What You Need

by Andrew Forbes

The Brookside offence tried to appear upbeat, but beneath it all they seemed stoic, maybe resigned to their unenviable fate.

  The first play of the game was a run off tackle, to my left. We swarmed their little back like pack animals. There was soon a solid blanket of red over top of him. He might have managed a yard before we buried him, a kid with hopes and dreams smothered beneath an avalanche of acne-dotted flesh.

  They went two-and-out. I was fatherless. I was adrift in a sea of pain. My consolation would come from spreading that pain to others.

  The cycles made rage seem like the natural response to just about anything. Later in the first half Brookside pounded down to within field goal range. Every small advance felt like an insult, a tiny wound inflicted. I looked around, down the bench: what was wrong with us?

  We stanched the bleeding, barely, and prevented them from reaching the end zone. Then their kicker put a wounded duck through the uprights: 3-0 Blues.

  I did not take that well. I sprinted to the sideline, passing our kick return team on the way. I yelled at each of them, “Revenge! Revenge!” Once on the sideline I took my helmet off, crouched and, gripping it by the facemask, slammed it against the ground in an S.O.S. rhythm, clustered beats of three, then a pause, then three more. My cadence had a basis: I was tapping out WHERE’S! MY! DAD!, though I was conscious that it could also be heard as STOP! BROOK! SIDE!

  On a play shortly before half-time their offensive line dropped back in pass protection. I hung back trying to eliminate any short little passes into the middle of the field. To my right I saw Joel give their tight end a nifty little swim move and race around on a clear path to their quarterback. But at the last possible second that fullback of theirs came over to give Joel a little shove, then fall, and add a highly illegal leg-whip that caught Joel in the thigh and knocked him down. At that same moment the quarterback moved up into the pocket a couple of steps and launched a rocket down field. It was a beautiful, tightly spiralling pass, a bullet, and it settled into the receiver’s arms like a sleeping baby. He never had to break stride. Our safety pushed him out of bounds, but it was a thirty-odd yard gain.

  The Blues offence jogged by us on their way to the new line of scrimmage, high fives all around. “Nice pass, Matty,” they were all saying to their passer, Jason Priestly in white high-top cleats.

  I was offended. I wanted to injure him. I wanted to humiliate him, to make him question his abilities and choices. I wanted to hit him in such a way that he would quit football and one day open a small newsstand that sold stale old cigars and then have a son who would not believe in him.

  That drive wound up netting them another field goal. On their next possession a couple of penalties and a botched running play put them back on their own 11 yard-line. On a second-and-long they ran play-action. Matty feigned putting the ball in their big fullback’s arms, then pulled it back. I stood rooted to my spot in the middle, making him feel like he’d frozen me with his fake, but when he moved his eyes toward the sideline I broke right for him, a seam suddenly open in the line. I made for him with frightening abandon.

  The hit was concussive, by which I mean not only that it knocked Matty onto his back, but that I believe the earth buckled a bit beneath the force of it. The ball dribbled out, away from the human pile-up, and toward Brookside’s end. I heard voices rise behind me. I saw the eyes of their fullback, who was on the ground nearby, grow large with panic. Scrambling on my elbows and my belly, I chased the thing, grunting like a bush pig. I could feel bodies moving in behind me, but I got there first. I fell on the ball and it felt like a stone beneath my gut. As I rolled over and cast my eyes skyward I saw the zebra raise his arms, his pale hands stretching up into the cold sky to signal the touchdown. In the next moment I was at the bottom of a heap of Red Raiders, because that was how we celebrated: we attempted to drive one another into the ground.

  Behind us, Matty writhed on the ground, gasping, unable to catch his wind. I looked back there and I saw him experiencing his wordless pain, compounded by my touchdown, and I wished for that to be the image I took forward into my life after all of this. Not the later sight of Butter hauling in two TD passes to give us the 21-6 victory, not Anil hoisting the trophy, not Brushcut with tears in his eyes. Just that: Brookside’s quarterback lying on his back on the shining green turf, alone, twisting into and away from the pain, fighting for his breath. That’s what I wanted.

  What I got was something altogether different. Now, the thing I remember most vividly—the single moment that seems most real to me all these years later—came a few days before I was told I would not be eligible to play in my final year at Tech, and that I would therefore, in all likelihood, never play in university. It came before nine other guys heard the same news. It happened several days after the Capital Bowl, on a skyless afternoon when I came home to find a police car in the driveway and an officer named Hurley sitting at the kitchen table with my parents, explaining that the head of our supply chain had been apprehended, and that the rest of the dominoes were now falling. We had all been named.

  That was an excruciating conversation, but the moment I have carried forward like a cursed memento came late in the night after Officer Hurley’s visit, in the wan light of the range hood’s 40-watt bulb, as my father sat slumping over the kitchen table.

  “Jason, I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Whatever, dad.”

  “Jason, you didn’t do this alone.”

  “Sure I did,” I said. “I make my own decisions, thanks.”

  “Jason, please, listen,” he continued, “I’ve done what I could for this family, but I see now that there are things I’ve neglected.”

  “Nobody cares,” I said. “Nobody cares, Dick.”

  I know now that when my dad looked at me he saw a scared and broken boy, not a muscled man-beast overflowing with confidence and power and, in that moment, beset by injustice, which is how I’d sized up the situation. But though he’d been given every opportunity and excuse to revile me, it wasn’t revulsion in his eyes; it was love, and sorrow, and regret. I couldn’t understand that at the time, of course. I was full of a cloudy desire to make meaty pulp of other boys my own age, surrogate victims in helmets and contrasting jerseys. I’m certain those things, those rages borne of circumstance, biology, and chemistry are what made me say next, “Just fuck off, Richard.”

  I turned to leave the brown and orange kitchen, the curling linoleum, and the scrawny bullseye of my confusion and hatred, but he stopped me. He stood and he puffed himself up, though he was by then a good four or five inches shorter than me, and who knows how many pounds lighter. I recognized in his eyes then the anger that I had attempted to make my own nature, my bedmate, my goal and my consolation. He raised his right hand over his shoulder and he aimed to bring it across my face. But he just stood there, his hand held aloft, shaking a bit, the veins in his temples throbbing. And he never brought his hand down, he never hit me, whether out of fear or pity I did not then know.

  I CANNOT BELIEVE WE ARE

  HAVING THIS CONVERSATION

  My stomach spills over my belt and folds my underwear at the waistband, and in general I don’t much look like the guy I was when I played junior. I know that. Also my wife thinks I hit on the babysitter too much, but truthfully I’m saying the same things I always have, they just sounded different coming from the younger me.

  “You call her sweetheart,” Irina said.

  “I call everybody sweetheart,” I said.

  “She is young and tiny and blonde with tight shirt and little shorts and you call her sweetheart. I think this is wrong.” She tucked her pretty chin into her chest with her arms wrapped around herself.

  “Irina, sweetheart,” I said, then realized what I had said. “See? Right there! I didn’t even know I was saying it!”

  “I am your wife, you are supposed to be calling me sweetheart!”

  I was so damn tired, you know, working fourteen-hour days selling cars. I didn’t need this. The dog was barkin
g at something, squirrels, birds, geese, whatever. Jaxon was wailing. He always cries. Two and a half, he’s a crier. And his sister was throwing a fit because we were paying attention to each other and not to her. Anna’s kind of like her mom in that way. They also look so much alike, they could be twins. They both look like they’re made of glass, just so perfect.

  “Everybody, EVERYBODY,” I shouted, just to clear the air, just to shut everybody up for a minute. There was a split second of silence and I jumped in and said, “I am tired. Like, bone-tired. I just need, what I need is for everybody to settle down.”

  “Always tired,” Irina said.

  “Somebody has to sell those Hyundais,” I said. “They won’t sell themselves, you know. I mean, they could. If there was a car that could sell itself, that’s it. But then I wouldn’t get paid.” At that moment the dog started up again, and that dog, Finnegan, he has the worst bark imaginable. Like a car horn in an aluminum shed, over and over and over.

  “But you are doing too much,” she said, and at the same time Anna, who’s six, was yelling, “Dad Dad Dad Dad Dad,” for no reason.

  “I cannot believe,” I said. “Why am I hearing this? Do you like your house? Do you like your clothes?”

  Wolters, who works with me, Mike Wolters, he’s what you might call my closest friend, we talk about everything. He played, too, got looked at pretty seriously by the scouts—Leafs, Flames, he says, and I think maybe Islanders—but then he wrecked his knee. That old story. But Wolters is a good salesman, almost as good as me, and we talk a lot. There are a lot of hours to kill when you’re waiting for customers in January during a snowstorm and the economy is down. Wolters thinks I’m crazy to want this, to have married Irina and the kids and the house and soccer practice, the whole bit. Wolters likes his freedom. He likes screwing his way through the receptionists and the single moms who come around looking to trade in their exes’ performance cars. But I tell him, there’s nothing like looking at your kids while they sleep, or staying up late with the woman you love to wrap their Christmas presents.

  And Wolters hears that, and he nods his head, way up there on his massive shoulders—Wolters has six or eight inches on me—like he gets it, but I know he doesn’t get it. He’s happy to know I’m happy. But then he’s looking at me, I know this, and he sees my gut and how I’m kind of soft and how I’m standing on the sidelines of my kids’ soccer games while he’s at a core class at Goodlife, planking and sweating, his face not two feet from some girl’s amazing ass in those yoga pants and when the class is over he’ll have her number and the next day he’s at his desk getting pornographic texts from her while Irina’s calling me because Jaxon threw up on her cashmere.

  When this all happened, the four of us were in the dining room trying to have a nice Saturday morning, and I had been trying to get through the sports section on my iPad, just relaxing with some hazelnut coffee from the Keurig. I had mentioned to Irina about seeing the Avengers movie, and said maybe we could get Leanna to come and watch the kids and put them to bed on Thursday, when Irina kind of blew up about it, saying all that about sweetheart. At the same time, Jaxon had just kind of drifted away from the table to dump a box of toy cars all over the place, his hands and his face still all sticky from juice and cereal. And Anna, when her mom and I started talking, wanted the iPad so she could play games. I think that’s why she was saying “Dad Dad Dad” over and over.

  “Irina, honey,” I said, “I don’t know what it’s like in Russia, like when you were younger, but here we can use names like sweetheart and not have it be like a blood feud between crime families or something.” That she did not like.

  “I cannot believe the things you say,” she said.

  “Well, I say them,” I said. “And about the other thing, this life you have, that we have and we love, and all the things we use and like, they need me to sell cars. So I put on a tie and go to the dealership and I sell cars, and I bring things home to you. That’s how it works. That’s how it’s always worked.”

  Irina, really, I think sometimes she’s still upset about how things started. She still says, if you ask her, that I misrepresented myself before we met, on the form she got with all the information about me and where she’d be going. It said OCCUPATION: and I wrote HOCKEY PLAYER, which she took to mean professional hockey player, even though by then I had not been drafted and had exhausted my junior eligibility and given up, more or less, on the big dream. But to defend myself, since it said OCCUPATION, I figured, well, it doesn’t say JOB, it says OCCUPATION, and I was still very occupied with the idea of being a hockey player. I was playing three nights a week in two leagues, one with the guys from the dealership, including Wolters, who had been really, really close to the big leagues, and so the skill level was obviously there. Plus, if you’ve ever been around these things, you know that a lot of deals get made before, during, and after the games, so professional wouldn’t really be stretching it. And besides, I never wrote PROFESSIONAL HOCKEY PLAYER. I wouldn’t do that, because it wasn’t true.

  “All the time, it’s just me and your kids,” Irina said.

  “Baby.”

  “Yes?”

  “They’re your kids, too.”

  This whole time, oh my God, the dog would not stop barking. Somebody should have told me about Shelties before I let Irina go and buy one. I mean, holy, barking all the time.

  And on top of this, Jaxon was getting antsy. Anna was good, because I slid her the iPad during all this, knowing I wasn’t going to be able to finish the sports section, so she was playing something on there. But Jaxon had already dumped out that bin of cars—dinky cars, we used to call them, but they probably don’t call them that now—and then moved back to the wall unit, to the lower cubbyholes where the toys and games are, and he was pulling out this giant floor puzzle and I could see he was about to dump that out all over the place.

  “One thing at a time,” I said to him, as per the rule we had written on the fridge on a blue piece of paper that the kids decorated with stickers. The rule was in place, really, to make it so Irina and I would have fewer toys to pick up at the end of the day, because on Monday mornings I really did not need to hear about how the cleaning lady had complained to Irina and made her feel terrible for being so lucky for marrying a man with a good job and a big house and having bratty kids with too many toys they never pick up. I mean, can you imagine saying this? To somebody who is basically your boss?

  But Jaxon dumped the puzzle, not listening to me, so I stood up, maybe pushing my chair back a little too hard, because it bumped the sideboard and made Irina say, “Hey!” and got Anna to look up from the iPad and say, “Daddy?” Then Irina said something quietly to Anna in Russian because she’s been teaching her some things I don’t understand, and that kind of bugs me, them being able to talk without me understanding it.

  “Sorry, what was that?” I said.

  “I just said that here you go. ‘Here goes Daddy,’ I said.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that here you go to take care of things.”

  “And so?” I said.

  “And so take care of it!” Irina screamed, and it really made me step back. I wanted to know what was going on there, but I had to handle Jaxon. I went over to him and he was looking at the puzzle and trying to pretend I wasn’t there. “Jaxon,” I said, “did you hear me? I said one toy only. You have to tidy something up before you get the next thing. Remember the rule sheet?”

  But he just kept looking down, and when I went down on my knees, which isn’t the easiest thing for me actually, but I did that to look him in the eye and he gave me the smile he gives when he knows he’s doing something wrong but for him it’s a joke. That sets my brain on fire.

  “Jaxon?” I said. “Jaxon, you are not listening to me. I’m your father. Why are you not listening to your father?”

  He didn’t say anything. Ignoring me is my button. It’s going to set me off every last time. You have to know this about me.


  The dog was still barking. I was standing ankle-deep in big cardboard pieces of puzzle and dinky cars and Jaxon was completely ignoring me.

  “You do not ignore me!” I said, with my lowest bass voice, my scariest one, the one that the kids hear and they know, okay, that’s trouble. “Don’t you ever ignore your own father!”

  Irina put her hands over Anna’s ears for reasons that were lost on me. My face felt hot all of a sudden and my mind was like gravy, but I knew enough to think to myself, “Why is she covering Anna’s ears?”

  “Don’t be his bully,” Irina said.

  “His bully?” I said. “I’m his father. I cannot believe this. Why are you talking like this?” My heart was thumping and the dog was barking, but I did my old trick where I make it quieter in my mind. It was like being in another team’s barn again, the first time I’d felt that way in years, like all my muscles were ready for whatever happened and I could block out all the distraction and just focus in. Tunnel vision. I forgot about my stomach and the waistband of my boxer-briefs, the way it was folded over. I forgot that I usually wear a really tight undershirt or those compression top things under my suit. It was like jumping back in time. It was like I was wearing skates and pads.

  I could hear Irina getting shrill, now she was shrieking at the dog, “Shut up, stupid Finnegan. Shut that dog up, shut it up, shut it up!”

  But I was focusing on the Jaxon problem. I did a thing I do where I pick him up by the ankles, so he’s upside down, and I haul him way up so I can look him in the eyes, upside down, his feet way over my head. He mostly likes it but Irina freaks out. Sometimes he laughs and wiggles around, but if I do it quickly, and I have on my really angry face, it upsets him and I can use it to get a point across.

  “Jaxon,” I said, holding him up there, “are you going to listen to your father?” And he was looking at me, and his bottom lip was starting to go right before the tears, and his eyes were squinting, and he was all red. I felt like it was working, like I was getting my point across but just then Irina let go of Anna’s ears and came racing over to me at a million miles an hour and was trying to get Jaxon from me, yelling at me, stepping on my foot.