Communal Raccoon Suicide

Since it was Sunday morning, I had my church clothes on underneath a pair of manure-stained coveralls and had pulled on some knee-high boots to take me through the black primeval morass that the cow pens had become after a cold fall rain. It was those boots—and the cow bog—that kept me from getting to the house as quickly as I should have, because when Lauren came to the back door screaming for me to come quick, they were killing each other, it seemed like it took a superhuman effort to slurp through the mud and manure, and once out, I ran lead-footed across the backyard, my boots weighed down by pounds of clinging muck.

I did not spend much time considering the question of who could be killing each other; with Michelle already gone to Sunday school like the loyal teacher that she was, it could only be B. W. and Michael, and although Michael and B. W. hadn’t had an actual fight since they were little kids, when Lauren’s words shrilled across the distance between us, it suddenly seemed to me not only logical but inevitable.

I panted through the back door, boots and all, and on into the kitchen. I arrived between rounds, but I could see well enough what had already happened. A cereal bowl was upended on the table in a small pool of milk; Michelle’s antique crockery butter churn had been knocked over; a slow drip of orange juice plopped from table-edge into a growing puddle spreading across the tile floor.

B. W. stood at the far end of the kitchen in church clothes, his tie pulled savagely to one side, his oxford shirt untucked and stained with orange juice. Michael, in sweats and a T-shirt, his back to me, raised his hand to his face, brought it down with a smear of crimson on the fingertips, and looked at it in silence for a moment. Then he said, “I’m going to kill you.”

“I don’t think so,” B. W. said, and they stood and glared at each other.

Somewhere in here, both of them became aware of my presence, but in a peripheral way, as though I was a threat of less immediacy, which I suppose I was.

At last, Michael whirled and brushed past me in the narrow hallway. Once in his room, he slammed the door with considerable force, rattling his graduation picture on the hall wall sideways.

The noise continued from inside the room—things being thrown, yanked—as I raised my hands in disbelief, palms up, and asked B. W., “What on earth has got into you?”

At first he dropped his eyes to the puddle on the floor, and I thought we were headed back to universal silence and gloom. “B. W.? Son?”

He looked up at me, shook his head, and said, “I just got tired of it. That’s all.”

“Tired of what?”

“Michael was calling him names,” Lauren said. “I heard from the bathroom.”

“I’m not asking you, Lauren,” I said. From Michael’s room, the sounds of violence committed on inanimate objects stopped cold, and I turned to assess this new development. “Stay right where you are,” I called back over my shoulder.

“We’ll be late for church,” B. W. said. “Mom will think something has happened.”

“Something has happened. And anyway, you can’t go looking like that,” Lauren was saying as I headed off to befoul new sections of the house. I met Michael coming out of his room with a full duffel bag slung over his shoulder. A black shirtsleeve was hanging out the opening, incompletely stuffed.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I’ll be back for the rest of my stuff,” he muttered without meeting my eyes. He tried to push past me, but it was a narrow hall. Only when he couldn’t get past me did he look up. “I’m getting out of here. This is a family full of lunatics and losers.” He raised his voice so the last part would carry back toward the kitchen. “Losers,” he repeated, in case we hadn’t heard.

“Maybe so,” I said, biting my lip. “But all the same, I don’t want you to go.”

“You can’t stop me,” he said, and he shouldered his bag as menacingly as a young man of his slender build could.

And I sighed, because he was right, at least short of physical force—he didn’t respect me as a person enough to do what I asked, and he didn’t revere God enough to honor his father just because it was a commandment. I stepped to one side, he brushed past me, and I settled for talking to his back, a conversational maneuver at which I was becoming disturbingly proficient.

“Michael, you’re making too much of this,” I called after him as he pulled the door open. “You don’t have to go. We sure don’t want you to.”

And, of course, his answer was to slam the door behind him, to slam it, in fact, hard enough to jar the family portrait completely off the wall. It hit the ground with a thud, and the glass cracked from one corner to the other. I picked it up, looked at it: Michael was ten years old in this picture, and he was smiling.

We all were.

I walked back into the kitchen, sank into a chair next to the orange juice ocean, and looked up at B. W., still standing obediently next to the butter churn, his eyes down.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” he said. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. Really I didn’t.”

I raised my hand in a gesture I recognized with some discomfort as being at least second cousin to Bill Cobb’s wave of dismissal. “It’s not your fault,” I said. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

“He caught me good a couple of times,” he said, and now I could see the beginnings of a shiner under his left eye. “But I’m okay.” He blinked rapidly a couple of times. “I’m really sorry.”

“Lauren,” I called, and she appeared, hovering at the edge of the living room. “I’m prepared to hear your testimony now. What in the world happened?”

She put her hands behind her back, assumed a posture appropriate for recitation, and declaimed. “Michael was making fun of B. W. for going to church. He called him a Baptist wussy. When B. W. told him to shut up, Michael threw orange juice on him.”

“Who threw the first punch?” I asked the room.

“I did,” B. W. said, before Lauren could decide what version of the truth she wanted to honor.

I sighed. God knows I never asked to be a parent: combination judge, counselor, mess cleaner. I sat in silence as they waited patiently for me to hand down a ruling. The clock chimed eleven, the time at which we should have been in our pew in Watonga. The opening hymn would be happening right about now, and I was supposed to help take the offering midway through the service.

“Dad, you should take off your boots,” B. W. said finally. “I’ll clean up.”

“I’ll help you,” Lauren said.

“We’ll all help,” I said. “Let’s at least get the house looking decent before your mom gets home.” And for the next hour, we wrestled with messes, the biggest of which was the traveling brown storm spread by my boots. But with some hands and knees scrubbing, I felt like the rug would at least pass muster, even if my fatherhood wouldn’t.

Michael’s room didn’t take much time to set right. All the noise had come, not from furniture being overturned, but from closet doors and drawers being flung open. In fact, it wasn’t noticeably messier than the last time I dared to enter, a few days before. All the same, already, there was a trace of absence in the air. His stereo was still on, the headphones dangling from his bedpost. I pulled the headphones out of their jack and was greeted by the blare of vintage Judas Priest: “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’.”

Michael couldn’t have been more than nine years old when this album came out. For a moment, I wanted to believe all the fundamentalist horror stories about rock music.

Then I decided to take it as an omen. I did have another thing coming.

And probably another thing after that.

When Michelle’s Lumina cleared the rise and headed down the driveway toward us at around 12:40, I sent the kids to their rooms. “I’ll handle this,” I said, although I wasn’t at all sure how I was going to. For the first time, I started to look forward to our three o’clock senior basketball practice at the high school, a miserable hour or two where Bobby Ray and Oz and I would stand around and throw feeble shots up at the backboard and finally shake our heads and go home.

“Hey,” Michelle called out as she came in from the garage. “Family? Where are you? What’s up?”

“Here,” I called from the kitchen, which looked surprisingly good considering the abuse we’d subjected it to about an hour previous. She walked in wearing a red and purple crinkly skirt, a silver concho belt, and a purple jacket, and she saw disaster in my face before I could even open my mouth.

“What happened?” she asked, and she dropped her purse on the table and rushed around the table to me. “What’s wrong?”

“Michael and B. W. had a fight,” I said, and before she could ask, I assured her, “Neither of them got hurt bad. But Michael stormed out of here with a bag over his shoulder.” I looked down at the floor. “I don’t think he’s going to come back.”

“Well, why didn’t you stop him?” she asked, her eyes glistening. “How could you let him walk out?”

I was willing to give her a moment or two to register the enormity of the situation before holding her accountable, but the words stung. “I tried,” I said. “I asked him not to go.”

“And he did anyway,” she said, and now her face had shifted from anger to sadness to resignation. She sat down across from me and slumped, her head dropping forward. “What did they fight about?”

“I didn’t see it,” I said. “But it sounds to me like they fought about everything. About their whole lives.” I stood, went around to her, took her into my arms, and she wept into my midsection, great racking sobs that shook us both. I murmured the usual ineffectual things, “Everything’s going to be all right,” and “Hey, hey,” and “We’ll figure things out,” but it wasn’t anything I said that finally calmed her. I could feel her take a deep breath, and then she pushed me back a step, stood up, and wiped her eyes.

“What are we going to do?” she asked. “Go after him?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “We can let him know that we love him and we want him to come back, but I don’t see how we can do anything else.”

“Oh, I think we can do more than that,” she said. “Have you called Gloria’s yet?”

“You think that’s where he’ll be?”

Even in the depth of her despair she had a little energy left for eye rolling.

“Be my guest,” I said, and she sighed and nodded.

“Okay,” she said, resting the phone in the crook of her neck and opening her address book.

“Luck,” I said as she began dialing, and I stood beside her and took her free hand in mine. I heard the far-off buzz of the ringing, then the sleepy “Hello”—Gloria worked nights, same as Michael—and Michelle said, “Gloria, this is Michelle Tilden. Is Michael there?”

I watched Michelle’s face as she listened. She began worrying her lower lip with her teeth. When she spoke again, it was with rigid control. “Okay,” she said. “Thanks, Gloria. Tell him that.” And she wearily hung the receiver back on its cradle.

“What?” I asked.

“He’s there,” she sighed. “Asleep, she says. Also says he told her we’d call and to tell us he’s not coming home.”

“Great,” I said.

“But she said she’d tell him that we loved him, and that we should call her anytime if we wanted to see that he was okay.”

So Gloria was actually some kind of okay. But still: “Big hairy deal. We could just go to Pizza Hut and order a Meatlover’s Pizza if we wanted to do that.”

She gave me a rueful smile, and then she lost it. I gathered her into my arms, and we stood there a long time, by male reckoning, before she looked up at me and asked, “So what do we do?”

Like I knew. “Give it some time,” I said. “He’ll be back or he won’t. Either way, we can let him know we love him.”

She let it sit for a bit—and decided she would let it sit a little longer. “How’s B. W. taking it?” she asked.

I snatched a look back down the hall to make sure both the kids’ doors were still shut. “Not well,” I said. “I thought I’d drag him off to the gym with me so he wouldn’t brood.”

“One brooder is enough,” she agreed. She put her hands on my shoulders. “Hey, are you okay? Are you sure you want to go to practice?”

I shrugged; the weight of her hands felt good. “Hey,” I said, trying to make my voice light, “I’ve envisioned worse scenarios. I had one where Michael killed us all for the family fortune.”

“You’re awful,” she said, leaning in to kiss me. Her face was still moist, and when she raised it to mine, I tasted salt. “Besides, he knows there’s no family fortune.”

I remembered Michael’s words. “Yes, I think he’s well aware we’ve been complete failures.” I looked at the clock. “You want to go back in with us when we go?”

“Rain check,” she said. “I’d like to sit and think. Say a prayer or two. Maybe listen to some loud music.”

I nodded. It was the equivalent of what I planned to do on the basketball court.

We fixed sandwiches, a tiny meal for B. W. and me since we’d soon be running hard. We ate mostly in silence, and Lauren asked, “We’re not mad at each other, are we?” and Michelle shook her head and said, “No, honey, the four of us are all right. Don’t you worry.”

In the truck on the way into town, B. W. was silent. I asked, “How do you feel?” figuring that would give him an opening if he wanted to talk, but he said, “Not so good,” and stared out the window as we turned onto Highway 270.

The leaves were starting to change, the various light and dark greens of elm, cottonwood, blackjack, river willow, and walnut turning to golds, browns, the occasional yellow or orange, the red cedars still standing out dark green on the hillsides.

B. W. stared out the window. I stared out at the road.

As we crossed the first of the bridges over the North Canadian River, I saw the body of a raccoon on the shoulder of the road, flat on his back, his paws crossed on his chest. Not twenty feet farther there was another, sprawled on his stomach, limbs extending in every direction. Just before we reached the other end of the bridge there was a third, curled in a fetal ball. Despite appearances, I knew they hadn’t actually committed communal suicide; they had probably just come up onto the roadway to find an easier way across the river and individually gone to meet their Maker at the powerful recommendation of fast-moving vehicles. Likely they were family members, come to check on the fallen—and falling themselves.

“Three coons,” B. W. murmured without looking across at me. “That’s a shame.” In earlier days, B. W. used to go out with a group of boys and dogs and hunt coons or possum all night long, but that was one thing, a fairer contest, maybe. He was right; this was just a sad waste.

We pulled into the parking lot and walked into the darkened gym, the jingle of my keys echoing into the vast blackness.

“I love the gym when it’s like this,” I said. “When I was your age, I had my own key.”

“Students aren’t supposed to have a key to the gym,” B. W. said. His face broke into a wry smile. “My dad broke the law.”

“Well,” I said, as we reached the light switches, “I guess you could say I got punished for it.” I smiled when he looked at me quizzically. “Your mom and I met here late one night after the girls and boys teams had both beat Okeene. We were feeling pretty good to start with—we’d both of us had good games that night—and this guy had bought me some booze. So after everyone left, we went down to Coach’s office and sat drinking Everclear and Gatorade, and eventually we ended up making your brother.”

It had been stuffy in that office, and I recalled the smells of sweat and wintergreen from the Atomic Balm that Coach used to dispense to rub into our sore muscles. The carpet was worn and was little comfort from the concrete floor, but I don’t recall that discomfort stopped us or even made us pause.

“Dad,” B. W. said after a bit. “I absolutely did not need to know that.” He seemed a little embarrassed—at least, his face was flushed—but then he was laughing. “That’s how it happened? Oh, man. I thought it happened in a pickup truck.”

“Ah,” I said, “that’s what everyone thinks. Now you alone know the truth.” I opened the closet and wheeled out a ball rack. I picked up a ball, felt it for pressure and texture, liked the grain, and stuck it under my arm. “I always thought Michael was going to turn into the basketball player. I mean, you’d think with a start like that—” I took the ball from under my arm and dribbled it once to complete the sentence.

B. W. fiddled around with a couple of balls, made faces at each, and finally pulled one off the bottom of the rack. “So where did you guys make me?” he asked. “I mean, if you remember. If you don’t mind telling me.”

“Not in a car,” I said, thinking hard. “And not here, although you play like you’ve got the gym in your blood. Probably the same old boring place.”

We dribbled over to the west goal, closest to the door we’d opened. “I think it’s neat,” B. W. said, raising the ball to his chest and pausing before he shot. “About how Michael got here, I mean. Have you ever told him?”

“No,” I said. I’d never told him anything about that night. I sighed. “Maybe we should have. Or maybe that would just have made him madder.” We both shot at the same time, and the balls arrived in the cylinder at the same time and crowded each other off to either side of the basket.

“Hey,” Bobby Ray said as he entered. “You boys are getting a head start.”

“You know it,” I said. “Grab a ball and join us.”

The three of us shot for about ten minutes with surprising success. Although Bobby Ray was always a streak shooter, he had a pretty shot when he was on. And when he was on, he could shoot the lights out. I remember once in the second half of a game against the Clinton Red Tornadoes in the Tornado Dome when he scored from deep outside—NBA three-point land—twelve straight times down the court. It broke their backs. They’d been up eight points, but a streak like that can take your mind off your game. They started double-teaming him, they tried to foul him when he went up, but we freed him on a couple of screens—I passed it to Bill in the post and then he would dish back out to Bobby Ray for the shot, and finally the Clinton players got so flustered and focused on him that any of the rest of us could have walked the ball up to the basket and shot, which is basically what we did the rest of the night. I’ve never seen anything like that game, although I knew what he was feeling, could see it in him, that sensation of being one with the flow, like a surfer maybe, completely in tune with the wave and completely in control as a result. He knew that if he shot, it would go in. It was as simple as that.

Who cared if he went one for twelve the next game against the Seiling Comets (as they used to be called)? Even the forty-seven points he later scored against Thomas that year didn’t compare in my mind to that twelve for twelve, a dozen shots arcing in perfection toward the net. That game against Clinton made up for a multitude of Bobby Ray’s sins, and believe me, there was a multitude.

Oz arrived precisely at three in a T-shirt and a pair of baggy blue sweats that were almost falling off his narrow hips.

“Get in here, Scarecrow,” Bobby Ray growled and passed him the ball as soon as he got on the court. “Let’s see your shot.”

“I’m not warm yet,” Oz protested. His first shot from about twelve feet missed everything. He flushed beet red and ran after his miss, which B. W. had retrieved.

“Here you go, Mr. Osborne,” he said.

“So are we gonna practice or not?” Bobby Ray asked. “Time is money.” Bobby Ray sometimes gave me the sense that, while he might have failed over and over again, at least he got there in a hurry.

“No Phillip?” Oz asked.

“I don’t think so,” I told him. “That’s why I brought B. W.” It seemed like a valid excuse; no use airing any more of our laundry in public than we had to.

“Of course he won’t be here,” Bobby Ray said. “Jailbird wouldn’t dare be seen in public, and I don’t blame him.”

“That’s our teammate you’re talking about, Bobby Ray,” Oz said, his usual quiet voice tinged with an edge.

“John?” called a voice from the hall to the girls’ locker room. Carla Briggs walked out onto the court in abbreviated red shorts and one of those black sports bras. I had seen women jogging and playing sports in them, but they were probably a violation of our community decency standards. “What are you boys doing up here?”

“Practicing for the big game,” Bobby Ray said, pulling a ball from the rack and walking across to present it to her. I didn’t blame him; she did look fine. All of us—except for Oz, so happily married that he had already turned back to our goal—had spent a moment gaping.

“I was just going to shoot around some,” she called over to me. “Will that bother you guys?”

“We’ll try to keep our minds on the job,” I said, before Bobby Ray could say something less tasteful.

“Well,” Bobby Ray said loudly as he arrived back under our basket, “are we going to practice or not?”

“We are practicing,” Oz said. “I haven’t had much of a chance to shoot lately.” His next shot slanted off the backboard and in, and although I don’t think he’d planned it—he smiled sheepishly at me when I complimented him—he ran down the ball with new vigor.

“When we’ve had a few minutes to get warm and shoot,” I said, “we’ll play some two-on-two. Then we’ll work on our wind. Maybe run some.”

This apparently satisfied Bobby Ray, although I could tell from B. W.’s quick glance that he had no intention of participating in the running portion of our program on his day of rest and wanted to make sure I knew that. I did.

We chose up for two-on-two, Oz and me against B. W. and Bobby Ray. The first game lasted for maybe fifteen minutes, and we only played half-court, bringing the ball back out to the top of the key at each change of possession. B. W. and I played tolerably well, but our teammates were not only not at the top of their games, they were not even the masters of their own bodies. They lost the ball dribbling, passed over our heads, or imagined we were cutting in directions that we had never had intentions of cutting and threw the ball out of bounds. The one bright moment for the old folks was when B. W. pulled up to shoot, gave Oz his standard head fake, and Oz stood like a block of salt and blocked his shot without leaving his feet. Bobby Ray doubled over laughing and told B. W., panting as he clutched the hem of his shorts, “Kid, when you’re as old as we are, you don’t go for fakes. Takes too much energy.”

We broke for a few minutes to get a drink, and I wandered down to the other end of the court, where Carla stood sinking free throws.

“You guys stink,” she said, smiling in commiseration before making another, and I could only smile back.

“Don’t I know it. But what do you expect from a bunch of old men?” I passed the ball back out to her at the line.

“B. W.’s not old—” she began. Then at the far end of the court, the outside door swung open with a bang, and Phillip One Horse stepped hesitantly into the gym wearing a pair of faded jeans, a jean jacket, and his own pair of ancient Converse high-tops. Phillip looked left and right before sighting me at the far end of the court, but he didn’t move from the spot just inside the door. Bobby Ray stopped dribbling, picked up the ball, and likewise just stood there.

No one made a move to welcome Phillip; I think for a moment none of us could quite believe he existed.

But there he stood, his head down, eyes darting from neutral corner to neutral corner, until I realized that if nothing more happened, if nobody said anything, he would disappear out the door and back down the road, probably for good. I stirred myself into action and called his name.

He recoiled at the sudden sound, his shoulders jerking, his head rising. I advanced quickly toward him with long strides to cut off his escape. “Hey, Phillip,” I said when I got closer. “It’s good to see you.”

Oz followed when he saw me stretch out my hand and saw Phillip slowly take it. “Thanks for coming,” Oz said, and knowing the difficulty of that utterance, Phillip gravely inclined his head to him.

“Am I too late?” he asked me quietly, and I could catch a whiff of something that smelled like bourbon when he spoke.

“No,” I said. “No, you’re not. We’re just taking a break. We were playing some two-on-two. B. W. can take a rest and you can get right into things if you want.”

“Could I maybe see a ball for a second?” he asked. “It’s been a long time.” He pulled off his jacket. Underneath he was wearing a ragged tank top that advertised Winston Lights.

“Bobby Ray,” I called. “Ball.” But he’d turned back to shoot, and so B. W. passed me his.

I walked over to Bobby Ray while Phillip took the ball and ran his hands across the leather cover. I could see now that Bobby Ray’s turning away from Phillip was intentional; his total indifference to Phillip’s amazing presence flew in the face of our involvement. Oz saw it too, and he followed me over, leaving Phillip and B. W. standing quietly on the far sideline—as though those two could stand any other way but quietly.

“We’re going to add Phillip and play some more two-on-two,” I said when I was close enough for Bobby Ray to hear me. “B. W. is going to sit out.”

“I’m not playing with that convict,” Bobby Ray said, his back still to us, although his voice was loud enough to carry.

“For Pete’s sake, Bobby Ray—” Oz said, and was about to say something undeaconlike, but I jumped in.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll go three-on-three. Oz and I’ll pick up Phillip, and we’ll ask Carla to join you.”

Bobby Ray got ready to protest again, either because he didn’t want Phillip on the court at all or because of the indignity of sharing the court with a girl. Assuming it was the latter and feeling my guts knot at his stubbornness, I said, “Carla can beat you four games out of five, Bobby Ray, and you know it. I think she’ll be good enough to play on your team.” And I turned my back on him to walk back over to Phillip, who was taking a few tentative dribbles as B. W. stood by.

“Phillip, you’re with us. We’ll take it slow.” Then I invited Carla over, introduced her to Phillip, and suggested they guard each other. I thought that might make it a little harder for Bobby Ray to communicate his distaste to Phillip.

B. W. took the ball out, and I dropped back a little, conceding the outside shot for the moment because I knew B. W. would try to involve the others and also because if I played him too close he’d be past me in a flash and into the lane. He passed across to Bobby Ray, who tried to dribble around Oz and lost the ball. Phillip picked it up and fired it out to me, and I nodded my approval. He had always had a nose for the ball, and even if he wasn’t in any kind of condition to play—his tank top flapped on his skinny frame—he still had good basketball instincts.

I passed it down to Oz, who passed it over to Phillip, and the ball slipped through his hands and out of bounds, to Bobby Ray’s barely suppressed snort of amusement. Phillip turned to look at him with genuine puzzlement and then gave his attention back to Carla, who was bringing the ball in.

Unlike B. W., who knew this wasn’t his practice and had generous instincts in any case, Carla was a scorer, pure and simple, and in her college days she had been a shooting guard. She drove the lane, and Phillip gave way and let her take it in, to the accompaniment of another snort from Bobby Ray.

Phillip stiffened, took a deep breath, and I wanted to be on another planet.

I passed down to Oz and went to set a pick on Carla so Phillip could roll free. Oz bounced him a pass, which he was juggling as he stepped toward the basket, and then Bobby Ray came across the lane and body-checked him into next week with only the barest attempt to look as though he were going for the ball.

“You stupid—” I started, getting ready to say something undeaconlike myself, and caught myself, seeing B. W.’s jaw drop.

“For Pete’s sake, Bobby Ray,” Oz said again.

Bobby Ray stepped forward to look down on Phillip, who was getting up slowly, without looking at him.

“That’s enough of that,” I said, shoving Bobby Ray backward, and I’m afraid I got up in his face, even after all I’d told B. W. about losing his temper on the court.

I don’t know what would have happened then. It’s true that I’d been mad at Bobby Ray more than once in the years I had known him, and that I’d still never taken a swing at him or he at me, but I can’t promise that nothing would have come of this. We glared at each other, our faces about four inches apart, both our jaws set and temple veins standing out.

Then the gym door banged shut again, and we turned to see that Phillip was gone.

“Look what you’ve done,” I said without stepping back. “I didn’t think he’d come out to practice with us in a million years. And you’ve sent him packing.”

“Good riddance,” Bobby Ray said. “He doesn’t deserve to play with us. He let us down. He disgraced the team.”

“Well, you would know about disgrace,” I said. I let out a loud sigh. “He made a mistake. God knows, it happens to the best of us.” I turned to Carla. “Could you run B. W. out to the house?”

She shrugged. “Sure, John, I guess. Why?”

“I’m going after Phillip,” I said, and turned to Bobby Ray. “If he doesn’t come back, then you can go out and find yourself two new players, because I won’t be coming back either.”

Bobby Ray looked at me with dismay, as though I’d just told him I was an IRS collector come to slap a levy on his tractor. “You can’t do that, John,” he stammered. “You’re the guy who holds this team together.”

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to do,” I said, and I shrugged on my coat and was out the door. The day had grown chilly, and the wind was blowing hard out of the north. I climbed into the truck, started it up, and turned toward the parking lot exit in the direction of Phillip’s place. It was then that I saw him beside the road not more than three blocks down the street, walking fast, his arms swinging as he went, his breath a gray cloud floating behind him.

I gunned the engine, slinging gravel as I left the parking lot, and rolled down the passenger side window, letting in the howling wind. When I pulled alongside him, I braked and called out to him, “Can I give you a lift?”

He walked on, not even looking at me. If anything, he sped up.

“Phillip, please,” I said. “Get in.”

“I’m not going back,” he said.

“You don’t have to go back,” I said. “I don’t blame you for not wanting to. Bobby Ray is an idiot. But you don’t have to walk home, either. If I’d known you didn’t have a way in, I would have come after you. The least I can do now is drop you off.”

He stopped, looked down the road, where a walk of close to a mile still separated him from the highway, which was only the first step on his way home.

He took a deep breath. He was thinking about it.

I leaned across and opened the door.

He got in.

“Roll up that window,” I said. “It’s gotten nippy.”

He did, and then we sat inside the cab in silence while outside the wind whipped past and the engine rose and fell as I accelerated away from a stop sign or eased up to the next one.

Phillip sat close to the door, one arm on the armrest. He looked down at his feet, or maybe at the floor mat.

“You shouldn’t let Bobby Ray get to you,” I said finally. “You know what he’s like. What he’s always been like. He hasn’t changed.” We turned onto the highway and headed past the airport and out of town. The airport’s windsock was stretched parallel to the ground in the stiff breeze.

“I never should have come today,” he said at last, when I thought no one on earth would ever speak again. “You’d be better off forgetting about me. I’m an embarrassment.”

“Don’t think that way,” I said, shaking my head. “Since when does anybody worry about what Bobby Ray thinks? Oz and I were glad to see you.”

He looked over at me then. “Bill probably thinks the same as Bobby Ray.”

“Also an idiot,” I reminded him.

“Anyway,” he said, staring back down at the floorboard. “You don’t need me there to fight over.”

We passed the entrance to Roman Nose Park, so I slowed and put on my signal, which clicked loudly in the silence.

“I told them I wasn’t coming back if you didn’t,” I said, looking across at him, and then I turned onto the washboarded dirt road.

“Why would you do that?” he asked after the road had smoothed out and we’d driven on about a quarter mile.

I slowed as I approached Phillip’s drive, such as it was, stopped, put the truck in park, and looked out the windshield at Phillip’s sad fence. “I’ve been thinking a lot lately,” I finally said. I sat with it, thought about what I wanted to say out loud. “If it’s possible to make up for the past, somehow. To fix things that I should have done right in the first place.” I rolled my shoulders upward in a slow shrug. “I’d like to think maybe you could. This seems like a good place to start.”

Outside, the wind whistled through the sagging barbed wire and the overhead telephone lines; the engine idled like the purr of a big cat. When Phillip spoke again, the unexpectedness of it made me jerk.

“You know the last time you and me rode someplace together? It was twenty years ago.” He looked out the window, but his eyes were focused on the past. “It was that night you and me went out drinking in your old man’s truck,” he said. “It was after the Canton game. You remember?”

I had a dim memory of headlamps lighting a triangle of dirt road and adjoining pastures, the dimness a result of drinking half a dozen beers on a deep dark starless night. I remembered an ice-flecked Coors nestled cold against my crotch as we drove—where?

“Is that the night we climbed the bridge?” I remembered us on one of the big iron bridges over the Canadian River, remembered him climbing up high—

“Climbing,” he snorted. “The night you kept me from falling off. I’ve never forgot it. You saved my life.”

“That was pure luck,” I said, although he was probably right. I had saved his life.

What he didn’t say—and I didn’t either—was that Phillip had not fallen.

He had jumped.

I had grabbed him as he fell, pulled him back onto the bridge, even though it almost tore me off with him, and when he was on solid ground, we held onto each other for a long moment to make sure we were both still there before we pulled ourselves slowly, carefully back onto the roadway, one foot at a time. He never told me why he tried to jump. Maybe I wouldn’t have understood.

I was just a kid, and I didn’t know yet how life could chew somebody up.

“I was drunker than you were,” I said quietly. “I was just lucky. I was in the right place at the right time.”

“I almost pulled you off after me,” he said. He turned his head slowly to me. “You know, John, when I was in prison, down in McAlester, I thought about that sometimes. You didn’t let go. I don’t think for a second you thought about not trying to catch me.”

“Hey,” I said, trying to keep it light, “it was my job, keeping the team together and all that. Coach would have killed me if I’d let you fall off the bridge. Besides, you would have done the same for me, right?”

His fingers and thumb rose to his lips and tapped gently, and he looked back out the window for awhile before he answered what I had thought was a rhetorical question.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not sure.” He looked across to see my reaction. I didn’t have one yet; I just met his gaze and waited to see if he had anything else to say. “I don’t know that I would have. I gave it a lot of thought, like I said.” He stared out the window again, at the field just sprouting with green shoots of winter wheat. “And what does that make me?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Human?”

“No,” he said. He dropped his hand to the door lever, his eyes darting across to mine and then back out the window. “You should have let me fall.”

He opened the door to a whirl of rushing wind, leaves whipping past, blowing dust.

“So long, John,” he said, and he started to slide out.

It was instinct, not any conscious thought, not anything I might have planned. But I leaned across and just managed to catch the sleeve of Phillip’s jacket as he was stepping out.

“Come home to dinner,” I said, not relinquishing my grip on his jacket. We stayed like that, joined tenuously for a moment, and then he looked back at me with a look that was not anger, or curiosity, or sadness.

I could only describe it as gratitude.

He nodded.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said, as he climbed back in and we were driving away from the chilling gale. “Maybe this is a good place to start.”

We drove home into a wondrous sunset, high clouds turning orange and red and purple, toward my wife, my kids, and my ever-surprising life.