Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend

by Alan Cumyn

  Pyke did not show up.

  Pyke did not show.

  The wind flung blankets off huddled knees and at the end of the first quarter sailed away with the referee’s hat. Programs flew off, only to be pressed hard against the chain-link fence at the end of the sports field, and everyone on the Vista View side looked to the birdless sky with draining hope.

  It was too windy for Pyke to fly.

  Pyke was not going to save the game.

  Robbie Lewis, who played somewhere on defense—that much Shiels could understand—knocked the ball out of a Wallin player’s hands and then ran down the sidelines the wrong way, into his own team’s end zone, and threw the ball down in deluded triumph, only to have a Wallin player fall on it for yet another touchdown.

  It was that kind of game.

  If Sheldon had been there—Sheldon had a nose for important events, and was not at this one, which only added to the building dread in Shiels’s gut—he would have delighted in the cascading incompetence of the Valiant Vikes under the pressure of playing a large, ferocious, talented team. He would have videoed and posted the Robbie Lewis debacle; he would have perversely gloried in the way the Vikes’ passing game went haywire in the wind; he would have found new adjectives for the sound of the Vikes’ bodies hitting the ground after colliding with such superbly conditioned monsters.

  Manniberg had skipped out. Jocelyne Legault was not there either. Too late, Shiels realized that Jocelyne’s absence was a clue. Pyke never had intended to come.

  This was all part of the dream, obviously. You could not summon someone like Pyke. Gods do not come when called.

  At halftime the score was 31–0. The eight visitors’ buses left with most of the Vista View crowd and almost all the media. But Shiels stayed because she was student-body chair, and felt responsible, and was clinging to appearances. When the teams ran back onto the field for the second half, Coach glared at her as if he’d known all along her central role. From seventy-five yards away she felt his accusatory malice hardening the roots of her hair.

  Could she even return to the school with this utter failure hanging around her neck? Somehow the image stuck in her mind that the doors would not even open for her. That she would be prevented from stepping foot in the place.

  But then, with Wallin about to score again late in the third quarter—when there was still time for a comeback!—Shiels spotted a speck in the eastern sky. Then not just one speck, a series of them, gathering force: crows. By the thousands. Heading their way.

  She grabbed her megaphone and yelled out, “Hold that line, Vikes!” so loudly that the players on the field turned to see what she was on about.

  Or, rather, the crowd was so quiet, so sparse at that point, her amplified voice, even caught in the wind, surprised them. “Hold on! Hold on!” she cried, and pointed, so that many of the players turned to look at the gathering storm of crows.

  Wallin ran their toughest player against the Valiant Vikes’ front line . . . which drove him back two yards.

  “Hold that line!” Shiels yelled again. She thought she could see one larger speck in the distant swirl of crows. It looked like Pyke was fighting the wind, trying to make it to the field.

  The Wallin quarterback kept the ball himself and ran around the Vikes’ stumbling defenders but was forced out of bounds. Close to scoring, but not quite.

  Shiels moved down to the mostly abandoned front row of the bleachers. A girl sat huddled under a frayed blanket. Jocelyne Legault! She’d been there all the time. “Is he coming?” Shiels asked her. “Is that him?”

  “Yes. I think so. I told him,” Jocelyne said. So Shiels yelled into the megaphone, “One more time! Hold that line!” and Jocelyne stood with her, shoulder to shoulder, and joined in the chant.

  The Wallin quarterback faked a pass, then ran around the Vike’s defenders. He had a clear route into the end zone. But at about the two-yard line, something black came out of nowhere. A crow! Who pecked at the quarterback’s hand and forced a fumble.

  Vikes’ ball! Coach called a time-out, and then everyone watched the mighty pterodactyl circle, circle, and finally crash-land near enough to the Vikes’ bench that he was immediately mobbed by cheering players. Yet the players were nothing compared to the crescendo of crows now swarming the bleachers, the fences, any railing or tower or other surface that would have them. They blackened the screen so that it was suddenly difficult to know the score or the time left.

  It was 45 to nothing, but that score would be changing. Shiels felt a sudden slide of something, that worm perhaps that had stirred to life the very first time she had glimpsed Pyke in the sky.

  There was still time. Who could stop a player who could fly? There was still—

  “He’s going to win the game,” Jocelyne Legault said. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  It was an odd thing to say, as if Shiels might want more than that, or something different.

  “I’m sorry our whole crowd has gone home,” Shiels said. She held her phone out and captured video of the masses of crows blackening the bleachers, of the Valiant Vikes huddling around the very first football-playing pterodactyl.

  The teams took the field again. Vikes’ ball on their own two-yard line. Behind the suddenly energized gray-and-gold front line, Pyke hopped, looking naked almost, without a jersey, without pads. When he opened his wings, the wind blew him off balance like he was a kite on the ground. So he hopped and shifted, fluttered, scrambled to stay on his feet.

  Jeffreys took the snap. He faded back, deep, deep in his own end.

  “Fly!” Shiels yelled. “Pyke! Take off!”

  But Pyke didn’t seem to know what to do. Wallin players surged after him even though he didn’t have the ball. He dodged, ducked, fluttered.

  “Fly!”

  Jeffreys ran the ball to him. What was this called? A broken play.

  A Wallin player now had a meaty paw on Pyke’s wing. It was hard to see what happened. Pyke turned a little bit, and then it’s possible he moved too fast for the eye to follow. The Wallin player backed off suddenly, holding his blood-drenched arm.

  The other Wallin players stopped running for Pyke and instead stood gaping, stunned.

  Pyke opened his wings and, rearing up, became monstrously large. The Wallin players fell back. One of the Vikes threw a terrific block then and flattened two of the Wallin defenders, who rolled on the ground, possibly hurt.

  Pyke took off awkwardly, the ball in his feet. He climbed above the heads of the other players and headed downfield. Not straight—a sort of zigzag pattern, dealing with the wind. It were as if he were running downfield, avoiding tacklers. But no one could follow him up there. He climbed, and climbed, and circled the Wallin end zone, but did not touch down.

  He didn’t seem to understand what a touchdown was.

  He flew off with the ball, thousands of crows now blackening the sky after him. A siren in the distance turned into a red flashing light, and then an ambulance was pulling up right at the side of the football field. That Wallin player really was bleeding badly.

  Shiels didn’t know what to say. For the longest time she and Jocelyne Legault stood at the side of the field looking at the black dots receding in the cold, gray sky.

  XX

  “I believe I have already told you a number of times about the importance of early application for Stockard College,” Shiels’s mother said, in a clipped, overly patient tone. It was evening. They were standing in the kitchen, the night outside already dark. Shiels was emptying the dishwasher, her mind stuck on the image of Pyke flying away with the football, getting smaller and smaller in the sky.

  She had the feeling he was gone for good. That she would never see him again.

  “Are you even listening to me?” Shiels’s mother said.

  “I’m working on it,” Shiels said distractedly.

  Her mother closed the refrigerator door with too much force. “How is your personal essay coming? I was going to look over the draft when it�
��s ready.”

  “I have a few paragraphs,” Shiels said. Where was her student-body chair voice? She sounded to herself like a little girl from grade two who’d forgotten where she’d put her pencil case.

  “What’s the problem? You write these kinds of things constantly for the various causes and events you get involved in. You could write a knockout piece for Stockard in your sleep.”

  Shiels summoned a weary smile. Did her mother even know what she was saying? Shiels felt like she was just waking up, like she’d been asleep too much of the time to focus on all these mounting heartaches and uncertainties and things too harsh to gaze at directly.

  Jonathan came in then with his phone ready to hit Shiels with it. With whatever news it contained.

  “Pyke has been arrested!” he announced.

  Shiels felt herself slump against the granite top of the kitchen counter.

  “What?”

  “He slashed that Wallin guy in the game. You were there. You must’ve seen it. Blood spurting everywhere!”

  The video was even grainier than the footage of Shiels’s wrangle dance. It was taken from the Wallin side of the stands, from quite a distance off. The frame shook in the wind. Shiels could see herself and Jocelyne Legault standing on the sidelines, near the end zone, screaming at Pyke to take off. The Wallin guy was coming for Pyke, laid his hand on Pyke’s shoulder, on his wing. The video was actually in slow motion. Blur, blur, the Wallin player slumped back. Black blur—blood? All the other players stepped back, and Pyke screamed—why had Shiels not remembered the scream?—and took off. The camera followed him but then returned to the player who was down. And bleeding.

  “Was that the football game you were so worried about?” Shiels’s mother said. Shiels had said nothing upon returning home. As if silence might mean the whole game had never happened.

  “What do you mean ‘arrested’?” Shiels said. “Where did they find him? Did he turn himself in? Are they saying he assaulted that Wallin player?”

  “The boy looks pretty hurt,” Shiels’s mother said. She was wearing her doctor gaze now. Her eyes were unwavering, the motherly nagging temporarily put aside.

  “He’s down at the jail right now!” Jonathan said.

  • • •

  Shiels’s first thought was to fly to Pyke’s side—metaphorically—to rush to the city jail and demand to see and talk with him one human to another. She had never been inside the jail, but she had a vague notion that Pyke would be on one side of a glass booth, that they would have to speak through a telephone, that the authorities might even have buckled his beak to his body to prevent him from slashing anyone else.

  She wouldn’t know what to say. She would just be with him. She would throw herself at the police constable standing guard over him and demand Pyke’s release.

  All of that in a first thought. But this was more than a first-thought sort of problem. This would require planning, coordination, leadership, spine. She might have lost all standing and credibility over the wrangle dance, over her purple nose, over Pyke’s disastrous performance in the football game, but she was precisely the right person now to spearhead the effort to free Pyke from unjust incarceration.

  Spearhead—perfect pun. Shiels called Sheldon right away. “What do we know?” she asked. Of course he understood what she was talking about. They were on the same wavelength.

  “Jocelyne talked him into giving himself up,” Sheldon said. “The police got her alone. They pressed her. He doesn’t have an attorney.”

  “Slimebuckets!” Shiels said. All she knew of the law came from crime dramas, but it was enough for her to imagine burly cops pressuring Jocelyne in a tiny, dark, airless room, alternately telling her what trouble she was in for aiding and abetting—she hadn’t, she’d been on the sidelines!—and reassuring her that it would all be for the best, they just wanted to talk to Pyke, nothing bad would come of it.

  “Is he charged?”

  “With assault,” Sheldon said. “People are saying Coach should step down for putting a wild animal in the game.”

  “He’s not a wild animal!” Shiels said. “He’s a boy, just like anyone. Has Manniberg said anything?” But Shiels knew already that Manniberg would be the last to comment on something like this. He might not even have heard what had happened.

  He would blame Shiels, no matter what.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” Shiels said. “We need a rally. Right now. The whole student body outside the jail. Everyone with video, everyone broadcasting. We need the world to know it was a terrible accident, there was no ill intent. It was football, for God’s sake. People get hurt all the time. I have the megaphone still from the game, I’ll bring that. How soon do you think—”

  “Shiels,” Sheldon said. It was the tone of voice he used when she was in full stride, when he had to get a word in.

  “What?”

  “You convinced Jeremy Jeffreys to throw that football in the assembly so Pyke would get into that game.”

  “I’m dealing with now,” she said. “Not the past.”

  “He didn’t know the rules,” Sheldon shot back. “He never practiced. They would’ve killed him if they’d hit him. He didn’t know he wasn’t allowed to nearly take off somebody’s arm.”

  “What are you saying?” But it was all right for Sheldon to practically accuse Shiels of causing the entire disaster all by herself. He was playing devil’s advocate. He was her reality check. That was how they functioned together.

  He didn’t have to try so hard, though.

  “I’m saying,” he said slowly, with something dangerous in his voice, “yes, he might well be guilty. Maybe you, too. I don’t know the law.”

  Shiels caught her breath. “Me?”

  “You.” Underneath the usual Sheldon calm, his voice sounded angry. “You get these ideas. You think that because they’re yours, they must be worthwhile. Sometimes they are, but sometimes they aren’t. This is pretty much a disaster, Shiels.”

  Well.

  Shiels stood very still, eyes closed, holding the phone to her ear. She could hear Sheldon’s breathing on the other end of the line. But she couldn’t hear her own.

  He might as well have said that Shiels had tried to maim that Wallin boy herself and turn Pyke into a dangerous criminal.

  He might as well have said he thought she was somehow deranged and power-hungry and out of control.

  That he didn’t respect her anymore.

  That he didn’t love her.

  That he couldn’t even work with her.

  That he thought she was somehow mentally or emotionally or psychologically incompetent yet at the same time arrogant and so full of herself as to be a danger to others.

  He might as well have been saying that someone else should be spearheading—that word again—the effort to defend Pyke and make the case that he had acted out of pure self-defense.

  He might as well have been saying that she ought to go to the police herself and take all the blame and maybe risk a criminal conviction of her own when she had done nothing except try to make a hugely unfair football match more of an even fight.

  Or, further, he might as well have been saying that she was, in fact, the only person who could save the situation, not by rallying masses of students to make a huge public noise, but by telling the authorities her role in the whole affair.

  Another unfortunate word choice—affair.

  He might as well have been saying that she could yet find a way out of this disaster by putting herself not onstage, but on the line.

  Sheldon might as well have been saying that he would respect her then, that she might truly redeem herself then, that if she did love Pyke in any way, explaining her own role quietly, fully, and honestly to the authorities would be the very best way of showing it.

  A painful, pregnant pause. Shiels exhaled just to hear herself.

  “How did you ever get so smart?” she said softly.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I will do
everything you’re suggesting,” she said.

  • • •

  Shiels would do everything, yet . . . there at the front door her father stood, looking ashen. “What’s wrong?” she asked. She was sitting on the stairs tying her yellow shoes. She was going to run all the way downtown to the jail to give herself up to the authorities and tell all that she knew so that they would realize her central part in the disaster and Pyke’s essential innocence.

  But the disaster was still unfolding.

  “He almost lost his arm,” her father said.

  His own arms hung loosely at his sides, hands open, empty of instruments. Shiels grasped that he had been the surgeon on call; he had been the doctor forced to save the poor Wallin player’s arm.

  “The site was terribly infected,” he said. “It was like he’d been both slashed and injected with poison or something.” His eyes focused finally on her. “Where are you going?”

  Shiels finished tying her shoes. Her mother approached from the kitchen then. “The boy was poisoned?” she said.

  “The tissue was purple, desiccating in front of my eyes,” Shiels’s father said. And then both parents turned to Shiels, whose hand went up to her nose, as if she could feel its hue.

  Her father kneeled to examine her, the way he had so many times when she was young and some infection had found its way in. Despite his weariness, his fingers did not tremble, but were warm and gentle on the base of her nose, along the ridge. “It’s still healthy tissue,” he murmured.

  Still. As if it might turn rancid any moment and kill her.

  “He didn’t poison me, Daddy,” Shiels said.

  “Where are you going?” her mother asked then.

  The PD, the parental dynamo, had her surrounded.

  “I have to clear my head. I’m just going for a little run,” she said. But besides her shoes she wasn’t wearing jogging pants or a sweat top or leggings. She was in her black jeans and a rose shirt and burgundy sweater. Her warm coat was on the floor beside her.