Broken Field

by Jeff Hull

  * * *

  On Sunday, the day after Dumont lost their last football game of the season, Josie lay in the half-sleep before sunrise, knowing she could sleep more if she wanted because it was Sunday, but so used to waking this early. And then she heard the shots. They weren’t loud, just pops—one followed by a loud squeal, and then a moment of quiet and then another pop, but Josie knew gunshots when she heard them. By the time she had pulled a coat over her shoulders, slipped into her muck boots, and headed outside still in her plaid flannel pajama bottoms, Jared had started up his pickup and was backing it toward the barn.

  Josie raised her hands in the air, a gesture of question. But as soon as she saw Jared ram the pickup into park, then sit with his hands on the wheel staring out the glass in front of him, she knew what had happened. Hot exhaust streamed from the tailpipe into the cold morning. The frost hadn’t completely cleared from his windshield yet. Josie walked to the passenger door and opened it.

  “You did it?” she asked.

  He didn’t speak. He pressed his lips together hard.

  “Do you want some help?”

  Jared shrugged. His eyes brimmed with tears that hadn’t fallen yet. Josie legged up into the truck. The shotgun lay across the crew seat. Jared dropped the transmission into reverse and Josie felt the truck settle under her. Looking out through the windshield, she could see her father standing in the window of the house, a cup of coffee in his hand, watching them.

  “Sorry,” Josie said softly.

  “Dad was right,” Jared said. “I couldn’t breed them. I’ll be gone next year. It wouldn’t be fair.”

  He backed the pickup around behind the barn and then up against the pig pen. They both got out and Jared dropped the tailgate with a clang. He shoved open the gate in the pen. The two bodies lay in motionless humps. First they grabbed Chops by his legs and heaved him up onto the bed of the truck with a whump. He was heavy and awkward, like a sack of grain with a spine in it. They did the same with pretty pink Carnitas, her head a bouquet of gore, swinging and smacking against Jared’s leg when they heaved. Jared climbed into the bed of the pickup and hauled on the corpses so they weren’t on top of each other.

  “Where are you taking them?” Josie asked. Jared dropped down out of the bed, turned and slammed the tailgate shut.

  “That guy in Havre,” he said.

  “Is he there? Does he know you’re coming?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll hang around until he is.”

  “Want company?”

  “Sure.” They didn’t say anything else. Jared drove and the pickup rolled over miles of highway, rolling past wheat fields and coulees, past farm houses and herds of cattle. Josie stared out the window, knowing Jared would talk when it was okay to. Until then she noted for the ten thousandth time how, when the wheat rows were perpendicular to the highway, the lines of stubble seemed to converge far away on the distant horizon, and thought about how, if she ever went to that point, they wouldn’t be any closer there than they were on this end.

  * * *

  On Monday, Josie stood in the lunch line, waiting to grab a tray full of whatever was being served. Some sort of beef, it smelled like, and she was seeing buns on people’s plates. Must be hamburger day, not her favorite. Matt would be happy. He loved hamburgers, even school hamburgers. He would pile several meat patties onto a bun and slather them with ketchup and mayonnaise and probably go for seconds. She was just glad lunch wasn’t pork. The cafeteria seemed dark and cold—Josie was wearing a hoodie to stay warm, and some girls wore their jackets. November.

  Almost Thanksgiving. The end of autumn had seemed dark and cold, more so than usual. The snow had melted to mud in most places, then the ground froze solid and it was snowing again outside. Even though it was basketball season now, her time to shine, Josie’s personal situation made it hard to relax and let Thanksgiving be Thanksgiving.

  Matt moved through the cafeteria lunch line several people ahead of her, Jared and his friends knotted around him in some dumb-looking entourage. They were afraid—afraid not to stand near him, afraid to be cast out. Sort of the same way she was afraid to walk away from their relationship. For so long, Josie had breathed in the mixture of wheat chaff, dusty soil, workout sweat, sweet beer breath, and the stale cafeteria food smells. What if, when she breathed it all out, there was nothing to breathe in again? Her mother was no help.

  Sunday morning over breakfast, when Josie and Jared had talked about Matt’s long attention-getting gallop through the darkness Saturday night, Judy Frehse had said, “I didn’t raise the kind of girl who abandons her friends because it’s easier than sticking by him.” Now Matt was smiling to Pearl Aarstad, telling her how much he loved her cooking.

  And then he slid his tray down farther, in front of Caroline Jensen, Mikie’s mom, and his eyes deadened, his face falling slack. The sudden coldness shivered through Josie as she watched. It was over in a second, Matt making some wisecrack to Jerry Brown, the dishwasher, and then ambling over to the senior table, surveying the lunchroom as he walked with his bouncy, bundle-of-muscle pop.

  Josie thought she saw him lock for a moment on Mikie LaValle, who was already seated with Wyatt Aarstad and Arlen Alderdice at their usual table, checking his phone—probably checking for a text from her. She caught herself realizing her observation could have been more about anxiety than reality.

  Except it wasn’t. Matt veered right toward Mikie’s table and, so fast that it hardly looked aggressive, snatched the phone from Mikie’s hand. Mikie thought about trying to get his phone back, lifted from his seat a bit, then sat back in it, and opted for a smug expression that wanted Matt to know he was making a fool of himself. Even from the distance she stood from them, Josie could hear Matt say the words “Metis warrior” but nothing around it.

  Mikie looked up, pretending he had the wherewithal to be properly disdainful of Matt. It didn’t help that Mikie was wearing a black T-shirt, across the front of which he had scrawled “Represent” in permanent silver marker and “Batoche” on the back. Matt stood, glowering at Mikie, fiddled with the phone until he saw something he either did or didn’t like and stood for a moment straighter. Then he bent at the waist, still holding his tray full of lunch, and lowered his face close to Mikie’s. Josie couldn’t hear what he said next, but she saw Mikie’s lip shortening into a snivel, fear laced with resentment, but also a resignation, the dog that knows it’s about to be kicked.

  He looked so weak that sympathy and revulsion fizzled against each other within her. Matt pitched the phone from close range into Mikie’s chest, and it clattered to the floor. Mikie was too paralyzed with anxiety to try to stop it. Josie caught a bit of movement coming into her vision, Mr. Potter, the math teacher, walking from the teachers’ table.

  “Matt, is there a problem?” Mr. Potter called.

  Matt turned to Wyatt Aarstad and hissed a whisper at him. Wyatt said nothing back, and as if he hadn’t heard, perhaps, stared across the lunchroom at a wall. And then Matt walked away, and it was over, whatever it was.

  Mr. Potter stopped halfway across the open floor. Matt stalked over to the senior table and sat down with Jared. Josie watched Wyatt, Arlen, and Mikie suddenly huddle.

  Matt was … he had never been easy. That’s what he wasn’t. He was not easy to figure out and there were things about him you just had to accept. She slid her tray in front of the window where Pearl Aarstad and Caroline Jensen were serving. She made a specific point of saying good morning to Mrs. Jensen.

  “Could I have a little extra corn, please?” she asked Caroline. “I love the corn.”

  “Everybody does,” Caroline said, shooting for cheerful, but Josie always felt Mrs. Jensen’s wariness around her. Josie understood why, too, and it was another step in understanding how complicated things could be.

  * * *

  On Tuesday afternoon after school Tom walked through a coulee, following Scout, when his cell phone rang. Another cold front had come through during the night and ear
ly morning and left a couple inches of new snow. Cold sharpened the brightness of the colors, made them ring against each other. The shadows of the deep coulee still held some hardened snowdrifts from last week’s storm. Tom was happily thinking about Jenny and a conversation they’d had during lunch in the teacher’s lounge. She was making a cup of coffee and asked if he wanted one. He said he did and could she add two sugars and two creams. She’d looked at him over her shoulder and said, “That’s not really a coffee, is it?”

  The way she’d said it, the familiarity of the tease. He liked it. He was as anxious for their date on Thursday as he had been for any playoff game. He did not recognize the number on his phone, and answered. The voice announced itself with a confident vigor.

  “Tom? It’s Marlo Stark.”

  Tom stopped walking then, his feet just coming to rest beside each other as if they had decided it. He stared at the shards of slopes cutting down to the coulee in front of him, brilliant in the hard glancing light, then at the furrow sunken through the landscape, clotted with thick russet and brown brush. The wheat and grass poking above the snow gave the land a gold and tan nap against a bright blue sky. He saw a harrier hovering over the hillsides, not ten feet off the ground, climbing steeply and pouring downwind before turning, and, with invisible flexes of its feathers, hanging almost completely still in the cold air a few feet above the brush.

  He found himself fascinated by how still the hawk could hover, by the power feeding that lack of motion. Then the bird tilted its wings and climbed steeply, flowed downwind, and looped back before dropping again, floating on some invisible welt of current.

  “Tom? Are you there?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry. I’m in the field. Bad reception.”

  “Are you hunting?” Marlo asked.

  “Just walking,” he said.

  “I wish I could have gone hunting with you. I would have liked that, I think,” she said. “I would have liked to have seen your dog working in the field.”

  “That,” he said, “would … have been nice.”

  “I saw you guys lost on Saturday,” she said. He wondered if that was just to let him know she was keeping up on things. “Sorry about that.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Did you go to the game?”

  “Yeah. Listen, you’re breaking up here, and I’ve got Scout running around out in front of me. I better hustle along.”

  “Okay,” Marlo said, and Tom could hear her disappointment, wondered if it was in him or in herself for having called him. She rallied some brightness into her voice to say, “I’ll probably be over there this winter for some school business. If you want to get a beer?”

  “You bet,” Tom said and clicked off the call, then shut down the phone. He had no idea where Scout was. The harrier still levitated along the edges of the coulee. Hunting by holding still.

  * * *

  The following evening after basketball practice, Josie told Matt she was going to do some extra work cleaning the church kitchen and drove instead to the reservoir. The road was slick with wind-scoured ice, and she wondered how she would explain what she was doing out here if she got stuck and had to call for help. She was there because when she had opened her history book she had found stuck in it a note, folded in a small, thick triangle.

  She had opened the note after examining it for a few moments, enjoying its presence. It had not occurred to her to be furtive, until she saw the scrawl inside. It was not every day someone received a note in school; it would be something worth speculating about for certain people—or an excuse to speculate, at any rate. The note said:

  He saw ur number in my sent calls. He said if I call u again he’ll kill me. Your man sucks Jo. He owns u. U told me we could be friends. What kind of friends is that? I thought u were honest & good, but ur just like him if u let this keep happening. Meet me at our place after practice to talk.

  “Our place” meant the reservoir, and Josie resented him appropriating it, as if by reserving a place, he could create some alternate reality in which there was a “them.” Josie had promised Mikie over and over she would be his friend, that they could talk about things, that he could call her.

  And Matt preemptively deciding they couldn’t angered her. She’d received several texts over the course of the afternoon from Matt saying, “We have to talk” and other equally strident suggestions that something very big was very wrong. But she’d managed to avoid him and told him she couldn’t tonight—first citing homework and then her responsibilities to clean the church kitchen.

  Matt would have to wait until tomorrow after practice. When he’d called, she hadn’t answered, just by way of letting him know she was royally pissed. She knew he imagined himself even more angry. He would have ginned up all manner of outrage and hurt and self-pity, would convince himself he stood firmly on higher moral ground and could unload on her with relative impunity.

  He wouldn’t see anything wrong with the way he had acted. But she was tired of people telling her things about herself. She had spent the afternoon thinking, at first urgently but then with a dreamy, finely detailed imagining, of how nice it would be to be Jared, or at least Jared’s age, and to be going off to college in the fall—not too soon, because there were friends here to miss, but soon enough that she could imagine being her own person, a person she started with and built from scratch, who reacted to things the way she wanted to, not the way she was expected to.

  She could start all over with relationships, not be in any for a while, just have her head to think what she wanted in it. There would be no Matt being Matt, and no Mikie guilting her into meeting secretly. She’d start all over and be a much better judge of character and motivation next time. Josie’s headlights swung over the barren grasslands, over hummocks of snow. She could feel her tires slide as they rotated over ice in some low spots. Please don’t let me get stuck, she kept thinking. Please, please, please. At the access pull-off, she saw no other car so she pulled in, searching for highest ground. Josie switched off the ignition and sat for a moment.

  She felt the wind shoving across the plain, rocking her car on its springs. In the moonlight, in the water not yet covered in ice, curved silver slivers pushed over the surface of the reservoir. A lot of days, when she gazed out over the miles of empty space around her, she thought about how she would miss this landscape when she was living at college somewhere on the East Coast, or in Seattle or Portland, the openness of it, the sense that you could see all of it. Tonight she found it all oppressive, all that space and nothing to do in any of it, the snow that never could remain unbroken, drifts that the wind bored scoops out of, underneath it the vale of mud and dirt.

  The door to her truck flew open then, the bright dome light shocking her as much as the sudden motion: first the sucking of the door opening her quiet cocoon to the night outside, then the thrust of Mikie stuffing himself into the passenger seat. The reek of pot followed him in.

  “What are you doing?” Josie asked without thinking.

  “Having a seat,” Mikie said. She could tell he was proud of himself about something, thinking he was clever. “I assume you’re here to see me.”

  “How did you get here?” For a moment she was struck by the horrifying notion that he had somehow stowed away in her vehicle, that things had possibly turned that weird.

  “I followed you,” he said.

  She whipped around to look for his car and spotted a glimmer of moonlight on a old sedan, parked several yards away from her rig. He apparently read the confusion on her face when she turned back and said, “I drove with my lights off. I’m getting good at it.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “You never know.”

  “You never know what?”

  “When you’re going to need to drive with your lights off,” Mikie said. His wore his pride at this skill with an unconsidered brio.

  “Mikie, what? Are you running drugs now? Or is this some ancient Metis lore about driving with your lights off?
Why do you have to be so goddamned weird all the time?” Josie regretted making the slur as soon as she had done it, wished she had settled herself before speaking.

  “I’m not being weird,” he said. “I’m being cautious. A few nights ago your boyfriend threatened to kill me if I even talk to you, if you want to remember.”

  Great, Josie thought, now Mikie had found an excuse to go all 007, a wrinkle in his persecution complex he’d probably been waiting to have triggered.

  “Matt’s not going to touch you,” Josie said, though she hoped she sounded more sure of that than she felt.

  “He’ll be sorry if he does,” Mikie said.

  A perverse part of Josie wanted ask, Oh yeah? She couldn’t imagine what Mikie thought he could do to Matt, how in any kind of physical confrontation Mikie could make Matt sorry about anything. Mikie must have read something in her expression.

  “I got a pair of brass knuckles,” he said, smug again. “Wyatt and me figured it out. If I know Matt’s coming for me, I’m going to coat my arms with Vaseline, so he can’t hold onto me. And then I’ll just keep hitting him with the brass knuckles. Bust his fucking face for him.”

  “Don’t even talk like that,” Josie said.

  “I’m not shitting,” Mikie said. He lifted his hand above the dashboard in a fist and Josie could see metallic bands looping above each of his knuckles. She’d never seen anything like this and, oddly, the brassy shimmer made her think of a wedding ring on each of his fingers. The weapon was obviously too big for his hand, but she imagined it could hurt somebody even in his fist.

  “Where’d you get that?” Josie asked.