by Chris Lynch
My hometown had become an ugly, filthy place, and I left it without knowing when I would come back, if I ever even did. The trade, for shrugging off the weight of eighteen years’ accumulation of people and history and life, was that I am apparently going to have to return now to the real side of football, the brute side. I was sure I never wanted to stick anybody ever again. I was done with that. Gradually, as I make my way across the field toward the team facilities in the building ahead, I start feeling changes, again. More changes, sharp shiftings. I refuse to look up and out at the sky and the mountains that I’ve been finding so reassuring and distracting. I watch as one by one the white hash marks pass beneath my feet. I’m picking up yardage, quicker as I go on, and with every yard I gain, I sense myself regaining something else, something harder and maybe meaner, difficult and essential.
Why not? I could stick with the best of them when I had the desire to. Maybe this is the right time to let the desire back in.
I’m not so sure, after all, that I never want to stick anybody ever again. Maybe it was a brilliantly executed game plan by the coach. Trick me into thinking I need not play defensive backfield. Lure me all the way out here to the western end of nowhere. Then jerk me back into the position I no longer felt mean and motivated enough to play.
Thus making me mean and motivated enough to want to start banging into somebody again. Possibly. It would take a pretty awful genius to execute that play, that’s for sure. Should I be petrified, or thrilled, to play for this guy?
I don’t even know the answer myself. But either way I’m finding myself undeniably excited, about the possibilities, the newness, the unknowns.
real time
I was always supposed to be here. Every part of me was telling me as much from the second I arrived. I felt like what I imagine salmon feel like. Right, the spawning thing, where salmon make their way upstream through crashing white water and whatnot. And from the ocean, for Pete’s sake, back up the river to the spot where they were born. Even though who can remember the spot where they were born, never mind somebody with a bitty fish brain? And why is a cold fish doing something that seems so emotional? But they do. And even though I visited several schools and none of them were Carnegie, I felt like a total salmon when I got here. I had made it, to the place I never even knew I always belonged.
And that was even before Joyce.
“Okay then,” she said, clapping her hands crisply together and snapping the next bunch of raw recruits into formation for the official campus tour.
This time, I did not lose focus at all. It’s even possible I managed to remain too focused.
“Miss?” I asked as we crossed the footbridge over the tidy man-made duck pond. Joyce was at the head of our party of eight clueless frosh and herself as we headed for the campus’s one big hill. A fancy spiky red-and-white brick building perched at the crest of that hill like a pointed helmet. A sign pointing up that way identified it as the main administration center, but to me it looked like a baron or somebody lived in there, with the pointed helmet and all to match his home.
She spoke without turning around to even see who was talking to her.
“Keir, I do wish you wouldn’t call me ‘miss.’ Sounds like I’m your kindergarten teacher or your nanny or something.”
She knows me already by voice. The thought just muscled everything else right out of my brain space, so I had nothing more to say while the rest of the group chuckled at the whole snappy exchange.
She finally glanced back my way. “Was that all you wanted to say?” she asked, amused. Everybody was amused. I smiled at her like a dope while I tried to recall my question and tried not to dwell on the fact that I had stalled after only one word, and even that was a word she didn’t want to hear. It seems I performed a lot better conversationally when I wasn’t paying attention so much.
So I bootlegged it. I shoulder-bumped my way from the back of the group to the front, being careful to excuse myself along the way, until I was right beside her. I couldn’t do public speaking very well yet.
“Sorry about the ‘miss’ thing. Joyce.”
“Ah, now. That’s better. Friendlier.”
“It just came out. I wasn’t being a wise guy or anything.”
She patted my arm as we swung into stride halfway up the hill. “We’ll put the whole nasty business behind us now, will we?”
I sounded like an oaf, and she was letting me know. “Okay, now that was wise guy, right? Got it. Wasting time. The point.”
“There. You do better with two-word sentences. Let’s go with those for the time being.”
“Ah, no,” I said, making her laugh loud enough to get my peers crowding around to catch the next act. “Do you mind?” I said over my shoulder to a guy whose breath was actually warming my neck. He drifted back. “Right, Joyce, now I remember what I was going to ask you, but now that I do, I realize I’m just going to make things worse because it’s a doink question.”
She looked genuinely excited as she leaned closer toward me, like we were walking together.
For a second, just one second, this got to me. Feeling the warmth of lovely cool Joyce, her arm running parallel to the whole length of my arm, I caught a lump in my throat. It felt wonderful, the arm, if not the throat.
I stuffed it, though, that lump, and pulled it together because to give this fine person whatever amusement I could give her would be an achievement, the very stuff to start my new life with.
I was actually trying to get laughed at now.
“I was going to ask you if this was the same tour you gave us in the previous group, because there is no way I saw that chapel before. And I would have noticed a thing like that no matter how many misty mountains surrounded us. And that other thing behind it. That was a yurt, is that correct? Because, again, no way. If this is the same route, then somebody definitely erected that thing in between the two tour runnings, because it was certainly not there before.”
Lord. Oh my, but this was glorious. My cheeks bunched up and the corners of my smile strained hard to try to meet up around the back of my head. The sound of Joyce laughing, the sight of her, tickled me so much, in a way I had not experienced in . . . some time. I did all I could do not to perform that little-kid thing of wrapping my arms around myself and squeezing to try to quiet the rowdy butterfly gang inside me. My neglected and soft abs would offer them no protection if I squeezed hard enough.
“Are you just pulling my leg with this daffy routine?” she said just before we reached the admin building. She was guarding her great generous laughter and her big open smile now, trying to figure whether I deserved them or whether I was just playing the dunce for show. Her suspicious face was a sharper, harder beauty of a thing altogether, and I knew already I didn’t want to see it any more than necessary, beaut or no.
But guarded or not, suspicious or not, every look she showed had those same soft chocolate-brown eyes. The eyes that looked like they knew me, my best me, and I was already completely gone, melted right into those chocolate eyes.
“No, no, no, I swear,” I said, more panicky than perhaps a normal person would be in this situation. “This is a genuine certified fool you’re looking at right here. I would not be putting you on like that, I promise. I was just trying to stay totally engaged, not waste your time like I did earlier. I mean, you volunteering to help out the likes of me, I should have more respect than to spend the whole thing with my head in the clouds. That’s just bad form, bad manners, a poor reflection on a guy’s home training, and altogether inexcusable.”
Now, as much as Joyce was pondering me and trying to work me out on the nonsense joker scale, I felt like I was getting the full range of her very articulated facial expressions in a crash course. It was a little disconcerting, and a whole lot of distracting, and if the rest of my courses turned out to be this mesmerizing, then I was going to do spectacularly well at Carnegie College.
Joyce held the door to let all her charges file in ahead of her, and I stood by,
helping, I suppose.
“See,” I said, pointing at her face in case maybe she didn’t know it was there. “That head-tilt, the quizzical expression that seems like it’s asking lots of questions or even just one or two heavy ones? I mean, I’m kind of shredded about it, because I think it’s lovely, honest, but it worries me a bit at the same time. Like I would enjoy standing by and watching you make that face at something else, so that way I could just appreciate it and not be unsettled by it.”
The two of us were standing there, teaming up to hold that door mightily open long after anybody needed us to. Whether she was doing it on purpose or not, Joyce just drilled me then, with that bewitching, probing look. She held it, and me, until I couldn’t bear it anymore. I just involuntarily snapped my gaze away from her the way a dog bails out of a staring contest. I turned to look up and off in the direction of my friendly misty mountains.
“I see you now,” she said while I held my mountainward position. “You are a charmer.”
It was unmistakably not a compliment.
“No,” I called after I felt the small breeze of the door closing behind her. “No, I am absolutely not.” I yanked the door back open and scurried after her. “I promise you I am nothing of the kind. Ask anybody . . . Well, once I know some people here, you can ask them, and I am certain they will vouch . . .”
wherever you go, there you are
One thing that has not changed, that will never change, that has no chance of changing, is that I have no urge in me to hang out, to be part of some core or corps or tribe or gang or pod of guys who are always seen together and seem to like it that way. Not that I’m a recluse or a hermit or even opposed to this kind of thing. I like parties, sometimes. I like folks, people, much of the time. But to be honest, I mostly liked most of them from a little bit of distance.
Carnegie represents a complete scratch-start for me, a reboot of my whole existence. But while I will always be friendly and polite and cool with whoever I can manage, there is no way I’m going to start cultivating a social circle around me or pursuing friendships now that I’ve resettled. That always struck me as one of the stupidest notions anyway, pursuing a friendship. Not that I’d be called up as any kind of expert on the subject, but the thought of hunting or chasing somebody down could not possibly be further from any valid definition of making or being a friend to anybody.
I would not be averse to pursuing Joyce, though. The thought keeps crossing my mind. But there will be no such approach unless and until she makes it blindingly clear that this would be acceptable and desirable. I’m already preparing myself for this not being the case. I could be alone and be all right. I could handle that. I’ve spent enough time already thinking of my life in those terms. I’ve never minded being alone.
I suppose this would be the explanation for how I could have gone deep into my second day of preseason workouts, prior to the first day of classes, without really meeting any of the guys on my team. Like Coach said, I’m behind everybody else, so maybe I would have benefited from introductions and greetings when they were being done more formally. Or maybe not. There are still opportunities, names being passed around from coaches to players, from returning players to new guys, from one new guy to the next one, and ultimately into one ear and right on out the other. For whatever reason, for lots of reasons, I feel very much on the outside of something.
Which gives the shock all that much more of an electrical jolt when it comes.
We had probably seen each other up close-ish, passing within six to eight feet of each other a dozen times before this, and nothing, blank. What it finally takes is a bump-and-run. He’s a receiver, in a helmet and no pads just like ten other guys lined up with him. I’m a defensive back, playing corner even though I was barely mediocre there compared to how well I’m suited to playing safety. But the respective backfield coaches decided to give everybody a look-over by running through a few pass plays, and now we’re lined up across from each other.
You are taught, if you are taught well, to make eye contact across the line. Get the guy’s attention if you can, and if you can, then use it. Show mercilessness and bloodlust you possibly don’t have but show it if he dares to lock eyes. Then, on a bump-and-run, forget about “bump,” which is a word that has no place in football and is only there to make the game sound more puppyish than it is or ever was. “Bump” is window dressing. On the field, “bump” means “bang.” That’s what we were taught, d-backs and receivers alike. Take no shit, dish it back out, make it unpleasant.
So, at the hike of the ball, with this guy and me full-tilting at each other for three or four strides, you could anticipate a mighty crack as we collide like blind fiery meteors. Because his eyes had indeed met mine and they told me indeed he had been taught like I was taught, not to look away, not to shy away from contact. . . .
Because we were taught by the same people. At the same time. At the same place.
We never collide because we recognize it before that can happen. Also because the play goes to the opposite side, my guy was just a decoy, and it’s called dead when the quarterback throws the ball ten feet over his real target’s head. And because we are both just too stunned to follow through properly.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he says as we stop short and stand shaking hands. In the place where I wasn’t supposed to know anybody and, more importantly, vice versa.
That is a question I would never have prepared for. It’s as if I’ve parachuted behind enemy lines like some kind of a slimy rotten spy.
Two assistant coaches come onto the field to wildly wave these units off and give the next bunch a shot.
I pick the conversation up on the sidelines. “I am an enrolled student-athlete here, is what I’m doing here.”
“But, here? You’re not supposed to be here.” His look is a strange swirl of intensity, astonishment, and at least a bit of anger. “Everybody everywhere knew you were going to Norfolk for, like, months already. I knew I was going to be on my own coming here, and that was cool, and it was not shocking and maybe it was part of what I came here for, and . . . Jesus, what the hell are you doing here?” He’s laughing enough, now that astonishment is becoming the dominant element, that I have no choice but to join in.
So I laugh with him, because it feels great, and because it’s so absurd, and because, could you believe it?
“I was forced to make a last-minute decision,” I say, “because of . . . circumstances beyond my control.”
“Ah, yeah,” he says. “Everybody knows about the circumstances by now. And the control. Or the lack of it.”
The laugh we shared seems like a long time ago already. Because in one short statement he’s wrapped up the whole issue of what I had to get away from and what I would obviously never be able to get away from. Not without putting a fat chunk of country between me and all the wrong stuff, but I never figured on being followed, being reminded, being suddenly and weirdly yanked all the way back into the worst things. And frightened by it.
He’s reading me, over my silence.
“Listen,” he says, “I hadn’t planned on having this conversation, here and now, any more than you did. Fair to say we’re both still in shock. But I’m not inclined to go rocking any boats unnecessarily, if you’re wondering. So relax, Killer.”
It hits me like a head butt. There were a few times on the playing field when I got my bell rung by a helmet-to-helmet collision and the lights went dim, my coordination got all short-circuited. That name, out loud, right now, after all, feels just like that. Damn it all to hell.
That was of course something I was wondering, about him making deliberate mischief with this. But if he thinks that calling me Killer, a reference to the other great dark shadow that loomed over my life at one time, is not rocking any boats, that’s a problem.
“Could you not call me that?” I say crisply. It sounds maybe a little more aggressive than I’d like, but this is serious. “I’m hoping for a fresh start here. And I don’t
think a nickname like Killer, and all the questions that will come along with it, is going to be a big help with that.”
He frowns. “You’re a football player. No football player in his right mind would ever decline a nickname as badass as Killer. You’ll be an instant legend.”
“Hmm, yeah, I don’t want that. I want to be known as a good player, just another good guy on a good team. That’s my dream, so if you don’t mind, can we lay the Killer to rest right now?”
He huffs, as if I have taken something great away from him.
“That’s the boringest dream I’ve ever heard of.”
“Well, I am sorry about that. But a guy’s name is his property to use his own way.”
Good thing he can’t read that I’m also wondering what his damn name is. I went to school with him for four years, played football with him for two of those years. We were on the freshman squad together, and again on the varsity as seniors, once he finally made it above junior varsity.
It is right there, though. I can just about taste it . . . begins with B . . . C . . . D . . . E . . . What the hell is my problem? What the hell is your problem, Keir? How could this be? What kind of person lets this situation come to be? F . . . G . . . H . . .
“Kelly,” he says, laughing at me and then clapping hard at a nice one-handed catch by one of his competitors at wide receiver.
My first thought is, no, that’s not it. “Damn,” I say, causing him to laugh again. “Billy Kelly. How you been doing? How was your summer?”
“Great, excellent, Keir. Thanks for asking. Oh, and Kelly is my first name. Kelly McAvoy.”
I stare down at my shoes, the only thing to do in this situation. At least I know that much.
“So sorry, Kelly. I am a shit.”
