by Jeff Hull
Well, dead people want out of hell. Mikie had sent a DM through Instagram, his new secret way of contacting her. “Sorry about last night,” he’d written, “but your boyfriend makes me feel bad about you.” He makes me feel bad about me, too.
That Mikie, what a weirdo. And then her food came and while she ate the door to the bar opened, and Mikie’s mother walked through it. Josie immediately dropped her eyes back to her phone, but Caroline Jensen had seen her. She knew that. She was going to have to look up again and pretend to just notice her and then say hi and be friendly.
What she really hoped was that Mikie wasn’t walking through that door next. Josie chewed some fries, scrolled through some more Snapchat videos. But she was sick of the food now and just wanted to leave, to go home and go to bed. She pushed her stool back, dug some bills from her wallet to leave on the table—she knew how much cheese fries cost—and wandered over to where Mrs. Jensen sat at a Keno machine, a short glass full of ice and clear liquid in her hand.
“Hi, Mrs. Jensen,” she said.
Mikie’s mother looked her over, taking her time. “Well, hello there.”
“Having any luck?”
“Luck?” she seemed to be scoffing. “Luck is for young people.” Caroline’s tongue sat forward in her mouth, filled up space behind her teeth.
“Well,” Josie said, “I just wanted to say hi.”
“Hi, then,” Caroline Jensen said. She kept looking at Josie, looking her up and down like she was trying to figure something out about her.
But Caroline Jensen already knew everything she needed to know about the Josie Frehses of the world. Caroline had known plenty of those girls when she was younger—knew several still. Pretty girls. The world an oyster.
Boys to be toyed with. They had the singing sword, the beauty and untarnished sexuality. This girl, Caroline could already tell, was going to wreck her boy. She wasn’t a terrible girl, and it probably wasn’t all her fault that she inspired the kinds of hard-ons that drained the thinking juice from men’s brains. She was actually sort of nice. But it didn’t matter.
She had the singing sword. And she swung it around, oblivious to whom it gashed. Caroline could see that Josie was about to turn away, leave. “Hey,” she said. “How are things in school?”
“They’re fine,” Josie said.
“Can I ask you something serious?”
“Sure.”
“Why is your boyfriend always on my boy?”
She watched Josie take a step toward the door, an unchecked instinct, before she gathered herself and said, “That’s really complicated. I don’t even know. I gotta go, Mrs. Jensen. I haven’t even been home from basketball practice yet.”
Caroline caught the shift in Josie’s demeanor when she mentioned Matt Brunner, saw there was something she hadn’t known before. She might not have cottoned to the scope, but she had been a beaten woman, and she recognized a girl in that trap. Maybe he hadn’t started yet, but he would. Caroline saw that Josie knew it, too.
“Hey, kid,” she said. Josie looked at her. “Misery is optional.”
Caroline liked the way that hit the girl. Josie had been leaving, but now stood there.
“You ever need to talk,” Caroline said, “I know I don’t look like it, but I know some things. I’ve been through some things. You know what I’m saying?”
Josie wouldn’t want to admit to herself that she did know what Caroline was saying. And that was fine. Caroline felt better just having offered. She felt better knowing that Josie had a problem.
Life just got a new layer for that girl. And that Matt Brunner … Caroline only hoped her son would stay out of that disaster, though it was clear as day that he was trying hard to walk straight into it.
* * *
Friday Josie went home after school, before the Whitewater scrimmage. She was far less nervous about the game than she was about walking in the door of her family’s house. She was stunned to find Matt Brunner’s pickup parked behind the house. She almost turned her truck around and left. But she couldn’t think of where she might go. It’s my house, she thought. Nothing bad could happen here. She heard their voices first.
Then a laughter, the laughter, the way they were allowed to laugh, boys like Matt and Jared. The way those boys laughed when they scored a touchdown on Madden or shot a coyote or made some stupid sex-with-a-cow joke. Not excited. Just steady and assured and in-the-know. Matt and her father and Jared sat around the kitchen table. Josie walked in, didn’t say anything. She swung her backpack off her shoulder and let it hang from her hand and looked at them all. She was pausing only for a moment, then heading for her room.
“Jos.” Her father. Now everybody went solemn. In preparation, she thought, to become devout hypocrites. Jared pushed himself away from the table and said, “I’ve got homework.”
“Jos,” her father said, “I think Matt came over to say some things to you.”
“To be really honest, Dad, I’m not interested in hearing what Matt has to say right now.”
Her father looked at Matt as if challenging him to clear that bar. Matt had gone from his swaggering self-assuredness to some sort of choirboy imitation. He sat with his hands clasped in front of him on the table. Josie wondered if that was what he had done as a young boy when he’d been in trouble. Nothing about it was cute. Matt said, “Josie, I’m sorry I got a little excited the other night. I overreacted. I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry. But there was a lot going on, and you had something to do with it.”
Josie had no desire to argue with Matt Brunner. She wanted to figure out what her mother had told her dad. Her father seemed comfortable with the apology that was being offered.
“Dad,” Josie said, “do you know what Matt’s apologizing about?”
Cal Frehse checked with Matt, then said, “I think Matt feels a little embarrassed about the way he acted, and he’s trying to apologize for that.”
“Do you know what ‘the way he acted’ was, Dad? Do you know what he did when he got ‘a little excited’?”
“Josie,” Matt said.
“I don’t need to be drawn into the nitty-gritty of your relationship to know that you kids have been dating for a long time and it would be a shame to throw that all away over one misunderstanding.”
“So, you think I should just calm down and be a good girl?” Josie whirled so her backpack wound up on her shoulder. She pointed at Matt. “Ask him. I dare you.” She slowly walked out of the room. Just before she turned to go down the stairs to her room, she lifted her shirt, feeling the cool air on the bruised streaks scuffing her ribs. “Ask him what he did.”
* * *
The open prairie never failed to fill Tom up, to take him away from what he was and put him where he belonged on the earth. When he swung the truck north, a sudden distance opened and he could see ranks of clouds that were over Canada, growing smaller as they receded, unabated and limitless, toward the far north. The land close at hand spun by, but the distance sat motionless on a neverland horizon.
All day long it was the workings of the sky that drew the eye, but in evening you looked down, too. Shadow pointed up the high contrast, drew the curves of the land, bringing the ground alive. Tom thought it was amazing what a little darkness can do for light. He pulled onto lane of the farm he was going to hunt, drove past the round bales protected by a high fence and then the huge pile of tires, decades of driving discarded in a heap.
In the coulee bottom the melting surface held a billion dirty little dimples, the reflections of wind currents. Scout was crazed, charging toward the stiff, magenta brushstrokes of old willow. He had wanted to watch the boys’ and girls’ basketball scrimmages, but too many days of inactivity could blow Scout’s circuits.
Plus he was still trying not to be idle, trying not to think about why Jenny could change where his life went. Because that would be a good thing, right? Any change Jenny represented would be one toward an overcoming of aloneness. An unfreezing.
Movement. The so-muc
h-all-at-once of her surprised him and made him think differently about what he should be doing. He thought he should be spending more time getting to know her children. He wanted to spend whole nights with her. He wanted to learn her house, and how to base routines from it. He wanted to see how his dog would get along with her cats. And football?
What of that? Because if he stayed here with Jenny, he would not coach football again. He knew that. Maybe they would let him. Maybe David Cates would ask him to. But he was done. The way everything ended had pulled his string. Slab Rideg had coached so perfectly, he deserved the chance to move the program forward. Dumont would be in good hands. But hadn’t football been Tom’s whole life?
And what if it was? Was there something better than that, something more? Since football had gone away, Tom was pouring his energy into teaching. He wasn’t surprised that discussing extracurricular reading with kids like Mikie LaValle brought him pleasure, but he was surprised by how much it did. Maybe he could become a good teacher, the kind the kids talked about, instead of the cruise teacher teaching the snooze class. He could work at it, get better.
Stay in Dumont and teach and see what sort of life might emerge. Tom tromped through the snow, watching the waggling butt of his small dog out in front of him. Scout ran across a swale of winter-dead buckbrush in front of a tall clay-fronted cutbank. At this age, you don’t wait and wait and judge and think. You choose and act and move. Or you should.
He hadn’t for a long while. The dog’s body folded around itself in midleap at almost the exact same time that a flock of Huns showered skyward. Two dozen buzz-beating sets of wings, two dozen courses leaping away with delicate haste in precisely parallel arcs. It looked too easy, so many targets all tightly grouped. They were even swinging from his left to right.
Tom knew by now you had to pick a bird. You had to single one out. Best to pick a lead bird, so if you miss you get a second shot at a trailer. Pick a bird, shoot it, pick another, shoot it, try for the third. Stay calm. Locate and swing. Locate and swing. Locate and swing. Boom. Boom.
Boom. Three birds dropped. He’d done everything right, all by instinct. If he’d had time to think about it … who knew? Tom felt elated. A triple. A rare occurrence. But he needed to know what Scout had seen. She was already circling near the first bird. She’d find that one. He didn’t know if she’d watched the second and third. He paused to scoop up the small dead feathered pile Scout was nosing, then started running to where he thought the second bird fell. “Dead bird,” he said. “Dead bird!” He swept his hand back and forth, palm down, and Scout knew what that meant. Within five minutes she’d found the Hun, and he collected it.
Now he lined up where they’d found the first bird with the second and tried to extrapolate where the third might be. He jogged and called to Scout, trying to jazz her up again. She ran and looked up at him, ran and looked up, not certain she believed him. When he slowed to a walk and swept his hand around and yelled, “Dead bird!” she hunted and sniffed, arced and circled, scrubbing the snow with her nose. But the brush was much thicker here, and the truth was, while Tom was pretty sure he’d killed all three birds, the third would have been on the outer edge of his shotgun’s range.
Maybe he’d stunned it and it hit the ground running. They searched for a long time, Tom walking in spirals, Scout working in sweeps. The snow was too crystalline to hold tracks from such a light creature. There should have been a feather, a drop of blood, but they found nothing. The longer they looked, the further Tom’s mood fell. The thought of a Hun or a pheasant on the ground in the night, carrying a shot-fractured leg or dragging a broken wing, always made him sick to his stomach.
They hunted for forty-five minutes for the third Hun. He had lost Scout’s faith by then. She quit trying so hard and as the sun slipped against the sky and purpled up the clouds, Tom realized he was going to have to quit, too. He hated thinking of that wounded bird, full of adrenaline and huddled under a buckbrush, hoping … what?
That it froze to death before a coyote got it? He’d put that bird in a bad place. And so they’d walked back in the gathering dark in a sullen silence. Scout trotted along beside him, checking in every few seconds, but finding no response she could do anything with. Which made going to the bar seem even more inevitable.
* * *
Josie came out on fire, and for a long while felt great. Felt awesome. Felt unstoppable. She was furious at her father and furious at her mother and wanted to show Matt Brunner who he’d kicked. She wanted to punish someone, and the one person the world let her have her way with was whoever tried to guard her. The gym was more crowded than she’d have guessed for a scrimmage. Farmers were not terrifically busy once the winter wheat was in, and the girls’ games started late enough for ranchers to mostly get their chores done. The gym was a warm place away from a scouring cold wind.
Before the suspensions of Matt and Alex Martin and Waylon Edwards, the boys’ basketball team had been favored for a deep run in the state tournament. The girls’ team still was. Ainsley Martin was a cheerleader in the fall, but played basketball in the winter. She was fast and she could shoot. Jocelyn Aarstad, runty Wyatt’s cousin, was five feet ten with soft hands and a big body, and she could pivot. And then there was Josie.
Against Whitewater, when Josie brought the ball up the court the first time, she paid no attention to the play swirling around her. She didn’t care about running the offense. She just wanted to see how badly she could beat the girl in front of her. Josie didn’t know the girl’s name—some new kid that she hadn’t faced last year. She just saw the girl’s high, tight black ponytail and her fervid slashing of hands and hyper little footsteps. Josie brought the ball up at a loose trot, no hurry, a little head fake here, a shimmy there, seeing what the girl was biting on.
She must be some kind of prospect, if she’s a sophomore and they’re sticking her on me. Either that or Whitewater had nobody, which was a possibility given the size of the school. Their bench held only three players. Josie brought the ball to the right wing, paused, and twirled her hand signal to start her teammate’s motion. She had no intention of passing the ball. She dribbled almost lazily, pretending to watch for a pass she could make. Instead she observed the girl in front of her and listened to the short squeals of shoes on the court as players pivoted around her. She loved that sound.
It placed her where she wanted to be. Where she was good, felt good. The Whitewater guard looked so serious. Josie swung a shoulder fake like she was about to dribble-pass to her left, cross court, but kept her dribble alive, jab-stepped left, crossed over right, and drove three steps.
The girl guarding her fell down. Josie launched a fifteen-footer that splashed in. Next time she’d let her teammates play. Because right now she knew everything she needed to know about the girl guarding her. By the end of the first quarter, Whitewater rotated their shooting guard over to double-team Josie, which was fine with her. The first three times they did it, Josie blasted through the double team, just to let them know she could.
But rotating the guard over left Ainsley Martin open almost every time down the court and Josie assisted Ainsley on her way to a career-high scoring night. But mostly Josie kept beating whoever guarded her and pouring in points. Her overly enthusiastic defense fouled her out early in the fourth quarter. By then Dumont was up by twenty-six, so it wasn’t a tragedy. Still, instead of congratulating her effort, Coach Bury stared her down as she came off the floor, and then kept openly gazing at her while she sat on the bench. He wasn’t shooting daggers.
He was serving up question marks. Josie shrugged, draped a towel over her head, and stared at her shoes for most of the rest of the game. She went through some feeling sorry for the new Whitewater guard, who was probably a nice ranch girl—not much wheat that far north—and probably worked hard and had cows and ballbuster parents and she had walked into something she didn’t know anything about. Josie thought a little about not being the best teammate, too, because she had been so wrapped up
in trying to prove … what?
Something to herself, maybe, something about her value, about her ability and what it could mean. Although that fell flat even in her mind’s ear. Because here she was, after lighting everybody up all night, and nothing had changed. There was still outside in the cold a Matt she could not abide, and right here in the gym a pair of parents who could not understand, and all around her a town she could not please. No matter what happened next, the way people thought of her was going to change. She would be the girl who walked away from Matt Brunner. Thinks she’s too good for him.
Or she’d be another girl who stayed with a guy who owned her. They’re a cute couple but he sure knows how to keep her in her place, don’t he? And so even the sheer release of performing on the court fluttered out to nothing she could hold onto, a plume of wheat chaff swirled away by the wind. Afterward in the locker room, after all the talk about playing better together as a team, Coach Bury caught her by the elbow and asked her to come into his office across the hall and then dragged her there so she didn’t have to answer.
He leaned against the small desk in the office, crossed his arms across his chest, and said, “Josie, if there’s something you need to talk about, I want you to know you can talk to me.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Josie said.
“How long have I been coaching you?” He’d been coaching her since she was a kid, got the bump up to varsity coach the year before she was a freshman. “I just want you to feel like if you need to talk to someone, I can be someone safe that you can trust. You trust me, don’t you?” he said.
“Sure,” Josie said, but if you think I’m talking to you about anything personal you’re out of your skinny little mind. “I’m fine, Coach.”