In the thin fall sunlight, the parking lot and three streets became a dense little village of their own, filling with tall characters in fresh cowboy hats who had been at the school going back through the decades and still owned this part of it; it never faded. Someone would start telling a story about a football play, a perfect slow-motion draw play or a wide-bellied double reverse, which had lasted twenty seconds twenty-two years ago in a game at homecoming, and before it was half told, there would be five tellers or six, with necessary flourishes including the names of the players and what they went on to do and where they now lived and how that place in its own way was inferior to Oakpine, and in some cases how they died, the kid who ran like a demon, low to the ground and fast, and could never be caught all that day so long ago, who later lost his life in the famous rail accident south of Gillette or all his toes on a late-winter elk hunt.
When the football game itself started, Oakpine was as deserted as a town in a movie about the end of the world, not a noise except for the train every two hours, and even the train sounded reluctant to move through, and the streets were empty north and south. Jackson Hole was being hosted and toasted, as the saying had it, and from the opening kickoff, in which Oakpine crushed the runback out at the six-yard line, Jackson Hole was in fact toasted and then just burned. The game was a deft display of Oakpine’s speedy offense and their smashing defense, and the game was fully decided by halftime, but not a soul left the overcrowded little stadium. It was a rout, but a nasty one, thirty-nine to three, and when Jackson Hole saw their fate, they played every play to the death, with a grudge, piling on, hitting hard even when their strategy was soft.
Larry Ralston, breaking from the huddle for each play, scanned the arena, all these people, and he knew the names of two hundred or three, and beyond this shell, the tiers of the stadium, he could see the sun caught in yellow slashes on the rooftops of the little downtown and the hazy horizon smoking on the curved world’s edge. He had a kind of vertigo, and even with seeing Stephanie Barnes waving and Wendy there beside her where the students stood behind the end zone, he felt removed, and he thought, I wonder if those girls know the guy they are waving to. Larry didn’t know what to think about the minute he was in and he heard himself say, “High school,” and he knew it to be just part of the craziness, the new craziness he realized was his life now.
Larry Ralston played weak side end, and early in the fourth quarter of the game he took a shot to the ribs, a knee after he had tackled the halfback, that had him wincing at the bottom of every breath, a pain and pleasure at once, which endured unto the final whistle, the three referees dancing out onto the field waving their arms making crazy shadows that ran twenty yards in squirming clusters: game over. Immediately the hometown crowd rushed the field, and the entire population of Oakpine was as densely packed as they ever became once a year, and a player or two appeared above the mob on shoulders as if pushed there perforce.
Larry Ralston never got his balance back after the game. There was the jamboree of bumping and twisting through the crowd, everyone batting his shoulders and tapping his helmet until it was pulled off his head and handed to him by Stephanie Barnes, who, jostled, kissed his sweaty neck, laughing, and then he went up the gym steps into the old locker room for the last time. He showered along with his exhilarated teammates, the room a riot, thirty-two animals scrubbing eye grease off their faces, spontaneous whooping and whistles and song, though the songs were hooted out and replaced by the names of these heroes called back and forth in the bright, tiled room. They threw their towels in the same game as always, trying to lodge them above in the hanging lights, so the room appeared to have exploded. Standing on his towel and buttoning his shirt, Larry put his fingers against his side and thought: I broke a rib. Or two. Then he said, “I broke a rib, but it does not matter.”
He imagined the Jackson Hole team in their two buses, gray motor coaches crawling north in the cool fall twilight, wet hair, already past the loss, past football, scheming someplace to go tonight, that wonderful mix of hope and fatigue, sixty lives headed away. He knew that road as it rolled off the plains and into the first mountain junctions. Buses on a night, just any night, not homecoming, just a night.