Inexcusable Read online

  Which is how I came to be there, when I shouldn’t have been. When fate and the coach and the devil shoved me in there.

  I did what I was told. I did what I was taught. I did what I did, what I always did, what I still always do. I followed things to the letter of the law. And I followed things to the spirit of the law.

  It is a game played to a particularly rough spirit. It’s a fact. Some would call it violent. Functioning within that specific world is not the same thing as functioning within the regular one. Circumstances change things.

  They were getting away with a lot of over-the-middle stuff. Anybody could see that. It’s elemental. You cannot just let a team keep throwing the ball right over the middle, behind your linebackers and in front of your corners and safeties, and not make them pay for that. Everybody understands this, and if they don’t, then they need to try.

  They teach you that from very early on. I learn my lessons. I comprehend the game. I play as I am taught.

  Stick ’em.

  I saw it unfolding again, the same way I saw it unfolding from the sidelines, play after play, when the guys on the field could probably guess what was happening but were just too whipped to do anything about it. The quarterback took the snap, took three quick long strides back into his pocket, and let sail with a motion too quick practically to even see, more like a baseball catcher throwing out a runner.

  The receiver, my guy, my responsibility, was just slanting off his pattern, angling across toward the middle of the field.

  You could see it from a mile. There was no decision to be made, really. There was not more than one possible thing for me to do. There was in fact exactly one thing for me to do.

  I could have closed my eyes and hit him. I mean, right from near the start of the play, I could have shut my eyes tight and still run full steam, and still arrived at just the right spot at just the right time, me, him, and the ball, because they were doing it so textbook, so simply, so thoughtlessly. It had been too easy. We had made it too easy. They were getting too comfortable. Too lazy, spoiled, entitled. You need to never do that. Never, ever, ever. It is inexcusable. It is so dangerous out there, you can never ever get spoiled, just because it is coming too easy to you. If you do that, you create a situation of your own danger, of your own making, which otherwise would not have existed, and you put me in a position to do the only thing there is to do.

  When you hit a guy with all your being, hit him the way a car hits a moose, you would expect it to hurt both of you. But it doesn’t hurt the hitter, if the hitter has hit perfectly. It is a strange sensation, almost a magical sensation. The car takes a crumpling, and the moose takes a mangling.

  But not the hitter. Not if you do it right, do it the way you have been taught to do it by guys who have smashed into a hundred thousand other guys before and who were taught by guys who had smashed into a hundred thousand other guys.

  It’s like you smash right through him. Like he’s not even there. You go in, you go down, and you just find yourself there, lying as if you are just getting up out of bed. You feel nothing bad. You feel relaxed, in fact, refreshed. You even hear a short soundtrack come out of him, a kind of a grunt- cry voice forced up through fluid, through his nose, that would be scary if you heard it anywhere else. It isn’t scary when you hit a guy so perfectly, though, it is something entirely else. It almost sounds like ecstasy when you play it over in your head as you get up and trot off, just a little, little bit horny.

  My timing was perfect. The defensive back hit the receiver at the instant the ball arrived. A beautiful pop and explosion, like fireworks.

  And that was that.

  I was already on the sidelines before I knew anything. I was already back, picking up my practice ball, grabbing somebody by the jersey to come hold for me so I could kick a few and make up for lost time and get a yard closer to an offer, a college program, a Saturday game and a nice restaurant with my nice people.

  I never received so many hard slaps on the back.

  It wasn’t a fumble, because he never had a chance to get possession of the ball. It just popped up in the air, straight up, just like the guy’s helmet did, and somebody, some straggler from my team who was just standing around waiting to get lucky, got lucky, and caught the ball. Then he fell down, and a lot of other guys fell on top of him.

  Great. We were on offense now, and I was off to the sidelines.

  Where I became a small-time short-term hero.

  “Way to bang him, Keir,” somebody said, and banged me on the back.

  “Way to stick.”

  “Mowed him, Keir. Absolutely killed him.”

  Until it stopped. All of it. Nobody touched me then, nobody said anything more. Some goddamn monster vacuum came and sucked all the sound, all the air and life out of the whole field, as every eye turned to the spot. The spot where I was a few seconds earlier, where I did my job as well as it can be done, where all the coaches were now and all the referees, and several people from up in the stands, and where people were looking back toward the school buildings and waving, waving for even more people to come.

  I stood there, all vacuumed out myself, feeling like a head in a helmet floating above where my body should have been.

  My holder walked away.

  * * *

  It was news. There were inquiries and investigations and editorials. I was home from school for a week, for my own good, for my peace of mind, because I couldn’t possibly concentrate, couldn’t hear a word with the constant roar in my ears coming from inside my own head and from all points around it. The phone rang all the time, and my dad answered it. He never put me on the phone, never shied away from a question, never lost his patience with school officials or local radio or whoever. He took off work and stayed there with me and played Risk, the game burning on all week as we took great chunks of continents from each other and then lost them again in between phone calls and lots of silence and lots of talks where he said not much more than that everything was going to work out all right and that it didn’t much matter anyway what any investigation said because he already knew, knew me, and knew that his internal, in-his-own-heart investigation had cleared me.

  “You’re a good boy,” he reminded me every time I needed reminding.

  I didn’t look at the mail. He did that, too. I could tell, though, if he had opened any letters from college football programs. He hadn’t. No acceptances, no rejections the entire week.

  No acceptances, no rejections. It was as if I did not exist. No acceptances, no rejections. That’s being exactly nobody, that’s what that is.

  By Friday of the week I stayed home, everybody had looked into the accident. It was an accident. And also, it was no accident, anything but an accident. Everybody concluded—though not happily—that I had not done anything wrong. I had not done anything out of line. I had not done anything blameworthy.

  “An unfortunately magnificent hit, in the universe of football” was what the writer called it, in the article about my being cleared.

  The game, Risk, was unchanged at the end of that sorry week. It was right back where we’d started it. In stock car racing, when there is a wreck on the track, they wave the yellow flag, which means everybody keeps driving, but nobody passes anybody else, nobody changes position, they just continue, motor on, high-speed float, until things are stabilized and you can race again. We ran that week under a yellow flag, me and Dad.

  Quietly, I returned to classes the following Monday. Everybody made a great effort to put the incident away, back, in the background, one tackle, late in a game, late in the season, very late in a high school football life. Very possibly the end of my football life.

  When I got home, at the end of that first quiet day, I got the mail and opened it.

  I had quietly received an offer of a football scholarship.

  The next day I quietly received two more.

  Fate is a bitch, but there you go.

  SHUT UP

  * * *

  Gigi Bou
dakian has her head in her hands, and that is all wrong. If you knew Gigi Boudakian you would agree with me that she should never have her head in her hands. She should be happy, like, every minute, because she deserves it. And for Christ’s sake, she should not be here with her head in her hands now, here with me, like this.

  “This is all wrong, Gigi.”

  “You got that right, Keir,” she says, still with her head in her hands, still with her eyes to the floor.

  “You are my friend, Gigi, forever. I love you, Gigi.”

  “Shut . . . up.”

  “Why does Carl have to come, Gigi? I don’t understand at all. And your father, and my father, and everybody. There is no reason for this. No reason. Miscommunication is all that really happened here, that’s all. I thought one thing, you thought another thing. Why do you have to make it worse? Carl has been my friend forever, just like you have been my friend forever, so why do we have to make an accident into something else? I love you, Gigi.”

  “Shut . . . up.”

  “You know I could never do anything to hurt you. You know I am the very last person in the world to ever do anything like that. I am a good guy and you are a smart girl, and we are us, so this could never be wrong the way you say it is. You know that! So why don’t you just know it, and know that you don’t have to say to Carl or to anybody else what you are thinking of saying?”

  Finally, for the first time in a while, something in the world goes as it should go. Gigi Boudakian removes her head from her hands and looks up at me.

  If she sees me, if she really sees me, everything will be all right. All right like always.

  “I thought I knew all that, Keir. And you don’t understand, that’s what makes this even more horrible.”

  Gigi Boudakian has her head in her hands again, and it feels like nothing will ever be right ever again.

  KILLER

  * * *

  I only ever wanted to go to the one school all along, to be honest. So I was lucky. Sure there were other schools, other teams, other weekend visits to campuses, boy oh boy, were there other weekend visits.

  But I never wanted to go anywhere else. I never wanted to go to fun-in-the-sun in California or Florida. I don’t need the sun for fun. I can have fun in the snow, or in the mud. Or indoors. I didn’t want to go to some ivy- choked four-hundred-year-old snot factory, either, even if they’d have me, which they pretty damn well certainly wouldn’t. All I ever wanted was to wind up at a place about three hours and one state line from home, not closer, not farther away. A place with a reasonable sports budget, a place where a guy could have some laughs, play some ball, meet some people, and get himself educated and experienced without an excess of fuss or, especially, muss.

  “You big baby,” my sister Fran said, laughing when I finally told her, over the phone, of my decision to follow her and my sister Mary to Norfolk U.

  “Cut it out, Fran, it had nothing to do with you guys.”

  “Mary,” Fran was yelling away from the phone. “Mary, you have to hear this.”

  “Knock it off, Fran,” I said.

  But I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind at all, really. I was looking forward to it, in fact, and would, in further fact, have been disappointed if I didn’t catch some grief from them for my news. There was nobody anywhere who gave me grief since they’d been gone. Everyone needs grief.

  “Sure, Fran,” I said, “just go ahead, go on, zoo me all you want. Just remember, I’m coming. Be forewarned. Your holiday is over once I get there.”

  “Oooh, I’m scared. Mary!” she screamed this practically in my ear. “Mary, Keir is being scary. You want to hear it? It’s very cute.”

  Everybody involved was very happy to see me going to Norfolk. We were all sweating it out when I was not hearing and not hearing from the school for so many weeks, because we did all want to be together again. We’re good together, us. We’re good together, and less good apart, even if they sounded pretty okay. So it was a treat we were getting reunited.

  Except for Dad, of course. We were getting de-united from Dad. I didn’t like even thinking about that.

  But he was the biggest booster of all, once the pressure was off, once the letter came through and my decision was made, no matter what circumstances might have prompted that college to send that letter to this modestly gifted athlete.

  “What does Dad think?” Mary asked, now that the two of them were hogging one phone.

  “Dad thinks it’s the greatest,” Dad said, from his sneaky bastard phone in his bedroom.

  “Get off the phone, y’sneaky bastard,” I shouted into the receiver while all three of them laughed at me. “Don’t make me come in there, old man,” I added when I didn’t hear a click.

  That was how it was, and I loved how it was, the year with Dad and me, me and Dad, father and son, brothers, roommates, bastards, and buddies in the absence of anybody else in the house. Nobody ever had it like we had it.

  And with that letter, with that decision to go to Norfolk, I had to end it. To put a bullet into the beloved beast.

  “You still there, Dad?” Fran said into the phone because nobody could tell if he was still listening. No breathing, no laughing, no nothing.

  “Dad?” Mary asked. “We didn’t really want you to hang up, silly man. Dad?”

  He wasn’t there. It was just the three of us now.

  “Well, really, Keir,” Fran said. “This is just the best news. The best.”

  “The best,” Mary agreed. “We are very, very happy for you, Keir. Happy that it worked out, awful as it was.”

  “Yes, and at least there’s that. It’s tragic, the whole thing, that poor kid, but at least you can take something from it, that you learned a hard lesson.”

  A thick silence came over the line.

  “A lesson, Fran?”

  “Well, ya. One would certainly hope so.”

  The silence returned.

  “I didn’t learn any lesson. There was no lesson to be learned.”

  “Come on, Keir,” Mary said. “Come on now. You dodged a bullet. Very good for you. But that doesn’t mean that what happened wasn’t—”

  “Should I show you the newspaper, Mary? Huh? The Chronicle says it was an accident. It was an accident. What lesson can you learn from an accident, other than be careful? I’m being careful, Mary, if that’s what you would like to hear.”

  “He’s all yours,” Mary said to Fran, with an angry little sigh.

  See, the thing with Mary is she’s all black and white. I mean, I love her, and she is loyal as they come, true blue. But she is rigid about right and wrong. She is a very hard person, and she can be intolerant. Fran’s not like that.

  “It’s important that you learn, Keir. Life teaches you a lot of lessons and if you won’t accept them, then it’s like you’ve completely missed the class.”

  The silence again. They were getting longer, and I realized, they were all me.

  “Haven’t I just been through all this, Fran? Haven’t I paid my dues with waiting to find out if I was responsible for what happened? Well, I waited, and I found out, and I’m not. So I’m not going to apologize when I didn’t do anything wrong, and I’m not going to let you guys make me feel like hell, because I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Do you think about the other kid?”

  “Of course I think about the other kid.”

  “You don’t sound like you’re thinking about him that much. Did you have to hit him exactly that hard?”

  “I hit him exactly the way I was taught. I hit him right. If he just stood up again I would have been a goddamn hero, wouldn’t I? I did what I was supposed to do. He didn’t do what he was supposed to do.”

  Big fat silence. Not mine this time.

  I waited for it to break. I waited, and I squirmed. Fran didn’t do this, you see. Fran talked. Clamming up was my move. Fran talked through whatever came.

  “Fran,” I finally said. “Fran, stop it, you know I can’t stand that.”

 
“I am going to assume,” she said in a sticky drawly voice, like she hated to hand the words over, “that you’re still hurting from what happened. That you still need to hold back from this stuff. So I’m going to leave it for now, Keir. For now.”

  I would have thought that I would be more than satisfied with her leaving it. I surprised myself.

  “Why do I have to feel sorry if I didn’t do anything wrong? I don’t understand that, and I don’t understand how that helps that kid at all.”

  “It doesn’t. It helps you. And I would figure that was a cause you could support.”

  “Well, I don’t,” I snapped without thinking.

  We sat there then, the two of us collaborating on a whopping great silence. It gave me a shiver.

  I hate it when people I love condemn me.

  “Listen,” I said, “I gotta go see where Ray is.”

  * * *

  Things changed. Every obvious thing and a lot of others changed, once I got my acceptance and full scholarship from Norfolk.

  Some of those things, you could probably guess. I didn’t have to sweat anymore. For anything. Grades came easy. Not wonderful grades, but my usual, just north of mediocre grades. But they came now without my having to break my neck or crack a book over them. It was made obvious, as it is for most graduating senior athletes, that I was no longer a priority, good or bad, of the education side of the education system. As long as I showed the proper respect, attended classes, stayed awake, answered whatever meatball question was tossed my way, I would do all right for the rest of my high school days.

  I could go with that system.

  I got along, and got along well. Got along with staff, with teachers and lunch ladies. Got along with guys, with athletes I knew before but knew better now, guys who were studs at basketball, or even guys who played sports that didn’t matter, like tennis. I got along with smart kids who did stuff like debate, as well as with guys who sat around glassy-eyed and famously did nothing at all.