by Chuck Crabbe
The man driving the bus wore a three-piece suit and tie, which struck Ezra as a strange choice of clothing for a bus driver. It was an old suit and a little threadbare, but he wore it nobly. He had very low classical music playing in the front of the bus and a high, neatly stacked, pile of cassette tapes on the ledge beside him. He watched the man closely without being noticed and came to understand that the man did not just listen to music, but that he was in fact musical. Not musical in the sense that he could play an instrument, though perhaps he could, but musical in the sense that it was a standard by which he lived.
The bus driver's hands rested on the large steering wheel as if upon the keys of a piano. He played his instrument surely and easily, according to its needs. Ezra picked up the football in his lap but did not take his eyes off the driver's hands upon the steering wheel. A strange sense of strength and energy seemed to grow into his own hands as he took possession of the ball and subdued it under his new power. Ezra knew that although it was a football in his hands, it could have been anything; a steering wheel, a sword, the lyre or guitar, a pen, clay, bronze, or stone. The energy that flooded his hands reached out and touched the dark river of his blood and then, tidal and gravity blessed, rushed his mind. Yes, his action would become his eloquence and his hands would become the living expression of his heart, whatever they reached out for. He turned the ball quickly, gripped it, and felt it give way.
Before everything happened, he knew. Doubts and fears fell away, he did not know how, and the hour delivered him into a freedom he was not the cause of. The entire way to London he did not let go of the football, and he did not speak.
Walsh called in Belle River's second offensive play of the game: "Split left, pro twenty slant," Jason Shoemaker said in the huddle without making eye contact with him. Ezra was not afraid or nervous and lined up wide to the left on the line of scrimmage, checked with the referee to make sure he was on side, and sank into his stance with his right foot forward. He kept his right foot up so that his first step could be with his left. The ball was snapped and he felt like a sharp blade coming across the middle of the field. Between the outside and middle linebackers Shoemaker drilled the ball. Before he had time to think Ezra extended his arms and claimed the ball. His hands picked it clean and his grip on it felt exactly as it had on the bus ride.
As soon as he had it. the middle linebacker laid him out. The loud smack rang across the field and Ezra's head snapped back. His body went limp and then he was slammed on his back, the linebacker driving him into the ground and coming down on top of him. Coach Walsh dropped his clipboard and ran onto the field before the referee had even waved him out for the injury.
People casually compare football to other contact sports, like hockey or rugby, but this is a mistake. In those games angles are the rule and direct contact is the exception; in football collision is the rule. Rugby contact resembles wrestling, football hits look more like car accidents.
Before Walsh could reach them Ezra pushed the young man on top of him onto his back, popped up fast to his feet, and dropped the football onto the linebacker's stomach. Walsh, already halfway onto the field, stopped dead in his tracks, his face blank with shock, and watched Ezra jog back to the huddle.
"Watch the stuff after the whistle," the referee, who was just as surprised as everyone else that Ezra was not paralyzed on the ground, instructed half-heartedly. Ezra ignored him and stepped into the huddle with his teammates.
"Nice catch!" Alex DaLivre said from the other side of the huddle. He held his hand up to slap Ezra's. It was the first time they had spoken since that spring day when Alex and Rick had chased him through the outdoor market and he had had a collision with Jason B. Prism. Ezra offered his friend and enemy his hand and, for a moment, they were brothers again.
That September afternoon, with autumn not even in the air yet, Ezra caught six passes for a hundred and thirty yards. Twice he turned short passes into long gains and broke tackles all the way down the field. It was his first game of varsity football and it was the best game of his life.
The games that followed were no different. Ezra quickly became Shoemaker's go-to receiver, and he caught more passes in the first three games of the season than all his other teammates combined. He felt good and strong and knew that he had come to be seen as sure handed and tough.
Word spread throughout the school. His classmates read his name in the newspaper and then spoke it again in the halls and cafeteria. Girls he did not know sat beside him in class and said hello as they walked past him. The humiliations and shame of the previous spring seemed forgotten or ignored now that his crimes had been replaced with fresh glories.
There were not many black people living in Belle River, so almost everyone made note of and recognized those that did live there. Lila Channer's parents were Jamaican and lived in Tecumseh, the town where Ezra had attended St. Anne's for his first two years of high school. Lila was a notorious troublemaker, and partly because of this she was well liked and even admired by the other students at Belle River High. Ezra knew who she was but had never spoken to her. He had stood with her in circles of friends and at crowded cafeteria tables but had had neither the nerve nor the occasion to speak with her. She wore her hair short, and it fell around her face at the height of her mouth. Her full breasts stuck out prominently under the t-shirts she wore tucked into her jeans, and her skin was soft and smooth.
She was ten minutes late for class and walked in without apology. When she could not find a seat she huffed loudly, creating even more of a disturbance to the lesson in progress, then stood still, looking at the teacher as if it was his responsibility to find somewhere for her to work. He pointed to the computer beside Ezra, at the back of the room, and she flopped down beside him. The teacher paused until she was settled and then continued with his instructions.
"Hi!" She turned completely sideways in her seat and looked at him flatly. "You're that football player, right?" she blurted out. Some of the other students looked at her.
"Yeah, I suppose so," he said much more quietly, attempting to clue her in.
"What's your name?"
"Ezra."
"Ezra?" she asked, quieting down a little. "That's a book in the Old Testament, you know."
"I know."
"Is that who you're named after?"
"No, I'm named after a poet."
"A poet?" The teacher was done giving instructions and the other students in the room started talking amongst themselves while they began their assignment.
"Yes."
"Well, that's better I suppose. My parents are still always dragging me to church and I don't even believe in God."
"Did you tell them that?"
"I tell them all the time."
"And what do they say?"
"My father says I will once I'm older and the world beats me down and I see how badly I need Him. My mother says I'll go to hell."
"Does that scare you?"
"Only first thing in the morning, for two or three minutes, right when I wake up."
"Why only then?"
"I don't know."
Lila had no intention of finishing or even beginning the assignment. She talked to Ezra instead, and he was happy for the distraction and the novelty and rashness of the things she said. She smelled of cigarette smoke and was wearing a belt that was green, yellow and black, like the Jamaican flag. They flirted and wrote short notes to each other on the computer screens and kept switching seats to read them.
For the next couple of days, whenever they crossed paths in the halls, she said hello to him. When she did she said his name in a strange way that he liked and that made it seem like they knew each other better than they really did.
On the weekends he hung with Nick Carraway and other players from the football team. They drank hard liquor and beer and went to parties in the woods and to school dances. At the dances the teachers knew that they had been drinking and were drunk but didn't say anything as long as they didn't cause trouble
. When he drank Ezra thought about his time with the Mexicans, and that drinking with his friends was fun but not special in the same way it had been with Ruiz and Nectario and Maria during the summer. Sometimes he told his friends about his time on the island, and about the people with whom he had worked. He never spoke about the guns he had found though, but he often thought about them. In whose hands were they now? Whose hungry eye stared down the black barrels?
Some nights he stayed home, and things were quiet. The time that he'd spent reading Demian that summer had changed him. He now realized that books could keep him company, and that he could finish reading one and feel like he knew the man who had written it better than he knew his own friends. Sometimes he read on these nights and, other times, he worked on his poems and the short story he was trying to write.
Lila started calling the house regularly and Elsie, not knowing whom she was, and sensing that something more serious was brewing, asked Ezra about her. He was vague and dismissive, as most young men are when they speak to their mothers about such things. Both Elise and Gord went to each of his football games, and it did not take Elsie long to determine Lila's identity. She saw Lila smoking freely, and swearing too, and she was not pleased. Gord was not nearly so worried and even laughed a bit.
The problems resulting from Ezra's arrest the previous spring aside, things were going better between Gord and Elsie too. The trucking company was doing well, and Gord was advancing steadily, both financially and in stature. Although he was not a formally educated man, he was very intelligent and, in a sense, an excellent problem solver. He enjoyed the challenges and the social aspect of business and took pride in his ability to bargain and barter with customers. In the evenings he still coached Belle River's minor football team.
Knowing that her relationship with her husband, and their circumstances, had improved, one might have been tempted to think that it was the reason for Elsie's very evident new happiness. But it was not. She was pregnant. She and Gord had tried off and on for the last ten years without any success. She was certain that the barrier had been in her mind and not in the physical ability of either of them to conceive. Though they had tried, and though she had struggled to banish the thought, the compulsive idea that her new baby would be a betrayal of the one she had lost forced itself upon her. She had even been tormented by nightmares, dark dreams that any new baby could only be some sort of awful doppleganger of the baby that lay under the earth in the Walpurgis cemetery.
But in the last few years she had become daring in the face of her fears and had in fact dared fate to send her another child, and she had known the moment she became pregnant. A few weeks later she had gone and bought a test. Layne had been drawing in the living room when she took it. She came out of the bathroom crying and lay down close beside him on the carpet. He felt her looking over what he had done. It took a minute for him to look at her.
"Why are you crying, Elsie?" he asked.
"Oh, it's nothing."
"You cry for nothing?"
"Sometimes. What are you working on?" She pulled the piece of paper closer to her.
"It's Jean Grey. She's a character from X-Men."
"What's all the fire for?"
"Well she's Jean Grey, but she's also Pheonix. She doesn't really know that yet though."
She told Gord when he came home from work that night. He was proud and happy and then later, when he was alone, afraid that things would not work out again. He knew that she would not recover if another child was lost. Elsie waited six weeks then told Ezra and Layne and her sisters. She had a feeling it would be a girl.
For Thanksgiving weekend Olyvia came with Ariadne. Little Marty, who was ten years old now, had Mononucleosis, so Sarah stayed in Walpurgis to look after him. On Friday the two women came to watch Ezra's football game, and afterward Olyvia kissed and hugged him and told him he looked like a man. This was the first time he was formally introduced to Ariadne. She had been at the London game with Olyvia, but he had not met her or seen her up close. But now he had a hard time looking at anyone else, no matter who was talking to him. Her family was from Peru, but she was half Chinese. Her hair was long and straight and she had beautiful legs. Olyvia laughed when she saw the way Ezra was staring at her, and the two of them waited around for him to shower and change and then drove him home.
After dinner Olyvia asked him how the summer had been and what he had thought of his grandfather. Ezra told her that the old man had been cold and ignored him, but he talked to her too about the time they had spent boxing together and about how much he had liked Nectario and Ruiz and the other workers.
"There is something very beautiful about them, isn't there?" Olyvia said.
"I learned a little on the Spanish guitar from one of them."
"And did he tell you what they believe about the Spanish guitar?"
"He said that they believe a man plays the Spanish guitar in the same way that he touches women," Ezra said through a suppressed smile.
"Yes, yes," she said fondly, as if she had just remembered something from long ago. "That was why Picasso was always painting them. Have you seen many of Picasso's paintings?"
"I don't think so."
"The marvelous painting that I've always had above my bed, The Saltimbanques, is a Picasso."
"The one with the guy with the diamond shapes all over his outfit?"
"He's the harlequin." Olyvia took a sip of her tea. "Elsie told me that you've begun to write."
"A little."
"What are you writing?"
"Poems mostly...and a short story," he said.
"That's wonderful, Ezra. Will you let me read them?"
"If you want, but I don't know if they're any good. No one else has seen them yet."
"Then I'll be the first."
Everyone stayed up late talking; he could tell they were all very excited about Elsie being pregnant, even though no one spoke out loud about it, as if it were something so precious and fragile that words could have done it harm. It was odd for him to see Olyvia and Ariadne holding hands and touching each other affectionately. The way they were with each other reminded him as much of the relationship between a teacher and a student as between two women in love. Several times throughout the evening, when such gestures were made, Layne looked at him with a look on his face like he was about to break into hysterics. Ezra scorned him and then took pride in his own openness and maturity. Before he went to bed he gave Olyvia his notebooks, one with the rough draft of his short story and the other with the poems, beginning with the ones he had done during his last days at his grandfather's vineyard. He passed them over nervously, but the way she took them and thanked him for letting her read them made him feel better.
That Saturday their chance finally came. He and Lila would finally have an empty house. Her parents were going to Michigan to visit family for the weekend, and she would have the place to herself. That night there was a party. One of their friends had parents who were also absent, and that friend had decided to take advantage of his family's absence in a different way than the young couple had. Ezra was to meet Lila at her house at four o'clock, and they would go to the party later that night. He wondered if his friends would be able to tell that he was different when they looked at him. He wondered if he would be different...
Gord and Elsie were going to an event that Gord's company was holding, so Olyvia and Ariadne were staying home with Layne and watching movies. Elsie left early in the day to buy a new dress. All of her old ones were now tight around her growing belly. Ezra was glad he would not have to say goodbye to her before he left. Of all the people in the world, she knew him best, and he was afraid she would be able to sense what his intentions were for that evening. He showered and made sure he had condoms and then called Nick Carraway to pick him up. Although Nick was a year younger than Ezra, he had gotten his driver's license first. When there was anywhere to go, they always went in his parents little two-door Chevy.
Ezra was nervous as he stood outside
her door, and he waited for Nick to drive away before he rang the doorbell. Wet leaves blanketed the yard and it was a little cold outside. He stood there waiting but no one answered. Not sure if the bell was working, he pushed it again and put his ear to the door to see if he heard anything inside. Nothing. He knocked, put his hand over his eyes, and then looked inside through the entrance window to see if anyone was about. The stairs on the other side of the glass were dark and there was a pile of shoes by the door. He pulled away and knocked harder, but no one came. Thinking Nick's car might still be close, he walked back to the road in hope of being able to wave him back.
"Ezra!" he heard her yell. He looked back and saw her in one of the second floor windows.
"Hey, why didn't you answer the door?"
"Sorry, I fell asleep. One minute." She disappeared from the window then opened the front door. She kissed him in the entrance before he could even take off his shoes. When he held her she felt warm and sleepy.
She led him downstairs and turned on the television. For a while they sat together on the couch and she held his hand and leaned against him. They watched Saturday afternoon reruns of Growing Pains and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Ezra barely paid attention to the television. He sat there wondering if she could feel the tension under his skin, and thought about how it was all going to happen. After an hour or so he turned to kiss her and they slowly fell back onto the sofa together. Ezra put his hand on her breast and she pulled him closer. They pushed against each other as if they were having sex. In the background the dubbed in laughter from the sitcom droned. Lila ran the tip of her tongue along the front of his teeth and gums. He found it strange but exciting and reached under her shirt and bra. The couch cushions were in the way so she pulled them out from under her and threw them onto the floor. Ezra pushed her shirt up and she lifted up her arms so he could take it off. Her warm breath pressed against his ear. The dark skin of her exposed stomach and chest heaved and flushed.
