Leverage

by Joshua C. Cohen

  From my bar stool in a dark corner, I watch the girls dance in little groups, sipping red- and orange-colored drinks through rainbow straws, flipping their hair from one shoulder to the other, throwing off their girl scent. A hungry knot tightens below my belly. Unable to approach the girls, they still give me hope and make me feel safe. No girl, no woman, ever caused me to hide or hunker down, expecting a beating. The swell of their thighs and hips, the creases in their laps, invite tenderness, not pain. Their boobs feel the exact opposite of pain. Even their shoulders are soft. Nothing about them can hurt you in the least.

  I see how they glance at me, know I scare them.

  A camera flashes in my eyes.

  “Good one,” Terrence says, then turns around, aims his camera into the room, and fires again. The room strobes. “Guaranteed, I’ll have some great shots once the drinking gets in high gear. Might make the trophy page on my site.”

  “What site?” I ask.

  “Greatest hits and misses,” he says. “All the good stuff. Need a secret code to get to the page, though. Can’t have some of it getting out there, you know what I mean.” Terrence aims his camera at the butt of a girl I think is named Heidi. The camera flashes.

  “Damn, she’s sweet!” Terrence sucks in his breath sharply, then slaps my arm with the back of his hand. “You play your cards right, I’ll let you take a peek at the site. Course you don’t play your cards right, you may be the star of your very own what-were-they-thinking page,” he says, laughing more to himself than me, like he’s in on his own personal joke. He throws his arm around my neck and holds up the camera to point at the two of us and it flashes, so I’m blind for a few seconds. When I get my eyes back, he’s showing me the camera screen. There’s Terrence, mouth open in laughter, teeth gleaming, having the greatest time, and there’s me looking like I just got pulled into a mug shot.

  “I’ll come back after you’ve had a few more drinks,” Terrence either promises or threatens, wearing his big grin. “See if we can actually capture you with a smile on your face.”

  And then he’s off, moving into the grooving bodies, camera flashing away, leaving me alone on the stool, watching.

  “Kurt, get over here,” Scott shouts over the music. He stumbles over and grabs my arm, towing me behind him toward one of the girl groups I’ve watched for the last hour. At least Studblatz’s basement is dark and noisy, all the better to hide my scars and stutter. I let my hair fall against my jaw, covering it.

  “Hello, ladies.” Scott inserts himself into the center of the girl ring. They giggle as if he’s done something brilliant. I wonder what that’s like, to have that level of charm. Scott sips at his drink and twirls around for all of them to admire. They cheer. He can do no wrong. I stand outside the circle until Scott reaches out of the group and grabs my arm and tugs me into the center next to him. We are the bull’s-eye of attention. I look down at my feet.

  “I don’t know if all you ladies have personally met our new star,” Scott shouts over the music. “Coach recruited him,” he continues. “You believe that? That’s how good my man here is. Coach stole him from Lincoln.”

  “Wow,” one girl shouts back. I imagine her rolling her eyes, but when I chance a peek at her, she’s staring right back at me, the drink straw between her teeth while she winds the other end around her finger.

  “That’s right,” Scott keeps hollering. “He’s a terror on the field but just a gentle, misunderstood beast off it.” Scott slaps my back. The girls titter. “Ladies, introduce yourselves to the man who’s going to lead us all the way to a state championship.”

  “Really?” another girl asks, sounding genuinely curious, making it a record for the number of girls I’ve met who show any interest in the game. This girl keeps watching me. She takes a sip from her drink, then purses her lips while her eyes wander all over me in a way that causes springs to tighten throughout my body. She steps up to me and grabs the thumb of my hand and then laces her fingers between mine.

  “My, what big hands you have, Mr. Wolf,” the girl says, batting her eyes. She has to have seen my scars but ... it doesn’t seem ... she doesn’t seem to mind. She leans in until her bare stomach brushes the zipper of my jeans.

  “You’ve got dangerous eyes,” she tells me, barely above the music.

  “Marcia wins the prize!” Scott hollers. “Mr. Wolf. I love it. Mr. Wolf. We’ve got a winner!”

  That’s how I get my nickname. That’s how I meet Marcia . . . and Tammy and Glory and Mona and Jessica. Lamar slips into my head as I keep drinking, surrounded by all this beauty. He tells me to take what I can get because tomorrow everything could change.

  With that thought, and lots of Jack and Coke, I end up on the couch and Marcia ends up in my lap.

  “I saw you play on Friday!” she tells me, putting her mouth right on my ear to be heard over the music. She lets her lips rest there when she’s through talking. Her fingers come up to comb my hair out of the way and then her tongue flicks against my lobe. I’m getting way too excited below and I try readjusting my pants but she’s sitting there and no way she can’t feel it.

  “I hear ... Mr. Wolf . . . you’re the biggest . . . ,” she says, and her lips travel from my ear to my jaw to my neck. Still kissing me, her fingers come up to trace the long scar running down under my eye. Her other hand reaches down between her legs and lands on the spot where I’m totally hard. “Are you the strongest, too?”

  Throughout the basement bar area people are sloppy drunk and swaying to the music—plebes and varsity starters, cheerleaders and dance line girls. Just before I stop caring about anyone but Marcia, I notice Goldberg handing a drink to Tom Jankowski and Jankowski laughing and rubbing Goldberg’s scabby, bald head like a genie lamp, like they’ve been best friends for life.

  13

  DANNY

  How’d your meet go today?” Dad asks. He pulls a slice of pizza from the cardboard delivery box resting on his lap. A long string of cheese attaches itself to his mustache. We sit on the couch, watching TV. I pull out a slice of pizza from my own delivery box balanced on my knees and bite into the soggy, hot goodness.

  “Okay,” I say. “Bruce scored a personal best on rings and I got best score on high bar. Fisher surprised everyone. He got second-highest score on parallel bars. But we’ve got no depth. Farmington High killed us.”

  “And why is that?” my dad asks, his eyes not looking at me, but watching the Friday night movie on TV, half listening to what I say. “Why no depth?” His hangdog expression deepens every year. The shadows under his eyes, which I never really noticed until after Mom died, progressively darken from lack of sleep during the week, so that by this time every Friday he looks like someone’s given him two shiners in a fight. I think about answering his question by saying, Well, if you ever came to a meet, you’d know our team has one, maybe two, good scores on each event but that we can’t put up three solid scores on every apparatus and that’s what the judges combine.

  But I don’t say that. My dad has basically worked two full-time jobs ever since Mom died, putting in long hours and also volunteering his time at a free clinic. It’s selfish of me to expect him to stop treating really sick people to make one of my regular meets. He says he’ll go see me in the state meet if I qualify. He won’t come right out and say it, but sports, in his eyes, should be more like a hobby, like chess, and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Especially if it gets in the way of grades. That’s why my secret plan to get an athletic scholarship is so important. I play and replay the scenario of a letter arriving one day and me opening it and handing it over to him—an offer for a full-ride scholarship. Then he’ll understand why I spent all that time in the gym, why I pestered him to go to private clubs during the off-season. It won’t be just a dumb hobby when I hand him that letter. It doesn’t matter to me if he can pay for my education. I want to pay for it, show him I can do it on my own. Until that magic letter arrives, though, there’s a little thing called math that keeps harshing my bu
zz.

  “How’s algebra going?” he asks, losing interest in his first question. That’s what I have to work with here.

  “We need more guys on the team,” I say, ignoring the algebra question. “New guys get scared off when they step in the gym and see how much work’s involved.”

  “Speaking of work, are you keeping up on your home-work assignments?”

  “I mean, it isn’t like other sports where you can just pick up a ball and start running or be competitive after doing it for a week. It takes a while just to put together a semi-decent routine.”

  “Hmmmm.” Dad nods like he’s being thoughtful but I know that means he’s too tired to argue with me and too tired to keep talking past me. What he’s really trying to do is catch what the lady accused of murdering her husband is telling the district attorney on TV. He has his ear tipped toward the screen while he chews, still pretending to listen to me. It’s okay, though, because I do the same thing back whenever he starts lecturing me about getting good grades. The two of us have an understanding. The key is to not upset the all-seeing eye of Mom’s ghost while we live completely separate lives under the same roof. In two more years it won’t matter, anyway. I’ll be out of here.

  After devouring our individual pizzas, we both slouch back into the couch. The TV screen fades and Mom comes into my head—a memory of her leaning over me, holding a teaspoon of medicine under my nose, waiting patiently for me to open my mouth and swallow it. A warmth comes over me that I cannot hold and then it’s gone. Mom once said you could put yourself in someone’s head if you thought hard enough about them. She said memories of the dead meant they were out there, thinking about you, trying to say hello. Was she out there right now, thinking of me like I was thinking of her? Dad laughed when Mom told us her theory. We’d been eating breakfast in the kitchen after burying our cat, Pebbles, in our backyard. Dad wanted to just bag it and throw it in the garbage but Mom insisted on a ceremony. Dad said Mom’s theory was superstition.

  After she died, he talked differently. Once, after I woke from a dream about her that was so vivid—about the three of us swimming together on the ocean, out at sea, and surrounded by shark fins . . . or dolphin fins, I was never sure which—he told me that she was still around and paying attention to us, and that was her way of talking to us. He said he dreamed of her all the time and looked forward to his sleep for that very reason.

  I wonder if she’s saying hello to Dad at the same time as me, if he’s thinking of her right now on the couch, seeing her like I am.

  “Dad,” I ask, “are you . . .” I glance over and my question fades. Dad’s eyes are closed and his head lolls at an angle that’ll give him a crick in his neck when he wakes. His mouth hangs open. I turn back to the TV. After another minute he begins to snore softly.

  “. . . dreaming about her?” I whisper. I take the pizza box off his lap and put it on the kitchen table. Then I grab the comforter off the couch arm and drape it over him and put a pillow under his head. He never even budges.

  14

  KURT

  Monday practice starts with game film in the team room. I scratch myself while Coach plays, rewinds, freezes, and replays video of last Friday’s game. While he talks, my eyes wander around the half-lit room. Judging from the looks of things, the other guys find game film about as interesting as studying the industrial revolution. Scott, though, peers intently at the TV monitor while scribbling in his notebook, bobbing his head along with Coach’s game breakdown. I fan myself with a sheaf of plays I’m trying to memorize, flipping through them flash-card style, thinking: If I put half as much effort into my vocabulary cards for Spanish, I’d be fluent by now.

  The TV screen goes black, the video finishes. The room lights flicker back on, causing a stir of bodies trying to wake up.

  “Men, let’s see if we can fix some of those errors I pointed out here,” Coach Brigs says. “Hope you were paying real good attention.”

  Uh-oh.

  “Drills, drills, drills,” Coach goes on, standing in front of the TV, arms crossed in front of his chest, whistle around his neck, and folded papers stuffed down the front waistband of his shorts. “Practice makes perfect,” he says to the room. “Out on the field in twenty minutes. Stragglers will be running laps. Afterward we’ll hit the weights. Hard!”

  Scott is still taking notes. I’m impressed.

  “Move!” Coach snaps.

  I get up first. Walking past Scott, I glance down at his notebook, expecting to see scores of X’s and O’s forming play diagrams and maybe some key concepts underlined with bullet points and notes in the margins. Instead, I see a sketch, a cartoon. Naked ladies climbing up and sliding down nine block letters spelling out “THIS SUCKS!” In one corner of the page, there is a mushroom cloud going off. In another corner, a spaceship shoots lasers and a stick soldier is machine-gunning air and a skull has a knife handle sticking out of its eye socket. Scott keeps the page tipped so Coach can’t see it.

  Twenty-five minutes later, Assistant Coach Stein is doing his best to drown out the team’s lingering Monday blahs on the field. “Bust a hump! Bust a hump! Hustle! Hustle! Hustle!” Coach Stein shouts.

  Except for Studblatz and Jankowski, the slouching line of yawning guys waiting for drill instructions stands like dozing heifers. Studblatz and Jankowski, though, they’re more like werewolves patrolling the chalk lines, itching for any opportunity to rip apart one of the lessers. Studblatz never stops clanking helmets with whoever’s nearby and pushing guys around like he’s getting paid to herd them.

  On the far sideline, older men—players’ fathers—gather together and stand like coaches themselves. Some smoke, some chew tobacco, some chew sunflower seeds, others chew gum. Some hold cans of beer in little paper bags; others drink half-liter bottles of sports drinks like they’re exercising right alongside us. They all seem to watch practice with faces full of worry and disappointment. Scott’s father stands among them, a rolled-up newspaper in his hand, slapping it into the palm of his other hand like a billy club. Coach Brigs, I notice, never acknowledges the group of fathers. A squad car is parked nearby on the grass. Terrence tells me the squad car belongs to Jankowski’s dad, a cop. Guess he makes his own rules about where it’s legal to park.

  Scott, hands on his hips, face mask swinging back and forth in an exaggerated “no,” keeps cussing under his breath, as if the sight of turf and sun irritates him. His golden boy routine faded right after we finished reviewing game film. He must’ve continued drinking from Saturday’s party straight through most of Sunday because his sweat smells like a brewery and he started dry-heaving on his way out onto the field. Still, he’s got it easy since he gets to wear the red vest over his practice jersey. Only player that gets one. The red vest means don’t hit or tackle him in drills or scrimmage no matter what because a quarterback is too valuable to ever risk injuring in practice. He’s untouchable.

  “I know you fellas don’t need reminding that we’ve got homecoming this Friday,” Coach Brigs speechifies. “God help you boys if we don’t destroy the Millfield Bucks.” Outside on the field, Coach Brigs communicates mostly through shouting that causes the veins running along his neck to bulge thick as night crawlers. “You understand what I’m saying, soldiers? I’m not concerned with losing because that is so unthinkable I cannot even tolerate thinking about it. No, I’m talking about not winning by enough. It’s our homecoming. It’s our house! You understand? I want to send a message to the entire division: You come to the Knights’ field and you should be thankful if you walk out under your own power.”

  A grunt of agreement off to my left. It’s Jankowski practically vibrating with Coach’s words. He beats his chest with his fists like Tarzan. I’m not kidding. He actually beats his chest and he’s not trying to be funny.

  “That’s what I’m talking about, boys.” Coach slaps his clipboard, then points at Jankowski. “Tommy, you hear me loud and clear, don’t you, son?”

  “Yes, sir!” Jankowski bellows ba
ck.

  “Good boy.”

  On the side of the field, the fathers offer no reaction to Coach Brigs’s pep talk. Some of them cross their arms over their chests or adjust the bills of their baseball caps. Some spit because the chewing tobacco wedged into their bottom lip forces them to drain thick brown streams into the surrounding grass. Others spit because watching their own sons play seems to pain them with frustration even though they cannot look away from us, like viewing a bad car accident. I don’t think Scott’s dad chews tobacco.

  Halfway through scrimmage, Coach Brigs blows his whistle like he’s trying to pop it, then Frisbees his clipboard inches above our helmets. Leaves of paper flutter down on the team while the clipboard sails out to the twenty-yard line.

  “No. No. No. No. Noooo!” Coach shouts, whipping off his ball cap and slapping it against his leg. He looks back up at us and the sight still pisses him off. “Goddammit, no!” he repeats. “What kind of pansy camp do you think I’m running here?”

  We don’t answer.

  “Scott, so help me,” Coach gripes, “you line up that slow under center again and I will sit you down, son, you understand?” The gate of Scott’s face mask dips, telling Coach he understands.

  “Studblatz, whatsa matter with you?” Coach taunts. “My niece tackles harder than that. If you want, I can get you a set of pom-poms and let you try out for the cheerleading team.”

  The image of Studblatz in a skirt and pom-poms makes me laugh out loud.

  “You think that’s funny, Brodsky?” Coach stares at me for what feels like a full minute.

  Crap!

  “No, sir,” I say, shaking my helmet.

  Coach wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, runs his fingers through sweat-matted hair, then yanks the ball cap back onto his head.