Cracking the Bell Page 10

  The same lying piece of shit?

  Just like that, the empathy was gone.

  Isaiah stood up and walked away.

  “Isaiah!” Dad shouted.

  Isaiah left the restaurant.

  CHAPTER 23

  OCTOBER 5: GAME DAY

  I jogged all the way to school from Steve’s Pizza. I didn’t have my backpack. I didn’t know where else to go. I had to go back to school. I cried a little on the way, turning sideways to hide my face from cars that passed by. I needed to go suit up, play the game. That’s what my plan was. I’d play football with my team.

  The first person I saw in the commons was Mr. Urness, my physics teacher. He was on his way out as I entered. He carried a giant pile of papers in a fabric grocery sack. “Mr. Sadler,” he said. He showed me the papers. “You were absent for the unit test. Still feeling sick?”

  “I . . . yes. I was at the doctor this morning.” I completely forgot the test.

  “You look healthy now,” he said.

  “Clean bill of health, I guess,” I said.

  “Four hours too late,” he said.

  “Sorry. I know. I didn’t want to go to the doctor . . . because I wanted to take the test.”

  “We’ll discuss this next week. I’m headed to my niece’s wedding in Iowa.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “She’s marrying a bozo,” he said.

  I moved past him, into the school. I couldn’t remember where I was supposed to be. English? Maybe? Two freshmen girls worked on a volleyball banner on the commons floor. “What period is it?” I asked.

  “Fifth?” one said, like it was a question.

  “Don’t you know?” I asked.

  “You don’t,” she said.

  “It’s fifth period,” the other said flatly.

  But right as I got to English, the bell rang, and my classmates began flowing out from the room, pushing me backward.

  It was Friday. I had Current Events, essentially a class where seniors watch CNN, and then I had a study hall last period. The day couldn’t end fast enough. I texted Twiggs to see if he wanted to meet me in the locker room instead of going to study hall.

  I saw that Mom had texted me fifteen times. She’d apologized again and again.

  I felt nothing but rage.

  Be there, Twiggs texted back.

  CHAPTER 24

  OCTOBER 5: GAME DAY II

  “Don’t you think it’s pretty weird, dude, that we kept asking you if you were injured from that hit, but you lied and said you had the flu?” Twiggs asked. We sat on a bench outside the school, looking over the practice field. He wore his game jersey, like we all do on game days, except I didn’t have mine on. I hadn’t even thought about it that morning.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. I don’t know why I lied. I didn’t want anyone to know about my concussion. It sounds worse than it is. My concussion. Not the lying part. That’s bad.”

  “Well,” Twiggs said. “It’ll be fun in some ways, you know? Pretty much Riley hasn’t played defense since we were freshmen.”

  I’d played some offense that year—running back. Riley had played my position, strong safety, and had been pretty good, although not as good as me because I like hitting and he doesn’t. “Riley?” I said. “Strong safety?”

  “He didn’t tell you? Reynolds is going to start him both ways, QB and strong safety. If we get up quick—which we should, because who the hell is River Valley? They haven’t won a damn game all year . . . Reynolds will let Willis take over.”

  Willis, a sophomore, was my backup, but he rarely got in. Never occurred to me that Riley would start at my position. My position . . .

  My stomach balled up in a knot.

  “Won’t be necessary. Riley doesn’t need to do that. I’m playing. Doctor said I could go back to normal activities. I’m in.”

  “Ha ha,” Twiggs said.

  “Ha ha?” I asked.

  “Well. No, you aren’t playing,” he said. “You didn’t practice all week. You had a concussion. We’re playing River stupid Valley, who we can beat without you. You didn’t even show up for pizza last night. You’ve been lying and acting like a dumbass, and that says to me and to everyone else, you aren’t playing, dude. You’re some kind of alien version of yourself right now. You’ll probably drop your eyes again if you play right now. You want to get injured for life? Wait and play next week against Prairie, when we need you and when your scrambled brain isn’t leaking out of your damn ear, okay?”

  “No,” I said. “I have to play.”

  “Dude, what the hell?” Twiggs said. “I’m super dumb, but I’m not dumb enough to play the week after a concussion like you got. That’s just ridiculous. Coach isn’t going to let you play, anyway.”

  “Shit, shit, shit,” I said. I dropped my head into my hands.

  “You’ll be okay, buddy.” Twiggs patted me on the back. “Next week will be here soon.”

  CHAPTER 25

  OCTOBER 6: THE GAME

  I twisted in my sheets. I rolled and turned on the light next to my bed. I picked up my phone and saw that it was 2:21 a.m. Shit, I thought. My head vibrated, not from a concussion, but from unspent adrenaline. I grabbed my green notebook from the floor.

  He Wasn’t Allowed to Play

  No, this wasn’t because his mother had called the coach to tell him she wouldn’t permit him to play. There had been no such communication. No, it wasn’t because the doctor had told him that morning he could not play. What had the doctor said? The boy can return to his normal physical activities. It was punitive. He hadn’t been at practice. He hadn’t been engaged. Not even his teammates wanted him to play.

  “Take a load off, bud. Hang close to Coach Dieter. Help make defensive adjustments if we need it,” Coach Reynolds told him.

  In every away game he’d played since freshman year, he and Riley had shared a seat on the bus, both to and from the game. On the way, they talked about what would happen in the game—the specific strengths and weaknesses of the offensive and defensive systems they’d be facing and, after they moved to varsity and watched video of their opponents, the specific strengths and weaknesses of the players they’d be facing. On the ride home, they’d debrief. If the ride was long enough, they’d often discuss every play that had taken place during the game, dissecting the larger action, their reactions, their roles in the play’s result. Again, it was tradition. It was what they did. Riley and Isaiah had never been best friends in the way friends are depicted on TV. They didn’t seek solace in each other’s company. They didn’t text each other (not like Isaiah and Twiggs did) to see what was happening. Isaiah had once asked Riley if they’d stay in contact after graduation. Riley said, “Well, yeah, if we play at the same college.” But don’t misunderstand. Isaiah and Riley were best friends. Football made them best friends.

  On the way to River Valley High School, a forty-five-minute drive across farmed ridges and into deep, forested ravines, Isaiah sat by himself, in the back of the bus. His normal seat next to Riley had been taken by running back, Iggy Eze. Riley hadn’t even looked at Isaiah when he boarded.

  The game unfolded as everyone expected. The River Valley Blackhawks acted like they didn’t want to be on the field with Bluffton. They ran a scared, old-fashioned Wing-T offense. Sweeps with pulling guards (guards who were both small and slow). Dives, bellies, a single tackle-trap led by a tackle who was no more than 5'10" but easily weighed 300 pounds—Riley slid past him like lightning, popped the running back so fast the ball shot straight up in the air and then Riley had caught it, turned into the amazing offensive player he is, juked three different guys before barreling into the end zone to make the score 27–0 in the first quarter.

  They were right. They didn’t need Isaiah.

  I put down my pen, closed my notebook, turned out the light above my bed. It was 2:47 in the morning. All this adrenaline in my body. I texted Joey Derossi, but he didn’t answer. I walked into the kitchen to get a glass of water.
>
  While running the water to make it cold, I looked out the back window.

  Someone stood in Grandma Gin’s backyard, smoking a cigarette.

  I went out the back door. “Grace?” I shouted.

  She didn’t answer. She reentered the house.

  I thought about what Dad had said, about how I should leave her be.

  But she wasn’t letting me be. She was staring at my house, waiting for me to come to her.

  Honest to God! What the hell was Grace doing at Grandma’s house at three o’clock in the damn morning? I almost went over to find out, but I stopped myself in the middle of the yard. I couldn’t wake Grandma Gin at 3 a.m.

  CHAPTER 26

  OCTOBER 6: THE MEANING OF 3 A.M.

  I wrote this, then forgot about it.

  He Was Retired. But He Was Still a Hero.

  At 8:25 p.m. on September 27 five years ago, a fourteen-year-old girl got into the car of a white male, age twenty-nine, in the parking lot of a Jimmy John’s in suburban Milwaukee. It was caught on security cameras. She’d gone to the restaurant pissed off because she had to babysit her little brother and didn’t want to. The girl already had a history of drug use, of trouble with the law. But her mother didn’t have anywhere else to turn. The girl had to babysit her little brother because her mother had to go to her shift at the hospital. Police found out later, the girl’s anger at being forced to babysit prompted her to get into this car. A little revenge against her mother. The white male offered her a chance to smoke some weed. The white male took the girl away.

  The white male’s name was Jeremy Chambers. He had a tattooed M on his neck, apparently an homage to the Big M, a well-known landmark on a hill near Bluffton, Wisconsin. Very identifiable. The police knew what car he was driving at the time, too. A black 2008 Pontiac Grand Am with a cracked back-left panel. What they didn’t know was this: What the hell was he doing on the other side of the state from where he normally operated, moving weed and meth and sometimes heroin across southwest Wisconsin, northeast Iowa, and southeastern Minnesota?

  Even though he was in suburban Milwaukee and not in his normal zone of activity, detectives at the Wisconsin Bureau of Criminal Apprehension immediately recognized both him and the car when they looked at the video footage. They were already in the midst of a larger investigation into a web of meth and heroin distribution that connected Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Des Moines and parts in between. Jeremy Chambers was a big player in the parts in between. He was also a well-known asshole.

  At 12:30 a.m. on September 28, Isaiah’s grandpa John Bertram, less than a year retired from his long career with the Wisconsin BCA, received a phone call from his good friend Mike Meisel, a BCA detective. Meisel conferenced him in with the Bluffton chief of police and the Grant County sheriff. Jeremy Chambers had been spotted pumping gas into his Pontiac at a Bluffton Kwik Trip gas station. He had exited the scene before police arrived. No girl was seen in the car, however.

  There was credible camera evidence that Chambers had headed east of town, likely to his girlfriend’s trailer, near where the larger County Road G turned into the one-lane Jericho Road. Grandpa Bertram knew the area well, knew the little dirt drives that pierced fields of corn and followed the jagged creek line of Mounds Branch. In the early 2000s he’d busted an isolated but large-scale meth production house in the same vicinity. He’d done so after months of surveillance, oftentimes on foot.

  They asked him to meet them off Jericho Road. To direct them into some of these drives and dirt roads that might help them surround Chambers’s location without tipping him or his girlfriend off. There was possibly a fourteen-year-old’s life at stake. Grandpa Bertram didn’t think twice about going, even though Grandma Gin had said, “I got a bad feeling.”

  She was right to have that bad feeling.

  Grandpa John rolled up slowly, his headlights off, stopped his GMC Yukon behind tall grasses and a stand of burr oak close enough to the trailer where Chambers was purported to be. He could see the black Pontiac parked in the light that the trailer shed. Grandpa John stayed there, watching, waiting for his friend Meisel, BCA staff, and the local police to join him. Unfortunately, the situation turned fast. Grandpa John saw a figure leave the trailer and enter the Pontiac. The Pontiac came to life. Reversed, turned, and began exiting the property via a nearby drive. Grandpa John pulled out his cell and called Meisel.

  “We’re five minutes from your location, John,” he was told.

  “Aw shit,” Grandpa John said. “Just got here, but he’s leaving.”

  “Don’t do anything,” Meisel said. “We’re close.”

  Grandpa John hung up. The Pontiac rolled down the drive. What could he do? Let Chambers leave? What about the girl? Grandpa turned the ignition, pulled the Yukon forward, drove it across the drive’s exit.

  Jeremy Chambers’s girlfriend—because she was the one driving, not Chambers—stopped the Pontiac. Grandpa John climbed from the Yukon’s cab, stayed hidden on the driver side, shouted over the car, “You just stay where you are, now. There are cops crawling all around the premises and we need to talk to you.”

  What Grandpa John didn’t know was that Jeremy Chambers had spotted him a moment earlier. He’d seen the Yukon pull up. Not good. Chambers needed to get out on the road to make it to Prairie du Chien before sunrise. Chambers figured he had to do something about whoever was in that truck. He told his girlfriend to pull the car up the drive to draw attention. He’d surprise whoever it was in that GMC Yukon, have a chat.

  Later Chambers told a detective, “I crept around the side of the trees over there. Figured it was a couple of teens, making out or something. Wanted to scare them off, so I could roll. . . .”

  Bullshit. The moment Chambers saw Grandpa John, he raised a Glock 9mm and fired twice. My grandpa . . . Isaiah’s Grandpa fell to the ground, dead. He never saw what was coming. The best dude in the world was gone just like that.

  But it wasn’t for nothing. Jeremy Chambers’s girlfriend lost her mind when shots were fired. Got out of the car and ran back in the trailer screaming. Jeremy chased her down instead of leaving in the Pontiac. That was all the time the cops needed. They arrived in mass a few moments later.

  When they got there, Chambers exited the back of the house and ran into the cornfields but was caught in minutes. His girlfriend was taken into custody without incident.

  They searched the house and the Pontiac. A terrified, tied-up fourteen-year-old girl was found in the trunk. Based on information gained from Chambers’s girlfriend on the scene, the fourteen-year-old was about to be driven to a farm near Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. The cops went to the farm instead. Wisconsin BCA broke up a Minnesota-based sex-trafficking ring using the information the girlfriend gave them.

  Grandpa John died for that fourteen-year-old girl and maybe lots of others like her.

  Grandpa John’s BCA friend Mike Meisel left the crime scene. He rang Grandma Gin’s doorbell at 3 a.m. He wanted Grandma Gin to see how her husband, John Bertram, died. Blocking a driveway. Protecting the life of a child. Meisel knew Gin well enough to know she’d want to see exactly what happened.

  She went out there to Jericho Road. She saw Grandpa John’s body lying by the Yukon.

  “That’s a dream I had a lot. Seeing him like that,” she told Isaiah later. “I always figured it would come to that. Was surprised he got to retirement in one piece, but he couldn’t really retire.”

  I couldn’t go over to Grandma’s house at 3 a.m. Knock on the door like some bearer of biblically bad news . . .

  Grandma Gin knew that Grace was there, though, right?

  Was Grace staying there overnight?

  She had to be.

  I wanted to know. I wanted to see Grace.

  My thoughts turned and turned and turned on the same item. Grace.

  The sun was up before I fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 27

  OCTOBER 6: SATURDAY, NOON

  I woke up at a little past noon. My phone
buzzed twice from a single text.

  Guess we don’t need you. I can play strong safety!

  It was from Riley, who barely talked to me Thursday. Riley, who hadn’t saved a seat for me on the bus Friday. Riley, who had played my position against River Valley the night before.

  He was right, too. He played my position great. What did he want me to say, though? You’re so much better at football than me!

  Good. I’m not going to play anymore.

  He wrote back right away.

  Don’t be a dick. I was just joking. I don’t want to play strong safety.

  Bullshit. He wanted to humiliate me. I didn’t respond. He was the dick.

  And I wouldn’t play anymore. That’s what I decided in the fever of my insomnia. Crack my brain for a hyped-up kids’ game? Play a stupid game, play for teammates who didn’t care about me.

  A game. A stupid game. Totally meaningless. Nothing changes whether you win or lose.

  Joey Derossi was right. Isaiah Sadler would be happier without all that shit. Isaiah Sadler was done with monoculture.

  Of course, Mom was sitting in the living room when I went out there. She was waiting for me. I’d dressed already. I planned on getting on my bike and going to find Joey to tell him the news: I was wrong. I was done with monoculture. He was right last summer when he told me about ghost towns. I was living in one. Mom smiled.