151 Days Page 11

  I pushed those thoughts aside and instead concentrated on what was in front of me. I really wanted to get this done for Brad. “Look, Mr. Parker, I know you could get into a lot of trouble, but you know how much they want to sweep what happened to Kelly under the rug. If coaches try to cancel your accounts, you can make an argument that the administration and the teachers are trying to cover up the parts about Foster they don’t like again. I’m sure there are a lot of people who would be on your side.”

  Tyler looked five years older than when we walked in as he looked directly into our eyes. “But even if people were on my side, things would have changed. Purposely placing the wrong uniform order, no matter how good the motive, isn’t the right thing to do. They trust me with their money, guys, and I don’t take that lightly.”

  Brad sighed, and I thought for a moment he might start to cry. “Well, it was worth a shot, I guess. Thanks for listening, Tyler.”

  He sounded completely defeated. “Will you at least think about it?” I asked the older man.

  He nodded at me. “I will, I promise.”

  We couldn’t ask much more than that.

  THE NEXT day as Brad and I watched TV on the couch, his cell rang.

  It was Mr. Parker.

  “Hello?” Brad answered.

  Small pause. “Seriously?” he asked, his voice getting excited.

  Another pause. “You mean it?” he almost shouted. He lunged to his feet, too wound up to sit.

  More silence and then, “Tyler, you are the best! I owe you so much!”

  He hung up the phone and turned to hug me. “He did it! He ordered the other uniforms!”

  I danced around with him and smiled, but I had to wonder… what exactly changed Mr. Parker’s mind?

  I didn’t wonder for long, because suddenly… Brad wanted to celebrate again.

  I’m not sure how we celebrated things before sex, but let me tell you, whatever it was sucked in comparison.

  COACH GUNN

  ONCE A Marine, always a Marine.

  I’d heard that before from guys who served in the Corps; a lot of them say it when people ask them if they had served in the military. I’m not sure if it means different things to different people. Maybe what being a Marine means varies from person to person, but for me that saying is pretty straightforward.

  You hold up one hand and swear to God that you will live your life by a set of standards that is above and beyond everyone else’s. That promise doesn’t end the second you take the uniform off. For some guys a tour in the Corps is a means to an end. College, training, getting out of a crappy situation—it’s just a job, not a way of life.

  For the rest of us, it’s the only way of life. For the rest of our lives.

  Honor, courage, and commitment. That’s it. At the end of the day, you take those three principles and you make them your life. It isn’t easy, and it isn’t supposed to be, because let me tell you, anything easy is just a pile of shit with a bow on top. Easy is how most people want to live their lives these days. No work, no sweat, no sacrifice. Just a button that takes care of everything for you, like we’re living in the fucking Jetsons with our robot maids waiting on us hand and foot. Life isn’t easy, and it’s not supposed to be. That’s something the Marines taught me. It’s also something I teach my kids every day out there on the field.

  It’s not easy being a Marine today, and that’s fine. What’s hard is trying to figure out what is worth getting suited up for to fight and what you should just let pass on by.

  This whole year has been one clusterfuck after another. I honestly thought I would get through my entire coaching career without having to worry about who my students want to have sex with, but it looks like I was wrong in ways I couldn’t even imagine. The entire school had been brought to a grinding halt because of this crap. I’m willing to take odds that most of Foster thinks it’s because of what the Aimes boy did, but that’s not true. Kelly Aimes was far from the first homosexual to die inside the city limits of Foster. Hell, he wasn’t even the fifth. He was just the first people couldn’t ignore.

  I was thinking about this whole fiasco the other day, and something struck me that I couldn’t get out of my mind no matter how hard I tried.

  Everything that happened was all kind of my fault.

  I was the one who told Greymark that he needed to get his history grade up. I was the one who told him that Kyle was the best student in the class. From what I’ve heard, it was that meeting that caused them to hit it off in the first place. So no matter how I tried to work around it in my mind, I really did knock over that first domino.

  That thought led me to How much responsibility do I take for it?

  The answer, of course, is not much. I mean, it’s not like I set the two of them up on a date, but I was in some distant way the cause of their relationship, and their relationship was the cause of all this drama, which meant in some roundabout way that I was partially to blame for some of what happened.

  Not a thought that sat well in my gut.

  Also not a thought I shared with Jeff Raymond.

  Jeff Raymond is the school principal and has been my friend for almost ten years now. I use the word “friend” here to mean someone I work with, have had no problem with, and interacted with over a period of time without complaint. It wasn’t like he came over for a BBQ or that we drank together or that we went to the same church.

  I don’t go to church anymore; that was always Rebecca’s thing. But even when she was alive, we didn’t go to the same church Jeff did. Jeff and Rebecca’s God never seemed to agree on much. Rebecca’s God was a lot like her: kind, forgiving, and understanding of the imperfections in the world around her. It was the reason I had fallen in love and married her. Jeff’s God is a lot like Jeff. He’s more about rules and what happens to people who break the rules. That attitude is another reason I wouldn’t socialize with him outside of work.

  All this and more shuffled through my brain as I watched the baseball team go through Thursday’s practice. I felt bad for some of them because I had already made my mind up who was going to make varsity this year. I just liked giving all of them as much time as possible on the field so they’d realize how much work they need to do in order to make the squad. Some of them would be back next year; some of them wouldn’t. The ones who wanted it bad enough would never stop trying. Those were the ones I always paid attention to.

  Which is why I had always paid attention to Brad Greymark.

  The boy’s father had played football years back and was considered a minor celebrity in these parts. Nathan Greymark was and is an asshole, but he could play football when he was young, so when he had a son, everyone assumed the boy would play as well. As fate would have it, Brad turned out to be different in a lot of ways Nathan hadn’t been ready for. Though not a lot of people look for it like they look for natural talent in, say, football nowadays, Brad seemed born to play baseball. He was never going to be as big as his father, but he had enough muscle mass to make him run fast and hit hard. I first saw him when he was about thirteen and playing for Junction Middle School. At thirteen, the boy was maybe a couple of months from being as good as a few of my varsity players. All he needed was some height and some skill training, and he would give a couple of the seniors a run for their money.

  He tried out for me his freshman year and made the team. Oh, I heard about it; at the time, putting a freshman on a varsity team was a controversial decision. Then came game number one. In that first game, Brad’s batting silenced any and all complaints I had heard from armchair coaches.

  His first year on the team, he was in the top-ten players in stats. That summer he went off to baseball camp with the rest of the team and had two-a-day practice sessions drilled into him. When he came back his sophomore year, he was easily the most improved, and by the end of that season I was getting calls from colleges asking if he was as good as they had heard. Junior year he practically led the team to a state championship, and everyone knew it. Even tho
ugh there were guys two years older on the team with them, they all looked to Brad for their cues, something a lifetime of practice couldn’t teach a kid. I’d seen it in the Marines more than once—that unexplainable combination of looks, attitude, charisma, and confidence that makes people respond to you. I don’t even know if Brad was aware he had it, but he did, and it could make all the difference in the world.

  I have coached meatheads, guys who are just slabs of muscle with no brains in them. They can be trained to do whatever you need them to do and follow your commands like robots. They’re great for tackles but can’t advance further than that. The ones that stand out, the stars of any sport, are the ones that might not have been the very best at everything, but are the ones everyone else huddles around. Name a sport and then the athlete you think is the best, and I assure you there is a guy you’ve never heard of that is better by far but just can’t speak to people worth shit. To make a long story short, what I was waiting for was for Brad to realize this and step up to be the player I knew was in him.

  And I am not sure that would have happened if he hadn’t come out to the entire school as being gay.

  Now let me say this upfront so there is no misunderstanding later. I don’t like gay people in general, but that doesn’t mean I have a problem with people being gay. It just isn’t my thing. When talk about gay sex is put in my face, the thought of two guys bumping uglies really makes me queasy. But that said, what people do in their bedrooms is their own damn business. I served with a few guys like that and when they were in uniform or around me, you’d never know they were any different than anyone else. I treated them as equals, and they treated me with respect, and that’s all that counts. So I don’t want you thinking I’m some old, homophobic asshole who hates fags, ’cause I don’t. I’m allowed to not like something if I want; that’s my right.

  What isn’t my right is taking rights away from other people.

  When a person puts a uniform on, raises their hand, and swears to uphold and defend the Constitution, the rights given to Americans by that Constitution become something special. If I am going to take a bullet for those damn words, those words better mean something. Not just for the people I agree with, but for everyone. I take that pretty seriously, because if my friends died just so some jackasses could only dole out rights and privileges to the people they liked, then my friends died for nothing.

  I have a problem with that.

  Anyway, when Brad came out as gay, I was pissed. Not because he liked guys, but because I knew this was going to fuck with my season. I knew Raymond was going to lose his shit over it when it was none of his business. By the time everything settled again, Brad was going to be lucky to still be going to school in Foster. Sure enough, everything came to a head at an emergency school board meeting. I had already been given my lines to say. Jeff made sure to ask me about the things he knew I could answer with all honesty. Did I think Brad should be allowed to shower with other guys? Raymond told me students had come to him to complain about having to get undressed with a known homosexual and that he was going to ask me if I thought it was appropriate.

  And that was all he asked.

  If I had been a braver man, or maybe if Rebecca was still alive, I might have said more. I have to admit I lost a step when she passed, one I hadn’t been able to get back. Maybe I’m old; maybe I’m done tilting at windmills. Maybe I was scared that if I spoke out, I’d find out what it felt like to be Charlotte Axeworthy. In any case, I did sit down, knowing my words were going to be used to condemn a kid for nothing more than having feelings for someone else.

  And then something outstanding happened.

  The guy I had been waiting three years to show up, the man I knew was inside the boy named Brad Greymark, reared his head and spoke his first words.

  And blew the roof off the auditorium.

  I was stunned. He had taken the half measure of protection his dad had coerced out of Raymond and threw it back, demanding protection from bullying be given to everyone. Brad stopped talking for himself and began to speak for everyone. It was the moment I knew I had found this year’s varsity captain. I didn’t say anything to anyone, of course. Well, I might have told Becca when I visited Foster Hills, but I didn’t tell anyone who could talk back. I waited and planned. I pushed Brad and the team harder than I had pushed any team before. These kids were not going to be just baseball players; they were going to be gods when I was done.

  I needed them to be so good, so intense that there was no way my decisions could be questioned. If someone was going to throw somebody off that team, it wasn’t going to be for playing ability, which was the only thing that counted at this level of play. This wasn’t the major leagues, where you could lose a contract for cheating on your wife or picking up a hooker; there weren’t million-dollar endorsement deals on the line. These were high school boys, and the only thing the baseball codes said they could get kicked off for was failing grades and my decision to cut them. There was no gray area, which meant if they did their best, Raymond couldn’t come after them.

  I trained them, and I waited.

  And while I waited we suffered a casualty, which at any age is inexcusable, but when it is a teenager, it is so much worse.

  Kelly Aimes was one of those kids that sports saved.

  Boys in general were an angry sort. It’s the aggression mixed with the desire to win that makes them so dangerous at times. To others, to themselves, to anything around them. The key is to take all that angry and point it at something. Kelly had that hate, that darkness in him, and thank God he found football. With his size and his problems he could have grown up to be someone dangerous, someone unbalanced, but sports gave him an outlet to channel the pressure. I had no idea that all of that came from his trying to deny his own feelings, but once I heard, it made perfect sense.

  I sat in the funeral home and listened to the service as they laid the boy to rest. There were a lot of tears and a lot of kind words, but no one was talking about the truth very much. The Aimeses were a family of means, and from what I had observed over the years, the more money a family has, the worse it is behind closed doors. The service was almost done, and I really thought no one was going to say a word until Tyler Parker stood up to talk.

  Tyler had gone to Granada, but he was one of those kids who inspired you to root for him even if he was on the other team. He elevated high school football from two groups of teenage boys running into each other into an art form when he was on the field. I remember watching tapes of him when we prepped for the yearly Foster-Granada game, and I was always stunned at watching him play. When he ran, he did it as if there was no one else on the field with him; it was just him, the ball, and miles and miles of grass. He scored a pretty sweet deal at Florida, which ended the moment his knee was pushed in a direction knees aren’t meant to bend. He had been at the school board meeting as well, and he admitted he was gay too, which was surprising. I honestly didn’t think Foster could have that many gay people.

  Parker stood up and said that we had failed Kelly, that as a town and as a culture we had failed him by not letting him know it was okay to be different. He said that it was his fault for not coming out sooner, that it was everyone’s fault for only now realizing there was a problem. He dared us to change; he dared us to be better. And then he stomped out, leaving me to wonder why I was so upset at his words.

  It took me better than a week to realize I was pissed because he had been right.

  The Monday we got back to school, I knocked on Raymond’s door and asked him if he had a few minutes.

  “For you?” he said jovially. “Always.”

  I wondered how long that attitude would last.

  “I wanted to give you a heads up. I plan on naming Greymark team captain next week.”

  His face went from smiling to sour in seconds flat. I found it amusing as hell, but I didn’t say anything out loud since he wasn’t going to share in my mirth. “I really wish you wouldn’t do that,” he said when his
brain started functioning again.

  I pretended not to know what he was talking about and stated the facts. “He is the best kid on the team, and they respond to him. He’s the obvious choice.”

  Jeff came around the other side of his desk, no doubt trying to instill some kind of personal connection between us. “You know that’s not true.” I refused to respond. “Jack, you have to consider the implications of making that decision.”

  “The only implications I have to consider are if he is capable of fulfilling the duties of the job and if he has earned the position. And he has done both with flying colors.”

  “I’m talking about the political implications. There are people who will not be thrilled that he is on the team at all, much less team captain. That could affect attendance.” I had never noticed before how much like a rat Raymond looked when he was trying to convince someone of something. He refused to look directly at me, instead moving his body to the side as if he was protecting himself from a blow he was waiting to come.

  “I don’t give a damn about attendance. If people are that upset, let them stay home. Because that team is going to state. I am willing to bet my job on it.”

  And that was the wrong thing to say.

  “It might be, Jack,” he said dangerously. “Are you willing to risk that?”

  Once a Marine, always a Marine.

  “You’re damn right I am.”

  THE WEEK before I post the list of who makes the team is called hell week by those who have to endure it.

  The kids thought they had kept the name private, but after fifteen years of coaching high school, if they called it anything less I would be upset. By this point in the year, I pretty much already had the team made in my mind. All that was left was the one or two guys who might pull a miracle out of their asses and prove me wrong. Hell week was for them.