Cracking the Bell Read online

  “That’s what I thought of when you said it tonight,” Grace said. “A cop.”

  “But I’m a juvenile delinquent,” I said. “I can’t stop doing stupid shit.”

  “Because you’re a kid. Good lord, John was a holy terror when he was in high school. He got into fights, rolled his mother’s car, would probably have gotten sent to jail if he didn’t get good marks in school. That’s part of what made him so good at the job later. He knew he wasn’t so different from the people he was arresting. He knew that everyone has that glass ass. He spent most of his time handing out cushions, not locking people in handcuffs.”

  “I wrote about that here.” I pointed to the green notebook. “I wrote about him saying we all need a soft cushion.”

  Grandma took a sip of her hot chocolate. She squinted her eyes at me. “You got a big, tender heart, Isaiah. You’re more like John than anyone else I know. Maybe you should let your grandpa be your mentor? Even though he’s gone, there’s a lot he can teach you. Maybe you should spend some time thinking of that?”

  I sat up straight. It felt like a slap across the face, the good kind that wakes you up. I idolized my grandpa when I was little. I never felt safer or happier than when I was at his side, digging in the garden, or out in the woods looking for birds (he loved birds). He had no problem with me being a dirty little kid. I was more like him than I am like my parents. Why didn’t I think to learn from him?

  Then another thought crossed my mind. Grandma Gin wasn’t innocent. “I will think about Grandpa, okay?” I said.

  “Good boy,” she said.

  “But you have to think about him, too. I want a real Thanksgiving this year. I want Melinda to be there, too. Even if it means Judy Gunderson is with her.”

  Grandma Gin glared at me. “Oh, I heard your little speech before, Isaiah. First thing I did when I came in the house was to send Melinda a text, ask if we could have a chat this morning.”

  “Seriously?” I said.

  “But for the damn record, I did not get angry at her for goddamn Judy Gunderson, as your mother likes to say. Lord knows I don’t want to imagine what my children do between the sheets. That’s Melinda’s business. None of mine. I got angry at her for marrying that poor fool Tom in the first place. Breaking his heart. Leaving him standing there in that house they bought. Melinda has known what she is since she was your age. How dare she trick that man into marrying a fantasy that never existed? I am so tired of my children and their ugly, broken marriages. I am so tired, Isaiah.”

  I thought for a second, then said, “Maybe Melinda married Tom to make you and Grandpa John happy, like I do stuff to make Mom happy, sometimes, even though I don’t really want to.”

  Grandma Gin stared at me. “Maybe that’s true,” she said.

  “I don’t know what’s true,” I said.

  “The hell with it. I miss Melinda, too.”

  “You sent her a text?” Grace asked. “You never send texts.”

  “I’ve sent two texts today, little girl. I’m a twenty-first-century woman.”

  CHAPTER 34

  OCTOBER 7: 11:20 A.M.

  My intention had been to get up in time to drive Grandma Gin to church the next morning. But it was well past 5 a.m. when I stopped thinking, stopped googling stuff on my phone, and finally fell asleep. The curtains in the TV room keep it dark, and no one else had woken me up. Sunday is the only day neither Grandma nor Grace work at Dairy Queen. Apparently Nels is a DQ prodigy and has learned to run the store all by himself.

  I went upstairs and had some coffee. Grandma wasn’t anywhere to be seen, but she’d made a pot. Grace’s car was in the drive. I figured she must still be asleep.

  Good, I thought. Grace should sleep as long as possible.

  I called Dad, because I’d had some serious thoughts about how I should proceed, had done some research. There was due diligence that needed to be done. There were some things I needed to see to make any move forward. But I didn’t want to go by myself.

  Dad lived in the shitty little apartment not to escape from me, but so I could continue to live in my house with my mom. That was a perspective that had never entered my mind. I decided if I was going to do what I wanted to do, I’d want Dad with me, because he has protected me (as has Mom), even though I didn’t appreciate it. But now I did appreciate it and I just wanted my dad. So I called him. He answered right away.

  Turned out, Dad was already at our house. When I got there, he and Mom were sitting at the little circular table in the kitchen. They had a photo album out, Hannah’s from when she was five years old. They were looking at a picture of her wearing a Santa suit and crying mightily. They were both either laughing or crying themselves.

  Laughing. Mom looked up and smiled. “Hi, honey,” she said. “I think we tortured you guys when you were kids. Look at this.”

  “Yeah. You guys were terrible to us,” I said. But I smiled. They were actually pretty great. I was a toddler that year. They dressed me as an elf. I loved that picture. I always loved Hannah, and I’m sure I loved acting like Santa’s helper.

  “It’s lunchtime. You slept in,” Dad said. “Very un-Isaiah-like.”

  “I was up late with Grandma.”

  “Yeah. She texted us this morning,” Mom said.

  “Wow. She’s a texting machine now,” I said.

  “How are you feeling?” Dad asked.

  “Like I’ve lived three lifetimes in the last week,” I said.

  “Sounds about right,” Dad said.

  “Isaiah, we’ve been talking. About you and college and your plans for next year,” Mom said. “You need to know, I get it. I haven’t been open to listening to your ideas, at all. For some reason I got it into my head that it was your plan to stay here and I was just supporting you. It’s weird how I’ve made my hopes into your hopes. It’s . . . it’s just really wrong.”

  I looked at her for a moment. The truth was, I wasn’t entirely sure what my hopes or ideas were for college at that moment. Part of me did want to stay in town. That wasn’t fake. Part of me wanted to leave and never come back here. That didn’t seem reasonable. “Thanks,” I said. “I might have some ideas about what I want to do, but I don’t know what that means about college yet.”

  “No pressure!” Mom said with a big, goofy, self-understanding smile.

  I turned to my dad. “Hey, I’ve got to go run some errands,” I said.

  “On Sunday? What errands?” Dad asked.

  “Well, maybe just one errand. I want to go up to school to see Kirby. He works on film all day on Sundays. Maybe a couple of errands after, but I don’t know. Would you mind coming with me? I’m a little . . . I just want someone else to drive.”

  “Of course. You got it,” Dad said.

  “Do you want me to come along, too?” Mom asked.

  “No. I want to be with Dad,” I said quietly.

  Mom swallowed hard. “Are you going to rejoin the football team?” she asked. “I won’t stand in your way, but I want you to know I’m still worried.”

  “I know. I don’t know. I have to think more. See something. Due diligence. That’s why I want to catch Kirby while he’s putting together game film.”

  Mom nodded. “Okay,” she said.

  CHAPTER 35

  OCTOBER 7: 11:55 A.M.

  Dad and I got into his car. He turned the key. The car roared to life. He needs a new muffler. He didn’t put the car in drive. He stared straight forward for a moment, then turned to me.

  “I’m an abject failure as a father,” he said. “I didn’t set out to be, you know?”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  “When I married your mother, I meant it. I was this young, out-of-place professor in this rinky-dink town in the middle of nowhere and suddenly I find a radiant, smart, hilarious lawyer to share my life with? I couldn’t see anything—not a single thing—that would keep us from being happy our whole lives together. I couldn’t see what was coming. How could I imagine what happened to Hannah?
”

  “No way you could,” I said. “No way.”

  “It devastated us, Isaiah. It ruined us. It’s ruined me. I’m going to admit something to you I’m not proud of. . . .” He dropped his eyes into his lap. “For a long time, the sight of you and your mother tortured me. I hated seeing you. You were a constant reminder not of your wonderful, amazing, beautiful life, but of all that we’d lost. Your sophomore year, when I finally decided to get out of the house, I applied for jobs back east. I went so far as to go to an interview at an engineering firm in Boston. But the night I came back, you had a game. One of the last ones of that year. I showed up just in time for the first defensive set. And I watched you out there, already calling adjustments, already orchestrating the team. The third play I saw, you shifted the defense after the offense changed formations. When the play started, you shot a gap on a blitz and hit the ball carrier at the same second the ball was handed to him. It was just a regular play, really. Just a good defensive play. But I could tell you had seen it coming just from the way the other team had lined up. I could see not only your athletic prowess, but your incredible intelligence, and I burst into tears, Isaiah. I just lost it. I just couldn’t believe I had such a miracle for a son. I called the manager at the engineering company right there in the stands, even though it was almost nine on the East Coast, and I wept into the phone, told him to pull my name from the pool, told him I couldn’t leave my goddamn miracle of a son. I can’t make it up to you, you know?” Dad was crying now. “We lost her. We did. For such a stupid reason. For being in the wrong place at the exact wrong time. Almost a statistical impossibility she’d be right there, right then. But she was. Hannah was. I lost her. We did.”

  “We did,” I said. “I know. I hate it.”

  “Listen, listen. It’s been a hard road. It’s going to be hard. But as long as I’m around and you’re around, I won’t lose you, too, okay? Don’t worry so much. Go be a miracle, okay?”

  I nodded. I really couldn’t speak. I mumbled something about Kirby and the high school. Dad put the car in drive.

  CHAPTER 36

  OCTOBER 7: 12:05 P.M.

  Kirby Sheldon, the team manager and AV guy, spends Sundays putting together packages of video for us to watch during the team meeting on Monday. I knew he would be up at the high school, in the tech lab, using the fastest computer in there to do his work. He often texted me on Sundays to ask what I thought the defense would want to see from the game before, what we’d want to see of the scouting video he had of our next opponent. It sometimes annoyed me, actually, because I wanted to spend my Sundays eating good food and watching NFL, not answering a bunch of detailed questions from Kirby.

  But Kirby was good. And he cared about his job. So, I always answered.

  We pulled up in front of the high school, and sure enough, Kirby’s Honda was out front, the only other car in the parking lot. I sent him a quick text and he agreed to meet us at the front doors.

  Dad and I followed Kirby back through the darkened hallways toward the lab.

  “A little spooky,” Dad said.

  “I like the quiet,” Kirby replied.

  The computer was hooked up to a couple of big, twenty-seven-inch screens. Video from the River Valley game sat paused on each. Kirby sat down at the office chair in front of the mouse and keyboard. Dad and I pulled up chairs from other stations.

  “So, what are you looking for? Something from Friday? Or something from the scouting video we have for Prairie?” Kirby asked.

  “I know this is weird, but is it possible to look at Dodgeville from two years ago—third-quarter defensive sets, specifically—and Oconomowoc from last year? I might want to look at this year’s Lancaster game, too,” I said.

  “No problem,” Kirby said. He minimized the window on the left monitor and pulled up a list of years. He clicked first into my sophomore year and pulled up Dodgeville and then into my junior year and pulled up the Oconomowoc game. “Third-quarter Dodgeville?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Let’s see that one first.”

  The two games I asked him to find were the two before this year where I hit someone hard enough and was hit so hard that the normal sounds of the world ceased and the sound of a dying girl, or a witch, replaced them. These were not simple collisions that made my sinuses clear, or my ears to ring a little (that ringing happened a few other times, but never made me feel unsteady on my feet). These were hits that knocked myself out of myself for a moment, at least. They were big enough to scare me.

  “Okay,” Kirby said. “What are you looking for?” He’d brought up the third quarter of the Dodgeville game.

  He let the film run play-to-play. It was a rainy night. Lots of mud on the Dodgeville field. I watched a much skinnier Riley rip a throw across his body to a much shorter Twiggs. Touchdown.

  “That was sweet,” I said. “I think two defensive sets from now. I made three tackles in a row and the third one was hard.”

  Kirby advanced the video and quickly found the spot. Dodgeville could not move the ball against us. They were totally overmatched. I knew what they were running before the play started, and by the third quarter, I was no longer playing my position correctly, staying in my lane, but just exploding up to where I knew the ball was going to be. Instead of worrying about my technique, I was angling my body for maximum damage on each of the plays we watched. The first two were run plays into the middle of the line. Each of the first two, their linemen stood up our tackles and another lineman got to one of our inside linebackers. Because their quarterback couldn’t throw very well, I wasn’t worried about any receiver running a route past me. Instead, I became a missile, dropped my shoulders, and used my head to hit the running back with everything I had. Terrible technique. On the third play, I didn’t get away with it.

  “Slow this one down,” I said to Kirby.

  “Okay,” he said.

  We watched a screen pass begin to unfold. I knew it was coming. As the play happened, I slid to my left, crouched, waited for the ball to get delivered into the back’s hands, then exploded forward and went at the guy low. One of the reasons I worked so hard to add muscle weight after sophomore year is that my best shot was always to go low against upper-class competition, dudes who were almost always bigger than me. I fired into the back’s legs just as the guy drove his left knee forward. My lowered head collided with that knee. The hit flipped him off his feet and onto his side. For a second, I lay on my face on the field, covering the ear holes of my helmet with my hands. The dying girl screamed.

  “Did you get hurt?” Dad asked.

  “Not surprising,” I said. “I dropped my head every play back then. I think I had a concussion on that play, though. That was the first time I heard witch whistles.”

  Before the play cut out and moved to the next, I saw myself roll over and push off the turf. I stayed in that game. Didn’t come out, even though I was unsteady the rest of the way.

  “Witch whistles?” Kirby said.

  “I stopped dropping my head by the next year, for the most part. But that doesn’t account for everything. Play midway through the fourth quarter against Oconomowoc, Kirby.”

  Oconomowoc runs a spread, gadget offense, with all kinds of shotgun and options and misdirection, and receivers cutting across the middle of the field. It’s the kind of offense lots of colleges are using now. I wasn’t prepared to track all of it. We didn’t see anything like it during my sophomore year. The game against Oconomowoc was in August of my junior year. What happened during the fourth quarter is the only time I’ve felt any real pain from being hit instead of hurting myself while hitting.

  Kirby began to run the video slowly. “Am I close to what you want to see?”

  “Yeah. Maybe a minute later. After we fumble and they get the ball and want to score fast.”

  “They didn’t score at all,” Kirby said.

  “Yeah. I know.” I watched Riley drop the ball in the exchange with the center, which gave Oconomowoc possession o
n our half of the field with about five minutes left. The video cut to the beginning of the next play. Oconomowoc ran all kinds of run/pass options against us. Even when they went empty backfield, they’d often motion a runner into position to take a hand-off right before the snap.

  On this play, a running back shot out from the backfield and lined up at receiver. I followed him out there. Then the guy went into motion back toward the quarterback. The play began. I’m sure I was shouting, “Watch reverse,” or “Jet sweep,” or “Slant left,” or something, because they had a couple of running plays and a pass play that branched from this setup. I flowed with the play. The quarterback handed it to the back as he went by. I sprinted to my left. What I didn’t see, because I had my eye on the ball carrier, was the receiver from the other side of the field gathering speed, running right at me.

  “Watch out!” Dad yelled at the monitor.

  Too late. That receiver cracked back, blindsided me, knocked my feet off the ground, knocked my helmet half off my head. I crashed to the turf right as Knutson, our outside linebacker, tackled the running back after a couple-yard gain. I’d lined my defense up exactly right for just such a play but was still caught unaware and was crushed. It was probably the closest thing I’ve ever felt to a pickup truck flying through an intersection and hitting a small car before the occupants of that car ever knew what hit them.

  I thought of this the next day, when I was sick from that hit. I did not tell anyone. It’s likely me and the receiver were each running over fifteen miles per hour. The come-down speed, then, was thirty miles per hour or greater. I took the brunt of that speed because I was straight up and down, not looking, and the receiver had coiled and burst into me. I don’t think the collision knocked me out—I jumped off the turf right away to show he couldn’t hurt me—but my feeling of being Isaiah was knocked out of my body for a short time.