Twisted Tree

by Kent Meyers

  There’s a good chance he might walk again, he said. At least fifty-fifty. That’s what I’ve heard. Let’s let the doctors do their work.

  Janeway would’ve tackled the ball.

  And he might’ve missed. That’s why you were out there and not him. You stopped the run. That’s your role. It doesn’t matter how.

  Doesn’t matter how? Jesus.

  I didn’t mean it that way, Clay. I didn’t mean it that way.

  They were both close to tears.

  I gotta quit, Clay said. I can’t play anymore.

  I can’t let you quit. That’s the worst thing you can do.

  If I quit, you’re not my coach anymore. You can’t stop me if you’re not my coach.

  Saying that, that they no longer had that relationship, broke them both. Clay wiped his face with the back of his wrist, and the coach sat there with his hands on his desk, letting tears fall, watching this young man whom he’d seen work so hard for four years and finally succeed. He was as convinced Clay had to keep playing as Clay was convinced he had to quit.

  You don’t quit in the middle of a season, Clay, he said when he could talk—and it was a long time before he could.

  What you don’t do is break a guy’s neck—Troy Lucas’s neck. You don’t put Troy Lucas in a wheelchair.

  You didn’t. It happened. What happened, did. Quitting the game won’t cure it. What you’ve got to do is look after yourself. You quit now, you’ll never be able to forget it.

  I don’t want to forget it.

  The chants of the cheerleaders had faded out like birdcalls receding, and then the crowd sound had fallen, too, leaking out of the world, a deflation of sound, and then, in a silence palpable and cast, a single cry had hammered down, breaking itself: No! No! No!

  A woman’s scream. And in the stilled crowd of hundreds, a movement of color, a bright red and yellow ski jacket, moving even before the trainers did, a yellow headband, red mittens, stumbling down the row, jerking down the stadium steps and lurching over the rail and then running awkwardly over the turf, a bumbling, shambling run, almost an antithesis of run, and the police who were supposed to prevent fans from entering the field standing stock-still except for one of them, a young reserve officer who started to sprint after her, a former athlete himself who gained ground on her as if he were devouring it and then as he neared her tapered off, powerless, like a too-light fishing leader cast into a wind folding back on itself, limp, and she came on crying, Oh God, oh God, oh God.

  The roommate suggested a bar. Clay finished the pitcher and ordered another before the roommate had finished his first glass.

  Guess we know who’s driving back, the roommate said.

  Clay stared out the plate glass window next to the booth.

  A few girls had come over and offered consolation. He hadn’t been unkind to them, but they withdrew after a while.

  I know you’ve heard it all already, the roommate said. It wasn’t your fault and it’s a risk anyone takes in the game and you were just playing your position and Martians are green.

  Yeah. I’ve heard it all.

  You really quitting?

  You see his mother run onto the field?

  The roommate nodded. Then he asked: How’d Coach take it? Clay grunted.

  He say you were throwing four years of work away?

  You think I am?

  The roommate fingered his beer, then lifted it to his mouth, emptied it, set it back down, and for a while watched the foam running slowly down the sides of the glass.

  You know what they used to do for fun where I come from? he asked. Way back when? Blow up anvils. Fourth of July, lay an anvil on a bag of gunpowder and see how high they could send it. Pretty damn poor entertainment, huh? Then when the fun was over, pick the thing up and haul it back to the shed and set it up again.

  That an answer?

  Just a story, man. Ain’t no answers.

  By the time the bar closed, the roommate was drunk, too, but not so much he didn’t know it, so they left the car and walked back, both of them wobbling. In a residential section of town, they passed a lot where a house had been torn down, leaving nothing but a ruined foundation, a big hole, and scraps of lumber and broken concrete. Clay stopped and stared at the mess.

  C’mon, man, the roommate said. Just a few more blocks and we’re home.

  Goddamn, Clay said. Sonofabitch.

  He walked off the sidewalk toward the hole.

  The roommate caught up to him. C’mon, he said. There’s nothing here.

  Damn right there’s nothing here.

  He pushed off the roommate’s hands.

  Against a sawhorse, in the bluish light of a faraway streetlamp, a sand shovel leaned. He picked it up and hefted it. Goddamn, he said again.

  What are you doing, man?

  Clay didn’t answer. He lifted the shovel over his head and slammed it down on the edge of the concrete block foundation. The handle splintered so loudly it echoed.

  Jay-sus, Clay! What the hell are you doing?

  Sonofabitch, Clay said. Sonofabitch, sonofabitch, sonofabitch.

  In rhythm with his chanting, almost ceremonially, he brought the shovel up and crashed it back down against the concrete, the tough hickory handle splintering with each vicious stroke until, with a final rending crack, it broke, and the head of the shovel flew into the ground, and he was holding the jagged stub of wood.

  A dog barked down the street. A light came on.

  Let’s get outta here.

  He let the roommate push him away, out the other side of the lot, stumbling over the chewed ground. When they were four blocks away and still hadn’t heard sirens, and the adrenaline and alcohol together had made them giddy and high and exhausted, the roommate let them slow down. They had to cross the football practice field to get to their campus apartment. Sprinklers were pulsing, sending foaming white rainbows of water over the field.

  Wait, man, wait, the roommate said, and made them both hold their shoes in the jet of a sprinkler to wash the dirt of the empty lot off. They got soaked in the process and stood in the middle of the practice field laughing their asses off while the sprinkler swung around and nearly knocked them over when it hit them. Finally they trudged up to their apartment and threw themselves, soaked, onto the furniture.

  After a while they settled down. They were staring at the walls.

  What the fuck’d you do that for? the roommate asked.

  I got no fucking idea, Clay replied.

  No fucking idea, the roommate said.

  He started to chuckle. Clay followed suit.

  No fucking idea, they said in unison, laughing so hard they hurt, their ribs hurt, their lungs hurt, their eyes and stomachs, they could hardly bear it, it was so funny. No fucking idea: the punch line to every joke ever told, and every one not told, too.

  Running Alone

  AFTER GRADUATING FROM COLLEGE and working in retail for a year, Laura returned to school for her teaching certificate. After receiving it, she accepted a job in Sioux Falls, then returned home for the summer. She started running again. When she and Hayjay had run at night, Laura had always liked the sound of their footsteps striking the pavement in unison, the enclosing darkness, and the way, when a car passed them, their elongated shadows spidered out in front of them and then swung wildly sideways and twisted together and collapsed. But now Laura found it easier to get up early than stay up late, and she liked the land in the morning, the way the light and shadows textured it.

  Sometimes, rather than running straight from the door, she would drive to a new location. She tried to surprise herself—to drive mindlessly, turning without premeditation onto unknown gravel roads. She liked seeing unfamiliar land unfold at the slow pace of a jog. One day she drove especially far, until she had only a general sense of how to get back. She came over a hill and couldn’t see a single sign of human beings: no houses or pole sheds or cattle or power lines. She stopped the car and gazed. She’d been raised to know space, but this
was a little intimidating—so large, so unmarked. Still, she wanted to run into it. She reasoned with herself: it was safer than running with traffic, and drivers who didn’t pay attention or called taunts. Only the emptiness itself was unsettling: the endurance of it, the sense of its long being.

  She checked her watch so she’d know when to turn around. Fifteen minutes later she came over a hill and saw them. In the instant of seeing them, she thought they were immense black stones, a monument, arrayed on the grasslands before her, a tableau suggesting meaning so esoteric or particular it touched the edges of awe. Then she realized they were buffalo, and where she was. This was the old Valen place, and the buffalo were Hayjay’s father’s.

  Laura slowed, disturbed. The last thing she had expected was to be reminded, out here in the emptiness, of the way Hayley Jo had detached herself. Seeing the buffalo wasn’t like seeing a ghost. She wasn’t even brought up short. It was more like a thin net vibrating, through which she could feel the past, distant and dealt with, but suddenly very tangible. The herd even looked netlike, strung out as it was, the massive animals like nodules on invisible filaments that connected them to the others. They wove together the land on which they stood—and her, too. She felt like a smaller nodule.

  She jogged on. She noticed a blackened square above a steep ravine halfway up the hill across from her. When she got closer she recognized foundation stones. She’d read Bea Conway’s account of Joe Valen building the first frame house in the area, refusing help, hauling stones from the river with an ox sled and ordering lumber brought in by railroad. In spite of Bea’s enthusiasm, he’d seemed to Laura a stolid, irrepressible figure—slaving wordlessly away, with only his wife, whom he’d imported also, to help. The next generation of Valens had abandoned the house. Laura didn’t know who lived in it after that. Here it was now, a scorched patch of ground.

  The herd was a quarter-mile away and grazing away from her. She could see a dirt road curving toward the burn site. When she got to it she turned and jogged down it and through an open gate in a tall wire fence. She slowed to a walk. Except for the driveway itself, so meager it might have been a double game trail, there was nothing suggesting that human beings had ever visited this place. Only the absence of wolves shadowing the herd hinted at history.

  She walked into the blackened square, imagining it roomed, divided, the Valen family moving in and out of doorways. She stood at the edge of the foundation, as if there were a window she looked through into the ravine below. She’d heard the stories Bea hadn’t included, and she wondered what it had been like for Emma Valen, trapped by distance out here, with a husband impatient with anything not aligned with his will. Laura remembered her father telling her that as a child he’d seen Emma, and her face had given him nightmares of a bear in a rage, great claws reaching for his cheek. Laura touched her face. She saw in the ravine what looked like a faded wooden sign barely visible beneath the cedar. She thought she might climb down to see it. Then she heard a distant engine and turned. A pickup crawled over a hill from the direction of the herd. She walked slowly out of the ashes and waited.

  Laura!

  She might have just showed up on Stanley Zimmerman’s doorstep, a surprise visit after years away, instead of being almost a trespasser, caught. He opened the door of the pickup and stepped to the ground. But in spite of the pleasure in his voice, there was something resistant to surprise, too—as if he was tired of suddenness and had found a way, within himself, to slow it down. He was older, of course, and heavier than she remembered. Not fat, but fleshier, in a way that made him less solid than she recalled, not as hard-edged or defined. Still, he was so familiar, all those nights she’d spent in Hayjay’s house doing homework or watching videos, that she felt the meshing of old relationships, the cogwork of memory. It made her feel newly bereft.

  I was running, she said. My car’s a couple miles up the road.

  Running, he said.

  There was in his face that quiet, warding-off look.

  She felt the need to explain.

  Then I saw this. She moved her hand to indicate the foundation. I’ve been hearing about this house all my life, and—I didn’t think you’d be here.

  He smiled: Guess I wouldn’t leave the gate open if I wasn’t here.

  Of course, she said, flustered. I didn’t think.

  They got out once, he said.

  I remember.

  It’s good to see you.

  Oh, come on, she thought—and didn’t know where the thought came from, or the sudden, astonishing anger.

  When she didn’t respond, he said, How long has it been?

  Since the funeral.

  She said it breezily: the factual answer to a question. But she pushed her hair off her ear and lifted her eyes to him, and she saw his face distort briefly, like a movement underwater. She’d surprised him. Good. He couldn’t absorb or resist it. He reached his hand back and sideways. For a moment it moved in the air as if he were conducting some whimsical orchestra. Then his fingers found the smooth metal of the pickup, and his palm flattened into it, and the machine’s solidity seemed to flow into him.

  Of course, he said.

  So, she asked. What happened here?

  She flicked her left index finger over her shoulder at the house that wasn’t there.

  He looked over his shoulder at the herd. She looked at them, too. She wondered if they’d changed position at all since she’d first seen them. She couldn’t tell.

  Fire, he said.

  That’s too bad.

  Is it?

  Kind of. It’s history.

  Yeah. It is.

  Lightning? she asked.

  A match.

  She’d been in control. And suddenly wasn’t.

  You—?

  He nodded.

  But.

  She looked at the rectangular boundary of stones and the blackened ground within it and the desolate springs of a mattress.

  She turned back to him. You just—all of it?

  He opened the door to his pickup, reached across to the glove compartment, opened it, brought something out. When he stood upright again, he was holding a mother-of-pearl brush, lustrous and small in his large hand.

  I couldn’t burn that, he said.

  It held her eyes like a flame would.

  Whose is it?

  Without knowing it, she’d lowered her voice.

  No idea, he said. The rest—he swept his other hand like a wing coming up, dismissive.

  She felt as if she were breaking up—were being transmitted from a distant place, through turbulent air and ionic storms. If it hadn’t been for the touch of the foundation against the back of her knee stabilizing her, she might have turned to snow.

  Can I see it? she asked weakly.

  He held the brush out to her. It was warm, it felt alive, a hard, alive thing, with bristles, as if it could flex and morph in her hand.

  Some girl, she murmured.

  Yes. That’s why I couldn’t.

  Her breath caught. She pushed the brush back at him.

  Take it, she said.

  He replaced it in the glove box. They looked at each other.

  I’ve got nothing of hers, he said. Kris and I—she has it all.

  The feeling of breaking up, of barely coalescing: she pressed the back of her knee harder against the foundation and lifted her hand, palm out, near her face to stop him, but he went on.

  She had a rodeo buckle, he said. If I could just have that. She was so proud—

  He stopped and gathered himself.

  So proud of it, he said. I asked Kris—I asked her if—we spent so much time together training, and—but she didn’t have it. It’s gone. We don’t know what she did with it.

  She lifted the other hand and held them both out. I don’t know. Why would you think I’d know?

  I’m sorry. I’m not asking. I’m just—I’m sorry.

  Why didn’t you—?

  She couldn’t finish. Her voice, like her body,
lacked coherence.

  Didn’t I what?

  But she could only stare at him.

  He nodded, understanding.

  You blame me, he said.

  She still couldn’t speak.

  I thought I was a decent father. I don’t know what she told you. I thought I wasn’t a terrible father, at least. When she was born, I—that morning was—

  She wasn’t prepared for the sadness of his statement: how small its hope—to not be terrible. Sweat was cooling on her, and she shivered in spite of the sun. The stone against her leg sent a spike of cold through her, but she wouldn’t step away from it. She crossed her arms on her chest. The herd moved the net of itself slowly across the land.

  You cut your hair, he said. Kris used to always say how different you and Hayjay—

  He stopped. He turned his head down. She could see him fighting for control.

  Yours was always long and blond, and hers—

  I got tired of it long.

  It looks good.

  I don’t need compliments.

  I don’t suppose. It is good to see you. I wish—

  He shrugged. He turned as if to get back into the pickup.

  Is that what you want to know? What she said about you?

  He turned back. He looked her in the eye.

  I couldn’t say her name, he said.

  Her name?

  I couldn’t say it. Just now? That’s the first time I’ve said it since—Hayjay. My God.

  You haven’t said her name?

  Hayley Jo.

  He reminded her of someone learning a foreign tongue, trying out the sounds. She wrapped her arms tighter around herself.

  All right, she said softly. All right.

  You’re cold, he said. I can give you a ride back to your car.

  She shook her head. You weren’t a terrible father, she said. I wanted to believe you were.

  I didn’t even realize. Didn’t know.

  I don’t know why she did it.

  Maybe I didn’t want to believe.

  She liked it.

  He gazed at her.

  The starving, she said. Maybe not liked. But—

  She gave in to the shivering. Rather than shaking her apart, her body seemed to gel with it, becoming itself again.