The plastic on the ceiling billowed and the door opened as Larry and Mrs. Brand came in with a tea tray. Jimmy noted his mother’s face when she saw the nurse, and regretted the hope he saw there. Human beings. There was always hope.
Mrs. Brand disappeared for a moment and came back with a grocery bag full of zucchini for Kathleen, and then they all had a tea in the little room, and then Larry lifted his guitar, and he and Jimmy played the rippling opening of “Help Me, Rhonda” three or four times, almost getting it right.
• • •
The nights cooled down, and Larry and Wade continued to run. Larry loved it, striding through the tangible air. After he was warmed up, jogging through the streets of his hometown, he felt something fill him, something he couldn’t have explained to anyone. He was changing, and he liked it. Wade wanted to walk certain stretches and give Larry advice. Wade was indiscreet about what his father said about other players on the team and repeated these things. Guys were screwups or lard asses. Larry deflected the remarks, defending his teammates when he could. Wade’s behavior was a surprise to Larry and it dismayed him. It was odd to have a friend act this way.
On the team, Larry had made his clear mark and was the undisputed starting defensive end and he rotated every other play on offense. Wade told him that his father had said that he’d wished he’d made Larry co-captain, and though Larry deflected this also, it got through and surprised and steadied him. He’d been heavily celebrated after the Rawlins game, guys clapping him on the back and talking about him making all state. He’d lost himself in the game. Here, halfway through the season, he knew his position well, and his body had caught up and was ready for all of it. He’d made eleven tackles and he took it all, the running and the diving and all the knocking about, as a kind of pleasure, rising from the grassy field with new energy after each play. There was still more in him when the game ended, and it was apparent to everyone. He was tall and strong, and as he pulled his helmet off and left the field that day, he said, “I’m tall and strong.” It was strange and thrilling to hear. He’d loved being a boy, but he wasn’t a boy anymore. He was the next thing.
They’d showered at Rawlins, and when they came out of the gym, it was nearly ten o’clock, and the wind had come up with its cold edge. On the bus all the way home, he’d ridden with the corner of his forehead against the window and watched the Wyoming night and felt apart from everything in his life. He watched the miles become a hundred miles, and he knew he could have run it. The boys on the bus, the game he’d just played, his home on Oakpine Mountain. He thought about his mother and father, their lives, and he knew what they had done for him, and he knew they loved him, but he felt separate from them now. His mother was a bright woman who was trying to make some kind of mark. He saw that.
He saw that she was different from the people she worked with at the museum, wanting something different. Thought opened now, and he could see her as the girl she had been, like girls he knew, and if that was true, then she lived in a kind of danger every day; she wasn’t finished at all. This broke his sense of safety, and he blinked and put his head back against the window. Good, he thought, good. He said it: “Good.” His father was happy these days with Mason Kirby’s house. His father wanted to build the world. In the dark bus, Larry wondered what people lived for; his parents—what did they want now?
He had a bruise above his left knee, and he squeezed it and saw again in his eyelids the tackle when he’d earned it, and then he pressed it with his fist again, and he saw the play, smelled the grass again. What was he living for, in this body, except these small surprises? Larry Ralston rode the bus. He had the clear sensation that it was going the wrong direction, taking him to a place he’d never been before. Around him, the team had settled down, quieted. Several boys were asleep. He put his lips against the cold glass and whispered, “I’m tall and strong,” and it misted on the window.
Now, running with Wade, he felt a pull at his sleeve. Wade had stopped, wanted to walk. “It’s a run,” Larry told him. “Not a walk.”