Fight Song (2 page)
A despicable truth about the human animal
Bob’s bike ride home that evening starts off much like the morning one. He is sweaty. Annoyed. He pedals past a billboard advertising Björn the Bereft, a magician/marriage counselor performing a few shows in town on his national tour. Coffen scowls at the billboard, knowing he and Jane will be catching the act this coming Friday. Actually, it didn’t sound like the kind of thing that Jane would want to do in the first place, but she had been so insistent, Coffen went along with it—of course he went along with it! Isn’t his fat ass oozed all over a bicycle seat because Jane wanted him to ride it, whip himself back into shape?
Coffen’s not on the bicycle by himself: There’s a corporate rucksack slung across his chest diagonally, the bandoleer of the working stiff. It pushes twenty pounds tonight because of the weighty plock.
He pedals and pants and perspires, turning onto a quiet stretch of residential road, riding in the bike lane, next to tall oleanders that line this street. His subdivision, his house, his wife, his kids, his computer and online life are only another half mile ahead.
Here’s where Coffen’s archenemy, Nicholas Schumann, pulls up next to Bob and his bike. Schumann slows his SUV, revs the engine, rolling down the passenger window
so he can scream out at Coffen, “Shall we engage in a friendly test of masculine fortitude?”
Schumann is a douche of such a pungently competitive variety that he carries a picture of himself wearing his college football uniform in his wallet. And shows it to people. Bob will be huddled with the other dads of the subdivision at one barbecue or another and Schumann will whip out the photo and talk about how he single-handedly guided Purdue to an overtime win against the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame and how nobody thought they had a chance, but as the quarterback he had to keep his team focused, poised, grinding, etc., etc. All the neighborhood fathers hang on Schumann’s probably fabricated remixes from his glory days. He has these dads trained to sniff out Bob’s lack of interest in sports and has even said things in front of them like “Gentlemen, it appears that Coffen doesn’t enjoy the great American pastime of pigskin.”
They shake their astonished heads. Their eyes eyeing Bob like he pissed in the damn sangria.
“You really don’t like the pastime of pigskin?” the disgusted dads ask.
“Football’s fine,” says Bob.
“Football is like storming the beaches of Normandy,” Schumann says, the dads all nodding along. “It is a bunch of samurai let loose on the field to kill or be killed.”
“I give up,” Coffen mutters.
“That’s your problem,” says Schumann. “You can’t give up. Not when Notre Dame’s linebackers are blitzing your back side. Believe me, that’s a life lesson.”
Now, Coffen answers Schumann’s request for a duel of masculine fortitude by saying, “You wanna race me?”
“Psycho Schumann wants to rumble.”
“You have an unfair advantage.”
“You’ll have to be more specific,” Schumann says. “I have about thirty advantages over you.”
The plock’s weight makes the bandoleer creep into Coffen’s skin. “I mean the SUV is your advantage.”
“I won’t go over seven miles an hour. Come on: Let’s see what you’re made of.”
It’s a despicable truth about the human animal that people often thrust themselves into the crosshairs of unwinnable equations. Logic is meaningless. Lessons learned get heaved from windows. All that life experience jets the coop with myopic majesty, and it’s here ye, here ye, gather round and take a gander as another dumb man makes a monkey out of himself.
Coffen’s particular monkey-ness on this particular evening lies with the plock and the self-hate at being honored for wasting ten years of his life on a job that does nothing productive or interesting, a job that shines the light on the fact that Bob himself has settled into curdling routine. Rationally, he knows he can’t beat Schumann—not piloting a bike while Schumann has a combustible engine—but Bob doesn’t care. He can’t care. There have been too many unwinnable contests in his life, and at this moment Coffen is hell-bent on seeing how he does against the Notre Dame pass rush, how he stacks up to what might be categorized as an insurmountable obstacle. Is he the kind of underdog that flouts expectations, or is Bob Coffen as miraculously pitiful as the subdivision fathers say?
So there Coffen is shirking the boring tradition of reason. There he is yelling to Schumann, “You’re on, you rat bastard!”
And thus, the contest is underway.
So far, so good—Schumann stays at seven miles an hour. Coffen pulls ahead. He’s winning! He’s a full SUV-length ahead, and his lead is growing; all the sweating and panting and pain from the clawing bandoleer jabbing into Coffen are worth it. Adversity is a stepping-stone. It’s in contests such as these that people disclose the true fight in their hearts, and Bob wants so badly to have fight left in his, despite the last decade’s evidence to the contrary.
Next, Schumann has the vehicular gall to shatter the established ceiling of seven miles per hour. He pulls up even to Bob, flashes a Nicky All-American grin. Then he pulls ahead. Schumann toots the damn horn, toying with Coffen, slowing down and saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, they’re neck and neck going into the homestretch … ”
“You’re speeding up,” Bob says.
“Are you questioning my honor?”
“What’s the speedometer say?”
“I fight fair and square,” says Schumann, shaking his head, looking sinister. “Until I don’t.”
Here’s when a certain self-celebrated college football hero reveals the existential interior of a rancorous cheater, edging his SUV a bit into the bike lane, almost clipping Coffen. Bob swerves into the rough patch of dead grass along the side of the road. Only a few feet before he’d be rammed into those unruly oleanders.
“Watch it,” Bob says.
“Do you know what your problem is, Coffen?”
Still edging the SUV …
“I’m being run into an oleander?”
“You don’t have any balls,” Schumann says.
Bob will not be testicularly ridiculed. Hell no, he won’t. Last week, last month, for the last ten years, yes, ridicule
away, mock Bob like it’s nobody’s business. But tonight he’s turning things around. Tonight, he hemorrhages pragmatism. Tonight, he cremates common sense, sends its ashes up into the atmosphere in a stunning cloud. What have these things brought him besides boredom, mediocrity?
“Fuck yourself, Schumann!” Bob says, taking his left hand off of the handle bar in preparation of giving Schumann the bird, except once his hand moves, the plock’s weight makes the bike go herky-jerky, balance faltering, front wheel turning quickly to an unanticipated angle and Coffen flies over the handlebars.
He is airborne. He has left the bike behind and travels a few feet ahead of it, though this trip will be short-lived and soon his voyage shall transition into an excruciating landing.
The bike crashes, and so does Coffen.
The valiant Schumann doesn’t even pump the brakes. He keeps driving. It’s funny how people expose their camouflaged spirits in moments of emergency. Bob watches the taillights disappear.
If somebody were to gaze down at Coffen’s particular subdivision from the great subdivision in the sky, it would be shaped like a capital Y. Currently, he hobbles from the main gate, down at the bottom of the Y and up toward the fork, where he’ll veer left to reach Schumann’s—his own light gray palace much farther down the same street.
“Coffen?” a voice says.
Bob limps in the middle of the road. There’s blood dripping from his brow. He’d been so mired in savage thoughts that he hadn’t heard the whir of an electric car coming up next to him.
“Hey, Westbrook,” says Bob.
“What’s the other guy look like?”
“Schumann.”
“Wish I looked like Schumann.”
“No, it actually was Schumann.”
“He kicked your ass?”
“He ran me off the road. I’m going to kick his ass now.”
Westbrook, unlike Schumann, can keep his vehicle at a steady speed, chugging next to Coffen down the darkened block. “You’ll be massacred,” Westbrook says.
“That’s why we play the game.”
“What game?”
“Purdue versus Notre Dame.”
“Which one are you in this metaphor?” asks Westbrook.
“I’m Purdue. I’m the underdog.”
“At least let me drive you to his house. You look like a hammered turd.”
The two men near the Y’s fork. “I have to do this on my own, Westbrook. If our paths should cross again, we’ll toast to my victory.”
“Our paths have to cross again. You still have my tent poles, remember?”
And with that, Westbrook speeds off. Coffen’s solitary limp powers on.
Bob stands in front of château Schumann, weighing what he should do next. Does he ring the doorbell? Does he hunt for an open window? He hadn’t really formulated any kind of plan, per se, as he lurched here. He felt like he’d know what had to be done once he arrived, inspiration striking as he stood on Schumann’s green lawn. But really, the longer he hovers on the grass, he’s losing some of his anger, his gall. Maybe he should just go home. Maybe he should err on the side of caution. Maybe he should go lick his wounds and try again tomorrow.
A meteorologist might call the conditions
an unusually warm night
.