by Kent Meyers
I felt their palpable stares.
Her grandmother?
Died years ago, I said.
The older patrolman broke into a grin. Yeah? he said. What bottle’d she come out of?
But Greggy lifted his hand. He was looking into the lights, or looking at the dark land invisible behind them, like he was expecting some immense thing to emerge from it.
These women, he said. They keep coming out of nowhere.
Postings
HE LIMPS THROUGH CORRIDORS of concrete and steel, calm. From him worlds flare into being. His worlds: hoarded, unshared. But he’s patient.
He regrets losing the buckle. It fell from his trunk. And then suddenly he was lighted. He didn’t pick it up. But they would have reduced it to evidence, as they have his clippings and mosaics. Such limited vision. They can’t see the creation: whole lives made of postings.
He loved all his Anas. They all understood that. They revealed their lives. They spoke their intimate secrets. They told him their fears. In postings all over the Web, he’s created their portraits and stories. The right links can put them together. He has faith. Artists have always leaned on the future. Someday they’ll discover his work. His genius will be revealed.
Only the last Ana’s portrait remains incomplete, the final postings not made. He thinks of it often: How the cattails broke before her. How she hummed. How the earth seemed to jump from itself.
A shape rising, she told him, and she, falling backwards, the cattails swaying and breaking, the redwing blackbirds disturbed. A cloud of cattail seeds, and a shadow behind them, with voice.
I saw you.
She dropped her fishing pole, crawled away. Splashing. Mud in her eyes.
The voice: Hay. Jay. I was there.
A hand on her ankle.
She twisted, blinded by mud, screaming and kicking, and the voice: I been watching, I have to tell you, I saw you, don’t scream, I just want to tell you I saw.
A hand on her mouth. She can’t see who it is.
Then the hand gone. The water, she’s under it, in a green blindness, until the need in her lungs is stronger than terror. She shoots to the surface and whatever awaits. Silence and emptiness. Still water, with hills rising. She’s breathing, and nothing is out there. Already she’s not sure what happened. She’s planted in doubt. Already she’s memorizing silence.
She can’t even name it. She’s not sure who, to say nothing of what. Her father might do something violent, her mother be more hurt than she was.
Is she hurt? She’s not sure of that. She’s afraid. But protective.
And maybe not innocent. She snuck from the house.
A tiny adventure. But secret. She’d risen in the dark. She thought she might catch that big fish. Hold it up to her boyfriend’s awed eyes.
She treads the green water, ringed by cattails. Near shore a cloud of seeds scatters. Is someone watching? Is that where she was?
I have to tell you.
Everyone has something to tell. Everyone is waiting. Sleeping and dreaming and waiting to wake to someone, who understands.
Alexander Stoughton. Alexander Stoughton understands.
Quitting the Game
NEAR THE END OF two-a-days his senior year in college, Clay Mattingly stopped at the coach’s office after morning practice.
You wanted to see me, Coach?
The coach waved at a chair. Clay sat down, his hands on his knees. The coach stared at him as if considering what to do with him.
You’ve been practicing well this week, he said. Working hard. Hitting hard.
Thanks, Clay said. He knew there was a but coming: But it’s about winning, and our sophomore, Janeway, has really come on. I’m going to need you in a backup role.
Clay didn’t even mind, much. He’d been a solid high school player, but he didn’t take from the game the kind of violent joy some of his teammates did. When his father had asked him why he was going out for college football, he couldn’t give an answer. He still couldn’t. At this point, it was just finishing what he’d started.
Janeway’s coming on, the coach said. I’m going to be watching both of you. He’s quick, but you’ve got more focus. I like that. You stay awake, and the spot’s yours.
Clay pretended he’d expected this.
I’ll stay awake, he said.
I don’t want you overcelebrating, now.
I won’t. I’ll—
He saw the coach was smiling.
You got some work ethic, Mattingly, he said. But have some fun. It ever occur to you this is a game?
I don’t get it, Clay told his roommate.
Why’s that?
Janeway’s brutal. He hits harder than me. Runs faster. Everyone knows it.
Clay couldn’t figure Janeway out. Janeway was never serious except on the field. But there he went beyond serious to some kind of dark. Other players had methods to fire themselves up—but not Janeway. He’d be laughing and joking all the way to the field, and he’d step off the bus and turn instantly ugly. No chants, no ceremonies or rituals of rage. It was just there for him. Even in practices, against his own teammates, he’d cut people low, elbow, use fists underneath. He seemed to love to hurt people. Or seemed unable to not hurt them. But later he wouldn’t remember it. Like he got nothing long-term out of it. Like it was just his body doing what it did, and his mind retained no mark or memory.
What the fuck were you doing out there today? the halfback once asked him. Jesus Christ, Janeway, I’m on your team.
This was after practice, during dinner. Janeway had taken his tray and sat down right next to the halfback, just as if there were no reason not to. Now he looked at the halfback in surprise and then grinned and reached up and put his arm around his shoulder and hugged him.
I love you, man, he said. What’d I do out there?
The halfback stared at his food, pressed up against Janeway’s shoulder like a kid.
Nothing, he said. It’s OK.
Now Clay’s roommate said: I’ll tell you why you’re starting. It’s because you don’t care.
What’s that supposed to mean?
About being hit. You don’t know what getting stopped is. Janeway does.
I don’t know. Janeway’s got—whatever it is. I’m not even sure why I play the game.
Tell you, the roommate said. Janeway don’t believe he can be stopped. So when he is—the roommate puffed out air—he thinks the play’s over. Thinks he’s it. But you get stopped, you’re still playing. Janeway likes to hit. But you don’t give a shit if you are hit.
Huh.
That tackle you made on Woolford today? You were stopped three times. I watched it all. Stopped cold. Three times. Bam. Bam. Bam. And you know what? Your eyes never left the ball. You’re still going after it.
Yeah?
There was something to it, maybe. He’d tried to cultivate Janeway’s rage but couldn’t get amped up that way. But there was a weird, satisfying indifference to being hit—now that the roommate had said it.
That old saying? the roommate went on. About the hammer and the anvil? Most people think the anvil’s getting the worst of it, getting beat on. But it’s the hammer that breaks. You’re anvil, Mattingly. Janeway’s hammer. Got a fiberglass handle. But it’s still the hammer breaks.
The fourth game of the season, it was like the roommate had said. Too much like. The opposing fullback came out of the line, head down. Moving, if anything, too fast. Janeway would’ve sidestepped, come back in, hit the halfback, who was following, so hard he would’ve seen lights. But the other way to do it was to take the hit yourself.
In the instant before the fullback crashed into him, Clay knew: this was why he was out here. To be hit just this hard and to feel this cool, pure indifference. Like he was watching himself, the way he might look at photographs of suffering somewhere and think he ought to feel sympathy but couldn’t: it was just images. He moved, at the last split second, directly into the fullback’s path. There was that moment of hear
ing the collision rattling up into his helmet, his pads popping with compression, his own expelled air. These noises from inside and outside his body. Even his ribs popping, cartilage and ligaments stretching and snapping. But it was just noise. He didn’t feel anything. Or he did, but it was a feeling of not-feeling. Like a slow-motion, muted action scene in a movie: a loud silence, a slow speeding. All noise and concussion and jarring—but nothing. Later he couldn’t remember feeling anything at all.
And he might have seen—or maybe only imagined, because he knew it had to be—the fullback’s body slink into itself. Like, for the barest moment, the fullback could actually tuck his head into his shoulders and turn inside out, and wouldn’t that be a trick, wouldn’t that be a move no one had seen before? The fullback’s head moving downward into his shoulders when he hit Clay, and Clay not feeling anything, and the fullback’s head like a turtle’s, except so quick Clay couldn’t be sure he’d really seen it. Then the halfback, trailing. That second concussion, insulated. That feeling of being on one side, the anvil, and the light hammer speeding in its arc out of the air. And, what his roommate forgot, the piece of soft metal between them.
Earlier in that year that Hayley Jo was killed, Laura Morrison had come to Clay. No e-mail or phone call or text message—she was just there, and his roommate, who’d answered the door, was saying: Mattingly, hot one for you.
Clay pushed back his dorm chair and went to the door, and there she was in the hallway.
Laura, he said. What are you doing here?
You got some time?
He lifted the calculator in his hand and looked at the graph he’d forced it to produce.
I got a test tomorrow, he said. How much time you talking about?
I don’t know. Time.
It important?
I’m here.
She went to college on the other side of the state, four hundred miles away.
She was dazzling, and her sadness made her even more so. She’d been attractive in high school, but—could a few months do this? Did a place lay some dimming dust on its girls that got washed away when they left? It made him feel rich just sitting across from her in the restaurant.
She’s not going to listen to me, he said.
This isn’t a time to be hurt, she said.
It brought him up short.
I was only thirteen, he said. We weren’t even going out.
That’s not how she saw it.
She broke it off.
So then? There must have been something to break off.
Before he could respond, she said: She felt right with you.
Then she must’ve liked feeling wrong.
This silenced them both. He adjusted his silverware. She aligned the salt and pepper shakers’ hexagonal sides.
I think she loved you, Clay, she said quietly, watching her outstretched hand, her eyes hidden by a sheath of hair.
Don’t lay that on me, Laura. I was thirteen. We fished. You’re still angry.
Disappointed. Every boyfriend she had was some kind of nobody. She wouldn’t go to college. Even her barrel racing she quit.
She’s killing herself.
He met her eyes. They were blue and serious.
She’s anorexic. I think she has been for years. Back when we both took up running. Maybe before. I thought it was cool at first, running together. But it was something way more serious for her. I could never go far enough. I think she wanted me to quit, so she could be alone. Finally I just let her. But now—it scares me. She’ll hardly even talk to me anymore. She tells me I’m interfering in her life.
Have you talked to her parents?
Her parents?
Well, yeah.
I suppose I could. But it’s—she told me her dad was really upset when she quit rodeo. I’m not sure they get along that well.
Upset? Geez, Laura. Do you know how many hours he spent with her? Helping her train? Taking her all over to compete? Of course he was upset. Who wouldn’t be? I was upset. She was beyond just good. And then she just quits? Come on.
I think she moved to Rapid to get away from them.
Of course, if she’s trying to hide it. That’s why you should tell them.
I’m telling you.
He reached out and twirled his cup, watching the dark liquid ripple and the overhead light shatter in it. After a while he said: Did she ever tell you why she broke up with me? If she felt—like you say?
When she’d told him she didn’t want to fish anymore, he’d been hurt and angry, and in the face of it she’d gone silent. He remembered how silent—how she hadn’t said a word more, had just climbed onto the ATV and waited for him. She had her hands on her knees. He’d gotten on and turned the ignition. He’d felt her presence behind him, her lips so near his ear she could have whispered and he would have heard her over the noise of the engine. Of everything that had happened that day, what he remembered most was that silence. A sense that she might have said more if he’d waited to respond, if he’d listened differently. She’d sat there, looking at her hands.
She never told me much, Laura said. We were best friends, but even I didn’t know she wasn’t eating until I got away from her and then saw her again. And I thought, My God.
Then she said: But when she did talk about you, it was always good. That’s why I came. I thought maybe if you—you know?—even now?
When the halfback discovered, too late, that the fullback wasn’t moving, and churned into him, the fullback’s head was doing that little twisting, slinking motion into his shoulders. Had it been slower, much slower, the way memory made it slower, it would have seemed he was turning himself inside out like a mitten. But the halfback’s hammer speeded it way up, too much way up, and among the ordinary, indifferent sounds of pads and lungs and ligaments and joints, another sound floated out, like a single bubble quietly breaking the surface of chaotic water. It was strangely soft, this sound: a thin stick under matted, wet leaves, or a beetle under a stepped-on two-by-six.
Then the safety came from the flat full tilt and smacked into them all to finish it, and the whistle blew, and they all rose and looked around out of their face guards, except for the fullback, who, when the halfback reached down to help him rise, simply stared at the hand held out to him as if it were an alien thing floating in the air that he had to figure out.
Clay had his hands on his hips. He was standing over the fullback. He’d never talked to Hayjay after Laura left. He thought he was going to. But it was large, being a voice from another time. He feared he would hear about something he’d missed. And after all this time, he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it. The silence had finally earned itself, worn into itself to become what it was. He had this feeling that if he broke it, he’d have to break other things, too, and he didn’t know what they were. So he had her number memorized but never dialed it.
He and the safety and the halfback formed a triangle around the fullback: the halfback in red and black, with his hand extended down, the safety in white on the other side, and Clay in white at the fullback’s head. He was looking through his facemask into the fullback’s facemask, the upside-down eyes wide open though in shadow, the three of them forming a small cave of shadow under the high lights, and the noises of the crowd in the distance and the chants of the cheerleaders.
When Hayjay was murdered, Clay had grieved. Of course he had. But he didn’t really feel connected. In some ways, even less connected than he would have with a stranger. With a stranger, you could work up a response and at least be horrified. But this news: having known her and established a distance and preserved it, having honored it, if that’s what it was—it made grieving strange. As if he grieved but mistrusted the feeling. Like he was borrowing it, trying it out for a while, to see if it really fit. And it didn’t, quite.
The fullback’s eyes were placid. No pain—just puzzlement, as if he were wondering what they were doing standing, or what he was doing lying on the ground. Clay had his hands on his hips. He was furious. He’d never
felt this way in a ball game before. He always just did his job. But this—it must be what Janeway felt. Get up, he was thinking. You goddamn, fucking sonofabitch, get that stupid-ass shiteating grin off your face and get your fucking ass UP!
I didn’t sign up for this, he said. This isn’t what I signed up for.
You signed up for the game, the coach said.
He was a decent man, and he said it gently, but there was rebuke in what he said, too.
This can happen in a game, he went on. He didn’t expect it. No one would expect it. But did he sign up for it? Well, in a way, yes, he did.
No, Clay said. No one signs up for that.
It’s not your fault. You’ll understand that eventually. Just like everyone else does right now. Even he doesn’t blame you. I’m sure of it. He hit you, and the halfback hit him. Even if there was fault—and there isn’t—it’d be—spread out. It happens. Sometimes.
I don’t want to be where it happens.
I’ll start Janeway this weekend. But I expect you back. You’re going to get over this. I expect you to. We all do.
You’re not listening. I don’t want to get over it.
Right now you don’t think you do. But you do.
You know his name?
His name?
Troy Lucas. That’s his name. I had nothing against Troy Lucas. I could’ve just let Troy Lucas go running up the field. And Troy Lucas would still be running.
It’s the game. You can’t let him go running up the field. Deep down you know that.
If it’s the game and deep down I know that, I don’t want the game.
The coach leaned back in his chair and looked at Clay. He wasn’t exasperated or impatient. He was a decent man. He understood trauma—or understood there could be such a thing as trauma. He was sick himself over what had happened. But he had to pretend wisdom and calm. This was a young man in front of him. He’d dedicated his life to working with young men. And he had to deal with this. He was trying. He was trying very hard to deal with it.
