Broken Field

by Jeff Hull

Tom looked at Hannah, who gave him every bit of knowing in her return stare. So he winked at her and she pointed a finger at him and he started shopping, such as it was. Here they were, surrounded by fields in which grew millions of dollars’ worth of commodities, but just try to find a fresh tomato. A thought probably sparked by his craving for a bottle of Clamato juice and the thought that a summer sausage might be nice to gnaw on.

  Then he realized how much that sounded like just craving salt in different textures. So instead he let himself follow some mixed ideas and half-finished impulses and picked up a liter bottle of Diet Pepsi and a wedge of cheddar jack cheese and some tortilla chips, a pound of hamburger, a head of lettuce, a red pepper, and some spaghetti noodles.

  He was wandering in and out among the five low aisles with all of these things gathered in his arms or hanging from hooked fingers when he spotted over a shelf a hank of hair color that could only be Dotty Lantner’s. He switched direction so they met at the end of the aisle. Dotty might have wanted people to notice the rhinestones surrounding the smooth rounded seat of her jeans, but Tom noticed the way her belt puckered the waistline.

  “Hey there, Dotty.”

  “Mr. Warner,” she said, laying it on thick for the Mr. part.

  “Mr. Warner,” Tom repeated, as if he deserved that.

  She narrowed her eyes and started to step away.

  “Dotty,” he said.

  “What do you want, Tom?” she asked.

  It was a fair question. There wasn’t really a thing she could help him with. “I just … I know you have some ideas about me.” He nodded to add some punctuation. She nodded as an answer with its own emphasis.

  He jerked his head to the north, the direction of Pep’s bar. “Can I buy you a drink?”

  He watched her cheeks pull the “no” back from her lips. A calculus unfold in her eyes. And it wasn’t very nice to turn down a drink from someone who asked so directly about it.

  “You gonna pay for all that … stuff?” she asked, nodding at his armload of groceries.

  “Can I meet you right over there?”

  “I’ll come,” she said. Then louder, including Hannah Alderdice. “I gotta feed my family. God knows they’d starve if they had to feed themselves.”

  “Won’t hurt them none to wonder where you are for a bit,” Hannah said.

  “Might remind them I exist,” Dotty said.

  Tom paid for his groceries, set the bags in his truck cab, and stepped up the street to Pep’s. He opened the door into its darkness, took a half step through, scanning the premises before committing. Only a couple of drinkers at the bar. Sam Hendricks and Randy Bury caught reminiscing about something they both found pretty funny but probably shouldn’t have. One of the older Aarstad brothers. Nobody under seventy except Hal Hartack behind the bar. Tom went to him, ordered a beer.

  Hal just shook his head so his chin waggled counter to his forehead. He set the beer down in front of Tom, took the five-dollar bill, and rapped his knuckles on the bar as he walked off with it. There would be change, but Tom was going to leave it and sit at one of the tables in the back of the room by the Keno and poker machines. Dotty spent a full twenty minutes in the grocery or somewhere before she walked through the ingot of light into the bar.

  “Vodka and soda with a lemon,” she said to Hal as she walked past him and sat down opposite Tom.

  The first drink helped, but not nearly as much as the second and third. The early ones went quick and Tom and Dotty worked through the weather and wheat prices and whether cattle was ever a good idea. “You gonna ever do the right thing with Jenny Calhoun?” Dotty asked.

  “I need this twice today?” he said.

  “You need it until you do the right thing,” Dotty said. Then they got into the school and rules and by the third time Hal Hartack clanked glasses on the table, they were ready for the brass tacks. They both leaned into the table.

  “Dotty, why I wanted to talk to you …”

  “I was wondering when we’d get to that. Didn’t think you were trying to get me drunk and take me back to that lovely little farmhouse you rent with that dog.”

  “These boys, Dotty. That’s what it’s about.”

  “You’re quittin’ on them but you want me not to?”

  “You know why I had to do what I did,” Tom said.

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  “You would have if I didn’t, for starters.”

  “True.”

  “And I think those boys need to see some consequences. I’m not against consequences. I mean, they screwed up royally. I’m not bucking against that. But if you could find it in your heart to see them as boys and not as some kind of full-grown TV villains …”

  Dotty sat back now, let her ass slide to the edge of the chair. She looked around the bar, keeping her eyes high, toward the seams of the ceiling, corralling thoughts. When she had a few together, she slid her seat again to tilt forward at him and they lowered their voices and started whispering ferociously over each other. “Here’s the thing, coach. I don’t like you—”

  “So punish me—”

  “It isn’t even that I don’t like you—“

  “But don’t punish them because you don’t like me. That’s unchristian.”

  “Might even turn out that I do like you, and when did you get so fucking concerned about my Christianity?”

  “It’s the rest of their lives—”

  Dotty checked back over her shoulder to see what Hal was doing before getting both her elbows on the table and finding a tone that shut Tom down. “I probably do like you, Tom Warner. I probably like you a lot more after this conversation than I did before. But I don’t like the idea of you. And I don’t like the idea of him”—she hooked a thumb in the direction of Hal Hartack—“and I don’t like this town’s idea of what it means to be a Dumont football player. I’m sick and goddamned tired of everybody thinking these boys walk on water and do no wrong, and everybody bending over to excuse them for everything they’ve done. You want to talk about the rest of someone’s life? You try being a young girl out in a pickup with three football players some night when you’ve all had too much to drink and I guarandamntee you the things that happen will change the way you are for the rest of your life.”

  The sudden silence seemed to be a direct effect of the finger she stabbed into the table. Dotty’s eyes glistened with intensity, seemed to shimmer as they shifted back and forth between his. Her upper lip pressed so hard against her lower he could see it quiver.

  “Dotty,” he said, softening, inviting her to soften. “Dotty, I’m so sorry for anything that might have happened to you.”

  Her finger levered up as a warning and she met his eyes as hers glistened. Only the ringing hammers of time could temper a gaze to such a hardness.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Tom said. “I know that the boys on my team didn’t do anything to harm you and they didn’t do anything as harmful as what you just talked about. Somebody might have, but it wasn’t the boys on my team. And I know that what you do next could seriously harm the rest of their lives. Do you think that’s just?”

  “I think it’s just crap.”

  Dotty wasn’t able to find his face with her eyes anymore. She’d returned to the ceiling, to the memories and ideas that lingered there with the years of muzzy cigarette smoke and dust against the stamped tin.

  “I’ve been learning through all this that right can be a temporary point of view,” Tom said.

  “But we don’t live in a temporary world, do we, Coach? Things just keep going on.”

  “Well, I guess that’s right.”

  “And you want to be on the right side of history. Isn’t that what people talk about now?”

  “I think we’re getting on the right side of it,” Tom said. “I don’t think what we’re doing with these boys is ignoring that. I resigned over it, Dotty. But I think there’s a difference between being hard and being strong. Isn’t there a way to punish them without ruining the
m?”

  “They ruined themselves,” Dotty said.

  “But isn’t there a way to punish them without ruining them more?” Tom repeated.

  “That’s just a sort of pissed-off optimism I see too much of around here. I just get fed up.”

  “What if you could help them get on a better track, be better people?” Coming back to the Christian angle for a good church-goer like Dotty.

  “I gotta go home,” Dotty said.

  “Let me walk you out,” Tom said. But she was up and moving, and he had to pay. He was throwing bills on the bar as she opened the door into a considerably less-bright day.

  Hal Hartack said, “I give her credit. She didn’t play the sympathy card after that house landed on her sister.”

  Tom ignored him, hurried out, managed to reach Dotty’s elbow just before she got to her Suburban. She didn’t yank her arm from his hand.

  “Dotty, what you told me … I’m sorry. For whatever might have happened along the way. If you ever need to talk …”

  “I don’t ever talk about that,” she said. “Not with football coaches. Not with men.”

  “Understood. Understood. If you ever decide you need to,” he said. “I’m a person, not just a football guy. I can feel for people. I feel for you. I want you to know that.” He slipped around her and opened the vehicle door for her.

  “That’s real nice,” she said, but he could practically see her slipping back into her coating of condescension and the moment when he thought he could say things like that to her passed right there on the sidewalk, as the late fall afternoon sunlight turned brassy and cold.

  She said, “Thanks for the drinks” and “We’ll see you at the meeting tomorrow” while she fished around for her keys and stuck them in the ignition and fired up the big Suburban and blasted backward into the street before lurching and wheeling forward and over the slight dip in the row, obvious now in more shadow, and then past the buildings and off into the empty distance surrounding town.

  * * *

  If the previous meeting had been a dog and pony show, the Friday night school board special session, held again in the gym, was an angry circus. People had come from neighboring communities, starving for entertainment. By now Dumont had had time to settle into camps. Rumors had multiplied and whether anybody knew what really happened on the bus, everybody thought they did.

  The meeting was called for 7:00 p.m. An hour earlier, Marlo met with the school board in camera, in the teacher’s lounge again. She presented the findings of her interviews with the kids and made her recommendations.

  “I want to know,” the second woman on the board, Amy Sibra, said, “if there was sexual abuse involved or not. And if there was, I want to know exactly who did what.”

  Marlo’s report had not been crystal clear on that point, she knew, but her vagueness had been deliberate. “I can’t say for sure, Mrs. Sibra, if a sexual assault occurred. The testimony was inconsistent. But that’s not my purview. That’s a question to be answered by trained investigators and maybe jury. Our job is to determine if something inappropriate happened, if it threatened—and that’s a key word, ‘threatened’—the safety and well-being of the kids on that bus, who we’re in charge of when they’re in school activities. And, if there was a threat, we’re charged with defining what an appropriate punishment might be.”

  “I’m the mother of four children in this school system,” Amy Sibra said, “and I don’t know how any of you can look me in the eye and tell me my children are going to be safe from something like this happening again on a school bus.”

  “That’s an issue,” Marlo said. She took another long look at Amy, noticing her crossed legs and the foot rapidly tapping the air like a metronome for some long-buried neuroses. She couldn’t remember Amy being so animated in the first meeting. Marlo turned to Brad Martin. “Anybody want to address it?”

  “You’ve got four kids in school, Amy,” Brad, who seemed put out by having to argue his points, said, “Has anything ever happened to any of them?”

  “Not yet,” Amy shot back. “But I wouldn’t let my eighth-grader get on a bus with your son.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Brad said, sudden anger whipping his words. “That’s unfuckingcalled for. My boy’s as good and decent a kid as there is in this whole goddamned town. What has happened to you people? All of a sudden I’m surrounded by a bunch of snowflakes. ”

  “Snowflake!” Dotty Lantner said. Marlo thought she might come out of her chair. “I’ve never been a goddamned liberal in my life.”

  “Well, you’re sure acting like one.”

  Dotty pinched her cigarette between two fingers and jabbed at Brad. “Don’t you ever make a personal attack at me like that, Brad Martin. Don’t you ever!”

  A fraught silence held the room still. Marlo was afraid to break it. Here, she thought, was a bloc coalescing. There was Brad Martin and the truck driver, Josh Danreuther, on the other side. Nathan Merrill was going to be the swing vote, and he was keeping his mouth shut, watching with interest how Brad answered the questions.

  Dotty muttered, “Goddamned snowflake. Jesus. I don’t want kids to get raped on the school bus, and now I’m a liberal.”

  “Nobody got raped on the school bus,” Brad said. “That’s not what we’re talking about.”

  “It is what we’re talking about,” Amy said. “You just aren’t listening.”

  “Oh you fu … you women, I see what’s happening,” Brad said. “You got together and clucked like a bunch of hens and now you’re going to take it out on those boys. Because you”—he pointed at Dotty—“are still pissed about your nephew who couldn’t get his fat lard ass off the bench and onto the field, and you”—the finger swinging to Amy—“are stupid enough to let her talk you into it. That’s fucking great.”

  “Brad, uh, you’re letting this get a little personal,” Marlo said. “It’s inappropriate.”

  “And you’re siding with them. Woman power. Beautiful. You all are just beautiful.”

  “Well, aren’t you a whole mouthful of nothin’?” Dotty said, looking right at Brad.

  Marlo saw Brad make the slightest lurch, but he said nothing more. “Okay, maybe we all take a deep breath. Relax. Step back,” she said. “There are some things we don’t know …”

  Brad interrupted her. “If I cared about all the things you don’t know in the world, I’d die of a broken heart.”

  “Brad!” Marlo said harshly. “We hear you. We have business and we have decisions and you don’t have to like any of us, but you have to help us reach these decisions. Got it? Business now.”

  For the next forty minutes, Marlo managed to guide the conversation through a series of questions designed to point the group toward decisions. But by seven o’clock, the voting blocs had settled into hunched silences, Nathan Merrill had said nothing to tip his hand, and when they filed out of the room, Marlo had no idea how the public meeting would turn out. It was exciting, she thought, but, like all exciting things, a little bit terrifying.

  * * *

  By the time Josie arrived at the gym with her parents, two camera crews lit small circles where reporters did stand-ups and tried to snag interviews. But the citizenry of Dumont was more reluctant to talk on camera now. Even the school kids, some of whom could not contain their desire to be on TV, spoke with a measured sense of what people should know about their town. Again, Josie sat with Matt and Jared.

  Her parents sat in the same row, on the other side of Jared. The Brunners sat on the bench right behind Matt. On the floor, Brad Martin opened the meeting by saying they were here to discuss what had happened on the school bus last Saturday and to determine if any punishment should be handed out. The way he said punishment pumped up Brad’s faction in the stands. Josie could feel the energy roll through. She heard Gary Brunner say, loudly enough for anybody to hear, “That’s bullshit.” Her own father looked at her, his eyes beseeching, as if to ask, do you see what’s right here?

  But she didn’t
. Josie felt more confused than ever. She wanted it to be okay for her brother and for Matt. But if the school board all turned to her and said, “Josie Frehse, you cast the final vote—what do you say?” she could not say. Beyond certain leanings she could have already guessed, nothing seemed apparent. Is this, she wondered, how important decisions always get made? What happened to decisive leaders? Where were Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont when you needed them?

  Dotty Lantner said, “Let’s go, Brad.”

  Brad looked at her. It was clear he didn’t want to go. He wanted to work the crowd some more.

  “Right now we’re going to open the meeting to public comment before voting, so if any of you have any comments on the information that you know nothing about,” Brad said, “please come forward and express your valid opinions.”

  Josie could see what he was doing, but also saw how it failed. She wondered if Matt or Jared would go down and take the microphone. A few football boosters stepped up and talked about the players and what good kids they were. Carson Hovland’s father stood up and said, “These kids have a chance to make history, to win a state championship. Don’t take that away from them. You know me. I’ve never been big into athletics or anything like that until my son got involved. But I’ve seen what it’s done for him. It’s done a lot of good. It’s built his character. He didn’t have nothing to do with what happened. Why would you take something so great away from him?”

  The next speaker, a football mother, said, “These are our boys. Our boys from our town. You know these boys. Sure, they got up to some shenanigans, like boys do. But they’re good boys. I’d let any of them take my daughter out on a date. Why are we going to punish these kids? Why aren’t we punishing the kids coming off that reservation who are selling dope and stealing and causing real trouble?” This brought whoops and a round of applause.

  The last speaker surprised Josie. It was Jenny Calhoun, whom Josie had never known to involve herself in anything that required taking sides. She had small children, still in grade school, a boy and a girl, Josie remembered. She noticed how the room fell silent for Jenny. “One last thing I want you to think about,” Jenny said talking directly to the board members. “What if that had been a girl on the bus last Saturday night? What if those boys had taken one of your daughters or granddaughters or nieces and taped her up so she couldn’t struggle, and then did these things to her? How many of you would be defending what happened then? That’s all I want to ask you to think about.”