THE GAME was at seven, beneath lights, in a railroad town called I Seneca, an hour and a half west of Echota. The road emptied, the sun weak. They passed a broken house set alone in a field. Francis said an old man lived there, said he killed his family, eight of them, and once a week, on Saturday, brought the gravestones from the backyard into the house and washed them with a toothbrush in a white claw-foot tub. They passed billboards on the highway; on one an elderly man and woman bore teeth, pedaled a red two-person bicycle on a path through fall leaves.

The high school stood all alone in cleared woods. Noah wedged the car between a row of three classroom trailers and a wide brick building. They kept the windows up, smoked a joint. Terry carried the plastic radio along to play the tape, kept it beside him in the backseat. They listened to a record by the Clash called Sandinista! They smoked a few cigarettes after the joint. The music hummed, made his eyes blink a flutter; he felt every vein. What he thought was, cut my wrists, I’ll bleed ash, smoke.

The first goal came fifteen minutes in the first half. Noah got up from the bench, went over to the water cooler and came back with two short paper cups filled with a bright yellow drink, handed Terry one of the cups and then sat back down. He bent forward and reached at his sock, put a blue pill to his mouth. He dropped another in the grass next to his foot. Terry reached down and picked it up, size of a thimble.

Halftime coach made them sit a circle around him. He stood over them with his hands at his hips and mumbled. Terry didn’t listen, went warm from the pill. He pulled grass from around his knees and threw it back down. He put some in his mouth and chewed. He built a small teepee with some twigs and it fell over. The world took a kind light, soft, blue, pale like through stained glass. Terry held his right hand straight in front; a stillness there he never felt, in all of him, eyes and ribs, legs and breath.

The second half started on midfield. Terry stayed sitting crosslegged on the ground near the bench, head lolled with the game and the lights, the grass growing at his thighs. He thought of a blue-eyed, charcoal cat from Issaqueena. It didn’t look him in the eye, but he knew it remembered his face. He found a dead bird in the storage shed, a few days later a squirrel, then a small, stump-eared rabbit, none of them mauled like the ones he saw the cat catch and toss around, but just dead, sat careful, a gift, he thought, maybe just another way to speak.