Athletic Shorts: Six Short Stories

  The guy I’d really like to ask about all this is André, but what if my dad found out I went to a you-know-what instead of him? But if my dad made a mistake about them, I wonder if he could of made a mistake about the other colors, too.

  In the Time I Get

  PREFACE

  IN THE TIME I GET

  We’re all bigots. All of us prejudge people on some basis, be it race, sex, sexual preference, height, age, or any of scores of categories we use to make ourselves seem superior when we are, in fact, feeling inferior.

  In the past school year, after his football coach had ordered an illegal hit on a black player from another team, Louie Banks took a righteous stand against racial bigotry and stood his ground heroically as he was stripped of his starting position on the team and generally ridiculed for “not having the stomach” to play Trout football. When all was said and done, Louie was proud of his conduct and eventually saw himself as stronger for resisting the pressure to conform.

  But we’re all bigots, Louie Banks included. Now, in the summer following his year of Running Loose, another challenge, in the form of his own bigotry, stands before him to be confronted. And the stakes are friendship and basic human dignity.

  IN THE TIME I GET

  I met him in the Buckhorn Bar two weeks after high school graduation. He was tall and thin, with jet black slick-backed hair and a manner I could now only describe as elegant. I guessed the loggers and cowboys who drank here every weekend wouldn’t use that word. At the time neither would I.

  I said, “Hi. I’m Louie. Louie Banks. I work here for Dakota. Daytime stuff. You know, replace the kegs, mop up last night’s war, run some errands. Who are you?” It was seven-thirty in the morning, and I hadn’t expected anyone. Dakota never gets down from his room over the bar until around ten or so when I’m finishing up, so usually I bypass the coin slot and stack up enough country tunes on the ancient Wurlitzer to get through the mop-down and all the dirty glasses.

  “Hi,” he said back. “I’m Darren. I’m working for my uncle for the summer.”

  “Dakota your uncle?”

  “You people call him Dakota. To me he’s Uncle Gene.”

  “That right? Uncle Gene, huh? I don’t think I’ve ever heard his real name. I didn’t know he had any relatives. I mean, I never even pictured him having—Jesus, why don’t I just shut up?” I put out my hand, and he clasped it in a brief, firm grip. “Wonder why Dakota didn’t tell me you were coming?” I thought out loud.

  “He didn’t know. I only called a week or so ago, so he didn’t have a lot of time to prepare. I haven’t seen him for some time, but I visited here often when I was little.”

  “Where you from?”

  “East Coast,” he said. “A little town just outside Harrisburg. That’s in Pennsylvania.”

  I smiled. “I just got out of high school,” I said. “I know where Harrisburg is. And Baton Rouge, and Pierre, and Providence.”

  He laughed back. “And Augusta, and Tallahassee. I didn’t just get out of high school, but state capitals are about all that sticks with you from those days. That and chemistry valences.”

  This guy had just summed up my whole school experience, though my transcript indicates chemistry valences didn’t stick. I liked him, though something made me uneasy. “Right. Don’t they know if you’re ever in any of those cities, you’ll see the statehouse and know it’s the capital?”

  He laughed. Then he said straight out, “You’re the guy who lost his girlfriend.”

  Caught off guard and pretty much speechless, I no longer liked him.

  “You don’t want to talk about it.” He said it as a statement of fact.

  “That’s not it, exactly,” I said, partially recovered. Then: “Yeah, I guess that is it.”

  “Well, if you want to, sometime, not necessarily now, I’d like it if you talked about it with me.”

  I said thanks but didn’t really mean it. This guy didn’t know me. I barely knew his name. You don’t just walk up to somebody and cram a hot branding iron into his tenderest part before you even know if he has a dog or where he’s going to college or if he’s a vegetarian or something, and I resented that. No wonder Dakota hadn’t told me about him; he was probably embarrassed. I snatched a wet rag from the back sink and began wiping off the bar, pretending to ignore Darren sitting on a stool at the end of it. Then I decided to hell with manners and punched up a few country tunes on the Wurlitzer. That should send him hightailing it back where he came from.

  Emmy Lou came on first, singing her sweet dreams, with Patsy Cline right behind her, singing exactly the same tune. Old Rob Simes and Nolton Brubaker near to killed each other one night just before closing time, trying to settle who sings the sweetest dreams. Nolton won the fight, so that put Emmy Lou up one, but if you listen close, it’s hard to pick. Patsy’s got some heart. Plus she gets a few points for singing it first. And probably a few more for dying young.

  Anyway, I stuck in some Hank Williams, Jr., and George Jones and Merle Haggard to let him know what kind of a tough corral he’d done rode into and got on back to my work.

  “You’re angry,” he said.

  I looked up, faking surprise. “Huh?”

  “You’re angry. I offended you when I asked about your girl.”

  “No, I’m not angry,” I said. I can be so chickenshit sometimes. I swore that I’d quit doing that when Becky died, that I’d be honest no matter what it took, because you never know when you won’t have the chance to go back and tell the truth. “I’m just in a hurry to get my stuff done, that’s all. I’m not mad.”

  “Then why are you punishing me with that?” he said, nodding toward the jukebox. “It was an offense, but it wasn’t a felony.”

  I smiled and dropped my rag on the bar. “Okay,” I said. “I’m a little sensitive, I guess. A lot. Nobody I knew ever died before. And I didn’t handle it so great if you want to know the truth. I mean, I trashed her funeral, yelled a lot of bad things about God, really messed up some people’s heads….” In my mind I saw my best friend and my worst enemy, a hand under each arm, helping me out of the church through the stunned silence of the congregation. That’s how crazy it was.

  Darren put up a hand. “You don’t have to explain anything to me. I just wanted you to know I knew about her so you wouldn’t be careful around me. We’re going to be working together and all. I know a little bit about death.”

  I let his last sentence pass, wondering why Dakota had told him. Is that how people refer to me now? That guy? Oh, that’s Louie Banks. His girlfriend died….

  Darren asked me to show him around, so I reached around the back of the Wurlitzer and kicked the volume down a couple pegs, then gave him the grand tour—which lasts maybe ten minutes—through the back storage coolers and into the narrow opening off the end of the bar where Dakota keeps all the beer nuts and pickled things, like eggs and pigs’ feet and jalapeño peppers. If it don’t go down easy, pickle it.

  He told me he was twenty-five years old and that he went to college at Penn State for two years before deciding to take a break and travel around the country for a while, till he could decide what he wanted to do in the world and quit wasting his tuition on Early Tibetan Philosophies and Creative Uses for Nuclear Waste, which I don’t think is really a class but made the point. I told him I was almost eighteen and headed for a little college up in eastern Washington called Clark State, where I had a partial scholarship to run cross-country. He said since he dropped out of the university, his parents weren’t exactly ecstatic about the way he was living his life and had written him out of his inheritance, which was one reason he came clear across the country to see Dakota. Dakota was never real close to his parents anyway, Darren said, even though Darren’s dad was Dakota’s half brother. He said the inheritance was worth probably more than a million dollars, but it didn’t mean much anymore. I said it was hard to imagine a million dollars not meaning much, that I could be written out of my parents’ will and never know the diff
erence, given what they had to put in it, but that they stood by me in the very worst of times. I said I didn’t know if that was better than a million dollars, but it had to be the next best thing.

  He said it was the best thing. Then he told me about his death sentence. Darren had AIDS.

  What I did is I panicked. I did my all-time sloppiest cleaning job and left before I found out any of the things I would want to know later: like did Dakota know, and how long did he have, and how could I get him to stay away from me if he was going to die because that was just what had happened to me already. Darren must have seen how messed up I was, because he backed way off and didn’t say anything more except to ask me not to tell anybody. I said okay, because how could I say no, but God, I knew I’d end up telling somebody, because AIDS isn’t something you just get, like flu. How you get it is the thing. I instantly knew why I’d felt uneasy before; his elegance was something I normally associated with someone who’s a homo.

  So who do you talk to about that? Nobody I knew. I did know I wanted to get as far from him as I could. I’d had about all the death I needed for a while, and everybody knows you stay as far away from faggots as you can.

  So I lay in my bed that night, long after midnight, twisting and turning so much the sheets almost mummified me, repulsed by what I thought about Darren, and maybe a little ashamed because I thought it, because this voice in me kept saying, “Hey, this guy is dying, and no matter what else is going on, still, he’s dying,” and I knew a little bit about how final that is. Those mixed-up thoughts got me thinking too much about Becky, which created so much anxiety I knew I wouldn’t get one bit more sleep, and the only thing to do was get up and run.

  My family doesn’t get alarmed anymore—or try to stop me—when I run in the middle of the night, though my little sister calls me Night Speed and asks in front of my friends whether I wear a cape. Night runs have been my common practice since the funeral, and they think it’s what I do to keep my head on straight, which is correct.

  The moon was nearly full, and I watched my faded shadow skim over the pocked blacktop stretching the three miles toward the river bridge where Becky crashed that day. I’ve never told anybody this—people think I’m crazy enough as it is—but I still talk to her sometimes. The reason I loved her so much—besides that she was heartbreak pretty—was that she made sense in ways most adults in my life don’t. She was less cautious—ready to take risks—and she always saw things from a simpler perspective. Plus she stood up for herself, which is the hardest thing for me. Christ, after Coach Lednecky ordered a killer hit on Kevin Washington to put him out of the Salmon River game because he was afraid one player—one black player—would wreck our perfect season, it must have taken me fifty attempts to quit. I wanted to be on the football team so bad I kept forgetting what I believed in. Quit. Want back. Quit. Want back. You’d have thought someone nailed one of my feet to the ground and whipped me with a quirt. But Becky stood right up and said what she thought, and that helped me finally stick to it, and it’s the main reason I still talk to her; because I can listen to her voice and then steal her words for myself and sometimes it works because her words have so much integrity.

  So have me committed. I hear voices.

  What I said to Becky, and I’m not proud of it, was this: “So what if this guy’s a faggot? So what do I do then?”

  I think it’s good to ask a dead person about someone who’s going to die. Becky didn’t answer. That should have meant something.

  After the night of my midnight run I avoided Darren like he had AIDS. I hated knowing his awful secret, and I resented the hell out of him for telling me—like I was supposed to do something about it. I began cleaning the Buckhorn at odd hours when I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be there, or I’d take Carter with me so Darren wouldn’t have a chance to talk. He never pushed, but sometimes I’d see him looking at me in a way that made me do a major-league squirm. God, I wanted him to go back where he came from. For one thing, what does it mean when some homo likes you? Just ask anyone.

  “So what do ya think of my nephew?” Dakota came down early that day, caught me sneaking around cleaning at 6:00 A.M. He couldn’t have had more than three and a half hours’ sleep.

  “He’s okay,” I said. “Haven’t seen him around too much. He work till closing?”

  Dakota nodded, hoisting himself up on the bar. The bar’s got holes all over in it from him doing that. One of his hands is a hook. “Yeah. He says you’re keepin’ clear of him.”

  I looked away, stacking dirty glasses from a tray beneath the bar, while my face burned and my heart hammered. I can’t lie to Dakota. When Becky died, he saw me naked.

  Dakota came in the side door of the Buckhorn. We were two hours past my having completely trashed Becky’s funeral, screaming at the big-city preacher who didn’t even know her, cursing God Himself before the horrified eyes and ears of the congregation. Dakota would have been well within the confines of decent human behavior to kick my butt across the bar and back. But he looked to my pain. “Figured that must be you,” he said. “Want some company?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

  He stood there in the doorway and just looked at me. Finally he said, “Louie, it ain’t safe.”

  “You’re right,” I said, “it isn’t. I gotta tell you, Dakota, I don’t get it. Man, what did Becky ever do to get killed? What did any of us ever do? It just ain’t right.”

  “Nope,” he said. “It ain’t right, that’s for sure.”

  For only the second time since she died, I burst into tears. My chest heaved, and snot ran from my nose in ropes. “It’s just not fair,” I said. “Where’s God, Dakota? Where is He?”

  “Louie,” he said, “I ain’t educated much; but I listen pretty good and I see pretty good, and one thing I’m sure of is that if there’s a God, that ain’t His job. He ain’t up there to load the dice one way or the other.” He paused, thinking, and his voice went soft. “Boy, if you come through this, you’ll be a man. There’s one thing that separates a man from a boy the way I see it, and it ain’t age. It’s seein’ how life works so you don’t get surprised all the time and kicked in the butt. It’s knowin’ the rules.”

  “The rules,” I said. “How can you know the damn rules? They keep changing.”

  “Naw, they don’t,” he said. “It’s just that you have to learn the new ones as you go. That’s the hard part. Learnin’ the new rules when they show theirselves. You go on blamin’ God, you get no place. You got to understand that the reason some things happen is just because they happen. That ain’t a good reason, but that’s it. You put enough cars and trucks and motorcycles on the road, and some of ’em gonna run into each other. Not certain ones neither. Just the ones that do. This life ain’t partial, boy.”

  As I started out the door, he stopped me. “Louie.”

  “Yeah?”

  “If you was walkin’ in the middle of the road an’ you saw a big ol’ truck comin’ right at ya, you wouldn’t stop an’ ask the Lord to get you out of the way, would ya?”

  “No,” I said. “I’d probably just get off the road.”

  “Well then, don’t be goin’ askin’ Him to get ya out of the way of all the other crap that’s comin’ at ya.” He held up his hook and looked at it. “You go on an’ take care of it yourself.”

  Dakota lives in my soul. To my credit, I didn’t try to lie to him about Darren. “Yeah, I guess I am keeping clear of him. You know why?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Do you know about him, Dakota?”

  “Tell me.”

  “He’s sick.”

  “Bet he told you not to tell me that.”

  “He did, but—”

  “Did you tell him you’d keep quiet?”

  “Yeah, but—Dakota, I don’t know what to do.”

  “Well, if you said you’d keep quiet, you should keep quiet.”

  “But—”

  He nodded slowly, scratching the end of his nose
with the hook. Someday he’s going to slip. “It’s a test, Louie. He asked ya not to tell. Ain’t many places that boy is safe. You must know that.”

  “So you know?”

  His eyes said yes, but he didn’t nod or speak.

  “Can you tell me how—”

  Dakota shook his head. “Nope. I said I’d keep quiet.”

  Frustration clogged my throat. One of the worst things ever would be losing Dakota. “Dakota, I don’t know what to do!”

  “Ain’t much precedent for it,” he said. “Leastways not around here. Guess you do what you want.”

  “But—”

  “Louie. Anything you wanna know you got to ask him. I got no better ideas than you ’cept to tell the truth.”