by Rick Bass
A hero is a hero in any age, under any setting; the fact that almost none of the local athletes whose exploits they listened to would ever play in college, much less professionally, meant nothing to Coach and his mother. The athletes had names and specific characteristics, valor and passion, strengths and weaknesses, and as long as the radio was working, they were always there, separating Coach and his mother from the darkness that surrounded them. The broadcasts were shimmering electrical threads tracing the night air, extending the players’ every gesture from Great Falls, or Choteau, or Havre, or wherever they had originated, out past their farmhouse and all the way south to the wall of blue mountains, the immense and snowy Front Range.
In the years when his mother was up to farming, Coach helped her clear the fields of the wind-varnished glacial moraine deposited there ten thousand years earlier. The stones and boulders, remnant and residue from the great ice shield that had once overlain the prairie, seemed infinite in number, most about the size of a basketball, and no matter how many times they dug them up out of the loose, rich soil each spring, there were always more the next year, ice-polished boulders rising through each season’s frost heaves, expelled like ancient eggs waiting to incubate in the mild sun.
In addition to listening to the games at the kitchen table with his mother every evening, those are Coach’s other deepest memories: trudging on stolid ankles across the farm, arms wrapped around one boulder at a time, re-clearing the field each spring and summer while his mother, often lacking a tractor, followed behind with a plow and a single mule, after which the two of them planted whatever section of field they had been able to clear, with long spells of daydreaming by Coach as he walked in a trance, and labored, it seemed to him, in a sea of light, as if at the bottom of the shallow old sea that had been there so long ago.
He was betranced, also, by his own physical exhaustion: for as long as there were stones—or, rather, for as long as there was daylight, for there were always stones—he would march back and forth across the fields, belly-gripping each boulder as if he were fused to it. In the absence of any tractor clatter, the only sound was the ever-present wind, and his own huffing as he struggled onward, the muscles in his neck and back and upper legs burning, his calves sometimes so aflame that it seemed he could light a cigarette just by touching it to them. He was not a tall boy, but his arms stretched longer over the years.
Occasionally in his work he spied something glinting in the loosened dirt—an arrowhead, the tip of buffalo skull—and stopped to pry it out, the regularity of his days leavened by such small discoveries.
A pocketful of arrowheads, and then a box of them, then several boxes, to sell to the museum in Great Falls for spending money. (Later, when he got older, he returned all his unsold arrowheads to the tribe that had last occupied that land, the Blackfeet.) It was said that farther down were the bones of dinosaurs from millions of years ago. But his and his mother’s work never plowed deeper than the last few hundred years. He was never bored, for even then he knew he was waiting, that something big would happen, and when it did, he would be in charge, for once, of the change.
In junior high school, still a boy, he pined for his father, but then hardened up, welded shut that lockbox. He played high school ball, and with his long arms was a leading rebounder and a pretty fair shooter but a rogue defender, always fouling out in the fourth quarter when his team needed him most. The welds on the lockbox were not yet firmly set, and seeps of loneliness and desire still trickled into it at inopportune times. Confusing his coach with his father, raging and rebelling and acting out, frustrated by his inability to be perfect, he quit midway through his junior year, thinking the coach would come pleading for him to return.
No such drama ensued. He was replaced with a lesser player who, as if by mere mechanical tooling, soon developed into the same caliber of player Coach had been, and the team neither anguished nor prospered in his absence but instead continued on as if he had never been there—a realization that sent him reeling into yet more rebellion and trouble, including numerous fistfights, early in his senior year. A little juvenile detention. But then his old coach intervened, and took him back under certain conditions: community service, a curfew, extra time in the gym. Nothing revolutionary, just attention and faith or, if not that, hope.
Coach had been mere days—perhaps hours—away from the abyss. And yet one of the attributes of a small town, for better or worse, seemed to be that you could never really get all the way lost. So many paths and choices and dead-end trails were available to him in small-town high school; before his coach got hold of him, the only two plays he knew were quit or fight. But that old coach—long gone now—essentially adopted him; mentored him in the art of pick-and-rolls, give-and-gos, diamond-plus-ones; blew heavy, iron-forging bellows into the last fissures remaining in the hidden lockbox. He set Coach afire, transformed him into a crackling pyre of unrestrained hunger, and made the confines of the basketball court the new boundaries of the world. He taught him where the cracks and secret crevices of the game were, so that giants might be toppled. Showed him, in other words, how to coach.
School ended. With no money for college and no scholarship offers, he went into the army. Stationed in Germany, he played basketball at various overseas bases, and served long enough to qualify for college on the GI Bill. He came back home and, in addition to studying Montana and Native American history, got a degree in psychology. There was little new he learned in the psych classes other than the names for the things he already understood.
His father, who had never even coached, survived a major stroke when he was thirty-nine. Coach is a ticking bomb, has always been one, but how glorious has been the pulse of each victory, and how excruciating and torturous each loss, whether large or small, expected or not.
His early years of coaching were easily the best of his life. He was back on the eastern plains, his mother was in remission, his heart was not yet bothering him, and he had a couple of flashy sophomores with whom he could envision standing beneath the bright lights of the state championship in a couple of years. Of course, there was no guarantee he could hold his team together for that long. The pressures of small-town, rural communities on adolescents were intense, on or off the reservation, and he was forever losing his most promising players to scholastic probation, bulimia and anorexia, teen pregnancy, drug and alcohol abuse, divorce and family dramas and relocations.
Still, he loved it. He loved it all. He involved himself in every possible hour of his girls’ lives, riding herd on their friends, keeping track of whom they hung out with and what they did, and scheduling as many team dinners and bowling nights and movie nights as he could. It was high energy, high maintenance, but necessary to weave a fabric, a culture, of success.
Then the army called him up—he’d stayed in the Reserves. He was stationed in Lebanon, was shot at and dodged bombs for two full years before there were any studies confirming what everyone already knew: that two years of bombings were not good for the psyche; that one single blast event could take a lifetime to recover from. When that conflict ended he was still alive, and still loved basketball, still had the blind spots of a genius, and now, courtesy of his patriotism, a new impatience and irritability that he chose to confuse, though he knew better, with his old drive.
He relaunched himself into his true heart, his one self, with such momentum and focus that for the most part he was able to stay out ahead of the trauma, as if he’d slapped the ball away from an opponent and was sprinting down the court with no one between him and the orange rim of the basket. Even in the off-season, when he couldn’t rely on being consumed by coaching, he managed to ward off those memories of war: the shock of the first attacks in Lebanon, the shock of being hated indiscriminately and collectively—unfairly, it seemed, rather than specifically—when the first bombing victims, some Lebanese civilians and some American soldiers, were carried into his barracks.
How had he made it back to something as safe as girls’ hi
gh school basketball, and with his soul intact? A good upbringing, he guessed. Through the game, he could put the horrors aside and keep them blocked out the way he taught his smaller players to lock down larger opponents with hinge-and-flange maneuvers. (He remembered a game from the reservation, before he went overseas, when his five-two guard and five-five small forward had manhandled a six-three girl, the district’s leading scorer—held her to zero points and reduced her to a sobbing hulk on the bench midway through the third quarter, her confidence wrecked for the rest of the season and, to some extent, much of the rest of her career.)
Indeed, the mix of high passion and deep irrelevance wrought by basketball was therapy. He could use it to heal from a lifetime of setbacks and pain, as he urged his girls to do. He’d convinced himself that by making basketball his existence, there would be nothing left of his own disappointments to bleed over into the game. He knew it was a brave and foolish stratagem, simple and reckless.
Obsession can carry the obsessed a long way, but has its costs. He had trouble making friends anywhere. So much in this regard conspired against him, from the peripatetic nature of journeyman coaching to the social discomfort of being a military veteran in a politicized era. But it would be even harder here in the mountains. At least on the eastern plains, whenever he had taken a new job, he was swarmed with dinner invitations, neighborliness, potlucks; here, in Placerville, he hasn’t received a single such invitation in his first two full days in town. Placerville strikes him as a place of brooding, of self-absorbed doubt and paranoia, as he has been told is the nature of most of the mountain folk, particularly during the basketball months—the dreary lock of winter followed by late-season slush and soggy gray. But no matter, the girls will be everything; he has staked his life on them, wants to save their lives just as his mother saved his.
It’s true there’s been a little dizziness and shortness of breath in the middle of some games. A few clustered strobes of eerie green light in the swimming darkness. Pain, sure, high in his chest, but what coach doesn’t feel that sometimes? And if he is to be taken, is it not better to be taken quickly? What greater cruelty is there for an athlete than the slow diminishment of age?
All loss is abhorrent. In such matters, grace is nonexistent. Only passion matters.
On his third day in town, a Monday, the boosters invite him to a team dinner to meet the girls. He has already received his five-hundred-dollar signing bonus, courtesy of the state of Montana, and has taken his mother to meet her new doctor, who seems to know what he’s doing. He’s transferred his insurance policy to the new school, filled out the necessary paperwork for the twice-monthly trickle of a contribution into his teacher’s retirement fund. He has met with the utility company and had the power turned on, and spent the weekend hammering and sawing, installing a wheelchair-access ramp for his mother. He’s had the phone connected and the satellite dish installed, so they can watch all the world’s various sporting events together, and so she can watch them by herself when he’s at practice or traveling to away games. There are so few schools in their division in all of western Montana that the bus trips will be long, with the team often not arriving home from these distant points until around midnight.
Late on the afternoon of the team dinner, he finishes photocopying and hole-punching the playbooks he has prepared for the girls, and organizes the folders containing inspirational proverbs, exhortations, and mottoes as well as a list of training rules, philosophies, and regulations. He showers and shaves, kisses his mother good night—she naps every evening from five to eight, then reawakens to watch the delayed telecasts from Europe, or the late-start games from the West Coast.
The new doctor, who is more honest than the previous one as well as closer to her age, said, when asked his assessment of her future, that at this stage every day is a blessing, and that surely she must be aware of how fortunate she is to have lived so long and seen so much, and how proud she must be to have a son who loves her. And then, although the doctor is not really a basketball fan, he talked about the team, and their hopes for the coming year.
Coach leaves a note for his mother, just as he used to do as a boy when he went somewhere and she wasn’t home. And then, feeling twenty years younger—every time he leaves one job and starts anew, it is this way, both terrifying and invigorating—he lugs the cardboard box, bulging with folders and playbooks, out to his truck, a 1982 Datsun, 360,000 miles, two-wheel drive, rust-gutted from road salt and the howling winds of the prairie.
Every bit as eager as a bridegroom preparing to lay eyes on his bride for the first time, he hurries, as though the church bells are beginning to ring, the short distance to the school, wanting to arrive before the girls do. He doesn’t think he’s seen any of them yet, though he’s kept an eye out. The girls he’s glimpsed, here and there, traveling through town or in the café or the grocery store or at the bowling alley, did not look like any basketball girls he’s ever seen—though you never can tell. He’s willing to be surprised.
He’s the first one there. He puts a playbook on each of the nine desks at the front of the classroom. He makes sure there’s chalk for the chalkboard. After a while, the boosters arrive, smiling and nervous and eager themselves, carrying grocery sacks and armloads of unidentifiable casseroles, salads, brownies. A crock pot of moose chili. Bread, cake, spaghetti: the meals of a thousand nightmares, but never has he been so glad to see them.
And then, at last, the girls themselves, trickling in, laughing and loose, graceful yet also wary, like wild animals stepping to a spring for a drink, knowing to be observant, perhaps even cautious, despite their thirst. But laughing, secure in one another’s company.
Look at them! My God, they are beautiful—so young—loving each moment, not thinking about winning, or even basketball.
Coach smiles at them, more nervous than he can remember ever being before. He cannot help but read them with computer speed, and in his mind is already diagramming plays on the chalkboard and then erasing those plays and starting over.
He watches them slide into their seats. He had worried they might not be wonderful, might not be happy, might not be perfect.
Now the athletic director is introducing him, though Coach barely hears the words. He looks out at the girls, and still is not sure what he will tell them. This is the best part—the beginning—even better than the addiction of the game itself. He can tell by the athletic director’s cadence and by the accruing stillness in the room—as when concentric ripples in a pond begin to vanish—that the introduction is winding down.
As if through a muffled tube, Coach hears the athletic director recite the ancient bromide about building character being more important than winning. No saying infuriates him more, but Coach tries to remain cool, and keeps smiling, almost stupidly, as if in agreement. He wills the throbbing vessels at his temple to stay submerged. He tries to think of something calming, something far away. Then he considers instead the joy of these girls gathered before him. The speed with which they are leaving childhood.
It’s intoxicating to behold: this evanescent, yet enduring, moment of youth. And once more he stands at the edge of it. Hiding his secret heart—I must win—he smiles at them. It’s really only an instant, melting already, but he steps up to the podium, into a place and a time where, and during which, no one will ever grow older or in any way diminish, but instead will burn brightly, purely, cleanly, and where each of them, even Coach himself, will, if only they can win, always be loved.
An Alcoholic’s Guide
to Peru and Chile
It was late March in Montana, which meant fall in South America. At the bottom of the world, things were upside down. The leaves of the trees along the rivers were gold, orange, yellow.
Wilson had been out of work, out of logging, for over a year. A snag had broken off when he was sawing and had fallen and shattered his ribs, punctured his lungs. Belinda had been gone almost a year by then. He hadn’t seen that coming either.
He had been d
rinking hard over the winter—well, longer than that; maybe a few years, depending on what hard meant—but planned to stop for this trip, spring break with the girls. Or to slow down, anyway. It was almost the same thing. It felt like stopping. The girls lived with him, in Montana, but soon enough, they would be gone altogether: grown up, departed also.
He didn’t need to drink. He liked it, but he didn’t need it. He knew that was the stance of someone who did need to drink, but he was different. Well, actually, he needed it, but he could go a little bit without it. Beer was safe. He was drinking too much but he could stop. He would stop, he promised himself, for the trip.
In North America Belinda had told him he was a bum, but in South America he could be…well, whatever the opposite of that was. He was pretty sure he could stay off the sauce. Chile was said to be good wine country.
His older daughter, Stephanie, had just turned eighteen, and asked most of the questions in the family. Lucy, fifteen, answered them. In a few months, Stephanie would be off at college: gone forever, he believed. Though he didn’t have the money to pay for her college—there was that small detail—nor for their journey to South America, nor for much of anything else, really. Even their cabin in the woods—built by Wilson—was no longer secure. Workers’ comp hadn’t been enough, and then had run out anyway. Soon enough he wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage. He felt life draining away and, panicked, topped out his last credit card. He needed this trip with the girls, one grand last hurrah before everything changed.
