by Chris Lynch
And this, I found, pleased me more than I ever would have guessed. Because a lot of guys in my position would have gone all stick-assed about it, noses in the air over the attentions of geeks and stoners and hall monitors. A lot of guys—and I have to criticize a lot of my colleagues in the sports world generally and football specifically here—figure that much of the regular free-range world is beneath us, and that if people want to like you then you might as well spit on them.
But here’s what I found out. I liked being liked.
I mean, I really, really liked it when people liked me. I didn’t necessarily want to be buddies with people, call them up and have them call me up and go to the movies together and all that. That took involvement, which, to be honest, I didn’t do very well. But to have people think the right side up about me. Felt nice. To come home and recount to my dad, hey Ray, you have a kid who is liked, practically all over the board. That felt pretty okay.
Which is why, now that I had emerged out the other side of all the awfulness of the crippling, I could tell you—that was the worst, the worst hell-on-earth ever, and I’d sooner die than feel like that again. It meant more than a little, then, and if the investigations came down at the end and said I was some kind of beastman, I don’t know what I would have done, but I would have done something quite unlovely, I guarantee you that. Because I knew all along I was a good guy, and to be declared otherwise would have been criminal. It would have battered me.
But it didn’t, which is why life got so damn, damn good when it didn’t. I was just so happy that it was decided officially that I wasn’t bad. That it would be okay to like me. I know a guy’s not supposed to care overly much about what other people think of him, but I do care a lot.
Even he understood. The guy. The kid. The unlucky receiver. He knew how important that was. That he understood. He told me so. I received a card, which I kept. I would have framed it, if people wouldn’t have gotten the wrong idea about it. It was just so important to me. As it is, I refer to it often. I even sent him a thank-you card for making me feel better.
And he understood everything, which a lot of people might not have.
Like the loosening up. That was one of the first, most surprising differences when things started turning right. Everybody loosened up, almost as soon as I returned to school.
It was as if somebody passed a law or a judgment, threw a switch, or opened a cage, releasing the problem and setting everybody free from it.
“Yo, Killer,” Quarterback Ken said that first day, after word spread that I got my scholarship and had, in fact, turned down two others. Quarterback Ken, himself headed on a full boat to New Mexico State, launched the name, making it official. “Way to go, Killer.”
What? How could that be? Who could that be? How could we have gotten here? Killer? Killer? K-i-l-l-e-r.
Me. Killer, me. How far from home was that word, nesting with me?
Killer Keir.
I was stunned at first, then embarrassed, then scared of it, what it was, what it said about me, about them, about everything there is.
But before long, it settled. It became like a different thing, like something that had shocked me because of the surprise of it. Like fifty thousand people screaming “happy birthday” at you at once would surprise you if it was not even your birthday.
But it was their surprise, their welcome back, their celebration that no, things were not so scary and hellish after all, and I was not so scary and hellish after all, and if they could make fun of it, out-bogey the bogeyman, then we would all be okay.
Well, not all of us, exactly. And not okay, exactly. But he understood. Great bastard, he understood. I like to think that if it ever happened to me, I would understand as well. I would like to be a great bastard too.
It was something prepared, something accepted, something released like a great big ball of balloons into the sky, saying everything was all right now because somebody somewhere, up there, had ruled that it was, after all, all right now. It was official. Officially all right.
By lunchtime that day it had even become a rhyming thing, which it would remain thereafter.
Killer. Killeer.
Rhymes with Keir. Keir Killeer.
I might have been able to stop it, at some point that day. Stop it instead of blushing, as I did the first time, instead of nodding silently, as I did later, instead of laughing, as I did later still.
I could have done something in there to stop it, that first day, before it got too far along. There’d be no stopping it, after that first day. I could have done it, if only I were a different kind of guy.
But I’m not. I’m exactly this kind of guy. I’m all I’ve got, and I never claimed to have anything better to work with.
* * *
Ray took me out to a place, our place, to celebrate. It always pleased me that we were the kind of guys who had a place, and it pleased me further that the place was Manolo’s Maison Meat. We’d always come here, but came a lot more often once the girls were out of the house and Risk was occupying the dining room table. Manolo’s, as the name suggested, was a house of meat. You could get other stuff splashed around your big yellow tile plate to keep the meat company, but there was never any disputing the fact that this was a temple to killing stuff and wasting as little of it as possible. Ray and I were Manolo’s keenest disciples.
It should have been all fun, all joy. And it was, up to a point. But it was more than that. The college issue meant, really, that things as we knew them were going to end, for good.
“I worry, though, Dad.”
He took a drink of his glass of beer. He always called it that, a glass of beer. Never a beer, a brew, suds, or anything else. He always made it sound just slightly gentle, genteel, even though it was just beer, and even if he was drinking it from a bottle or a can.
“Would you like a glass of beer, Keir?” he’d asked.
“I’d love one, Ray,” I’d answered.
I loved us together. I really loved us together.
“What would you possibly have to worry about?” he asked. “This is it, boy, the tip-top of life. Life is being good to you, because you have been good to it, and so you should enjoy it. You have nothing to worry about.”
He popped a small handful of smokehouse almonds into his mouth and smiled at me broadly. He was wearing his suit. He has a few of them, but this is the one he wears, on the rare occasions he wears a suit. It looks like it was made from the skins off of Spanish peanuts, slick shiny thin-skin brown.
He looked a freakin’ million, pardon my French.
“I worry . . . you’re going to miss me.”
“Ach,” he said. Ach. His term of dismissal. And shyness, embarrassment, and love. Ach.
“Ach yourself,” I said. “You’re going to miss me, I think. You need me, old man.”
“Ya, I need you, like February needs another R.”
He was still smiling when he attempted to drain his glass. He couldn’t stop grinning, so he couldn’t drink his glass of beer because bits of it would come streaming out the corners of his mouth and land on his Spanish peanut suit.
Drained a lot of others though, eventually. We both did.
And we ate a pile of food. This is what it can be like, when it’s me and Ray and nobody to stand between us and a defenseless supply of eats. It can be scary. Ray got the rib ticklers, a spread of rib-region remains of all the usual unfortunate farmyard beasts—spare ribs, baby-back ribs, country-style ribs, and a mini rack of lamb. I got Manolo’s signature dish, the Noah’s Ark, consisting of two of every animal he could get his hands on that day: marinated turkey breasts, pan-fried catfish, sirloin tips, a double ice-cream scoop of his pulled pork, and ostrich steak strips.
Dirty rice. Greens. Barbecue beans. All of it, still tasting somehow of meat. Even the sweet potato pie we had for dessert contained, I think, little bits of chicken. Mason jars filled with ice water, though they went pretty much undrunk.
Which you could not say about old Ra
y and young Keir.
“You know, they’re going to ask you to do it again,” he said as he reached across to my plate and removed a big wedge of sirloin that had been left unattended just a little too long.
“Was I done with that?” I asked him.
“Ya, I think you were.”
He ordered more glasses of beer.
“You know it,” he said. “They’ll be asking you to do more of it.”
“Who they, and more of what, Dad?”
“They, being the school, the coaches . . .”
I had it worked out now.
“What, Dad, they’re gonna expect me to cripple somebody again, is that what you’re saying? They going to want me to cripple somebody every week?”
“Keir,” he said slowly, calmly, clutching his beer tightly for balance, “coaches, other players, some loudmouth in the stands . . . you’ll hear things. People will say stuff, you’ll hear stuff . . . that’s all.”
That’s all.
“What do you mean, Ray? That’s all? That’s not all. That’s not even the end of a story. How can that be all?”
“Just be yourself, is all I’m saying,” he said, his voice and manner growing thicker by the minute. “Right? Don’t let circumstances control what happens to you. Be who you are, don’t be who you not are. . . . .”
He caught himself there, raised a hand to his mouth as if he had burped, droopily smiled at me with his eyes.
“Don’t you worry about it, Ray. I’m already there. I know who I not are, and I not are a cornerback, okay? I’m a kicker. I am going there for a kicker’s life, and if it was cornerbacking that helped me get there, then beautiful. But if they expect to see me sticking and sticking people all over the field . . . well, I am sorry if they are disappointed.”
He nodded. He liked that. He was happy with that, but it wasn’t quite all somehow.
“You’re all soft on the inside, Keir. You’re a big softy.”
I took a gulp of water, pausing for effect.
“Oh, ya,” I said, “well guess what? I got a nickname now. At school. Wanna know what they’re calling your boy now?”
“What?”
“Killer. That’s right, me, the killer. What do you think of that?”
I could tell right off that he didn’t think what he was supposed to think. He looked sadder than hell and started shaking his big Dad head.
“No,” he said. “Make them stop calling you that, Keir. You know and I know that you are no kind of killer. You’re a good boy.”
I felt so bad, like I hurt his feelings or something, though how could that be? I just had to reach across the table and pat him on the side of his head.
“I know, Dad. People know. That’s why it’s such a joke. That’s why I can get away with it, because it is so obviously not true.”
Ray was only half relieved, and not even a little impressed.
“You aren’t a hard man, and it wouldn’t do you any favors to try and be. It’s good that you’re an old mush on the inside, and it would be even better to let people know that. Make them not call you Killer, Keir. Let them call you Mush instead.”
“Shut up,” I said. “I’m as tough as you ever were.”
“Well, yes,” he said, as if we were agreeing somehow.
Anyway, like I could stop it if I wanted to. The name was out now, it was mine, it was part of the world and I couldn’t reverse the world.
“I’ll tell the girls,” Ray said, pointing at me and grinning slyly. “Do Fran and Mary know about this awful nickname of yours? They’ll fix your wagon.” He thought he was joking.
“Christ, Dad, don’t do that.”
He thought I was joking. He laughed loud and slapped the table hard enough to make all the plates and glasses jump.
Ray sank his beer and I sank mine and we got two more without even asking.
“For the celebration,” the waiter said, putting the beers down and clearing away plates that looked cleaner than the dishwasher would have got them. “Manolo says congratulations.”
It’s not a very big town.
Dad and I drank appreciatively, even though we practically had to wake ourselves up to do it.
“You know,” he said, leaning heavily over the table, “my doctor once called me, a long time ago, not long after your mother died, called me quasi-alcoholic. How’s that? I said, what’s that, like Quasimodo? And he said, just be careful. Just always be careful, Ray, he told me.”
He hung there, his face, his intensely lined, magnificent cool face suspended above the table between us, and all I could do was stare. And all he could do was stare.
Until we both took to our bottles and sipped.
“Ach,” he said, refreshed, “but that was a long time ago. It went away. And I was careful.”
I watched and watched him, waiting for a payoff, a tip, a laugh, or a frown, but instead he went blank on me, staring at me, as hard as a person can stare at a person, but still sidestepping me completely.
“You okay, old dude?” I asked.
His pilot light was relit. “Let’s go visit your mother. Want to?”
It was closing in on midnight, a school night. We had a week’s worth of food in our bellies and a month of alcohol in our blood. The cemetery in question goes all the way back to the Revolution days, and it is so gothic, crumbling, and overgrown in the older parts that ghosts are too afraid to go there. Even in the daytime.
Sometimes, oftentimes, I don’t even miss my mother. She was the one who opted to die, not me. It was an effort for me to remember even a scrap about her, and this was not coldness, but just fact. I love my mother, love the idea of her and whatever vestiges of her I can still feel in me, in Fran and Mary. But really, honestly, fairly, I love her through Ray. You cannot help loving my mother, missing my mother, when you see the love and the lonesome that cracks like lightning across his face when he hears her name, no matter how many heavens away she is by now.
I once, just once, expressed a small lack of enthusiasm for the idea of visiting her grave on a Thanksgiving Day when the Lions were playing the Cowboys on TV and my body was overdosed with that chemical in turkey that makes you all sleepy.
I didn’t hear his voice directed at me for four solid days.
If ever I was going to not hear his voice again, it would be because one of us was dead. Preferably me.
I hate it when people I love are silent to me.
“Sure, Dad,” I said. “Let’s go see Mom. Who’s driving?”
“We’ll take turns,” he said, pulling me up out of my chair, all renewed, happy, and energized, like we were a couple of kids off on some great adventure.
* * *
It was almost noon when I woke up after the night out with my parents.
The house reeked, and my head rang with fire engine alarms until I slithered downstairs and swallowed some Tylenol with a quart of orange juice.
I walked around aimlessly. Dad was long gone. He never missed work, ever, not even if a train hit him.
Tougher than I will ever be, my dad.
I went to the dining room, where Risk still sat.
Apparently, we had played. When we came in? Jesus, yes, we had. Ray kicked my butt all over Asia, the rat. Took advantage of me while I was vulnerable. He could always function under the influence, under any and all influences, while I, most definitely, could not. My decisions, my memory, my brain control, deserted me at the hour of need.
I was a lucky guy, in fact, that my dad was easygoing on the issue of partying, because I could never fool anybody if I had had a bit too much to drink or whatever. He caught me one time when I had a shot of peppermint schnapps at a freshman party, and he did it without even smelling me. He caught me over the phone, when I called to say I would be staying at a friend’s house instead of coming home, if that was all right with him.
He laughed out loud.
I came home.
Now he was at work, and I was wandering the empty house in my underwear, waiting for th
e Tylenol to soothe me and the orange juice to rehydrate me before I made my next move, if in fact I had a next move in me.
I would never do this again. Never again.
I remembered. I remembered crying. It was not a dream. I was crying, out loud, with sounds and tears and everything, and Dad had to pat me on the back and tell me everything was going to be all right.
It was at the cemetery. Possibly.
Or during Risk. And there may have been some vomit.
How does he do it? How does he just do it? How does he get through everything?
School was obviously out of the question. But I was going to football practice if it killed me.
Soft on the inside? I may not have been the Killer, but I could be at least a shadow of the man my dad was.
THE COMPANY YOU KEEP
* * *
Sometimes you get caught. Caught up in moments, in the whirlwind of events. Caught unawares. It’s just not you but wrong place, wrong time, wrong company can really easily add up to giving people the wrong idea about yourself. And yet again the way things look drift away from the way things really are.
I had become, in my senior year, a somebody, and let’s face it, much of it had to do with the whole “Killer” thing, which erected a rugged new structure on the formerly vacant lot of my persona. Like I said, I was liked around school, and I liked being liked. I had all the football teammates and the soccer teammates—because I played intramural spring soccer, strictly to keep in shape for football, and not because I saw the point of soccer whatsoever. And I had the hundreds of other casual friends I’d made in my travels, all happy to slap my back or offer a cup or three of kindness behind the stands after school. I considered this popularity, and I considered popularity pleasant.
The season had already been filled with many gatherings, many good-byes and best wishes, and many fine nights out. The football team had a final breakup party, which basically involved a dinner at the coach’s brother’s restaurant, followed by three hours hanging out at the field in the dark, followed by another hour of more industrious breaking up. We broke up couples in cars down by the river. We broke up windows at the library. And we broke up a statue of Paul Revere and the other guy who rode with him but nobody seems to remember.
