Shame (19 page)

“I shot this one over on the Old Place,” I protested. “It's a free-range turkey. It ate bugs or berries or whatever turkeys eat. It lived a happy life. You saw me bring it home. Remember, you asked me what I thought I was doing, shooting another of God's creatures?”

“I don't care,” she said. “It's a protest.”

“More for me,” B. W. said.

“Just as long as you save room for pie,” Michelle said.

The Hooks, Michelle's mom and dad, were, as always, our first arrivals. They pulled up in front of the house just past ten o'clock. I wasn't completely dressed yet, but the kids ran outside to help them with their precious Thanksgiving cargo. Michelle was pulling on one of her favorite T-shirts, a sort of orange, and then buttoned an embroidered vest over it, while I pulled on a clean pair of Wranglers, my dress boots, and a denim shirt.

Carla arrived at eleven thirty with a squash casserole. Michael Graywolf, his wife, and three kids arrived at eleven forty-five bearing fresh-baked rolls and a sugar-cured ham. Oz and Caroline and their four boys, hellions all, showed up around noon, each boy carrying something appropriate to his size and level of trustworthiness: relish plate, green beans, homemade fudge, strawberry cake.

The table and cabinets had begun to resemble the all-you-can-eat bar that is Thanksgiving, the kids' tables had been set up in the living room, and we were beginning to think about eating when it happened. A dark blue Buick Century pulled to a stop in front of the house, and Samantha and her two girls got out, although they loitered hesitantly near it.

“Go let them in,” Michelle told me, and I wandered to the front door, feeling every eye on me.

“Come in,” I called, sounding much heartier than I felt. “Come in!”

“Hello,” Samantha said with a wan smile as she leaned forward for a chaste hug. “I hope you don't mind our coming.”

“Not at all,” I said, relieving her of what I presumed was candied yams.

“You look great,” she said.

No—she looked great, like a model, perfectly made up, every hair in place. It was the kind of face that probably doesn't stay that way without a nip or tuck here and there, the kind of hair that doesn't stay that color without an assist from the hairdresser, but who could argue with the results? The dream about the two of us in my truck flashed into my head, and it took a moment of mental wrestling to body-slam it to the mat.

The silence behind us was thunderous. “I'm glad you could join us,” I said, and turned toward the kitchen with my burden. Michelle came forward to steer the girls over to the other kids and make introductions and then conducted Samantha back to where we were.

“Everything smells so good,” Sam said, nodding at the faces she knew.

“As soon as Phillip gets here, we'll say grace,” I said.

“Phillip One Horse?” Her voice could have expressed either surprise or disapproval. I opted for the first.

“My cousin is becoming a social butterfly,” Michael Graywolf said. “First he agrees to play basketball and make a spectacle of himself. Now he's coming to Thanksgiving dinners.”

“Why don't you all just go in and watch football until we're ready,” Michelle said. “It won't be long now.”

And it wasn't—maybe ten or fifteen minutes until Lauren came into the kitchen to tell us, “Phillip's coming!”

“I'm glad,” I said. “Everybody's getting hungry.”

“I'm glad too,” she said, and ran out the back door to meet him. Shortly thereafter, she slipped quietly back into the kitchen and pulled me into the back hall.

“Something's wrong with Phillip,” Lauren said. “He hasn't gotten out of the truck. When I waved at him, he just stared at me.”

“I'll go check on him,” I said. “Don't worry. He's not used to being around a lot of people, you know. Probably just getting his courage up.”

Which he was, although not in the way I had hoped. As I stepped carefully out the back door, I could see him raise a bottle to his lips and take a long pull.

I got in the passenger side and shut the door quietly behind me. The cab smelled of whiskey.

It was cold in the truck—the heater wasn't on, and Phillip was wearing only a windbreaker, a promotional jacket with a Winston logo.

“I can't do it,” Phillip said, his eyes on the hand holding the bottle. “I'm sorry, John. I'm going home. I just can't come in.” Then he caught my gaze and brought the bottle up so I could see the label. “Wild Turkey. Ha. Happy Thanksgiving.”

“Phillip,” I said, “we're all happy to see you. You don't have to be so nervous.”

“Your family doesn't make me nervous,” he said. “But there's other people in there. I see all the cars. So many people.” He took another swig, shorter than the last.

“You know them all,” I said. “Or most of them. I'll stick close to you. There's nothing to be nervous about. And that—” I gestured at the bottle in his lap—“doesn't help.”

“Nothing to be nervous about? If I know them, then they know me.” He gestured at himself. “They know all about me. They know about all I done. Did. Everybody knows.”

“That's over and done with,” I said. “You've got a chance to put all that behind you now.”

He laughed, and it was not a pretty sound. “It'll never be behind me,” he said. “Not as long as I live. I'm trapped in this life and there's no way out. The most I can do is make it hurt a little less.” He tilted the bottle for another swallow, and my cheeks flushed with anger.

“That's an easy way out, Phillip. Do you think you're the only person who feels trapped? The only person who hurts? The only person who's ever made mistakes? The only person who wants to escape?” I yanked the bottle from his surprised grasp and raised it to my lips before he could do a thing, the unaccustomed taste burning as it went down. I took a long drink and fought the roiling of my stomach, the watering of my eyes, before handing him the bottle back. “Maybe I'll climb inside that bottle with you, Phillip,” I said. “How would that make you feel?”

“Stop,” he said. His eyes were wide.

“How'd it feel, watching me just now? How would you like to see me throw my life away, to hurt my family and friends, everyone who ever cared about me? It would be so easy to do. Easy as taking a drink.”

“Stop,” he said, and now he was pleading. “John, don't talk like that.” He capped the bottle, and it dropped to the floor with a muffled thump. “I'm sorry. So sorry. I'll just go now.”

“I want you to stay,” I said. “Please. Phillip, you can do this.” I dropped my head, and then I raised it.

I had figured it out—why this mattered so much to me. Why I couldn't just let him give up. “Phillip, I need you to do this. To show me it can be done.”

He realized it too, and there was a moment when I saw the fear in his eyes. Then he took a deep breath, nodded slowly, as much to himself as to me.

He leaned over in front of me, rummaged unsteadily on the dashboard, and found an antiquated roll of butterscotch Life Savers. “For your breath,” he said, taking one and offering me the roll.

“All right,” I said. “Come on. Let's go in and wash up.”

I led Phillip inside, we got cleaned up, and then Michelle invited everybody into the dining room for the prayer.

“Dad,” she said, turning to Mr. Hooks, “will you say grace?”

And there followed a rendition of the long and rambling prayer my father-in-law delivered every Thanksgiving while we stood, feet tapping, stomachs growling, as he thanked God for the beasts of the field and the birds of the air, for our families and friends and all the people in all the world, for the wonderful lives we lived, for car phones and fax machines and satellite TV. It was a prayer that could have been a four-part TV miniseries.

“Amen,” we all said at the end, although that hardly seemed proportional to all the praying. “Amen,” Phillip said, a little more loudly than necessary, I thought, but no one else seemed to notice, and I marked it up to being hypersensitive.

B. W. and the kids filed past the food first and were exiled to the kids' tables in the living room, all except for Lauren, who pleaded with her mom to stay with the adults. At the main table, so many leaves in that it looked like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, Michelle, Lauren, and I were joined by the Hooks, the Graywolfs, the Osbournes, Samantha, Phillip, and Carla. Lauren seated herself next to Phillip, and Michelle maneuvered things so that Carla was on his other side. Samantha was directly across the table from me.

Phillip talked shyly with Carla, his head rising only occasionally to meet her gaze. She asked him questions about basketball, talked about her team. I had not suspected she had it in her to be something other than brusque and abrasive, but there is plenty in the world that I don't know.

Instead of looking across the table at Samantha or joining one of the conversations orbiting the table, I took a big bite of dark turkey, tender and juicy, and followed it with a bite of Michelle's stuffing, a riot of spice, savor, and tang. I began to reconsider some of my recent feelings about life. My stomach even acted like it was willing to be friends.

Then Samantha leaned forward to talk to me, and a vista appeared that suggested someone may have paid for a little improvement on God's original creation, and I guess maybe that distraction and the huge swig of Wild Turkey I'd taken on a practically empty stomach kept me from following the turn that the conversation around me was taking until it was too late.

“So what have you been doing with yourself, Phillip?” Mr. Hooks asked.

Phillip looked across the table at him, and I was pretty certain he was weaving.

“Since I got out of prison, you mean?” he asked, and his voice was again just a little too loud, and I could see a stirring around the table, heads rising from plates throughout the house.

“Phillip helps Dad around the farm,” my dear Lauren said, launching herself into the silence like a solitary skater onto a frozen pond.

“I keep a few cattle,” Phillip said. “I fish. I hunt.”

“Sounds like a good life,” Michael Graywolf said, trying, I think, to inject a little congeniality back into the conversation.

“I think,” Phillip said. “I think too much.” Then he stopped, laughed a disturbing laugh. “I think too much and I drink too much.”

That's when I knew that our Thanksgiving dinner was doomed. The Hooks dropped a collective jaw as they realized that Phillip was toasted; Sam shook her head and rolled her eyes; Michelle and Lauren looked stricken.

I tried to think about what I might say to redirect conversation, tried to imagine that I was a talented conversationalist, and all I came up with was an innocuous remark about the Dallas Cowboys. And desperate as I was, I said it, although no one seemed to even hear.

“Well, what if I do drink too much?” Phillip was saying into his plate. “Maybe you would too. John said he might. Maybe all of you would.” He shoved his chair back from the table and stood, his voice rising with the rest of him. “Maybe all of you would. What do you know about me? What do you know about my life?”

And then, in that complete and utter silence, not a fork clanking on a plate, not an ice cube clinking in a glass of iced tea, he looked up and saw the faces turned toward his. As he looked from person to person, an expression of growing awareness spread across his own face. By the time he looked at me, his eyes were full of such pain that I could barely stand to meet his gaze. I read pain and anger and shame there before he looked away, mumbled, “I'm sorry,” stepped away from the table, and clomped out of the room and out the back door.

Michelle, Carla, and I all half rose to follow him. “I'll go,” I said. “It'll be okay.” The Hooks returned to their meals, since whatever had just happened had been planned since before the creation and therefore was not worth puzzling over, which was their way of looking at the world in general, and a soothing way of looking it must be. A slow murmur of conversation began at the other side of the table and spread slowly, like fire in a damp meadow.

I got up, stepped to the kitchen window, and saw Phillip standing outside in the cold without his jacket, his head down, his shoulders slumped. Maybe he was crying.

I headed for the back door, and as I pulled It open, I heard my truck start up.

By the time I was out the back door—slowed as I was, I probably was not the ideal candidate to chase Phillip down, although it's also true that I knew him best of all those gathered for dinner—the truck had started down the driveway, and where it had previously stood was the bottle of Wild Turkey, empty.

I kicked at it with my good foot, and it spun like a bottle in a teenager's game. It pointed at the house when it was done, at the house where I was going to have to return and face Samantha's enhanced cleavage and my in-laws and a million questions, not one of which I was the least bit qualified to answer.

I was mad—mad at Phillip, mad at life, mad at myself, mad at the empty bottle.

If he was going to take off like that, he might at least have left a little behind for me.

Shame

The phone rang that evening. I was in the kitchen, making a cold meal of Thanksgiving leftovers while the rest of my family watched football in the other room.

“Hello,” I said through a mouthful of mashed potatoes.

“John Tilden?” came the voice.

“Speaking.”

“Is Phillip One Horse still working for you?”

I instantly straightened in my chair and choked down the last of my potatoes. “Yes, he is,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“Can you think of any reason that he would leave your truck sitting in front of the police station with the keys under the floor mat?”

Yes, I could. I smiled sadly. “I'd guess he wanted to leave it someplace where he knew it would be safe,” I said. “We'll be in to pick it up later, if that's okay.”

“This is not a parking garage,” the voice said, as though I'd made the mistake of assuming that it was.

“I know,” I said. “Thanks for your help.” I hung up the phone and shook my head.

“Idiots,” I said, before lifting my spoon again. “Complete and total idiots.”

“Who is?” Michelle asked.

“Game over?” I filled my mouth with potatoes and swished them around between my teeth before hissing again: “Idiots!”

“Commercial break,” she said, coming over to put her hands on my shoulders. “Was that my parents?”

I snorted, which was almost enough to send mashed potatoes out my nose and did send me into a choking fit, which Michelle abetted in some way by pounding me between the shoulder blades. When at last I could speak and caught my breath, I said, “Phillip. He left the truck at the police station.”

She turned this information over in her head. “How did he get home?”

I shrugged, let out a long sigh. “Walked, I guess.”

“In this cold? Do you think he got home?”

Our eyes met.

“We should check,” I said. “If he's still out there, he could freeze to death.”

“I'll get my coat,” she said. Thirty seconds later we were on our way down the driveway in Michelle's car.

We drove in silence until we got to the blacktop and the tires hummed beneath us. “Do you think he's okay?” she asked finally, when the silence became oppressive.

“Why did you invite Samantha today?” I asked at the same time. Our questions got fouled on each other in midair like neighboring tree branches. Neither one was answered.

We drove on through the darkness, through the blowing snow occasionally obscuring the road, until we reached the highway and turned toward town. “Should we pick up the truck first?” She turned to me. “We should make sure that Phillip got home safe, right?”

“Right,” I said. “Let's start at the station and then head toward his house to make sure we don't miss him.”

We followed the street back to the highway, around the airport, driving slowly to make sure there was no one lying in the ditches we passed, and then we made the turn toward Phillip's. At last we came to his gate, which was open; two forlorn cows had wandered out into the road. Michelle threw the car into park and jumped out.

“Git,” she told the cattle, waving her hands in the general direction of the gap. “Go on. Shoo.” They slowly turned, made their leisurely way back inside the fence, and began walking across the snow-covered pasture.

“Nice job,” I said, as she climbed back in and we headed down toward the trailer.

“Farmer's wife,” she said, and gave me the first big smile I'd seen in hours. “I know plenty of useful things.” She took off down the track, bouncing my foot around painfully before I was able to induce her to use a little more caution.

As we came over the rise, there was a light on in the back of the trailer where Phillip's bedroom was, but none showing anywhere else. It was dark as dark could be. Michelle pulled up between piles of bottles, wrinkled her nose fastidiously, and came around to help me up and out of the car.

We made our slippery way up to the front door. I banged with my fist, the noise resounding in the clear, cold air. “Phillip,” I called.

“Phillip,” Michelle joined in. “Are you okay?”

The lone light went off.

“Phillip,” I called. “We just want to make sure you're all right. Phillip, please!” I tried the door. Locked. I rattled it in the frame, but it stayed put.

“Phillip,” Michelle called. “It's us.” She made a face. “We should have brought him some dinner.” I saw that she had his windbreaker folded over her arm; he'd walked back without even that feeble protection.

“Phillip,” I called again, but I did not pound on the door. I knew he wasn't going to open it.

“Well,” Michelle said, stamping her feet on the top step to keep warm, “at least we know he got in. Let's give him a chance to cool off.” She winced. “I mean, warm up.”

She laid his jacket gently in front of the door.

“I know,” I said. “But still—”

“Come on,” she said. She took my arm and led me carefully down the ice-encrusted steps. “We can't do anything for him until he's ready to let us.”

“I don't want to believe that,” I said, petulant as a three-year-old. I stood at the front of the truck and looked up at the trailer. Still no lights.

“I don't either,” she said, opening her door. “But it doesn't do any good to try and help somebody do something unless he wants to do it.” She sighed, a long cloud of her warm breath making the night air visible. “Let's go home.”

Early the next morning, I made my way back to Phillip's. The gap was open again, although I couldn't see any cattle in the road, and it was imperfectly opened at that, the post dropped right next to the fence as though it had been opened just far enough for someone to squeeze through. I hobbled over to open it enough for the truck to pass without shredding my tires on the barbed-wire strands, then made the bumpy way down to the trailer.

I honked once or twice, experimentally, and slowly got out of the truck, half expecting to see a rifle barrel emerge from the door. When I tried the knob, I found it locked again, but I noted footprints coming down off the porch and heading off in the direction of the road.

“I hope he's wearing a good coat,” I muttered and then climbed shivering back into my heated cab. “I hope he
has
a good coat
.
”
I drove slowly back to town, scanning for him all along the way, but I saw not a trace. On a hunch, I drove to Ellen Smallfeet's home and made my way to the front door, where I knocked twice, respectfully.

After a period of time familiar to me from my own convalescence, Mrs. Smallfeet cracked the door. When she saw it was me, she threw it wide and invited me in for breakfast.

“Have you seen Phillip?” I asked as she seated me at the table. “I've been trying to track him down, but I haven't had any luck.”

She shook her head. “He's gone off again,” she said. It was not a question.

“How do you know? Have you talked to him?” I slowed myself down. “I just want to talk to him.”

“He does not want to talk to anyone,” Mrs. Smallfeet said, pouring me a cup of coffee. “When he is like this, he wants to be alone and try to forget his life.”

I took a sip—it was good coffee, strong and fresh.

“Can't you do something? Can't you talk to him?”

She shuffled back over to the stove and began to load a plate with scrambled eggs and bacon. My cardiologist would be grateful.

When she said nothing, I tried a new tack. “Will you go over with me, then? To Phillip's?”

“What for?” she asked as she placed the plate in front of me and produced a fork out of thin air. “So I can freeze on the porch with you while he hides in the back bedroom?”

“He'll open the door if you're there.” I took a bite.

She shook her head slowly. “Phillip is my grandson. I love him and he loves me, but he will not do what I tell him. Family should do anything for each other, but this is not always so. You know this.”

“Yes,” I said, remembering Michael disappearing out my back door. “I do.”

“I would like to save him,” she said. “But I do not have that power.” She looked at her hands, wrinkled and spotted with age. “Before we can be saved, we must choose it ourselves.”

“What can I do—” I began, but she rose and placed those aged fingers, dry and slight as a bundle of twigs, across my lips.

“You are not listening,” she said. “I have heard about what happened. So I know that Phillip has shamed himself in front of people he loves. Shamed himself.” And she looked at me with intensity, with the unblinking gaze of a bird of prey. “Ask yourself, John Tilden, how it must feel to do something which you know you should not do. Ask yourself how it must feel to be eaten up with shame, and you will understand.”

This was not just a message about Phillip. “I do understand,” I said. “We must all do the best that we can, even if sometimes we fall short.”

“Do not
fall short,” she insisted. “Remember your friend, my grandson. I believe he is looking for an example.”

“I will remember,” I said. I let out a breath.
An example.
Would I ever get to stop doing the right thing?

I twirled my fork through the eggs, then pushed myself back from the table. “Thank you,” I said.

“What for? You did not even finish your eggs.”

“For your wisdom, and for your care for me.”

“I hear many things,” she said. “The wind talks to me.” And as she said it, the wind howled around the eaves of her tiny particle-board house, and she grinned from ear to ear.

I think we both knew that her best sources were the women at the beauty parlor.

Our tournament game that night in the ancient gymnasium in Calumet was against Hinton. They had decent speed, some height, and they brought much louder fans than we did; maybe more importantly, they knew each other well. Their starters had played together for three years, and they passed the ball to where their teammates would be, an extrasensory awareness that we would not have for some time yet, assuming we ever got it.

We lost by seven, and the margin was that small only because Bird Burke threw off a game-long torpor and arced in four three-pointers in the last three minutes. It was one of our few bright spots. Jimmy Bad Heart Bull played like a football player, like his namesake instead of the antelope we so desperately needed.

“Basketball is a game of agility and endurance,” I reminded him when I pulled him off the court to sit after bulldozing his way to three first-half fouls in only four minutes of play. The sideline lecture is the coach's classroom, his last chance to instruct—that is, if the player will listen to you and not watch the action on the court or lose himself to the voice inside his head instead of yours. “Jimmy? Look at me. You understand what I'm saying?”

“Yessir,” he said, and he nodded to himself. He wanted to be an antelope, but he had spent so many months being conditioned to knock people on their cans that it was difficult to adopt another way of life.

B. W. alone played with grace and intelligence, and he made excellent decisions, although his teammates did not always justify his faith in them. He finished with eleven points and eight assists. I thought he had every right to hold his head up, but he was not doing this when I found him in the locker room, shoulders slumped, naked except for the towel around his middle.

“That was loads of fun, wasn't it,” I said, patting him on a humid shoulder.

“Loads of fun,” he agreed, slowly letting out a long stream of air. He looked up at me. “We were awful, Dad. They weren't even that good, but I never felt like we had a chance to beat them.”

“They didn't have great players,” I said. “But they played better together. Give it a chance. We'll get better.”

He looked up at me, misery written on his features. “You think so?”

“Things'll get better,” I said, because a coach can never tell his players otherwise. “Keep hope alive.”

He smiled. B. W. was, like his mother, a big fan of the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

“I said I'd stick,” he said. “And I will. That's all I know how to do.”

You and me both,
I thought.
No matter how much it hurts.
“I'm proud of you,” I said. “I couldn't have asked for a better game from a point guard.”

“Really?” A corner of his mouth crept surreptitiously upward.

I nodded. “Really. I didn't see a single bad decision. Keep up the good work.”

On the dark bus ride home, though, I had the opportunity to imagine the worst, and it wasn't difficult to imagine, because already I could see the possible shape of the season: Unless something changed, we could not win. I leaned my head against the window, felt both the cold of the outdoors and the moisture condensed on the inside of the pane, heard it rattle with our slow, steady progress back to town. My stomach knotted up on itself as I thought about a season of games like tonight, of fans yelling abuse, of scoreboards in every gym of every rival proclaiming our utter and humiliating defeat.

To be a good coach, you have to strike the right balance between caring too much and not caring enough. If you care too much, you're on the expressway to Ulcer City. Nothing in coaching is ever really under your control: If your players perform well, your decisions look good; if they don't perform to your expectations, you're a dunce, an idiot, a chowderhead, no matter how brilliant your plans may have been on the chalkboard.

And if you care too little, it won't hurt so much, but the kids will know it. The fans will know it. You can't motivate other people if you don't believe—at least a little—in the dream.

I could already read my boys, an unremarkable group of high school players: steady and dull, or brilliant and inconsistent.

It is a sad thing to see the possible future one game into a season, but such is the curse of vision.