“Maybe if you got on with your breakfast you’d have time to floss, instead of fooling around with your friends.”
“Just finishing, Sir.” Brendan shoveled in the last mouthful and stood, slipping the phone (oh so casually) into his pocket before Sir could investigate.
7:20
Coach Gilbert
Joe Gilbert sat in the breakfast nook stirring his coffee, oblivious to the sound, the sunlight, and the presence of his wife at the stove. Carol had to speak his name three times for him to look up.
“Sorry?”
“I said, why are you stirring your coffee? You don’t use sugar anymore.”
He looked at the spoon and laid it back down next to the knife. When he picked up the cup, it had gone oddly cool.
She frowned at him, dish-towel in hand.
“Joe, is something wrong with Nick? Trouble at school?”
“Nick? No, Nick’s doing great. In fact, if anything I’d say he’s becoming something of a hero.”
“Really?”
Coach could understand his wife’s reaction. Sure, they loved the boy, and had since they’d first laid eyes on the tiny, wizened creature in the neonatal intensive care unit, but Nick wasn’t exactly the first kid who came to mind when you said the word hero. And there had definitely been problems at school, early on. There were always problems. He still didn’t know why the whole school hadn’t risen up and started laughing at his grandson as soon as his crazy story got out. No, Coach would never understand middle school students. Or maybe there was something in how the principal was running the place. “Bee Cuomo seems to’ve been a popular girl. Anyway, Nick’s something of a celebrity now. Like if he’d had a UFO land on his lawn.”
“So if it’s not Nick that’s bugging you, Joe, what is it?”
He took a deep breath. “I think maybe I’ve got a pervert coming to watch the team practice.”
She laid the dish-towel on the sink and came to sit across the table from him. “Are you sure?”
“No. But the guy isn’t there to pick someone up. He comes in and sits in the stands, then he drives off without a kid in the car. And he doesn’t work at the school—I’m pretty sure I know all the faces by now.”
“Does he…” Reluctantly, he lifted his gaze to her, and the two of them consulted silently across the table on the possible endings for that sentence: Drool? Breathe heavily? Play with himself? “…do anything?”
“He watches. And he wears a raincoat.” Immediately, Coach felt ridiculous.
“It has been raining.”
“I know, I’m overreacting. He’s just…strange. Intense, I guess.”
“Is there any kid in particular? Or the team in general? I mean, could it be a scout? Another coach, looking for tips?”
He stared at his coffee, wondering, as he had for a couple of days now, if it wasn’t just his own sensitivity to the boy in question. He answered her reluctantly. “I think it is one kid in particular. I think he’s got his eyes on Brendan Atcheson.”
—
Coach Gilbert had only noticed the man in the stands a week ago. He might have been there all along, but Coach had been rather preoccupied. New school, catch-up work in the classroom, a team in shambles: it was understandable he didn’t see the man earlier. But once he’d seen him, once Joe Gilbert really saw the man’s posture and the…hungry expression on his face, it was hard to see anything else.
Coach Gilbert was a hasty hire ten days into the new year, after the math-teacher-slash-basketball-coach skied himself into a tree over Christmas vacation.
Joe Gilbert, retired teacher, volunteer tutor, grandparent of troubled sixth-grader Nicholas Clarkson, was there for the asking—and Linda McDonald had asked. She’d begged. And even though Coach was doing just fine in retirement and had no intention of taking another job, he ended up telling the principal that he’d fill the position until the skier was back. If nothing else, it meant he could be near Nick without either of them feeling like Gramps was being a nursemaid.
In any event, Coach found a lot to like about Guadalupe Middle School. Oh, the school had more than its share of problems, but its teachers were mostly young enough to still care, the principal was nowhere near as corn-fed Ohio as she looked, and the kids (most of them) had a certain amount of respect for their elders. He’d spent much of his life teaching in the inner city, until he and Carol made a hasty move back to San Felipe in November to help their daughter with Nick. And unlike in LA, he didn’t feel like he should wear a Kevlar vest to work.
Still, Coach had been a Marine and a teacher of adolescents long enough to know that he had to walk in the door with a bang. So he’d come in to first-period math, found a riot in progress, and responded like a drill sergeant: no fear, no doubt, no hesitation at getting right up in their faces. Riot quelled, kids wary, books on desks, Coach was boss.
The same on the court that afternoon, once he’d dismissed the three bickering volunteer-coach dads with brusque thanks. He’d stood with his arms crossed and glared down at his motley collection of twelve- to fourteen-year-olds, tall and short, flabby and muscled, brown and white and one lone black kid, letting them know that Coach Gilbert was a tyrant, by God, and unless you wanted off the team or to have a part of your anatomy verbally shredded or ripped away, you did what Coach wanted. Now.
But there was always one kid…
Well, that wasn’t true. Some blessed years his only rebels had been the usual testosterone-fueled boys who couldn’t help pushing the boundaries. He’d learned to deal with those by a show of Alpha-male domination followed by a dose of humor, to establish a sense of shared masculinity. He’d found that the troublemakers often turned out to be the most helpful assistants and players imaginable. But then there were the others, those kids with some bleak space in their psyches, who made life a constant painful battle—not for domination, but for salvation.
Coach wouldn’t use a word like salvation out loud, of course, except maybe after a couple of beers, and then only to his wife. But that’s how he thought of it. And he knew, deep in his soul, that the basketball court—or the baseball diamond or the playing field—was where, for a boy that age, salvation lay.
What hurt was knowing how rare it was to actually save one of them. He’d had maybe a dozen such kids over the years, kids with dead patches in the depths of their eyes and nothing but hate for the world. He’d saved two of them—he personally, using the court, the kids’ skill, and his own teacher’s soul, had saved two young men from defeat, turning them into productive human beings who’d gone on to lend a hand to other lost boys. Another four of the dozen had somehow fumbled their way out of the morass to become what looked like normal men, with drinking problems maybe, but carrying on. Some of the others had slipped out of his view, which he tried to take as a good sign—at least their names hadn’t appeared in the headlines. But for three of these kids, it had been a matter of too little, too late. One to drugs. One to a bullet out the window of a passing car. One to a homemade knife in prison. Three of his boys, he had failed.
And now he was faced with another arrogant fourteen-year-old with deadness creeping over his eyes like spiritual cataracts. Brendan Atcheson’s entire being seemed to beg the world to kick him and justify his own self-loathing. All Coach could do was keep an eye out for reportable bruises, and remind himself that the boy was here, willing to play ball, willing to risk a commitment to the game: the kid was not lost yet.
So all in all, what with wrenching unruly classes into line and hammering those adolescent minds onto equations, while figuring out the workings of this particular school and a new set of colleagues, then scrambling to knock the basketball team into some kind of order (undoing the lessons of that trio of well-meaning idiot dads) on top of all the hours of paperwork, meetings, and phone calls that teaching and coaching entailed—to say nothing of many, many hours spent with his grandson Nick—it was little wonder that three weeks went by before he raised his eyes far enough to notice the man in the
stands.
Yes, Brendan Atcheson was this year’s official Problem, no doubt about it—all three of the dads had taken pains to warn him. He’d had two complaints about Brendan in the first week, from parents who disliked the kid’s attitude toward them—and toward his teammates. At the games, Brendan always managed to get himself fouled by players who were fed up with his sneers.
The trouble was, Brendan was damned good, on the court, anyway—tall, fast, and ruthless, with a decent arm and an unerring eye for the smallest gap in an opponent’s attention. Wickedly bright. It didn’t help that he was blessed with dark and brooding good looks and a rich hot-shit of a father. All of which meant that Brendan Atcheson was not interested in being a team player.
Coach had had gifted kids before, and found them a mixed blessing. These boys were always disdainful of their teammates until they’d had it beaten into their thick noggins that one player could win a point, even a game, but he couldn’t win a season. The trick was convincing the kid before the season had gone too far to be retrieved.
The first step was to make it clear that for Coach, the team was more important than one fancy player. To establish that maybe past coaches hadn’t been willing to kick the top scorer off the team, but things had changed.
Once that weapon was out of the boy’s hands—once Brendan accepted that Coach meant it when he said, I’d like you on the team, kid, but not if you can’t play nice—he’d have a chance to reshape the boy. The trick was not pushing matters so far that his star player quit the team.
So the games and practice sessions went by, Coach benching the kid whenever he got out of line, and Brendan acting like it was all the same to him if he was kicked off entirely (which Coach didn’t believe for a minute) while waiting for Coach to lose his temper and lash out at his lack of discipline, his waste of talent, his unwillingness to use his gifts…
So Coach refused to moan and plead. Refused to show how much he was counting on Brendan’s presence. Instead, he acted even more casual than Brendan about whether or not he stayed on the team. That attitude puzzled the boy, a lot. Which was just fine with Coach.
In the meantime, practice was a battleground. Games were worse, with the kid pressing the bounds every moment, and Coach always there to check his challenges. Sometimes Coach sent him to the bench just so he could give the other players his attention. He was grateful that Brendan was not one of his math students, as well, and wondered if he had the strength, what with everything else, for the war of attrition Brendan seemed to have declared.
Then at last week’s practice, Brendan fouled another player so subtly that the kid picked himself up from the floor thinking he’d tripped over his own feet. Even the sharp-eyed mothers hadn’t caught it. But Coach blew his whistle and called Brendan over, pitching his voice too low for anyone else to hear. “That was clever, Atcheson, but if I were you, I’d save it for an actual game. Too much practice’ll give it away.”
The open-eyed expression of innocence that the boy had put on at the whistle’s blow gave way to honest surprise, with a thread of something more, some emotion darker than the usual mix of challenge and scorn: Coach almost thought the boy was about to take a swing at him. He managed to keep still and reveal nothing of his impulse to self-defense; then the expression vanished, and the cocky confrontational kid was back.
Coach held Brendan’s eyes for another couple seconds, then sent the boy back into play and let the game go on, wondering what exactly he had seen.
It was twenty minutes later when Coach noticed the man in the stands. Practice was nearly over, with parents and younger siblings drifting in to watch the end of the mock game and catch up on gossip. Coach was happy enough for their presence—players had to get used to an audience—but no question, it made for more distractions, for the players and for him. Which meant that he didn’t see the water bottle coming or where it came from, merely a shiny object cartwheeling through the air above the rapidly-moving pack to explode on the wooden floor at the very feet of the front-man, Brendan Atcheson.
The boy whirled and nearly went down. The ball careened off into the hands of an opposing player while Brendan stared, white-faced, into the stands. Only for an instant: the shamed outrage of a mother and an appalled chorus from the malefactor’s friends made it clear what had happened, and Brendan pivoted to sprint after the ball. But that brief, unguarded look up into the stands left Coach searching the bleachers until his eyes settled on the solitary man.
Tall guy, mid-forties, dark hair going gray, thin under the trench-coat he wore. A guy who just sort of faded into the background of dads looking on and moms waiting to give rides. This time, however, Coach kept an eye on him. He saw the man stand up at the end of practice, pull his coat together, and walk easily down the bouncing metal stands to the door and out into the parking lot. He didn’t wait for a player. He drove off alone.
The twist in Coach’s gut almost took his mind off that expression of horror on Brendan’s face.
In the two practices and one game since then, he’d watched. The guy showed up every time. He always sat in the same place, never too close to the cluster of moms near the floor, never too far from the dads who sat with their elbows propped on the seats behind them. He came in before practice began, left when it ended, never acknowledged the presence of another adult, never showed any expression—no pleasure in a clever score, no sympathy when the Peralta boy injured his knee, nothing.
The guy just watched.
—
“I think he’s got his eyes on Brendan Atcheson.” Coach looked across the table at his wife.
“Your bad boy.”
“I don’t know that he’s a bad boy.” He probably shouldn’t have told her about Brendan in their various so-how-was-your-day dinner conversations since he’d started at Guadalupe. “Just a smart-ass.”
“Sounds like more to me.”
“If you condemned every kid who sneered at his coach, hell would be full. Anyway, I still have a responsibility, Carol. He’s only fourteen, even if he acts like twenty.”
“This is Thomas Atcheson’s son, right? The man’s not quite in the Bill Gates category, but maybe he thinks the boy needs a bodyguard? Or could it be a relative? A dad who’s lost custody, or something?”
“If they know each other, why don’t they talk? You’d think Brendan was completely unaware of him—except last week, when some kid threw a water bottle out onto the court? Brendan stopped cold and looked straight up at where this guy sits.”
“Wait. You mean the boy assumed this adult in the stands threw something at him?”
“Sounds crazy. But it’s more than that. He seems…” Coach stopped, embarrassed. “I get the feeling Brendan’s aware of him all the time, even though he never looks up there. Like…like the way a kid’ll play to a girl he wants to impress, without showing it openly.”
“So Brendan knows the man, but doesn’t want to let on?”
“Pretty sure.”
“You think he’s flirting?”
Coach pushed down the surge of revulsion, and got up to put his coffee cup and spoon in the dishwasher. He closed the door and propped his backside against it. “If the kid is…‘flirting,’ it’s more like his attitude toward me than anything more…overt. When Brendan pulls one of his tricks on the court, he’s watching out of the corner of his eye to see if I notice. Testing, like. I mean, I don’t begin to understand how gay men think, much less pedophiles, but it’s more like Brendan’s saying, Look at what you can’t have.”
“So maybe the guy made a pass at him, and Brendan turned him down and is rubbing it in?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it’s possible. Ah hell, Carol, what am I going to do?”
“If it were me, I’d call the police. Knowing you, you’ll probably want to have a private conversation with the man first.”
“Yeah. It’s just, if I’m wrong, if he’s just some innocent fan or something…”
“Then you’re both going to be horribly embarrassed
and you’ll avoid each other for the rest of your lives. At least bring in the principal.”
“I’d like to be a little surer, first. Today’s Career Day, and next week there’s a state evaluation—they’re making Linda crazy.”
“This wouldn’t be one of the evaluators, would it? Checking on school security?”
“I’ve never heard of them doing that.”
“No, but after last year’s problems…You know, you could just ask Brendan himself.”
He shook his head slowly. “I’m not sure I’m in any position to do that.”
After a minute, Carol broke the silence. “It might be good to find out. In case this is someone testing how well the school protects its kids.”
“Oh, yeah, I really need that hanging over me!”
She walked over and gave him a quick kiss. “Joe, you know it’ll turn out to be something simple. You’ll solve it. Stop worrying about it. You better go if you want to be there by first bell. And you’ll give me a ring if you think the day’s getting too much for Nicky?”
“Absolutely.” He only wished his grandson was the least bit interested in sports. Of all the activities he’d tried, from fishing to football, the only thing Nick had responded to was range shooting. Which his mother had immediately banned.
Without some kind of a sport in common, Coach really wasn’t sure what to do with the boy.
JANUARY
Nick: his story (1)
CLINICAL CASE NOTES AND TRANSCRIPT: NICHOLAS CLARKSON
The following is provided as evidence, as requested by the Superior Court of California, concerning events leading up to the Guadalupe Middle School incident. As per my conversation with Judge Stanley, only specifically relevant portions of the transcripts are provided here.
—Dr. Cassandra Henry
Client information:
Nicholas (Nick) Clarkson, eleven-year-old Caucasian male, parents divorced. Nick’s grandparents are close to him—they returned to San Felipe in November following the events described below.