Out of Position (3 page)

I try to find the row house again, but there are no numbers on the street and they all look alike. I don’t even know why I’m looking. I want to yell at the fox. I want to hold him. I want to grab him by the throat and tell him to get the fuck out of my head. I want to kiss him again. A ferret asks me if I’m lost as I wander from one front porch to another, and I say, “Pal, you don’t know the half of it.” He leaves me alone.

I find what I’m sure is the right house three times. Each time I stand there for fifteen minutes trying to figure out if the pattern of the peeling paint is familiar or not. I peer at the names on the mailboxes, but I don’t even know the little fucker’s name, and they don’t put “Little faggot fox” on the listings. Plenty of people come home while I’m looking around the porches, but only one fox, and she is definitely a vixen. For real.

At 12:30 in the morning I find a cross street that looks exactly the same as the street I’ve been wandering up and down for two hours. I look at all the row houses on that street and find the right house two more times.

At 1:30 in the morning I go back to the bar and snag the first girl I see who isn’t attached and isn’t the painted squirrel. I take her back to my room and we go at it, and it’s fine. It’s not great. It’s not fireworks. I kick her out at 3, get back to bed and lie there staring at the ceiling. I get the crazy idea that if I bring a pair of binoculars and look through the upper story windows, I could find the ceiling that has the specific pattern of water damage I remember and then I’d know where he lives. I go so far as to check online to see where I can get a pair of binoculars close by, and I realize that I have gone completely around the bend. I’m sitting at my desk at four in the fucking morning shopping for binoculars so I can look for the ceiling of the apartment where I had the only gay experience of my life. Not to mention how crazy I would look walking up and down the street looking through third floor windows. Lion Christ.

I need to find that fox. I want him out of my head, and one way or another, I’m gonna get what I want.

Saturday practice is another disaster. I’m running on two hours sleep and coach bumps me down to the second team for the last drills of the day, where I get paired with a frosh backup wideout who is a red fox. He’s not my fox, though; he’s about six feet tall and only has to tilt his head a bit to look me in the eye. Plus he’s got a deep voice. But he has the same slender muzzle, and twice I get caught imagining it sliding over my cock and lose my focus.

I wait to take my shower until the rest of the team is gone.

I don’t know what to do. I retrace my steps from the bar the next day, this time borrowing Randy’s car and finding the right street, absolutely for sure this time. I park at seven o’clock and sit in the car watching the whole street, everyone who comes and goes.

Eight-thirty. A policewolf comes over and asks if I need any help. I say I’m waiting for a friend from the football team. He checks my ID and leaves me alone. Thank god there are some fans in this town.

Nine-twenty. Two male foxes show up, laughing and talking. They walk right past my car and go into the building three doors down. Neither one is him. I’m pretty sure. I make a note of the building anyway.

Ten-forty-three. I sit up in my seat. It’s him. There’s no question. He’s dressed in a trim blue button-down shirt and jeans, carrying a worn backpack over one shoulder. No pretense of being a woman now. My claws extend, punching holes in Randy’s seat. I can’t see his expression, but I know he’s got that cocky smile on him.

It isn’t until he’s halfway to my car that I register that he’s not alone. He’s walking with some freakishly tall mustelid, ferret or weasel or something, and damn if the first thing I feel isn’t
what the fuck is he doing with that guy?
Of course, what I mean by that, I rationalize, is if they go into a building together, it might be the weasel’s place.

They don’t. They pause at the front of one of the houses. The fox climbs the first stair so he can look his weasel friend in the eye. They talk for a few minutes and then the weasel moves on.

And that’s the right house, I remember now. That door frame, that old piece of tape on the window. My heart beats faster.

The fox goes inside. The weasel clears the street and turns the corner, out of sight. I get out of the car.

I walk to the house just like I live there. Big problem: the door’s locked. I stare through the door. There are names on the mailboxes, but the apartment numbers just go 1, 2, 3. I can’t figure out whether he’s R.Michaelson or W.Farrel. And I can’t get in. No problem. I’ll just go through the fire escape.

It occurs to me yet again, as I find the hallway window ajar and squirm my way through it, that I am pretty far gone. Fortunately, I’m also far past caring.

I might not have recognized the building, but when I get to the third floor, I know which door is his. It might have a tiger magnet in it, with the force it’s pulling me to it. I knock before I know what I’m doing, before I’ve figured out what I’m going to say. I can’t wait a minute longer, and besides, I could stand here for another four hours and not figure out what I’m going to say.

His scent hits me a moment before he opens the door. I get a moment of surprise in his baby blues before he sizes up the situation and relaxes into a smile. “Well. Devlin Miski. How did you get in?”

I’m thrown off guard by him knowing my name. “Uh. Fire escape.”

There’s a twinkle of humor looking back at me now. “I see. Back for more, or back to beat up the faggot?”

I can’t give voice to the maelstrom of emotions in my chest. “What the fuck are you playing at?” I yell, louder than I mean to.

His eyes flick to the opposite door, and he shrugs. “The jocks at this school crack me up. You’re Division II football, for the love of God. You’re not even in sniffing distance of playing professionally, but you strut around like you own this town. Despite our enlightened culture, you still go around making faggot jokes and beating up queers.”

He’s talking about that incident last year that everyone’s forgotten about. “I had nothing to do with that! And Coach kicked the guys off the team.”

“Yeah, well.” He shrugs again. “Getting kicked off the football team. Whoop de doo. I got a kick out of the idea that I’d get one of you in bed, so I could tell my friends about it, maybe give you something to think about.”

“Just one?”

Again, the slight hesitation, and now I’m quick enough to see him surprised before he recovers. “Look, whatever you want, let’s get it over with, okay?”

“I don’t know what I want!” I howl. My claws are out and in, out and in, and my tail is lashing.

He looks at me and gives me the throaty Lauren Bacollie again. “Well, handsome, come back and see me when you do.”

He starts to close the door. I can’t let him walk away and I can’t follow him. I can’t sleep with women and I can’t sleep with guys. I’m caught in between worlds and it’s tearing me to pieces.

I wedge my foot into the door. He backs away a couple steps. I scream at him, “You’ve ruined me for women!”

We stand and look at each other for an eternity. Slowly, he gets that cocky smile on his muzzle, but there’s a sad sweetness behind it too. “Oh, honey,” he says, and reaches out with those gentle fingers to tickle my chin. “You were never for women.”

He puts just the slightest stress on the last word. I stare at him. I want to wipe that smile off his muzzle. I want to slap his face, knock him down, make him take it back. I hate his smugness. I hate his scent. I hate the gulf between us, the fact that he’s standing so perfectly in his world, where he belongs, and that I no longer know where I belong.

I hate the fact that he’s right.

I step into his apartment and grab him. He squirms in the half-second before I press my muzzle to his, then he melts into the kiss.

I’d forgotten.

It’s like a drink of water after a full practice. It’s stepping into air conditioning on a hot summer day. It’s a steaming cup of hot chocolate with frost on the windows. It’s all that combined, times a hundred. It’s passion. It’s fireworks. It’s so good I forget everything, even where I am, until I hear the slam of the door behind me and feel the fox’s leg withdrawing from kicking it shut.

I look down into his sparkling blue eyes and he’s grinning that smug, cocky grin again. So I pick him up and carry him over to the bed to do exactly what I know he wants me to do.

Goddamn foxes.

(Lee)

 
When I was seven, I had a bunch of classmates ask me whether I wanted the Devils or the Firebirds to win the championship. I didn’t know what they were talking about. My dad liked football, but I liked stories, and I may have said a couple things I shouldn’t have about people who liked to watch thugs run around on a field and hit each other. So while my mom was combing the playground sand out of my face and chest and tail, my dad started to explain football to me.

Even though I was still at that age where I wanted to be like my dad, I didn’t have much interest in football. But with the championship coming up, he thought it was the perfect time to get me started. Whatever else he’s done in his life—and I’ve run through the list more than once—he got me into football. So if you’re one of those kids who likes chess and books, listen up, because reading this story you’re in the middle of is like growing up in Nicholas Dempsey Middle School. You don’t have to like football to get through it, as my dad told me, but it helps.

See, what I always hated about football was that I was bad at it. I’d only played one football game up to then, at camp. I didn’t understand the rules. To me, it was just a stupid excuse for big kids to beat up little kids. What my dad told me is that football is actually like a chess game.

Hang on. Stay with me. Imagine you’ve got these eleven guys. Each one can move in a certain way. You want to advance your position (symbolized by the football) up the field, either by giving it to a piece and having him carry it forward, or by passing it to a piece down the field. The guys who line up right at the boundary are the offensive line—like a bulwark. Behind them stands the quarterback, and behind him the halfback (or running back) and fullback. They’re the ones who will carry the ball if you choose to run it. Out to the edges are the speedy guys whose job is to run down the field and be ready if you choose to throw the ball: the wide receivers and tight end.

Your quarterback is like a queen (and believe me, more of them are than you’d think). He’s the most powerful piece and he directs the offense. Wolves and lions make good quarterbacks, because they have this inbred pack mentality. The offensive line is like pawns: they only move a very short distance, and their job is to protect the queen. You get big, aggressive guys in there, like bears and boars, because they also have to move the defenders in such a way as to leave room for the running back to run through. This is harder than it sounds, but I’m not going to get into it. The tight end (yes, we’ve all heard the jokes) either helps block or runs a short way down the field to act as a receiver.. Then you’ve got the running back and fullback, wolverines and horses most often, who are like the bishops: they have to move through the spaces cleared by the pawns. The knights would be the tight end and the slot receiver, who can either help defend or jump short distances down the field. And wide receivers are rooks, who take advantage of long open columns to run down the field. For all those last ones, you get deer, cheetahs, and foxes. And what you have to do with these pieces is design a strategy that will help you gain ground, program a series of moves in advance, and watch them go. Meanwhile, our opponent has his own eleven guys, and he’s trying to figure out what your guys are going to do so he can stop them.

If you’re defending, your aim is to stop the progress of the other team. This is the part of football I hated, by the way, because I could never tackle, and they could flatten me with one arm. The QB starts out with the ball, so you go after him. You look at the situation on the field, you look at the way the pieces are set up, and you set up your guys to hopefully disrupt what the offense is doing. Your defensive line, setting up across from the offensive line, is actually attacking, which is why the best ones tend to be large, fast predators, like big cats. Then you have a bunch of guys that stay behind the defensive line to mess with the wide receivers and tight end if they get back into that territory. The best ones there are medium-weight predators, like coyotes, bigger foxes, and cheetahs. And because it’s such a big field, you have to decide things like do you assign one defender to each specific offensive player, or do the defenders just cover sections of the field, and so on.

And then, not to make things more complicated, but there’s everything else, which is called “special teams.” If a team doesn’t move the ball well enough on offense, they end up kicking it, either to the other team (a punt) or through the goal, if they’re close enough. Horses and rabbits, of course, usually do the kicking. On the other side, you need someone quick and slick to catch the kick and try to run it back, and while you get a couple rabbits who are good at this, the best ones have always been weasels and otters.

The thing that makes football more interesting than chess is that the pieces can actually think (well, some of them) and make decisions on the field. They know what they’re supposed to do, but if they see something that’ll block them, they can make an adjustment and change it. Sometimes they do really stupid things, which is fun, and sometimes they do amazing things, which is even more fun.

Also, I mean, it’s guys in tight clothes. There are closeup shots of the quarterback sticking his paws under the center’s tail (with some definite touching). There’s muscles galore, occasional tail-grabbing, and after the plays, there’s butt-patting. What’s not to like?

 
Quick Reference Diagram

Here’s how the players line up on a typical play: