by Gurley, Jan
“Let’s do this thing,” I said, hoping I sounded braver than I felt.
***
Viola, Tio and I stood together on the concrete ramp, side-by-side, a mass of humans roaring and screaming behind us. I’m not sure, but I think it meant that the game's score was close.
“Here’s the deal,” I shouted. I had my hands cupped around my mouth so they could hear, even though we were so close our shoulders bumped, “When the game ends and the guys are running down this ramp, we’re going to play the da-dut, da-DUH lead-in.”
Tio’s eyes bulged so much I thought his tongue might actually pop out and catch a fly. He shouted back, “You mean the one where the stands shout ‘CHARGE!’ afterward?”
“Yep.”
Viola said, “But I don’t know all the words.”
Tio shouted, “You’re telling me…that you think we’re going to be able to…inspire…this whole stadium to yell 'charge' with only a trombone, a flute and a triangle?!?”
Luckily for me, I was saved from answering. Everyone in the stands came to their feet, stomping and throwing things. I thought the aluminum bleachers might crack and disintegrate. The three of us retreated to the bottom of the ramp-wall, dodging thrown popcorn and crumpled paper hotdog wrappers. There was a long, bone-rattling “Boooooooo.”
I told myself all these people were probably unhappy about a referee’s call, and not my lame idea to impersonate a band.
I could feel a hard concrete chill seeping into me. Viola hummed over her flute and when the deafening sound lessened for a second, I heard her making weird harmonics with her voice and instrument. She couldn’t have been more relaxed if she’d been sitting in a bubble bath.
Tio and I twitched and watched the game clock inch its way down. Who knew one “minute” of game time could last fifteen? It was weird actually seeing the end of a game. There seemed to be a lot of grunting, ker-powing, and even some earth shaking involved.
“That’s pretty loud, when they hit, isn’t it?” I hated the fact that my voice shook. I had no idea anyone could slam another person that hard. I cleared my throat. “Like a slap of thunder.”
Tio muttered under his breath, like he was chanting a rosary, “Heaven’s artillery thunders in the sky…”
Sheesh. More ‘Spears. I needed to change the subject, fast, or we were both going to freak out here.
“So what do you think the Dog is — a depp or a pitt?” I asked to cut the tension. It’s a game our group plays, ever since I explained my theory of guy attractiveness based on the timeless 1990's dichotomy. See, underneath it all, there are only two kinds of hot guys: young Johnny Depp (witty repartee, rebellious, omnisexual) and Brad Pitt in his Thelma and Louise phase (square-jawed, clean-cut, push-your-cowboy-hat-up-with-a-thumb uncomplicated). You can go through history and peg every attractive guy as one or the other from a combination of looks and personality. Try it for yourself. Take Errol Flynn. A depp. Kirk Douglas? A pitt. Oscar Wilde? A depp. Zac Efron? A pitt. Robert Pattinson? Current group consensus: trying too hard to be a depp.
Tio answered me between gritted teeth. “I don’t know.”
This was a shocker. Could the Dog be both? Or neither? That would be a first. “How do you reckon that?”
“I’ve never seen him.”
As the buzzer sounded and the stadium roared, we stared at each other in horror. “I thought YOU knew what he looked like.”
“I don’t!”
“I don’t either!”
“Wasn’t there a picture in the newspaper?”
“He’s always wearing a helmet!”
“A number for his jersey? A last name? Something?”
“I don’t do sports. Besides,” Tio shouted at me like I was hard of thinking, “I was just supposed to grab the camera, remember?”
Oh Jesus.
The announcer came on overhead, the volume deafening, so loud that the words smeared and buzzed over the crowd's screaming. We won — a high school team defeated a college team. Apparently people cared.
Tio bounced up and down, hands flapping and I could see his mouth moving as he shouted something at me. Oh crap. My trombone. That’s what he was saying. I was supposed to already have it out.
Four seconds later, my trombone was out, the case tossed aside. I perched one hip on the side concrete wall of the exit ramp down to the changing rooms.
For just one second, I had a mental panic attack. This truly was insane. How could we possibly carry this off? Thousands of people were screaming above us. People that we knew, people who knew our parents. Classmates and teachers. Tio was shaking so hard, the triangle bobbed and jerked on its string. Viola licked the mouth of her flute, frowning as she twisted the end to get a more precise alignment, all business.
They both looked at me. Waiting. Expectant.
In my head, silence swelled in my ears, the world contracting down to the sound of my own heartbeat. Buh-bum. Buh-bum.
I lifted my instrument and blatted the reveille lead-in notes to “Charge!” with clammy hands that left damp rings on my slide brace and bell. I could see Tio banging his eensy dangling triangle, and Viola inhaling and blowing her flute. But I couldn’t hear them at all.
Did anyone in the stands hear anything?
As if in answer, silence rolled down from the crowd above, like cold frost from a freezer. My heart felt like it followed the bumper on my slide — down, down downdown. Oh God, what if they all started to laugh, instead of shout?
I licked suddenly dry lips, then I played again, this time loud enough, even with a cold mouthpiece, to get the first three rows above us to shout a faint, raggedly Charge! in unison. I blew until my head felt light, and my lips felt bee-stung.
I hyperventilated my vision down to a narrow tunnel. All I could see was my spit valve, bobbing in front of me.
And then the raggedy cheer picked up, I gulped air like I’d just surfaced from deep under water and, by the sixth Charge!, the entire stadium joined in. I was a one-girl marching band.
Everyone in the audience seemed giddy because we’d won. No one questioned why we were shouting Charge! after the game was over.
There was a clatter and an endless stream of players started bumping past. I kept playing and forced myself to look like I belonged. My right leg, heavy with the weight of my Doc Marten, dangled down over the waist-high wall as I blew notes, my lips buzzing. Unfortunately I realized too late I forgot to make sure my crinoline was behaving. I gave it a shove down and it popped up again as I went back to playing while discreetly staring at the players.
These guys were massive, grim-faced as bulls running down a shoot, jostling, shoving, a foggy smell of guy-sweat and mildew crowded around them. They were covered with pads. Some had helmets pushed back far enough that I could see a raw chin, or a little patch of pimply forehead, but that was it.
My mother could be in this crowd and I wouldn’t be able to spot her. Not if she wore a helmet and pads.
At least I knew the very last guy wasn’t the Dog. He straggled behind, rail thin, his uniform blinding white (it looked like it had been recently ironed), and he could barely carry a plastic barrel with a screw-on lid, bigger than his torso.
“Tio,” I hissed, “it’s time!” Tio dropped his triangle and headed down the ramp. Now that the players were off the field, no one in the stands paid us any attention.
If you play in the band long enough, you can pack your instrument in less time than it takes some people to sneeze. I handed Viola my packed-up horn and the triangle, hopped off the wall and tried to saunter — like I belonged — after all the smelly beasts, into the darkness.
***
“Pitt.”
“Pitt.”
“Mega-pitt.”
“I think they’re all pitts. Shame.” Tio and I were on our bellies, taking turns looking through the zoom lens.
We lay across the top of a row of tall filing cabinets in a closet-sized room that adjoined the football team’s locker room. There were narrow, dusty windows above t
he cabinets, as small as sheets of paper laid in a row on their sides, which we peered through at the team. We could barely fit. I tried really hard to ignore the legs-curled-up fly corpses lying like confetti all around us. And the layer of dust — thick as powdered sugar on a doughnut — coating everything (including, now, me).
Tio said, glancing over at me as if he just realized it, “You don’t like pitts, do you?”
“They’re okay. Just not my type.”
We’d started playing the depp vs. pitt game because our nerves were getting the better of us. The head coach was yelling at the team and the guys all stood around listening, except for a few who sat on the bench in the middle of all the lockers, their sweaty heads in their hands.
“I thought you were supposed to be happy after you won,” I said.
“One of many reasons not to play football,” Tio said, like he was an expert on the subject.
“Got a clue yet which one is the Dog?”
“No. You?”
My stomach heaved and clutched. I had no idea what Celia was going to do to me if I gave her money back — but it wasn’t going to be pleasant, that’s for sure. And it would probably involve lawyers.
But more than that, I needed this money. For my trees.
The coach stopped shouting at them and slammed out of the room into a far doorway. The football guys, moving slow and listless, sat and unlaced shoes, popped helmets off their heads and whammed them against lockers, took the hems of nylon jerseys in one hand and ripped them over heads. It was like a complicated, choreographed dance.
“Hand it over,” I whispered in a rush to Tio. He slapped the giant camera into my palm, understanding what I meant.
We’d come so close. I’d be darned if I left now without even trying. Heck, I’d take pictures of them all. Surely one of them would turn out to be the Dog.
The world narrowed to the camera’s gray thumbnail-sized window and the neon-bright display. Snap after snap. But it just wasn’t working. The problem was me, not them. These weren’t, in a pitt kind of way, bad-looking guys. But my shots were terrible. One guy had his eyes closed. Another looked confused. The next looked like he’d just been arrested, backed against a wall, and I’d taken a stunned mug shot. Another had his face screwed up like he was trying to pass gas without anyone knowing.
This was terrible.
“You’re stressed,” Tio hissed in my ear.
No duh.
“Think of them as depps,” he suggested.
Shot after shot. It wasn’t working. And things were getting, um, well, we’ll call it PG-13 down there. Let’s just say I never realized that a jock strap was, literally, a guy-thong. Until now.
“I think…I think I’m going to have to call it quits,” I said to Tio, without looking at him. “Otherwise I’ll make a liar of myself. I will be doing naked.”
But then a sound froze me in place where I perched balanced on top of the filing cabinets.
“Hey Dog, what’d you think of the boner.”
The one guy with his uniform still on, the one sitting in the middle of the bench with his head in his hands, like he’d personally caused the earth to implode, that was the guy who looked up to answer the name Dog.
“Boner?” he said in this deep voice as he unsnapped his chinstrap.
There was a leery chuckle that went round the room.
“The chick with the trombone — that’s pretty sweet, a girl who’s got a boner in her mouth all the time.”
All I heard was some guy shout “what a pair of lips she must have…” and the rest was a blur of red.
“Shh! Shh! Shh!” finally filtered into my consciousness. I was clanging against the filing cabinets, scrambling to get down and give that cretin a piece of my mind. Only the sound of exploding, pornish guy laughter kept me and Tio from being discovered. Tio had clamped his hand over my mouth and it was hard enough to breathe that way (especially when you’re struggling to get free) that I was snorting like a bull ready to charge before the red haze lifted from my eyes.
Because the “boner” comment was just the beginning. Let me tell you, unless you’ve heard an entire guy’s locker room describe your anatomy (and its flaws) in detail, including –I might add — insulting your prized vintage crinoline underskirt, you haven’t lived. I was merely the first in a long line of critiques — girl boobs, girl mouths, girl butts, girl, well, you get the idea. And the Dog? No wonder they’d asked his opinion first. For the whole discussion (or should that be dissection?), no matter what anyone else said, everyone always asked the Dog what he thought. He was definitely the leader of the pack.
Right when it got to the point where Tio said, “Okay, now that’s my limit — maybe you should go in there and…” the coach’s door swung open and he barked, “Dog, your sister’s here.”
The locker room silenced like someone pushed the mute button.
The Dog had his shoulder pads and shirt off, his chinstrap undone, and the helmet pushed back on his head. He had his back to us, so I still couldn’t have picked him out of a line-up. Or even tell you what color his hair was. He stood, grabbed a towel, tossed it over his bare shoulder and headed out a door to the right, walking in this rolling slow gait, like he'd been hurt, or something.
“Go! Go! Go!” I hissed at Tio as fast as he had hissed shh! Shh! Shh! at me only a moment before.
***
When Tio and I peek around a corner together, we make a totem. My head is the perfect height to perch on top of his head.
They were down a blank hall, just outside the main double doors to the locker room area. The locker room doors had been painted glittery gold — I guess to celebrate a winning season. A thin, blonde girl and the Dog were having an intense conversation. You might even say a fight. Snatches of it drifted down toward our corner.
“Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about,” the Dog was saying.
“Tell me what you expect me to do!” she was trying to steer the conversation, the way I do with my mom when I’m in trouble. The girl looked willowy and reed-fragile next to the hulking guy, but she clearly wasn’t backing down. Two points for her in my book.
The Dog leaned back against the locked double doors, arms crossed, like he had all the time in the world. But the expression on his face was anything but casual. Listening to them argue, I felt, for the first time, like I was eavesdropping. It was an icky feeling.
“Tio,” I whispered, to break the tension, “we ought to see if Mr. Whitworth’ll paint the band room doors gold if we get a superlative at CMEA.”
Tio didn’t answer.
I looked down. “Tio?”
He still stared down the hallway. His voice was a low murmur. “’I saw her coral lips to move, and with her breath she did perfume the air.’”
I grabbed his arm and dragged him back around the corner. “Earth to Tio. What the hell just happened there?”
His eyes had this funny glaze to them. Then he seemed to wake up and, even more scary, he looked at me like he was pleading for me to help him. “’I burn, I pine, I perish…’”
O.
M.
G.
“Tio, stop with the ‘Spears. Read my lips: You just saw this girl for the first time. Come on, be real.” I peered around the corner again.
O-kay. I could see where some of this was coming from. She was, well, somewhat of a goddess. But this was Tio we’re talking about here.
Tio, for God’s sake. The man that hormones forgot.
Or had they?
He was back in place, but this time I noticed that the cowlick on top of his head brushed my chin. Had he recently (gasp) grown?
To make matters worse, the voices down the hall were getting louder and it became clear that the goddess and the Dog were arguing about…dating?
“No way, Bianca. No way you’re going out with anyone. I don’t care if it is just a school dance. Hell will freeze over first. Look at yourself. You’re a freshman. Ever since Dad left, there’s no one
but me to keep an eye on you.”
“Oh, so you, the fine upstanding criminal, you’re going to-”
“Hey, I wasn’t convicted. And listen, takes one to know one. I know exactly the kind of things those guys will say about you.”
Bianca whipped around, long blonde hair sweeping like a curly cape around her shoulders, and stomped off.
Toward us. Eek!
Tio and I stared at each other in horror, then false-started in about three directions at once, only narrowly missing an out-an-out collision. “Act natural,” I said.
It was hopeless. Tio went limp and stood there, eyes big and brown as a lab puppy, mouth slightly open. He gave a slow motion blink, just as my voice, too loud, came blaring out of me and said, “So…Tio! That math test! That marching band! What do you think about that, huh?”
I might as well not have bothered. Bianca was weeping too hard to see much of anything when she careened around the corner. She stood there, stricken, for a split second, then put her hand to her mouth and sped off. (How can some girls weep delicately? Me, I sob like a horse hiccups. There’s snot. There’s even a whinny or two. But not her, oh no, not the Biancas of this world. Sigh.) Tio stood paralyzed in place, then started to tilt, like he would fall, like he was one of the redwoods someone cut at the base. But just before he lost balance, he lurched a step, then another step, following after Bianca like a space ship caught in a tractor beam. By the time he hit the end of the corridor, he was trotting again.
I shook my head. I definitely was on my own now.
When I got the courage to peer around the corner, I decided that, despite all the disasters up until now, maybe the fates finally decided to favor me.
The Dog still stood in the hallway, facing the double doors. He had his helmet off, dangling from the fingertips of the hand furthest away from me, and he propped himself with his other hand flat-palmed against the right-side golden paneled door. His head was bowed.
I brought up the camera, and as I did, he let the helmet thud to the ground at his feet. He had one foot forward, the other leg back on his heel, like he was leaning all his weight into his palm and he vibrated with tension, like he could barely resist punching the wall. His tight knee-length pants made every curve of his thigh stand out. Still leaning on the door, he reached up to run his fingers through his hair, a gesture of frustration maybe. Oh, he was definitely a pitt. As his hand shoved up through his hair, I realized this was the pose of all those beefcake guy-in-the-shower shots, right before the overhead water cascaded down in slow-motion onto their bare, muscle-ripped backs. My heart started twirling a happy dance in my chest, faster and faster — I was going to get the shot! The shot! This was it! A joy I hadn’t felt for months made my head feel floaty. It was like a giant weight lifted off me, one I didn’t realize I’d been carrying ever since I learned the school was going to buy the tiny strip of land at the edge of playing field and cut down my circle of trees to build a concrete snack shack. But now I could do this, it was going to work, we were going to get the money and buy that land first.
