Damage Read online

  A. M. Jenkins

  Damage

  For those who are struggling; for those who have made it through; for those who have been left behind

  Contents

  Chapter One

  It’s all yours. Your hands rise, fingers spread, ready to…

  Chapter Two

  Sure enough, the first week of practice is like sliding…

  Chapter Three

  The alarm clock has been going off for a while.

  Chapter Four

  Apparently God was trying to tell you something, the other…

  Chapter Five

  The first game is an away game.

  Chapter Six

  You pick Heather up early in the evening. You’ll take…

  Chapter Seven

  The next morning is Sunday. Sunday always gathers own momentum;…

  Chapter Eight

  That night you dream you’re driving the pickup with Heather…

  Chapter Nine

  By the time a few weeks have passed, you’re feeling…

  Chapter Ten

  Used to be you’d hang around practice to give Dobie…

  Chapter Eleven

  Sixth game. Final score: Panthers, 21; Bulldogs, 10.

  Chapter Twelve

  In the field house Monday afternoon, Dobie seems okay. He…

  Chapter Thirteen

  It’s a comfort to watch Heather get dressed.

  Chapter Fourteen

  You keep thinking about her all the way home, through…

  Chapter Fifteen

  The air has caved in on top of you.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Are you okay?” Heather asks.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Late the next afternoon you enter the field house with…

  Chapter Eighteen

  You see Heather for a brief moment between classes try…

  Chapter Nineteen

  When you finally get home, you pull up the gravel…

  Acknowledgments

  Praise

  Other Books by A. M. Jenkins

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER ONE

  It’s all yours. Your hands rise, fingers spread, ready to feel the firm scrape of the football, ready to pull it to you, ready to tuck it safely in.

  But the ball bumbles against your fingertips. It lurches away, and that beautiful spiraling pass ends its life in a series of ugly bounces across the field.

  Then there’s just a football lying untended on the grass, just that—and your empty hands.

  When you open your eyes, the joyless feeling has already crawled onto your chest. The ceiling of your room presses you down into the mattress. The air settles in your lungs so heavy that it’s almost too much trouble to breathe.

  You kind of remember having some bad dreams, but you can’t remember what they were. You just lie there, flat as the faded streak of afternoon sunlight that slants through the western window and impales your bed.

  It’s almost night. You’re supposed to pick up Curtis and Dobie, so the three of you can go out. Your eyes move, skimming the room, trying to grab hold of anything that will break the suction of the bed.

  A newspaper clipping tacked to the bulletin board. It’s a black-and-white head shot of a guy in a football jersey, and underneath in bold print:

  AUSTIN REID: PRIDE OF THE PARKERSVILLE PANTHERS

  That picture smiled out of the sports section during last year’s state semifinals. Now it smiles out over the bedroom.

  It’s you.

  Shoot, that guy in the picture there wouldn’t lie around on a Saturday night. He wouldn’t think how it’s too much trouble to breathe.

  So you roll slowly to sit up. Get to your feet. Lumber down the hall, past your sister Becky’s room, into the bathroom. Stop in front of the sink. Raise your head to look into the mirror.

  The guy reflected back at you is the same one from the picture. Only he’s not smiling. And he hasn’t got a jersey on. Not even a shirt. But still, that is him—dark hair, straight white teeth, a strong jawline, a nose that’s not anything special.

  You lean forward, looking into his eyes. They’re blue.

  What do other people see when they look into them—those eyes in the mirror? Are they flat? Cold?

  Or just nothing at all?

  You look harder, trying to feel anything for him. You try to get him to smile, to see if that will help.

  All you can get is a dull stare.

  Your gaze slides down to your own hands. Even now they can almost feel the football bulleting into them. Your hands are big, strong. Like your dad’s hands, you remember, even though he died when you were only three. That’s what you remember about him; strong hands, lifting you up to sit on the bathroom counter.

  You’re staring at your hands and the memory runs, like a movie: the hiss of shaving cream escaping into a frothy white pile; the sharp clean scent. The soft light foam hanging off your cheeks like a floppy beard. The connection, you and your dad, both scraping tracks in white lather, you with a toy razor.

  You raise your head to stare into the mirror again. Those three-year-old cheeks belonged to you. Not some guy in a picture. You.

  You turn the faucet handle all the way to the right. Shoot, there’s plenty of people who are abused or neglected, plenty of people who would probably love to have your particular life instead of their own. Your life that’s a gift from God.

  It’ll be an outright sin if you don’t snap out of feeling this way.

  The water rushes down the drain, running from cold to hot, sounding so alive and urgent that it gives you the traction you need to climb out of this rut.

  Okay. So you’re going to clean up a little. Then you’re going to put on a fresh shirt. Put on that smile, like clicking on a button.

  And then you’re going to go out.

  You’ve parked your truck in the usual spot, past your country neighborhood with its patchwork of trailers, houses, small farms, and ranch land, out where the old railroad tracks disappear into dirt and tall grass. You and Curtis are sitting on the tailgate, but Dobie slouches long legged in the bed of the pickup, carelessly leaning against the wheel well next to the ice chest.

  This is partying, Parkersville style.

  Your beer bottle’s empty now, but you don’t move to throw it away.

  “You all right?” Curtis asks, eyeing you as he takes another swig from his longneck. Curtis Hightower is your closest friend, your next-door neighbor, too—not in the town sense, where neighbors live right in one another’s back pockets without ever knowing each other, but in the country sense, where neighbors are like family, yet everybody’s got a little elbow room.

  “Yeah,” you say. You are all right, and what would you tell him, anyway? Sometimes I can’t face getting out of bed? Sometimes I feel so crushed I can’t move? Like Curtis can do anything about it anyway. “I’m fine,” you add.

  Dobie pats the ice chest. “Want another?”

  “No thanks.”

  Dobie looks at you for a moment, confused like a dog, like you didn’t speak his particular brand of English. Then he nods. “It won’t hurt to lay off for one night,” he says, as if to comfort you. “You drank enough at the lake last week to last you through a dry spell.”

  “Hell, Austy’s probably still getting over that one.” Curtis swings his legs idly, as relaxed looking as ever, but his dark eyes are sharp on you. He does that sometimes, his words dry and teasing, his eyes searching.

  Tonight you think they might be searching for something Curtis feels but can’t name. You swing your legs, too, your hands gripping the edge of the tailgate, trying to think of the right words to say. Curtis has a head-on, outspoken way of looking at things, and you don’t particularly want
him looking at you right now.

  Click. You grin. “I think it’s a good idea to leave some of the drinking to the other guys,” the Pride of the Panthers announces in just the right voice. “That way they’ll all be busy burping and pissing while I’m out chasing the ladies.”

  Curtis chuckles. You relax.

  “They ain’t ladies once you get through with them, Austin,” Dobie remarks.

  “Now, why do you say that?” you ask, to egg him on. Curtis just listens, his eyes roaming out into the darkness now. “Why shouldn’t they have a good time, too, without you calling them sluts?”

  “I didn’t call nobody a slut.”

  “Are you saying you’d marry some girl who’s slept around?”

  “Well, no, but that’s different.”

  “Nobody’s going to marry Dobie,” Curtis says, deadpan. “Not with that beer gut he’s getting.”

  “So are you,” Dobie shoots back. Dobie believes anything anybody says to him. Curtis is exaggerating about his beer gut; in fact he is outright lying. Dobie is tall and thin and mostly cowboy hat and legs and belt buckle. He isn’t muscular like you or even wiry like Curtis. He’s just Dobie.

  Curtis laughs and takes another drink. Curtis has a cowboy hat, but he doesn’t wear it much, and he doesn’t have a beer gut, either. He isn’t the type to argue if he knows he’s right.

  You set the empty bottle down beside you. Girls are another thing that’s not right anymore. The Pride of the Panthers has always had a girlfriend—but you haven’t had one in a while. Just haven’t been able to get interested. The way you haven’t been able to get interested in much of anything.

  That joyless feeling is out there in the darkness around the pickup, hanging like a low cloud; you can feel its edges brush against you.

  Curtis drains the last of his beer and tosses the bottle into the bushes. He hasn’t dated anybody since Kat Hopkins broke up with him in the spring, and he doesn’t want to talk about girls, either.

  “Two-a-days start Monday,” you say to nobody in particular, and saying it almost makes you feel a little better. Not that you’re looking forward to sweating through sprints and conditioning drills, line drills in sweltering pads. But Monday morning you won’t have the option of wallowing around in bed like you have all summer; you’ll be out there in the late August sun doing what you’re told.

  You’ve always played for sheer fun. Practice or games, doesn’t matter which—there’s nothing like running the play and actually having it work, turning to see the ball coming at you, feeling it fly straight into your hands as if it’s been sucked there.

  On Monday, you’re pretty sure, you’ll wake up with the sun, and find that this drag-down feeling has faded away like some bad dream.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sure enough, the first week of practice is like sliding into a well-worn groove. There’s no doubt you’ll be starting. Your body, at least, still seems to have a fierce interest in the details and mechanics of football. Inside you still feel pretty much like a flattened tire, but it’s not too hard to shove that feeling down and just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

  This is Coach Van Zandt’s first year at Parkersville. Nobody knows yet how far he can be pushed. All anybody knows is that he used to be in the marines, and he’s passionate about his job.

  After one play, when everybody’s heading back to the line, Coach gives his baseball cap a furious tug. “Stargill!” he bellows. “Whatcha doing lying in the dirt?”

  Brett Stargill lumbers to his feet, towering over Coach. Coach’s paunchy stomach is the only part of him as wide as Brett. Still, Brett just shrugs, eyes on the ground.

  “You ain’t hurt ’less I say you’re hurt.”

  Curtis said earlier in the week that Coach thinks he’s some kind of drill sergeant. He said that’s okay, though, since Coach takes his football seriously. Curtis takes his football seriously, too.

  When Coach hollers, “Water break!” nobody needs to be told twice to take off for the coolers Dobie has set up on the bottom row of the bleachers.

  You get in line with Curtis, waiting for the water cooler on the end. Both of you are a little apart from all the jostling and joking. Both of your gray practice jerseys are dark with sweat. Curtis holds his helmet under one arm. His hair is sweat-plastered to his head.

  You undo your chin strap but don’t take off your helmet. Instead, you just stand there, staring out at a world framed by rigid plastic edges.

  “You’ve been playing different,” Curtis says out of the blue. “You’re not as focused as you usually are.”

  Now you see that his dark eyes are on you; they’ve got that sharp, considering look. If he thinks you’re going to spill your guts, he’s wrong. There aren’t any words for what you feel sometimes, and, anyway, there’s nothing to talk about.

  The guy in front of Curtis steps away from the cooler, but Curtis hasn’t noticed. “You’re the one needs to pay attention,” you say, and give him a friendly shove toward the cooler.

  Curtis picks up and fills a paper cup, and everything moves one step closer to normal. While he drains the cup in one long swallow, you pull the silence around you like a blanket. He bends to fill the cup a second time, dumps the whole thing over his head, and shakes like a dog, sending drops of water flying.

  Now it’s your turn. You push your helmet up and gulp down aching cold water, letting some run down your chin and neck to cool your front.

  Everybody else is straggling onto the field. You crumple the cup, toss it into the trash, and turn to walk back, too.

  “Hey,” Curtis says, not moving. “Austy.”

  His tone stops you in your tracks. You turn to look at him. Curtis’s eyes are brown, but not the soft brown most people have. They can be hard like a flint striking sparks, if he’s angry. Which isn’t often; Curtis doesn’t let much get to him. Right now, though, his eyes are zeroed in on you with the intensity that means there’s some kind of emotion backed up behind them.

  “It’s not just football,” he says. “You’ve been acting different. Out of it. Like you just woke up. Or like you’re some old man, in slow motion. Hey. You know you can talk to me, don’t you? If anything’s wrong?”

  Curtis is quiet, not much of a talker. But he’s one hell of an observer.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” you tell him. It’s true. It is—because you’ve got nothing to complain about. Nothing to explain, nothing that makes any sense. Nothing that’s a real problem, like what other people have.

  Take Curtis. It was about five years ago you found him in the tack room out by your family’s barn. He was sitting with his back to the wall, knees drawn up, head buried on his arms, so he didn’t know you were there. You could tell he was crying, and you turned to sneak away—but that didn’t seem right, so you came back and sat down beside him without saying anything, and just kind of kept him company till he was finished. You didn’t look at him or ask about it, and he never did say what happened—but you had an idea what it was about. Sure enough, right after that his father left for Nevada with one of the summer interns from his law office.

  Curtis never did talk about it much, but he spent quite a bit of time that fall out in the wooded acres behind your house, sawing up an old dead tree and hauling the chunks to your family’s barn to chop them small before flinging them onto the woodpile. Hardly said a word about his dad—but for a long time after that, whenever you went over to the Hightowers’, you felt like there was an invisible hole right in the heart of the house; a jagged hole that everybody walked around and nobody talked about. It’s still there, even five years later—though now it’s not so huge and the edges have smoothed.

  But in your life, there are no holes. Your house is just a house like anybody else’s. And you’ve got nothing to talk about.

  “I’ve just been a little tired,” you tell Curtis.

  “Reid and Hightower!” Coach is hollering. “Get your asses in gear! Time to get back to work!”

  The t
wo of you start running back.

  “Cox! Try to get the goddamn ball in the air this time.”

  As everybody lines up you can see Curtis’s eyes on you. Impersonal now; you’re just an object he has to track and follow.

  “Blue thirty-four!” Cox shouts. “Blue thirty-four! Set…Hut! Hut!”

  You sprint forward and cut inside. You can feel Curtis shadowing you, but the ball is spiraling toward you. You stretch out your hands, ready to feel the clean smack of the catch.

  It doesn’t come. Curtis gets a hand up; the two of you get tangled up somehow and you both come down in a heap on the grass.

  Curtis gets immediately to his feet; he’s in his usual between plays half awareness and barely gives you a glance as he scoops up the ball and tosses it back to the center.

  You lie outstretched on the turf and wait for your breath to come back into your lungs.

  “Reid!” Coach hollers. “You don’t jump up and get moving, you better be able to show me some bone sticking out!”

  So you get up, panting; Curtis has already trotted back to the line.

  You follow. Alone and empty-handed.

  After practice on Friday, Curtis asks if you and Dobie want to go grab a burger or something.

  “Sure,” you answer, although you’re not really hungry. There’s nothing else to do, and, besides, there’ll be plenty of people down at the Dairy Queen. It’s easier to click on that button around a lot of people. Easier to go through the motions of having a good time.

  You drive, Curtis rides shotgun, Dobie’s in the back. The pickup bumps across the field house parking lot, bottles rattling and bouncing around in the bed.

  Since it’s Friday night, the Dairy Queen is pretty crowded. You have to park way back in the corner of the lot, next to the close-cropped grass lawn of the church next door. When you get out of the truck, you’re close enough to read the weekly quote-on-a-sign in front.