of the three tall grain elevators like a campaign promise. The snow was starting to melt, only to ice up overnight. Tom would have loved to watch Slab Rideg run the boys through practice, but walked into town instead. The sheriff’s cruiser’s taillights flashed as Sheriff Rue dropped it into reverse on the way to pulling off the curb. Across the street Tom saw two men smoking cigarettes outside the Mint bar, pinching the butts like convicts. He ducked into the IGA. Hannah Alderdice peered out from behind her cash register and beamed and said, “Hello Tom!” like she’d been waiting to see him for a long time.

  He said hello and she said, “Well, just what kind of shame is going on over at the school, Mr. Football Coach?”

  “Well,” Tom said.

  “Well,” she said, “I swear I just don’t know any more.” Tom moved on into the store, five low rows of grocery items, but her voice stopped him again. “How are you treating our Miss Calhoun?”