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Authors: Sean Patrick Flanery

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BOOK: Jane Two
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“Listen up, ya little shits! We've got about a minute and a half left in this season, so we ain't gonna win this one, but any you folks thinkin' we gettin' shut out in this game get the hell off this field right now.”

My Grandaddy would've kept yelling at us, but Coach Gasconade cut in. “Let's get some touchdowns here!” hollered Coach Gasconade, interrupting my Grandaddy—which, incidentally, no one ever dared do—and attempting to tone down The Language.

But my Grandaddy cut him off before Coach Gasconade could wax eloquent. “Or, get used to bein' where we are, wallowin' in pig shit!” yelled Grandaddy. “But I'll be DAMNED if my BEARS are gonna be shut out like a buncha pussies!”

“Ain't no way!” bellowed Lew taking a drag on his unfiltered Camel.

“Now it's time you men asked yourselves how bad you really want it.” Grandaddy's voice got real low. “Life wears a cup, so you kick that fucker straight in the balls, men! Y'hear me? Yeah, that's right, you ARE men, you're not boys, so I'll talk to ya like men!” Coach started to open his mouth but Grandaddy just plowed right through his intentions, and then I saw James give Gasconade a look that was sure to shut him up for good. “It's time to shit or get off the pot! 'Cause otherwise you're gonna regret it your whole life. This is when you decide if you's a winner or a loser. This is when you reach inside yourself and you pull somthin' out that you'll take with you the rest of your lives.”

Grandaddy spat out his toothpick and took a long, slow drag on his cigarette before he spoke again. Every one of us teammates hung on his every word. “Let you tinies in on a little secret…tell you how you gonna beat a team that may be bigger, faster, hell, even stronger. Sometime talent gonna get you in trouble, make you fat if you ain't got no heart. Heart gonna beat the shit outta talent every goddamn day. Maybe they capable of playin' at a level ten and you's only capable of a nine. But heart gonna determine how much'a that ten they gonna grab out they pockets every day. Pullin' it all out take heart, desire, discipline; shit my Bears got in spades. Yep, maybe they capable of ten, but I look in they eyes and know they only got the heart to call on eight of they ten, day in and day out. I look in each of you eyes and goddamn if I don't know each and every one'a you gonna demand all nine of your nine…every goddamn day. Sometime the talent you ain't worked for breed pussies, and that what you seein' right now in the eyes of them little shits in them red jerseys 'cross from you. Know it. Today they only grab eight. You squeeze yer nine tight and you go out and you destroy them pussies!! You do this today with your nine, and someday when you finally earned and grew into yer ten, you gonna be able grab it anytime you need it…and ain't nobody gonna stand a good goddamn chance.”

“Sing it, Charlie!!” chorused Lew, swigging his Miller.

“Hear it now, 'cause Charlie know!” James's deep, rich baritone reverberated.

“Now there ain't a doubt in my mind that if y'all want to put seven up there on the scoreboard, there ain't one of them corn-fed tub o' shits in them red jerseys gonna stop you! You'll finish the season eight and two, which ain't bad, but you'll be the only little shits that put seven on them pussies! You let them shut you out, and they'll take a piece of you home with them that you ain't never gonna get back. This is a fork-in-the-road moment for all of you tinies. What you do here'll change your path moving forward for better or worse. Up ta each 'n' every one'a you. This is the moment that you got a lot more to lose than any of them fuckers. The crisis of them little shits taking home a piece'a you gonna give you access to the best parts of each one'a you, should you be willing to grab it. They fat right now with thirty-five on the board. This is y'all moment to make them think for a whole fuckin' year about seein' my Bears next season, and wonderin' if y'all gon' play next year like you played the last few seconds of this game. You make them afraid of the Bears they about to see next year, and put seven on those cocksuckers…or you get shut out, and spend the off-season missing a pretty important part of each one of you. You either want it, or you don't. But if you WANT IT, well I know that you all capable of sticking seven on those cocksuckers right here…and RIGHT NOW!!”

Every team member and Coach Gasconade had long since gone silent at Grandaddy's profanity, uncertain if it was okay to appreciate this tactic.

Then from the back of the huddle I heard a rumble, “Seven!”

I glanced back.

“Seven! On the cocksuckers!” Clatterbuck the freckled Bolshevik, with snot running out of his nose and mud everywhere, was yelling at the top of his lungs.

“Don't you never let me hear y'all yellin' like that when they's ladies in earshot, y'hear.” Grandaddy glowered. “Not ya momma, not ya sister, not ya girlfriend, 'cause you, Clatterbuck, you gon' have lotsa them, and one's gon' matter to you, so watch ya goddamn tongue.” Grandaddy looked long and hard at Clatterbuck.

Clatterbuck's eyes welled and his jaw dropped under the scalding reprimand of Grandaddy's Law. Then with a steely-eyed smirk, my Grandaddy roused the chorus of boys' voices. “Now, 'tween us men, Clatterbuck, and don't you fergit all them women waitin' fer ya in ya future, you tinies say all the cocksuckers you want, but only 'tween us men—'cause that some man talk right there. You ain't failures till you either quit, or you start blamin' somebody else. Now, you tell me right here and right now. Y'all gonna put seven on them cocksuckers?”

Bewildered, Clatterbuck's tears turned to joy, and slowly we all started chiming in, one by one, timid at first, with
seven
and
cocksuckers
, till we had going there a ripping chant. “SEVEN ON THE COCKSUCKERS!”

While the parents were getting over the shock of it, Trent, the quarterback, entered the huddle and issued the play.

“Okay, Mickey, it's you.…Thirty-eight pitchout on two, ready…break!”

“Wait,” I said.

“You don't
wait
me, shit head.” Trent was pissed, but I continued.

“Well…it's fourth down. If this is gonna be our last play of the year, let's do it like we do it in our backyards.”

“What the hell are you talking about, dork?” Firefly burst in.

“Shut up! Firefly!” Trent seemed to understand.

So I explained my plan. “I'll sweep around the end, same as usual, but if I'm gonna go down, let's have someone follow me close…that I can lateral back to.”

“We ain't got anybody else that's that fast,” Trent objected, and I countered.

“They don't have to be fast, it just has to be someone they can't tackle.”

“Yeah, well, who we got on the team that can't be tackled by one'a them huge fuckin' Red Devils?” asked Firefly incredulously, and he and the whole team looked at me like I was completely crazy.

“T. rex the fuckers, Firefly,” I whispered across the huddle.

“Holy shit, he's right,” exclaimed Trent.

And the team hollered, “Firefly, Firefly, they can't tackle a fuckin' T. rex!”

His eyes lit up with pride that we all thought he could do it.

“Okay, thirty-eight pitchout with a T. rex follow, on—?” Trent looked to me.

“On FOUR! We've never hiked on four,” I said.

“Okay…on four, READY…BREAK!”

As the team took to the line of scrimmage, everything seemed to slow down and all the sound around me came to a complete halt. I noticed the red Firebird parked in the adjacent field. Kevin was sitting on the roof as always, watching and grinning at me. Scrawny Clatterbuck, still feeling the power of yelling
cocksuckers
, drew my attention back to the game when he yelled in the face of his opposing lineman, a demonic thug twice Clatterbuck's size.

“Watch out for T. rex, you fuckin' tub of shit!” Clatterbuck screeched.

I looked out at the whole field, and into the faces of each player as the play was called, and Clatterbuck's opponent clearly had heard him, and was seething. A flag went up as Clatterbuck's opponent flattened him, and was drawn offside by our new “hut-four” snap call. Grandaddy smiled his dragon grin, exhaling a lungful of smoke. The next play's snap was called, and Trent pitched out to me as I swept around the eighth hole in between two defenders. I found myself running downfield along the sideline, occasionally looking left as defenders came into view until I outran them all. But one sole Red Devil defender had an angle on me. I kept on going, with widemouthed fans, parents, Mom and Dad yelling nothing, until I turned to see the defender right there. I stopped in my tracks, sending the defender flying right by, and spun completely around to find Firefly approaching fast, but still about ten yards behind. I looked at another looming defender approaching at light speed while I stood still. I waited until Firefly was finally close enough, and I lateraled the ball to him about a millisecond before I got hit, hard! As I went down, I could see Firefly continue to the end zone with two defenders on his back, his cleats churning up earth. Looking at them sideways as I fell, amidst all the sea of helmet grilles that crossed my field of vision, I recognized her. Jane. She was there. She had to be there. And she wasn't watching Firefly tear down the end zone. She kept her eyes on me…until it all went black. When I came to, I tracked the stands for her, but only my parents and James and Mamau and Grandaddy and Lew and a lot of litter remained.

“Sug, let's get you home for a hot shower,” murmured Mom, soft palm on my brow.

*  *  *

Jane,

I scored today. I saw you. I was Number 24.

*  *  *

I stole a stamp out of Mom's butcher-block drawer in the kitchen and walked over to The Dancing Mailbox on the corner of Bentliff and Sandpiper. Mailing letters to Jane at a made-up address was like throwing a ball into the stratosphere and waiting for it to come back down. My rationale was that if she was meant to get it, then grace would step in, and the postman would do the right thing and reroute it accordingly. I was hopeful. I never told anyone about my affection for this tempestuous creature. She moved me so much that I kept on going. I learned at an early age that there were seventeen important people in the universe, and that Jane was nine of them. She was more than half…just like my Grandaddy said.

O
ne, two, three, four, five, let's go!” There was that counting again. Something was always starting on the count of five. And it was something that I was growing accustomed to not being invited to.

I got dressed and picked up yesterday's clothes off the floor, uncovering four of my favorite 45s all stuck together with pink goo. My stomach recognized the substance on the records even before my brain could, and I immediately tried to keep my belly intact, but my sister's chewed, cigarette smoke–infused Bazooka bubble gum had undeniable power. I pinched my lips together as hard as I could and ran for the kitchen sink to remove the sticky glob from my records before her death smell claimed a win. I had my belly fully in control until I rounded the corner into the front hall and saw my mother speaking to the mailman at the front door. Victory was in sight if not for the bundle that the postman was handing to my mom. My heart withered as all the balls of hope I had thrown so high crashed down around me in the form of one brown-wrapped package of letters stamped
RETURN TO SENDER ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN
. I don't know if it was my hatred for that postman or my disgust at Lilyth's dirty “smoke” gum on my 45s, but I could no longer combat my belly's urge. I just made it to the kitchen sink as all of my stomach's contents left me.

“Sug, you okay?” I heard my mom yell.

I wiped my mouth, laid my gooped records down, and set out to face my hatred. By the time I got down the hall, Mom was wrapping up the conversation at the front door and holding the bundle. The bundle I did not want to see. The postman stared past Mom at me, foreboding like the Grim Reaper. My eyes widened in gnawing fear. It was too late for me to hide from the postman's inquisition.

“Sug! Sugar? Come say hello. The nice mailman returned eight letters to you that you have addressed to a…Jane. Sug?”

My brain imploded on my cottonmouth, and yet from the ether I mustered an answer.

“Oh yeah, we're doing a project thing at school, um…about the postal service.”

Mom smiled and handed me the bound letters. Before she closed the door, the postman waged a long, sharp look at me, as if a warning to me to convey that neither snow, nor heat, nor gloom of night, nor Lew Hoagie's rain could stay
this
courier from the swift completion of his appointed rounds. Nor even Jane. I stood in the hallway as Mom's words sloshed in my ears where my tears were hiding. The postman turned and disappeared.

“Your dad and I talked about it, and we decided that it's okay if you ride your bike to school, Sug. BUT, the first time I hear that you're late for class…” Mom kissed the top of my head as she dashed back to the kitchen. “Here's your lunch and a quarter. The mower gas tank is full, too. You all right, Sug? Lord, have mercy, what's in the sink?” I couldn't answer. “What happened to your records, Sug?”

“Lilyth,” I mustered, teetering back into the kitchen as the front door closed on the vanished postman.

“Oh, it's
fine
, Sug, Lilyth duddn't mean it bad. I'm sure it was an accident. She's a
nice
girl. It's fine. I'll wash 'em off for y'Sug.” Mom dried my eyes.

My mom was wrong. It wasn't
fine
and Lilyth wasn't
nice
.

*  *  *

I rode my bike to school, cataloguing all I wanted to tell Jane. My homeroom peers were rowdy, jumping around out of their seats, unsupervised because the new homeroom teacher hadn't arrived yet, and so I palmed a stamp from the teacher's desk where they were kept in the top-right drawer for writing to our congressman.

The smell of mothballs sent everyone to their seats. Mr. Totter, our principal, entered with a tall, exquisitely beautiful woman with long, wavy, brown-black hair.

“Lest you forget, children, the sooner y'all start acting like adults when no one is around, the sooner no one will need to be around to remind you that you're not adults.” The conundrum of the principal's cyclical reasoning was lost on us.

Smiling amiably, our pretty new homeroom teacher turned her attention to the principal, saying bemusedly, “Mr. Totter, well, if that's not the tree falling in the forest!” He grunted and she continued to smile patiently at him. “I can introduce myself to my new class, thank you.”

But Mr. Totter stood his ground.

“Okay, people, as you know, Miss Flinch has gone to teach at the new Quail Valley Elementary School. And this lovely young lady is your new homeroom teacher, whom I'm sure we will all grow to love. I've advised her that any misconduct should be directed to my office immediately, so that her transition will be as seamless as possible. Any questions?” No one in the class responded; they just stared at him. “Good, oh, and lest you've forgotten, tomorrow is Halloween so no one gets into class without a costume, but I don't want to see ONE piece of candy or gum, understood? Don't hesitate to send for me if you need to, Lola.” Mr. Totter's unctuous drone pattered to a close while the new lady thanked him and held the door open for him to leave already as he eyeballed her up and down.

I liked her
way
immediately. She was so familiar.

“Well, I will start off by apologizing for Mr. Totter's introduction of me. I usually don't go by ‘lovely young lady,' but by my name. Y'all are welcome to call me by my first or my last, whichever makes you feel more comfortable. You can call me Lola or Mrs. Bradford.”

*  *  *

After school, I skulked around waiting for Mrs. Bradford until she approached an orange '73 VW Vanagon, climbed in, and sputtered away. Then I pedaled my Sting-Ray as fast as I could, taking every shortcut, even the one past The Hole. I knew that if I was right, she had to make a stop before coming home, and if I was right, I knew where her home was. On Bentliff Street, I ditched my bike just as the orange VW Vanagon pulled into Jane's driveway, and Jane and Mrs. Bradford got out and went into the house. I had known for sure where that van was going before it got there. I knew it. Mrs. Bradford was Jane's mother. From then on, most of the things I learned about Jane came from her mother. Mrs. Bradford spoke of her daughter often, and because she went to the new school in Quail Valley, I was sure I was the only one in homeroom who knew who her daughter was.

Through the bushes, I watched the garage light come on and the door come up to reveal Jane placing paintbrushes in a jar of turpentine to soak off the pungent oil paints. She had a small canvas on her easel that was an entire field of green. The blades of grass in the foreground were defined with a tack-sharp clarity. And I wanted to play on a field like that someday—a field like Jane's.

“You need fresh air, Two,” said mother to daughter. “The fumes from those oil paints can't be good for you.”

“I guess, but there's just something about the smell of turpentine that I like,” Jane protested a bit too loudly with her headphones on, gazing at her partially completed canvas from her cinder block stool.

“Well, keep the door open so you get fresh air,” said Mrs. Bradford before heading back inside the house.

I loved those headphones because they muted my world just a little bit, and at the same time amplified the most beautiful being I had ever seen. I knew I had to go home so my mom could fit me for my Halloween costume, but I wanted every possible moment with Jane. Her closed garage door was the only thing that would send me away. I spent hours watching Jane create, and something always happened to me in her presence. Jane was drugs. And she could completely reorganize my chemistry from across the yard. When the door rolled down, I headed home.

*  *  *

I stood stock-still, quilled on a chair as Mom adjusted pins all over Speed Racer.

“Hold your scarf out of the way, darlin'!” instructed Mom, gritting through a mouthful of straight pins.

“Are we too poor to buy him a new costume?” asked Lilyth, chewing the Cocoa Pebbles she kept waving under my nose. “Last bowl, punk.” I tried to take a bite and Lilyth pulled it away, causing me to jerk and get stuck by pins.

“His new homeroom teacher hasn't seen this costume yet. Quit fidgeting, Sug.” Since last Halloween, I had outgrown the white pants and blue shirt, but Mom had hand-made my costume like she did all my other clothes—with enough seam allowance to give an extra size or two as I grew.

“Come over here, Lilyth, and help me pin your brother's pants.”

“No, she'll stick me!”

“Course she won't, Sug. She'll do no such thing.”

I recoiled. Yes, she would. I knew she would. To this day, I still have the scar from Lilyth's experimentation with tailor's shears on the thin skin of the inside of my elbow when I was two. When my parents found me bleeding from the fold in my arm and asked Lilyth what had happened, she simply replied, “I wanted to see if he'd bleed.”

“Lilyth, give your brother a bite.” Mom glowered at Lilyth.

Ignoring Lilyth, Steve McQueen sauntered into the kitchen with a half-chawed eight-track streaming tape and stared at Speed Racer on TV next to me.

“I hope that eight-track wuddn't a good one,” said Mom as she rigged up her old Singer sewing machine.

I grabbed the eight-track and chucked it on the table, relieved it wasn't Kevin's “Free Bird” I'd rescued from the driveway the day of The Plank.

“Hope it's good for something,” Mom added, looking up from the sewing machine.

It was.

I pulled the tape out in fourteen-inch lengths and cut them off. When I had a good bunch, I wrapped one end in Scotch tape, making a tassel. The smell of tuna casserole baking made my tummy rumble. Then my ears caught on fire as Mom started in again about Mrs. Bradford.

“Sug, your homeroom teacher called all the parents of her new students and gave me her number just in case. She said she lives on Sandpiper Drive, that's right directly behind us across the ditch out back. Or, at least she will for a few more months; they're having a house built in that new subdivision, Quail Valley, out on that new golf course. She said she has a daughter going to Quail Valley Elementary, about your age.”

“Hey, Mom, how long does it take to build a house?” I avoided her gaze and kept measuring lengths for the next eight-track tassel.

“Depends, Sug.” Mom smiled more to herself, because I was still not looking right at her, for good reason. “Mrs. Bradford said that they hoped to be in their new house by summer.”

“So, how far till summer?”

“About forty feet, ya retard.” Lilyth could be counted on to bludgeon my quest for knowledge. “It's probably right out back, ten feet down in that gorge of a
ce
ment drainage ditch. Why don't y'all go take a good long look'n' see if you cain't find it underneath a crawdad, you moron.”

“That's enough, Lilyth, y'all be kind to each other. Best friends forever, remember that, you two.” Mom repinned a section on my costume. “It's still October, Sug, and summer duddn't start till June…so about seven months.”

Dad came in with a pair of old flight goggles and handed them over to me proudly.

“Go, Speed! How about these for your Speed Racer costume? They're my old air force flight goggles, virtually fog resistant, except under the most severe weather conditions, but they look like the ones Speed wears on the show, don't they?”

“No, he wears a bubble shield, but these're even better, Dad.” I slid out of my iron maiden Speed Racer costume so Mom could have at it on her two-hundred-pound black machine. I noticed the first thing she did was stitch up the
Made with Love by Mom
tag in my collar that had been dangling by a thread since last year when Lilyth tried ripping it out.

“Seedlin', get out here!!” So, out I went.

My Grandaddy had been on the porch with a pencil and a single sheet of paper. I had wondered what he had been writing on it, and why it had taken him so long to fill up a single sheet. Maybe it was the dozen ponies at his feet that slowed him down, but I always knew that the lack of pace was almost always made up for by a willingness to hand over early an insight that I'd take with me for the rest of my life. He sat in his lawn chair right next to James's empty chair, whose webbing looked as if it had had a bowling ball dropped right through it. Grandaddy leaned way back in his chair to ease a hand into his right front pocket and extracted that single sheet that now looked like it had been folded and unfolded and pocketed and unpocketed about a hundred times.

“James's big ass broke the webbin' so you gotta stand, but this only take a second. Mo' ingredients go in the Boudin to feed my great-granbabbies. I wrote 'em down for ya. You gone have ya own, but these is mine, ta give ya idea what I'm talkin' 'bout. That list there is the most important peoples in my life. On the left is what they do. On the right…who do it. You need a goddamn gardener, I don't care, write it down. A momma for ya babies, write it down. Everything that you need for tha' good life that ya either ain't capable give to yaself or you don't wanna give to yaself. Next to it, ya gon' see tha name o' who I found ta git it from. Now, I got a big list there, but you see you Mamau's name next to th' majority of 'em…That why she a unicorn. That the qualifier for when you ready to wife-up…you don't quit lookin' till you find one that right. List all the important people in ya life on tha left…but ya wife need ta fill more than half of 'em 'fore you chapel her up, hear me, boy? Don't matter how many people on that list you got, so long as the one you plan ta wife-up more than half of 'em. Maybe one or two of them people gonna seem more important to ya early on, but know that some'a the least important peoples on ya list is gonna become tha most important later on. Plan for that shit. Don't neglect today, but plan to please the person you gonna be when you's old like ya Grandaddy. I plan that shit perfect with ya Mamau. Time's right, you gonna know. Any damn mirror'll show ya. Right one's gonna do somethin' with ya face. You gon' try, but cain't hide it. Now, you see that you's tha last one? That why I call these porch meetin's when everybody else inside. I pick you 'cause you ain't the kind ta ever have nobody do his gardenin' for him. I plant this shit in you 'cause I trust you gon' take care of tha sprouts and hand 'em down proper. I ain't gon' be around, so it gotta be someone I trust. Put this in the Boudin and feed it to my great-granbabbies. Now get t'hell inside'n' git t'bed fo' ya Mamau come holler.”

BOOK: Jane Two
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