28
KURT
After a full week out sick with the “flu,”
I walk into first period on Monday shadowed by a dull headache;
wondering how I’m supposed to set foot on the same field as Miller,
Jankowski, and Studblatz and remain their teammate. Mrs. Helmsley,
our English teacher and a tiny thing with arms like Popsicle sticks
and a brittle voice to match, sets her chalk down at the board and
pulls her eyebrows into a serious expression. “As you heard last
Friday,” she begins, “one of our students killed himself. I thought
maybe we could take some time out of our regular class today to
talk about it, if anyone wants to.” She is met with silent,
unmoving heads staring back at her. I’m massaging my temples, only
half listening. “Did anyone know the student? Ronnie Gunderson?”
she asks. A few heads shake no while the rest remain motionless as
she struggles with the topic. Finally, a girl two desks in front of
me raises her hand, then asks why he killed himself. Mrs. Helmsley
lets her cheeks puff out, holding her breath for a moment, before
releasing a long exhale.
“That, I’m sure, is a very complicated answer,” she
says.
“Who was he?” someone near me whispers while I
press my thumbs under the top of my eye sockets, once hearing that
was a way to stop headache pain. It’s not working.
“No clue,” someone whispers back. “Never met
him.”
It takes at least a minute before the news actually
penetrates my bruised brain and I understand that Ronnie Gunderson
isn’t just some freshman I never met and too bad for him. Ronnie
Gunderson is Ronnie. The gymnast. That kid. Ronnie.
The one who helped Bruce and Danny spot me on back handsprings. The
one ... Scott offered up to me in the storage room, pants down ...
“You want a shot, Mr. Wolf?”
Absorbing the full hit of Mrs. Helmsley’s news, my
skull clamps down on my swollen brain. My head starts pounding and
pounding and I know if I have to sit in that cramped desk for
another second and pretend I don’t know anything about why Ronnie
killed himself, I’ll maybe tear the desk apart, if not the room, to
relieve the pressure.
I lurch up to standing, feeling the whole class
tilt with me.
“Yes, Kurt?” Mrs. Helmsley asks, partly helpful and
partly challenging. I wave her off, not really sure what might come
out of my mouth if I try talking. Like maybe I’ll blurt out that
Ronnie Gunderson, the freshman nobody knew, was torn apart in a
storage room and that’s what killed him. The suicide came after.
And maybe I’ll stutter and stammer that our homecoming king did it.
And maybe I should go find him right then and make sure, once and
for all, he never hurts someone like Lamar—like Ronnie ever again.
I walk up the aisle and out of the classroom, gripping my books
tight, wanting to whip them as far down the hallway as possible as
if that might help even for a second. Breaking things is all I can
imagine, is all I want to do. It’s all I’m good at. I suck at
saving things, suck at saving people.
Outside the school, there’s a spruce tree planted
in the middle of the lawn near the edge of the teachers’ parking
lot. It’s warmed up again, back to being early fall, and the sky is
powder blue and the grass is emerald green and still soft and the
leaves on the maples are starting to turn auburn and gold. It’s a
perfect day and I feel nothing but wet concrete churning through my
blood, causing my tongue to taste clay while light and sound just
turn to dirt. Brown dirt. All of it. Everything.
I reach into the spruce and grab smaller branches
and start breaking them off the tree, twisting them down and back
until they make a satisfying snap, like the spine of a small
animal.
Dumb sons of bitches!
Snap! Snap!
Stupid, stupid, stupid . . .
Snap! Snap! Snap!
I stay outside hoping the sun might burn off some
of the ugliness swirling around me, but it ain’t working. When I
finally go back inside, it’s only to catch Danny in math, hoping he
knows more, hoping he’ll tell me Ronnie was already suicidal, that
me pushing him out of my room—telling him nothing happened but a
fight and it was all in his head—wasn’t what killed him.
I get to algebra early and drum my fingers on the
desk waiting for Danny to arrive. When the bell rings, there’s
still no sign of him. Mr. Klech starts diagramming on the
chalkboard while everyone pretends to care or at least not fall
asleep. I keep watching the door and waiting for Danny to slip in
with a hall pass. Thirty-five minutes later, I give up. He ain’t
coming. And even if he does, I realize, he ain’t about to offer any
words that’ll excuse me.
No one except me saw what happened to Ronnie in
that storage room. No one. If I go down to the principal’s office
and tell the truth about what I saw, they’ll accuse me of doing it.
Accuse me just like last time. They’ll tell everyone about my past.
They’ll start the rumors all over again; that I hurt Ronnie same
way I did my best friend at Meadow’s House before I killed him.
That I’m the monster. Without Bruce or Danny seeing anything
until after it finished, it’s three against one; Tom, Scott, and
Mike’s story versus mine. Ronnie can’t say different. Ronnie is
gone. I try picturing Ronnie in the gym last week but I keep
seeing Lamar instead, resting in his polished chrome casket, smile
like a mannequin’s. The memorial service attended by three news
crews and more people than either of us ever met. Lamar’s shiny,
boy-size casket—the most expensive thing he ever got to own.
Algebra finishes. Mr. Klech sets the chalk down in
the metal tray running along the bottom of the board. He rubs his
hands together and gives us our assignment. I write it down, not
paying attention, wondering, instead, how I’ll get through the next
hour, afternoon, day, year.
I’m back at practice that same day I hear the
news, too weak-minded to quit, unable to imagine walking away from
it, hating myself for showing up. Scott, Tom, and Mike are all
yammering and jawing on the field, same as always. I mean to ignore
them and expect the same back. But when Scott sees me, he jogs over
and greets me with a fist thump on my shoulder pad.
“Hey, man, no hard feelings, all right?” he says in
friendly tones. The helmet shades his face, making it hard to read
him.
“Wuh?”
“My left arm’s still aching after that shot you
gave me.” Scott lowers his voice so it barely clears his face mask.
“Good thing you didn’t hit my throwing arm, huh?”
I don’t answer.
“But you wouldn’t do that,” he says. “Don’t want to
mess with our record. Mess with what we got going on here. That
would be pretty stupid.” Scott pounds my shoulder pad with his fist
again, then jogs over to run passing drills with Assistant Coach
Stein.
“Hey, bro,” Tom yells over at me. “Starting to
wonder about you, weren’t we, Pullman?”
“Hell, yeah,” Pullman agrees. “Glad you’re back,
man. That flu’ll kick your ass.”
The gate of my practice helmet, the one without the
camera and mic, dips as I nod back at him.
“Just don’t give it to me,” Pullman says.
“Now that Brodsky’s back, we can start slaughtering
the rest of the division again.” Tom thumps his chest pads and then
slaps the top of Pullman’s helmet. “Without your daddies on the
field, that last game was a little too close.”
“We still won,” Pullman answers. “And it was
an away game. That’s all that counts.”
“You won by a field goal,” Tom says. “A field goal.
If you can’t beat Farmington by at least ten, you should wear a
skirt.”
“My man is back!” Terrence calls out. His
smile, at least, is genuine. I move closer to him, feeling safer in
his zone. “Ain’t too fun running behind your backup,” Terrence
tells me, then clasps his hands together like he’s praying and
tilts his helmet up to the sky. “Thank you, Lord, for giving me my
stat boy back. You know how bad my yardage totals were last game?
Please don’t let Kurt go off and get sick no more, you hear?”
I hold out my fist. Terrence bumps it with
his.
Judging from practice, you’d never guess my
captains and me helped kill a boy. Wearing the red vest that makes
him unhittable, Scott doesn’t even have to protect his bad arm
during scrimmage. Tom bullies every player within shoving distance
during our drills, same as always. Studblatz, unlike Scott and Tom,
stays away from me, but, for him, that’s normal. As leader of the
defensive unit, he always treats our offense as the enemy during
practice. Halfway through scrimmage, though, I notice him favoring
his right side, like his rib cage on the other side’s real tender.
Good, I think, pretty sure that’s my doing.
“Brodsky, Miller, Studblatz, Jankowski,” Coach
Brigs calls out, “meet in my office after showers, gentlemen.”
Coach Brigs’s tone leaves no room for negotiation.
I dawdle on the field, pretending to work on some
blocking techniques and lateral steps so I won’t have to change
alongside those three guys. Once in the shower, I take my time,
letting the water scald me, hoping it might help clear my head. I
put off the meeting in Coach’s office long as possible.
“You squeaky-clean, now, Kurt?” Coach asks, closing
the door behind me. “I support good hygiene as much as the next
guy, but let’s not go overboard with the prima donna routine. It
leads to softness. And softness is something I can’t tolerate in my
players.”
Scott snickers while Tom grins knowingly like
they’ve been discussing my softness with Coach the whole time.
Along with Studblatz, the three captains sit on Coach’s couch,
their bodies packed tight between the armrests.
“Softness leads to problems, leads to trouble,”
Coach continues as he settles into the chair behind his desk.
“Hell, that confused boy, Ronnie Gunderson—God have mercy on his
soul—I heard was troubled with that problem. Soft.” Scott and Tom,
I notice, lose their smiles.
“It’s a damn shame what that boy did to himself,”
Coach says, staring up at the top shelf of trophies in his office.
“What a selfish, selfish act it is to take your own life.
Can you imagine what his poor parents must be going through? I’m
sad for his parents. I’m sad for his family. I’m not sad for him,
though. For him, I feel only anger. I feel contempt. I don’t
have an ounce of pity for such a cowardly act.” Coach
squeezes his eyes shut as he stresses the words, then suddenly
opens them again. “Maybe it’s just as well he got culled from the
herd early. Lord has a plan. He always has a plan. Bet on
it.”
I shift my weight in the small wooden chair, the
only seat left in Coach’s office.
“Now, boys, I bring up Ronnie Gunderson for a
reason,” Coach says. My eyes shoot over to Scott. He’s holding his
breath, same as Tom, same as me. Mike looks like he’s just chomped
down on his tongue. “What that kid did tore a hole in the fabric of
our community. Do you understand? And what we provide our community
on Friday nights is more than a ball game. It’s a time for
restoring faith in our future, of passing the baton from the strong
of one generation to the next. So this ball game coming up is not
just about winning and improving our record. It’s about healing our
community after suffering a serious blow, about giving our
community something more than the failure of one soft, misguided
boy to dwell upon.”
I gaze down at my knuckles, examining the scabs
left on them from the punches I threw in that storage room.
“You all might be asking yourselves why I’m not
giving this speech to our whole team, why I’m privileging you boys
with it all by your lonesome.” Coach leans back in his chair until
I’m sure the springs will snap and send him toppling over. He stays
upright, though, drumming his finger on his belly, taking his sweet
time shifting his gaze to each of our faces. “You boys, you did
something weekend before last.”
This is it. Here we go. It’s all about to burst
open.
“I don’t know what happened or what you did, but I
find it more than a coincidence that my four best starters all come
down with the same bug that lays them all out for a week, risking
an away-game loss to Farmington High, of all teams!” He
keeps drumming his fingers on his belly. “Meanwhile, not one other
boy—not a single player on the team—missed class or is even
remotely sick.
“You want to know what I think?” Coach asks
us.
The only thing that calms me is watching Scott,
Tom, and Mike actually squirm on the couch, waiting for Coach’s
next thought.
“I think you boys had yourselves a little party,”
Coach continues. “Maybe drank a few too many beers and decided to
go for a joyride and got banged up enough that Brodsky was out with
some sort of concussion, Studblatz now has bruised ribs, Scott has
a bad arm—you real lucky, boy, it’s not your throwing arm—and Tom’s
been limping during sprint drills.”
Coach rocks forward in his chair, the springs
creaking, and jumps up to attention. He leans over his desk,
planting both arms on it like cannon supports. “I’m not even going
to begin lecturing you all on how stupid it is to drink and drive
and how lucky you boys are that you didn’t—God forbid—hurt anyone
other than yourselves and how lucky you are that you got by with a
few scrapes, near as I can tell. I’m not going to start lecturing
on how badly you let this team down when your own selfish need to
party gets in the way of performing on that field with the body
that you were fortunate enough to be gifted from the good Lord
himself. I’ll leave all that for now.
“What I will not stand”—and now Coach’s face
turns crimson—“is being lied to and told you were sick with the
flu. I will not allow that type of deceit and disrespect, you
understand? We are a team. We are a family. The whole community
looks up to us and what kind of example are we providing when our
own family is lying to its coach? Huh? Look at me! You boys
aren’t even smart enough to come up with a good goddamn lie!”
“Coach, we—” Scott starts, but Coach cuts him
off.
“Don’t you start jawing that oily mouth, boy!”
Coach pounds the top of his desk. “You may be the quarterback—for
now—but I’m the coach, you understand? You want me to keep talking
nice to those recruiters—telling them all how you’re such a great
kid and asking your teachers to bump up your sorry-ass grades—then
you better shut your mouth and listen up. I don’t want to ever have
another game where my four stars are out. We got a chance at going
all the way to state this year and winning the whole shebang! The
whole enchilada! You understand that? I don’t want anything
standing in the way of our team forming into a cohesive unit, like
soldiers under fire.” Coach lifts a hand and drags it across his
mouth before planting it back on his desk.
“I will not tolerate your lying to me,” he says.
“Do you understand?!”
We nod our heads yes.
“I can’t hear you.”
“Yes, Coach,” we say.
“Good,” he says, taking his hands off his desk,
standing taller. “And you better hope, for your sakes, that you
heal real quick. I don’t want to hear a single excuse about you
getting hurt on the field and it turns out it’s one of these
injuries that came from goofing off when you should’ve been in
bed.”
We nod again in unison.
“Now get out of here,” Coach growls.
I stay sitting in my chair while the other three
get up to leave. I can tell Coach what really happened. Tell him
Ronnie wasn’t soft. That he was destroyed by Coach’s captains,
tortured in that storage room without mercy until they broke him.
There was no car accident. Just a fight to stop them. Stop evil.
And I lost.
I sit there, mind scrambling, trying to come up
with a way to get my mouth to talk fast and smooth, form the first
words that’ll lead down that path. Maybe if I was wearing my
helmet, I could get the words out.
“Cuh-cuh-cuh-cuh-Coach?” I start. Tom and Mike have
already stepped out of the office. Scott waits, though, like he
knows what I’m thinking.
“You coming, Brodsky?” Scott asks, interrupting me.
I glare up at him, then glance desperately at Coach, hoping he’ll
read my eyes, see I need to confess. “You heard the man,” Scott
drones like a radio ad, filling every moment with his voice. “He
said get out of here and leave him alone.” Forced laughter pummels
the small office space, leaving no room for my voice. “We’ve given
him a big enough headache for one day. He’s sprouting gray hair
even as we speak.”
“You’re a real comedian, Scott.” Coach grunts, then
waves the back of his hand at us. “Yeah, all of you, git!”
I feel my chance evaporate while Scott stands in
the doorway, ready to keep talking, if need be, waiting for me to
exit. When I do, he pulls Coach’s door shut behind us. I move to
get away from him but he stays in step with me.
“You better rest that head of yours, Kurt. We need
you ready for Friday. Ashville won’t be easy. They got a monster
defensive linebacker, Jackson. He’s going to try and eat all of us
for dinner. We need to pull together, not let anything get between
us.”
“Uh-huh.”
“There’s no going solo on this team, Kurt. We got
your back. You need to have ours.”
“I’ve guh-guh-guh-got to guh-guh-go.”
“You want a lift?” he asks. “I’m giving Tommy and
Mike a ride home.”
“No.”
“All right.” Scott shrugs, then dusts my shoulder
like I might have dandruff, which I don’t. “Now don’t go making up
stories about us, okay?”
I’m unable to speak, betrayed by my mouth, again,
hating myself, hating my weakness, more than Scott, wishing Lamar,
just for ten seconds, could come back and speak for me.
“’Cause you know me, Mike, and Tommy would never,
ever lie to Coach or anyone else about what happened,” Scott
murmurs in my ear. “Tommy’s car got banged up when all of us went
drinking. Coach is too smart to trick. He saw right through us. Saw
that we tried to cover up a car accident by pretending we had the
flu.”
Then Scott walks away, leaving me stalled there
like a fool.