Wade said to him, “Don’t you talk.”
Wendy said no again and no again, and Larry could hear them cuffing and pushing.
“Wade.” Larry sat forward. “Wade, let’s go back. Let’s just go back.” He saw Wade put his hand against Wendy’s face and push her head back against the window. “Stop it, man.”
“Don’t you talk, you shit.”
Larry slid to his door and jumped out of the truck, opening Wade’s door and dragging him out onto the windy hillside. “Leave it,” he said. “Cool down, and let’s go home.”
Wade hit Larry below the eye, following with his right hand to the ribs, and Larry went down, and Wade jumped on him, swinging down now and missing. Larry’s chest was on fire, and he threw Wade off and tackled him, rolling in the dirt, beyond angry, way beyond like some old man looking at himself, and then standing and lifting his teammate by the arm and the collar and throwing him in a spin to the ground.
The girls had climbed from the truck. “Stop,” Wendy said. The antelope had risen silently and leaped the cemetery fence and drifted through the tombstones, disappearing. “Stop.”
Wade sat splayed on the ground and then got up. “Fuck you, Larry.” Wade stood up, scooping up the little bottle of whiskey, and stepped into the driver’s seat. He revved the engine and backed without closing the passenger door, rocking it closed when he wheeled out of the lonely place and down the hill toward Highway 31.
“Are you okay, Larry?” Stephanie asked. His eyes wouldn’t quit watering from the pain, and he sipped shallow breaths as he brushed himself off.
“Yeah,” he said. “We’re good. I think I cracked a rib in that game today, but right now I can’t feel a thing. I think, however, I might have torn these fine trousers.”
Wendy had a hand over her face, her shoulders naked in the night wind. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Oh god, Wendy,” Stephanie said, “it’s not your fault.” Wendy had left her purse and jacket in the vehicle, but Stephanie had hers. “I’ll call my dad.” Larry shrugged out of his suit jacket and put it on Wendy and pulled the collar up and buttoned the two buttons while she looked up at him, and then he tied the sleeves in a loose knot in front.
“And he’ll be happy to come out in the night and find us up here at Memory,” Larry said.
Stephanie smiled and fished her cell phone. “His daughter knows what she’s doing,” she said to Larry. Her face was bright and flushed in the dark. She turned so Larry could pull the back zipper up those five inches. “He’ll be glad I got this far.” She took his arm, and the three walked the perimeter fence with the wind at their backs.
“Those kids from Jackson Hole are just pulling into that town now, grabbing their gear, walking across to the doors of the gym.”
“What?”
“Other people,” Larry said. “Way out in the world.” Then he added. “That was a short fight for such a long wait. Was it even a fight?”
The wind was pulsing through the cemetery shrubs, and when they came to the corner of the iron fence, Larry said, “This is where Jerry Wainwright is—this corner.”
“He was a good kid,” Wendy said. “He was in algebra two.” Wendy moved alongside Larry, and he put his arm around her, and she pushed the side of her face into the hollow of his shoulder. Larry stopped again and looked over the fence at all the dark graves, and he pointed there. “I know what you’re going to say,” Wendy said.
Larry dropped his chin onto his chest in the gusting wind and said, “I think you do.”