The Weight of Glass

by Stuart Heatherington

  “Actually, I was hoping for a cigarette and a blindfold,” I remarked.

  “Won’t help,” Amy added out of nowhere and it brought our conversation back into focus.

  I thumbed back behind me, whiskey sifting through my veins, slowing the motor down. “Charlie asked me something about Mom earlier. Wanted to know why she was interested in our stepfather. And I remembered something just now. We never really knew Mom’s parents. There were pictures we had of them. But other than that, it was like the McQueen family up and disowned us.”

  I glanced in Amy’s direction, getting the confirmation I wanted. “She told me once that Grandpa McQueen, was nuts and bolts religious. Hands attached to everything in the church—elder, deacon, associate pastor at times, as strict as any hard-line southern Baptist you could hit with a stick; and he didn’t approve of her marrying Dad. In a way I think Mom was looking for answers in Dad’s death by getting back to what was familiar to her. I think she saw it as punishment. Maybe she was looking for a father figure, I don’t know. But I think she imagined getting closer to God was the way to do it. And at the time, Warren happened to be playing a pretty close fiddle.”

  Amy dug out her cigarettes. “I would agree with that. It’s not an out, but it explains a little about who she was.”

  I sat there thinking about the last thing she said. “If she were here would you forgive her?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that.” Amy took a long drag and blew it toward the ceiling. But her face wavered a little. It would be tough. I thought she might say no.

  “Really? What if she was here right now?”

  “Lee, don’t.”

  “There’s no such thing as ghosts anyway,” Nicole said.

  What do you know? I wanted to smack her in the head. “You’re wrong about that. There are ghosts, or things like them.”

  “Are we talking about Casper?” Nicole asked.

  I wasn’t getting off the subject. They needed to tell hear it all. “What about demons?” In my mind I pictured Linda Blair, crawling upside down on a flight of stairs like a fleshy, pale spider, and shivers scalded the outside of my arms. It was easier believing in evil, because we were faced with it everyday in the media—reminded of its potential and appetite on the nightly news.

  “Ghosts, demons—they’re just things that go bump in the dark, Daddy.” Charlie added, “They’re not real.”

  “That’s what you think. There are things out there that will scare the shit out of you and leave you wondering if you’re losing your mind night in and night out.” My eyes were blinking slowly, the pace of my tongue cleaving sideways with the alcohol. “And I know because one visited me twice in the dark. Told me everything I needed to do. What it would take to destroy the monster.”

  “Monster? What are you talking about?” Nicole looked around confused.

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “Then you haven’t been listening.”

  “I’m listening, Lee.” Amy drew me back to her. “I think I know what you mean.”

  “Then how do you kill the monster?” I almost begged for an answer.

  There was quiet.

  “By becoming it,” Amy whispered loud enough for everyone to hear. “You first have to be the monster. Don’t you?”

  I stared blindly into the floor. “But of course, you’d know.” I gathered in the panic of my thoughts and pushed them away. I wasn’t sure what made a ghost story seem so real—if it was just hearing it or as simple as the trust of believing it. But I did know, as a little boy, those two things went a long way. They were enough. Yet what scared me to death back then, growing older, was that I needed to see to believe.

  19

  1973 - Ghosts existed in folklore, a night of bed sheets and broomsticks. They were something of a tradition, such as burnt marshmallows and hotdogs. Or tales to be heard around campfires in Bascomb or offered as warnings to small children who did not faithfully obey the signs of danger.

  For me, they meant nothing. That is, until I began seeing the ghost during the summer following the death of my mother. But this particular spirit visited me like a demented version of the Ghost of Christmas Future, only it wasn’t Christmas, and he showed me things, I knew, would put a man in prison.

  The entire month of August, I stayed away from the house at least until dark. Football had begun and I immersed myself in the warfare of its splendid brutality. Working through the summer with a separated shoulder prepared me to endure the season of violence I planned to release on opposing teams. I withdrew into myself during workouts; fought through the aches and afterthoughts that had come with the beating the Good Shepherd unleashed.

  It took two weeks to overcome my fear of being in a pile of bodies after a tackle. But I resolved that quite by accident, when I broke another boy’s jaw during a practice game. One I hit as hard as I possibly could. Instead of walking off the field to the sounds of his screams, I learned to feed off them. Somehow the misery that sprung out of his mouth spoke to me like a breakthrough.

  And sitting there, I understood what I needed to survive. How much better those screams sounded coming from him than from me. On the field I became obsessed with contact, and it overpowered any sense of well-being. I fought through players, running a gauntlet of pads, elbows and knees, in an effort to land a hit at any cost.

  Games started this way—my terrorizing opponents. Face in rage, I stalked them across the line. And from the outset of the whistle, it signaled an unrelenting force of something that, looking back, skated on the edge of madness.

  There came a point, following games, in the broken reflection of the locker room mirror, when I could not solve the pieces that were me. I was a puzzle without borders and wholly incomplete, except for the times my cleats turned out the grass between two sidelines. Teammates loved to recount, following our victories, the plays they had lined me up for, because I didn’t know where I was. Reason lost meaning. It disappeared from sight.

  There was the game against the Birmingham Tigers. I set the school record with 24 tackles, three of which had been sacks. After finishing half of the fourth quarter, they fielded a third string quarterback. The rest of the game he spent looking over his shoulder, even as I drug him into the sidelines on the final play, smashing my helmet into the visitor’s bench and knocking myself unconscious. When I woke up I was in the locker room with my pads laid off on the floor, a cracked capsule of smelling salts being waved under my nose.

  “He’s comin’ around now.” Coach Wheeler’s voice seemed far off in the distance, but he was standing right over me when I opened my eyes. “I’m tellin’ you what, you’re too tough for you’re own good.”

  I tried to push his hand away from under my face and missed by several inches; smells of ammonia burned my nose and chest. I coughed and rolled my shoulder left, as I slipped off the changing table and hit the concrete floor.

  The coach’s hands latched under my arms. “Hold on. Ain’t the door, son.”

  “Stop it—get the hell off me!”

  When they put me back on my feet my head swam in a ridiculous current. Each movement brought with it the sharp point of a knife digging in behind the eyes. Walls swirled one way, while balance went the other. Stomach drifted on that wave repeatedly, as I ached to throw up.

  “Easy does it, bossman.” Coach Lester Eaves shifted my legs back over the taping table. “You know it wouldn’t have hurt nothing to let that kid go outta bounds on the last play. Nothing says the other team has to be carried off on a stretcher.”

  A series of troubled faces surrounded me. Lester Eaves, the defensive coach, stood to my side, keeping his hand pressed against my shoulder in case I decided to take another spill. Coach Wheeler sat leaning behind the end of the table, feet pushing a folding chair up to the wall on its rear legs, as Doctor Gage held a penlight in my eyes.

  “What happened?” My head swam out of focus.

  “You happened, killer,” Coach Wheeler said, using the nickname he’d given me the
year before. He had been quoted in the paper as saying, in response to the undefeated Tuscaloosa Rebels’ high-powered wishbone attack coming into town, that the only thing a wishbone was good for was holding up a turkey’s head. And they could bring whatever amount of wishes and bones they wanted, because he had a table set for them and a whole slew of hungry turkey killers. I recorded 17 tackles, 4 sacks, 3 fumbles and a safety in route to collecting my nickname Turkey Killer. Later, the next week, it was amended to plain killer when I nearly duplicated the stat line.

  “I don’t remember anything, coach,” I said, the hollow sound of my own voice accompanied by a string of bright stars.

  “Probably ’cause you put your head through the bench, after putting it through their quarterback,” Wheeler said seriously, rocking the chair forward onto four legs. “May’ve been the hardest hit I’ve ever seen. Heard it across the field—sounded like a cap gun.”

  “What’d I do?”

  “What’d you do? Thanks to you, he ain’t got a quarterback left.” He winked. “Not that it hurt my feelings or nothing. Butters wouldn’t even shake my hand after the game.”

  Dr. Gage knelt in front of me while I lay on my side and held up some fingers. “Son, the good news is your head is hard as a rock. The bad news is you might have a concussion. How you feeling right now, little dizzy? How many fingers am I holding up?”

  Focusing on his blurry hand, I blinked and rubbed my eyes until they came in clear. “Three, I think. I feel sick to my stomach.”

  His eyebrows united with a twitch of uncertainty. Then he gazed over the top of his horn rims at Coach Wheeler. “Without running more tests, I’d say he sustained a pretty good concussion. But he should be all right by next week.” He turned to me again. “Probably gonna have yourself a hammer of a headache the next few days where you rung your bell. And it’s good thing you aren’t having anymore falls down the stairs. Your shoulder holding up, okay?”

  “There’s a caterpillar on your face.” I pushed my arm out for leverage, and tried to swipe at his eyebrows to get it off.

  Dr. Gage smiled for some reason. “Lester, would you help me here? Let’s see if we can get him sitting up.” They allowed me to lean back against the wall and Coach Wheeler held out a bag of ice to rest behind my head. I looked down at the sweat soaked letters of my t-shirt and tried not to be sick. Everything swam in and out of focus.

  “I’m really tired. Can I sleep a few minutes or two?” My eyes were already shutting. “Just a minute’s all I need, then I’ll be ready to go.”

  “You guy’s go ahead, I’ll get him home,” Coach Eaves said. “That okay with you, doc?”

  “Take him to his house.” I could hear the sound of Dr. Gage zipping up his medical bag. “I’ll get by tomorrow and check on him.”

  I opened my eyes and saw six people standing around me. “I’m fine with it. I can put my pads back on, coach. Quarterback’s rolling out of the pocket on two. I’m telling you Red Hot Cover 3. That’s the play. Just my bell is all rung.” I tapped my face with my fingers because the words weren’t coming right, and pain shot through my eyes on pins and needles.

  Coach Wheeler rubbed me on the back. “I think you’re sitting this one out.”

  I remembered the shower, because it was bitter cold and the throbbing sprayer was a rash of nails spreading against my skin. All I could do was stand under the pounding water, somebody’s arm keeping me steady. The sickness came and went, but the dizziness remained. When I finished, I found gym shorts and a clean shirt to change into, and Coach Eaves helped me into his truck. My head was clear of some of the fog, but it still hurt with a splendid fury, filtering through my eyes into the back of my brain.

  I tolerated the jostling of Coach Eaves’ truck for as long as I could, the splitting glow of his headlights pinning my eyes closed. We managed to reach the crossroads of Lewis and Cumberland, which was about half a mile from the church, before I forced him to stop by opening my door and trying to climb out. I found myself staring at the ditch off to the side of the road and thinking how comfortable it looked flying by and that I might be able to lay down and sleep there.

  “Hey, hold on! Lemme get stopped, you crazy son-of-a—” he yelled over my shoulder. Brakes squealed under the plume of dust that spread everywhere. And as soon as the old Ford’s door swung open I heaved a stomach full of water on the dirt road. Wiping my mouth dry on the shoulder of my sleeve, I staggered down to the side of the truck bed, both hands running one after another to the bumper. My head seemed better, but there were stages to feeling like shit.

  Eaves jumped out of the cab and came around to the back. “Now hold on an ever-loving minute! Because I declare I’m gonna kill you, if you don’t kill yourself. You don’t go jumping out of a truck without telling somebody. You lookin’ to get me in trouble with the doc?” He used a hand to unfasten the tailgate and folded it out into a seat. “You ain’t lookin’ so hot. Do you even hear me?”

  A post of wood rose out of the truck bed. I hugged it tight as I looked down and saw I was drooling on my shirt. “I can’t go back in the game right now, coach. I need a breather, I think.”

  He was nodding at me. “You’ll get one. We just gotta get you home.”

  I pointed to my head. “Dr. Gage said my thing-a-me-bob, got rung real hard.” The dim red glow of the taillights disturbed the dusty ground around our feet and the color of it made me dizzy all over again.

  “That thing’s your head, Lee.” He looked at me, dumbfounded. “Son, you got your wiring all messed up, don’t you?”

  “That’s what you say. My wirings okay. It’s a lot better anyway,” I whispered. “It only hurts if you didn’t know.”

  “Yeah. Hey, it’s getting late. What do you say we get you home now? Five in the morning comes early for me.” He rested a hand on my shoulder. “So how ’bout we get you in the truck and—”

  I shook my head no and it whipped my brain around so that I grabbed my face. “It hurts too much to do that. If you didn’t hear, I got hit in the thing-a-me-bob, what with the bell in it that goes—” I grabbed my ears. “Boy, it’s loud out here. Why’s it so loud out here, coach?”

  “What about the back here?” He patted the truck bed. “You can lay out on the floor.”

  “I don’t think so coach.” My eyes turned glassy out on the road. “Your driving and my head don’t get a long. Hey! I remembered not to say thing-a-me-bob.” I stood up laughing then, which made it even funnier for some reason.

  “How are you gonna get home?” Eaves watched me from the tailgate. “You can’t hardly stand, let alone walk.”

  I pushed off the truck as I turned around, standing in the road from where Cumberland crossed over in the distance. If it was proof he needed, I could give him some. “I can hoof it.” I galloped in place and nearly fell down in the dirt, hand steadying on his arm. “But at least I won’t be hurting none. See there, coach? Told ya so. Standing tall in the saddle. Right here in the middle of this—” I threw up water on his chest and blinked at him in surprise, then threw up down the front of my shirt.

  “Lee, get in the goddamn truck! Or I’m leaving you out here, and you can walk home.” Eaves tried to grab me.

  I ducked under his arm and slid into the ditch, barely keeping myself up. “Can’t do it, coach.” I scrambled across the other side and took off down the road, staggering to the right on a tightrope of gravel and dirt. Behind me, the engine of his truck turned over and finally caught, the misfiring of one of the cylinders knocking from under the hood as he lugged after me.

  “Get in the truck, Lee!”

  I looked to my left, and Coach Eaves’ face glared out the cab window.

  “Why are you following me?”

  “So I can get you home, damnit! Now come on!”

  I was trying to balance myself on the dirt when I noticed my knees were bleeding down the front of my shins. “Hey, coach, would you look at this? How’d that happen?” I held up my hand, seeing the blood on my fingers.
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  “You fell in the dirt, you idiot. And you’re not thinking right in the head. Now, for the last time, would you get in here?” He leaned across the cab and slung open the door, motioning his right arm in circles. The ditch leveled out and went away. And after a second, he pulled out in front of me and turned sharply across my path. A wave of dirt spilled out from under the tailgate like a patch of heavy fog, cutting beneath the tires and leaking through the grill of the truck’s headlights onto the ground.

  Without looking, I cut through the woods, feet stumbling beneath me. Dusty echos of leaves followed my footfalls as I dodged in and out of trees. Limbs struck at my face in a fury. And several times I found myself face up between towering trunks, legs locked in among vines, so that above me, the fading moon spread its way through a weave of weeping branches and the darkness acted as something desperate to carry it away.