Empire Falls (44 page)

“Hello, Meyer,” Miles said, the two men shaking hands.

“I just saw Christina over on the other side. She tell you about her painting?”

Miles quickly replayed their most recent conversations. “I don’t think so.”

“It was one of two selected from the sophomore class to be in the citywide art show.”

“Doris Roderigue picked something of Tick’s?”

Meyer snorted. “Don’t be an idiot. I brought in a professor from the college to do the judging. Christina didn’t say anything to you?”

Miles shook his head, at once embarrassed, hurt and proud. Their vacation, he’d come to understand, had represented a brief
glasnost
during which Tick had offered up a few confidences of the sort she’d routinely surrendered as a child. He hoped such openness would continue, but now, a mere month into the new school year, she’d grown remote again. Probably he himself was at fault, at least partly. He’d registered his objection to the Minty boy much too strongly earlier in the week, and as a result Tick now seemed even more reluctant to share whatever was on her mind. “Lately,” he told Otto, “she seems to hide where I can’t find her. The only way I learn anything is through Q-and-A and then cross-examination. And she tells her mother even less.”

“She’s in high school, Miles. They all go to ground.”

They paused to watch a busted play, then Miles said, “I think she’s concluded from the divorce that neither one of us is to be trusted. She could be right.”

“Nope. You’re wrong. She’s a great kid. She just knew you’d find out, eventually.”

“You think?”

“Actually,” Meyer confided, “I’m afraid I placed an unfair burden on her a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been regretting it ever since.”

“The Voss boy?”

He nodded, looking guilty. “She say something?”

“Of course not.”

“I heard you gave him a job. That was awfully good of you, Miles. He’s a troubled boy.”

“Troubled how?” Miles said, recalling Horace’s cryptic admonition.

“The kids all love to pick on him for some reason. I wish I knew more. It seems his parents abandoned him. He lives with his grandmother out on the old Fairhaven Highway.”

“I gave him a lift out there last night,” Miles said, recalling how strange it had been. No light left on, not a sign of life.

“He was the other sophomore whose work was selected for the art show, incidentally.”

Miles nodded, swallowing something like fear. Last night, in the restaurant, he’d felt the same apprehension, an unwillingness to have his daughter linked with this unfortunate creature. Now here he was, grudging the boy’s painting being hung next to Tick’s in a school art show. Insane. And even worse, a fundamental breakdown of the charitable impulse. Miles could feel his mother’s sudden presence at his elbow. No need to visit her grave, either. “He seems to be a good worker. I can’t get him to say two words yet, but Charlene’s going to work on him.”

“I always have a hard time talking around Charlene myself,” Meyer grinned. “She makes me stuh-stuh-stutter.”

Miles smiled, remembering when as a high school senior, he’d finally confessed to Meyer that he was in love with Charlene, only to have Otto sheepishly admit that he was too, which explained why he’d always been so willing to accompany Miles to the Empire Grill, a decidedly uncool place, to have Cokes after school. There was something touching about his old friend’s admission now. Meyer had, as far as Miles knew, a fine marriage. But like Miles, he’d left Empire Falls only briefly, for college, then again years later for graduate school, which meant that Meyer also shouldered the weight of his childhood and adolescent identity—Oscar Meyer, the weiner, he’d been called. Growing up to become principal of the high school had merely confirmed the worst suspicions of his classmates.

“Kind of a shame the rivalry game’s so early in the season,” he observed.

Miles nodded, noncommittal. “I thought a rivalry was when you win some and they win some.”

Fairhaven had won about the last ten. Both high schools had suffered declining enrollments over the past two decades, but Empire Falls’s decline was much steeper, having already dropped from triple-A to double-A, and it was about to drop again to class B. Fairhaven, more stable because of the college and a couple of smaller mills that had somehow managed to stay open, had retained Empire Falls on its schedule but insisted the game be played earlier in the season, as a tune-up for more important contests. For Empire Falls—in the tradition of jilted lovers everywhere— it remained “the game.”

Otto Meyer Jr. nodded, watching Empire Falls break their huddle and lumber up to the line of scrimmage. “I don’t get it,” he admitted. “Our kids are too big and mean and stupid to get pushed around like this every year.”

Another roar went up as he said this. Fairhaven had recovered a mishandled snap and was back in business.

“Damn,” Meyer said, shaking his head. “Hey, speaking of getting pushed around, will you please stand for school board again? The damn fundamentalists are going to ban every library book worth reading if I don’t get some help. You can’t leave the good fight to the Jews, you know. This is Maine, and there aren’t enough of us to go around. Besides which, some of
your
people are worse than the snake-handlers.”

Which was true enough. Many Catholics, Miles hated to admit,
were
trying to out-Jesus their evangelical brethren, though he liked to think Sacré Coeur Catholics were more prone to this than St. Cat’s.

“I’ll think about it,” Miles said. “I swore I wouldn’t after my last stint, but—”

“God,” Meyer blurted. “Just listen to us. Talking about damn school board. Only yesterday we were those kids out there.”

“So long, Meyer,” Miles said. “I’d like to chat longer, but my
date
dropped her
cane
under the bleachers.”

This provoked a wide grin. “I thought that was Cindy Whiting I saw you with. You want to know the truth? I was kind of surprised to see what an attractive woman she’s become.”

Miles couldn’t help smiling. Meyer was one of the kindest men he knew, and this was his way of suggesting that if Miles was contemplating marrying all that money, it was okay with him. And, as often happened when he ran into Meyer, Miles wondered why they hadn’t been better friends over the years. Their mutual fondness hadn’t diminished since they were kids, and Miles often got the impression that Meyer could use a friend. One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he’s made by not really making them, like allowing friends to drift away through simple neglect.

It took Miles a few minutes to locate the right section of bleachers, where it smelled as if several decades’ worth of elderly high school football fans had been secretly draining their colostomy bags from above. He was sick to his stomach by the time he found the cane leaning improbably against one of the metal supports. Had someone propped it up like that? Could the thing actually have landed that way? By putting one foot into the crotch of one of the supports and pulling himself up, Miles was just able to tap the bottom of the bleacher seat Cindy was perched on. When she bent over to receive the cane, he could see her face, and it was so full of hope and joy that Miles was tempted to remain where he was. Or, better yet, to bolt. Once the game was over, surely someone would see her sitting there alone at the top of the visitors’ section and bring her home.

B
Y THE TIME
he returned with a couple of sodas Miles found that his prayer for someone to notice Cindy Whiting had been answered in the way God will sometimes respond to a request that’s carelessly phrased. Her companion was Jimmy Minty, and they both waved at Miles as he climbed the bleachers toward them, swallowing hard to keep down the memory of what David had told him last night, that Jimmy Minty had been watching the Empire Grill.

“How come you’re setting over here with the bad guys?” Jimmy wanted to know. He was in street clothes and he seemed eager to shake hands, though Miles held a Coke in each. “You ashamed of your own hometown?”

“We got here late,” Miles explained, sliding past both the policeman and Cindy, then staring at the same woman who hadn’t wanted to budge earlier until she finally moved down again. Fairhaven, he noticed, had added another field goal, making the score 17–zip. “That forced us to
sit
over here with the winners,” he added, just barely emphasizing the “i” in “sit.”

“I wouldn’t say this one was over just yet,” Minty quickly countered. “My boy Zack’s playing a pretty good game. I never seen a kid so fired up as he was this morning.”

“He’s on the team?” Miles said.

This time the policeman flinched. He was almost certain Miles knew that, in which case his chain was being pulled.

“Which one is he?” Cindy wanted to know, as innocent as her companion was pretending to be and far more interested.

Jimmy Minty put a hand on her shoulder and leaned close so they could both sight along his extended arm and out past his index finger, all the way across the field to number fifty-six, now on the bench while the Empire Falls offense tried to figure out what to do with the ball.

“What position does he play?”

“He plays linebacker, Miss Whiting,” he explained, his hand still resting between her shoulder blades. “That’s on the defense. Which is why he’s setting over there on the bench just now. It’s his job to patrol the line of scrimmage. Make tackles on running plays. Rush the quarterback when he throws. You have to be pretty smart to play linebacker, and I expect there’ll be some interest in him if he keeps on like he’s going. From colleges, I mean. He doesn’t have the size to play pro, and I won’t have him eating steroids. I told him, I ever catch you swallowing anything you can’t buy at the mall, I’ll bust your ass as quick as a kid with a kilo of crack cocaine.”

“I didn’t know they sold crack by the kilo,” Miles said.

“However it’s sold,” Jimmy Minty allowed. “Zero tolerance is what I’m saying.”

“How come you’re not working the game today?”

“In uniform, you mean? Well, Miles, I don’t work crowd control anymore. Most of the guys you see at the gates and out in the parking lot are rent-a-cops.” He took a slender walkie-talkie out of his sport coat pocket and showed it to them. “I am on duty, though. Nothing like the Empire Falls/Fairhaven game to spark a rumble.”

A rumble? Miles smiled, trying to recall the last time he’d heard the term. If you could control the urge to kill Jimmy Minty, he was entertaining enough, unless you liked your humor intentional.

“This section seems pretty law-abiding,” Miles said, “but I promise to come find you if a fight breaks out.”

Jimmy Minty chuckled unpleasantly, confident now that he was being made fun of. “Either that or you could just quell the disturbance yourself.” He nudged Cindy with his elbow to include her in the joke. “I wouldn’t mind seeing that, would you Miss Whiting? Ol’ Miles here, quelling a disturbance?”

Below them, the Empire Falls punter was again trotting onto the field.

“Damn,” Minty said. “Another three and out. Our defense is going to be plum tuckered out by halftime.”

It was indicative of Empire Falls’s team that the thing it did best was punt, and the boy who did all the kicking took this moment to launch one that traveled about sixty yards in the air. Unfortunately, it settled securely into the arms of Fairhaven’s punt returner before the first Empire Falls players got more than twenty yards downfield, and before they had a chance to make much more progress in the direction of the ball carrier it became necessary to turn around again because he’d sprinted past while they were trying to shed their blocks. It was the punter himself who finally pushed the returner out of bounds at the Empire Falls thirty, and once again the tired defense trucked onto the field, Zack Minty trying to buck up his teammates by cuffing them on the back of their helmets and barking his signals as Fairhaven’s offense broke huddle and approached the line of scrimmage.

Jimmy Minty again put his hand on Cindy Whiting’s back and pointed down at the field. “That’s my Zack there,” he said. “Now we’re on defense. They got the ball.”

No doubt smelling blood, the Fairhaven quarterback took the snap, drifted back into the pocket and spotted a receiver streaking down the sideline. The pass he threw was a beautiful, arcing spiral, and virtually everyone, including the officials, turned to follow its flight. Miles, however, saw what Jimmy Minty saw. Number 56 for Empire Falls, a full two beats after the ball left the quarterback’s hand, put first his helmet and then his shoulder pad into his kidney. Locking his arms around the quarterback’s thighs, he lifted the boy off the ground and drove him into the turf so hard his head bounced twice.

The elder Minty leapt to his feet. “Yeah!” he cried, shaking his fist in the air. “Oh,
yeah!
Did you see that hit?” He was pointing excitedly. Cindy, however, as Miles had good cause to remember, was not the best of students. She’d followed the flight of the ball, and even now, despite Jimmy Minty’s insistence, she seemed reluctant to look where he directed.

Zack Minty was back on his feet, quickly turning downfield, but the Fairhaven quarterback was still sprawled motionless on the grass, either hurt or aware that his services weren’t required just now, the ball having come down in his receiver’s arms for a touchdown. The Fairhaven coach, who’d also seen the late hit, now stormed onto the field, pointing alternately at his quarterback and at Zack Minty, who stood with his hands on his hips, staring off at Fairhaven’s end-zone celebration and shaking his head. One of the officials farthest from the play trotted up the field, nodding his head and pointing at number 56. The officials held a brief caucus, at the end of which the referee took out his yellow flag and tossed it at the Minty boy’s feet.

“Aw, let ’em play, ref!” Jimmy Minty yelled, an unpopular sentiment here in the visitors’ stands. “This ain’t badminton!”

“Is he hurt?” Cindy asked, since the Fairhaven quarterback still hadn’t moved.

“Nah, he just had his bell rung, is all,” Minty assured her. “He just needs to set there a minute. Get his bearings.”