“What kinda bullshit is this?” Coach holds the note in his palm, slaps it with the fingers of the opposite hand. “What the hell personal bullshit kinda reasons do you have for leaving your team in the lurch, you overgrown clown?”
Dropping a heavy hand on the coach’s shoulder, Reuben turns up his palm in a gesture of inquiry. Trembling with fury, Coach all but throws the note at him.
Staring at the floor, face burning, Sam hunches his shoulders in dull resentment against the buffet of the coach’s rage. He isn’t a fucking jarhead. Coach can’t talk to him like that. Why can’t they just let him go?
“I don’t understand.” Reuben raises his eyes to Sam. “Why?”
“Tired of it,” Sam answers. “Tired of giving up my time for guys who don’t give a shit.”
“What d’you mean?” Coach demands. “We’ve had full turnouts every practice during break. Everybody was there today but you and Gauthier. Woods says you told him you were gonna quit to get more hours working.”
Tracking the coach intently, Reuben shakes his head in disbelief.
Sam glances at Rick, who glares back at him.
Reuben drops the rag into the rag barrel. “I haven’t had lunch yet. Neither has Sam, if I’m not mistaken. Coach, maybe you and Rick would go down to the diner and ask my wife to pack enough for the four of us and Sam and I could talk while you’re gone.”
Coach glances from father to stone-faced son and goes with his best shot.
“Tell her we’ll eat what she wants to give us,” Reuben advises as the coach and Rick start for the diner.
Reuben hooks his chair away from his desk and slumps into it. “Tell me about it, Sammy.”
Wondering why he never foresees the consequences when he pitches a handful into the fan, Sam suspects they must all be right about him; he’s not smart enough to be let out without a keeper. How he could have gotten himself into this without considering how he was going to explain it to his father? He can’t—not the stuff about New Year’s Eve.
“I know how tight things are. I want to help. I don’t want you to have to sell the farm.”
Astonishment lights Reuben’s eyes. “Oh, Sammy. I couldn’t sell the farm if I wanted to, the way things are. Fortunately I had the good sense to marry a woman with some means of her own who’s willing to support me. She’s convinced me it’s an insult to her not to accept her help. You don’t have to give up your season.”
Sam retreats into himself. There’s no way he can shop Pete and those other three idiots, not without eventually having to admit he knows of other teammates’ violations. Rick’s, for one. To say nothing of tearing the team apart. Maybe that’s what Deanie meant by her injunction to grow up. Maybe growing up is when you accept that some things are insoluble, unfixable. It’s done, can’t be undone, what Pete and the others did, like something fundamental was altered, something way down in the tissue of things. Now it’s just part of the whole wrong world. Nevermind the training contracts—the laws they broke are scarcely enforced anyway. The wrong is still there but there’s no righting it, no justice or retribution. Nobody gives a shit except one thickwitted greasemonkey jock who’s no kind of saint himself. Maybe they all understand something he’s missing.
The brief silence between father and son shatters with an explosive whirr like an exhalation as an overhead heater kicks on.
“Yeah,” Sam says, with a nod.
Reuben shoves back the chair and rises to his feet. “Good. Here comes lunch.”
Coach reads the resolution in their attitudes and closes his eyes to mutter something, possibly a brief prayer, though he’s not a praying man. Maybe just an admonition to himself not to get worked up, to remember these are kids he coaches. He departs half an hour later, comfortably full of an unexpectedly gratis lunch and self-congratulation at his handling of an unexpected crisis.
Too close to Sarah to miss the opportunity to see her, Rick calls her and asks her to pick him up and transport him to his three-to-eleven shift at the supermarket.
When Reuben drifts back to his work again, Rick shrugs toward the door and the boys step outside.
“You’re an asshole,” Rick says. “I’d like to stomp on your stupid face. You know how long it’s gonna take to get everybody settled down again? You walked out this morning and left me with Coach shitting the bed and the team all dazed and confused. Trying to get a practice out of those guys was a major assache.”
Sam listens stonily, angry responses tangled in a hot lump below his breastbone.
“But we had one, if you want to call what we did a practice. While you were out there turning wheelies with your little bitch buddy.”
Sam’s fingers trip down his fly buttons, checking if they are all closed, and drift onward to tug at his crotch.
“Don’t call her a buh-buh-bitch! Shuh-shuh-she was trying to talk me out of quitting,” he chokes out, though it almost strangles him.
“Call her worse than that,” Rick snarls. “You’re right about one thing. Gauthier is just like your sister. You’re so hung up on Karen, it’s fucking up your head. Karen’s a burned-out druggie slut and Gauthier’s going the same way. I don’t care how good her fucking hook is. Scrape’m both off your boots, Sambo; they’re stinking up your life.”
“Fuck you,” Sam advises quietly, without a trace of stammer.
It’s the trigger Rick’s primed for—his fist flies almost on its own volition, catching the already moving Sam with a glancing blow to the left cheekbone. Then Sam’s hands cuff Rick’s wrists and he is propelled back against the plate glass of the office window with a glass-rattling thump. Inside, Reuben looks up curiously.
“Karen’s my sister, you dickhead. She’s a mess and maybe she’s a lost cause but she’s not shit. Neither is Deanie. So shuh-shuh-shut up, Rick. And check your own
