The Big Hit

by Jamie Bennett

  “Yes. You just haven’t noticed, and now you’re looking for it.”

  I didn’t believe that, because it wasn’t like I was a famous football player or someone who other people would be interested in. I still found it easier to stare at my feet, but I stopped trying to replicate Knox’s expression.

  “That professor was different from what I expected,” he said. “Older.”

  “He came out of retirement to work on the collection,” I explained. “But I can’t imagine him retired. He loves what he does.”

  “Lucky.” Knox paused. “I thought he was a young guy. Handsome.”

  “Professor Amico?” I smiled. “I think he’s handsome! But not young. He’s such a nice man, and I’ve learned a lot from him.” Now, here was something to talk about! “We’ve been reviewing European sports stars of the twentieth century as we unpack. Ever heard of Ferenc Puskas?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, let me tell you,” I said, and we talked about Puskas, Nurmi, Latynina, and Enrico Visconti all the way to the library. I forgot, mostly, about the other people on campus and their ogling.

  “Thanks for carrying my bag,” I told Knox as we got to the door. “And for helping out Domenico and me. It would have taken me forever to get those crates into pieces.”

  “Sure.” We stood for a moment. “Your hand’s ok?” he asked.

  I held it up. “Sure,” I echoed him. “Just a little scratch, not a big deal in the pursuit of art history glory.”

  Knox took my hand in his and looked at the little bandage. “Seems ok to me.” His fingers squeezed mine, just briefly. “I have some writing to do, later, after my workout. I’ll be in the West Stacks, if you want to stop by.”

  I nodded, words stuck in my throat, because we were kind of holding hands.

  He let go, and I watched his broad back for a moment, the weak spring sun glinting off his dark hair. Then I skedaddled into the library, where a little crowd had gathered because Knox had been there. I skirted them and went past the circulation desk for my cart. I tried not to smile a lot as I did it.

  Solomon was right behind me, and he had been mighty curious about things since the week before, when Knox had cornered him by the public access printers, scared him to death, and asked him for my phone number. “Was that Knox Lynch again?” he demanded. “Did he walk you over here? What’s going on, Daisy?”

  Well, I didn’t really know, not quite yet. But whatever it was, it made me very, very happy.

  Chapter 7

  “So thanks for that, but it really doesn’t answer my question,” I heard Tatum remark as I rounded the corner into the West Stacks of the library. Squeak, squeak, squeak! my cart said, complaining about our speed. I had been past this same area several times, and Knox hadn’t been there yet. But Tatum was talking to someone, and now a deep voice answered her, too low for me to hear the exact words.

  And there she was, perched on the desk of a study carrel where Knox had put his laptop, and there he was in the metal chair, looking at her like she had two heads. She rested her chin in her small hand and gazed at him, and I felt a surge of jealousy that I tried to tamp down. “Hi,” I told both of them.

  “Hi!” Tatum answered. She hopped off the desk. “I was just talking to Knox about the mint thing. The blow job thing,” she clarified. “It seems like it could be true from what I read online, but he doesn’t know for sure either, and I may just have to do some fieldwork. Speaking of blowing someone, has Nico Williams been around the gym?” she asked Knox. His mouth fell open.

  I knew she had gone by the stadium a few times, but I had refused to accompany her. Lyle from security had ratted on her that she was taking the ID to get in the Authorized Personnel Only door, and her dad had confiscated it. She had been relegated to waiting around in the parking lot.

  “Nico,” Knox repeated the name. “No, I haven’t seen him. I think he left to go back to wherever he lives in the off-season. The medical people finished their injury rehab evaluations.” I had actually never seen him looking disoriented like he was now, but that happened often enough to me in my conversations with Tatum.

  “Oh,” she said, and her face fell for a moment. “I mean, whatever. I don’t care. Yeah, I’m going to go, I guess.”

  “Hang on,” I told her. “I finish my shift in half an hour. Why don’t you wait for a while and we can go hang out?” I glanced over at Knox. “All of us,” I suggested, marshalling all my courage to say it.

  “No, I’m meeting up with the spin girls,” she answered. “I just came by to say hello to you and see if my book on Boolean algebra is in from the Northern Michigan U library.”

  My antennae went up at the mention of spinning. “Weren’t you with them when you did the donuts on your neighbor’s yard? And puked from the wine floats? Are you sure you want to go out with them?”

  “It’ll be great,” she told me, and gave me a hug. “Bye,” she said to Knox. “Thanks for the information.”

  We both watched her walk away between the bookshelves. “I don’t know why she’s reading books on Boolean algebra, with a communications major. And I think that’s a bad idea for her to go out with those people,” I said. “From everything she’s told me, the spin girls are wild. Way worse than yoga.”

  “She seems like she can handle herself,” he said.

  I turned to him. “What information did you give her?

  “Not too much. She asked a lot of personal questions that I wouldn’t answer. If I had used some of the words that Tatum just did when I was a kid, I would have had my mouth washed out with soap.”

  “Really, soap?”

  “You should have seen my little grandma, bending me over the sink with the yellow bar that she used on the laundry. I can taste it right now.” He grimaced.

  “Your grandma was short? Where did you get your height?” I asked.

  Knox just shook his head.

  “Everyone in my family is tall,” I told him. “My brother, for sure, and my mom. And I remember my dad being tall, but I was young when he left permanently, so everyone was big from my perspective at that point.”

  “He walked out on you guys?”

  “It was a good thing. He used to hurt my mom and my brother. He used to, uh,” and I stopped, because thinking and talking about that time of our lives made me very upset, even though Dylan always said that it was over and he was fine.

  “Did he hurt you?”

  I looked at Knox, because he sounded furiously angry. “No,” I assured him. “My brother never let him. And Dylan used to hide me places in the house and take me out, to the library or to the beach, so I wouldn’t see what was happening to our mom or what our dad broke when he was drinking. But I knew, of course. I knew enough to be really scared.” I shoved the cart, embarrassed and ashamed of my family issues, and thinking that I didn’t need to share them with Knox. “Anyway, I’ll let you study. I need to go shelve.”

  “I’ll come.” Knox stood up. “Maybe you’ll need to reach the high shelves. You’re not that tall.”

  He pushed the cart for me, too. “I’m worried about Tatum,” I told him, and passed him a book for his side of the aisle. “It goes right there, on the second shelf down in between Bahamian Flora and Air Plants of the Western Caribbean.” He hesitated, and I said, “Next to the mustard yellow one. Thank you. She didn’t really know him very well, but I’m pretty sure she thought she had a chance with Nico Williams.”

  “A chance for what?” He picked up another book. “To sleep with him?”

  I winced. “I guess, but I was thinking more like she had a chance to have something meaningful with him.”

  And Knox laughed a little, a short bark that didn’t sound like he found anything really funny at all. “Daisy, that’s not what guys like Nico are looking for. If that was what she thought, she was always going to be disappointed.”

  I picked up a book and stared down at the title. I didn’t want her to be disappointed.

  “Hey. Are you done her
e? It’s about six,” he said.

  I looked at my phone for the time, noticing the message from my brother checking in, and some more pictures of guys for everyone in the yoga crowd to vote on. They were already driving down to Grand Rapids because they had moved through most of what was available in northern Michigan. Soon, they’d have to spread to Wisconsin. “I guess so. I’ll put the cart back.” I started to take it from him, but he kept his hands on it.

  “I have it.”

  There were a few people at the circulation desk trying to check out their last books and materials before closing time and they all eyeballed Knox, especially since he was pushing the squeaky cart. “I’ll just be a minute,” I said, taking it from him and shoving it ahead of me to grab my stuff from the back room. When I came out, he was signing an autograph. Someone had gotten up a lot of nerve to ask him, but he did it very nicely.

  “Why didn’t you leave through the basement?” I asked as we walked out to the parking lot.

  “Just seems kind of dumb to let you walk by yourself, doesn’t it?” he asked me. “When I could go with you instead.”

  “This campus is really safe,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, this is a nice walk, though. I’d rather be with you.”

  “Oh.” I glowed inside. It didn’t seem to take much, just a crumpled paper list and the suggestion that I was an improvement over a musty basement.

  “I made dinner,” Knox told me.

  “That’s nice,” I commented.

  “I meant, I made dinner for you and me, at my place, if you’re interested.”

  “Oh!” He was inviting me. He was inviting me to his house. I felt a rush of…something, a mix of nerves and excitement and a tinge of nausea. If I went to his house, he was going to expect me to know things I had only glimpsed in a text chain, to have personal knowledge of acts I had only read about in books about women doing it with wolf- and bear-men. “Thank you, I’d love to have dinner. With you, I meant.”

  “You wait in the car, then, and follow me. Lock your doors, even if it is a safe campus.” He gave me one of his rare smiles before jogging off to the student parking lot on the big feet that still seemed not to make any noise.

  I drove behind his truck over to his house and while I did, I worked myself up into such a state that I almost had to open the window to puke out of it. I did all my strategies to calm down, because the worst thing I could imagine, the most horribly embarrassing, would have been to get into one of my things in front of Knox. Someone so controlled and in charge of himself would not have understood that kind of reaction at all.

  In spite of my work to rein myself in, my legs shook as I walked over to his truck after I parked my car in front of his building. “This is nice,” I told him, because it was one of the fanciest condo complexes in the area.

  “It’s fine,” he answered briefly. “I don’t bother much about it.”

  I walked next to him to the stairs, and then had to go in front because he was way too wide for us to walk up side by side. “What did you make for dinner?” I asked over my shoulder.

  “Chicken. In that pot, the one you plug in. And corn bread.”

  “Wow! I’m impressed. I thought you were going to say that you reheated something. That’s how my brother does his cooking. But I like to experiment, try new stuff, new ingredients…” I was nervously babbling. “Corn bread sounds great,” I said firmly, to shut myself up.

  “It smelled pretty good earlier.” Knox opened the door to his condo.

  It actually smelled delicious inside, and I told him so as I stepped into his apartment. That stuck out to me, as did the boxes. The condo wasn’t large to begin with, just a rectangle with a tiny galley kitchen at one end that made me briefly wonder how Knox fit himself in there. And one whole wall of the living/dining area was lined with big cardboard moving boxes, three deep, that stretched up to the ceiling and shrunk the room to a narrow hallway. Clearly, he really didn’t bother much about where he lived if he hadn’t even unpacked. Or maybe he was moving.

  “What is all that?” I asked curiously.

  “Just stuff. Dinner should be ready, so let me get some plates. I think I have two.”

  His cupboards were mostly bare, I noticed, and dusty. I stood to the side because I had been right, he barely fit into the kitchen and there was no way I was getting in there, also. “Beer?” he asked me, and I nodded, looking into the almost-empty refrigerator as he retrieved two bottles. There was a pile of ingredients on the kitchen counter: the smallest box of baking soda I had ever seen, a tiny bag of cornmeal, a little container of shortening. Cooking for one, I thought.

  Knox followed my eyes. “I used my grandmother’s recipe.” He popped the cap off the bottle and handed it to me, then passed me an index card that had been propped up next to the baby baking soda.

  I looked at the spidery handwriting, the card that was soft on the corners from use. “What is it called? Pone bread?”

  He took it and squinted at it. “Yeah. That was what she called it.” He studied the card for a moment before giving it back.

  I looked at it again. “Not too many ingredients. I think this says ‘baking powder,’ right?”

  “Right.” He took a cast-iron pan out of the oven and I admired the circle of golden bread inside it.

  The box he had on the counter was baking soda, not powder, but I kept that fact to myself and took the two plates to put on his small dining room table, moving some papers with the Woodsmen logo off it. Knox carried over an avocado green crockpot. “This was hers, too,” he explained. “I had to dig around for it.” He nodded at an open box in front of the couch.

  I had thought he was moving out. “Is that what’s in the boxes? Your grandmother’s things?”

  “Some of it’s mine, some my grandpa’s, but mostly hers. I drove it up to Michigan with a tarp over it, hoping it wouldn’t rain too much. I slept in the truck one night so no one would take anything. This turned out ok.” He scooped some of the meal inside the pot onto my plate.

  “Mmmm,” I said, inhaling. He watched as I took a bite. “This is so delicious.”

  Knox's face relaxed a tiny bit. I wouldn’t have noticed the difference before, but now I seemed to catch the little changes in his expression. “Good, I’m glad. She liked to cook.” He broke off a piece of the corn bread, the pone bread, and chewed. His face changed again. “Something’s wrong with this.”

  I took a bite too, and it was awful, like a mouthful of strong, bitter metal. “Not too bad,” I tried to tell him, but really, I wanted to wash off my tongue. Even some of the laundry soap his grandma had used on him might have tasted better. I tried to force it down my throat and drank some beer to help dislodge it.

  “Spit it out,” Knox told me, and I did into the paper napkin he handed me.

  “I think maybe you used soda instead of baking powder,” I said, and drank some more beer. “I’ve done it before, and if you do it the one time, you’re always careful after. But the color of the bread is beautiful. I bet it would have been really good.”

  He got up and moved the poison pone bread into the kitchen. “At least we can eat the chicken,” he remarked when he sat back down. He took a big bite and crunched on something, then removed a bone from his mouth. “Shit.”

  “I’ll just be a little careful eating it, and I plan to have seconds. I think it’s delicious,” I assured him, and poked around my plate a little. There was another one. I pushed the bone under the remainder of my corn bread with my fork. “How come you never unpacked your boxes?”

  “No room,” he said. “This place is small.”

  “But how long have you been playing for the Woodsmen?” I thought back to my research on him. It had to have been…

  “Next season will be my eleventh. It’s hard to believe it’s been that long.” He pushed a bone over, too.

  “You never wanted a bigger house?”

  “This is cheap and easy,” Knox said.

  “Oh, of course,” I real
ized. “You have a house you live in for the off-season, like Nico. Tatum said he goes to Las Vegas.”

  “No, I don’t. I considered it after my rookie year, buying a place in Oklahoma, but I’ve never done it. I rent this and then I’ve been going to Arizona and renting the same house there when I’m not playing. They have indoor facilities so I can train even when it starts to get hot. I’m usually outside of Phoenix for the winter, but this year I stuck around here to take the class on American filmmaking. The college worked with my school in Oklahoma, getting them to accept the credits and what all, because I’m a Woodsmen.”

  I looked around again, at the cramped space. “What about when you retire? You were talking about it before. Will you go back to Oklahoma then?”

  “I haven’t thought about it.” He was quiet for a moment. “No, I have. I’d like to coach, high school or younger. My coaches made a difference for me.” The words were very, very low.

  “That’s—”

  Knox stood up and walked into the bedroom, then came back with a hardcover book. “Here. I ordered it when you told me about it.”

  “He Who Howls at Bears? You’re reading the sequel to He Who Howls Alone? A shape-shifter romance book?”

  “It sounded interesting when you talked about it,” Knox said. He tapped a big finger on the picture of the shirtless man on the cover. “But that wolf-man doesn’t make any sense.”

  “How so? I mean, besides the fact that he’s part animal,” I allowed.

  “He puts the woman in danger. Bringing her out into the woods, when he knows those bear people are there. Why would he do that?”

  “We can talk about the book, but I don’t want to give too much away. How far have you read?”

  Knox flipped to the end of the first chapter. “Here.”

  “Oh, you have to keep going for it to make sense. There’s a reason he keeps returning to that cave. And then the woman, Guinevere…no, I can’t tell you, it would ruin it.”

  “Tell me anyway. I probably won’t get around to reading it with finals coming up.”

  I filled him in as we ate, avoiding the chicken bones, but my mind was on what he had said about finals. “There’s a third one, He Who Howls at Aliens, a kind of cross-over with the author’s other series of books about extraterrestrials, but I don’t like it as much at all. I wouldn’t recommend it, but maybe you’ll want to try it when finals are over.” I toyed with a bone. “Are you worried about exams?”