Fight Song (26 page)

Adamant rodent nodding ensues.

“What did you do to your wife?” Coffen asks Björn.

“I can’t talk about it. I thought I was punishing her but all I did was make me hate myself.”

Björn picks mousy Schumann up and puts the rodent in his jacket pocket. Then he lightly taps on the rodent-lump from outside the jacket a few times. The magician takes a deep breath, shuts his eyes, and there’s a clap of thunder outside. Bob and Tilda look at each other. Björn takes another deep breath, and there’s another clap of thunder. Finally he says, “Let evolution take its course.” He taps the lump one last time.

And it’s gone.

“Where is he?” Tilda asks.

That’s when Schumann lopes in the front door of Taco Shed in his football uniform, standing full-sized, dressed as though Purdue might lock pigskinned-horns with Notre Dame any minute now.

“What happened?” he says, looking perplexed and disheveled.

“Where were you?” Tilda says.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I was suddenly standing out in the parking lot, and everything before it is hazy. I kind of remember feeling inconsequential, a sort of afterthought.”

“Where are you coming from right now? Think hard,” Coffen says. “Did you hear thunder just now?”

“I can’t remember anything besides wearing a really warm fur coat,” Schumann says.

“Holy shit,” says Tilda.

“Boo-ya,” Björn says.

“Are you being serious?” Coffen asks Schumann.

He nods and says, “Yeah, the fur coat is really all I can remember.”

“What the almighty pigeon-toed fuck is going on?” Tilda screams.

Björn cracks up. “I keep telling you people I’m a sorcerer. But nobody wants to hear that. You all only want to rain hate down on my happy little shindig. Let me do my thing. Leave me and my well enough alone.”

Bob wants to ask a flood of practical questions, feels the tug to disprove the possibility that Schumann had indeed been a mouse. The urge comes on strong, almost like a craving, a habit, but Coffen strangles it. The explanation isn’t the point. Schumann’s back. His wife has her husband. Little Schu, his dad. That’s the point. That’s all that matters, and Bob tries to embrace the mystery of it.

Schumann tells all that he’s completely famished and asks if he can have a Mexican lasagna. Nobody objects, so he takes Coffen’s straight out of his hands and digs in, signals that he’s going to wait for everyone outside so he can try and think straight about this. Tilda altruistically volunteers to keep him company in the morning light—no doubt to test his memory of all she said to him while babysitting. He chomps away and Coffen watches her give him quite a speech. It makes Bob kind of sad, actually, thinking about Tilda pleading to her former mouse man, trying to make him want what she so badly wants.

“Good-bye,” Björn says to Bob once the others are outside, finally removing his shades. His cheeks are dry. Moustache flattened on one half. “It’s been interesting.”

“You’re not crying … ”

“Not after the show last night. I’m done bending over backward for people. The world is full of ingrates.”

“Magic is hard for us.”

“Why?”

“I’m trying to turn over a new leaf and believe, but it’s hard.”

“Turn it over,” says Björn. “Being a know-it-all is a terrible way to go through your life.”

“I’m trying.”

“What’s the holdup?”

It’s all so much for Coffen to take, to accept, to change years of his thinking. He never before has believed in magic, so why all of a sudden does he want to? And where’s the valve on the parts of himself that don’t want to believe? How can he turn them off, leaving only the open-minded parts of Bob? The ones that believe in Jane’s chances to break the world record. Believe in Björn’s dark arts prowess.

“Hello?” Björn says. “I asked what the holdup is.”

“I’m probably the holdup.”

“Do you want one more trick to prove I’m the real deal?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, this one will knock your socks off. This one will prove beyond any reasonable doubt that I am who I say I am.”

“When’s it going to happen?”

Björn laughs. “Stay tuned and keep your eyes open. I’m leaving this skid mark of sprawl one last spectacle. Do you like rainbows?”

“Rainbows?”

“Keep your eyes peeled,” he says, then limps toward Taco Shed’s door, putting on his sunglasses. He looks back at Bob and says, “I hope you turn over that leaf.”

“Me, too.”

Björn doesn’t say anything to either Tilda or Schumann as he makes his way to his rental car. He speeds off.

Coffen makes his way outside, too.

“Can you drop me off at home?” Schumann says to Coffen.

“I’ll drive you home, sweetie,” Tilda offers.

“Thanks, but no. Bob and I need to talk about some stuff,” he says.

“Don’t we need to talk about some stuff as well?” Tilda asks. “We left a lot on the table last night.”

“Yeah, but let me gather my thoughts, okay? I’ve been through quite an ordeal,” says Schumann. His football uniform, which had always seemed symbolic and poetic and larger than life, now looks like any other costume—something a person puts on when he wants to see how the other half lives, when he wants to escape himself.

“Call me later?” she says, to which he nods, something timid in it, something defeated, victim of a fourth-quarter comeback that’s come up short.

Tilda waves wildly as Coffen and Schumann start driving away from Taco Shed. The last thing Bob sees is Tilda bringing her hulky arms up, flexing like she’s onstage in a bodybuilding competition. Bob’s not the only person who’s gotten out of his box this weekend; Tilda is taking a chance and opening up to her mouse man. Coffen smiles, looking back at Tilda’s massive physique.

The plight of the people of now

Bob’s nice enough to drive Schumann home when in actuality what he needs to do is hightail it to work for his team’s Monday-morning status meeting, which will be getting underway in roughly half an hour. Coffen’s boss is not a fan of late arrivals and often attempts to scold those of his underlings who traipse in after the clock has struck
late
, like a snobby professor sarcastically welcoming a tardy undergrad to class.

“Well, that was quite a weekend you had, Reasons with His Fists,” Coffen says.

“Please don’t call me that.”

“What are you going to tell your wife?”

“As far as they’re concerned, I’ve been on the couch watching the boob tube the whole time they were gone. And that’s exactly what I will be doing from now on. My competitive streak has been cauterized. I thought I wanted to relive my glory days, but I don’t. I’m not that person anymore.”

Bob is appalled: “Jesus, you really are a mouse.”

“What?”

“You don’t think she deserves to know the truth?”

“I know the truth. That’s what matters.”

“I bet she’d disagree with that.”

“The important thing is that I’m going to be a better man now.”

“I bet she’d think the important thing is that you had sex with Tilda.”

It disappoints Coffen that Schumann isn’t going to level with his missus, but then Bob figures he has so much to worry about in his own life that he can’t try to control how Schumann’s going to handle things. At the very least, it sounds like Coffen will never endure another cameo from Reasons with His Fists. Thank Christ for pigskinned miracles.

Plus, and maybe this is the heart of the matter, Coffen sees Schumann for what he is: confused, sad, and broken, like so many others their age. Like Bob. Confused about their role in the world. A football game. A video game. It all adds up to the same thing. A way to escape how grueling reality can be, all the responsibilities, all the worries. There’s good stuff, too, as Tilda says, between the cops, monsters, prudes, and mice, but you have to hunt for it, or the routine can pull you under.

“You’re not going to tattle on me, are you?” Schumann asks.

“On one condition.”

“What?”

“For one week, starting now, I want you to take a steady dose of Scout’sHonor!
^®
”

“Why?”

“So you know when you lie,” Coffen says. “I want you to be aware when you lie to your wife.”

“What good will that do?”

“She won’t know, but you will.”

“I can’t walk around all week bleeding from my nose, Bob.”

“Exactly why Scout’sHonor!
^®
works so well. Nobody can
afford to bleed all week long. Our lives are busy. Wonder what would happen if you don’t lie to her but come clean about everything?”

“I don’t want to come clean. And because you don’t cheat on Jane, you’re no perfect husband yourself. Don’t you lie to her about other stuff?”

“I more leave stuff out than lie.”

“Like what?”

“Like most of my real feelings.”

“Isn’t that lying?” Schumann says. “You should take Scout’sHonor!
^®
too. Let the pill decide what’s lying and what isn’t.”

He’s spot-on. No disputing that. If one of Coffen’s goals going forward is to do right by his people, then he has to find out all the facts. Try to be honest about everything, even issues he’s previously avoided or downplayed or gone dumb about. Bob should go into his future with his eyes open as to when he’s being dishonest. A week of Scout’sHonor!
^®
will help keep him on track.

“Fine,” Coffen says. “I’ll do it.”

“Right on. Good man. You take it for a week and after your time is up, maybe I’ll decide to take it once we see how it works on you. That makes perfect sense.”

“Take it or I tattle.”

“What if I bleed to death?” Schumann whines.

“Stop being so selfish and you won’t bleed to death.”

“It’s not that easy. You can’t stop cold turkey.”

“Choice is yours, Schumann. But I’ll rat you out.”

“These are the moments I know you never played on a football team. Teammates have each other’s backs no matter what, until the game clock of life expires.”

“What’s it going to be?”

“What choice do I have? I’ll take them and try not to bleed to death,” Schumann says. “But if I do die, you can have my bagpipes. Every time you look at them remember that you murdered me with your truth pills.”

“I can live with that.”

They shake on it. He squeezes Bob’s hand hard. Really hard. Hard enough that Coffen winces and emits a little girly yelp.

For the first time during the conversation, Schumann smiles, still crushing Coffen’s hand. “Now who’s peeping like a mouse,” he says.

After dumping Schumann at home, Coffen makes it to the status meeting with ten minutes to spare. It’s just him and Malcolm Dumper in the conference room, Coffen’s young cohorts only arriving seconds before these meetings commence, risking late arrivals to maintain a persona of youthful ambivalence to structure, rules, the asinine consideration of other people’s time.

Dumper is plopped on a beanbag, while Coffen hooks his laptop up to the overhead projector, so Scroo Dat Pooch will appear on the large white screen.

“Are you excited about your unveiling this morning, Coffen?”

“I’m excited to see what you think of it.”