“Ben, let’s don’t end the year this way. I don’t understand this at all. You’ve never been a problem. I know you boys have troubles at home….”
I say, “You think I’m doing this because I have a crazy mother?”
“No, of course not. Certainly not.”
“Look, Mr. Phelps. I’m doing it because I decided at the beginning of this year that I wanted the most out of my education. That sounds all cheesy and stupid, I know, but it’s the truth. I think this project will do me more good than any others I can think of. I recognize that Mr. Lambeer runs the class and I realize he has the right to flunk me if I don’t do what he says. I know what I’m getting into and I know the consequences. I’m not going crying to my dad if I flunk. This is a free country, it’s a class about government of a free country, and I have the right to fail.”
“Ben, that makes no sense whatsoever. I can’t allow that.”
Lambeer sits erect in his seat, doesn’t change expression, doesn’t say a word.
“You can’t not allow it,” I say back to Phelps. “Look, I’m going to do the project, I’m going to write it up, I’m going to hand it in, and I’m going to take the grade I get. I’ve been warned. I’m taking everyone off the hook.” I stand.
Phelps looks at Lambeer and shrugs. Lambeer stares straight ahead.
“Is that everything?” I ask. “Can I go now?”
There’s no answer so I do.
Man, if you haven’t given yourself permission to fail a class you need for graduation, you haven’t lived.
Seventeen
When Rudy lets me in after eleven in the evening, he seems broken. He’s not been drinking, though, or at least not so you can tell.
I say, “Hey,” and place a package of supplements on the workbench. He’s not out of the others, but it seems like a “familiar” thing to do to let him know we’re okay.
“What are you doing back here?”
I point to the sack. “Here to make you well.”
“What I have doesn’t get well. I was expecting the cops.”
“No cops,” I say.
“Why not?”
“Well, there’s a statute of limitations on charging you, and besides I didn’t tell anyone.”
“You should have.”
“Look, Rudy. What you did was seriously fucked up. I mean fucked up. But you obviously already know that or you wouldn’t have spent the last however many years of your life drunk and lost in Podunk, Idaho. But man, you gotta convince me you haven’t done it to anyone else. I mean, I looked on the internet….”
“If I’d done it to anyone else, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “I wouldn’t be anywhere. I don’t have much by way of redemption, but I have that.”
I can’t help it. Right or wrong, I believe him. “And you didn’t try anything with me. You told me the truth. That took us both out of danger. I mean, hell, you’re an old guy and I can outrun you. Besides that I’m a football hero.”
You told me the truth.
I’m suddenly feeling even worse about hiding my own death penalty. I can’t be my brother’s best friend while hiding something that big. I can’t expect to be loved by Dallas after I’m gone if I don’t let her know what’s happening to me. And I can’t look Rudy in the eye. Hey-Soos has been telling me this all along. The thing that prevents the worst from happening is the truth. Rudy’s just shown me that, loud and clear. You get that as advice from your parents when you’re a little kid stealing candy, from your pastors, from your teachers, even if they don’t practice it. It’s the one thing you can’t be wrong saying.
“I told myself a long time ago that if I ever felt that desire again I was gone,” Rudy says.
“Well, you felt it and you’re still here.”
“I may not be for long.”
A chill runs from my butt crack to my hairline. “Are you talking about, like, leaving or…”
“Ben, I knew what I was doing. I had firsthand experience being in his shoes. I knew the hate, I knew the self-contempt, and I knew the confusion. And I loved that kid; like a father loves a child; but I did it anyway, and he’s gone. That’s as close as you get to first-degree murder without pulling the trigger.”
“Yeah, but…”
“You know what my church would have done? Demand I go on retreat and get counseling. Then they’d send me to a new parish.” He shook his head sadly. “They’re a church. They believe you can be cured through prayer.” He throws up his arms. “So I ran.”
I’m listening, but my mind is back there where he said if I ever felt that desire again I was gone.
“Look, Rudy,” I say, “let’s try something. I’m safe because I know. That covers it for now. All you gotta do is stay here and do your job and teach me about Malcolm X and all the other good shit you know about the history you’ve lived through, so I can go to school and whack on the back of Lambeer’s head. We’ll take it a day at a time.”
He walks slowly to the workbench and opens the sack, extracting a bottle of geezer vitamins and some flaxseed oil. He stares at the labels. “No guarantees,” he says.
I drive toward home, thinking I got the best I could get. I suppose the thought of Rudy’s possible death would scare me more if I didn’t have my own to think about.
I drive up and down a deserted Main Street at maybe twenty miles an hour. The community Christmas tree stands decorated and alone in the middle of the street, a traffic hazard for sure. This time of year you could throw a sleeping bag under it at eight P.M. and not worry about anything until six or seven the following morning if it weren’t for the freezing temperatures and the occasional possibility of a late-night snowplow. I turn up one side street after another, gazing at colored lights surrounding windows and the occasional dim bluish light of a TV playing. The living room light is on in Coach’s house and I impulsively pull the pickup into his driveway. I sit a few minutes, contemplating going in. I know what I want to say, but I can’t find a way to do it.
As I start the engine to drive away, his front door opens. “Hey! I’d recognize the sound of that engine anywhere. What happened, Ben, did my pickup finally find its way back home? Get in here.”
I sit on the couch while he pours me a Coke and pops a beer for himself. He sits. “Talk.”
I say, “Could I ask you some questions without you asking anything back?”
“Probably not,” he says, “but I’ll give it a go.”
“Do you ever talk about your girlfriend?”
“Which one? I’ve had a lot of girlfriends. You mean Becky Sanders?”
I nod.
“I talk about her sometimes. There’s not much to say.” He sips his beer. “Biggest surprise of my life,” he says. “Bigger than that catch you made in the Horseshoe Bend game. I swear, I’d already thought of a million ways I could lose her, mostly having to do with us going off in different directions after graduation, but I never thought a couple of shitheads playing on a dirt bike would get her.”
“What was it like?”
“Like taking a shot to the ribs from a Reggie Jackson home run swing,” he says. “My mom had to tell me. I was working at Dad’s service station and I just left the place wide open and hauled ass for the bridge. The front of her car was nosed into the river….” His voice trails off, then he shakes his head. “An old bartender named Dakota, guy missing one hand—had a hook—was there with the tow truck. I worked for him part-time at his bar when I wasn’t working for Dad. He was kind of a mentor. Anyway, he stopped me from going down to the car, from seeing her.” Coach takes another sip and smiles. “You know, we live in this high mountain air and it was one of those days when the sun was so bright you have to squint without sunglasses. But I swear, as I drove back into town, the entire world was dimmer. It was dim for a long time. It’s still dim, I guess.” He watches me playing with the ice in my glass. “What’re you, writing a paper? What’s up?”
I say, “Is there anything that would have made it better, could have mad
e it better?”
“I don’t know. I cursed God for not preparing me, but I don’t know that you can prepare for that; maybe if someone you love has an illness, something you see coming. At least you’d be able to say good-bye; make sure everything was cool at the end. But no, I don’t think there was a way to make it better. What’s going on, Ben?”
I laugh. “I’ll ask the questions here.”
He laughs back. “Someone you know in trouble?”
“Not really,” I say. “I don’t know. There’s this old guy….”
“You talking about Rudy McCoy?”
“Yeah, kind of. He’s been stopping drinking and stuff. Might not be in all that good a shape.”
“Is he dying?”
“Naw. I mean, I don’t know. He just got me thinking.”
“I know this,” Coach says. “Becky’s dying wounded me. All I thought of was things I wished I’d said. I was a worthless date that first year in college, because I compared those girls to the idea of Becky; judged my relationships by how I felt with her, then I wouldn’t hang in there long enough to let one get that far. I was probably kind of an asshole. It made me a fast runner, though.”
“Do you think that’s why you’re not married now?”
He laughed. “I’d like to say no, but yeah. I know it is. I felt sorry for myself, got to thinking the only person who could understand me was me. Then I came back here and…Well, you’ve seen the middle-aged dating pool in this town.”
“Think you’ll ever beat it? Like go find someone?”
“Yeah, I do,” he says. “I haven’t told anyone, but I’m leaving after this year. I wanted to get you and your brother through school, and”—he laughs again—“see if I could help Boomer’s kid turn out different from Boomer. Two out of three isn’t bad.”
“Thanks, Coach.”
“You’re not going to tell me what’s going on, are you?”
“Naw. I mean, it’s nothing. If it is, though, I’ll tell you first.”
“By the way,” he says, walking me to the door. “Why don’t you limit your Malcolm X issue to English class. Haley’s Autobiography is a hell of a story and truly great literature, and you could avoid a war with Lambeer.”
“If you’re not in a war with Lambeer, his class is intolerable,” I say. “He just tells you how things are. He has his point of view and the only way he validates you is if you see things his way. Funny thing is, the more you learn, the more you know how full of shit he is.”
“I was afraid I’d get that answer. See you tomorrow.” Coach isn’t about to dis a teacher outright. He takes another sip of beer and lets the door slam behind him.
What I wanted from Coach was a glimpse of what it feels like to be left behind. I’m hardwired to sweat what’s going to happen for Cody and Dallas (God, who’d have ever thought I’d get close enough to her to make a hole by leaving?) and my dad. There’s no guessing what it will set off in Mom. And what about Coach? He sounds invincible to me most of the time, but he’s had about as much sneak-up-behind-you death as he needs.
I drive back to the house and get on my winter running stuff and head out on a course I used for cross-country back in the day. I measured it by quarter miles so I could do interval training and measure my exact conditioning level, so I know exact distances. It runs a mile and a quarter along the highway toward Boise, veers off onto Cabarton Road for two and a half, makes a sweeping turn, and comes back home. It’s cold outside so I use the first mile to get my legs warm, then shoot for full-speed half miles broken up with half-speed quarters. In my cross-country days, I’d go over the course two, even three times.
The warm-up mile tires me way more than it should, and I figure I’m simply not in top shape. The first full-speed half mile leaves my lungs burning so I take the first half-speed quarter mile more like quarter speed, and by the time I’m through the second half I’m thinking I get it that I’m not in great running shape, but football didn’t end all that long ago and I’ve been running no less than four days a week. It’s starting. I take the next quarter at a slow jog and try to kick in and there’s nothing there and my heart starts to race and all of a sudden I hear myself screaming—I mean screaming—“No! No! Noooooooo!” and I’m lying in the snowbank sobbing, begging God for more time. I can’t stop my racing heart and I’m thinking Doc didn’t say anything about this shit giving me a heart attack before I realize it’s panic; adrenaline. I lie there staring at the blanket of stars, wet cold seeping through my jacket, and take deep breaths between convulsions to slow my heart. I’m nearly soaked by the time I’m ready to get up, and I shiver and jog/walk to the house.
I run a hot bath, turn off the bathroom light, and sit in pitch darkness. I was going to tell. I really was: Dallas, Cody, Rudy, Coach, at least. But how can I do that now? I’ve talked myself into imagining dealing with them, but how can I deal with me? I feel my bravery leaking out into the warm bathwater. I can’t let them see me weak. That would ruin everything.
Going out quietly is becoming a lot more complicated than I thought.
In the early evening on Christmas Eve my brother and I ride down to the football field to work on agility drills. I’m a few days away from my meltdown and I’m thinking—hoping—it was a false alarm. I woke up the next morning feeling pretty okay, and though I haven’t tried anything quite that strenuous, I have taken a couple long slow runs and felt fine. I intentionally avoided calling up Hey-Soos that night, or since, because (and I know this is dumb) I didn’t want even him to see me weak.
This workout may seem normal for a guy like Cody, getting ready to go on to a small-college football career, but remember it’s December and Trout is a mile above sea level and Cody’s working out two and a half hours a day at roundball. Above and beyond. So we dress up like we’re headed to discover the South Pole except for our cleats, and hop into the Grey Ghost and head for the field. The good news is wind has blown most of the snow off the field. The bad news is the ground beneath it is rock hard.
Except for the lights from the Shell station across the street and the dim glow of a couple of distant street lamps, the field is dark so we leave the pickup running with the headlights pointed at a small section of the field; not the most conservation-minded thing to do with gasoline running close to the price of gold, but we promise to take cold showers and not turn on our electric blankets and leave our mother on an ice floe so we don’t have to heat her room.
We take an easy six laps around the track to warm up, jogging through the glow of the headlights into the blackness at the far end and around again. I’m so relieved my strength feels normal. I run in front, Cody a couple steps behind with a ball. He yells, “Right!” and lobs it over my right shoulder, directly into my outstretched gloves. “Right!” and there it is again. “Left!” and I reach to the left, where the ball settles in. “Over the top!” and I stretch them out in front. The drill was created for receivers, but Cody uses it to hone his accuracy. He falls farther and farther behind me, still placing the ball perfectly 90 percent of the time. It’s his show on the far end because I can’t even see my hands. My brother has some feathery touch.
He talks as we jog. “It’s gonna be great at Boise State with you, little big bro,” he says. “You know it’s not just the football. Right!” and the ball comes over my shoulder. “It’s us, man. We can split the scholarship. We’ll split the scholarship and the trust. Hell, with your brain you’ll have an academic scholarship before the first year is out. What institution of higher learning is going to give you up? Left!”
Cody’s right. It is us. We’re the heart of the Wolfs, or better, the heart of the wolves. Dad’s will drive that mail and freight route and take care of Mom until that turns out however it turns out. It’s always been me and Cody and it will be me and Cody until the day…well, until the day.
I want to tell him but I can’t. Not tonight. It’s Christmas; Mom is out of the bedroom and has actually put up a few decorations. Dad is acting as if everything??
?s perfect; got a tree, bought presents. Here on the track, the ball settles into my hands every time and I just don’t want to feel the way I’m going to feel when I say it. Not yet. I wish I’d have said it right off, now. I wish I hadn’t been so selfish as to think I could ask for a normal year.
Christmas Eve
Eighteen
“Man, why didn’t you tell me what a stupid idea it was to try to keep this secret?”
“I believe I did hint at it.”
“Yeah, but I mean, like, the first time you showed up. Why didn’t you say it then? ‘Ben, that’s the dumbest fucking idea I’ve ever heard of.’”
“Have we talked about the appropriateness of certain language in the presence of a spiritual entity?”
“We have. And I’ll hold back on the F bomb if you’ll give me a quick heads-up when you see me diving into my own asshole. Here on earth we call that metaphor.”
“Believe me, I know metaphor.”
“So what about it? A deal? I clean up my potty mouth and you swim ahead and clear out the big logs?”
“I told you before, by request only. Don’t you know anything about free will?”
“Wasn’t he a killer whale some kid let go in a movie?”
“That’s Willy,” Hey-Soos says. “Get the free will thing down. It’s the greatest thing about being human.”
“So tell me.”
“Well, basically if I knew everything that was going to happen, you wouldn’t have free will, would you? What fun would that be?”
“If you knew it and I didn’t know you knew it, I would.”
“Nope. If anyone knows it, then it isn’t free. It would mean that no matter what you do, things would have to turn out the way the person who knows how they turn out says they turn out.”
“But God knows, right?”
“Nope again.”
“God doesn’t know how things turn out?”
“It knows that things turn out. Listen, Ben, I could spend a whole bunch of human time telling you how things are. But if your doctor’s right, you’ll know soon enough, okay? Let me satisfy your curiosity for now, and then let’s stop talking about all this and live your life. God isn’t a guy. God isn’t a girl. God is a force. You have all these people trying to figure out whether to believe in God or the big bang. Well, God is the big bang. God is the ultimate scientist. If God relegated his thinking to human cognition, it would never get anything done. I mean, look how slow you think, and you’re probably the smartest kid in your class. Just know that everything started as one, everything still is one, and it will end up as one.”