Broken Field

by Jeff Hull

  The Absarokee defensive end was buying, hustling like mad to beat Jared to the corner. Then Jared cut upfield inside him. He had the kid beat. But Jared’s plant foot slipped in the mud and he found himself straddled over cleats that were splitting far apart from each other. He put his hand down to stop himself, and while he hovered there, defenseless, the defensive lineman found his bearings and blasted him. Jared hung onto the ball, but came out of the game.

  The kids always said when someone got hit that hard they’d have cartoon X’s for eyeballs. On the next play there was no decoy. Johnny Baken dropped back to throw the ball, and it was exactly what Absarokee anticipated. Absarokee defenders dropped back into coverage. But Slab was faking again. Baken took off on a planned run. The receivers blocked.

  Baken ran into open field, but this, Tom knew, would eventually happen: Johnny Baken was a sophomore and he would play like one. He ran down the field with the football gripped in one hand like a cheeseburger. The Absarokee safety lunged, swiped, and swatted the ball loose. An Absarokee player trailing the play landed on it. Absarokee scored three plays later to take a 63–48 lead.

  Jared Frehse returned to the game to field the ensuing kickoff. He caught the ball, ran five yards, got hit, seemed to be going down, but the contact spun him completely around. Unspiraling, taking several steps forward with a hand jabbing down to keeping him from torpedoing into the ground, Jared managed to get over his feet and ran straight up the wide-open field to score. Dumont converted for two points.

  Now they trailed by seven. Tom found himself wishing for the things that he knew would not happen—a late-game fumble, an interception. He watched the Absarokee coach, and old adversary and friend, take time off the clock, running up the middle, picking up first downs with quick outs when he needed to. The afternoon waned.

  It seemed to happen quickly. Light slipped like hope from the sky. The pickup trucks surrounding the field switched their headlights on. The home crowd voice seemed to grow hoarse, or just lost. Absarokee had a first down on Dumont’s fifteen-yard line. Tom watched Jared Frehse standing with his hands on his hips, chin on his chest, staring at the ground, breathing with his mouth open. He saw Carson Hovland line up over his receiver, fingers curling into fists and springing open again. Johnny Baken was too close to the line of scrimmage. Tom could see that if Absarokee called the right play, Dumont was burned.

  He nearly ran onto the field, screaming, Time out!—before he remembered he couldn’t anymore. He nearly yelled at Slab to call time out. But he’d given up that right. Then Absarokee snapped the ball. The entire Dumont defense blitzed.

  Everybody. Tom couldn’t believe it. It was either the boldest or the craziest call he’d ever seen a coach make. The linebackers did beautiful, ballet-like stunts where they each took a step back and then looped into each other’s places, causing confused offensive linemen to lunge and miss. The whole Dumont defensive backfield charged. All the Absarokee quarterback had to do was stay cool. All he had to do was keep his feet settled and light.

  All he had to do was float one pass into the darkening blue of sky. Toward anybody. There were no defenders in coverage. His receivers were wide open with clear shots to the end zone. The Absarokee quarterback was an athletic small-town high school kid with a decent enough arm. But he was no football genius. And when he saw crimson and blue jerseys pouring through the line, sprinting from the corners, he panicked and tried to scramble from the pocket. He sprinted directly into the path of a hard-charging Carson Hovland. He tried to throw it at the last second.

  Hovland hit him and Jared Frehse hit him at almost the exact same moment. The quarterback’s throwing motion continued, fractured, even as he fell backward, and the ball sailed up almost straight into the air. Johnny Baken caught it and was smart enough to fall on it. Or he was falling already.

  Either way, the crowd erupted again and Dumont had the ball. They had sixty-five yards to cover and less than two minutes to cover it, but they had done something every coach everywhere wanted their kids to do. They’d not given up.

  They’d believed in the chances their efforts could bring them. Dumont ran the Six on their first play. Jared Frehse made his cut and somehow managed to run twenty yards before being dragged down from behind. Tom was ecstatic. He’d never seen Jared caught from behind, but he’d never seen one player exert so much will during one game. Slab pulled Jared for a play, called a quick out that Johnny Baken overthrew. Jared returned as a decoy, which let Johnny Baken run for nine more yards.

  On the next play, Slab called the Six again, Jared taking the ball on the pitch, sprinting to the corner. He faked an inside cut and froze the defensive end, then ran around him to the outside.

  The far-side safety closed on an angle. Jared held a stiff arm out, caught the safety’s helmet with his hand, and shoved. The safety’s head bent back and he skidded onto the mud. But this was the kind of thing that happened on muddy days with high school kids, the kind of thing that defined coaching careers: the Absarokee safety slapped one of Jared’s feet.

  On a dry field, if he hadn’t run for over two hundred yards already, if he weren’t playing on sheer will, Jared might have recovered—Tom had seen him do it probably a hundred times. But on this field, on this day, when he staggered to try to stay upright, Jared’s right foot clipped his left and slipped when it found the ground. Then his left foot slid out from under him, and he was going down. He held the ball out, lunging for the goal line. The ground gave him nothing. He fell flat.

  And this, Tom saw, was how you lose. Jared had gained enough yardage for a first down, which stopped the clock. They had one more shot from sixteen yards out. Tom looked at Jared, his fingers interlaced on top of his helmet, mouth agape, a sort of shock on his face that it wasn’t over yet. Tom thought: What a beautiful football player. He had no idea what kind of life Jared would one day have.

  He didn’t know if Jared would even play for a college team. But here, in this season and in this game, Jared Frehse had played harder and better and more beautifully than anything Tom had ever seen.

  Exhausted, probably injured, Jared had formed on this field a piece of the man he would someday be. Before the game ended, Tom understood it. He hoped Jared would one day, and that it wouldn’t take him too long, wouldn’t ruin too many other things before he figured out how he had done it. Johnny Baken walked from the huddle to his spot under center, his feet crossing over each other like a drunk’s.

  On the sideline, Slab Rideg’s hands extended in front of his chest like he was trying to grasp an unreasonably heavy invisible object. Tom could see him trying to say something—the right thing—and confounding himself to silence. Down the sideline from Tom, Brad Martin stood with his arms folded across his chest, silently furious about everything in front of him. Tom’s eyes slid to the field, patches of yellow mostly submerged by dark mud, the center of the field churned. He wished he could feel it on his feet.

  So much of his life had happened with field grass under his feet, green grass, white lines. But he could clearly see his distance from this field, the dozen or so steps he would have to take just to reach the Dumont sideline. Open space he was no longer able to cover.

  He heard Baken bark under center. Heard that clatter of pads and the grunts of effort. Baken pitched the ball to Jared, the play everybody knew was coming. The whole Absarokee defense knew it was coming and sold out to attack Jared. Jared made a ridiculous jump-cut toward the edge. Tom couldn’t believe the kid still had enough leg strength, but that’s what Jared always did—headed in one direction and then suddenly bounced out, landing in a different spot, on a different vector than anybody could have anticipated, usually with nobody near him.

  This time four Absarokee players drove toward him. Jared fought like a wild animal, throwing them off with his arms, gnashing the ground with his legs. Then a fifth and sixth Absarokee defender crashed into the pile. Jared would not go down, his legs driving. He bucked and twisted and thrashed, but the pile of Absarokee
defenders shoved him backward into his own backfield and then the whistles started blowing, Jared still on his feet, still trying to charge even as he was thrust backward, and the whistle blew enough that the Absarokee players let go of him and ran across the field with their arms upraised and Jared, finally unencumbered, quit trying to run and tossed the ball aside and turned and ripped his chin strap loose and started walking the other way down the field, and it was over.

  The game was over and Jared’s career with the Wolfpack was over and Tom watched him walking away from something he’d known a long, long time. For a stretched moment, Tom heard the sudden quiet of the afternoon, even though it was quickly broken by a scattering of cheers that seemed far away. Across what seemed like an ocean of field, a group of Absarokee fans jumped and screamed and held onto each other and shouted. The Absarokee players, looking so small, like miniatures of football players, raced onto the field and fell all over themselves. But then Tom heard something different, a deeper, stronger note.

  The Dumont fans were all staying put, all on their feet, clapping hard and shouting. Some men stuck their fingers between their teeth and loosed long, shrieking whistles. On the small section of wooden bleachers, people stomped their feet. Very quickly, the sound of the Dumont fans drowned out that of Absarokee’s victory shrieks. Tom turned and saw ranchers and farmers staring at the field and risking their stoic faces, risking wet eyes. Mothers pressed their lips together and let tears stream down their cheeks. Tom watched Slab Rideg walk across the field, hand outstretched.

  The Absarokee coach ignored the hand and wrapped Slab in a two-armed hug. The two men stood like that together for a moment, and Tom could see the Absarokee coach talking with animation into Slab’s ears, saw the Absarokee coach swat Slab on the ass with his laminated play sheet, and heard, as Slab turned and came back to his team, the crowd thundering louder, a step-change that made even Jared Frehse pull his head from his hands and regard the scene in front of him. Dumont was celebrating its children.

  Tom felt himself slip even deeper into the world he’d chosen to inhabit, the world of guts and effort and choices. He realized he was pounding his hands together so hard they hurt, stinging right down to the bones. He had not, he knew from the pangs he felt swelling into his chest, completely lost them. They were still his boys, too.

  * * *

  The party Saturday night took place at the Martins’, a split-level ranch on three acres of knoll just far enough from town to look down on it. What mattered most to the boys were the Xbox and HDTV sets in the finished basement rec room. Alex Martin, Matt Brunner, and Waylon Edwards had been rotating turns on the Xbox and drinking beer, swapping barbs about each other’s relative lack of abilities in video gaming. They had stolen the beer several months earlier from a train car that had stopped to load grain at the elevator.

  The train had idled overnight at the elevator siding and Waylon Edwards had spent some time after dark crawling around among the boxcars. When he was able to slip into a gap left by a loose locking mechanism and noticed the bounty of craft from the micro-brewery in Great Falls, Waylon had quickly called Matt and Alex and Jared, and the four of them had spent several hours in the middle of the night offloading cases and shuttling them in pickups to an abandoned homesteader shack twenty miles north of town where, in better weather, they hung out and shot gophers.

  They had stolen almost sixty cases of beer, lifting them from the middle of the car so that, at a casual glance from the outside, there had been no apparent molestation of the cargo. They’d stacked hay bales around the beer and covered it in blankets against the cold. The great train robbery had occurred in early August and they had been enjoying the beer in select moments, rationing it, ever since. Though it was an open secret at the high school that the booty existed—even its whereabouts were broadly known—nobody seemed interested in stealing from the thieves, who were anyway fairly liberal about distribution of their product.

  The boys had thirty cases left, and this Saturday afternoon seemed like the kind of day that hijacked beer was made for. Though many bottles had exploded during the cold snap, the bales and blankets protected enough for one last party. The boys spent a great deal of time drinking it and playing Madden and comparing themselves to the artificial players on the screen.

  “Can’t stop talent,” Alex Martin said, as his avatar juked around Matt’s and scored.

  “But you can outwork it,” Waylon said, a crude imitation mocking the source of the sentiment, Coach Warner.

  “Warner is rearview mirror, dude,” Matt said. “I just want to forget I ever saw that bastard’s sad face. It’s hoops season now.”

  Matt had called Josie to come over, and she had said she would later. Ainsley Martin and Britnee Mattoon were also coming, and anybody else they told who wanted to. Cell phones were deployed. Even as they sat, word was sizzling around town. Alex and Ainsley’s parents had planned to watch the playoff game and then were off to Missoula for several days to visit relatives.

  “You pissed at Coach?” Waylon asked.

  “Fuck Coach,” Matt spit back. “Guy ruined my fucking career.”

  “That was a hell of a lot of work,” Alex Martin said, “just to be over.”

  “We were gonna win, too,” Matt said. “We were gonna crush Wibaux …”

  “They almost beat Absarokee without any of us,” Alex said.

  “… and then we were gonna beat Drummond. We could have gone anywhere we wanted, after that.”

  “And we don’t even get to try,” Alex said. “Because of such a stupid reason.”

  “I don’t hold nothing against Wyatt,” Matt said. “What’s fun is fun, you know. It’s not his fault. But Coach Warner, man, he sold us out.”

  “And he played,” Alex said, as if this were the crowning stupidity. “He did the same shit. I know he did. Things aren’t that different in Winnett or Jordan, or whatever butt town he’s from. He did everything we did.”

  “Warner sucks,” Matt agreed.

  “The whole school sucks,” Alex said. “That shitbag Dotty Lantner—like she doesn’t have something to prove because somebody gave her nephew a browneye last year.”

  “That was Pete Dodd that gave him the browneye,” Waylon said. “I remember that. I was laying low, afraid they were coming for me next.”

  “Pud?” Alex said.

  Matt barked out a laugh. “Ol’ Pud couldn’t put the brakes on in time.”

  They all laughed.

  “That was one of the nastiest things I’ve ever seen,” Waylon said.

  “He browneyed me the year before,” Alex said. “Kept it tucked, though.”

  “Cost us our season, boys,” Matt said. “Right there—Pete Dodd and his untucked sphincter.”

  They all looked at each other, unable to decide what to make of it. “That’d be really funny if it wasn’t true,” Alex said.

  “True doesn’t make it not funny,” Matt said, “No use warming beer about it.” He scooted his bottle over his head, upended it, and drained the contents into his open mouth, swallowing hard to keep up. Some of the beer spilled over his cheeks, but most of it went down his throat. He belched explosively, wiped the back of his forearm across his mouth, and left in its wake a broad, beaming grin. Matt looked ready to will himself to say to hell with it all, an old trick.

  * * *

  Mikie LaValle was sitting in his room, staring at his computer screen. His avatar had just reached a new level, and while in the past this sort of feat of virtual derring-do had made playing the game what it was, now it felt less than thrilling. The truth was Mikie had once spent most of his time playing World of Warcraft and he still did, but not with quite the verve. The funny thing that had happened to Mikie LaValle was an awareness that what went on around him wouldn’t go away when he escaped into the cyber void any longer.

  Like many confused teenagers before him, Mikie had taken refuge in books, usually fantastic novels involving outrageous fortune and vengeance, not unlike the video ga
mes he played. But as of quite recently his fascination turned to history—specifically the history of the Metis people, the Riel Rebellion and Gabriel Dumont. The county library was predictably short on books about the Metis, but Mikie had borrowed books from Coach Warner and immersed himself. And yet even the fascination with a lost people—a culture of relatively recent invention, created by the clash of Indian and white blood he felt coursing through his veins—could not distract him from something that was becoming painfully, painfully obvious.

  He could not stop thinking about Josie Frehse. So on a cold Saturday afternoon in November, Mikie’s attention drifted from Warcraft. He thought for a little while about why she was so nice to him, nicer than anybody else in school was. He wondered what that could possibly mean for him. Did she like him? There was no way she was going to dump Matt Brunner because she liked him. But Brunner had done some dumb things now—not any dumber than a whole litany of experiences Mikie had with Matt, he thought, but dumb in the eyes of public opinion, even the eyes of jock-crazed Dumont—and maybe that made Josie reconsider.

  And maybe in the reconsidering, she would consider him, and maybe … and soon he found himself drifting off to imaginings about how Josie would come to him and tell him that she’d been thinking a lot about him and how she wanted to try it with him, and see what it would be like. And in a not too sluggardly pace, those imaginings became infiltrated by adolescent hormones and flourished with lust. The fact that he had never actually done the things he began to envision doing with Josie made playing out the fantasy difficult, so he concentrated on a few words from her, a few reactions he ascribed to her.

  Soon this was not enough, and he wanted to hear her voice, although that could be a delicate risk. If she did not talk to him in the sweet, approving and somewhat longing voice he imagined for her, his day would begin to pool. He knew this from other experiences of having fantasized about how she was starting to like him, how she was wanting to be with him, and then actually talking to her only to find out that Josie was not spending a lot of her time imagining their life together.