Inexcusable

by Chris Lynch

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  * * *

  THE WAY IT LOOKS

  * * *

  The way it looks is not the way it is.

  Gigi Boudakian is screaming at me so fearsomely, I think I could just about cry. I almost don’t even care what the subject is because right now I am sick and I am confused and I am laid so low by the very idea that Gigi Boudakian is screaming at me that the what-for hardly seems even to matter. I love Gigi Boudakian. I hate it when people I love scream at me.

  And I don’t feel guilty. That is, I don’t feel like I am guilty. But I sure as hell feel sorry.

  I am sorry.

  I am one sorry sorry bastard. And I feel very sick.

  I am so sorry.

  “What are you sorry for, Keir?” Gigi screams again, grabbing me by where my lapels would be if I had a jacket on, or a shirt, or anything. She can’t get a purchase because I have no clothes, and very little fat, because I have been good about my health lately. She grabs, can’t grab, scratches instead at my chest, then slaps me hard across the face, first right side then left, smack, smack.

  “Say what you did, Keir.”

  “Why is Carl coming? Why do you have to call Carl, Gigi?”

  “Say what you did, Keir. Admit what you did to me.”

  “I didn’t do anything, Gigi.”

  “Yes you did! I said no!”

  I say this very quietly, but firmly. “You did not.”

  “I said no,” she growls. “Say it.”

  “I don’t see why you need Carl. You can beat me up just fine on your own. Listen, Gigi, it was nobody’s fault.”

  “Yes it was! It was your fault. This should not have happened.”

  “Fine, then it didn’t.”

  “It did, it did, it did, bastard! For me it did, and it’s making me sick.”

  “Don’t. Don’t be sick. I don’t want you to be sick or anything. I just want everything to be all right. Everything is all right, Gigi. Please, can everything be all right?”

  “It is not all right! It is not all right, and you are not all right, Keir Sarafian. Nothing is all right. Nothing will ever again ever be all right.”

  She is wrong. Gigi is wrong about everything, but especially about me. You could ask pretty much anybody and they will tell you. Rock solid, Keir. Kind of guy you want behind you. Keir Sarafian, straight shooter. Loyal, polite. Funny. Good manners. He was brought up right, that boy was, is what you would hear. All the things you would want to hear said about you are the things I have always heard said about me. I am a good guy.

  Good guys don’t do bad things. Good guys understand that no means no, and so I could not have done this because I understand, and I love Gigi Boudakian.

  “I love you, Gigi.”

  As I say this, Gigi Boudakian lets out the most horrific scream I have ever heard, and I am terrified by it and reach out, lunge toward her and try and cover her mouth with my hands and I fall over her and she screams louder and bites at my hands and I keep flailing, trying to stop that sound coming out of her and getting out into the world.

  I am only trying to stop the sound. It looks terrible what I am doing, as I watch my hands doing it, as I watch hysterical Gigi Boudakian reacting to me, and it looks really, really terrible but I am only trying to stop the awful sound and the way it looks is not the way it is.

  The way it looks is not the way it is.

  REALLY, TRULY

  * * *

  There are verifiable reasons for the wrongness of this situation. I have character witnesses. Because I have character. I have two brainy, insightful older sisters, Mary and Fran, who brook no nonsense off anybody, and Mary and Fran love me to pieces and respect me, and they would not do that if I were capable of being monstrous. People like that don’t support monsters. But they support me, Mary and Fran do. Meeting Mary and Fran would convince you I am what I say I am.

  And here’s another reason. If I’m going to tell you the truth, and that is exactly what I am going to do, then I would have to tell you this about me: Most of the time, I would rather go to my room and whack myself silly to a good song than to have a whole team of actual lap dancers all to myself in person. Really, truly, I would rather. Does that sound like a menace to society to you?

  Really, I’m the kind of guy who would rather stay at home on a Saturday night to play a board game with his dad than go to a party. I have done that, a lot of times. Truly. Does that sound like a monster to you?

  * * *

  Ray never screamed at me, which was one of the many things that made him a great father, a great man. I hate it when people I love scream at me. There is no more piercing sound, there is nothing that runs you right all the way through, like having somebody you love scream at you.

  What he did do was play Risk with me. My dad and I had a game of Risk going forever. It started on the Sunday night when we got back from trucking the girls off all the way to college, three hours and one state line one way and three more and one more back this way, and we came back wrecked and empty to a house without the girls in it and even though that should have come as no surprise, inside, it was a big surprise. I thought I knew, but I didn’t really know, what a house without girls was going to feel like.

  We stood in the doorway, looking around in the darkness, looking around as if we saw a strange car in the driveway or heard a burglar alarm wheening, and we were standing and staring and listening for what was there that shouldn’t have been.

  He was as tired as I was, I knew it. It was time for bed for both of us.

  “I don’t want to go to bed yet,” he said, flipping on a light but still looking all over like everything was spooky strangeness.

  “Na, I’m not ready yet either,” I said.

  And so the war began. It started with my Venezuela kicking squat out of his Peru, continued through my fierce razing of the rest of South America, two frozen pizzas, one tub of microwave popcorn, and half a white chocolate cheesecake.

  Before we finally went to bed, I had been driven all the way back up into Canada, and pretty deep into the second half of the cheesecake.

  We left the board right there, on our square maple- top dining room table that had no leaves for extensions but was always the right size for the four of us, me and Dad and Mary and Fran, for all those years, and for me and Dad and Fran since the year before when Mary left for school, and would surely be enough for just the two of us now, but not with the whole of the Risk map spread out across it. We said we’d finish up the next day, and clear the table again and eat dinner there like always, once the game was finished, and we went up to bed.

  * * *

  “I’m looking forward to it,” he said, near the end of our bachelor year. When it was just the two of us in the house. “I can’t wait for you to be gone.”

  Right.

  “Right. Why is that, Ray?”

  “Because I’m going to need all this space. Going to need all the rooms, to start my new family. To start my new, beautiful family to replace the one that left me. My brand-new, loyal family that won’t leave me.”

  “Guilty family, you mean.”

  “Loyal.”

  “It’s the same thing, probably.”

  He didn’t mean it. Some of it, he did. He missed the girls terribly. And it was going to be worse next year when I went to school.

  But I kind of doubted he was going to replace us.

  �
�I’m going to join one of those dating services. Meet the right woman. Start making babies left and right.”

  “Dad, jeez,” I said.

  “See, you’re jealous. My new family is going to be better.”

  Mercifully, the phone rang. Fran. She called me every day from school. Good ol’ Fran. Thank god, some days, for good ol’ Fran on the phone.

  “So who wants to hear about his fantasy family?” she said.

  “Exactly,” I said. “That’s what I told him. Here, let me put him on—”

  “Don’t you dare,” she said.

  “He’ll listen to you, Fran.”

  “Like hell he will. He’ll just get worse.”

  She was probably right. Nobody could really do much with Ray once he got going, once he got to having a good time. If he thought he was getting a rise out of you, he’d just keep upping the ante.

  “Mary,” we both said into the phone at the same time.

  We said this because he’d listen to Mary. Everyone listened to Mary. There would have to be something seriously wrong with a person not to listen to Mary.

  Mary was my older twin sister. Right, no. Not my twin. Well, not Fran’s twin, either. They are Irish twins, y’know, born ten months apart, with Fran coming just a year ahead of me. Ray said that was just a helluva time, baby-machining, him and my mom, getting started on a complete zoo of a house full of us that they weren’t ever going to stop making until somebody passed a law or something.

  Or something. Or something like my mom dying, which is what she did to us.

  Three years married, three kids, and bang, gone, so long, Mom.

  We have a piano in this house that exists solely for the purpose of supporting her photograph.

  He marches us to her spot in the cemetery about six times a year.

  I didn’t even know her. I wouldn’t even ever have known her. Wouldn’t have missed her, I don’t think. If it weren’t for him.

  Ray loves her like she was standing right in front of him.

  “You telling people about my new better family?” he said as he passed by the phone.

  “Don’t tell him it’s me,” Fran said.

  “Want to talk to Fran, Dad?” I said.

  “Jerk,” she said.

  “Franny, my Franny,” Ray said, pawing at the phone like a bear at a honey pot.

  Anyway, they are not twins exactly, but they look enough like twins, and they act enough like twins—in that under-each-other’s-skin kind of way—that they are mostly considered to be twins.

  “When are you coming home?” Ray said, sounding all wounded and needy as if he had been abandoned by the world. “And where’s Mary? I want to talk to Mary.”

  He had no business acting abandoned. He had not been abandoned, yet.

  Mary was a sophomore at the university. Fran was a freshman.

  Me, I was a senior in high school, for a couple more weeks. Then in the fall I’d join the girls, if all went according to plan.

  “But you’ll be here for the graduation, right? You wouldn’t dare miss—”

  He was cut short and started nodding as I watched him there, squeezed into the too-small telephone table/chair setup. We could assume Mary had come on the phone.

  He nodded more emphatically.

  “She can’t hear that, Dad,” I said.

  He waved me away, but resumed oral communication.

  “Of course. Of course. Sure I know that. Sure I do.”

  I watched him. He was one outstanding old geezer. A geezer and a half.

  He was a full-time, long-time, professional widower. There’s a word for you. Widower. With that er at the end, making it sound like an action verb. He widowed pretty well.

  And he was a pretty fine roommate, a great player of games, a sport, and a loyal best, best friend.

  You had to be a good guy if you were Ray Sarafian’s kid. You couldn’t possibly be anything less.

  UNFORTUNATELY MAGNIFICENT

  * * *

  I can show you how things can go wrong, how they did go wrong one other time. I can show you by showing you another thing I didn’t do. Anyway, a thing I didn’t do in the way some people tried to picture that I did it.

  I was unfairly famous one time, for a little while. No, I was infamous. No, notorious.

  Famous, then infamous, then notorious.

  Then it all went away and things quieted back down and that’s when the stuff really started happening.

  But the thing is, it was all wrong. It was all unfair and incorrect and ass-backwards. None of it happened the way it should have.

  Here’s why I got famous. I got famous because I crippled a guy. No, that’s not right. I didn’t cripple a guy. He got crippled, and I was part of it. The difference is very important.

  He wasn’t even crippled, exactly, but he surely doesn’t play football anymore.

  I shouldn’t even have been there. That’s the thing, understand. I shouldn’t even have been in that spot, in that game, that day. I don’t normally play cornerback, see. I am second-string cornerback. Mostly I’m a kicker. I’m first-string kicker, third-string tight end, and second-string cornerback.

  This is significant because of the league we played in. This was not a passing league. This was not a razzle-dazzle league where the ball and the buzz were in the air all the time and there were scouts here from big-time motion-offense colleges like Miami and Southern Cal looking for talent. This was just another lopey suburban league like a million other suburban leagues around the country, full of white wide receivers and built around fullbacks who got their jobs based on the fact that their backs were very full indeed, like the view of a grand piano from above.

  So the passing game was not an important thing. Not important to the game, and surely not important to me. Understand, I could have been a starter for this team, as a cornerback or as a tight end. Coach wanted me, in fact, always badgered me, to play more. But I didn’t want to play more. I wanted to play less. Because I was wasting my life at cornerback and tight end. Because I wasn’t good. Good enough for this team? Sure. Good enough for any decent college in America? I had a better chance of ice dancing in the Olympics.

  Kicker, though, was a different story. There was a reasonable chance I could slip in as a placekicker on a respectable small-to-midsize program if I worked hard at it.

  So I did. And every year I played a little less offense and defense where I might get mangled, and spent a lot more time on the sidelines kicking the air out of that ball, out of the hands of whoever would hold for me, into that practice net over and over and over.

  Until Coach dragged me into the game. Other guys needed a breather here and there. And I was no liability on the field, so I had to do my bit when called upon.

  Matter of fact, I was an improvement on the guys I replaced. Because I always did what I was told. I always did it by the numbers. I always followed the plan. And I always gave it full tilt.

  That is me. If I am any good at anything it is because I do it just like that. Do like you’re taught, do it by the numbers, and do it maximum, and you will do something well. I figure.

  I wasn’t looking for any full-time cornerback job, and I wasn’t looking to catch the eye of some Division III scout looking for defensive backs. I was looking to get the job done the way I was taught, and get back to the sidelines where I could kick and kick and remain safe, and get the easiest possible college scholarship so that my dad could come and see me at Homecoming and not have to remortgage the house to pay for the privilege. My dad could come on some excellent Homecoming day, my sisters would be up there, Mary on his right and Fran on his left, sitting up there in the sharp freezing November sun and then they would be able to see me run onto the field at the end of a big game and bang that ball through the posts, just as cool as you like.

  That would be the moment, wouldn’t it? That would be the best. Every eye on me, because the kicker is the only one who can do that, hold every eye, hold the game close to himself, and then Fran an
d Mary and Dad would be on their feet, screaming louder than everyone, so proud they could just expire, and I would wave dramatically at them, and later we would go to a nice restaurant and I would eat like a king and listen to the best people I knew telling me I was very good.

  That was my dream. That was as far as my dream went, and I would have stacked my dream up against anyone’s.

  Which is why I shouldn’t have been on the field that day. I should have been working on my field goals, because guys were starting to get their offer letters from schools and I wasn’t. I had had some interest from schools, but you would have to call it tepid if you called it anything.

  Understand. I should not have been on that field. They should not have had me on that field. I had to kick if I was going to get anywhere.

  But first, there was business. It was late in the season, in a game that didn’t matter to the state championships or the league standings or even to any of the parents of the players beyond the twelve or so in the stands, but for some reason, the quarterback on the other team started going mental. One of those parents had to be his, and he must have been aware that one or more of the others was a scout with a desperate need for a quarterback and an offer letter in his fist, and that quarterback must have been opening his mail every morning just like I was, to the same screaming lack of interest from the college football fraternity with time whipping by at whiplash speed.

  Because he started to throw. The sonofabitch started to throw. And throw and throw and throw.

  I even had to stop kicking to watch. He was immense. He was a monster. I was thinking, jeez, if you had just thrown like this the last three years you could be sitting at home right now comparing illegal incentives from Nebraska and LSU instead of busting your hump trying to get somebody’s attention now.

  But he sure was kicking snot out of us. All our defensive players—from our tubbo linemen to our confused concrete linebackers to our backs who circled and flailed their arms looking like they were flagging down help for one car wreck after another—were absolutely ragged. They had their tongues dragging on the ground as they lamely pursued the quarterback, then when they missed him, missed the ball, then when they missed that, missed the receivers. Replacement defenders were shoved onto the field after every play.