What You Need

by Andrew Forbes

  At night, beneath these trees, at the edge of this plain, when the insects begin their chorus and the wind combs the fields, I think I will miss this life, this iteration of reality. When I have my choice of wives to lie with, next to an open window, and the children are safely tucked up, and that night’s wife gives herself over to me.

  But then I have only to consider what awaits us in the next epoch, and I am recommitted to the exercise, to the process.

  I have something which cannot be called fear, perhaps trepidation, in a small recess next to my stomach. I can feel it there, hard and round. I mustn’t allow it to dissuade me, of course, but it is there. Out by the bigger of the two Quonsets my horse Meshach stirs. I consider, for a brief, cowardly moment, mounting him and riding across the prairie and leaving all this, all which is soon to pass. I could make for a city—Saskatoon, perhaps. There I could preach at the eleventh hour about the perils to come, the nature of the Rapture and the path through Hell to the paradise which awaits.

  But that isn’t my role, of course. My preaching is done. This is where I am needed now, required to act my part as the very tip of a great and faithful arrow aimed at the heart of the awful world-swallowing beast. Here and now. This is the moment and these are the chosen and I am their leader. The Quonset, which sits like a hunched steel animal with its back turned on the world, houses much of our arsenal, and three of my eldest boys are headed there now to fetch the sacks which contain the assault rifles. I scan the sky and see nothing but the early hint of morning. Okay, I think, you devious SOBs, for they are devious, Come at us. Come and attempt to inflict your worst. I am expecting ominous beings, misshapen, malformed, something this world could not dream up, but if they wish to come in the form of a Mountie detachment from Lloydminster, that’s their business and who are we to say.

  I ask Mary 5, who is securing the nursery door, if she checked the wiring on the charges at the east gate this week, as she is to do every week. You know I did, she says.

  Mary 3, who I always thought looked a lot like Grace Kelly, if Grace Kelly were shorter and more a kind of dirty blonde, is standing in the middle of the room, looking at the floor. What is she looking for? I laid with her last night. Is she the last woman I will know carnally? Did we succeed in planting another seed? What are you looking for, Mary? I ask.

  My sock, she says. Have you seen my other sock?

  Your sock?

  It’s cold in here, she says. She is wearing a khaki work shirt and one red sock. Nothing covers her legs, but she holds a pair of Levi’s by a belt loop. I don’t ask that they wear bonnets and ankle-length dresses. That’d be weird. Practical clothes, jeans mostly. Work wear, for there is always more work to be done.

  I haven’t seen it, I say. But there’s a basket of clean laundry in the closet. Find another pair. Then get your weapon. As I am saying this I am hoping that Mary 2 is not within earshot. She’s kind of a zealot when it comes to the laundry being put away. Mary 3 rubs her eyes. Alright, alright, she says.

  I stand with my shoulder to the wall and peek out the window, to the southeast. A pinkish light blushes the horizon and against it I see two of my oil derricks nodding as though in deference to something great and terrible. It used to be that every time those derricks bobbed I saw dollar signs. Now their motion in the corner of my eye causes my heart to skip a beat. Every movement might be an agent of our enemy racing to a new position, a better place from which to spy us, and to fire upon us.

  In reality of course there is no sense in trying to mask our movements, because whatever we do, they see. They see and they know. When we defecate. When we make love. When the milk in our refrigerator is past its date. The awful things we find ourselves up against have ways we cannot comprehend. We can only adapt.

  Are Adam and them back with the duffel bags yet? I ask. Mary 3 says, Not yet I think. I go through the doorway and back into the kitchen to check the CCTV. There are cars on the approach road, three that I can make out, and I see Adam and Mark and Matthew laden with bags, the guns, coming to the back door of this bungalow.

  It is getting lighter by the moment and this gives me tension, for I suspect they want to launch their assault before daylight. Or perhaps they want us to see them, their terrible forms, before they spread darkness across the Earth and black out the sun, before they gouge out a few billion sets of eyes with their terrible claws.

  Perhaps all of it means nothing to them. I consider this. Perhaps this gives them no more pause than filling a gas tank or cleaning a firearm would cause me to stop and think over what I am doing. Perhaps it is simply who they are, ignorant of malice, bred to do a thing and move on to the next world and do the same thing again, mindful not of the cries and the blood.

  What will they look like? asks Mark.

  We have no way of knowing, I tell him. Grotesque, tentacled things? Small green men? We don’t know. I have a feeling they will look like normal men. That’s the worst trick.

  Oh, says he.

  I say, Everything we have learnt is dwarfed by all we have yet to learn. In the next few moments you will learn more than you have known your entire life.

  Mark, who is scrawny and delicate and brash, but who is nevertheless an excellent shot, says nothing to this. Instead he turns on the radio and we are all inundated with detestable dance music.

  Taylor Swift, he says with a quick smile of recognition.

  Find a news station, I tell him.

  He begins turning the little wheel and when he finds the public broadcaster’s station they are carrying on as per usual. Nothing happening in the rest of the world, says Adam.

  Fool, I say, don’t you think that’s what they want us to believe?

  Mary 7 comes in the house and says the dogs are all penned up. They’re agitated, she says. They ought to be, I say. In her I see such tenderness. She is two months along now. Her features are just beginning to soften. I have placed her on an ultra-high-calorie diet because in a dream I saw that she is carrying twins.

  The first Mary was a twin. Her sister was a teacher in Toronto, that stinking pit. I think that’s where she went, to be with her sister. When I first told her about what was to come she asked me when we would bring our families here to be with us, to be protected. I said no family. This is your family. She wavered then, the first such instance. We sat in wire lawn chairs next to a fire I’d built in an old truck rim. The air was chilled. This was probably May or early June, so many years ago. Mary’s soft brown hair caught the firelight and her skin was clear and white. Her eyes narrowed. But my family is who I am, she said. I know who you are, Mary, I said. You are me. You are this, my arm sweeping around to indicate the land, and this, I said, putting my hand on my heart. Of course, she said, and she knelt in front of me, rested her head in my lap. I believe very firmly that we became pregnant that night with Adam, my first son. Such a woman. I’d have filled her with so many beautiful children, had she possessed the fortitude to see this through.

  The radio is still talking and the lights still burning when the power is cut. I expected this; the electromagnetic radiation from their crafts. In a heartbeat the backup generator kicks in. I can hear its diesel engine fire to life out there, out by the second house. Then it too fails, and there is silence. Just the wind. A faint pinkish light from the windows. I see shadows all around me. The boys, young men now, with proud chests, shoulders back, chins up. I see my wives’ faces, faintly, and they are smiling because they know where we will soon be. The youngest children are all tucked away in the secure basement nursery. Though I can hear nothing, see very little, I know that out there on the prairie, silent machinations are underway to finally bring this thing to a head. We are on the precipice here. What’s coming is unlike anything any human being has ever known.

  People ask me do I really believe this stuff. I tell them that I live it and I breathe it and I know it to be true. There is no question of mere belief. Ask me that question tomorrow, when the whole of the Earth is scorched black and the cities h
ave fallen and your family is all gone. When the crops are burnt, the oceans dry, and gashes to dwarf the Grand Canyon have been opened upon the land. When most all mankind has finally been called to task but me and mine are still here, still fighting. Ask me then do I believe. And I will ask you, do you finally believe? And who is so crazy now?

  I am not given to sentimental thoughts, especially not now, not as I bring the Kalashnikov to my shoulder and lean in to line up the first shot. I am not wistful and I am not fooled by this world’s illusions, but some recessed part of me can’t help but spare a thought for the first Mary, fallen and sullied though she is. It would be nice, after all, to know where she is, who she is with, and how she will fare in all this. I am thinking of her, of her eyes, and how she is the only person I would allow to come into this place, now. About how Adam can’t even remember his own mother’s face, and how I’d like for that to change, when their vehicles, a lot more vehicles than I’d figured, throw on their searchlights, bathing us all in a cold luminescence, casting hard shadows against the walls. It is with the first Mary in mind, then, that I use the Kalashnikov’s barrel to break the brittle glass of the window, and begin to squeeze with the index finger of my shooting hand. Maybe, it occurs to me, as the walls begin to buckle and deflate and the crashing voices begin to call to us in their indecipherable tongues, maybe this might have gone differently if she hadn’t left, my first beloved Mary.

  THE GAMECHANGER

  I’m all about Robert Grainge right now. His mother, Claudette, tells me on the phone it’s pronounced “Ro-bare.” She says, “Like the French.”

  “We’ll put that in the media guide,” I tell her, “so that everybody knows it’s Ro-bare, not Robert.” She likes that.

  Ro-bare Grainge is my whole life right now. Me and every other major Division I basketball recruiter. He’s the top scorer in the nation, a rangy guard with great handling and plus defence. He’s six-five, and he loves the paint. Always knows where to find his teammates. A gamechanger. We watch tape of him while we eat our Corn Flakes. We read his stat sheet while lying in bed. He consumes us.

  I want to put him with Dallas Carmody, a smooth shooting guard, a real perimeter guy from Indiana who the Hoosiers loved until I swooped in and poached him. I don’t even know how I did it, to be honest. But I did, and he wears orange for us and he finished his freshman year the fourth-highest scorer in the country.

  Carmody and Grainge is a combination of names that sweetens my dreams at night. I see Grainge in a backcourt with Carmody in two years’ time. I see Grainge handling and slashing into the key. I see him drawing bodies over—because everybody fears Grainge—and I see him kicking the ball out to Carmody. I see Carmody burying a long jumper, or a three from the wing. I see this over and over and over. I see KU falling. I see Duke falling. I see a tournament run. I see a title.

  My office is a thousand high school gyms. My office is the airport at 6:00 AM. My office is a housing development in Youngstown, Ohio. My office is the IHOP on Route 16. My office is the dome packed with thirty thousand people when Georgetown visits. My office is the goaty-meaty-vinegary smell of young men exerting themselves and the clatter of a dozen dribbled balls in the practice gym. My office is wherever they need it to be.

  My wife, Pam, will call me on my phone and say, “Where are you, Eddie?” I’ll say, “Pine Bluff.” I’ll say, “Chicago.” I’ll say, “In the driveway, Pammy.” She’ll ask how it went and I’ll say, “I think we’ve got this one,” or “Hard to tell,” or “His brother went to Michigan and he’s pretty set on going there too.”

  Sometimes I land these young men and sometimes I don’t, but if I don’t there likely isn’t anyone else who could have. Believe that. Petey, or Dont’e, or Ellis, or LaShawn, or David, had his mind made up before I landed on his doorstep, because his brother went somewhere else, or because the Jayhawks just won a title and they have a spot at power forward where he might get actual freshman minutes, or because his friends always wore Carolina gear and now he wants to wear the uniform, or whatever.

  Sometimes they say no but I don’t believe them, so I make one more trip. What the hell; between the Athletic Director and the alumni our budget is virtually bottomless. I’ve never been told no, and my card has never been refused.

  On too many occasions to count, such last-ditch trips have yielded fruit. No, they said, but I said, Hold on, let’s talk about this a bit more. I said, Why don’t I fly out there and we can have dinner, me and you and your dad, and we’ll just be sure you’re making the right choice.

  And come signing day in April, what was the address on those letters of intent?

  Right now, there is only one letter I’m interested in seeing. The wait breeds a restlessness in me I can’t stand, so I’ve decided to come see Grainge play again, and maybe put the bug in his ear once more. I’ve made the trip for this weekend high school tournament in December, braving the three-plus-hour drive down I-81 from upstate to the rusted heart of Pennsylvania. Christmas has come and gone but the new year is not yet upon us. The days are cold.

  Technically we have until April, but these winter days are where this battle is lost or won. I’ve seen recruiters from other schools make the mistake of hanging back for too long, losing their player. You have to become a part of the kid’s life. You have to become a part of his emotional landscape. Fill him with good feelings and stories of glory and potential victory so rich with detail that they function like memory. Start early. Make him see it. Let him feel it. Tell him, “You, in orange, cutting down that net at the end of the tournament.” Repeat times a million. Get right inside his head, between the thoughts of girls and the lyrics of songs and the early memories of basketball on TV.

  You have to do the legwork. Spend the fall and winter in regional airports and in rental cars and gyms and arenas. In chain restaurants and shitty motels. The Nite Owl. Super 8. Sandy’s Sleep Inn. The Comfort Inn, within sight of the mighty Susquehanna River, in Harrisburg, PA.

  In desperate cases it might be necessary to call in the coach. Insist that he fly out and get a rental car and arrive on the kid’s doorstep to make his impassioned pitch. And yes, to anticipate the question, Grainge is a desperate case. Accordingly, Coach B is due here in a few weeks. I didn’t think that would be necessary, but no one’s heard one way or the other from Robert, and this makes me anxious, makes us anxious. Such anxiety is the sort of thing that requires me to visit exotic locales like wintry Harrisburg.

  In December this part of the world is the colour of ash—the ground, the light, the sky. My car is white. It disappears. Late last night, when I got in, I parked beneath a light stanchion in the Comfort’s lot but this morning I couldn’t tell which light it’d been. I had a strange moment of disorientation as I walked around that lunar landscape and couldn’t quite recall just where I was, let alone where I’d left my car. Once that lifted and I had identified the white hump beneath the white mound of snow, I brushed and scraped and warmed it up, then made for a face-to-face with Don Sykes, Grainge’s coach at Harrisburg High.

  I meant to pump Sykes for indications as to which way Robert might be leaning, under the guise of asking about the kid’s development since I’d last watched him play, back in September.

  “What more can I tell you?” Sykes told me, leaning back in his office chair and rubbing the white stubble atop his head. “Kid’s ready. He’s readier than ready.”

  “Good. I need to hear this, Don.”

  “Best I’ve seen, Eddie. And getting better.”

  “Okay. Good.” But no indication as to which way Grainge is leaning.

  I spend the afternoon in my room, watching video, talking to my people back upstate. My room is quiet and dark, a cave of study and contemplation. A base of operations, an impermanent temple to the game.

  It’s basketball. It’s always been basketball. The reason I can stand being away from Pam so often, stand the bad hotels and the terrible food. The reason, if you really want to drill down, that Pam and I
are childless. It’s an unreasonably demanding job, but I do it because it allows me be within this world, on hardwood courts, in old arenas, talking to men and boys about this game, all the time. My father took me to see Oscar Robertson and the old Cincinnati Royals when I was six years old, and that was it. There was no turning back from that. Since then I have seen Wilt, and Bill Russell, and Dr. J. I’ve seen Magic and Bird and Jordan. I’ve seen LeBron. And I’ve loved every minute of it. I’m fortunate, as I see it, to get paid to float through this world, looking for the next great. I’m pulled by the hope that I might find him, but I’m sustained day in, day out by nothing more than this game. Dribble and pass and catch and shoot.

  I’ve watched uncountable hours of video. Call it bearing witness. I have a ton to get through right now. We’re kind of hitting a crunch time. Robert Grainge is not my only quarry, not by a long shot, but he’s my top priority. My obsession, actually. I wind up watching a highlight reel of him three times in a row before I take a shower and head out to the gym to see the day’s games.

  “Orange Eddie!” someone bellows, and I wheel around to see Bill from Duke standing with his arms outstretched in surprise, or supplication, or greeting. “Haven’t seen you at the Hilton,” he says, and chuckles. Bill is short and round and red-faced. He makes liberal use of the agricultural product that once made North Carolina prosperous, and he has the deep-chest wheeze and yellowed teeth to show for it.