by John Goode
His eyes were wide, and I think he might have been shaking, but I’m not sure.
“Because what other reason would you have for screaming and calling him a faggot in front of everyone if you weren’t trying to drive him to kill himself? We just got done burying one of them. You couldn’t have forgotten this quickly, so I assumed this was your plan.” I walked over to him, and he pushed back in his chair even more. “I mean, you do have a plan, right, Tony? You aren’t just out there spreading hate because you’re bored or because you’re jealous. You can’t be openly mocking a guy for the same reasons a friend of yours killed himself without thinking the same thing could happen again. So, Tony….” I put my hands on the arms of his chair. “What is your plan?”
He was looking up at me, terrified. Not at me, but at my words. I could see his brain connecting the dots, and the image it was painting was not a good one. “I mean, between you and me, Tony, don’t you want him to kill himself?”
“No, sir!” he said pleading. “I don’t.”
I let my voice go and bellowed at him. “Then why would you keep calling him a faggot?” He flinched and then began to break down in front of me. “Why would you come all the way down here just to mock him on the day he was named captain? I can’t figure out a reason, Tony, other than you want him to kill himself just like Kelly. That you saw Kelly’s death as a good thing and want more of it. Because there is no other reason here, son.”
I paused as he openly sobbed.
“I know you love your dad, and you should. But your old man has some opinions on things that are wrong, Tony, dead wrong. And I don’t say that from opinion or from guessing. I say that as someone who passes Kelly’s grave every week when I go see my wife’s. Those words and those actions kill—they kill. And if you aren’t trying to get someone to die, then you need to stop saying them.”
I knelt down in front of him. “Do you understand what I am saying, son?”
His face was a wreck as he blubbered something and nodded.
“It’s okay not to agree with the lifestyle, Tony. But it’s their life. You have to let them live it.”
He leaned forward and threw his arms around me. I froze, surprised, and I heard him cry. “I just… I just keeping thinking if they just kept their mouths shut, Kelly would still be here.” He clung to me and just cried. “I miss him so much, Coach…. Why do I feel this way?”
I pulled back, and though I wanted to say something that would make him feel good, I needed to tell him the truth.
“You feel this way because you feel guilty, Tony. Because you know you were partly responsible for his death.” He didn’t say a word, but I could see the guilt in his eyes. “You can’t keep hating Brad for this. You need to forgive yourself. You know that, right?”
He nodded as he wiped his nose. “Am I suspended?”
I shook my head. “No, but you need to realize you can’t keep doing this. It isn’t their fault.”
“I know, Coach,” he said miserably. “I just miss Kelly so much….”
Neither one of us knew what to say, so after a while I just let him go to class.
It got me no closer to figuring out the Brad problem.
IN THE old days, it would have been easy.
If I had doubts about a team rallying behind their captain, I would simply go on a warpath and start training them mercilessly. There would be general bitching, but no one would say anything, at least not to me. That technique solved two problems. The first was that it gave them a common enemy: me. Nothing unites people together more than a bad guy to bitch about. The second, and more important, would be that sooner or later one of them would go ask the captain to talk with me about easing off some. Though they weren’t conscious of it, the team would acknowledge that the captain was their leader and ask him to speak for everyone in telling me I had gone too far.
It’s a shame that wouldn’t work now.
I had gotten the report of what happened in the hallway with Tony, and from what I heard, it was encouraging but not in any way proof Brad was home free. It took people a bit too long to fight back against Tony’s bashing. It was only pride in the team that motivated the other kids to fight back. I needed to know their acceptance of my decision wasn’t just a reflex from being grateful they had made the team. They needed to really bond around Brad, or when things got bad—and every season, they did—they would turn on him, and in turn, themselves.
I just had no earthly idea how to do that.
I had settled in for a quiet Saturday night when my phone rang. I must have been one of the few people left in the country who still had a phone connected to a wire, but I didn’t care. As far as I was concerned, it was a step forward that the phone had buttons instead of a dial.
“Hello?”
“Coach Gunn?” a male voice asked on the other end. It didn’t sound like a student from the tone of voice, but it held the same reverence I was used to hearing in kids.
“You got him,” I answered, trying to place the voice.
“This is Tyler—Tyler Parker?” I wasn’t sure if the boy thought there was a list of Tylers who would call my house on a Saturday night, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt.
“What do you need, Tyler?”
He cleared his throat, and I smiled as I heard the nervousness in his voice. I was never his coach, but he had spent more than enough time in sports to know that most of us liked to be spoken to with a certain regard. “I was wondering, if you weren’t busy, if you could come down to the store.”
If he was this hesitant when talking to other men, it was no mystery why he was still single.
“Is there a problem?” I asked him, knowing he wouldn’t have called without there being one.
He paused, which told me he was trying to find the right words to use. “I just think you should come down here if you can.”
I was tempted to ask what would happen if I didn’t, but I refrained. “Give me twenty minutes,” I said and hung up the phone.
I hadn’t been downtown this late on a weekend since… well, let’s just say for a while. There was more traffic on First Street than I would have guessed, the majority of it around Nancy’s. It was crowded with what looked like a full range of couples enjoying a meal. The sight of so many people in love made me feel cold for a moment as I remembered what having someone to just sit across from was like.
“Jack?” a voice called from the alley next to the diner.
I squinted and was barely able to make out Gayle, sitting outside finishing a cigarette. I trotted across the street toward her. “I didn’t know you smoked,” I said, my voice sounding harsher than I intended.
She shook her head as she took one last drag. “I don’t. At least, I didn’t. It’s a stress thing, I suppose. I don’t even inhale anymore. I think it is just the ritual that calms me down.” She tossed the butt down and ground it into the street with her heel.
“Stress?” I asked, surprised I was actually concerned.
She sighed and leaned against the side of her diner. “Dorothy Aimes came by. She’s filing for a divorce.”
I wasn’t sure how to react to that since her husband was a first-class idiot. “That’s a… bad thing?” I offered.
She laughed. “I suppose. Lord knows, after Kelly things haven’t been ideal, but I think it was the last straw. She told him tonight, and he went off on her, so she came over here to talk, and it just got to me. I mean, here she is, a strong-willed woman who used to be such a go-getter, and to see her crying because she wasn’t sure if she wants to leave that ass of a man… it just gets to me to see a strong woman tore up about a man who doesn’t deserve her. When did we as a gender become so scared of being alone that staying in a loveless relationship was better than leaving?”
It was the most I had heard her talk, and I had nothing to say back. It wasn’t that I didn’t agree or have opinions. I was just struck by how out there, with only part of her face lit by the streetlights, she looked a thousand times more delicate
than she normally did. If you were to ask anyone in town what would be around after a nuclear war, the most popular answers would be cockroaches and Gayle. And I am willing to bet you that she was a thousand times more resilient than the bugs. But seeing her right there, right now… it just reminded me that she was a woman too.
“Look at me blabbing away,” she said, standing up. And just like that, her mask slipped back into place, and she was good, invulnerable Gayle. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would have not believed it was true. “What has you out this late?”
Why was I there?
“Oh,” I said as my brain finally found a gear. “Needed to head over to Parker’s for something.” I stood there for a second, feeling like I was sixteen again and nothing in my body worked liked it was supposed to. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take, and I can tell you’re busy in there, and you probably aren’t even hungry, so it’s not a thing, but I was….”
She reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. “When you’re done, come over here, stop in, and we’ll have a coffee.”
The smile on my face felt foreign as I looked back at her. “I’d like that,” I said earnestly.
We stood there just looking at each other for several seconds before she said, “Well, go on over there and get whatever it is over with already. I’m not a young woman, and I don’t have time to dawdle.”
I chuckled as I turned and jogged back across the street.
“That’s some good hustle, Coach,” she called after me.
Damned if I didn’t feel my face get red as I walked into the store.
Parker was sitting behind the counter. In front of him was a catalog, and beside it was the uniform order. “You ask me down here to verify a uniform order?” I asked him, closing the door behind me. The implication was that we could have done that over the phone.
“No,” he said, standing up. “Well, yes and no.” He sounded conflicted and gestured to one of the stools. “You want a Coke?” he offered as he walked into the back room.
I thought about the coffee that was waiting across the street and waved him off. “I’m good. So what’s this about?”
He came back in with a bottle of Coke in his hand. In this light he looked like his father when he was younger. “Were you aware how tore up Brad was about Kelly Aimes’s suicide?”
It was the first time I had heard someone refer to the boy’s death as a suicide, and it was as shocking as I imagined it would be. “The whole town was affected,” I said, not sure where this was going.
“Yeah, but Brad and Kelly had a history,” he said, sitting across from me. “They were friends for a long time, and he is harboring a lot of guilt over the death.”
That made little to no sense to me. “Why? Wasn’t like Greymark was one of the kids riding Aimes about being gay. Why would he blame himself?”
Tyler sighed. “Because he is a teenage boy, and everything in the world is about him. It’s worse than anyone really knows. I think he’s been tearing himself up over it since Kelly died.”
I nodded, accepting his words but still not getting any closer to figuring out what this had to do with me or my uniforms. “Okay, so Brad is upset. That was what you wanted to tell me?”
“He is so upset that he wants to find a way to make it up to Kelly. Something that would settle his guilt and make him gain some closure.”
Again I had no idea where this was going, and then my eyes fell to the uniform order. “What did he do?” I growled.
Tyler got up and tried to calm me down. “He didn’t do anything. He asked me to do something, and I told him that I wouldn’t. But I think you should know about it.”
“What did he want to do?” I amended my question.
Tyler turned the catalog toward me and pointed to the open page. “He wanted me to order those.” I looked at where his finger was and read the description.
My eyes couldn’t pull away from the black armband. “They make these?” I asked him.
“I was surprised myself,” he admitted, sitting back down. “It’s based on the Texas Rangers’ tribute to Danny Thompson in ’77. I looked it up, and they are completely legal for play, but I told him I wasn’t going to go behind your back and order them.” I nodded my head in agreement. “Instead I decided to bring you down here so I could beg you to order them.”
I looked up at him in amazement.
“I know we don’t know each other well, and you don’t owe me a thing. But I am begging you, on behalf of every single person who is still mourning the loss of Kelly, to order these uniforms and let them wear them. These cost more, but I will personally pick up the difference. I’ll mark them down to cost if you want. Just, please, let the team wear them for the season.”
His voice was nothing but emotion. It was obvious he was not used to asking for things.
“I can’t make a decision like this,” I said, knowing that was a half lie even as I uttered it. I could make a decision like this; I just shouldn’t because Raymond would lose his ever-loving mind. He wanted nothing more than for this whole incident to go away, and dedicating our entire season to Kelly, wearing tribute uniforms, was the farthest thing from going away you could get.
Tyler sighed and looked down. “I understand, Coach. Look, I don’t want to get Brad into any trouble. He was just trying to step up and do something for Kelly. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t punish him for this.”
I could do this; I could tell him to order these, and it would be just another nail in my coffin at Foster. Raymond would have it out for me, and anything less than a state championship would mean I was gone, and even a win didn’t guarantee anything. It was just too risky, not for something that was just symbolic.
I looked out the windows and saw the diner. Gayle was talking to someone as she took their order, and I suddenly felt ashamed. When did I become this scared man? Was he born when Becca died? And if the man I’d been was gone, then what was left? I traced a finger over my Marine Corps ring and saw our motto shine back at me.
Semper fidelis: always faithful.
Tyler was still talking, no doubt trying to convince me to change my mind, but I hadn’t heard any of it. I was tired of being scared, and it ended now.
“Order them,” I said, cutting him off. “Order them, and tell Brad you did it, but don’t tell him you talked to me.”
He paused as he tried to figure that out. “Why?” he finally asked.
“Because they need a bad guy,” I said, smiling. “They need something they all agree with to rally behind, and they need someone to stand up to. Order them, Tyler, and I will pay the extra cost for them. Just don’t tell Brad we talked. Let him think he talked you into it.”
“But… but he should know what you did,” he sputtered as I stood up. “I mean, he should know you’re on his side, Coach.”
I smiled at him. “And he will, after I spend the entire season seeming to be upset about his choice. Then I will slowly get wore down until I can admit to him that he changed my mind.” I looked Tyler right in the eye. “He needs a win—they all do. The kids at Foster need a real, solid win. And I plan on giving it to them.”
With that, I turned around and began to walk out. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I am keeping a lady waiting.” I tipped my imaginary hat to him and walked out to cross the street.
It was time to stop being afraid of a lot of things in life.
MARCH 25: EVERYBODY TALKS
Everybody talks, everybody talks.
Everybody talks too much.
—Neon Trees
81 days left
BRAD
I RUSHED into the classroom, trying to make as little noise as possible.
“Mr. Greymark,” Mr. Powers called from the front of the room. “I know the baseball team is on a seven-game winning streak, but that does not mean you can walk into my class at any time you wish.” This was a dick move, because he was wasting more time bitching about me wasting his time than me coming in late did.
&nbs
p; “I’m sorry, Mr. Powers, won’t happen again.” I used my humblest voice and even gave him a quarter of my aw-shucks smile. I have been told it gives me the appearance of a scolded puppy and makes it almost impossible to continue to berate me any further.
He sighed. “Take your seat, and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Chalk another one up for the patented puppy eyes.
I moved to the back of the room and sat next to Jennifer, who was rolling her eyes at me. Her expression grew innocent, and she pantomimed sniveling a bit. “It w-won’t happen again, Mr. Powers.” I flipped her off as I pulled out my book. “One of these days that stare isn’t going to work, and you are going to be in actual trouble.”
I shook my head and pretended to look at the board. “Never happen. The power of the puppy eyes is foolproof.”
She laughed and pretended to watch Powers talk. “So let me guess—you’re late again because you were making the sex with Kyle?”
I looked over at her and said quietly, “I really think I created a monster.”
Jennifer paused. “Kyle?”
I nodded. “All he wants to do is have sex. I mean, all the time.” I looked around to make sure no one could hear us. “Like all, all the time.”
She gave me a strange look. “And this is bad how?”
“I’m tired!” I explained.
I was tired and sore. We had won seven games straight but not without a cost. We had paid for every single run with hours of agonizing practice that left me with about enough energy to kick off my shoes before I passed out. I had never been so tired in all my life, but I had no time to rest. As soon as we were alone Kyle would start kissing me, stripping me naked, and next thing I knew we were having sex.
