Broken Field

by Jeff Hull

  But nothing did. She was standing there still, wrapped in her own arms, dangerously chilled—muscles tense and shivering, jaw clenched enough to hurt—but unwilling, on this night, to give up a possibility on the scale of shooting stars, when headlights bounced along the reservoir road. While she waited for the lights to come clear she kept watching scattering of pinpoints in the dome of night. Whatever came, came.

  Josie moved her head and the whole sky twirled over her. It was beautiful, she thought. There were still beautiful things. And then Mikie was walking from his car. The headlights doused, the engine ticked. His feet crunched on the snow.

  “Jos, what’s up, man?”

  “Stars right now,” Josie said. She was shivering uncontrollably.

  “Are you okay? I’m a little bit worried about you.”

  “Why would you worry about me?” Josie asked. Maybe it was the cold, she thought. Maybe she had stayed out too long in the cold in sweaty basketball clothes. She felt so strange, though, not a part of herself. Josie was down there shivering and she was a little bit above that, watching, watching this Mikie boy approach her, knowing what Mikie wanted and how he would try to get it. Josie watched it from her detached perspective and didn’t have anything to say about any of it.

  “Cuz you’re acting a little different, and I just want to make sure you’re okay,” Mikie said.

  It was peculiar, Josie thought, watching it all from her perch outside herself. Something was going to happen and the groundwork was being laid for it.

  “I’m fine,” Josie said. “Can we get in your car?”

  “Yeah. God, you’re freezing. Come on.” He put an arm over her shoulder and led her to the car, put her in the passenger seat. Why? her detached self wondered.

  “So cold,” Josie said.

  “Here,” Mikie said. He took off his jacket and pulled the warm hoodie from his own body and gave it to her. He put his coat back on over his T-shirt.

  “I’m so cold,” Josie said. She heard herself say it, knew why she was saying it. Cold, sure, but that was overcomeable. The emptiness … who knew? “I’m freezing, Mikie.”

  He started the engine, left the headlights dark, and cranked the heater so that gouts of hot air burst from the dash.

  “Why are you here?” Mikie asked. “Is it him?”

  “No,” Josie said, “But it’s always him, isn’t it. My whole life.”

  Mikie had an I-told-you-so look on his face, but to his credit didn’t say it. Instead he said, “I was just thinking, I spend so much time thinking about what it’s like to be me and how much that sucks, but just lately I’ve been thinking about what it must be like to be you. I mean, I guess it’s not as easy as it looks. I guess there’s stuff people don’t always know about.”

  She said, “It’s not easy being anybody.”

  Josie felt so cold. Mikie’s hoodie pressed the cold basketball uniform against her skin. She craved warmth. The car heaters felt faint. She wanted something to warm her full body. She tried to focus on what Mikie was saying, which was, “I want to understand you.”

  Well, hats and horns. She wanted to understand her, too. But it was a sweet gesture. She said, “I’m so cold, Mikie.”

  And from her distance she saw how nervous he was, how much he wanted but didn’t want to mess up. He put his hands out tentatively and when she didn’t notice them, he put out his arms. And then he was holding her. They did that for a while. She shivered less, though the two parts of herself did not recombine. A detached her still saw herself wrapped in this kid’s arms, still in basketball sweats, hair in a ponytail, sweat dry on her skin. The kid, her detached self could see, had no idea what he was going to do.

  But when he kissed her, she let him. And maybe then the two pieces of herself began to recombine because she realized that she could kiss him back much more ardently, but didn’t. She didn’t know if she didn’t want to encourage him or if she just wanted to let whatever was going to happen happen without accelerating it.

  He kissed her twice. His tongue felt stubby and unsure, jabbing at her mouth. But she let it happen. It helped calm the shivers. She felt less rigid. It felt so good to be touched tenderly. He kissed her again, hard this time, as if he was seeing how far he could get going. She put up no resistance. This, she knew, was it. She could not do this and ever be with Matt again. This would end everything.

  And then he stopped. “Will you get in the back seat with me?” he asked.

  “Okay,” Josie said.

  Mikie went out the driver’s side door and came in through the back seat door. Josie just climbed over. She did not want to go outside again. She’d already started to think about how she would get home, how that would mean going outside again to get in her truck. Maybe Mikie could just drive her, she thought, although part of her knew how stupid that sounded. Mikie took a bit of time getting into the back seat and very suddenly Josie understood why. He was holding a joint when he slammed the door behind him.

  “Sweetgrass,” he said. Josie heard him chuckle at his little Indian joke. She watched him light the joint and take a long drag, close his eyes, let the smoke slide through his nose. He looked like nothing she’d ever seen before.

  “You want?” he asked.

  Josie didn’t answer. She took his hand, moved it to her mouth, let him hold the joint while she breathed it in. The smoke hit her lungs in an acidic splash, and she coughed so hard she gagged. Mikie laughed at her.

  But he talked to her. “Why are you here?” he asked.

  “It’s stupid,” she said.

  “It’s not.”

  “It’s family shit.”

  “All families are a dark forest,” he said. “Russian proverb.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “They all look alike from the outside, but inside … who knows?”

  “How do you know Russian proverbs?”

  “Reading,” Mikie took another long hit from the spleef, his eyes squinting. He handed it to her again, “This time, go easy. Just a little sip.”

  Josie took the joint, sucked less, this time noticing the mossy taste, the musky funk in her mouth. She coughed again, coming out.

  “What can books tell me about my life?”

  “Oh shit, Josie, I don’t know. What do you want to know about your life?”

  “I want to know what I’m doing. If it’s right or if it’s wrong. If I’m making good choices.”

  Mikie laughed. “You’re sittin’ in a car, with me, smoking dope. You really need someone to tell you if you’re making good choices?”

  “I don’t care about tonight. I mean the rest of my life.”

  “The rest of your life is a whole string of tonights.”

  “Tonight’s different. I want to know if my life is going the right direction. If I want the right things.”

  “Well, that much I can tell you straight up—there’s no way of knowing what you’re doing until it’s all done.”

  Josie made a face to show him he wasn’t helping. Mikie shrugged.

  “I was waiting for one falling star,” she said. “When you came.”

  “If you want falling stars, man, you gotta look in August. Perseids. Sometimes there’s a hundred an hour.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “How do you even know to look?”

  Mikie laughed. “Oh, redskin shit. Old Indian secret. Or eighth grade science class.” He laughed again.

  Josie was high fast. Five minutes in, she felt like a guitar string that had just been plucked, the edges of herself all tickly vibration. Mikie seemed so confident all of a sudden, so full of whatever he wanted to say. She wanted to go back outside and look at the stars because she knew they’d all be moving now.

  She’d find one shooter. But she didn’t want to be cold again. She felt warmer now, warming, and she let herself be drawn into Mikie to feel even warmer. She was surprised by the sturdiness of him. He looked so skinny, so bony. He was, in fact, hard and r
oped with muscle across his chest and shoulders. Pretty quickly she felt that he had a hard-on.

  It was weird being high. Something she’d never done. What was weird was doing it without Matt. All of her firsts had been with him. First time, of course, but so many others. First real kiss. First time she drove. First time she got drunk. First time she spent the whole night with a boy.

  First boy who came to her family’s for Christmas. Any first she could think of, Matt had been with her. And now she was getting stoned in the back seat of a car with a kid she really knew not all that well. He started kissing her again, those strange, tentative kisses, and this time she let herself be part of it and he almost instantly became more confident. Or more insistent. Her detached self split off again enough to watch and think: How stupid.

  This boy is getting me high so he can have sex with me. And that will be the end of growing up, the end of being Matt’s girl, the end of the part of her life that was really over anyway. And the other stupid, stunned, insensate part of herself thinking: This is a nice thing I’m doing for him. She didn’t need him to tell her that he was a virgin. He was a mad rush of terrified glee. As high as she was, Josie felt a swell of confidence from his fumbling hurry. She understood that every inch of her naked skin made his fingers clumsier and more dumb.

  With Matt everything seemed in his hands—the timing, the pace, the decisions about when each article of clothing would come off, and which ones wouldn’t be bothered with. Finally, she was doing something different. She let it keep happening fast, let him keep snatching at her clothes, grasping her flesh, thrilling in his rush. She listened to his breathing, a fast, shallow pant. She felt herself breathing faster, felt herself falling in with him, growing giddy and awhirl.

  “Condom?” she mumbled at the right time.

  Mikie uncorked a gasp of frustration at the sudden need to speak. “Oh god, you’re not going to make me stop now, are you?”

  “You don’t have one?”

  “No,” he said, “I didn’t know this was going to happen. Can’t I pull out? I promise to pull out.”

  “You gotta promise,” Josie said, dopey and sated with sensation.

  “I promise.”

  “Mikie,” she warned.

  “Oh my god, I promise,” he whined. “Just don’t make me stop.”

  She was not sure he was ever fully in her before he started pulling out. It was over that fast. Josie was not disappointed. She was, instead, pleased by the power she felt to empty this boy of his anger, his fear, his everything. Pleased with being able to cause him to surrender all his neurotic hang-ups in the pursuit—however brief—of pleasure with her body. She had caused him to hold himself now, in his hands, awash in a baffling puddle of embarrassment and gratitude.

  He was apologizing, but she shushed him, held his face, pressed his hair to his head with her fingers. She kissed his mouth, holding him to her even as he tried to pull away, until he relaxed and let himself respond to the sensation of her kiss. There we go, she thought as his tongue began to meet hers, now we finally connected.

  Just before Josie left to get back in her truck, Mikie said, “Can you tell me one thing?”

  “What?”

  “Why?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “Why me? Why me now?”

  You’re not him, she almost said. But, even stoned, she could see how he might take that. So she caught herself and put it this way: “You’re different.”

  * * *

  When Tom left Pep’s, very shortly after Cal Frehse did, he walked out into the cold and climbed into his pickup. Tom didn’t want to go home. He wanted to see Jenny. Her jaw was too long. Her nose was too long. Her smile was too wide. Her forehead was too wide. He loved all of it. Maybe he was going to love her. He remembered what she had said about moving fast and deeply into like, in case love came along. So he called her. She answered. She said yes, she would like for him to come over.

  “I’ve been at the bar for a while,” he warned.

  “Not my first rodeo,” she said.

  Tom drove to her house and got out of his truck and, before he went in, tilted his head back to peer up at the starry sky. There was no moon, though the belt of the Milky Way seemed to hold its own incandescence. He couldn’t single stars out. There seemed thousands, and on the periphery of his vision they seemed to be swirling. He couldn’t make them hold still. Maybe, Tom thought, it was because there were so many.

  Or maybe it was because he’d been drinking. When Jenny opened the door wearing a man’s long-sleeved shirt over a pair of flimsy cotton sleeping shorts, purple and patterned and edged in lace, he knew he hadn’t woke her, and, even intoxicated, he understood that she’d had time to choose what she wore. The problem with being him and knowing the specific collection of women he knew in the order he knew them—the high school sweetie, the challenging college girlfriend, Sophie, the sad lonely hook-ups in Great Falls and Havre—was never understanding whether the signals were archetypical or temporal.

  Most signaling systems were designed to be recognizable to all appropriate user groups. Stoplights. Semaphores. Play calls he signaled in from the sidelines. They all held up over time and circumstance. He knew she could sense his confusion, but she didn’t do anything to allay it.

  “Do you want a drink?” she asked.

  “No, I’ve had enough,” he said.

  And she walked to the sofa, sat at one end, curled her legs under herself. He sat next to her.

  “What,” she asked, “would you do if you never got to coach another football game?”

  Well, shit, he thought. Now we’re going to just talk about that?

  So he stalled by saying, “What would you do if you could never teach another class?”

  “Be a mom,” she said right back, and then: “Oh, shit. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to … I’m sorry, Tom.”

  She had shifted and was petting and then holding his upper arm, and looking into his eyes.

  “No, it’s okay,” he said.

  “That wasn’t what I meant to say … or mean … I’m not usually a lout.”

  “It’s okay, really,” he said. Because it was. He knew she hadn’t meant to say anything other than one of her personal truths. He liked that about her.

  He liked that every approach funneled into a straightforward path to who she was. She hadn’t let go of his arm, and he hadn’t moved. But he was looking at her, seeing her face, the openness of it.

  “Tom,” she said. “I want to tell you this because I really like you.”

  “I like you, too,” he said, thinking it was funny that what they weren’t saying was “I love you.” Because they were too old. Because if they were younger they would have been in a hurry to say that, and it would have changed what they meant, changed the way they could talk about how they felt, altered their trajectory. He liked the way they were saying this first instead, knowing they’d get to that other soon enough.

  “I’m a mom. First, last, and most of the middle,” Jenny said. “That’s the most important part of who I am, but it’s also not all of who I am. It’s not all of what I want for myself. I’m not looking for help raising my kids. But I do want help to make my life interesting and complex and fulfilling.”

  “For a long time,” Tom said, because he felt now was the right time to try to explain himself, “my life pointed at one thing. I thought it was everything, and I gave everything to it. While I was doing that, I met my wife. And we had a good thing. We had a great thing. I mean, it’s gone now. I’ve let it go, but I don’t want to pretend it was some sort of bad marriage. It wasn’t. She was great for me. She changed the way I felt about what I wanted from my life. And then we had our son, and he changed me even more. And then, when I lost all that …” Tom stopped and watched himself, waiting to see if he might choke up. He could feel the urge.

  But it seemed important to push through. “When I lost all that, I think I just reverted to that first thing, the one I knew best. I sort of sacrificed myself to it again
. Burned up all the pain with constant effort. But I didn’t pay close enough attention. I didn’t notice the flaws all along the way. I just let it subsume me too much.”

  Jenny didn’t hesitate or give him a moment’s cushion to hesitate. One moment he was trying to figure out if he had finished his thought, and as soon as he was looking at her eyes, she was kissing him. She slipped her hand around the back of his head and held him so she could kiss him the way she wanted and he felt it as a sweet relief but then noticed the insistence, the duration, the not-going-away sweep and swirl. It felt like a continual rush of warm sugar melting into his mouth.

  When she broke it off, slowly, a taper, a fine point, she said, “I really, really like you.”

  “I really, really like you, too,” he said, and this time he led the kiss.

  When they stopped she took a long time to let both of her eyes look at each of his. “What happens to you if you don’t coach anymore?” she asked, and he understood right away that she was asking about their future, the chance of it, asking to see a glimpse. He could give her that. Why not? She had whole lives to weigh in the balance.

  “I’ve been thinking about it a lot,” he said. “I think I could be happy as just a teacher.” Then he hurried to say, “Not just a teacher. Not like that’s any small thing … I mean I think I could be happy without coaching. I could be happy with the interaction I get from teaching. I could try harder. Be better at it. I could see how it would be rewarding on its own.”

  He let his head nod a little while he paused to warm up to the second thing. “Just in the interest of complete honesty, I think another thing I could be happy doing would be coaching on staff at a bigger school, maybe college. Not head coach. I’m not saying that’s the way. I just … for the longest time there was one way for me. I wanted to run everything my way. It meant a lot of stress, but the feedback was really clean. W and L. And the results were always ownable. They were mine.” He saw her eyes change as she followed him, and knew she was trying to understand, to frame things in a way she could empathize with. And that made his night.