Run. He thinks this word over and over as his long legs carry him, jump him over and around obstacles threatening to take him down. Run. Run. Run. Ten more yards. Twenty. Thirty. Forty.
And then he is there. Alone in the end zone. As shocked as everyone else appears to be. At first he does not know what to do—Marshall should have been there, he thinks. His teammates have broken free of the end-of-season worn-out white line of lime that keeps them on the sidelines, off the field of play. They are charging toward him.
“We’re going to state! We’re going to state!” The shouts surround him. Arms reach around him, hoisting him up on shoulders and he is bumpily carried along part of the field, toward the coach. In the dusk, his smile real, his happiness completely filling him so that he feels he might burst wide open. He raises his fist in the air like theirs all are but his is the one noticed, his is the one they all see from the sidelines. The Murrays turn to leave now that they are sure their dead boy’s team will carry on just fine without him. Parents of the rest of the players clap and cheer. But in Henry’s head there is silence. Beautiful, complete silence.
When he is deposited back down, the Fridge gives him a huge bear hug that lifts him again off the ground.
He trots past the team, past the coach who says “good work out there, son,” past the parents who say things like “way to go, Welly,” and “good job.” Off to the side of the regulars, the ones who come to every game, the ones who know which number is which player, who sometimes even argue helplessly against a referee’s call, to where Edgar Powell is buttoned up against the cold in his winter overcoat, a dress coat that fits handsomely over his three-piece suit. Henry slows his approach and his father looks down at first, but when his son is right there in front of him he looks up.
“I’m proud of you, Henry,” he says. He extends his hand and Henry takes it. Firmly shaking it. When his father’s grip begins to relax Henry tightens up his own, reluctant to let this moment end.
“Thanks, Dad.”
With a sliver of hesitation, just a tiny sneeze of a moment, Henry puts the car into Reverse, backs out of the parking lot and back into 1999.
Chapter nineteen
2000
Henry is looking forward to his lunch. He made a week’s worth of lasagna the night before and purposely did not eat any for dinner because his intention is only to eat it for lunch and, anyway, he has always been of the belief that most Italian dishes are better the next day.
He hangs his overcoat in his locker, pushing the shoulders side-ways so when he shuts the locker door it won’t slide off the hanger in the banging. He keeps meaning to switch out hangers for one from the store that is meant to keep this from happening (the kind with a thin foam grip on the arms) but once the locker door is shut he forgets all about it. He puts his Tupperware container in the minifridge and sees that Mr. Beardsley, too, has brought in a lunch. Recovering from hip-replacement surgery has prevented his boss from walking up the street to Larry’s Diner like Henry does most days. They have never eaten lunch together as they spell each other on the floor. Which is a relief to Henry, who is accustomed to reading the newspaper silently while he eats. And to Mr. Beardsley reading the newspaper is a group activity over which he presides, happily doling out topics worthy of discussion. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he might say, looking up to catch his companion’s attention and then will proceed to read aloud whatever it is that has caught his eye. This happens every eight minutes or so. Henry timed it a while back one day when they technically did not even need to open the store, the snow was so bad no one was leaving their homes. But it had been a snow day for schoolchildren and Mr. Beardsley called him to tell him to please find a way in because mothers might take advantage of the day off to get errands done. But not a single soul entered so Mr. Beardsley read the paper sitting there at the counter by the cash register. Every eight minutes reading some inanity out loud to Henry. Never anything that might interest him (never sports). “The jury awarded two-point-nine million dollars to that woman who sued McDonald’s for being scalded by coffee. Can you believe that?” or “Wow. Turns out Ron Brown was on that plane that went down in Croatia. Poor guy.” Or “Chrysler and Daimler-Benz are merging. Huh. What do you make of that?”
Henry emerges from the back room and sees Mr. Beardsley waving the sign at him indicating that it is time.
“You’re the traditional town crier,” Mr. Beardsley says as Henry nears. “You’ve always been the one to put the sign in the window. So, my dear sir—” he says this part bowing, making a big show of the first day of the sale “—would you be so kind as to fill your Baxter’s role with the same flourish and gusto with which…”
“All right, all right,” Henry says, taking the sign from him. Mr. Beardsley was trailing off, anyway.
He carefully puts it in the same corner up in the front window and unlocks the doors while he is there even though it is only a quarter until ten. Fifteen minutes early. Lately he has found he has less energy to run back and forth across the store so he multitasks whenever he can. “Multitask”—a term he has only recently and somewhat begrudgingly absorbed. Typically Henry avoids words or expressions that appear out of nowhere and threaten to disappear just as quickly. “Twenty-four-seven” is one such example he cannot abide. No sirree. “No sirree,” he proudly notes, transcends time.
They sit and wait. Henry busying himself with making sure the shirts on the ladder display are equally spaced.
Late morning, things really pick up and Henry is relieved for the break in monotony. A thirty-something man comes in and though he asks questions about a sport coat he ends up buying a golf shirt in a loud color that, in Henry’s estimation, will never look good on him, and a pair of Dockers. Another, older, man comes in to see if any of the dress shirts are on sale and Henry tells him why yes they are in fact everything in the store is on sale and the old man nods and says I’ll be right back and never is.
The mothers come, though. The mothers always come, Henry thinks. And somewhere along the line in the past few years mothers got more attractive. He notes the flat bellies where paunches used to be. Flat bellies on women wearing tight jeans (how else would he know about the flatness?) with sometimes two children in tow. He cannot imagine his own mother ever looking like this. So “put on” as if going shopping in town were an event. For her it had been, yes, somewhat social when they were very young, but she never got dressed for it in the way these women seem to.
Soon it is lunch and Henry retreats to the quiet of the back room for the lasagna. He unfolds the newspaper on the table next to his container but hesitates, trying to remember what it was he told himself he’d think about at his earliest free minute. What was it, what was it? he wonders. And then poof the thought hiccups its way back into his mind: that girl who used to sit one row in front of him in Western Civ. It was a survey course so it was in the auditorium, which had seemed like a treat to Henry. To have class in upholstered seats. Like it was a Broadway show. He loved that class in all its Feudal Law and Spanish Inquisition glory. All that and a redhead in front of him. He hadn’t even minded the fact that it was a 9:00 a.m. class. Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays.
Her name was Rita. He is pleased he remembers this part. Rita. He’d borrowed her notes several times after he’d missed class—regrettably—for away games. She wrote lowercase a like a typewriter would. In the margins of his notes he’d tried to do the same but his a looked like a cowering d, ashamed of itself for some alphabetical misdeed.
He’d masturbated to the thought of Rita plenty of times but never found the courage to ask her out. Something about her told him he’d have been rejected. Maybe it was the way she flicked her hair over her shoulder. She was nice about lending him her notes to be photocopied in the student center where there was always a line for the machine, but once when he suggested they meet at The Pub (across the street from campus) for him to return her notebook she’d said “Um, would you mind just leaving it for me at the front desk at Taubman??
?? Taubman was her dorm.
Rita. Rita. How’d he think of her again? Oh yes. He’d had a customer that morning who’d had the same color hair. Red but not too red. The kind of red that can look brown in a certain light. Not stripper red. This woman was looking for something for her father. He’d liked the way she rolled her eyes when she saw the price on the golf shirt he’d shown her. A natural eye roll, not a socialist one, for his benefit (“I’m with you, man. I’m not one of them,” the roll said), but genuine surprise that something as simple as a forest-green golf shirt could cost over one hundred dollars. She had tried to fold it back up before he took it from her gently. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.” “Sorry,” she had said.
He’d answered “That’s what I’m here for” and regretted the clear indication that he was merely being nice to her because he was an employee.
“I was thinking of something around fifty dollars,” she said. “Maybe a windbreaker? My dad likes to hike. I’m thinking something light would be good—he can tie it around his waist just in case.”
Henry resists the urge to tell her men don’t like tying things around their waists and instead nods approvingly and leads her over to sportswear.
Rita had huge breasts. He remembered that. Huge. Sitting behind and slightly above her he’d noticed—on a day when she wore a tank top (that fall semester had been unseasonably warm up until November)—her bra straps digging canals into her shoulders, they were that big. She sat with someone—a blonde?—who appeared to be a close friend in that they whispered a lot to each other even during class. But Rita’s friend was petite and high-breasted and threw Rita into Ethel Mertz relief when they were side by side. Rita’s breasts parted crowds during the busy time between classes and it wasn’t long after the Taubman book drop that he saw her walking with a loud guy he knew from his dorm who always wore a Schaefer Beer T-shirt that read The One Beer to Have When You’re Having More Than One underneath the logo.
Henry finds himself hard thinking about Rita. And he realizes that is why he is thinking about her. He hasn’t masturbated in days. Can’t even remember the last time. He keeps a travel-size bottle of Jergens lotion in his locker for just such occasions but just as he opens his locker he thinks of the redhead he had waited on. When he’d asked her what kind of windbreaker her father would prefer (over the head or zipper-down) she’d said, “I don’t know. He’s your age about—what kind would you want?”
This thought deflates him and it’s all for the best, Henry sighs to himself, closing his locker, because Ramon walks in.
“Beardsley’s calling you,” he says. “He wants to know what’s taking you so long?”
“Sorry but it’s getting crazy out here,” Mr. Beardsley says when Henry comes back onto the floor.
He looks around and realizes it is not that it is crazy, it is that Mr. Beardsley either got lonely, which he is doing with more frequency these days when Henry leaves the floor even for the shortest period of time, or else he is hungry, too, and wants to take his lunch break.
“Okay. Whew—” Mr. Beardsley wipes his brow as if sweat has developed there “—now that it’s a bit more under control I think I might go have a bite in the back as well.”
The wind is blowing hard up Main Street. An unforgiving, unrelenting wind that whips the snow off branches and in doing so makes it appear as if it is snowing all over again. Every customer entering the store is pushed in by the winter weather, on which nearly all of them comment. “It’s horrible out there,” one will say. “Cold enough for you?” from another. Most step inside so quickly they don’t mind, notice or are at all grateful for the fact that Henry and Mr. Beardsley tightened the springs on the front doors this fall so they shut quicker. Every little bit helps, said Mr. Beardsley at the time: he is becoming more concerned with heating costs and in the warmer summer months, air-conditioning. He’d determined, Mr. Beardsley had, that the time it took for the door to float shut would allow too much cold air to cause the thermostat to misread the overall store temperature and therefore remain engaged for much longer than was actually necessary.
So they tightened the springs. A move Henry considers an act of genius because just now Neal Peterson flings the door open to add pomp to the circumstance of his arrival but the door—with its newly tightened springs—slams his backside.
He tries to pretend it has not happened but Henry’s grin will not allow it.
“Neal Peterson.” Henry walks to him, hand extended. Emboldened by Peterson’s humbling. “How the heck are you?”
For many, aging is a contest. Some choose to beat back nature and throw themselves into exercise, a healthful eating regimen, perhaps a disavowal of old vices bent on defeating them. Others make peace with it and, while not ignoring the fact that their bodies are shifting, seem almost amused by the weight redistributing itself, lines—wrinkles—reminding them of past laughs or frowns. Then there are those who give in to it altogether.
Neal Peterson has fallen into the latter bracket—shocking to Henry as he’d overestimated Peterson’s vanity. With a Ted Kennedy sort of bloating that wears just fine with Top-Siders and a ketch on the open seas but appears less jovial, more pathetic in town, Peterson looks much older than Henry. Henry wonders if it is still referred to as premature balding if the subject is forty—that wouldn’t be premature, then, would it? he thinks. Peterson has lost all the hair on top of his head, only a Caesar laurel leaf wreath of hair remains. His cheeks, now fat, are shiny not from the cold—that sort of redness generally wears off once inside the store if wind-caused—but from drink. Henry assumes the down parka is constraining him to the point of his arms not being able to properly fall to his sides, but when Peterson unzips his coat it affords no extra room for movement. All of Peterson’s clothes are too tight.
“Good, I’m fine,” he says, shaking Henry’s hand. “I thought I might find you here.”
Henry knows this is Peterson’s way of volleying back for the smirk Henry broke out into at his botched entry. The emphasis on thought implies, Henry knows, an expectation on Neal Peterson’s part, of dormancy.
“Yep, I’m here,” Henry says. You will not intimidate me, you big jerk. For a second he considers thinking a much stronger word, the kind Geigan might use for instance, but decides against it because he will not sink to that level for someone like Neal Peterson and besides these are just his thoughts. So maybe he should have thought the word asshole like he really wanted to. Henry has, of late, become troubled by his errant thought patterns appearing out of nowhere. Recently he had a similar thought about a much worse word. Henry Powell is not a racist, he thought to himself a few weeks ago. Not by the most remote definition even, no sir, he is color-blind and proud of it, thank you very much. It sickens him to think that just a few weeks ago, while treating himself to a dinner out and being waited on by a new server at a new restaurant called Imogene’s down the road, a certain ugly word whispered itself into his ear. A word that has shaken him to the core. Called into question everything he thought he was. The n-word. A tiny moment that, if converted to a video image, would have amounted to a subliminal message inserted into a television commercial, not even a second in length. A burp in time. He had looked into her beautiful black face and thought the n-word. Really what he’d thought was “what if I lost control of my faculties for just one teensy second and said the n-word out loud?” But that counts as having thought the word and Henry is disgusted with himself for it.
So Henry thinks of Neal Peterson as a jerk not an asshole.
Two more customers enter immediately after Peterson and they are the sort that like to be hard sold. It used to confound Henry, this kind of person. The type that wants to buy something, they just don’t know what. So they will offer themselves up as suggestible—a phenomenon Henry remembers learning about in Interpersonal Communications that fall semester. He and his fellow students had read that children especially can be highly suggestible in interview situations. There was a
n experiment offered up as evidence: “Your mother likes to cook you dinner, doesn’t she?” and the child is nodding yes yes she loves to cook me dinner of course she loves cooking me dinner (the interviewer nodding encouragingly). But the mother had expressly stated she hates the kitchen and cooking and anything having to do with it within the child’s hearing not moments before being interviewed.
These customers come in and don’t brush him off right away when he asks if they are looking for something special. “Noooo, not really” will draw out. Their hand will touch this sweater and that, feel the arm of this hunting (but not really hunting) jacket—the English kind—remarking on how surprisingly soft it feels (“Huh. It looks so stiff on the hanger” they’ll murmur). “No, not really” is lingering in the air, ready to be refuted by an invisible and unspoken “Sure you are. You know you’re looking for something. Let me show you what I think you should buy today…” and Henry obliges, even though he was at first unfamiliar with their nonverbal cues.
The customers stomping off the cold after Peterson are a young married couple well matched in their mutual desire to spend money that exhibits itself almost immediately, before the cold has left their nostrils. “Oh, honey, look, here’s that flannel overshirt thingey you saw in that catalog the other night,” the wife calls out to her husband. The husband is sizing up the dress shirts, pants, socks, all of it, happy to be inside out of the cold and with his pretty wife’s company in this new town of theirs in a store that hasn’t yet overpriced every goddamn thing like Ralph Lauren who used to have similar weekend-in-the-Northeast clothing at prices those who didn’t own weekend homes in the Northeast could afford but now, no, now he has everything priced so high it’s like natural selection, like you’re only allowed to buy these clothes if you own a weekend home, but places like this are throwbacks, the real deals the way it should be in small towns outside larger cities in the Northeast so fuck you Ralph Lauren we found the back door.