Mr. Fahrenheit

by T. Michael Martin

  A squeal of feedback screeched over the speaker system. Benji flinched, thrown off his rhythm.

  There was a kind of rumbling sound, like someone was wrestling over the microphone in the press box. Then, a voice: “Lightman puts flash paper on his gloves to make the fire. You can get it on Amazon for three bucks a sheet.”

  The voice wasn’t the announcer’s. It sounded like a teenage guy.

  “The wand’s a Sparkler Stick. Twelve bucks,” the guy said, starting to laugh. “Bedford Falls, you suck, you bunch of rednecks! Have fun tonight, ’cause Newporte’s gonna kick alllll your asses next week! Benji Lightman, you suck, Bedford Falls you suck, NEWPORTE HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL FOREVER!”

  The Bedford Falls crowd booed. Some in the home crowd started laughing. A grown man’s voice, off mic, said, “Kid, you get the heck away from that!”

  After what sounded like a scuffle for control of the mic, the younger voice spouted one final sentence.

  “Hey, Lightman, don’t set yourself on fire again.”

  Benji’s cheeks flared. In his mind, he pictured an old red door.

  He cut the thought off, shouting, “Let’s make it nine and zero!”

  He hurled the cards to the earth: two bangs of light and smoke, this time in the school colors of blue and gold. The marching band blared to life and the Bedford Falls Magic football team erupted out of the stadium tunnel, a rushing stream of shoulder pads and shining helmets, splitting around Benji like they were a river and he a stone.

  He was almost back to the tunnel when a Bedford Falls player grabbed his bicep. The player’s fingertips bore white rings of athletic tape, the better to grip the ball on cold nights.

  “Wrong way, sexy,” he said. The voice echoed through the stadium; Benji realized his lapel mic was still broadcasting and switched it off.

  “Whatever you’re thinking of doing,” Benji told him, “let’s do the other thing.” But he was already resigned to the fact that protesting was useless, because he recognized the expression on the player’s face: laser-guided rage. It was the same focused fury, familiar from four years of football game nights, that had made this quarterback the most singular and legendary athlete in the history of Bedford Falls High School.

  Quarterback Christopher Robin “CR” Noland said, “Nobody puts my Banjo in a corner.”

  The marching band departed the field in formation. The teams were stationed on the sidelines; the only people on the field now were each team’s offensive captain and the referee waiting on the fifty-yard line. CR was Bedford Falls’s captain. A lean mountain who towered over Benji by six inches, CR had hit puberty early and hard: Shortly after moving to town during the vanishing summer before sixth grade, he’d sprouted like a kid christened by comic-book radiation.

  Nearing the (bewildered) referee, CR stuck two fingers through his helmet’s face mask and whistled in the direction of the Bedford Falls sidelines. “Zeeko, this is a party of three!” he called.

  Zeeko—the team’s trainer and one of the few African Americans on the sidelines—looked uncertainly at Coach Nicewarner, who, after a moment’s indecision, motioned for him to join CR. “Jesus, help us,” Zeeko muttered as he caught up with Benji and CR, his eyes enormous behind his thick glasses. But there was a laugh in his voice.

  As they reached the fifty-yard line, the other team’s captain glared at CR. “Son,” the ref said to CR, confused, “this is a captains-only, no-mascots type deal.”

  “Hell, sir, you think I don’t know that?” CR said earnestly. “These good-looking studs are captains.”

  “Love of God, son, they don’t even have uniforms,” said the ref. As if Benji’s tuxedo wasn’t enough, Zeeko was wearing the plaid hoodie and boxy Kmart jeans that had earned him his (affectionate) nickname, “Dad Clothes.”

  CR grinned, this huge smile that was absurd on his face, but it was precisely that goofiness that made it the sort of smile you just had to believe. C’mon, now, would I lie? “They’re injured,” he said. “Special teams.”

  “More like special ed,” the other team’s captain muttered.

  “You’ll want to watch that mouth, kid!” CR growled. The captain visibly recoiled. It was not CR’s normal voice: It was his Quarterback Voice. Talk about magic, Benji thought.

  “Sir, I sure don’t want to tell you how to ref,” CR said, normal-voiced, “but I think our crowd’s kinda ticked about that little prank on the speakers. Am I saying that maybe, just maybe, somebody in your press box let those Newporte players in? Nope! That, I am not doing! But how about we let these fine young Americans stay here for the coin toss, just to call it even?”

  The ref paused, tallying the calculus of pros and cons. “Well . . .” he said, “let’s not make a habit of this.”

  “Great, thanks a ton!” Then CR turned to the sidelines again and shouted, “Eleanor, come get a close-up!”

  The ref looked like he wanted to object as Ellie walked toward them with her camera in tow and a rueful smile on her face. But she stopped about fifteen feet away, which was apparently an acceptable distance, and the ref seemed to decide it was time to rip the Band-Aid off.

  He flipped the coin, the floating disc twirling and flashing in the field lights. He caught it and slapped it onto his wrist. “Call it, Bedford Falls.”

  “Heads,” CR replied.

  The ref took his hand off the coin. Tails. “We choose to receive the kickoff,” the other captain said.

  Benji looked at CR, wondering if he might be upset by this not-so-awesome turn of events. CR just stage-whispered, “Benji, turn your mic on.”

  As Benji did so, CR did something strange: He slammed his fist on the chest of his filthy jersey, which he’d refused to wash since their victory the week before. (The Bedford Falls football field, he said, was the place in the world that most felt like his home.)

  A thin trickle of dirt tumbled off the jersey. CR caught it in his hand and said, “We’re gonna need more. Zeek, Banjo, put your hands out.”

  Confused, they held their open hands palms up in front of him.

  CR proceeded to beat his chest like Donkey Kong until their palms were sprinkled with dirt.

  He nodded, satisfied.

  CR (to the captain, but amplified for the rest of the stadium): “Do you know what that is?”

  The captain: “Dirt . . . ?”

  CR: “That’s our field. That’s Bedford Falls.”

  CR nodded to Benji and Zeeko, who suddenly understood. They tipped their hands, letting the earth tumble to the field, like they were baptizing it.

  “So now this is our field,” CR said, and then shouted directly into the mic, so his Quarterback Voice boomed through the universe like something vast and ancient. “You’re in our house, fellas!”

  Following the call of his performer’s instinct, Benji snapped his fingers, the pyrotechnic sheets momentarily flaring the moment with magical light as CR finished:

  “You are IN. OUR. HOUSE!”

  And the Bedford Falls fans surged to their feet, their roar cracking like a joyous lightning electrifying every atom of the night. Benji, CR, and Zeeko turned from the stupefied captain and referee, Ellie following with the camera capturing everything: four friends who had become the unlikely center of the universe striding together toward their sideline. It was just a game night, that was all, but amid that happy mayhem, nothing in all the world could have felt more enchanted.

  Nothing else on planet Earth.

  2

  The Bedford Falls victory was as spectacular as it was assured. Final score: 59 to 3, and their opponents only got on the scoreboard because CR let his second-string quarterback (a wide-eyed junior nicknamed Charlie Brown) take over near the end.

  A post-game party was assured, too, but its location wound up surprising Benji. And when he looked back on this night later, he wondered if “surprising” was the wrong word. “Inevitable” was better, maybe.

  Or “destined.”

  After the game, Benji hung his tuxedo
and top hat in a garment bag, tugged on two hoodies and a pair of jeans, then, very cautiously, peeked through the door into the hall outside the locker room.

  The instant the door cracked, a solid wall of media people—photographers and writers and TV reporters with logos on their microphones—swarmed forward.

  Benji smiled apologetically, said, “Players and sorcerers only,” and closed the door.

  “Christ on a friggin’ cracker, Banjo,” CR said, toweling his hair in front of a locker, “how many people are out there?”

  “All of them, I think,” Benji said. CR gave a dry chuckle. “Like, twenty. Mostly local, but there’s TV people from Chicago. Want to do an interview?”

  He already knew what CR’s answer would be, of course: Hellll no. The reporters in that hall would have donated a kidney to a terrorist in exchange for a few minutes with CR. In their minds, he was CR Noland, the Number One College Recruit in the Midwest. But the instant CR stepped off the football field and removed the cocoon of his helmet and pads, the attention usually made him a type of uncomfortable that verged on panicky. It wasn’t something Benji ever brought up, though.

  “This TV reporter,” CR said, pulling on boxers under his towel, “is she hot?”

  “He’s wearing a wedding ring.”

  “Double whammy!”

  Zeeko and his dad burst out laughing at the mini medical station on the other side of the locker room. Zeeko’s dad, Dr. Eustice, was a doctor from Sierra Leone who volunteered as the team’s medical guy during games. Zeeko had inherited a lot from his dad (Zeeko’s dream was to be a doctor in Bedford Falls), and one of those things was Dr. Eustice’s easy, wonderfully booming laugh.

  The locker room filled with more players from the showers, their celebratory shouts thunderclapping in the cinder-block cavern. CR accepted a series of fist bumps, but didn’t look away from Benji. “Text Ellie to meet us at my truck behind the field house, okay?” CR said. “We’ll sneak out the back . . . Shit, wait, there might be some reporters out there.”

  Benji thought about that, then said, “How ’bout this: I’ll tell the reporters you’re gonna have a quick press conference out on the field.”

  “Ha! I like it.”

  “Misdirection is useful, I’m telling ya. BTW, where’s the party?”

  “Charlie Brown’s house.” CR smiled, tying his shoes. “The kid still can’t believe he got to touch the football.”

  Benji was almost to the door when CR called, “Oh, hey, Banjo. I liked how you exploded the wand tonight. I know it’s not a new trick, but—new ‘illusion,’ sorry—but you threw it real good.”

  “Thanks, man,” Benji said, honestly touched.

  CR waved: no biggie.

  After sending the reporters out of the hall, Benji headed toward an exit. He texted CR:

  All clear

  As he opened the door, someone quite large bumped into him.

  “The field is that way,” Benji began, then looked up. “O-oh. Hi, Mr. Noland.”

  The middle-aged man’s face bore a resemblance to CR’s, but only a blurry one. They shared the same broad mouth, the same sky-blue eyes. But CR’s father’s eyes always seemed narrowed, as if in some kind of ambient, low-level disgust. Disgust with what? Benji used to wonder. He’d decided the answer was “nothing in particular,” which was of course another way of saying “everything.” And you got the feeling that if that mouth had ever smiled, it had been by accident.

  Mr. Noland stormed past Benji and toward the locker room, leaving Benji thinking, I hope you’re hurrying out of there already, CR.

  Benji stepped out through a side door in the field house, grateful, after the cramped hallways, for the wide-open space and cold air of the Indiana November night. The stadium was to his left, maybe a hundred feet away, and as he watched, the towering lights that ringed the stadium powered down one by one. There was a growing chorus of protest from the reporters on the field. Just before the last light went black, the announcer came over the speakers: “The stadium is closed. Everyone off the field.”

  Benji chuckled and pulled a deck of cards from his pocket, raising his gaze (still hazy from the field lights) to the sky, practicing complex card flourishes without looking at his hands—

  An eye opened in the sky.

  A few cards startled from his fingers. A globe of light, a strange and bright green light, pulsed in the clouds. It flickered, almost like heat lightning, except this was winter, and in the center of the pulse was a dark circle, like a pupil.

  Benji blinked. And it was gone.

  He turned when he heard CR’s truck skid to a halt behind him. Zeeko opened the passenger door, hopped out, and whispered to Benji, “Be gentle. Our friend has come down with a mild case of ‘I’m gonna kill my father.’”

  Uh-oh, Benji thought.

  “My dad,” CR said, “is a dick.”

  “In other news, the earth is round,” Zeeko said.

  “Ha-ha-ha,” CR said sarcastically, then grinned. “That was sorta funny, actually.” Benji got in, sardining himself between CR and Zeeko.

  “What’d your dad say?” Benji asked.

  CR seemed to weigh whether or not to tell him. “Just . . . whatever, it doesn’t matter,” he said, although clearly it did. “He hates me. He doesn’t need a reason. He just needs an excuse to remind me. It’s like he’s jackin’ off with sandpaper. Whatever, I don’t care anymore. It’s game night, Banjo, let’s make my sobriety disappear.”

  “So, we’re going to Charlie Brown’s house, then?”

  “Nope,” CR said. “I just decided the party’s gonna be somewhere else.”

  The old quarry, outside Bedford Falls, belonged to CR’s dad. Getting there required enduring several miles of teeth-chattering forest roads, and then you were greeted by fences topped with rusting hoops of barbed wire, and a locked gate with a sign assuring you TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. Inside the fences, you found a couple of acres that had once been a successful extraction point for natural gas and a quarry for granite and shale; they’d actually used some of the granite from here for the floor in the first Apple Store in Chicago. But nothing remained of that pre-Recession hot streak except a few Noland Natural Resources trucks and the enormous quarry pit, which had long since filled with water and become a frozen lake. This land was just a junkyard, mostly, home to abandoned cars, refrigerators, and ambitions.

  Within an hour, the open space in the middle of the junkyard filled with a crowd of three hundred people, which was double the usual post-game party attendance. There was way more alcohol than usual, too. Both surpluses sprang from the same phenomenon: a Homecoming Week FIG invasion. Benji recognized some of the FIGs from when he was a freshman, plus or minus beer bellies. More FIGs than a Newton factory, he thought as he directed traffic with CR and Zeeko, and made a mental note to tell Ellie the joke when she got here. Somebody hooked their phone to a car stereo and whammed the night with distorted hip-hop; a few defensive linemen lit a bonfire that belched orange constellations of ash into the wild wind (which struck Benji as a fairly unwise decision, given that the quarry was surrounded by several miles of trees).

  “Okay,” CR said, “Banjo and Dad Clothes, y’guys babysit me, okay? I’m gonna get beertarded.”

  So Benji and Zeeko followed CR toward the crowd, the bonfire, and the nexus of everything awful about high school. And Benji did what he always did to survive the hot mess of make-outs, beer, and breakups: He pulled out a deck of cards.

  He took off his gloves, even though he knew his cold fingers would fumble a few complex flourishes. Drunk people were a very easy audience. He walked the crowd, approaching people with a handy cheesy line (“How much does a polar bear weigh? Enough to break the ice. Heyo! Pick a card”). An hour passed and the party blasted, but those things seemed to happen just outside the searchlight of his awareness. The act of magic cocooned him, made him feel lighter with a kind of time-free joy. And that was why he wanted so badly to leave Bedford Falls, to move to Chicago and try t
o land an apprenticeship at the famous Magic Lantern Theatre and Shoppe.

  After several orbits around the bonfire, Benji felt his phone buzz in his coat. He pulled it out, clicking the button so the screen lit up. A text from Ellie:

  Help me, Benji Lightman, I am fake-texting to avoid FIG encounters! (near the front gate)

  Benji texted back:

  En route

  He spotted her on the outskirts of the bonfire crowd, sitting on the hood of an old truck with a huge magnetic winch for towing cars. He was about thirty feet away when his phone buzzed again:

  Stay there.

  Shaun Spinney, 12 o’clock.

  SHAUN SPINNEY?!

  Benji looked at the crowd, now purposely focusing on the individual people, his heart thundering weirdly. He didn’t recognize anyone.

  Ellie texted:

  Retreating hairline. Ambitious but unsuccessful goatee.

  His gaze landed on a particularly heavyset FIG in a Colts jacket, who was drunkenly yanking people into embraces with a fervor that suggested bro-hugs were about to be outlawed.

  Benji gasped so loudly that it drew a snort-laugh from Ellie. He felt a happy voltage, a current conducted through the medium of their texts. He looked at her from the side of his eye. She had taken off her knit cap and tucked her long, deep blond hair behind her ears, which he knew she hated because they were pointy. But God, she looked adorable lit up over there by the bonfire light.

  Ellie texted:

  We’re talking to Shaun. Now. That is a thing we’re going to do.

  “I cannot believe my life right now!” she shouted before Benji could text back. “Is that Shaun Spinney? Is that the Shaun Spinney?”

  Spinney turned and raised his hand in the tentative wave that is the universal sign for “I’m not sure who this person is.”

  “Ellie Holmes and Benji Lightman,” Ellie explained as they reached him.

  Recognition lit Spinney’s drunk features. “What’s up, bitches!” he cried happily. He yanked Benji into a bro-hug. Benji’s eyes popped wide. Over Spinney’s shoulder, he saw Ellie do a face-palm.