Bells Above Greens (12 page)

“Farther than you can run,” I said.

“Look who it is,” the boy in the small coat said.  He had not removed his eyes from Elle, and he was now pointing at her.

Elle had her arms crossed in her coat, her hair showing under her white hat.  The other boys all studied her with the same big eyes. 

“You write for the sports page,” the boy said.  “Has your picture in it and everything.  You’re Elle Quinn.”

“Yeah, sure is her,” the boy in the white sleeves said.  “We read your articles.  Never miss one.”

“Why, thank you,” Elle said.  “You boys must be football fans.”

“Sure am.  Gonna play for Notre Dame when I’m older.”

“And then the professionals,” she said.

“Maybe.”  He gave an uninterested shrug. “I don’t care about the professionals.  Just Notre Dame.”

A skeptical voice came from the group.  “You won’t make the professionals.”

“What if I do?” He was quick to reply with sincere belief.

“You won’t.”

“Well…” the boy said, only slightly broken, “…what if I do?”

“Well,” Elle said. “You’ll make a good, strong quarterback.”

“Nah, I’m a running back.”

“Oh sure,” Elle gestured at the boy’s shoulders.  “You have the build that all the greats have.  I can see it.”

“Better than Lattner even?”

“Much better.”  She was leaning in at their height with her hands on her knees.  The boys stood without words for a moment, just staring with red faces.

“Dave is sweet on you.”  The large boy put a thumb over his shoulder and a sharp voice came back.

“I’m not either.”

“You are too.  He keeps your picture in the paper every time.”

“I don’t.”

They went into a small scuffle of embarrassment and they all joined in.  Only the boy in the small coat stood unmoved.

“You’re sure pretty in person, ma’am,” he said.  “You think I’ll play, ma’am?”

Elle leaned in and whispered.  “I know you will.  I’ll be here to report on all your games.”

He turned to me with a huge smile on his face, the blush coming out.

“Go long,” I told him, and he went running down the field with the speed of a future great in his legs, the belief in his heart. 

The other boys saw him take off and joined in the footrace.  I waved my hand for him to keep going, the other boys frantically trying to catch him, and when he was on the other side of the park I threw the ball to where only he could get it.  It bounced off his chest with a cold thump and there was a big scramble for the loose ball. 

“You have quite the fan club here,” I told Elle.

“Who would have thought it?”

We sat at the first table at Blarney’s and debated about the easiest topic on hand.  I tried my hardest to find a hole in her knowledge.

“…and Coach Brennan inherited a great team,” I said.  “
I
could have coached them this far.  Nobody could mess up what Leahy had going.”

“That’s not true,” Elle was expert in her statement.  “Guglielmi and Lattner are gone.  He’s working with a new quarterback and backfield.  And his secondary had to be handpicked.”

“Wins start with the linemen.  One of those boys from your fan club could carry the ball a thousand yards behind that offensive line.”  I laughed at myself. “There you go.  A line for your article.”

She sipped her Coke the same way as when I first saw her.  “There’s a new running back coming up.  He’ll run for twenty touchdowns next year.”

“Who?”

“You should know him.  You did what the first defense has been trying to do in practice all year.”

“What’s that?”

“Tackle Pat Carragher.  Coach Brennan is excited about him.  He’s been carrying around linebackers all year on the practice field.  And
you
took him down.”

I leaned back and waved a hand.  “Ah, he slipped.  Everyone saw it.”

“You should play next year.”

“Not a chance.  I’m not trying to tackle him again.  I nearly broke my back.  Besides, I should be a senior this year.”

“You still have eligibility.  They’ll let you play for another year.”

“I’ll never be as good as Peter was.”

“You don’t have to be.  Just have fun.”

“Anybody without talent can just have fun.  It takes talent to be serious about it.”

She jabbed her straw into the Coke bottle.  “I just saw you throw the ball across the entire park.  Must have been sixty yards in the air without a warmup.”

“Not a lot of women sportswriters,” I said, changing the subject.

“Not at all, in fact.  Most of the women in journalism write stylish domestic pieces of home life.”

“How did you get in the door?”

“The school paper is excellent for creating a portfolio.  I started with sports articles because it was the only spot left in the paper.  Then I fell in love with it.  Notre Dame football is the easiest piece to connect to an audience.  The audience is already there, even if you’re a woman sportswriter.”

“And the
South Bend Tribune
fell in love with your work and hired you.”

She gave me a daring look and leaned forward with her answer.  “They thought I was a man.”

“They thought what?  How on earth…”

“I submitted my portfolio as ‘E. Quinn’, and signed it in rough handwriting.”

“You didn’t.”  I felt my jaw hanging.  “What a gutsy move. 
You
should be carrying the football for Notre Dame.”

“You do what needs to be done.”  She waved a hand.

She surprised me with that.  She hid her boldness under such fair skin.

I leaned forward.  “Peter knew how to have fun too, you know?”

She broke into a smile and held herself still, her eyes big, waiting for my words.  “What do you mean?”

“I was a sophomore when he was a junior.  We went to a game and watched from the stands.”  I nodded and said again, “He knew how to have fun.”

She waited a moment.  “Well, tell me.”

“After halftime he jumped the field.”

“He did not!” her mouth dropped open.

I leaned back in the booth.  “Leahy had the game won and sat the starters.  There was no action going on, so Peter jumped the field when no one was looking and stood on the sidelines near the benches.”

“Oh, you boys.”

“He took a helmet from one of the starters and was going to hand it to me over the rail.”

“And?”

“And he got caught.  It was a defensive end’s helmet. Bob O’Neil.  Remember him?”

“He was drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers.”

“Yep.  Bob O’Neil saw him with his helmet cradled in his arm, about to hand it to me over the rail.  Leahy would have still had him running laps if he had lost his helmet.”

“Well?”

“Well, Peter went running.  He ran out into the field with this big defensive end on his heels.  He did what college running backs had been trying to do all year.”

“What?  Take his head off?”

“No,” I laughed at her response.  “Dodge a tackle from Bob O’Neil.”

Elle covered her mouth, embarrassed to laugh about it, but her eyes were bright and merry.

Higgins brought out a quick pair of sandwiches and slid them on the table.  He stood over us.

“On the house,” Higgins said.

“What for?”

“Just because.”

Before I could argue, he turned and went back behind the bar.  Peter was with us then, a medallion of reputable standards pinned upon the wall forever, and I felt his presence as if he was sitting across from us.  I shrugged.

“This is just a lunch then,” I said as a joke.  “Don’t get the idea that it’s a date.”

Elle had already taken a bite of her sandwich.

“You didn’t even pick off the onions,” I said.

“I’m hungry,” she said with a full mouth.

“Usually girls pick off the onions and pickles.”

“What girls?”

“All girls.  There’s not a sandwich on earth they just bite into like that without taking a peek underneath first.”

“I must not be like other girls.”

I sat back and looked at her.  Under her notebook on the table was a book.  I had dismissed it at first, thinking it was just a hard surface she was using to write on.  I looked closer and saw it was
Madame Bovary
.

“Are you reading that?”

She put down her sandwich, nodding with enthusiasm.  “I am.  I know it’s old but it’s certainly not outdated.  The rules of society hardly change over time.”  She looked at me.  “I must sound like a square.”

“No, I’ve just never seen anyone carrying around Flaubert.”

“Isn’t it grand,” she said.  “All the problems we could possibly face in the world, someone somewhere has faced them all before and written down the answers for us to read about.”

She wasn’t like other girls, I thought.

We walked back under the starlight of a cold night, brisk and clean, still fevered with victorious car honks from double headlights and the shimmer of a dancing crowd in the commons. 

Elle hurried inside the girl’s dorm, her feet carrying her quicker than she would have liked, bending backward to wave to me.

“Thank you for the sandwich, Sam.”

“I’ll read your article tomorrow.”

“If I get it in before the deadline.  I have an hour.”

“Put in my line about boys being able to run behind our linemen.  I’ll look for it.”

She rushed inside.  I waited on the steps for Liv to come down.  Girls were passing by wearing nice little dresses, their eyes darkened by shadow, sure in themselves to attract a dance partner. I stamped my feet to stay warm and was about to take to doing jumping jacks when Liv opened the door and appeared in a sweet breath of her perfume, her hair done up in a bun, and red lips that needed to be kissed. 

“You weren’t here the whole time, were you?”  She was wearing a gray coat perched wonderfully on shapely legs. 

“You look marvelous.”  I don’t know if I stuttered because my lips were frozen or if I was speaking without the words properly formed.

“Oh golly.  I bet you thought that of all the girls who came down.”

I shook my head, still without words.

“Well don’t just stand there.  I’ll freeze.”  The last word went up in a humorous pitch and she made the innocent face of a child, bundling herself deeper in the coat. 

“What did I tell you?  I feel upstaged.”  I tucked in the billowing ends of my shirt to make a tighter silhouette.  I looked again at Liv and held my arms out. 

“It’s no use.”

“You look just fine, Sam.  You’re as handsome as can be.”

She pressed her lips gently to my cheek, a gift that I hoped left evidence.  Then she took my arm and we walked across campus to the lights of the dance, pulled by the magnetic tune of a jazz band already in full swing, a beckoning finger of notes over the grass.

The commons was a large room with windows that reached the ceiling.  People inside moved past the windows under a strobe of lights like fish in an aquarium.   Two young boys held the double doors open for us and I was quick to lose any inhibitions in the musical air.

At the front of the room, a makeshift stage of tables had been pieced together, and four musicians stomped atop of them.  A man with a stylish hat pulled low on his brow hammered away at a drum set, a man with a mustache dipped with his saxophone, a broad back played a piano behind him, and a handsome young man, probably a student, swung a trumpet back and forth under a fedora.  The students on the floor were captured in swing, the boys circling the girls in spins under their arms.

Liv unbuttoned her gray coat and let it slide off her arms.  I again found myself to be completely inept at language.  She was wearing a flirty black dress with red piping.  She twirled once, just for me, and gushed when I couldn’t say anything.

We went right to the floor.  There were so many dancing bodies, so much movement, that the frost vanished from the windows and seemed to reappear as sweat upon our brows.  Liv danced well, her feet gliding under her as if she was on ice, and I kept up with the beat, shifting back and forth between the twirls of smiles and arms that floated by. 

“You dance so well,” Liv said to me, leaning close to be heard.

“I feel like my feet are on backwards.  My knees are down by my ankles.”

“No, you’re good at it.  I mean it.”

The band had an ability to take one song into another without the slightest hint of dead air, and our feet never stopped.  When I was out of breath I took a fruit punch and leaned against the wall.  I wiped the sweat from my brow and sank into a sit.  Liv took a drink of my punch.

“How do you keep up the energy?” I asked.

She tipped the cup down and her words struggled around an ice cube. 

“You just have to keep going.  Don’t sit or you’ll be there all night.”

She leaned over me and gave me an ice-cold peck on the forehead. 

“Let me catch my breath.  Just for a song or two.”

“Look at the musicians on stage,” she pointed.  “They don’t get a break.”

“I’ll be here for another song.  My legs are like clubs.”

“Look at the trumpet player.  He has more energy than all of us.  Look at him go.”

“He needs a shave.”

“I like it.  It’s carefree.” 

“Just one more drink for me.  I’m dancing in quicksand.”

“Is he a student here?”

“I think so.”

She shrugged with a little smile over her shoulder and dancewalked in tiny steps back to the floor, her arms held straight by her sides and her palms level with the ground, her shoulders shimmying with the beat.  Three other girls from her dorm shimmied without partners, and she joined them. 

I watched from the wall as the faces swayed above me, the lights reappearing in blinks behind them and the music probing through them, searching for a light heart to shake with rhythm.  I collected myself with another fruit punch and stepped outside for some air. 

The cold of outside was a relief, the music dispersed in the night.  I wandered into the grass away from the pockets of conversation.  From a nearby stand of trees on the lawn, the branches of which drooped in gray nakedness, I watched the fish swim in the musical bowl.

A dark figure appeared from the darkness of the lawn, moving the glow of a cigarette from hip to face.  I saw it was Myles and I saw the reflection of moonlight on the lens at his chest.  He was looking all around and finally made his way to me.