Deadline

  I do a quick recap. I’m coming off one of the best all-around days of my life: we kicked the Council Lumberjacks’ asses into the hills, I’ve been dancing and talking and being cool with a girl who could own me with a frighteningly low bid, it’s half past midnight and that girl is inviting me into her empty house. I have no idea what she has in mind because everything about her so far, starting with her giving me a second look, has caught me off-guard. I don’t have a curfew because my romantic history is such that my parents never thought I needed one. Submit this story to an editor and it’s returned as too much fantasy even for fantasy.

  “Sure,” I say. “I can come in for a little while.”

  Now I don’t kiss and tell and I think only dickwads brag about their sexual conquests, but I’m dying and this is my first and final story and I have to say it like it is. We get to the part in the Friday Night Lights DVD where the cheerleader takes the quarterback into the bathroom to make him prove he’s not gay, and all of a sudden we’re up in Dallas’s bedroom and I’m proving I’m not gay.

  “Whoa! What was that?” I’m lying in Dallas Suzuki’s bed with her and I am out of my element and I probably don’t have to tell you what an understatement that is.

  “That was sex,” Dallas says, and rolls over facing away. I’m thinking I don’t want to be one of those guys who scores and leaves, like they talk about in every Men Are Pigs HBO comedy special, so I’m already thinking of excuses on the outside chance my mother is still up and running, keeping Dad awake. I don’t have a curfew, but they do expect me home sometime. A flat tire won’t do it; you can walk from one end of Trout to the other in about thirty minutes. Even if you’re coming from the old graveyard it’s about an hour. Two stud athletes like me and Dallas could make it in forty minutes. Can’t say one of my relatives died; Mom and Dad are my relatives. I’m working on a really stupid story about having had to drive Dallas to Boise because of some emergency her mother had….

  “You’d better get your stuff and go,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Get your stuff and go.”

  “I’m not one of those guys who—”

  She rolls over and smiles. “I’m one of those girls who,” she says and tweaks me on my cheek. “Go home or you’re gonna get in trouble.”

  I’m sitting on the end of the bed pulling on my shoes. “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to think.”

  “You’re supposed to think you just had a really nice time,” she says.

  DUH! “I’d like it if I was supposed to think that you just had a really nice time, too.”

  “You should think that, too.”

  “Yeah, but what beyond that?”

  “Don’t go there.” She sits up, holding the sheet high with one hand and cupping my chin in the other. “Hey, Little Wolf,” she says. “We’re cool, okay? Now go home before your parents send the cops. It’s after two.”

  I sit at the lake in my pickup, staring at the half-moon reflecting off the water. I want to close my eyes and dream up Hey-Soos, but that requires getting the other part of me out of the way and so far, I can only do that in near-dream state, and that requires bed. My mind skips like a flat rock sailed onto the glass-smooth surface of that lake. I can’t tell if I’m closer to Dallas or further away. I wanted more response; wanted her to want me to stay. But if we are closer, then what? I mean, I’m like the worst kind of army brat or something, here for the year and then gone. Only I’m really gone.

  Well into September

  Seven

  “I’ve spent as much time as I’m going to on the basic structure of our government,” Lambeer says. “We’ve covered the material well in spite of Mr. Wolf’s attempted blockades, and your book serves as a solid reference. I expect you to know that structure when you address an issue. Clear?” When Lambeer says, “Clear?” it isn’t really a question. He’s telling you it is.

  “Fifty percent of your grade will come from your civics project,” he says, “so those of you who haven’t, best be selecting one. Again, you can choose from the handout I gave you on the first day, or you can conjure up your own, though of course it will be subject to my judgment.” He stops beside my desk. “What is this you’re reading, Mr. Wolf?” He touches my paperback with his pointer.

  “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” I tell him.

  “Interesting taste,” he says. “Have you something against Dr. King?”

  “Nope,” I say, “but Malcolm was a pretty interesting guy. Came up the hard way.”

  “Indeed. He had some radical ideas, don’t you think? A little far from the mainstream.”

  “I’m not done with the book yet, but yeah, I’d say he was a little out of the mainstream.”

  “Far enough out to get him gunned down by his own people,” Lambeer says.

  Cody says, “Aw, man, you ruined the ending for him.”

  Lambeer taps my head with the pointer. “You have a clever brother. I suspect you already knew the ending. By the way, you’re one of the few who hasn’t chosen your project. Can you have it by the end of the week?”

  “That I can, sir.”

  In the cafeteria Cody and I sit at a table alone, going over this week’s defenses. Dallas drops her tray next to Cody. “Oh, you big tough football boys, teach me the basics of your game. How come all the guys who play football have such big shoulders?”

  “Those aren’t real,” Cody says. “We wear shoulder pads. Hey, Dallas.”

  Dallas plops onto the bench in front of her tray, runs her fork through the Spanish rice, and wrinkles her nose. Her bare foot sneaks up under my pant leg. “You been racking your brain for someplace nice to take me soon, Little Wolf? We do want to keep this ‘thing’ going, right?”

  “I was thinking about taking in a volleyball game,” I say back. “Nothing else to do. Wanna come?”

  “I mean, after the volleyball game. And you’d better be thinking of taking in a volleyball game unless you want your pitiful little life to get more pitiful.” Dallas is pretty vocal with her feelings about the differences between emphasis on boys’ as opposed to girls’ sports.

  “Only fooling, dear,” I say. “Only fooling.”

  Trout’s opening volleyball game against Salmon River is a barn burner. The sort of Asian-looking girl with the leap that blocks out the sun is everybody’s MVP. On her talent and guts alone, Trout takes it to a fifth, tie-breaking set. Dallas Suzuki is everywhere, diving for balls only extreme sports dudes try for and drilling kills Sooner would be afraid to block, but in the end, it’s a team game and she doesn’t have much of a supporting cast this year.

  In the Grey Ghost afterward, she is inconsolable. “You had a great game,” I say, touching her shoulder.

  “We lost.”

  “Yeah, but Jesus…”

  “We lost.”

  This will not be a warm and fuzzy night. After one bite of her burger at The Chief, she tells me to take her home. “Nothing personal,” she says. “I’m just a bad sport.”

  When I drop her off she doesn’t want me to walk her to the door, which means she doesn’t want me to kiss her, so I peck her on the cheek and watch her stride across the lawn, and I am overwhelmed with that one thought that sneaks up and whacks me across the back of the head when I least expect it. Enjoy it, buddy. You’re dying. A block from her house I pull to the curb and let the fear crawl into my throat and almost strangle me.

  “What you doin’ up this time a’ night?” Rudy sits by the workbench, looking way better than I expected.

  “I might ask you the same thing,” I say.

  “I’m a vampire. What are you doin’ here?”

  “Didn’t want to go home,” I tell him. “Thought you could use some company.”

  “You’re running around in the middle of the night and you decide the town drunk needs company? I think not.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Well, you’re wrong.” Then, “What’s in your back pocket?” he asks. “Lemme see that.”

/>   I take out The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which loosens my pants. It’s a big damn book, even in paperback.

  “Serious literchur,” he says.

  “You know Malcolm?”

  He holds the book, staring at the cover, turns it over in his rough hands. “Oh yeah, I know Malcolm,” he says, and disappears for a moment into his room. He comes back with his own copy, opens it, and shows me Alex Haley’s autograph. He holds the book like a Bible. “Malcolm used to get my juices goin’,” he says.

  I nod toward his room. “You have other books in there? You read books because you’re alone so much?”

  He gazes across the room at the workbench. “You thought all I do is drink?”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Being alone isn’t new. No worse than my years as a priest.”

  Whack! “What?”

  “What,” he says back.

  “You’re a priest?”

  “That slipped out. Forget I said it.”

  “A Catholic priest?”

  “I said, forget—”

  “Too late.”

  “Ex-priest. And keep it to yourself.”

  “Shit, who’d believe me?”

  “I mean it, you tell no one.” His voice has completely lost its slur, turned to a dialect I couldn’t distinguish from either of my parents’. It is deep and resonant. I can’t help but look at him funny.

  “It’s a long story,” he says.

  “Tell me.”

  “No chance.”

  We stand, staring at each other. “Okay, then,” I say finally, “I won’t tell anybody, but you have to tell me more about Malcolm X.”

  “That could be arranged, but not tonight.”

  “Thanks for letting me…you know, stop by.”

  He nods, touches my shoulder. “Go.”

  Now that has to be one of the top five strangest things that’s happened this year, which is saying something when you consider a doctor told me I’m dying and Dallas Suzuki asked me to homecoming and took me to heaven and then sent me on my way, and I’m starting special teams on a football team. First he’s Rudy McCoy the town drunk, then he’s Rudy McCoy who sounds like he stopped drinking, then he’s Rudy McCoy with an autographed copy of Malcolm X—which, I shit you not, is an amazing book—and then he’s Rudy McCoy the ex-Catholic priest. I think when you’re dying you start looking for important things in the corners. You can’t let anything that seems even semi-important pass, because it passes forever. Things take on meaning. In my pickup on the way home, I’m figuring Rudy McCoy is somebody I’d better get to know better.

  The Horseshoe Bend game is fast approaching and all of Trout is holding its breath. I’m up till the wee hours with Cody every night, playing and replaying the HB tapes Coach Banks gave us, studying the physical nuances of the two or three players who don’t get that they’re telegraphing Horseshoe Bend’s every intention. We’ve got tapes from all their games so far, thanks to the compulsive nature of Gustavius O’Brien, who needs an A in phys ed to keep aloft his four-point-plus grade point average and who can’t dribble a basketball twice without sending it scooting off his foot and under the bleachers. He convinced Coach it’s as valuable to record physical activity as it is to perform it. Coach wasn’t hard to convince: Gustavius provides some primo game tapes.

  Horseshoe Bend’s center linebacker—also their QB—a monster Basque kid named Johnny Bilbao, who probably averages fifteen tackles a game, leans back ever so slightly on his haunches when he’s expecting a pass and also lilts slightly to the side he thinks a running play is going. His predictions are uncanny, but Cody’s quicksilver when it comes to improvising on the run, and if he catches Bilbao leaning the wrong way for a micro minisecond after the hike, he can burn him at least once out of ten times. It could come down to that with Horseshoe Bend. They’ve got studs at the same positions we’ve got studs, so gaining a fraction of an advantage on one out of ten plays could be the difference. Cody and I refuse to lose this game; that’s all there is to it. We watch Bilbao three hours straight. He’s smart as a whip; he’ll figure out Cody figuring him out.

  They’ve also got Elston Thomas, a linebacker, and Matt Miller, a defensive guard, who could make Sooner’s day a long one. They’re both about his same size, and though he’s faster, Sooner tends to think he can run right over anyone who gets in his way, and these guys are way tough. Miller takes out the interference and Thomas cleans up after him. They can switch sides depending on the running tendencies of the other team, so it’ll be impossible to run away from them. You see them lining up, time after time, against the oppositions’ strengths. But we counter with Dolven and Glover, who consider it a personal affront each and every time either Sooner or my brother is touched by an opposing player behind the line of scrimmage, and they’re pretty quick and versatile, too; and Andy Evans, a threat to catch almost any short ball Cody throws, who doubles as a defensive safety and claims nobody gets behind him. He’s right more often than not.

  This is going to be a good game.

  “You and Coach are going to have to call smart to keep these guys off balance,” I tell Cody. “And you might have to call more audibles at the line, which is not your best thing.”

  “Wish you were on the field with me,” he says. When we played backyard ball as kids, Cody and I were always on the same team and he’d check the call with me. Sometimes he just let me make it.

  “If I’m not on the field with you in high school, I’m sure as hell not going to be there in college,” I say. “We’ll go back through all this as soon as we’re sure you have these tendencies down. You tell me what you’d call in any given situation and I’ll tell you if we’re in synch.” Actually most of the time we are on the same page, which would be Coach’s page, too. A given play in a given situation usually just makes sense. It’s those few times when you can call against the grain that you give yourself a little edge. That usually happens on the field.

  After several more hours about 95 percent of our play-calling is identical. “Let’s get some sleep,” I tell him. “You gotta be rested come Friday. Boise State scouts.”

  “We’ll tell ’em we’re a team,” Cody says.

  “We’ll tell ’em shit,” I say back. “We want them looking only at you. They don’t give scholarships to guys who come with miniature look-alikes.”

  “You’re right. We’ll unveil you when we get there.”

  “Right.”

  In bed I drift; feel myself slipping toward a conversation with Hey-soos, but I want it too bad, and when I want it too bad Hey-soos makes me wait. I breathe, like Hey-soos taught me, and repeat my mantra: Little Wolf, Little Wolf, Little Wolf. It’s what I imagine the fans chanting. Not exactly Buddhist.

  “Hey, Little Wolf.”

  “Hey, Hey-soos.”

  “Getting complicated, huh?”

  “Does the Pope wear a beanie? Is Sooner prehistoric?”

  “Not really, but I get the point.”

  “Yeah, we’re probably all the same in your eyes.”

  “Maybe not all the same, but I stand in a place that gives me a broader perspective. What’s up?”

  “If you stand in a place that gives you a broader perspective, you should know.”

  “Man, why you busting my chops?”

  “You’re right. You think we have a chance against Horseshoe Bend?”

  “I know who I picked in the office pool.”

  “But you won’t tell me.”

  “Life’s no fun without risk,” he says.

  “I’m worried about my brother.”

  “But you know your brother is going to be fine.”

  “He was counting on me next year. I mean, no college coach is going to let me have anything to do with their football team, but Cody leans on me. Just having me around…”

  “But you know your brother is going to be fine,” he says again.

  “Yeah.”

  “So whassup?”

  “You know Rudy McCoy?” br />
  “I know everyone you know.”

  “Do you know people I don’t know?”

  “Stop wasting your time trying to figure out who I am. Rudy McCoy.”

  “He’s important, isn’t he?”

  “Does he seem important?”

  “I mean, to me.”

  “Does he seem important to you?”

  “Did you know people on this planet get paid up to a hundred fifty bucks an hour to do what you’re doing?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Ask questions and never give answers. They’re called therapists. I have one.”

  “So why are you talking to me? Wow. A hundred fifty? Am I good? At least I’ll know what to come back as. You were talking about Rudy McCoy.”

  It’s hard to figure how to get answers out of Hey-Soos. He never says something is or isn’t going to happen, and he won’t tell you whether something is the right or wrong thing to do. That exasperates me cubed, but when I get past trying to wrangle answers out of him, he usually brings me around to finding my own. He’s like a good math teacher. But I’m like a bad math student: I want the answer and I don’t want to show my work. I’m dying and I’m impatient.

  He says, “There’s time for everything, Ben.”

  God, it’s like he hears me thinking as well as he hears me dreaming. This is so bizarre. “I’m trying to figure out what to do about Rudy McCoy. I get it that he’s important if he feels important, but I don’t know what to do.”

  “Want some advice?”

  “Jesus, I’d pay for advice.”

  “It’s Hey-Soos,” he says. “And it wouldn’t help. I’m on an expense account you wouldn’t believe. Here’s your advice. Pay attention. Use your mind. Use your instincts. You’ll know what to do. Not just with Rudy McCoy, with everyone.”

  Coach stands at the door to the locker room before our next practice. “Sooner is out.”

  That plays to a stunned silence.

  “Broken collarbone,” Coach says.