At the Jim Bridger: Stories (13 page)

It was always four laps, no stopping, and Daniel Hamblin ran four laps, always finishing among the first few players, picking up his helmet and going into the gym. There was a group of boys on the team who were always last, who shuffled so slowly around the track that they were inevitably lapped and lost to the sequence of things, purposefully really, and
they picked up their helmets after three laps, joining the file into the gym. One of these boys was the center of the football team, a wry and popular guy named Deke Overby, who was also co-captain. He was a roughneck with a good head of red hair and a face of freckles that looked manly on him, and he was admired, as certain athletes are in the fall of the year, for strength and confidence and his wide-open sense of humor. As the boys stripped off their soaked uniforms and hung their pads on the drying hangers and peeled off their jockstraps, Deke Overby kind of ran the room, calling questions to the various players about what they had done just now during practice or what was the deal with some girl they were seeing, and these were good things, not unwholesome, and it made the guys smile as they stood soaping in the steamy shower, and each boy was hoping Deke would pick him out and say, “If you tackle that hard in practice, two things are going to happen: you’re going to hurt old Qualls here, and we’re going to kick butt on Saturday at Highland,” or some such.

Daniel Hamblin loved the locker room. He liked having his gear stowed and he favored pulling on his oxford cloth school shirts and standing there on his discarded towel in his boxer shorts, his thick black hair in wet disarray, buttoning the shirt. It would be dark by the time they departed the gymnasium, and he loved riding home with his longtime neighbor Qualls, who also played defensive end and who was quiet and tough. They rode home with the windows down even as the nights had cooled, watching the lighted storefronts of their town pass by, not talking.

Daniel felt a new waking, a special distance from his life that made him feel part of a story, a character. It all felt like an amazing backdrop. “We’re teenage boys involved in American high-school football, driving home from practice.” Qualls would shake his head and say, “Right, boss.”

Tonight as Daniel Hamblin pushed open the heavy gym
doors and felt the October air come at his neck, he heard his name. It was Deke Overby, one sleeve in his letter jacket, hustling up the locker-room steps. “Dan,” Overby said. “Listen, do you think you could do me a favor?” Daniel waved at Qualls across the street opening the doors of his Pontiac; he’d be right there. He was a little stunned that Deke Overby even knew his name, and now they were talking. “My girlfriend goes to Copper View. Do you know Holly?”

“I don’t think so,” Daniel said. Everyone knew Deke had a very steady girl who went somewhere else to school. Copper View was out beneath the copper mine, clear across the valley.

“Holly’s girlfriend Jackie is queen of their homecoming this Saturday and she doesn’t have a date.” Deke had squared his jacket and now zipped the front and thrust his hands into the pockets. “You’re a nice guy. We gotta do the right thing. Think we could double? As a favor? I’ll drive.”

Daniel smiled; he wasn’t sure what was being asked. “Sure,” Daniel said “Sounds good.”

“Great,” Overby said. “It is. She’s the queen of the damn thing.” He tapped Daniel’s head. “So be sure to comb your hair. We’ll be the only two Cougars there.”

Daniel Hamblin’s friend Laura Sumner understood the arrangement. “It’s a favor,” she told him. “You’re good to do it.” They were sitting on the side steps of the old main building in the weak fall sun, having their lunch. Laura’s mother made tomato sandwiches on homemade wheat bread, and she traded these for his own bologna and mustard white-bread creations. When she unwrapped them, she had to peel them apart and realign the bread. “A homecoming queen cannot go unattended.”

“I guess,” Daniel said. They had been meeting for lunch for three weeks, exchanging notes for two, and they had
kissed on these old stone steps one week ago and every day since.

And. There had been a tussle. Three days before at Laura’s house in front of the television, half on the rug and half on the couch, they’d had a moment. They had been to the school play, which had been
Gidget
, a bright thing to behold, full of their classmates with thick makeup tans. Laura was reviewing the play for the school paper and she’d asked Daniel along. After a bottle of 7Up and twenty minutes of
The Late Show
, their embrace closed out the world, and they slid down, gracefully and awkwardly, until at one juncture when they had to shift, Laura said, “We’re acting a lot like we’re about to have sex.” This took a moment to register in Daniel, and when it did he was hurt, and started to apologize. She put her hand on his mouth. “Stop,” she whispered. “We are.” Her eyes were bright. “I hope.” She kissed him. “But not here. My parents are right down there.” She pointed to the hall. “Getting caught would spoil it for me.” Her smile against his face caused him to smile, and they sat like that for a long moment, not exactly laughing, but close to it, happy to have this dear understanding between them.

Now on the old school steps, Daniel asked, “Is it going to make me something? Besides her date, I mean.”

“Like king?” Laura Sumner said. “You can’t step in at the last minute as a blind date and be king. There’ll be a king, but he’ll have been elected, too, and with his own date.”

Daniel fished in his lunch sack for the Baggie of crushed potato chips, offering it to Laura. “They elect the king. It should be president or chairman.”

“Czar,” she said.

They sat on the old side steps because they could be alone and look across the street at the little Favorite Pharmacy, a throwback edifice, its windows plastered with specials and discounts years old. Most days they talked about the people
coming and going, what they were after and why, and when a person came out with the little white Favorite bag, Laura or Daniel would comment about how much better everything was going to be for that person very soon. “He’s warts from neck to toe,” Daniel said about a man all in khaki. “He’s all bumps, can’t sleep. Contracted a wicked case of wartarama in the jungles of Arkansas.”

“He’s talking to the pharmacist right now,” Laura picked it up. “Saying he’s got a friend that is worried he might have a touch of wartsomething, like…a…wartarama!”

“Don’t give me that,” Daniel said in the voice of the pharmacist. “You don’t have a friend now and you never will until you get rid of those warts. I can see them poking out of your clothing.”

“You need this!” Laura mocked a commercial and held up her little lunch sack. “Wart-All-Gone! One treatment and you’ll be smooth as a baby’s bottom.”

“And then maybe I could get some sleep,” Daniel said.

“Oh, you’ll need something else for sleep.”

When the man came out a moment later, they laughed because he was carrying a huge cardboard box of something they could not read. “That man is taking the big cure!” Laura said. “He feels better already!” Laughing, their heads fell together in a way that Daniel Hamblin loved, and their faces were close when they turned and looked at each other, and with their eyes open, they kissed. Then they closed their eyes and they kissed again. They stayed close and he could smell the dry, clean scent off her face. He loved that it was so clear that they were both willing to kiss again. Finally, Laura sat up and took a few of the crumbly potato chips.

“At the dance, what should I call her?” he said. “Your majesty?”

“What’s her name?” Laura said. “This girl, your queen?”

“Overby said her name is Jackie.”

Laura Sumner, who usually was very funny about Daniel’s hurriedly made sandwiches, stopped eating then and began to put her lunch away. Daniel watched her and said simply, “I’ll call her Jackie.”

It was a strange week for Daniel, the first strange week in his life really, because he realized that the feelings that pulled him this way and that were his feelings now, his responsibility, and this thought, which he had on Monday as he sat on the old steps on the side of the high school and Laura Sumner did not show up, made him feel terrified and powerful. Deke Overby buddied up to him at practice, pulling him into the first circle of guys there, hauling at his shoulder pads and talking to him as if they were old friends, good friends, and this made him feel elevated and unreal; he liked it. He’d come into the coach’s view somehow and his name was called more frequently. Laura Sumner did not show up Tuesday either, and he ate his stupid sandwiches and crushed chips alone, watching the people file in and out of Favorite Pharmacy He pointed at each as they emerged and said quietly, “You’re cured. You’re cured.” He missed Laura, a feeling primarily in his stomach, a hurt. She was in his Biology II class right before lunch, and the fact that he saw her there, knew where she was every minute, and then that she didn’t join him on the steps, made him sorry and proud. The cool north shadow of the big building was a lonely place now.

He rode home from practice every night with Qualls and they stopped at the Blue Bird and ate the forty-nine-cent cheeseburgers, three or four of them with the vanilla shake, fries, and icy Cokes, sitting on the old wooden picnic tables under the Blue Bird’s buzzing fluorescent lights. Quails had a system: he unwrapped his burgers, unfolding the yellow paper and peeling the top bun off to remove the four pickle slices and stacking them on the paper. He didn’t like the pickles.
The boys ate and watched Qualls’s pickles stack up. Daniel’s hair dried. When they talked, they talked with their mouths full, and if Quails was through removing the pickles from his sandwich, he gestured with it when he spoke.

“So, you going with your buddy Overby this weekend?”

“I’m escorting the queen of Copper View’s homecoming.”

“That’s where his wife goes.”

“That’s what he said,” Daniel replied. “Why does everybody say that?”

“That’s what he calls her. They’re way into it. He stays out there some weekends. There’s a ring. He hasn’t told you this stuff? I thought you’d know the color of her underpants by now, you guys are such good buddies.”

“Come on, Jeff. I’m just doing him a favor.”

Qualls balled the yellow burger paper tightly in his fist. “Well,” he said, standing up now and stepping out of the picnic table, “it hasn’t hurt you in practice.”

“Jeff…”

“Hey.” Qualls plucked his paper shake cup from the table and drew on the straw. “If you start against Fairmont Friday night, you and Overby will be way even.”

On Saturday, Deke Overby picked Daniel up at six and they drove across the valley toward Copper View. Deke was driving his father’s Oldsmobile, a huge car featuring plenty of chrome; he’d washed it up and the heavy car shined in the new evening. Deke smelled of aftershave. His hair was combed over severely and his sport coat was folded over the front seat-back. The radio was playing on KNAK, the cool station. Daniel liked this and he could feel the world pulling at him.

It was a pleasure, the world calling him, and he listened to it. He had started in the game yesterday against Fairmont, and Qualls had played second platoon end. He’d done well,
stepping into the expanded role with a toughness that surprised him at first. Every time the Fairmont line would roll his way, he’d fend them off one by one, delaying the sweep long enough for the linebackers to come up and crush the play. It was more contact than he’d ever had in an afternoon, and late in the day at the end of the third quarter, when the shadow of the Fairmont Science Building fell across the south end of the Fairmont football field, which was lush and torn up, Daniel felt a happiness fill his body, his shoulders and his hips, his wrists and his knees, that was beyond thinking, beyond his words for it. He could not have identified or expressed it, but it came off him in waves. At first he had wondered if Laura Sumner had made the drive, was at the game, and then thoughts of her—and everything else—dropped away and he was taken by the work before him. He had been waiting to find out what running and diving and rolling and getting back up were all about, and now he just committed them all again and again. When the game ended there was still more in him; he could have played and played. Everyone knew he had made a mark and would start the rest of the season.

This had all happened in a week, this step, whatever it was that had him now in his new gray tweed sport coat with Deke Overby headed out of town. Laura Sumner had come by their stone steps finally on Friday at the end of lunch. He’d sat there every day savoring something bittersweet he had no name for, something real, though, a little loss. She stood above him in a blue and gray kilt, the gold pin in it maddeningly beyond his comprehension. There was a matching gold pin on the heart of her gray sweater.

“Hello,” he said. When she didn’t answer, he said, “I already ate all the chips. Sit down?”

Laura sat down and hugged her knees. They watched the front of Favorite Pharmacy until two women came out closing
their purses and talking. The two women got in a white Ford pickup and drove away. Daniel looked into Laura’s face, her eyes, and the hot glance held until her eyes teared. They heard the bell ring deep in the building, but neither Daniel nor Laura moved. After a while the second bell rang. “Now we’re late,” Daniel said.

“You’re late,” she told him. “I’m going to give it all a rest.” She stood and walked down the stairs toward the parking lot in the rear.

“I’m doing it as a favor to Overby,” Daniel said to her. “You know that and I know that.”

She stopped below him and once again folded her arms. “Well,” she said up to him before leaving him there. “That’s everybody.”

He knew from the feeling that then rose in him, the space that opened, that he was m love with Laura Sumner, and it wasn’t all a good feeling, some of it made him feel older than he ever wanted to be. For the first time in his life, he put his forehead in his hand and closed his eyes and sat still.

Copper View was a rough little town of small houses on dirt lanes. Everything needed painting and nothing would be painted, because the copper mine was slowly and inevitably moving down the mountain. The IGA grocery was boarded up and the little string of shops on Main Street looked sad. In the early evening, the place had the look of an ancient village, the green weeds growing to the street, the hedges unruly, and the huge poplars and cottonwoods just beginning to change. Deke Overby pulled the big Olds onto the gravel margin in front of a tiny house overgrown with roses and sego lilies. Holly appeared and at first Daniel thought she was somebody’s little sister, a short blond girl in a strapless blue satin dress. Then she pulled Deke into a serious kiss, practiced and resolute, there on the walkway, the two of them folding
together urgently. Daniel, three steps away, didn’t dare approach. Finally, Deke put Holly down, and she looked at Daniel and said, “Oh, Jackie can’t wait to meet you. This is going to be such fun. You are such an angel. Come on in!”