The Wide Game

by Michael West

  “Yeah.” She looked at her toes. “But I didn’t care how they saw me.”

  “Well, lights don’t shine on what I see when I look at you.”

  She blinked. “Huh?”

  “Your heart, Deidra.”

  “Oh.” She rolled her eyes and giggled. “You are full of so much shit.”

  “Am I?”

  Deidra smiled. “Look, how ’bout if we win the Wide Game –”

  “When we win.”

  “When we win, we shower together before you leave.”

  At the words “before you leave,” Paul felt emptiness try to gain a foothold within him and he squashed it. He was going to spend the entire day with the woman he loved, and nothing was going to spoil it. “Sounds great.”

  Deidra started to go up the stairs, then paused and turned to face him. “With Mom and Dad gone, it’s been hard for me to sleep at night. The house has been just ... every little creak, y’know?”

  He nodded.

  “But last night in your arms, I slept better than I have in my whole life.” His face lit up and she blew him a kiss. “I’ll save you some hot water.”

  Don’t worry about it, Paul thought, still smiling as he walked back into the kitchen. He found the camcorder battery and charger next to his backpack on the counter, removed the fully charged battery, and tossed it in with the other two he’d packed for the day’s events. For most, the weight of the camcorder would have been a burden, but Paul was accustomed to it. It was a part of him.

  His eyes rose to the kitchen window. At the edge of Deidra’s lawn, the cornfield waited, green stalks swaying in the breeze. Paul wondered morosely how far off the old quarry was, then questioned why he felt so odd. Bits of the dream crept back into his mind. Running. The crow. The naked Miami girl dancing around her bonfire.

  “– get moving.”

  Paul turned his attention to the voice. Deidra wore a white INXS T-shirt and pink sweat pants, her savage hair curled and her make-up freshly applied. The smell of her perfume filled his nostrils, bringing memories of the previous night flooding back into his brain.

  “Sorry?”

  Deidra bent over, laced up her Nikes. “We’re playing a game. What are they doing in your world?” When she looked up, her chuckle faded. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he told her, then smiled, driving the nightmare back into the darkness of his subconscious where it belonged. “Just excited.”

  She replied with a satisfied nod.

  He finished preparing the camcorder, then went off to ready himself for the game.

  Four

  Harmony was what people in the city called a “hick town.” Nothing to do but play basketball in your driveway, or maybe take in a movie that had been out for weeks before finally making its way to the Woodfield. Nothing to see but acres and acres of corn.

  Robby Miller traipsed through this corn alone. He wore a green tank top, and his father’s Army camouflage pants – which were loose and gathered around his legs like the folds of an accordion. His feet were clad in fire-resistant black boots; on his head, he wore a red Harmony Volunteer Fire Department ball cap.

  Being with the Fire Department gave Robby a feeling of importance, as Paul had suspected, but, better than that, it made him privy to the town’s secrets.

  For example, Robby knew the black domes in Tony’s Speedway Market, the ones supposed to hide surveillance cameras, were empty. He found this out during an inspection, when he pulled the domes down and found nothing but cinder block and metal rafters above the drop ceiling. Paul Rice had worked there for two years, and even he was ignorant of the ruse. But Robby knew.

  He knew Mayor Perry beat his wife. Robby had seen her eyes bruised, her lips bloodied, her bones broken and in need of splinting. “She fell down the stairs,” Perry would say, all business-like, or “She slipped on some spilled ice from the fridge.” Mrs. Mayor never offered even a contradictory glance. She would sit there, crying, echoing her husband’s words as if his arm were in her back making her lips move.

  Everyone knew there had been a fire at the Woodfield Movie Palace back in the ’50s, knew that a balcony full of people burned. Robby, however, knew the manager of the Woodfield liked to do the wild thang with the girl who sold the tickets. One night, Robby went along on a fire inspection, and he heard them in the business office – grunting, moaning, calling out to God. The manager was in his forties, and she, a sophomore at Stanley University, was just out of her teens. Sean Roche worked at the place as an usher, and he suspected something, but Robby knew.

  Just as he knew sixteen-year-old Lisa Hayden didn’t want to die, she only wanted her mother to think she wanted it. Robby had been on three calls to Lisa’s house in the last year. She had turned the car engine on with the garage door closed, had taken an “overdose” of pills, and, last but not least, had slashed both her wrists. All of it was for her mother’s benefit. The car had been turned on a few minutes before Lisa’s mother was to return home from work, she had not taken that many pills, and the cuts on her wrist had not been deep enough, or in the right direction, to be life threatening. Lisa’s mother thought these attempts were a cry for help. Robby knew.

  He knew Sheriff Carter was a pervert. Once, they had been called out to his house and found him naked and handcuffed, face down, to the brass headboard of his bed. Carter’s wife had lost the key to the restraints. She had been standing there, her face rosy with utter humiliation. And while she had taken time to cover her husband, she had not bothered to remove her strap-on. With great amusement, Robby had witnessed the latex dong waving back and forth beneath her robe as she moved.

  He also knew Melissa Atwell smothered her baby boy while it slept and blamed it on crib death. Melissa had gotten pregnant last year, her senior year of high school. The father had been Bill Clouse, a friend of Danny Fields, and the quarterback of the Harmony High team. When ol’ Billy went off to college and left her pregnant, Melissa made it known she wanted an abortion. But Harmony was a Catholic town, and her practicing parents forbid it. The baby was born, and it looked just like Billy – same hair, same eyes, same cocky half smile that looked cute on a newborn. And when the baby ended up dead, Robby had been one of the EMTs to answer the call. He’d gone up to Melissa and whispered into her ear, “Looks like you’re free now.” She’d said nothing, hadn’t even raised a hand to slap him for the implied accusation, and, most important of all, she shed not one tear. And so he knew.

  Robby thought only Father Andrew was more aware of Harmony’s underbelly, and he was a priest. There was no way for him to have any fun with the knowledge. Robby could, however. Robby did.

  Once, he had palmed a 3 Musketeers bar into his pocket at Tony’s Speedway, looking up at the vacant black dome and smiling as he did it.

  Another time, when he bought tickets to see The Secret of My Success, Robby asked the blonde in the box-office if the manager paid her well. She blinked and told him she did all right. “I hear you do more than all right,” Robby said with a wink. He walked into the theater and left her behind the glass, face sinking and eyes wondering.

  Boldest of all, when Sheriff Carter had pulled him over for speeding, Robby had come right out and asked him if he still let his wife fuck him up the ass. Carter’s face had turned bright red with a cocktail of rage and embarrassment. At first, Robby wondered if the comment would earn him a night in a jail cell, but Carter had told him “Get the hell outta here” and Robby had driven on, free and clear.

  When he told his friends at the fire station about this day, they told Robby even more interesting tidbits about the town. Well, not so much about Harmony itself ... they were more about the cornfields around it, more about the Wide Game. Of course, they had told him the story of the Miami Indians – the tale he’d heard a million and one times by now. The braves would go out into the cornfields to play the Wide Game. Some would come back to the tribe as men and warriors, others never returned.

  No one knew what happened to them.


  Robby yawned, told them it was a bullshit story.

  “That’s what I used to think,” his captain had told him. “But some strange shit has gone on over the years in those north fields.”

  He, and the other firemen and EMTs, then told Robby some new stories.

  In September of 1946, a black family named Warner had moved to Harmony. At that time, there was a strong Ku Klux Klan presence in the town. One night, Klansmen broke into the Warner home and took the family from their beds. The next day, they found them hanging from a tree at the edge of the northern fields – every man, women, and child; the ground beneath them muddy with their drained blood.

  A month later, Sam Fuller, the Grand Dragon for the Realm of Indiana, fell into a threshing machine.

  Some thought Fuller’s wife had pushed him. She’d left him in the middle of the night, moved to Atlanta with their children, and when the police called to tell her the news, rumor has it she said, “Thank God!” The woman had a truckload of alibis, however, so Fuller’s death was ruled an accident.

  In August of 1964, Peter Grant, Harmony’s Baptist minister, set fire to the north fields. When the fire department arrived to fight the blaze, he tried to stop them and had to be dragged from the scene in handcuffs. A few weeks later, he was found dead in his church, shot four times in the head.

  Police questioned farmers who had lost their crops, but none were charged and no weapon or related evidence was ever found. To this day, the case remained unsolved ... the identity of the killer a mystery.

  In July of 1972, Marcia and Betsy Andrews, twin girls, were reported missing. Marcia found her way home the next morning, bloody, hungry, and confused. They found Betsy a few days later in the cornfield – what was left of her, at any rate. The EMTs told Robby the coroner had ruled it an animal attack, but her body had been so ravaged, identification of the beasts had been impossible. Dogs had been his best guess. Marcia remembered nothing of the time she and her sister were gone. The doctors thought the attack had been so traumatic that the memory had been blocked from her mind.

  But they never found any dogs, and the blood had all come from Betsy. Marcia wasn’t even scratched.

  In October of 1980, EMTs had been called out to Route 6 – a ten-mile stretch of dirt road running just north of town. Deputy Oates had found Cory Sparks wandering out of the corn, his pants covered in blood. Sparks owned a small farm that had been passed from father to son for generations. The town knew him to be a quiet, likable man who always had a kind word for everyone. When Oates tried to question him about what had happened, he took out a meat cleaver and claw hammer. The deputy drew his gun for protection, but Sparks had not attacked him. Instead, he turned the tools on himself, slashing and tearing at his own groin. Oats had to shoot him in the shoulder to stop him from killing himself. The EMTs told Robby that, when they arrived, Sparks was barely conscious from loss of blood, rambling about voices that knew his name.

  They took him down to Indianapolis and locked him up, a permanent resident of the Central State Mental Hospital.

  Finally, they told Robby the truth about Russell Veal. The kid had gone missing the day of the Wide Game, back in September of 1984, but it didn’t end there. A month later, EMTs were called to the Veal home. It seemed Russell’s mother, Sarah, had smashed the kitchen window and slashed her own wrists with the shards. Her husband told the police that his wife had called out Russell’s name, then he heard the glass shatter.

  Before she slipped into a coma at the hospital, and later died, Sarah Veal had said to her nurse: “His eyes are gone.”

  Robby chuckled to himself. At first he had not believed any of it, thinking the guys at the firehouse wanted to freak him out with all these little horror stories. He did some checking, however, and, from what he could find in old fire station logs, in newspapers at the local library, much of it was true. Robby, in turn, tried to freak Danny out by relaying the information to him.

  “For God’s sake, please don’t tell that shit to anyone,” Danny had told him. “Nobody’s gonna play the damn game if you spook the shit out of ’em.”

  And so, Robby remained silent about the things he’d learned. Maybe he would share the tales at the quarry, when the game was over. Yeah, he thought with a smile. I’ll freak Nancy out, then watch her think about it when she has to walk back through these cornfields to get home.

  A power line divided the sky above the field. On it, two crows sat unnoticed. One spread its wings and pecked at its own black feathers. The other’s head twitched; its eyes followed Robby as he continued down the row.

  Five

  It had been nine o’clock on the dot when Danny, Sean, and Mick started their hike into this crop, moving between the rows. With rain, the ground would have been a brown soup, pulling and sucking on their feet, slowing them down. The last few weeks had been dry, however, and, so far, they had made good time, plowing through the leaf-chocked furrows; every quick step brought with it a loud crunch.

  But Mick could not hear these sounds. His ears were hidden beneath headphones, his Walkman blaring Orff’s Carmina Burana. Sean and Danny had been talking sports, and, short of playing trumpet at the half time shows, Mick had little or no connection to the topic. He carried a black backpack, wore green shorts and a tie-dyed T-shirt; a Beatles logo across his chest, and, on the back, “I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends.”

  Harmony High was a beast with fangs, and it had been eating Mick alive for three years now. He walked the entrails of its halls, sat in the hostile belly of its classrooms, and Skip Williamson attacked him as if he were a bit of foreign matter rejected by the flesh. But sometimes, Danny was there to defend him.

  Mick remembered a time when Skip had passed them in the halls, chains hanging from his black leather jacket, eyes narrowed in a Clint Eastwood squint; his brown, shoulder-length hair swung as he moved. Skip stuck out his arm, snagged the stack of textbooks in Mick’s hands, then pulled them to the floor as he kept walking.

  Mick bent down to pick his books off the rust-colored carpeting, silent resignation in his magnified eyes.

  Danny would have none of it. He put a hand on Mick’s shoulder and called after Skip. “Dickweed, get back here and pick these up.”

  Skip looked surprised. “You talkin’ to me, Fields?”

  “Yes.”

  The hallway became a clogged artery, everyone waiting to see how the scene would play out.

  Skip looked around, then held out a hand. “This has nothin’ to do with you.”

  “This is my friend,” Danny nodded at Mick. “If you wanna mess with my friends, you wanna mess with me.”

  “I don’t get you, Fields. Why does a guy like you hang out with that?”

  Mick started to bend down again, and again Danny stopped him.

  “Pick up the damn books, Skip.”

  Skip stood for a moment, looking at Danny’s stone-faced expression. He hesitated, shifted his feet, then rushed down to the pile of textbooks. He threw the stack together and held it out to Mick, his eyes never leaving Danny’s. “If you used a fucking locker, Slatton, maybe this wouldn’t happen.”

  Shaking, Mick reached out and took the books back.

  Skip threw up his hands. “We done here?”

  Danny nodded. “Guess so.”

  Skip knew what would happen if the school delinquent and the school football hero got into a brawl. The fight would be broken up, the school delinquent would be handed a fat suspension, and, with all of his parents’ “get out of jail free” cards used up, Skip would be shipped off to military school. So, on that day, with Danny at Mick’s side, that had been the end of it.

  But Danny couldn’t be there every moment of every day.

  When the teasing was heightened, when Mick was alone, the months that lay before graduation became serpent coils, smothering him, and he felt certain that he would die before he could escape. That’s what today had become: an escape with his friends, a break in the day-to-day torment, and Mick welcom
ed it.

  Danny ran a hand across the short-cropped lawn of his crew cut. “Need a break, Mickey?” he called back.

  “Sure.” Mick slid the headphones from his ears, heard the chirping of insects, the rustle of stalks moving against each other in the light breeze. He stopped and looked around. “Hey, how do we know we’re heading in the right direction?”

  Sean scratched at his arms. As captain of the swim team, he’d shaved them clean for speed in the water. Now, as the hair grew back, they itched terribly. “The quarry is north of town.” He pointed up, a blue shaft of sky visible between the tassels above them. “The sun is to the right, so east is on the right, so we’re walking north. When we hit the woods, we can tell by what side of the trees moss is growing on.”

  Mick smiled. “And what side of the tree means north?”

  Sean thought for a moment, pointed one way, then another. He looked like the Scarecrow trying to give Dorothy directions to OZ. “I can’t remember.”

  “Forget about the sun and moss. Check this out.” Danny knelt on the ground, unslung his pack and opened it. He reached inside, pulled out a hunting knife, then freed it from its leather sheath. He held it up for their inspection, turned it over and over with pride. It was huge. The business end alone stretched eight inches in length, shiny steel, serrated down the backside like the jawbone of a dragon. The handle was black, textured, and grooved for fingers.

  Sean nodded his approval. “Fuckin’ A. Where’d you score that?”

  “I bought it up in Michigan. Went fishing there with my uncle over the summer.”

  “It’s pretty cool,” Mick admitted.

  Danny unscrewed the butt of the knife, revealed a compass and, in the handle, a compartment that held toothpicks, a needle, and a small spool of thread. “Just like Rambo.”

  Sean snickered. “Yeah, I’d like to see you sew up your own arm like he did.”

  “I could, if I had too.”

  “You guys know that was just a movie right?” Mick adjusted his pack, his eyes focused on their own reflection in the blade. “Can I hold it?”