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"SLANT, TRENT, SLANT!"
Trent heard Tommy's call and immediately cut left from the deep pattern Tommy had given him in the huddle, and cocked his head a bit to the left to see if Tommy was going to throw the football in his direction. As he turned his head, Trent saw Joey having no problem at all covering Matty as Matty ran a curl route as best as his rotund frame would allow him, a burnt orange spaghetti sauce stain still showing on the collar of the white shirt he wore underneath his navy nylon-covered down jacket. Trent knew the ball would probably be coming his direction soon, despite Nobi's best efforts to cover him.
Tommy had made the call because he saw Nobi and Joey were both doing an excellent job of blocking potential passes from him. Tommy's only hope, since Matty would never be more open than a boarded-up factory building, was to try to angle Trent's run and make it easier to lead the ball to him. As Trent made a beeline for Tommy's Packers jacket which signified one corner of the end zone, Tommy spiraled the ball, trying to get it to the minute point where Trent could catch the ball over his shoulder, just behind Nobi's gaunt, outstretched arm.
Trent saw the ball heading ahead of him, and broke from his heavy jog to a dead-on sprint; Tommy's throw didn't leave him much choice. Nobi trailed off as he too realized Tommy's gaffe, and that even if Trent caught the ball, he'd have a clear run for six points. Trent pumped all he could out of his bony legs, and perhaps had the game not wore on for so long he might have had enough energy from somewhere to propel himself those few extra inches to make the decisive catch. But all Trent could do was lunge forward far enough to have the football bounce off his taut fingertips and land gently on the big "G" on the back of Tommy's jacket, then stumble forward and break his fall just in time to avoid having his whisper-thin lips kiss the partially frozen tundra of the park.
"We take over on downs," Nobi said, trying to sound enthusiastic but his voice betraying his tired condition more than the heavy panting that enveloped it.
Tommy was concerned that Trent was okay after his fall, but he was more disappointed in himself. He had been so close to making that pass, but he was just off by a handspan. The Wyanoke Elementary Badgers were already oh-and-five for the year, and even Tommy's bony ten-year-old shoulders felt like a hundred pounds apiece. In all the games this year, the Badgers' defence was weaker than the fruit punch his mother made him from a frozen can, and despite Tommy's best efforts as team quarterback he couldn't keep the team close in any game. So he tried to get the gang together as much as possible these past couple of weeks, play some games with him as all-time QB to try to get just that little extra bit of practice that maybe, Tommy hoped, could finally propel his team over the hump. Especially since Tuesday practice had been cut after some of the other players' grades went down, Tommy was looking for all the time he could get to throw.
As the football rolled off the satiny forest green of his new jacket, Tommy was relieved to see Trent appeared to be okay, just the slightest hint of grass stains on the knees of his faded jeans. Trent picked the ball up and jogged back to Tommy with it as Matty bent over with his doughy hands bracing themselves against his knees, sucking each breath of air as hard as his shallow pace would allow him. Nobi and Joey were walking back to the line of scrimmage as well.
"Hey, you guys wanna go take a look at that thing I found Sunday?" Joey asked, his youthful voice already turned scratchy and heavy from all the cigarette smoking he was subjected to at home.
"Maybe later, Joey," Tommy replied, not particularly caring to see what filthy woodland creature Joey had gotten his hands on this time. What time Joey wasn't spending on the Internet, he liked to spend either tending to all the frogs, crickets and other creatures he'd find in the recesses of the park's forest, or in the park itself finding new ones.
"Come on, guys, the sun's already starting to go down and we're up by two TDs already!"
Nobi sighed as if he didn't want to go on another exploration with Joey, but he knew he'd have to do this sooner or later anyway. "Joey's right, Tommy, let's just stop here, go see what Joey's got then call it a night."
Tommy's eyes looked older than any fourth grader's eyes should look as they were cast down on the football Trent had just tossed him, prematurely aged by the demands he placed on himself. Somehow the brown colour of the football looked a bit redder against the maroon sweatshirt his mother always made him wear when he went out this late in the day, its single tone marred only by a darker splotch on the collar from when Matty bloodied his nose last year after Tommy told a fat joke he didn't really mean. Beneath the sweatshirt Tommy wore the t-shirt of his idol, Green Bat Packers quarterback Brett Favre, and as he tried to somehow see through the heavy crimson cotton beneath him to gaze into Favre's stoic face, he began to doubt if he could ever live up to the standard Brett had set. If he couldn't even get his elementary school a single victory, how could he expect to lead the Packers back to the Super Bowl when he grew up?
The football seemed to get a bit heavier in Tommy's hands. "Sure, whatever," Tommy said, as he palmed the football in one hand, leaving the other hand ready to grab the jacket he was walking towards. Trent and Joey went to get their jackets, leaving Nobi to care for Matty as Matty silently prayed for his heart to stop exploding in his chest three times a second, for the cold autumn air to stop burning his nostrils and throat as he drew it in, for the rolls of fat on his stubby body to just go away so he could know what it was like to be as popular as Tommy.
The Indian River cuts a delicate curve through the southeast part of Wyanoke, Wisconsin, bisecting the trees in McCully Memorial Park. The thin oval trail through the park runs parallel to the river in some sections, but few people go down to the riverbank because of the steep thirty-foot descent. So why, Tommy asked himself, did Joey go down here Sunday, as Tommy searched for footholds in the decline as best he could in the cloudy October sky.
"Come on, Joey, we're gonna be late home," Trent bleated. All the boys had a curfew of dusk to walk the three to five blocks from the park to their homes, and the sun's descent seemed to accelerate in front of their eyes. The past few days had been cloud-covered and full of a rain that seemed too cold for the time of year, leading up to today where the clouds had finally parted but the air that was left behind was even colder than the rain. Tommy began to think Trent had a point.
"It's only a bit more, guys," Joey called back, just finishing the final, easier part of the decline to the riverbank. Tommy could see the dirt by the river had not been affected yet by the overnight freeze, which surprised him as he could feel the air was colder the further down he went. Trent and Nobi were trailing just behind Tommy, but Matty had grabbed onto a big tree several feet back up and claimed he couldn't go down any further, after a stone he had been stepping on popped out from underneath his white canvas shoes and almost caused Matty to take a twenty-foot header into the river.
All throughout the walk to the riverbank Tommy's friends had asked him if he was okay. Tommy said he was, hoping his face and heavy sighs would not give away his depression. This Friday Muskogee Elementary was coming down to face the Badgers, and this was the closest thing to a rivalry Tommy had ever been a part of in his young life, Muskogee neighbouring Wyanoke on the north. Even though the Muskogee Minutemen had only won two of their first five games, at least they had won this year, which Tommy knew made them the favourites coming into the game.
This was Tommy's first year as the Badgers' quarterback; the previous year he had been on the team, but an older, frail boy by the name of Mike Rodgers had been the starting quarterback. The Badgers went winless that year as well, and it was only after Mike twisted his knee in the second half of the final game of the year that Tommy even got to be on the field during a game. Mike was in junior high now, so Tommy became the new starter almost by default, and while Coach Meers lavished praise on Tommy, calling him a "natural thrower" at least once in every practice, Tommy still felt heavy, almost useless, as the team he was commanding kept losing game after game after bitter, agonizing game. Beating Muskogee felt like the only salvation Tommy had, the one thing that could possibly sustain his hopes of being the next Brett Favre, the one thing that could possibly keep the only wish he'd ever had in his young life alive.
As Tommy came down the last few feet to where Joey stood on the riverbank, he saw the deep footprints Joey had left behind. The ground beneath was saturated with river water, and while the cold air had dried up the mud enough that it failed to stick to anyone's shoes, it was still an impediment to walking. Joey was only a few steps away, but the ground beneath combined with Tommy's ruminations about the importance of Friday's game made every step a laboured effort. Trent and Nobi lighted up on either side of Tommy.
"So what is it?" Tommy sounded as annoyed as he was.
"Here." Joey used the stick in his hand to prod at something black. It looked like a tangled mess of some kind of cottony fabric, blunted spikes sticking out every which way. Had Joey taken them all this way just to see some stupid pillow stuffing or something? But as Tommy's eyes adjusted to the darkening sky, he began to see a more chocolatey tone behind the black mass, rounded and pudgy but with some sharp lines and corners. There was a white glob in there somewhere, looking like a swollen, albino olive. As Tommy began to make out what was in that glob, he slowly, unwillingly, began to piece together that Joey was poking away at a severed human head.
All Trent could do was whisper, "Oh my god." Even against his racing heartbeat, Tommy could hear Nobi's breathing stop as dead as the object in front of them. Tommy didn't know what Matty was doing, but given the sight in front of his eyes Tommy could not have cared less about Matty, or Trent, or Nobi, or Joey, or even football.
"How do you think it happened?" Joey seemed as calm and cool as ever, too disaffected by his animal hoarding to be fazed by this.
"I don't know," Trent gasped, trying to put as much power behind his voice as possible but still having it come out a whisper. "And I don't think I wanna."
Like a cartoon anvil, a singular thought dropped on Tommy's brain, and the force of the impact somehow counteracted his shock, and the words came to his mouth like arrows. "Joey, don't you think we'd better tell somebody about this, like our parents or a cop or something?"
"Maybe later," Joey replied with the practiced nonchalance of one who has eaten more worms by ten than most people care to look at their entire lives. As Joey braced the stick beside the head with one hand and reached out with the other, Tommy had a singular, disgusting thought flash in front of his eyes, but just as soon as it disappeared, Tommy stopped believing it couldn't ever happen and realized it was happening.
Somehow, Trent got the words out before Tommy could begin to speak them. "Oh jeez, Joey, you're not gonna touch it, are you?" Even though Joey's eyes were transfixed on the head, Tommy still gave him an exasperated stare, trying to somehow will Joey's hand away from the withered, hairy globe in front of them.
And Tommy could not turn his eyes away as the hand that he was trying to move away from the globe grabbed the darker black mass by the tufts of decrepit hair and picked it up. Joey braced his legs into a courageous pose, his stick in one hand and the head in the other making him look like some knight of long ago who had slain the enemy country's king and was bringing back the proof to show his liege. Tommy could hear a dry, stifled sniffling coming from Nobi.
"Aw, it's not that gross," Joey said as he let his stick drop to the ground so he could turn the head around with his other hand to look at the face. As it swung around, Tommy could not help but be transfixed at the head. The skin was dark but not too dark, almost Puerto Rican, but from the mass of hair attached Tommy led himself to believe that this ... this person, this detached part of a person, had been African-American. Maybe it was just faded from age. The skin seemed to stretch dryly over the cheekbones, the jaw, the nose, but yet it also somehow seemed swollen in parts. The eyes had also swelled, and seemed as faded as the skin, the coronas gone cigarette-ash grey, the retinas that had once perhaps been mahogany now like plywood.
Joey grabbed the nape of the severed neck so he could look directly at the countenance of the partial corpse. "You guys wanna look at this?" Joey had a reputation for saying shocking, offensive things and acting like he didn't know what the fuss was about, but Tommy was beginning to realize Joey really didn't know, that he had no concept of how other people could be taken aback by the things he said and did.
"Uh, no." Tommy could sense Trent was taking a couple of steps back. Nobi's sniffling became wetter, louder and heavier, as his tears began to mingle with the river water in the dirt underneath him.
"You sure?" Joey began to walk forward towards Tommy with the head. Tommy's first instinct was to walk backwards, get as far away from Joey and his latest collectible as soon as possible, but somehow a force greater than the mud kept his feet bound in the same spot. Tommy wasn't sure what was going on; he tried giving his body every command he could to get away from that head; to run away or swat it away or tell Joey to stop, but aside from his stilling breathing the only motion that came from Tommy's body was his right hand slowly raising up to greet the detached head Joey held by the hair.
Even though his body didn't seem to react to the orders he was giving it, Tommy could still feel Trent and Nobi's eyes piercing through him. "Oh god, Tommy, no," Trent said with a force greater than he'd been able to muster since coming down to the riverbed, but Tommy didn't, couldn't, hear him. Tommy placed a still hand between Joey's on the skull, cupping the back of it like a baby's as Trent sighed and croaked gutturally at what his friend was doing.
This person was, or had been, an African-American male, Tommy was sure of that now. The hair, which felt as dully sharp as a scouring pad in Tommy's hand, was grouped into irregular, large cones, perhaps forty or so, which tried to spray out every which way from the skull, but were too withered to do so and just flopped down. The lips seemed slightly parted, but Tommy could see no teeth as the last glints of sunlight vanished from the top of the hill. A year ago Tommy's grandfather passed away from a heart attack, and Tommy suddenly remembered his grandfather's face at the open-casket ceremony, and how peaceful it had looked. This deceased visage in front of Tommy now also looked peaceful, but yet troubled at the same time. As if it had found final peace, but not without a singular cost, a cost that maybe it had doubted was worth it as it took its final, tortured breath.
Tommy's eyes were drawn to a silver hoop that pierced the left earlobe of the head. The hoop was wide, but thin, and Tommy obsessed over where the hoop joined unto itself. Tommy's mother had pierced ears, but all of her earrings were affixed behind her ear with some sort of clasp. This hoop was seamless, however, and Tommy rubbed at the hoop, groping for some hint of a seal.
As Tommy felt at the hoop, he began to hear some sort of chanting behind him, as if it were coming from just a few inches behind his ears. It sounded almost like the Native American ceremony Tommy had recently seen on a field trip, but deeper, and faster. Tommy couldn't make out any of the syllables of the chanting that well, only well enough to know they weren't English and some of them didn't sound quite right. One particular three-syllable pattern in the chant was louder than the rest, and Tommy detected more menace in the syllables each time they repeated.
Suddenly Tommy began to feel some control come back to him, not enough to distance himself from this scenario but enough to shake his head as he realized that the chanting he was hearing couldn't really be there. Tommy stared at the skull as if to ask it where the sounds he was hearing were coming from. The skull didn't answer back as the chanting grew louder. But Tommy felt that maybe the skull did know, and just wasn't going to tell him without a fight. Slowly Tommy raised his left hand up to get another hold on the skull, as if that might coax the answer out of it.
Tommy only gently grazed the right cheek of the head with his fingertips, and the jaw flung open, creating a small chasm that Tommy briefly saw the true meaning of his own mortality in before Joey let out a high-pitched shriek and jerked both hands off of the head. The head made one graceful rotation as it fell, before it landed on a river-worn rock just a foot from where Joey had been standing. As it landed, the skull made a sound like breaking eggs, and for three seconds of perfect silence the boys watched as a jelly just slightly darker than the grey rock beneath it began to ooze out from underneath the skull. The jelly reminded Tommy of the miso paste he'd had at Nobi's house at a recent sleepover.
The silence was broken once again by Joey's shrieking, as he ran back to the spot where the boys had descended and began flailing his limbs wildly, thrashing to get every inch of distance between himself and the head as he possibly could. Trent, Nobi and Tommy all followed soon after, Trent and Nobi adding their own screams in a chorus to Joey's. Tommy was the only one who seemed to have some sort of control as he more methodically stalked up the hill, though the control was clearly not his.
"Hey guys, what's going on?" Matty was still hugging the thickest tree on the hill, unaware of what the boys just witnessed. "What's wrong? Where are you going?"
Tommy wanted to tell Matty to get out, to run with them as best he could, to leave this place as soon as possible, but all his being was focused on the flight. As a stick beneath Tommy's foot slipped and rolled away, Tommy lunged forward, grabbing onto the dry sleeve of Matty's coat to regain his balance and continue his retreat. Tommy kept going forward, but the strong pull on his coat caused Matty's hands to slip off the tree, and before he could shift his girth to compensate, Matty found himself going down the hill, bouncing as well as anyone his size could bounce. Matty was rolling end over end, but with enough rotation caused by the irregular terrain that each time he "bounced," it was a different end on top. A growing roar in his side preceded the sharp snap of his right arm breaking cleanly beneath him, then one last tumble took away all the pain as Matty landed on the back of his head but his body rolled on top of it, rendering Matty unconscious.
Instinctively, the rest of the boys took a hard right once they got to the top of the hill, the earliest possible path out of the forest and back to the rest of the park. The sun seemed to stop in its tracks for the boys as they sprinted down the trail, not bothering to keep up with one another. Trent and Nobi had quieted down, but Joey continued his shrieking, the same shrill sound he loved to pull from other peoples' throats with all the things he said and did, finally pulled from his mouth by the sight of the shattered skull. Tommy ran for all he could, but he still seemed detached from the experience, somehow out of his body. The chanting had stopped, but that was all Tommy was aware of, not of Matty's horrific tumble down the hill, not of the sound of Joey's screams, and not of the seamless silver hoop earring still held between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, a marble-sized shred of torn flesh still hanging off the end.
Joey finally shut up just before the boys left the forest, but all of them continued to run, with Tommy eventually taking the lead, until they were a block removed from the park when Tommy suddenly felt his faculties come back to him as he pocketed the earring in his Packers jacket. Tommy stopped and turned around as the other boys came toward him, and got them all to congregate in front of Mrs. Fletcher's ramshackle house, the marigolds in front of her porch burned brown by the cold.
Nobi was worried about Matty, but the other boys were more concerned with what was going to happen to them. With the same practice he used in penetrating defences, Tommy calculated a plan to get them out of this mess: each boy would go home and say that they were all walking in the forest when Matty stumbled on a rock and slid down the side of the hill. Nobody would say anything about the head, not to their parents, not to their brothers and sisters, not to their friends, not even to each other. The head did not exist, Tommy tried to convince them, although Tommy wasn't sure he was getting through to Joey, his bloodshot, vacant eyes staring off nowhere in particular.
Nobi lived the closest to the park so he was the first home, but Tommy wasn't sure what would happen there or at Trent's or at Joey's so he had to sprint three final blocks to his home. After throwing the door open, he let his own momentum carry him to the dining room, where his mother was putting the sweet potato bake on a cat-shaped rest in the middle of the egg-shaped table that dominated the room, and gave her the same quick story he'd been practicing in his head all the way home. Tommy's mother called Matty's house from the kitchen, and got his mother on the line, but as soon as Tommy's mother related the story, Matty's mother put her on hold to take another call. Thirty-seven loud breaths from Tommy later, his mother began talking again for an instant before hanging the phone up. Tommy's mother said that she'd been put on call waiting, while Nobi's mother told her the same thing. Matty's mother hung up on both of them, Tommy's mother continued, so she could call the park rangers.
Tommy sat down on the living room sofa as his father mindlessly channel-surfed from the torn plush navy La-Z-Boy to the left of him. When his wife came in and told him the news, however, he immediately shut the TV down to see if his son was alright. Tommy said he was worried about Matty, but in truth he was more concerned that the ruse he had concocted would hold up, if the other boys would stick to the story or if the truth would somehow be plied from them. Acting as best he could, Tommy stared off into the corner where Zelda was playing with her catnip mouse and nodded his head as his mother asked him if he'd feel better if she'd call around to try to keep up with Matty's condition.
After the tasteless mush of dinner, Tommy went back up to his room where he finally took his Packers jacket off and folded it over the top of the chair in front of his desk and gracelessly fell into a heap on the edge of his bed. Tommy felt like crying, but the tears just wouldn't come out. What was going to happen to Matty? What was going to happen to the skull? What was going to happen to him? How was anyone supposed to continue living like a normal person after what he had just seen? And what was he supposed to do next?
Zelda trotted into Tommy's room and hopped on top of his bed, rubbing her bony yellowish neck against his left hand. Tommy mindlessly stroked her neck with his fingers, but just as her purring became audible Zelda hopped off the bed and crept her way to the edge of Tommy's jacket hanging over the chair. Zelda sniffed at the jacket a couple of times, then took a step back, hissed like a cobra and darted out of the room, her claws making dry scraping noises as they went across the naked sections of the hardwood floor in front of the door. Tommy's hand fell limp beside his body again.
As she had promised, Tommy's mother gave him regular updates on what had happened to Matty throughout the night. The park rangers had found Matty and taken him to the emergency room at Shriner Hospital, where he'd been diagnosed with a broken right arm, two broken ribs, various cuts and bruises and, more important than all of those things combined, a very severe concussion. Tommy stayed up hoping to hear that Matty had regained consciousness, but the only further news his mother gave him was that while the rangers were tending to Tommy, they'd discovered something else on the riverbed, but they weren't quite sure what it was. But Tommy had school the next night and so he wasn't awake for the announcement on the eleven o'clock news that the head of the graverobbed body of Jackie Mubay had been found in McCully Memorial Park.
The next day in school, of course, the students who had heard the news were quick to spread it to the other kids. By the time Tommy got to school, news of what had happened with Matty and the rest of the gang had also circulated, and Tommy was asked if he saw the head. Tommy did his best to act distant about everything, but his remembrances of the severed head made it little of an acting job.
During the morning math class Tommy was escorted outside to the hallway by his teacher, where both his parents and Lieutenant Stevenson of the Wyanoke Police Department were waiting for him. After some assurances from everyone that he wasn't in trouble and he wouldn't be punished for telling the truth, Stevenson asked Tommy repeatedly if maybe he'd seen something, anything, while he was down on the riverbed. Just as he told the other boys to do, Tommy said he'd just made his way down to the riverbed when he heard a snapping sound and then Matty came down. Every time he mentioned Matty's name, Tommy would make sure to ask a question about Matty in the middle of the Lieutenant's next question, to stymie him. Finally Stevenson told Tommy's parents Tommy may just be in too much shock now, and for now he was through and he put on as thick a veil of sincerity as he could muster through his frustration when thanking Tommy "for all his help."
After math came social studies, and Mrs. Bartlett immediately brought up the discovery of Jackie Mubay's head. From his faded-tomato plastic chair in the back row of the room, Tommy could see Nobi, Trent and Joey, and though their backs were all turned to him Tommy could detect their uneasiness, their guilt over the lie they were all perpetrating. Joey seemed especially shaken, a slicing contrast to everything Tommy and everyone else knew about him. But as far as everyone else knew, seeing Matty take such a nasty spill down the hill might have been what finally snapped Joey out of his pomposity. No one else need know the real reason, Tommy thought to himself.
Tommy's eyes darted back to Mrs. Bartlett in a flash when she made use of the word "football." It took a bit for Tommy to follow along with what she'd been saying while he was thinking about Matty and the lie and the head, but Tommy soon realized that Jackie Mubay had been something of a star, or at least as close to a "star" as anyone could be in Wyanoke, playing football in high school. Jackie and his parents emigrated from Jamaica to Wyanoke when Jackie was fourteen, and since Northern Catholic High School had no soccer team for Jackie to play the sport he excelled at, he instead became a kicker for the Northern Catholic Bulldogs.
The fact that Jackie could earn any kind of respect as a kicker was odd, Tommy thought to himself, since, like most testosterone-laden football towns, Wyanoke looked on football kickers with about as much respect and usefulness as the waterboys. But Jackie commanded respect, breaking nearly every local high school field goal record by his sophomore year and starting to break state records the following year. It was a forty-two yard field goal from Jackie that led the Bulldogs to their first city title in his sophomore year, and as a junior he was a thirty-seven yarder away from sending the Bulldogs into the Wisconsin State Division I Championship game when, on his run up to kick the field goal, Jackie unexplainably fell to his knees.
The final score of the game was Milwaukee Country Day 30, Northern Catholic 28, but few people who attended the game actually remembered the score. What they remembered was the ambulance crashing onto the field, the clean-cut men with jackets whiter than the yard markers painted onto the field, the spasms of Jackie's body only slightly visible from the nosebleed seats. Jackie was rushed to the closest hospital, but the next day he passed away. Milwaukee Country Day dedicated their victory the following Friday to Jackie, under the shadow of his death which had, at that time, not been explained publicly.
Mrs. Bartlett turned to Nora Dunkirk in the front row, since her older brother Sam had been on the team with Jackie at the time of his death, and asked her for her remembrances. Nora said what she remembered most vividly was the aftermath, when the doctors revealed that something had happened to Jackie's brain on the field and there was this big question about why Jackie's family never said anything about it. There were rumours, Nora added, that Jackie's father practiced voodoo, and that after a fight with his son earlier, the father placed some sort of curse on Jackie which caused the affliction that resulted in Jackie's death.
From that point Mrs. Bartlett took over, talking about stereotypes and abuse and things of that nature, but Tommy's brain was drowning in a sea of memories from the previous night: the first realization that he was looking at a human head, the feel of the hair on his freezing fingers, the brief glimpse into the void of its mouth, the dull cracking sound the skull made when it hit the rock, the ooze coming out from underneath it. Mrs. Bartlett tried asking Tommy a question later in the class, but when Tommy blurted out a startled "Huh, what," she told Tommy it was okay, that she understood why he was so frazzled. Even in his absorption, Tommy couldn't help but let the thought "if only she really knew" petulantly cross his mind before returning to the sights, sounds and smells of the previous night.
Wednesdays were also devoid of football practice, and just as soon as Tommy and Nobi got home and had their customary after-school cookies and juice, Nobi asked Mrs. Harding if she could drive the two of them to the library downtown so he could work on a report for social studies. Tommy's mother asked her son if he had the same report to do, but Tommy couldn't remember anything from school that day, so he just said, "Uh, yeah," and started putting his coat back on. Nobi asked Tommy's mother to call his mother at work, so Nobi's mother could pick Nobi up at the library on her way home. While his mother was tending to that, Tommy asked Nobi what report he was talking about, and Nobi replied that they had a one-page report on stereotyping due by Friday.
Mrs. Bartlett had been talking about stereotyping in recent days, so Tommy at least knew what to write about, but his mind was still on Jackie Mubay and his shadowy skull, still right in front of Tommy's eyes as best as his brain could discern. Tommy let Nobi and his mother chatter on the way downtown in the minivan that suddenly reminded Tommy of the forest with its blue-green exterior. Even though Tommy had removed everything but his social studies textbook and folder from his backpack, somehow it felt heavier than ever, as he leaned back to let the edge of it rest on the spacious middle seat of the year-old Aerostar.
Once at the library, Tommy let Nobi, who now seemed only slightly affected by the ghastly events of the past twenty-four hours, go off and do his own thing, while Tommy went up to the reception desk and asked for help with newspapers. With a little assistance from the whisper of an elderly librarian behind the desk, Tommy had a stack of microfiches in his hands, walking towards the dusty dark beige viewer which stood in sharp contrast to the new computer to its right, against the wall with the mosaic of the big open book, cream-coloured pages with coffee lines and edges.
After showing Tommy how to load and unload the microfiche, and how to skim through the pages, the librarian shuffled back to her counter, her low heels ringing out in the vastness of the main lobby, to help a teenage girl twirling her honey-blonde hair with her pinky finger. The librarian had already loaded up the microfiche containing the Wyanoke Sentinel the day after Jackie's death, so Tommy began reading the front-page story detailing the previous night's disturbing events. After determining the story would yield nothing he hadn't already heard in social studies that day, Tommy began loading up further editions of the Sentinel, trying to find out as much as he could about Jackie Mubay and what happened to him.
It was about in the middle of the stack of microfiches that Tommy finally came upon the edition containing the official results of Jackie's autopsy. Tommy couldn't make heads or tails of the two words in italics that was the coroner's diagnosis, but Tommy read the rest of the article which explained the condition was a sudden chemical imbalance in Jackie's brain, which caused it to liquefy. In the span of a breath, Tommy made the connection with what he had seen underneath Jackie's skull the previous night, and began to taste acid, juice and cookies in his throat.
Tommy turned his head to one side, waiting for the inevitable flood of vomit to desecrate the shiny tan floor of the library, but it all seemed to reach a roadblock in his throat and didn't want to go any further. Tommy even tried contracting his stomach, hoping to push it all through, but that didn't work. Finally Tommy rested his head against the palm of his left hand, braced by his left elbow on the arm of the chair, and drew in breath made sour by the pungent taste in the back of his mouth.
Everything was becoming too much to bear for Tommy. Skulls and football and brains and hair and mouths and screams and cold and football and brains and eyes and lies and accusations and brains and football and brains and brains and brains. Even the dim light of the microfiche reader seemed like it was blinding Tommy's withered eyes. Tommy wondered if it was like this in an interrogation room in the police station, when you were being questioned by a cop after doing something really bad. Like he had done.
And going to the police crossed Tommy's mind more than once during the day. Just owning up to everything, telling them about the skull and Joey (hoping to deflect some of the blame onto him) and what really happened to Matty, and just begging, pleading for some sort of mercy or leniency. But Tommy realized that because he'd created the big hoax, he'd be in extra trouble for all that he did. The kind of trouble that can't be solved by groundings or spankings or anything like that, the kind of trouble that can only be solved by things Tommy didn't want to conceive of now. And not only that, but the other boys would be in trouble too, and while that was a secondary concern to Tommy next to his own well-being, it still weighed heavily on his mind.
"Goodnight, Tommy." The words coming from Nobi shook Tommy back to the present, as Nobi waved a clean hand at Tommy, the other hand embraced by the warily smirking Mrs. Uematsu. Tommy sat up in his chair and nodded at Nobi, then turned back to the reader in front of him, a black-and-white picture of Jackie Mubay in his football helmet staring right at him. Tommy was reminded of the only time he'd ever known Nobi to be in trouble; he wasn't sure what it was about, but he was at Nobi's house at the time and he was in Nobi's bedroom, playing Tetris on Nobi's Playstation, when he heard Nobi and his mother in the hallway. They were speaking in Japanese, but even though Tommy didn't know anything but the most basic of phrases Nobi had taught him, he knew that Mrs. Uematsu was really telling Nobi off. It was so sharp and staccato, that Japanese, Tommy remembered. He wondered if that's how you get told off if you do something really, really bad. And he wondered what punishments being told off like that led to.
But the Japanese had been sharper than that, Tommy remembered. And Mrs. Uematsu's voice wasn't so deep. But as Tommy strained to remember her voice, it seemed to get deeper, and more like mumbling. What Tommy was hearing in his head wasn't Nobi's mom, but it was familiar. Unnervingly familiar. As Tommy tried to figure out what he was listening to, his eyes happened back on the small patches of white that peeked out from inside Jackie Mubay's football helmet on the reader in front of him, and he became more aware of his surroundings. The hardness of the old, polished wooden chair beneath him, the warm breeze from the heat vent above his head, and this weird lump that had found its way into the right-hand pocket of his jacket.
Tommy knew what the lump was, but he could not help but pull it out of his pocket to look at it. A seamless silver hoop earring, with a small patch of smoky-brown flesh still attached to it, brittle like ancient fabric. As Tommy fingered the disembodied earlobe with his middle finger, it fell free and landed silently in Tommy's lap. Even if it had made a sound as it landed, all Tommy was hearing right now was the chanting, the chanting that had started on the riverbank yesterday and had now suddenly came back. Tommy looked back up at Jackie's picture, at the ovals of light that represented Jackie's eyes, and stared back into them, trying to ask Jackie what was going on, what was this noise he was hearing, why he had to be the one to discover his skull.
"Are you finding what you need, sonny?"
Tommy made a snorting noise as if he'd been in some kind of sleep, as the librarian's voice again snapped him out of wherever he had drifted off to this last time. The librarian smelled of Kayopectate and dryer sheets, her breath of stale mint.
"I'm fine, I'm fine," Tommy stumbled, hurriedly putting the ring back in his pocket and swiping Jackie's crusty earlobe off his lap and onto the floor beneath the desk.
"The library's closing soon, shouldn't you be calling your mother or father to pick you up?"
Looking over his shoulder to the clock above the entryway, Tommy realized he was supposed to call his mother twenty minutes ago to come pick him up. "Oh ... oh no." Tommy fumbled in the pocket of his jeans for the quarter his mother had given him to use in the pay phone just to the left of the entrance to the library. "I'll come take care of the films after I call my mother, I promise."
"That's okay, take your time, dearie."
Tommy told his mother he'd lost track of time at the library, which was at least partially true. After going home and eating the roast beef and potatoes his mother had kept warm for him in the oven, Tommy went back to his room to write the report he was supposed to have been working on at the library. At least he'd been able to hurriedly check out a couple of books as the minivan idled in front of the grand glass doors. Tommy didn't really have time to give the books more than a cursory glance, but he was sure he could find something in there for the report.
But as Tommy laid on his back on his bed, the giant green oval on the pillowcase with the big white "G" in the middle of it framing his head like a halo, he had yet to crack those books. Nor had he worked on his other homework. All he had done, after dinner was over, was to climb into bed, hold the earring up and stare at it, marveling at it. Tommy had looked at the ring from every angle he thought of, and still could not detect where it fastened. How could it have gotten on Jackie's ear, Tommy asked himself, but still he could not come up with an answer.
Frustrated by his inability to detect a seal on the ring, Tommy again began rubbing the ring, hoping to feel it with his fingertips. In science class Mr. Donovan had been teaching about how fingertips are the most sensitive part of the human body, so Tommy hoped he could perhaps find the seal that way.
But as Tommy moved the ring between his fingers, he heard the chanting start again. Finally Tommy made the connection between his feeling the ring and the chanting, and he sat up in bed so fast that the springs of his mattress let out a rusty squeak.
At once, Tommy felt out of contact with his body again. He became so focused on the chanting, as it grew louder and angrier, that he became unaware that he was still fondling the ring. Tommy didn't have any clue about what the chanting was or where it was coming from, nor did he even know how to figure it all out. But he wanted to know, he needed to know. And he knew he couldn't ask anyone for help, that nobody else could hear what his ears were hearing.
Tommy's eyes darted to the right and left of the ring, trying to detect something, something that maybe nobody else could see but him, like the chanting. But all Tommy could see was his skin folding onto itself as his thumb rotated and his forefinger curled in and out. The ring didn't feel exceptionally cold or warm, it just felt like a ring. At one point Tommy had debated smelling the ring, maybe even touching his tongue to it, just to try to find something else about it, but no, that would have been too much. Besides, Tommy thought, if the ring gave off that bad a smell, wouldn't someone else, a classmate or Mom or Dad, have told him by now?
The litany lingered, growing seemingly stronger, loud enough that Tommy could detect an echo in it. It was all still gibberish to Tommy, a language he knew nothing of, only that three-syllable pattern that seemed angrier than the rest of it, a pattern that grew fiercer each time he heard it. Tommy wasn't sure where that anger was directed, although the thought that it might be directed towards him made Tommy's spine go cold.
It was still becoming louder, the chanting, so loud it was beginning to hurt, the echoes collapsing into each other and washing out all but one of Tommy's thoughts, his desire to know where this was coming from, what it all meant, why it had to be him that had to go through all this. Reflexively, Tommy's eyes closed as it felt like his eardrums were being torn apart, like the chanting inside his head was trying to find holes through which to escape to the rest of the world. Tommy's hands shook as he slowly brought them up to his temples, and finally it became too much for Tommy to bear as the ring dropped through his crooked legs to the plush comforter underneath.
Tommy wanted to yell, "STOP THIS!", but all Tommy could do in his condition was to scream, a shriek not unlike the one Joey gave the previous night, but more forceful, more meaningful, a cry from his very soul for this torture to end. Joey had just been afraid of what was in front of him; Tommy was afraid of everything, absolutely everything in his little world. It didn't take long for the sounds inside Tommy's head to cease, trailing off back to whatever evil place they came from, but Tommy didn't notice. The pressure and the stress had made Tommy's circuitry collapse, and all he could do now was cry, hoping to drive whatever toxins had poisoned him out through his tears.
Tommy's mother was the first one into his room, his father close behind. A warm, nervous hand was placed between Tommy's shoulderblades. "Tommy, honey, what's wrong? Tommy?"
That was it. Tommy couldn't hold out any longer. He had to tell the truth, had to tell them all about Joey and the skull and the brains and Matty and the ring and the chanting. Tommy really hadn't given much thought to voodoo and its effectiveness, but Tommy wanted to believe something, anything to explain away all that had haunted him since his trip to the riverbed. Tommy tried to get the words out, tried to undo all that he had plotted just outside the park, but as soon as he said, "Matty," he couldn't say anything else. He tried and tried again, but all he could croak was, "Matty ... Matty ... Matty ..."
"Honey, call the hospital again," Tommy's mother pleaded. "See if there's another update on Matty's condition."
"But we just called a half hour ago," Tommy's father explained.
"Do it!"
His wife's barking sent Tommy's father downstairs to the living room phone just as quickly as he'd climbed the stairs. Tommy's mother cradled her son's hunched-over body as best she could. "It's all right, honey, it's okay. You're going to be just fine. Matty's going to be fine, too. You just wait and see. Hush hush, now, it's okay. Let it all out, it's all right."
"No, it's not all right," Tommy screamed in his head, but nothing he could do could get those words out in the open, where his mother could hear them. Tommy felt fevered, too warm, and having his mother's body draped over his own wasn't helping any. But Tommy didn't care. At least the hurricanes in his head were dying down to dull roars now, at least if he didn't have control of his body back quite yet he thought he was regaining it, piece by piece.
A few seconds after a familiar creaking noise from the staircase ended, Tommy could sense his father's presence in the doorway to his room. "He's still out."
Tommy's mother let out a sigh of disappointment, a sigh that betrayed her knowledge that nothing could have changed in the last thirty minutes but she had to do something for her son. "Tommy ... Tommy, look at me, okay?"
After a few more sobs, Tommy's head raised to meet his mother's, as slowly as a heavy wooden door being pushed open in the front of a mansion. Tommy's cheeks were flushed and streaked with saline, his eyes veined the colour of raw hamburger, small shiny circles below his nostrils showing where the glistening mucus was beginning to leak out, as uncontainable as Tommy's emotions.
"Tommy, you listen to me, okay? Matty will be okay. But he needs your help. He needs people like you, people like Nobi, believing that he's going to be okay. If enough people think he's going to be okay, then he will be okay, he'll get better. But right now he needs you to be strong for him. I know you want to go see him in the hospital, but that's just not possible right now. I promise you, as soon as it is possible, I'll take you to see him, even if it means picking you up in the middle of school, okay?"
"O-o-o-okay." Tommy had asked to see Matty in the hospital, but only because he needed to let Matty know about what all the other boys were saying. Tommy was sure Matty hadn't seen the skull, but Matty would still have quite a different tale to tell about how things went in the forest, and Tommy was hoping he could get Matty to go along with the history he'd rewritten.
"Okay now. Be strong. Matty needs strong friends right now." Tommy paused. "Friends? How much of a friend was I to make Matty the fall guy for the whole sordid mess? Some friend I am," Tommy thought to himself.
"Okay." Tommy sniffled, tried to suck back in the snot he could feel at the top of his upper lip. "Okay."
"You get your homework finished and then try to get some sleep, okay? And if anything else happens, you come down and you tell me or Dad and we'll help."
"Yes ... yes, Mom."
"I love you, Tommy."
"I love you too, Mom."
Tommy's mother reassuringly rubbed her hand across Tommy's back before she left Tommy alone again. Tommy grabbed at the tissue box beside his bed, and began honking and wiping and trying to recover from his collapse. The pain was going away, and even the memories of Jackie, his brains leaking in a puddle beneath him, seemed somehow hazier, more tolerable. Tommy didn't know what was going on, but he knew he had to just keep going as best he could, maybe try to make up for what he did to Matty earlier by being strong now, by pulling him through this.
After throwing a softball-sized glob of cottony paper and his own secretions into the tin wastebasket next to his desk, Tommy sat up, pulled out his math workbook and finally started in on his assignments. Everything seemed a little harder than it was during the day, and even that hadn't been easy for Tommy with the memories he had dancing in his head. But Tommy managed, maybe his work wasn't as good as it could have been but it was at least something, at least he made the effort, and right now the effort was all Tommy had in him.
Midway through the social studies essay, Tommy shifted his feet under him on the bed and felt a sharp pain coming from the ball of his right ankle. As Tommy sat up and lifted his feet into the air as if they were being put in stirrups, Tommy saw the ring again, still as shiny and seamless as it was before. Keeping his pencil clenched near the base of his fingers, Tommy picked the ring up with his thumb and forefinger, a positioned that somehow seemed practiced and natural to Tommy by now.
"I have to throw this away," Tommy thought to himself. "I have to." But the void inside the ring somehow seemed inviting to Tommy, it's seamless surface was comforting, reassuring in its perfection. Tommy tried to move his hand towards the wastebasket, to throw it in with all the tissues and all the pain contained in them, but he couldn't. Tommy tried flinging the ring with his fingers, but his body just wasn't responding to him. "No, not again," Tommy thought, as he sat up and walked over to his Packers jacket on the coat hook next to his door. Tommy placed his hand in the right pocket of the jacket, and finally his fingers unglued themselves, letting the ring fall to the bottom of the pocket with a dry bristle.
Tommy turned back to his bed, to the open books and notebook containing the start of his essay, but somehow in the trip from his bed to the coat Tommy's eyes became twice as heavy. A yawn forced its way out from Tommy's lungs, cascaded through his weary eyes and warm blood. "I'll finish the essay tomorrow," Tommy said to himself. Tommy had practice tomorrow night, the last practice before the big game against Muskogee, but he'd have time after dinner to finish the essay, he thought.
As Tommy looked over to the big framed poster of Brett Favre above his desk, Tommy somehow found himself concerned less about football now than he could ever remember being. Tommy turned the light switch off, stripped down to his underwear, dressed himself in his pajamas by the moon blue nightlight on the wall, cleared the books and pencil from his bed, tucked himself in underneath his Packers bedsheets and silently prayed for a peaceful sleep.
The next day at school had been rough for Tommy. Some kids had started a nasty rumour that Joey and Tommy and the rest of the boys had been responsible for the graverobbing of Jackie Mubay, and that the police had been over yesterday to accuse them of it. At first Tommy tried to point out that the graverobbing had taken place over the summer, while he and his parents were on vacation at their grandparents' in Florida, but finally Tommy relented and just shut up while he was being picked on, because kids were kids and Tommy realized he couldn't get them to stop no matter what he said. The other kids weren't on him so bad, but Tommy knew that for Nobi and Joey, who weren't as popular as him, this must have been torture. Tommy saw at least two classmates who'd supported him when he was being picked on by other kids, then go over to Nobi and pick on him later.
Tommy tried to rationalize that all the kids would be taking this abuse whether or not the truth came out anyway, but the strain of maintaining the web he'd spun on the town was starting to get to him. What if Matty had awoke in the hospital and told his side of the story? Tommy feared that, but he feared even more that Matty would never wake up again. Every time Tommy replayed the run up the hill in his mind, Matty's scream got louder and louder, and Tommy began to see more and more trees to grab onto instead of pulling poor Matty down the hill and making his body break. Tommy hated himself as much as he thought the rest of the town would hate him if he didn't lead the Badgers to victory over Muskogee the next evening.
Maybe that will make things right, Tommy thought to himself. Maybe if I can get that first victory, defeat our big rival, maybe then everything will start to go right. Tommy even considered telling everyone the real story of the riverbed after his victory, while still being carried on the team's shoulders. It took all of a second for him to realize how ridiculous that idea was, but Tommy felt like he had to win the next night, he had to get something in his life going right before things got any worse. Victory against Muskogee might be the only epoxy that could hold together Tommy's rapidly unraveling life.
Tommy was never the first player out of the locker room and onto the field for practice, but until this day he hadn't been the last, either. After everyone else had gone out into the cold Wisconsin afternoon in their uniforms and miniature plastic armour, Tommy reached into the pocket of the Packers jacket in his locker and pulled out that last piece of Jackie again. Tommy stared through the middle of the ring to the worn white tile below, wondering what it was that kept this little hoop in his life when he so desperately wanted to be rid of it, and everything it reminded him of.
And again, Tommy looked for the seam in the ring, the place where it detached from itself. Tommy began to think that maybe if he could unfasten the ring, it would undo everything that had happened, would break the bad luck and allow the world to start being right again, start making sense. The fluorescent light of the locker room seemed brighter than the bulb in his room, so Tommy started looking for some sort of defect in the ring, some point where he might be able to pull it apart.
But aside from the same pinprick of a dark splotch he'd seen on the inside of the ring so many times before, Tommy still could not find a defect in the ring, let alone where the ring came back onto itself. Realizing what was about to happen, Tommy braced his tiny body as best he could as he began to feel for the seam again. Just as he'd feared, the chanting behind him began again. Tommy knew his time was short, before the chanting would become too much for him to bear, before he'd wind up in a tight ball on the grimy porcelain tiles beneath him, so he searched as frantically as he could for that part of the ring he needed to find more than anything.
"HARDING!"
The bass tone of Coach Meers resonated through the fabricated metal of the lockers, making them rattle like an aluminum shed in a thunderstorm. Tommy palmed the ring to the opposite side of Coach's voice as best he could. "Y-yes, Coach?"
"Harding, practice is starting, why aren't you out there?"
Tommy felt sick as he realized how naturally the lies were coming to him now. "I'm sorry, Coach, I just thought about Matty and I ..." Tommy let his voice trail off, knowing it would make him sound more confused, more pathetic, more in need of help. At least the chanting had ceased.
Coach Meers slowly walked towards Tommy, knowing that at a time like this he needed to be as sensitive as a man could be without looking all faggy. "Tommy, son, I know you're thinkin' about Matty right now." A bulky hand, more used to handling steak knives and beer cans than reassurance, gripped Tommy's shoulder. "But you gotta get past that, son! Just sittin' here mopin' around ain't gonna solve nothin'! You've got to use that emotion, let it drive you! Go out there and win one for Matty! Okay?"
Tommy sighed out of relief that his lie was still working, but tried to make it sound as exasperated as possible, like he wasn't quite sure what to do yet. "Okay, Coach."
"Good." The brute, dry hand came off of Tommy's shoulder and slapped his behind. "Now get out there and show me whatcha got, son! Tomorrow's the big game!"
"I know, Coach," Tommy said as he grabbed his helmet and jogged out towards the exit. Tommy slowed a bit as he felt something hard against his hip, but then brought his pace back up when he realized he didn't care how he'd placed the ring in the waistband of his pants, he just wanted to get out there and start throwing the football.
After the perfunctory runs and stretches to start the practice, the defencive players went to one side of the field for their drills while Coach Meers had Tommy go through reception drills with the offense. It was always the same drill: two lines to either side of Tommy, the players at the front of each line would run the patterns Coach called out while the players behind them in line acted as guards, then Tommy threw to whoever he thought he could get the ball to the easiest.
The first couple of times the drill went as usual for Tommy, a couple of easy completions because the offensive players didn't know how to guard the receivers (then again, neither did the defencive players). But Tommy noticed something when he was throwing: he was feeling okay. More than okay, really, the football somehow felt more natural in his hands. Cocking the ball back, flinging his arm forward and releasing the ball all seemed to come easier to Tommy than he remembered. And his eyes seemed sharper, he was finding the places to throw the ball better than before.
On the third drill, the receiver to his left was supposed to run a flag pattern, but the player who was defending him cheated by basically running the pattern Coach Meers had called out himself, instead of trying to defend the receiver one-on-one. Despite the other receiver being more open, Tommy thought he could see the exact point where he could throw the football so it would be just out of the defender's reach, but still catchable by the receiver. Tommy threw the ball with incredible poise for the difficulty of what he was trying to do, and as the spiraling ball whistled over the fingertips of the defender and gracefully fell into the receiver's cradling hands, Tommy suddenly felt all right. There was nothing in his waistband to irritate him, no lie to remember to uphold, no severed head in his short-term memory. All there was, was the football.
The next drill, Tommy could see that both defenders were going to cheat on their routes again, but that the receiver on the left was going to have a crack of space open after he turned around in his curl pattern for the football. But the window would only be open for the shortest amount of time, so Tommy whistled the ball, expelling it from his hand like a ticking hand grenade. The smack of the pigskin against the chest protector of the receiver made even a few of the defencive players across the field turn around to notice, and the receiver clutched the ball against his body, stunned that the little brown ball could hurt almost as much as a tackle but still happy to have made the catch.
With newfound confidence, Tommy was glad to hear Coach Meers tell both receivers to go deep, to just run as hard and fast as possible down the field. Even though both defenders were faster than the receivers, Tommy smiled as he looked to his right, and used every muscle in his body to throw the football as hard as he possibly could, believing the ball would find its way into the receiver's hands, somehow. But as the ball whistled high over the receiver's head and landed a good twenty yards in front of him, the receiver let his sprint slow to a jog as he went to retrieve the ball.
Coach Meers went over to Tommy as the smile had come off Tommy's face like dust off a chandelier. "Whoa, easy now, son," Coach reassured. "These guys are football players, not sprinters, take it easy on ‘em, okay?"
"Yeah coach." Tommy was only slightly disappointed in this failure, as he realized that things weren't going quite that well but they were still going well. The passes weren't being completed by some force of magic, Tommy still had to work at it, but something was making it a lot easier to make those passes. Tommy was beginning to understand what it was, and despite himself, he liked it and wanted it to continue.
Tommy didn't miss another pass for the rest of the drill, and the scrimmage match afterwards was sharp in its decisiveness. The Badger defence had been laughable throughout the year, but Tommy was carving them up so bad that Coach Meers ended the practice fifteen minutes early out of mercy. Tommy was a good quarterback, but on this day Tommy seemed almost super-human. Coach Meers had always heard football analysts on television talk about players having skills that could not be coached, but it was only now that Coach understood what that truly meant.
The only real trouble during the scrimmage came when the centre missed his assignment, and Tommy was tackled shortly after getting his pass off. Reflexively, Tommy went into his waistband, to see if the ring had been jarred loose. It was still there, though, and as Tommy's finger rubbed across it he could hear the chanting bubble up and then die off just a second later. Tommy felt the corners of his mouth curl up just the slightest bit at the sound.
Tommy slipped the ring back into the pocket of his Packers jacket as he got undressed in the locker room, then later in his home, while he was supposed to be finishing his social studies essay, he brought the ring back out and began rubbing it again. By stroking it for a bit then stopping, Tommy could control the volume, keep it just bearable enough that he didn't break down like before but as loud as was otherwise possible. Tommy realized he had been wrong to fear the ring all along, fear where it came from, fear what it was doing to him.
But that was a scary moment, almost losing the ring when he'd been tackled down, so Tommy had to find another place for it. Tommy tried looping it over the silver crucifix that he wore more out of habit than anything else (he and his parents hadn't gone to church since moving to Wisconsin two years ago), but the ring was too small for that. Tommy puzzled at this problem, until the solution startled him with its simplicity: Tommy took the chain holding the crucifix off from his neck, then fed the chain through the ring, letting the ring rest on the top part of the cross. Tommy fingered the side of the ring and let the chanting fill his head again, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath to savour the sensation, the liquid fire ripping through his veins, the inebriation of the self-realization of one's true power.
Jackie Mubay and his disembodied head and Matty and his concussion still were in Tommy's mind, but they had been shunted off to some dark and dank corner. Tommy was vaguely aware of them, but only in the context that a victory tomorrow would somehow make things right, would justify all the tiny little things he had done wrong these past couple of days to get to this point. Beating the Muskogee Minutemen would make Tommy a hero in his mind and in his little world, and while everyone might not forgive a kid for doing what Tommy had done to Matty and the other kids, they'd forgive a hero.
Tommy's face beamed wider than the door Zelda stared at him through. But then Tommy looked up at Brett Favre's impassive face, and tried to mimic the composure of his hero. The game's not won yet, Tommy thought to himself, but I've got a real good feeling about it. Tommy kept his jaw straight-laced, but let his eyes look upon Favre's lovingly as he let out a sigh of wonderment, before returning to his social studies essay.
Tommy almost didn't get to play the game. His social studies teacher had called Tommy's parents after school to let them know that Tommy's essay on stereotypes was far below his usual level, and both his mother and father had reservations about letting Tommy play with the spectre of Matty's condition still on everyone's minds. But Tommy said he was feeling better now, and he really wanted to get out there and throw the ball. Once they got to Wyanoke Elementary, Tommy's parents searched out Coach Meers to see if he could convince Tommy to sit out this game, but it turned out to be Coach Meers talking Tommy's parents into letting him play, relating the story of his incredible performance in yesterday's practice and assuring them that maybe football would be the best thing for Tommy at this point.
Up in the stands, Tommy's parents sat next to Mr. and Mrs. Uematsu and Nobi. Trent wasn't there, and Joey hadn't even shown up for school that day. Just before the game started, Mr. Uematsu called the hospital on his cell phone, only to get the same practiced message from the woman on the other end, that Matty still hadn't regained consciousness. The October sky seemed to dim just a bit more in the parents' eyes.
But the sky seemed bright and full of opulent possibilities to Tommy, almost as bright as the perfect little white and navy uniforms of the Muskogee Minutemen as they stepped onto the field. More than ever, as Tommy held a hand over his armour where he could feel the ring against his bony chest, Tommy realized he could make everything right tonight. The riverbed of McCully Memorial Park was as distant in Tommy's mind as his old home in Iowa, only without the annoying letters from all the old friends Tommy wished would just leave him alone. And Tommy was positive that if he talked his parents into driving him to the hospital after the victory, he would walk into Matty's room to see Matty sitting up in bed, his pudgy pug-like face smiling because even though his friend accidentally pulled him down a hill, he still won the big game, was good when things really counted.
But after the first half of the game, Tommy wasn't quite so sure his victory was guaranteed. Tommy had been brilliant, completing all but one pass when his receiver tripped on his way to the ball, and scoring a touchdown on every drive. But Muskogee had done the same to the Badgers' frail defence as well, and the score was tied 28 to 28. And with Muskogee getting first possession in the second half, Tommy realized that if things kept up at that rate, the best Tommy could hope was to take things into overtime. Tommy held the same beliefs of the rest of the town, that the two-point conversion was impure and didn't belong in football, but Tommy really wished he had it at his disposal now, to try to get an extra point or two up on Muskogee, to eke out that victory.
With seven minutes to go and the score tied at 42, Muskogee began another drive. Tommy realized he could be fighting against time, depending on how soon Muskogee scored. If they drew it out, Tommy realized he might only have a minute, maybe less, to get another touchdown to tie the game, and he realized that while his passing skills were dead-on, his receivers could not quite run all the way to the end zone in so short a span. As the two-minute warning neared and Muskogee still held possession, Tommy could feel a marble with the weight of the world making a slow descent down his throat, passing through his viscera before finally landing at the bottom of his stomach with a thud that resonated through the whole of Tommy's body and soul. Maybe he wouldn't be the hero after all. Maybe the power of the ring was just a hoax. Maybe he wouldn't be able to undo his lies like he'd hoped he could.
But just as soon as Tommy thought to try to shake off that feeling, he looked up to see two Badgers linemen tackle the Muskogee quarterback, throwing his body back like it had taken a cannonball at point blank range. Right away both coaches and a handful of parents came onto the field, because this had not been an ordinary tackle, this had been an assault. As the other players looked on in concern over the young boy's condition, Tommy didn't even try to stifle a sick giggle, as he realized finally his defence had done something right, at just the right moment. Everything fell back into place for Tommy again, and he could feel the air grow thin like he knew it would be on top of everyone's shoulders. Tommy slipped a finger underneath his chest protector and reveled in the familiar chanting, those three syllables that had once seemed so menacing now seeming to scream, "LET'S GO TOM!"
The backup Muskogee quarterback came in after the starter had been assisted off the field and taken off in the distance to be looked at by some parents, but the new quarterback had been left in a very tough situation. Despite gaining some yardage on the next couple of plays, Muskogee couldn't get in position for a first down, and so as the two-minute warning came, the Muskogee placekicker came in to put in a field goal. Muskogee Minutemen 45, Wyanoke Badgers 42.
Tommy thought to himself about the two-minute drill and its simplicity. The true test of any quarterback: going the whole length of the field in such a short span of time, marshaling the troops to make the most use out of their tired bodies, penetrating the frenzied, fevered red zone defence and scoring those winning points. Victory was now close, and Tommy thought he would soon have it in his hand to replace the ring.
Coach Meers stared at Tommy, his blissful face in stark contrast to the boy who had been so worried about his friend at the hospital, his right arm strangely stuffed down the front of his uniform and chest protector. "Tommy?"
Tommy opened his eyes, let the ring drop back to the flesh in front of his heart and bid the chanting a silent adieu. "I got it, Coach," Tommy said breathlessly, as he walked out onto the field to greet his team for the first play in what would be the finest drive of Tommy's young career.
The principles of a two-minute drill are simple enough: short, quick passes near the sidelines so the receivers can step out of bounds and stop the clock. Keep the passes neat, and don't try to go for too much at once because two minutes can be a long time if you need it to be. And Tommy was brilliant in his plotting, more brilliant than the grand lie, only stifling a bit when he saw a defencive lineman right in front of him and Tommy had to fling the ball out of bounds to avoid the sack. But the clock still stopped with the incompletion, and Tommy still got a first down on the next play.
As the Badgers crossed the fifty-yard line, all of a sudden the bleachers holding all the parents and kids seemed to lower and grow back, becoming bigger and bigger, until finally they hit a wall and then began curling up, forming another layer on top, and then another above that. Yellow letters spelling out "PACKERS" slowly faded into the end zone that would be Tommy's salvation. The cheers of the parents doubled and redoubled and then redoubled again, sounding as thunderous as the crowds Tommy heard on the television Monday nights. Tommy began to reach into his uniform after every play, stroking the ring to hear the chants play a counterpoint to the approval the crowd was giving him, the approval that everything Tommy had done this week was going to be all right.
Coach Meers called his last timeout with seven seconds left and the ball seven yards from the end zone. Coach had been convinced he would call for a field goal here, send the game into overtime and try to win it from there, but as he looked at Tommy standing opposite him in the huddle, his jagged head bowed down on the forearm that was reaching into his uniform from the neck, his eyes closed as if in meditation, his lips strangely spread on his face like a wolf about to bare its fangs for a fatal attack, Coach felt a strange sensation trickle through his veins. It was fear. Not fear of making the wrong decision, but fear of Tommy. Fear of angering Tommy, of not letting him go for the win. Coach stared up above Tommy's head as the words "Go for it, Tommy," escaped his mouth without sense or direction.
Tommy stroked on the ring all throughout the timeout, and now the chanting was even louder than when he'd broke down in his room. But the chanting was indiscernible from the cheering of the tens of thousands of football fans Tommy heard in his mind, it had all coalesced into one giant trampling mass of sound that told Tommy this was his time, that he could do this, that he was the hero. Even when Tommy brought his throwing arm back out of his jersey, the noise didn't seem to diminish. The burgundy of his teammates' uniforms almost began to take on a greenish hue in the setting sun, matching well with the golden numbers.
The calls required no conscious thinking on Tommy's part. It almost seemed to Tommy like he was picking the names at random, looking at each receiver and going, "Slant, post, long, curl, long." A part of Tommy felt compelled to give a little speech to his troops, like the generals in all the war movies his father liked to watch, but Tommy had no time for that now. This was his time, and he wanted to throw that Super Bowl-winning pass as soon as he possibly could, to bathe in that glory while it was still steaming.
Anticipation hung so thickly in the air it seemed to warm everyone, tendrils of anxiety shining against the oblique sun, as the Badgers and Minutemen lined up for what was likely the final play of the game, the do-or-die moment. Tommy slowly surveyed all the receivers to his flanks, all the potential boys that would be as men in just a moment, mature in their victory. Tommy's shoulders rose and grew wider as he called "HUT!" twice, his voice raspy from all the previous playcalling but now with force unlike anything he'd known before, even in the riverbed. Tommy called "HUT!" one final time, the centre snapped the ball into his calm hands, and Tommy effortlessly stepped back into the pocket.
Tommy's eyes scanned the field as, as he'd expected, the Minutemen went into a dime defence, keeping as many men downfield as possible to block attempted passes. Nobody was open for a pass yet, but Tommy had time to wait because the extra pass blockers meant there were fewer defencive linemen to potentially sack him. Tommy took an extra step back, just to give himself that extra split-second should the offensive line crack.
Everyone had run their routes, but still nobody was open. Tommy was sure seven seconds had passed by this point, so he couldn't spike the ball and try again, he had to do it on this play. All the receivers tried to find snatches of open field to call their own, places in the end zone where they knew Tommy could throw safely . Suddenly three of them all darted to the left at the same time, and a crack had developed in the Minutemen zone, a tiny little space where Tommy could throw the ball and make the game-winning completion. In the hellish hubbub of noise, Tommy smiled as he cocked his arm back, knowing that victory was just a couple of seconds away.
As Tommy's arm came back, everything began to feel like it was in slow motion to Tommy. He had seen this in the movies, though, so he figured it was just the drama getting to him, that this was how Brett Favre must have felt in the Super Bowl. But as Tommy's brain tried to send the command to throw the ball, something failed him. Just as the world had gone slow, it had also gone heavy. Tommy's arm suddenly felt weak, trapped above his head, unable to move or even release the football.
Tommy realized something was going wrong, and tried to shake some sense into himself. But now the football players, the field, the stands, it was all starting to blur in front of Tommy's eyes. Tommy tried to squint, to refocus, but all he could see were slow-moving blobs, blobs that seemed like they were starting to melt, to be drawn into the ground. None of this made any sense to Tommy, but he could not hope to even hear himself think in the midst of the chanting, chanting that was once again separate from the dwindling cheers of the fans in the stands.
Then Tommy began to feel himself melting into the ground. His legs seemed heavy and full of fluid, and like they were sinking beneath the hard, frozen dirt and grass underneath his cleats. His head felt as though it were made of lead, trying to push itself down through his neck, into his chest, into his heart, and down into the earth's core. Tommy's body shivered involuntarily at these sensations, control of his muscles and bones long since gone.
Finally, something began to take shape in front of Tommy's eyes. At first it just seemed like a couple of bright dots, but as moments wore on Tommy could see more of a shape to them, a shape like a face, like the superimposing of Darth Vader's visage Tommy had seen on the end credits of Star Wars. Suddenly Tommy flashed back to the library, and the eyes of Jackie Mubay glowing at him from the microfiche viewer. And while the face materializing in front of Tommy looked like Jackie Mubay, it wasn't quite him. The eyes seemed more mature, more wizened, more sinister. The flesh, as it faded in, was older and more wrinkled, and the hair was cut short and neat, not like the spiky, ratty outgrowth on Jackie's skull.
Tommy's equilibrium told him he was starting to fall backward, but Tommy knew that couldn't be possible because his legs were telling him he was still standing straight. The chanting had grown denser than Tommy's skull could contain, the chant looping back onto itself to the point where not a single syllable could be heard. It felt like Tommy's head was about to burst, to explode to the point where even his football helmet would be shattered into thousands of pieces of foam and plastic, covered with whatever it was that was inside there. Tommy looked directly into the eyes of the mirage in front of him, pleadingly, hoping that somehow this ghost could stop whatever it was that had ravaged control away from him.
The phantom face looked down while still keeping its pupils pointed directly at Tommy's, and snarled. Even against the cacophony of chanting inside his head, the voice of this person was clear, distinct, and thrice as loud as the chanting, as it uttered three all-too familiar syllables at Tommy, the same three that seemed as utterly menacing as this person. Then its pupils leapt out at Tommy, their darkness surrounding Tommy, enveloping the field and the stands and the chanting and Tommy's consciousness, and swallowing them, absorbing them into a place from which they would never return.
The first defencive lineman that broke through sent Tommy's body flying to the ground like a giant, thin teddy bear that had been run into by a truck. Tommy collapsed to the turf with limbs splayed all over the place as the second defencive player scooped up the ball that had not followed Tommy's hand down, but just dropped, and began an eighty-yard dash to the other side of the field that seemed more like a formality than anything else. Scoring the extra touchdown was just the final blow, the last statement of a team that had looked defeat in its gaping jaws and stared it down. Muskogee Minutemen 51, Wyanoke Badgers 42.
"Goddamn it, the kid choked," Coach Meers thought to himself, keeping the cursing held inside his head so he wouldn't have to hear from the parents like he did the last time he swore on the field. Meers was upset over Tommy's surrender to the pressure, and the poker money it had cost him. Now not only would his pals laugh at him about this, they'd also be able to keep him out of next Tuesday's game. Just wonderful.
Tommy's mother had wanted to run down to the field after her son fell onto the field, but her husband had held her back until the rest of the crowd began to disperse, agitated that they had come so close to that first taste of victory in over two years, only to have it taken from them. But once she had the opportunity, Tommy's mother stuttered down the steps as fast as she possibly could, Nobi Uematsu close behind, to check on Tommy.
Coach Meers arrived at Tommy's side just a few seconds before Tommy's mother did. Realizing his mother was nearby, Coach Meers forsake the bickering he was hoping would give him some release from the tension, of the loss and all his selfish thoughts about it. "Tommy ... Tommy, son, get up." But Tommy did not move.
Tommy's mother knelt down to the side of Tommy's head and placed a hand on his chest. "Tommy ..." Instinctively, Tommy's mother reached her hand up inside her son's facemask, in front of his nostrils and slightly parted mouth. She waited for the warmth of Tommy's breath on her fingers, the sign that things were not as bad as they'd looked from the top of the bleachers. When that breath was slow in coming, she placed her fingers on the side of Tommy's neck. She tried feeling something pulsing in there, but his neck was as cold as the ground beneath her feet.
Something just wasn't connecting in Tommy's mother's mind: Tommy had to be okay. She'd seen her son take sacks much, much worse than this before. Surely he had to be pretending, had to be so upset with himself for screwing up that he'd rather play dead than face anyone else. But as she searched for signs of life that never showed up, Tommy's mother became worried that Tommy really wasn't playing.
Coach Meers bent down and placed his hand on the other side of Tommy's neck, and he too failed to find a pulse. He put his fingers in front of Tommy's face, and felt no breath, only the dying warmth of Mrs. Harding's own hand. As Mrs. Harding pulled her hand back and cupped it to her hand, futilely attempting to stifle her sobs, Coach Meers realized the gravity of the situation, something that went far beyond football or poker. "Jesus ..." he whispered, then sprang to his feet as quickly as his beefy body would allow him. "SOMEBODY HELP, WE NEED SOME HELP HERE!"
Tommy's father and the Uematsu parents came down the bleachers as Coach Meers screamed. Some of the same parents that had looked over the Muskogee quarterback were on their way over to Tommy's body as Tommy's mother draped a limp arm over her son's body, hoping against all she consciously realized that Tommy was going to be okay. Her husband had to drag her off Tommy's body as the parents began checking over Tommy and Mr. Uematsu dialed emergency services on his cell phone.
Tommy was dead before his body had even been loaded onto the ambulance, but the paramedics would not pronounce death on the scene, they had the body taken to St. Vincent's and hoped the doctors there could do something they couldn't do with the limited equipment in their vehicle. But there was nothing they could have done for Tommy.
Nobi Uematsu didn't stop crying until the following morning, his parents keeping a vigil over him hoping to provide what small comfort they could to their son. Once Nobi had regained enough composure to speak again, he told his parents everything he knew, of Joey and the skull and what Tommy did with it and how Matty had been further up the hill but he just didn't know what had happened to him. Word quickly spread to everyone's parents and then through the town, but by now it didn't really seem to matter. Matty finally woke up that morning, but Tommy would never wake up again.
Upon examining Tommy's body and making an inventory of the clothing he'd been wearing at the time of his death, the coroner slipped the silver crucifix off of Tommy's neck and took the ring off. The coroner looked at the ring for a short while, wondering why he'd be wearing such a thing on his crucifix. The coroner looked the ring over a bit in the brightened light of his work lamp, then tossed it into the Tupperware container along with the crucifix. Instinctively, the coroner looked behind him, thinking he heard his assistant behind him saying something. But there was nobody there, his assistant was sick with the flu that day. The coroner shrugged it off and continued with his inventory.
The final diagnosis of Tommy's death was the same as Jackie Mubay's: a chemical imbalance had caused his brain to liquefy. Many people in town made the connection with Jackie Mubay, but those who had claimed Jackie's father had cast a voodoo curse on him were dumbfounded to explain how Tommy could have died the exact same way. All the doctors who had examined Tommy, some of whom had also examined Jackie, said they had no ready explanation for how something like this could happen, only that they were sure it was not contagious, so there was no cause for a health scare.
The ring came back to Tommy's mother, along with the crucifix and all the rest of Tommy's personal belongings, after the coroner had completed his work. Tommy's mother didn't know what to make of the ring, so she placed it in a box with some of Tommy's other trinkets, and placed it up in the attic, while the crucifix was framed with Tommy's last class photo on the end table in her living room. Her husband kept telling her to give Tommy's stuff to Goodwill, but Tommy's mother couldn't bear to separate herself from those last bits of her son, up in the attic whenever she needed to look at or touch what he had left behind.
Many families, including the Uematsus, left Wyanoke in the next year or two, as the spectre of the two deaths cast a pall over the small town. But the thought of moving never really crossed the Hardings' minds, they thought the talk of the town being cursed was just silly, the kind of chatter caused by prolonged exposure to the cold Wisconsin winters. A couple of years later the Hardings conceived a new son, knowing that they could never bring back Tommy but feeling empty without an offspring in their lives. Football didn't seem as important as it used to be in Wyanoke as it used to be, but maybe Jacob Harding would follow in Tommy's footsteps, the Hardings thought to themselves. Maybe, Tommy's father thought, if Jacob grows up to be the same size Tommy was, he could use some of Tommy's old equipment, up there in the attic.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon