TERRY STARTED school in Echota the day after. It rained full on the way, trees bent to cold water. The green river beneath a small concrete bridge ran high at the pilings and foamed a sheet over the road. His tires gave some, wobbled through the slick. The radio shook in the seat, and the bridge ended, the ground looked up and the tires bit the road hard, town behind a smear of railroad and tin.
He listened to a record called Combat Rock by a group named the Clash. He’d taped it to a cassette, played it then in the plastic radio he’d set on the passenger seat. The radio was metal gray, the size of a bread-box, a fold-out handle on top. He faced the black web speakers at the windshield, believed the slant of glass pushed the music from the speakers over his head, against the ceiling and to the back of the car and the rear glass, and there it bent down, over the backseat, along the floor, under the front seat to his shoes and the pedals, kept that way, moved the way heat filled a room. Alice Washington told him all about Joe Strummer. He thought of him, then, his job cleaning toilets at the English National Opera before the Clash got started, climbing rafters sixty feet with a wire cutter longway in his mouth like a horse bit to steal a microphone. Terry wanted to love something that way. All the headlights he passed in the wet morning were suns burning out. An early joint put everything to a moan; he knew later, at soccer practice, he’d get pummeled.
The Echota school was square and dark brick on the outside. Exhaust fans shaped like globes turned on the flat roof, and steam came out and fissured just above the metal. The main yard edged short trees and a concrete walk. The cars of teachers nudged the curb. Two sides were shallow fields, the ruin of pine between the school and highway. He put the asthma inhaler to his mouth and pulled hard and held it in. He’d gotten it from the school nurse. She gave it to him after he went in and said his throat was tight and he couldn’t breathe so good. She’d listened to his chest with a stethoscope.
Inside he was led by color; the white and black check of the cafeteria floor just past the front glass, the pale yellow and blue walls, the wood brown railing of staircase rising to the second floor. He blazed the halls for a smoking section, and found none, and then he went to the front office where the principal and all those other bastards lived. It was quiet inside, no one behind the counter. Terry leaned to it, put his knees against the flat panel below the counter, fished out his pack of cigarettes and held them. He waited a few minutes, knuckled the veneer with a four-count tap, he rang a tin bell; one like a hotel must have, he thought, a chime for a bellman.
A teacher came from the back offices and faced him. Terry showed him the cigarettes, held the new pack out over the counter. The teacher wore a wine rouge blazer, pale carnation pinned to the lapel. He looked down, bone white hair long at the neck, then swept thin wisps over the crown, and lingered at Terry’s hand, the smokes gripped there, amber tint bifocals low on the bridge of his nose. Terry looked at the pack, too, then back up, quickly; the teacher’s wet yellow boutonniere and his staring confused him.
What? Terry said. Stop looking at my hand.
The teacher reached over and took the pack; Terry lurched to get them back.
Hey, he said.
The teacher yanked the cigarettes past his reach, held them up and broke the pack in the middle. He took a few steps and dropped them past one end of the counter to a trash bin on the floor below.
Hey, man. Hey. You owe me a dollar for those.
Can I have the busted ones back? What do you say?
No.
I was looking for the smoking section.
You can’t smoke here.
What?
The school board says it.
What does that mean?
They don’t allow it.
They did at my old school.
This isn’t your old school. Be quiet.
Can I have that dollar?
Two times you get caught, the teacher told him, it’s school on Saturday, eight hours bagging trash, painting classroom trailer walls. Then he dropped his eyes to the counter and opened a thick ring binder and flipped through. He stopped past the middle pages and kept his face there a moment, and then he closed the book, and set it back. He got a pen and wrote on an index card, and then he came back and stood at the counter and faced him. Terry shifted his weight, pad to heel.
Please can I have those cigarettes, man?
The teacher put the white card on the counter and tapped it with his left index finger.
Your schedule, he said.
He raised an arm and pointed over Terry’s right shoulder, through the glass-laced break wire.
End of this hall is your class, he said.
Terry stopped at a tan cinder block bathroom. He pushed the metal slide lock in the stall, and put his back against the door. He dug at the big zip pocket on front of his knapsack and found an old pack with three left. He put it to his mouth and blew, rounded the soft pack with his breath and shook one out. He struck a match, pulled through his mouth and blew smoke from his nose. He waved his hands to break the cloud. The cherry burned long, orange and pointed. The filter turned in on itself. The speed and volume of things grew sudden then, and the world moved quick, jagged, sped then slowed by a hand he could not figure; he saw dot-nosed warheads, butted through doors in the great plains, Alice Washington held seatbelt to her chest, upside down in her crushed car; he heard wedding music. The sound outside grew, and thumped, so loud he let go of the rail and put his hands to his ears; whetstone, a hungry ghost, music never listened to, stuck past his hands beneath the hair and bone. His eyes rolled, back pressed hard on the door; bells rang high on the hall brick, heels from the classrooms grew loud on the tile, he went to dream.
A fist against the locked door at his back and his head shook straight. His lips tasted singed plastic. He took his hands from his ears and let the smoke drop from his mouth to the toilet water. The fist knocked again.
I heard goddammit, he said.
He pushed through the door and shouldered a tall kid with stringy black hair, said what he thought was, I’m a visitor.
During classes he sat in back of the room and kept his eyes down. The teachers called his name.
In the hall shoulders knocked him down twice. Both times he stood quiet and kept walking.
At the last bell he went fast to the front doors and lit a smoke in the yard. He threw it down next to his car, opened the door and got inside, pressed a button on top of the radio to play the tape.
He turned left and drove the long cracked highway run in front of the school. The houses shrank, split to field, air warm and red at the window, a lull, like first light. He pulled a joint stub from the ashtray He parked in the concrete lot beside the practice field, and leaned to the backseat. He sifted trash in the floorboard for shin guards and socks zipped in a blue and red duffel bag from his father’s closet.
The sport was new in the state. They played it in Russia, Terry thought, and Europe, Germany, east and west, and Mexico, and the country vampires came from, Transylvania. In Issaqueena there were two teams for Pickens County, green and blue, and Terry played green, for Stay Loaded Dump Trucks of West Issaqueena. Blue was sponsored by Issaqueena
Pawn and Gun. Dixon Brown’s father was the coach. He stood them in two rows. They lost all five games in the season; end of the last one he made everyone charge the other goal. Dixon Brown flattened a kid to a sheet of water. It was November. They stood over him, and breathed smoke. The kid clutched one hand at the busted leg, and the other flailed on the ground, the bone through the shin a sharp white key The kid screamed. Terry thought of fireworks, and red popsicles.
Terry could kick, but not much past. He didn’t have the head for seeing far into the game. He couldn’t conjure how things might shape on one end of the grass while play was at the other. He thought there was a fury in him, but he didn’t have the body to dole it. He was not swift.
A group of players sat on the shoulder of the field closest to his car, and a few were on the far side and ran the chalk line, the kicked dirt and broken grass, clouds at their feet.
He sat one end of the row and faced the field. The coach came from behind them. For a few minutes he spoke on teamwork, and patience, and the stone necessity of drills. He smoked three cigarettes while he paced a short line in front of them. He dropped them, and they kept smoking in the grass. Terry liked people who smoked. The kids on the team wore old softball league shirts with sponsor names like Pointed Lumber or Haven Florist pasted on front, block numbers at the back; most wore cleats ground to nubs. Terry’s cleats were the same, one size too big, quarter holes on the heels. He wore a mail order gray sweatshirt with a picture of a cat from a popular comic strip printed on the front. The cat was orange, boggle eyed, and lived in the nation’s capital, near the white dome where the actor president lived and slicked his coal black hair. The cat was fond of snorting at a pile of cocaine, and liked to pal around with a penguin that was very short and responsible. The penguin wore a top hat, and carried a cane, and sometimes he thought to find a friend like that penguin; clear eyes, steady hands. The coach was small, and he wore a thick dark beard. The school’s mascot was a bear who smiled with big square teeth, and wore a navy and white beanie. The bear’s face was stitched into the front pocket of the coach’s white shirt. He cocked his head to the ones running, the front three near the southwest corner of the practice field.
Just because you don’t get into some game and run around yelling and spitting like bulldogs.
The runners passed at his back. The coach didn’t turn, but kept his face to the players sat in front of him. He sauntered, light folded around his head.
Unless all of you are here, and want to be, do your damn best, or we can’t move.
Terry thought him a lover of animals; wished to ask if it were true.
The coach split them into pairs. He pointed at Terry, and then he pointed to a dirty looking kid on his left. The players spread out to the field and kept a distance from each other. He followed the dirty looking one to a spot near the middle of the west end.
You’re new.
Looks that way
Terry didn’t know what else to say. The kid’s hair was almost orange, long and thin, hairline a bent elbow. His face was patched red, head too big for his hunched shoulders.
How long you been here?
A few days.
You got a car?
Yeah.
I just got one. It’s got a good engine.
When the ball got close Terry put one cleat on top, held, and kicked it back.
What’s yours like? the dirty kid said.
My car?
The engine.
I think it’s good. There’s an eight cylinder.
Bullshit.
Yeah.
Sonofabitch. That’s a fucking tiger, man.
Alright.
A good engine’s important.
Terry thought this might be true, but he wasn’t sure.
Does it drive good?
I think so.
What does the speedometer go to?
He hadn’t looked enough times to remember, and didn’t like so many questions about cars, either. To get an answer, he thought of other cars, numbers buried in their dashes; the blue hatchback; Alice Washington’s gray station wagon; police cars; an ambulance. He thought to say eighty, but it seemed low.
A hundred I think.
Mine goes up to one forty That’s just what the numbers say, I mean. It’s probably more like one sixty My dad told me he flipped it back to zero.
What?
All the way around, like past one eighty.
The dirty kid stopped talking, and they kicked the ball between them in slow straight lines.
After drills there was scrimmage. The field was marked holes, grass trod a patchwork. Terry’s head had not yet cleared; the coach put him at defender with the second team. He stood around and waited for things to happen, dumb and stoned, loud voices on the field; a forward ran through him full speed and knocked him flat on the dirt; the air got colder.
The goalkeeper, tall, with what looked white hair, reminded Terry of a scarecrow, and kept screaming at him.
Fucking play, he said.
Terry glared at him, straight and hard, and shook a hand that way.
I hear you jackass.
The second time someone knocked him over, the force of the tackle stretched his ribs and yanked his head back. Terry felt lifted from the earth; flyblown, and tossed down. On the grass he couldn’t remember a moment between his words with the goalkeeper and someone planting a shoulder to his back; coach yelled for him to get off the field and sit. His knee was bleeding, dirt on his face.
The dirty kid was sat down, too, eyes pinched. He scowled and seemed to ponder something difficult, kept his head straight a moment, then looked down. He pulled up a small twist of grass and put it to his mouth, crammed it with two fingers at one cheek, closed his mouth and chewed slow, a cow gnashing new cud.
Where did you get that beard, anyway?
Terry put a hand to his chin and then both cheeks. It didn’t feel much like a beard, gaps on his jaw and at the sides, whiskers poked straight, steel wool. One morning he left for school and his father said there’s a cat I know that will lick that dirt off your face if you put some milk on it; he stayed at his newspaper and laughed but did not look up.
There’s not much of a beard, Terry said.
It is. You should be happy I had a Cherokee for a grandmother. I’ll never get one, not like that.
Terry didn’t understand. He stayed quiet.
They pulled the hair out of their faces for some reason. Cherokees did.
What’s that grass taste like?
Grass.
He had a pinch left in one hand, and held it to Terry
You can have it if you want.
Terry looked at the same grass beneath his knees and everywhere else.
I’ll get some later maybe.
The dirty kid threw down the ends.
It’s for my stomach anyway, not the taste. It helps with digestion, the fiber.
He spit the mouthful and winced, pulled another bunch and jabbed it the same cheek.
I learned it from a dog, he said.
The dirty kid snorted, hawked deep at his throat and spit.