A Density of Souls (12 page)

But Stephen looked paralyzed, one hand splayed against his locker’s open door. Greg loomed behind Brandon, staring at the back of Brandon’s head. The other football players had lost interest. “Just fuckin’

leave the fag alone. Jesus,” one of them mumbled as they filed out the side doors.

Meredith watched as Stephen managed to hold Brandon’s gaze.

“You celebrating, Stevie?” Greg asked from behind Brandon.

Meredith was now gripping her locker door because it was the only thing keeping her standing. Please say something, Stephen. Say something.

“Did you use a knife?” Stephen asked, his tone even and quiet.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Brandon hissed.

“On my car. Did you use a knife to flatten the tires?”

Brandon punched Stephen’s locker door closed. It missed Stephen’s face by several inches but sent his book bag falling from its hook, tumbling to the floor and emptying his books. Stephen did not move to retrieve them.

“Fear cannot touch me,” he whispered.

Meredith stifled a gasp.

Brandon and Greg seemed paralyzed suddenly as Stephen bent down in front of them and slowly began repacking the mess of textbooks at his feet. When he finally stood, sliding his bag over his shoulder, Greg had turned his back, but Brandon still glared at him.

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Meredith watched as Stephen moved past them, with Brandon’s glare following his every step toward the side doors. Stephen disappeared. Meredith was halfway to the doors by the time Brandon had made his first bounding leap toward them. Her head was spinning as she threw herself in front of them, arms shooting out in front of her.

“Enough!” she screamed.

Brandon halted in mid-leap, one fist pawing the air.

“You’ve got a game tonight, remember?” Meredith said. “Save it, Brandon!”

Coach Henry Stubin slid a notice into the daily bulletin box during third period. The headmaster’s secretary immediately plucked it from the box and hastily made copies for all the homeroom teachers. When David Carter read it during fourth period, a cheer ripped through his homeroom that he could hear matched throughout Cannon School.

“Remy Montz, coach of the Thibodaux Boilers, has reported that the football field of Thibodaux Senior High School has been cleared of ice and other weather-related obstructions. The game will take place tonight as scheduled,” David read.

As his homeroom students embraced and slapped each other on the back, David sunk down behind his desk and realized that all hope of learning for the rest of the day had been killed by one memo.

During lunch, he sought out Stephen Conlin, looking for him in the locker room, the English Hallway, and some of the empty class rooms. He wove his way through the students thronging the stretch of grass between the locker room and the cafeteria. A group of football players had sneaked a stereo onto campus and the cafeteria manager was attempting to unplug it, elbowing through a crowd dancing to the tinny sound of the Spin Doctors.

Then David saw a blond figure sitting on the distant stands, across the football field. Stephen was eating his lunch in the bottom row of the desolate bleachers. He had fanned out the contents of his brown paper bag on the silver bench. As David crossed the field toward him, gusts of wind flapped the hand-painted banner hung between the goal posts. BASH THE THIBODAUX BOILERS! it proclaimed in bloodred letters.

As David approached, the noises of the lunchtime crowds were dis-84

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tant echoes. Stephen seemed so placid that David looked for a bottle of alcohol at Stephen’s feet. There was none. He sat down beside Stephen.

“Selena Truffant was just in my office, Stephen,” David began. The silver bench was cold. David shivered.

“What about?” Stephen asked, studying the cheerleaders as they practiced their dance on the lawn.

“It seems the girl who was supposed to play the knight in tonight’s game has detention. They need someone for the pep rally. I thought of you,” David said, pinching his hands between his knees to keep them warm.

Stephen laughed, low and brief, before taking another bite from his sandwich. The Cannon mascot was a squat blue-skinned knight, with an oversized foam rubber head emblazoned with a cartoon grimace, its angry slanted eyes embedded in a silver helmet. The mascot typically brandished a foam rubber sword as he gyrated around the cheerleaders.

“Why me?” Stephen asked.

“You’re an actor. It’s performing, isn’t it?” David asked.

Stephen smirked, still not looking at David, who shifted against the frigid metal of the bench.

“It’s a costume. No one will know who you are,” David tried. He felt instantly ashamed. Her jerked his chin away from Stephen and fixed his gaze on the empty bleachers behind them. When Stephen laughed again, David stood quickly, hoping to escape. “It’s just for the pep rally. Not the game,” he said through chattering teeth.

“I’ll do it,” Stephen said casually, pulling a bottle of orange juice from his lunch bag.

“Good.” David said, feeling somehow satisfied.

In the ensuing silence, a corner of the banner tore free and fell slightly before the wind picked it up and battered it against the top of the goal post.

“Big game tonight. Are you going?” David asked.

Stephen looked at David for the first time. “I don’t go to football games, Mr. Carter,” he said.

At two-thirty that afternoon, Angela Darby and the seven other members of the Football Mothers’ Club arrived at Cannon and began The Falling Impossible

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dressing for their satire pep rally skit “Da Thibodaux Mommas’ Club”.

Angela had the lead role, toting a crab trap and railing against rich Cannon boys and their fancy cars in a mangled Cajun accent.

As Elise Charbonnet decorated Angela’s costume with fish netting and rubber cockroaches, other mothers congratulated Angela on Greg becoming starting quarterback.

At three P.M., when the final bell rang, the Mothers’ Club assembled in the locker room as the students of Cannon School funneled into the Senior Courtyard.

In the English Hallway, Meredith stood poised with the other cheerleaders in front of the door to the Courtyard. They would make their entrance, leaping and squealing down the steps onto a raised concrete platform. Idly, she watched as the Cannon Knight hobbled out of Selena Truffant’s office and took up a post behind the file of cheerleaders. Meredith rolled her eyes and looked back to the crowd assembling in the courtyard. Marine Hillman, the girl inside the costume, had made the mistake of telling several cheerleaders she didn’t wash her hair every day, so nobody talked to her. Better she’s in costume so we don’t have to look at her, Meredith reasoned.

“That’s so sad about Jeff,” Julie Moledeux said.

The Knight’s head jerked. Meredith heard a startled gasp waft through the foam rubber helmet. Then its arms bounced limply to its sides.

Meredith listened with one ear as out on the patio, Bryan Ham-mond, football cocaptain, invited Greg Darby to say a few words,

“since Jeff can’t be with us today.” Brandon let out a war whoop, and with five other sophomore players he buoyed Greg across the courtyard before depositing him in front of Bryan. The courtyard was filled with shouts of “Darby! Darby!” Jeff Haugh had never gotten that kind of reaction. It always seemed to Meredith that the few cheers he did receive during pep rallies embarrassed him.

The crowd hushed. The cheerleaders aligned themselves behind the English Hallway doors. The costumed Football Mothers’ Club clustered behind the locker room doors. Someone was complaining about how their entrance was blocked by students.

“Big game tonight,” Bryan boomed. “Hope you guys can all make it up to Thibodaux.”

He elbowed Greg.

“What can I say? We’re gonna kick ass!”

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The crowd roared and in spite of herself Meredith jumped. The stereo blared Tina Turner’s “Simply the Best” and she let herself be swept with two other cheerleaders as they burst through the English Hallway doors and descended the stairs, pom-poms held aloft, a few doing split leaps as they rushed forward. The Cannon Knight stumbled down the steps behind them, the foam rubber sword lowered to his side.

In the front row, nausea bubbling inside her, Meredith saw the arms around her curl into formation, beginning the dance.

Stephen was suffocating inside the costume, Julie Moledeaux’s words resonating inside his head. Suddenly he felt the dull impact of Kate Duchamp’s fist on his shoulder. “Dance!” she ordered.

He lifted his head and stared out at the gyrating crowd of Cannon students. No one knew who was inside. He felt a sudden, unprec-edented freedom. He shot one hand over his foam rubber crotch and the crowd hollered and applauded. In front of Cannon, the buses idled, their droning engines waiting to transport parents and students two hours up the river to Thibodaux. The Pep Band loaded into a Cannon school bus. Stephen danced. Jeff was not here and so he danced for himself, masked, a naked man among the blind.

Thibodaux sat upriver from New Orleans. The cavalcade of school buses made their way up Highway 90, the subdivisions of the river’s west bank giving way to swamp punctuated by pools of black water.

Eventually they pulled alongside the blaze of Dobie H LeBlanc Field of Thibodaux Senior High. Beyond the field’s far fence, the plume fires of oil refineries on the horizon flickered over the expanse of swamp beyond.

Thibodaux was a small town. The high school’s long-standing ri-valry with Cannon had prompted a half-day of work that Friday. Students, parents, and college students from nearby Nicholls State had decorated the swampy banks of Highway 90 with painted banners that prophesied doom to all spoiled, Mercedes-driving Cannonites. Looking out the window of the cheerleaders’ bus, Meredith saw a banner that exclaimed CURSE CANNON! Beneath its slogan, she glimpsed a crude rendering of a Mercedes-Benz spraying blue Cannon football gear as it smashed into a brick wall.

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Behind the school buses trailed the custom cruisers transporting parents and Cannon fans who paid a nominal fee to join the convoy.

In their plush seats, Elise Charbonnet and Roger Charbonnet shared a gin and tonic from Roger’s thermos, the alcohol fueling their growing indignation as they passed beneath homemade signs that announced the dire fate of the Cannon Knights.

Angela Darby’s eyes looked from the clock on the mini-van’s dashboard to the profile of her husband behind the wheel, his Scotch-sluggish eyes trying to focus on the thin swath of pavement furiously ribboning away beneath them. She could hear Alex in the backseat, desperately excited, his breathless chirping quieted for the moment as he struggled against his seat belt. The boy was wearing one of Greg’s old jerseys, which hung down to his knees like a nightgown.

“Slow down,” Angela whispered to her husband.

“We’re late,” Andrew said.

“And we don’t want to get pulled over, either!” she hissed.

“Are we going to be late?” Alex Darby asked. “We can’t! I’ll miss Greg!”

She turned to face her seven-year-old son, his eyes shining as if it were Christmas Eve. “Of course not. In fact, I called ahead and made sure your big brother would hold the game just until you got there! So don’t worry!”

Alex smiled slightly, a smile Angela could barely discern in the darkened backseat. She could feel Andrew bristle. Thickly corded with muscle, her husband had the body of Mr. Clean and a temper she countered with sarcasm that she felt sometimes ran painfully thin. Except for Alex, who had in seven years grown from a “happy accident”

to a disarmingly innocent and radiant young presence in their lives, Greg’s glory was the only thing the two of them shared. How could Andrew fuck that up, too?

“Next time, I drive,” Angela whispered.

Greg Darby had thrown two first downs, and the Knights had to run the ball in to score. In the stands, drunken Cannon fathers pantomimed the sequined Thibodaux Dance Battalion’s elaborate and high-stepping routine. Meredith shifted her weight from one tight 88

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shoe to another as the cheerleading squad performed a clipped routine that looked like they were directing airplanes on a tarmac with their pom-poms held aloft. Her eyes passed over the Thibodaux side of the stands, which looked to her like a mass of angry, crab-fattened parents, blowing plastic trumpets—dressed in a patchwork of gawdy Wal-Mart sweaters featuring airbrushed cats and Christmas garlands.

The Cannon side of the stadium was a sea of L L Bean winter jackets, thermoses filled with the contents of home wet bars tucked between legs. To Meredith it seemed as if Cannon couldn’t hold a candle to the pure rage of Thibodaux, and she was suddenly cheered by the thought that the Knights might loose.

The routine done, Meredith turned and watched from the sidelines as Brandon got tackled and lost the team five yards. She knew fellow cheerleaders mistook her intent concentration as loving concern for her boyfriend, Greg. They would have been shocked to know she did not want to miss it if Greg got injured.

Players were peeling off Brandon. Bored, she glanced behind her to the front row where Elise Charbonnet clasped her hands in her lap, obeying her belief that if she kept her eyes on her son at all times he would not be hurt. “It worked for Jordan,” Meredith’s mother told her.

“She thinks it’ll work for Brandon, too.”

“I can run it in! It’s twenty yards!” Brandon growled, as the players huddled, their adrenaline rushing through their veins despite the time-out Coach Stubin had called after Brandon’s sack.

“Yeah. Twenty yards your ass has gotta run, Charbonnet!” Cameron Stern shot back. “You just lost us five!”

That hurt, and Brandon’s eyes shot to Greg’s, wide and desperate through the face guard of his helmet. The rest of the huddle was breathing in rattling grunts. Cameron Stern noticed. “No fucking way!” he shouted right at Greg. “You hear me, Darby?”

Brandon saw Greg’s helmet flinch slightly in Cameron’s direction.

“Fuck off, Cameron!” Brandon barked. “You know I can fuckin’ run it and Haugh’s not here to throw you a bunch of pussy passes you’re not even open for . . .”