It had been raining now for a little while, and the water sheeted and merged as it ran down the windshield. It blurred the scene before him, the people across the football field in their coats, dots of red, brown, yellow, green, blue, three hundred people in the rain of Wyoming. They would blur and focus in the glass. He concentrated on them as they came and went. The rain was a soft pressure on the van. He lost it and then started awake and made a note to stay awake and lost that. It was a short step from the swimming windshield to his hallucinations to the high dreams. He could not feel himself breathing, and he made that note and then lost it.
Maybe he was already dead, these colored dots come to greet him, witness his induction, rows and rows of the dead blurring in this great gray room, a tray of apples. The dozen friends in New York, one by one, and suddenly the bottom dropped out. Eldon Rayalf had died in elementary school, shot one stormy fall out on the antelope hunt. He was shot in the head, the story was, and the second story was that his uncle, bored in the million-mile afternoon, had been playing with his rifle, up, down, shooting-bushes bored, and wheeling by the boy, he’d touched the trigger early, and instead of offering a noise that would have rung his ears for a week, he took off most of his forehead. Jimmy remembered the funeral in the Mormon chapel, the closed coffin, all the town it seemed, and then the ride to the cemetery. Was he the first? Jimmy’s dad’s hands were on his shoulder, and Jimmy could see Mr. Rayalf, the back of his head, his dark hair shiny from Brylcreem. Old man Rayalf would have been thirty-one or thirty-two years old at the time, and now he had something he would never get out from under, ever. It became the shadow, the pressure that would press his drinking, and he was a good, quiet, diminished man forevermore. But Eldon wasn’t the first. There were two girls with the flu, and Boyd Mildone in junior high, drowned in the river, swimming or fishing. He must have been fishing alone before school, and his waders taken suddenly with the cold water like a scoop, he drowned. There was a place beyond the old Knop junkyard, the spillage of ruined cars, where the river bent and the cattails grew tall, and it had always been only one thing, the place where Boyd had drowned.
Now Jimmy focused suddenly on the furrowed windshield of Chuck Andreson’s truck, and beyond he could see the rainy home-team stands, all black dots and yellow dots, raincoats and the red umbrellas here and there, and one green one, a golf umbrella. The plangent dizziness arrived like a breeze, and Jimmy wondered at it again, the merging of the world and idea; how could he ever parse what he was seeing from what he was thinking, especially now with the five kids killed in the car driving back from Cheyenne in the year 1967, all five, and he knew them, middle names and all. And now in a car humming with the impinging friction of the rain, he could hear their voices, Claudia DeSmet, who reminded Jimmy always for some reason of a goose, a girl with a great straight nose and a woman’s body at fifteen, now dead thirty-three years.
Before him the clusters of dots, the people in the stands, shifted and reshifted, running in the rain on the glass, and he knew as an idea, as a thing, that he had been writing for them all. They were his audience. So strange. He’d written a thousand reviews for deadlines and for the magazines in New York, and all the stories and the novels, and he’d been writing for the kids they’d all been. He slowed his thinking down and started in sophomore year with homeroom, with Mrs. Scanlon, and he saw the classroom and went down the rows chair by chair looking for the dead. She had the alphabet, in large examples of cursive writing, in a lined banner around the top of the walls, and Jimmy felt the letters now, the weird feeling they’d given him where they were listed above the blackboard and the door and the windows that opened onto the great western desert running west to places that as a boy he could not imagine, though he had tried.
He was dozing lightly, the pain still a hard, untenable force along his spine, when Chuck came back. The big man was wet and smiling. “This one is history.”
Jimmy looked at him, unsure for a moment who he was and what he was speaking of. History? “Craig Ralston’s boy is the most amazing receiver we’ve had in some years—he can scramble. We’ve got Sheridan by two touchdowns with five minutes. You knew Craig Ralston, right? He runs the hardware?”