Shame (11 page)

I don't know what would have happened then. It's true that I'd been mad at Bobby Ray more than once in the years I had known him, and that I'd still never taken a swing at him or he at me, but I can't promise that nothing would have come of this. We glared at each other, our faces about four inches apart, both our jaws set and temple veins standing out.

Then the gym door banged shut again, and we turned to see that Phillip was gone.

“Look what you've done,” I said without stepping back. “I didn't think he'd come out to practice with us in a million years. And you've sent him packing.”

“Good riddance,” Bobby Ray said. “He doesn't deserve to play with us. He let us down. He disgraced the team.”

“Well, you would know about disgrace,” I said. I let out a loud sigh. “He made a mistake. God knows, it happens to the best of us.” I turned to Carla. “Could you run B. W. out to the house?”

She shrugged. “Sure, John, I guess. Why?”

“I'm going after Phillip,” I said, and turned to Bobby Ray. “If he doesn't come back, then you can go out and find yourself two new players, because I won't be coming back either.”

Bobby Ray looked at me with dismay, as though I'd just told him I was an IRS collector come to slap a levy on his tractor. “You can't do that, John,” he stammered. “You're the guy who holds this team together.”

“That's exactly what I'm trying to do,” I said, and I shrugged on my coat and was out the door. The day had grown chilly, and the wind was blowing hard out of the north. I climbed into the truck, started it up, and turned toward the parking lot exit in the direction of Phillip's place. It was then that I saw him beside the road not more than three blocks down the street, walking fast, his arms swinging as he went, his breath a gray cloud floating behind him.

I gunned the engine, slinging gravel as I left the parking lot, and rolled down the passenger side window, letting in the howling wind. When I pulled alongside him, I braked and called out to him, “Can I give you a lift?”

He walked on, not even looking at me. If anything, he sped up.

“Phillip, please,” I said. “Get in.”

“I'm not going back,” he said.

“You don't have to go back,” I said. “I don't blame you for not wanting to. Bobby Ray is an idiot. But you don't have to walk home, either. If I'd known you didn't have a way in, I would have come after you. The least I can do now is drop you off.”

He stopped, looked down the road, where a walk of close to a mile still separated him from the highway, which was only the first step on his way home.

He took a deep breath. He was thinking about it.

I leaned across and opened the door.

He got in.

“Roll up that window,” I said. “It's gotten nippy.”

He did, and then we sat inside the cab in silence while outside the wind whipped past and the engine rose and fell as I accelerated away from a stop sign or eased up to the next one.

Phillip sat close to the door, one arm on the armrest. He looked down at his feet, or maybe at the floor mat.

“You shouldn't let Bobby Ray get to you,” I said finally. “You know what he's like. What he's always been like. He hasn't changed.” We turned onto the highway and headed past the airport and out of town. The airport's windsock was stretched parallel to the ground in the stiff breeze.

“I never should have come today,” he said at last, when I thought no one on earth would ever speak again. “You'd be better off forgetting about me. I'm an embarrassment.”

“Don't think that way,” I said, shaking my head. “Since when does anybody worry about what Bobby Ray thinks? Oz and I were glad to see you.”

He looked over at me then. “Bill probably thinks the same as Bobby Ray.”

“Also an idiot,” I reminded him.

“Anyway,” he said, staring back down at the floorboard. “You don't need me there to fight over.”

We passed the entrance to Roman Nose Park, so I slowed and put on my signal, which clicked loudly in the silence.

“I told them I wasn't coming back if you didn't,” I said, looking across at him, and then I turned onto the washboarded dirt road.

“Why would you do that?” he asked after the road had smoothed out and we'd driven on about a quarter mile.

I slowed as I approached Phillip's drive, such as it was, stopped, put the truck in park, and looked out the windshield at Phillip's sad fence. “I've been thinking a lot lately,” I finally said. I sat with it, thought about what I wanted to say out loud. “If it's possible to make up for the past, somehow. To fix things that I should have done right in the first place.” I rolled my shoulders upward in a slow shrug. “I'd like to think maybe you could. This seems like a good place to start.”

Outside, the wind whistled through the sagging barbed wire and the overhead telephone lines; the engine idled like the purr of a big cat. When Phillip spoke again, the unexpectedness of it made me jerk.

“You know the last time you and me rode someplace together? It was twenty years ago.” He looked out the window, but his eyes were focused on the past. “It was that night you and me went out drinking in your old man's truck,” he said. “It was after the Canton game. You remember?”

I had a dim memory of headlamps lighting a triangle of dirt road and adjoining pastures, the dimness a result of drinking half a dozen beers on a deep dark starless night. I remembered an ice-flecked Coors nestled cold against my crotch as we drove—where?

“Is that the night we climbed the bridge?” I remembered us on one of the big iron bridges over the Canadian River, remembered him climbing up high—

“Climbing,” he snorted. “The night you kept me from falling off. I've never forgot it. You saved my life.”

“That was pure luck,” I said, although he was probably right. I had saved his life.

What he didn't say—and I didn't either—was that Phillip had not fallen.

He had jumped.

I had grabbed him as he fell, pulled him back onto the bridge, even though it almost tore me off with him, and when he was on solid ground, we held onto each other for a long moment to make sure we were both still there before we pulled ourselves slowly, carefully back onto the roadway, one foot at a time. He never told me why he tried to jump. Maybe I wouldn't have understood.

I was just a kid, and I didn't know yet how life could chew somebody up.

“I was drunker than you were,” I said quietly. “I was just lucky. I was in the right place at the right time.”

“I almost pulled you off after me,” he said. He turned his head slowly to me. “You know, John, when I was in prison, down in McAlester, I thought about that sometimes. You didn't let go. I don't think for a second you thought about not trying to catch me.”

“Hey,” I said, trying to keep it light, “it was my job, keeping the team together and all that. Coach would have killed me if I'd let you fall off the bridge. Besides, you would have done the same for me, right?”

His fingers and thumb rose to his lips and tapped gently, and he looked back out the window for awhile before he answered what I had thought was a rhetorical question.

“I don't know,” he said. “I'm not sure.” He looked across to see my reaction. I didn't have one yet; I just met his gaze and waited to see if he had anything else to say. “I don't know that I would have. I gave it a lot of thought, like I said.” He stared out the window again, at the field just sprouting with green shoots of winter wheat. “And what does that make me?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Human?”

“No,” he said. He dropped his hand to the door lever, his eyes darting across to mine and then back out the window. “You should have let me fall.”

He opened the door to a whirl of rushing wind, leaves whipping past, blowing dust.

“So long, John,” he said, and he started to slide out.

It was instinct, not any conscious thought, not anything I might have planned. But I leaned across and just managed to catch the sleeve of Phillip's jacket as he was stepping out.

“Come home to dinner,” I said, not relinquishing my grip on his jacket. We stayed like that, joined tenuously for a moment, and then he looked back at me with a look that was not anger, or curiosity, or sadness.

I could only describe it as gratitude.

He nodded.

“Maybe you're right,” he said, as he climbed back in and we were driving away from the chilling gale. “Maybe this is a good place to start.”

We drove home into a wondrous sunset, high clouds turning orange and red and purple, toward my wife, my kids, and my ever-surprising life.

Dreams and Murmurs

Everything in the dream feels at once so familiar and yet so strange; maybe it's not surprising that I take a moment to recognize where I am and with whom. It takes me a second to place the song on the radio, since I haven't heard it in years; the Spinners' “Could It Be I'm Falling in Love” probably came out in '71 or '72. Likewise, it's been years since I've been horizontal with a girl on the bench seat of a Chevy pickup truck on a cool, rainy night.

And of course it's been years since that girl was Samantha Mathis.

But it's just as beautiful as I remembered it: the rain tapping at the roof, the far-off splash of lightning and rumble of thunder, the fog on the windows becoming droplets, rivulets of water, the faint green light from the radio dial illuminating the territory I've already explored. Sam whimpers as my lips flit across her skin, as my fingers cup her curves. Way back—at the farthest reaches of conscious thought—I recognize the insistent low stomach tension of fear. I suppose it's the fear that we're going to get stuck in the mud if it keeps raining, because we once did and it was a hard thing to explain to her father, but memory or fear, it is shouted down by the desire to stay right where we are, the desire to touch Sam's pale, thin body, the desire to feel her lips on mine again.

Her eyes look up at me, wide and dark, and I see the glint of her teeth, her lips drawn back in a smile, or pleasure, or both. The rain picks up, a patter becoming a pounding that duplicates the sound of my heart.

In a flash of lightning, we are revealed in our nakedness, and with that flash and the following boom of thunder, foreboding again rumbles through my gut. What if someone sees us this way? If someone comes along and catches us: my folks, her dad, Michelle?

Michelle
.

I can't be doing this.

I shouldn't even be dreaming this.

I'm married. Married to Michelle.

That life is over and gone.

And so I forced myself awake, swam up to consciousness, to a chilly bedroom and the light patter of early-morning rain against the windows—woke, bathed in sadness and shame, woke to a gnawing in the pit of my stomach that I knew was not hunger but guilt, big-time, capital “G” guilt, like it must feel to get caught doing the babysitter.

“It wouldn't have hurt to sleep just a little longer,” I muttered to myself as I rolled out of bed—hung for the goose, hung for the gander. Behind me Michelle stirred and murmured, “Wha's that, honey?”

“Go back to sleep,” I said. “Nothing.” Guilt or love—or both—impelled me to pull the comforter back up over her shoulders and gently adjust it at her throat to protect her from the farmhouse draft we never quite succeeded in preventing. She was instantly asleep again—oh, to be so at peace with the world and with myself—and I stood watching her snore as she lay on her back, mouth open, face pointed toward heaven.

I dressed quietly and went into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee, meditate on my night, and contemplate the coming day.

Some fun. And it got better as the day wore on.

“So how are things going?” was what Bill Cobb asked when Michelle called me in to the phone hours later. I had been out doing early chores and cracking a thin layer of ice from a light freeze on the stock tanks. The calves had been jostling me thankfully. I bet trying to break ice with a warm moist nose is no fun.

I came stamping into the house, took off my boots carefully on the back porch, and deeply inhaled the warm dry air of the kitchen once before picking up the phone—and inhaled once again after hearing Bill's question.

“Things,” I said, at last, “are going like you would not believe.”

“Good practice the other day?”

“There was a lot of action.”

“Who ran my spot? One of the kids?”

“You know there's no one who could fill your shoes,” I said. I foresaw a future of communication with Bill in which he could fill in the blanks however he wanted; it was actually kind of liberating.

“When's the next practice? This Sunday?”

“Probably,” I said. And maybe we would practice again. When I dropped Phillip off after dinner, he said he would think about coming back. I guess all that was needed now was to work on Bobby Ray, maybe with a lead pipe. “When are you coming up?”

“I might be able to get up for one practice before the game,” he said. “Lots going on here. It's crunch time in the elections, you know, and I've got a good friend running for Texas governor.” A good friend, I recalled, whose father used to be the president of the United States. All this delivered in the I-don't-want-to-brag tone that I always hated Bill for; maybe he didn't want to brag, but somehow he always managed to.

“Uhm,” I said. “Well, we'll try to manage without you somehow.” This delivered in my sweetest and most secretly ironic tone, a voice that has always worked on Bill.

People who take it as an article of faith that they are smarter than you never pick up on any clues that the exact opposite might be true.

As quickly as I reasonably could I hung up, anxious to quit talking about Bill's stupid basketball game and get back to the more important things I'd been thinking about. Things such as Michael, of whom we had neither seen nor heard a thing for weeks; things such as the mysterious call from Samantha some time back, still unexplained, although it began to take up more and more space in my head; things such as my varsity team, which still seemed woefully unprepared for the pending season, and, unless Jimmy Bad Heart Bull made a remarkable difference in our starting lineup, would spend this winter looking at the other team as bewildered as a cow at a new gate; things such as the upcoming Watonga homecoming game which marked Lauren's first date (if you could call it that—said date consisting of she and her beau riding to the game with me and then riding with me and Michelle to the restaurant afterward).

In any case, enough things on my mind to make me want to go somewhere to think seriously, to think without interruption, down by the pond, which was what I did, although it was too cold for fish to be biting and I had to bundle up with my jacket collar upturned.

It was a gray day, intermittent drizzle, the sun occasionally threatening to break through. I sat staring at the lightly wind-rippled surface of the pond and the low clouds reflected in it, and I was so deeply lost in it—like you might lose yourself in the sight of the crackling gray static of a television set or the lulling tumble of clothes in a dryer—that I didn't even hear the rustling of the wind high up in the cedar trees on the hillside.

I did hear a displaced stone bounce first with a hollow thunk on the red rock beside me and then with a hollow plunk into the pond, and I prepared to get up to shoo a cow away from the steep incline and back to safety. Then a pair of battered ropers descended, followed by black Wranglers, until gradually B. W. was revealed. He sat down next to me with a sigh and stared down into the water I had so recently sent my mind swimming in.

“How'd you find me?” I asked, and he glanced over at me and gave me a slender smile.

“Looked for you,” he said.

“There are times you're too smart for your own good,” I said.

“Maybe.” He looked back out at the water. “Not many, I'd guess.”

The wind picked up a little bit and bent the treetops, riffled the water so we lost our reflections. He put his arms around his knees and hugged them close, and I could see that it was going to be up to me to do the talking, at least until I could guess what had brought him down here.

“You still feeling bad about Michael?” Because I was certainly feeling bad, and Michelle was pestering me to try and confront the issue more forcefully.

B. W. shook his head, then picked up a small, flat rock beside him, aimed it experimentally a few times, and skipped it across the pond with a flick of his wrist.

“I feel bad, I guess. And I miss him, even. But I need to talk to you about something else,” he said. “I've been thinking about this for a long time, only I don't know how to say it, and I know you're going to be upset, and so I haven't said anything.”

“Okay,” I said.

“But it doesn't go away. Not talking about it just makes it worse.”

Well, that was true enough. “So now you're here to talk about it,” I said.

He nodded.

I waited. The last concentric circles of the rock he had skipped had disappeared.

“Okay,” I said at last. “Did
you
get somebody pregnant? Become a vegetarian? What?”

He didn't laugh, just flashed another brief, mouth-only smile that died on his lips. Nah. “Dad, I've decided I don't want to play college ball. I don't want to play basketball, period. I'm not having fun anymore.” Then he looked back down and away.

“What are we going to do about college?” I hadn't meant to say that out loud. But now that it was out, I starting thinking about the balance in our savings account, about the feed bills coming if we had a tough winter, about new parts for the combine, and my stomach knotted with something that felt very much like fear.

He held up a hand, perhaps to try to forestall that whole panicked line of thought. “I'm still going to college, Dad. I've been accepted into the forestry program at Montana.”

“Montana,” I repeated.

“I got the letter last week,” he said. “And I want to go. I'll work to pay my way there if I have to.”

“If you have to,” I repeated. If he'd said, “When I get there, I'm going to become a moose,” I probably would have repeated that, too.

“So I guess I'm asking your permission,” he said. “To quit.”

Quit
. I never did like the sound of that word, and I didn't repeat it. Instead I turned to him, and there was an edge in my voice I couldn't help. “B. W., don't you know that basketball could be your ticket out of this town? More important, don't you know what a gift you have?” I dropped my hand onto his knee and clamped on tight. “Don't you know what some people would give to have the talent, the instincts you have? If I'd had what you've got, I would have ridden it as far as I could go. I would have left Watonga and never looked back.”

He looked at my hand for a second. I was probably hurting him, but he didn't pull away.

“Dad,” he said. “I'm not you. And you can't live my life.”

I lifted my hand. “Right,” I said. “You're right.”

He looked away from me, his mouth drawn in a grim line. “I'm sorry,” he said, finally, looking up. “I didn't mean to make you worry. It's okay. We'll make it work somehow. I can take out loans. Maybe get some grants.”

I mentally calculated our savings again, the possible income from the winter calves, from next summer's harvest; the numbers did not lend themselves to much optimism. But I looked at B. W., my obedient boy, the boy who had always done what we asked.

The boy who had never been anything but decent and honorable.

Didn't such a boy deserve every chance at the life he wanted?

So I looked at him and I nodded, and what I said was, “We'll find a way, I guess.” But my limited optimism didn't get too far down the road before some other things sidetracked it. I wasn't just a father here, although maybe I should have tried to be; I was also a coach from whom people expected great things and in a very short time. Which meant I had another problem.

“If you quit now,” I said, “you'll be leaving me and the team in a real fix.”

He nodded.

I brought my hands together as if I were praying, brought them to my face, thought for a moment. “What if we compromise? I won't bug you about college ball. But play for me. Finish the season. It's not like we'll be going to regionals, be playing playoff games into the spring. It'll be a short season.”

He smiled sadly. “I think you're right about that,” he said. His shoulders relaxed. He had decided. “Okay, Dad, I can do that. For you.”

“And if it starts being fun again, well—”

“Dad,” he cautioned, and raised that warning hand.

Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

He pushed himself to his feet. “I got to get on to school.” He brushed off his butt, then held out his hand.

“I think I'll stay,” I said. “For a bit.”

“I'm not trying to help you up,” he said. “I'm trying to shake your hand.”

I reached my hand up, and he took it in a firm grip. “Thanks for talking to me.”

“Likewise,” I said. We shook once and he turned to climb up the hill.

“See you at practice,” he called from the top. “Don't forget you wanted to try Todd Daugherty at guard today.”

“I won't forget,” I called after him.

I waited a moment to make sure Lauren wasn't in line behind him, then I turned back to look at the water.

I had known B. W. was unhappy, but I misjudged the cause of his unhappiness. I was reminded what I had said in my letter to my folks; if I misunderstood even B. W. so completely, how had I misunderstood the others in my life, the other people I should know best?

I didn't want to think about that any further. It didn't seem productive for anything except paranoia.

It was cold, and the day was growing grayer, with clouds blowing in from the north. I decided I didn't want to stay, so I got up, dusted myself off, and walked to the truck.

When I got back to the house, I made my early-morning phone call to Gloria's place—a new habit I'd developed since Michael had left—and Michael, if he was there, was exercising his new early-morning habit of not answering the phone. After that, unless I lingered for hours over coffee with my farming buddies up at McBee's, my calendar was depressingly clear until basketball practice.

Come November, I'd just as soon be anything besides a farmer. November can bore the life right out of you, make you want to sleep forever or run screaming through the fields.