Pilgrims Upon the Earth Read online

  Terry could kick, but not much past. He didn’t have the head for seeing far into the game. He couldn’t conjure how things might shape on one end of the grass while play was at the other. He thought there was a fury in him, but he didn’t have the body to dole it. He was not swift.

  A group of players sat on the shoulder of the field closest to his car, and a few were on the far side and ran the chalk line, the kicked dirt and broken grass, clouds at their feet.

  He sat one end of the row and faced the field. The coach came from behind them. For a few minutes he spoke on teamwork, and patience, and the stone necessity of drills. He smoked three cigarettes while he paced a short line in front of them. He dropped them, and they kept smoking in the grass. Terry liked people who smoked. The kids on the team wore old softball league shirts with sponsor names like Pointed Lumber or Haven Florist pasted on front, block numbers at the back; most wore cleats ground to nubs. Terry’s cleats were the same, one size too big, quarter holes on the heels. He wore a mail order gray sweatshirt with a picture of a cat from a popular comic strip printed on the front. The cat was orange, boggle eyed, and lived in the nation’s capital, near the white dome where the actor president lived and slicked his coal black hair. The cat was fond of snorting at a pile of cocaine, and liked to pal around with a penguin that was very short and responsible. The penguin wore a top hat, and carried a cane, and sometimes he thought to find a friend like that penguin; clear eyes, steady hands. The coach was small, and he wore a thick dark beard. The school’s mascot was a bear who smiled with big square teeth, and wore a navy and white beanie. The bear’s face was stitched into the front pocket of the coach’s white shirt. He cocked his head to the ones running, the front three near the southwest corner of the practice field.

  Just because you don’t get into some game and run around yelling and spitting like bulldogs.

  The runners passed at his back. The coach didn’t turn, but kept his face to the players sat in front of him. He sauntered, light folded around his head.

  Unless all of you are here, and want to be, do your damn best, or we can’t move.

  Terry thought him a lover of animals; wished to ask if it were true.

  The coach split them into pairs. He pointed at Terry, and then he pointed to a dirty looking kid on his left. The players spread out to the field and kept a distance from each other. He followed the dirty looking one to a spot near the middle of the west end.

  You’re new.

  Looks that way

  Terry didn’t know what else to say. The kid’s hair was almost orange, long and thin, hairline a bent elbow. His face was patched red, head too big for his hunched shoulders.

  How long you been here?

  A few days.

  You got a car?

  Yeah.

  I just got one. It’s got a good engine.

  When the ball got close Terry put one cleat on top, held, and kicked it back.

  What’s yours like? the dirty kid said.

  My car?

  The engine.

  I think it’s good. There’s an eight cylinder.

  Bullshit.

  Yeah.

  Sonofabitch. That’s a fucking tiger, man.

  Alright.

  A good engine’s important.

  Terry thought this might be true, but he wasn’t sure.

  Does it drive good?

  I think so.

  What does the speedometer go to?

  He hadn’t looked enough times to remember, and didn’t like so many questions about cars, either. To get an answer, he thought of other cars, numbers buried in their dashes; the blue hatchback; Alice Washington’s gray station wagon; police cars; an ambulance. He thought to say eighty, but it seemed low.

  A hundred I think.

  Mine goes up to one forty That’s just what the numbers say, I mean. It’s probably more like one sixty My dad told me he flipped it back to zero.

  What?

  All the way around, like past one eighty.

  The dirty kid stopped talking, and they kicked the ball between them in slow straight lines.

  After drills there was scrimmage. The field was marked holes, grass trod a patchwork. Terry’s head had not yet cleared; the coach put him at defender with the second team. He stood around and waited for things to happen, dumb and stoned, loud voices on the field; a forward ran through him full speed and knocked him flat on the dirt; the air got colder.

  The goalkeeper, tall, with what looked white hair, reminded Terry of a scarecrow, and kept screaming at him.

  Fucking play, he said.

  Terry glared at him, straight and hard, and shook a hand that way.

  I hear you jackass.

  The second time someone knocked him over, the force of the tackle stretched his ribs and yanked his head back. Terry felt lifted from the earth; flyblown, and tossed down. On the grass he couldn’t remember a moment between his words with the goalkeeper and someone planting a shoulder to his back; coach yelled for him to get off the field and sit. His knee was bleeding, dirt on his face.

  The dirty kid was sat down, too, eyes pinched. He scowled and seemed to ponder something difficult, kept his head straight a moment, then looked down. He pulled up a small twist of grass and put it to his mouth, crammed it with two fingers at one cheek, closed his mouth and chewed slow, a cow gnashing new cud.

  Where did you get that beard, anyway?

  Terry put a hand to his chin and then both cheeks. It didn’t feel much like a beard, gaps on his jaw and at the sides, whiskers poked straight, steel wool. One morning he left for school and his father said there’s a cat I know that will lick that dirt off your face if you put some milk on it; he stayed at his newspaper and laughed but did not look up.

  There’s not much of a beard, Terry said.

  It is. You should be happy I had a Cherokee for a grandmother. I’ll never get one, not like that.

  Terry didn’t understand. He stayed quiet.

  They pulled the hair out of their faces for some reason. Cherokees did.

  What’s that grass taste like?

  Grass.

  He had a pinch left in one hand, and held it to Terry

  You can have it if you want.

  Terry looked at the same grass beneath his knees and everywhere else.

  I’ll get some later maybe.

  The dirty kid threw down the ends.

  It’s for my stomach anyway, not the taste. It helps with digestion, the fiber.

  He spit the mouthful and winced, pulled another bunch and jabbed it the same cheek.

  I learned it from a dog, he said.

  The dirty kid snorted, hawked deep at his throat and spit.

  TERRY STOOD by the drink machines at lunch the next day, and the next after that, and two weeks after that; pictures on the drink machines lit from inside, large sweating red aluminum cans waist deep in ice. He thought a few times to unplug one of the drink machines, but couldn’t figure what good something like that could do other than hold warm drinks it wouldn’t even give out because it was dead with no electricity.

  When his name was called he raised a hand. A few times he said present, or here.

  In the halls after bells there were knapsacks, forest green, navy blue and black and gray, dull red, a rare orange or yellow, all moving toward lockers and other rooms and each other, and he was at front and at back and inside and everywhere at once within these stacked bags.

  Every so often these mountains burst open and cleared a hole in the center and someone got beat into bone meal. He saw two fights up close. The first left one kid holding a clump of red hair. In the other a short, pale girl, hair and eyeliner the same boot black, took a cheap hit from over her shoulder, but quickly she shook her head right, got the one who suckered her by the shirt front and tackled her hard against the block wall. The girl’s head made a dull sound when it slammed back and she fell down.

  AT PRACTICE he ran fast and kicked; during these weeks thought of maps, the distance between c
ertain places. He unfolded one at an end table and read the names, moved a finger at the road lines, the middle states between him and her sister.

  HIS FATHER turned up when he came through the front of the house. The light above him was bright and felt fluorescent; his father’s scalp slick pink beneath it.

  You’re dirty, he said.

  He bent again over the black and white print magazine on the table in front of him. He turned a page and looked back up, pointed at Terry’s knee busted red from practice.

  Knee’s broke.

  Terry nodded, dropped his bag at the kitchen floor.

  Is it the cap? Your patella?

  It’s just a grass burn.

  Terry looked at his hands, lines stood white in the red of the palms; he closed them hard to fists a few times. The blood went to the tips of his fingers.

  Those hurt?

  Not so much.

  He would not bathe, but ran water in the shower, anyway, because he liked the sound. He pissed at the drain and pulled the plastic curtain back when he finished. He took off the practice shorts and dropped them into a lump on the tile. He put on jeans, cupped water at his hands and rubbed his face. He took dope from an empty aspirin bottle in the medicine cabinet, dark, tight smoke he got from Curtis Rigby sometimes; it sparked and hissed when burned. He kept a small pipe John Michael Johnson sold him for a dollar inside the aspirin bottle, gold finished, shaped like a spark plug. He rolled it in one hand, metal cold against his skin. He opened the window and stuffed the bigger hole on the pipe, put the lid down on the toilet and sat there. He struck a lighter, bobbed it in front, pulled slow until the metal got hot on his lips and then he held the smoke until his eyes watered. He studied his knee; caked over, gone to scab. He pulled out pieces of grass left. The backyard outside the window was dark; on the north end of the roof, gutter rain fell through a floodlight. Small brown moths batted the windowsill. He blew smoke at some from the toilet, and one putted inside, drifted to the sconce over the medicine cabinet. The moth was thin, brittle, scrap tissue paper. He stood up, tapped the brushed glass covering the light. The moth flew out and landed on the white porcelain lip of the sink, fluttered terrible brown wings. He heard it thinking; not words, but something like the gray hiss wind put to trees when it blew hard. He put an index finger soft under one of the moth’s wings, and it stepped between the first and second knuckle, stayed there still for a moment.

  Benjamin Webber didn’t say a word when he came back to the kitchen and told him he was ready to go. Terry was high, beaten, sure the air moved at his father’s head and shoulders, sure he heard songbirds turned to smoke and crying inside the chimney.

  Terry watched houses squat and brick on the way to the church.

  What are you thinking about? his father said.

  Terry didn’t know how to answer. He didn’t want to talk; nothing came of words neither one knew the meaning of. The road fell beneath them. Terry put a hand on the door latch. The grass burn throbbed on his knee. He winced.

  Fuckall, he said.

  I feel a little sad, his father said. Not sure why, really.

  The tires caught another hole. Terry turned the radio louder. His father let it be for a moment, then twisted the knob back down.

  You mad?

  No.

  Did you use soap?

  What?

  In the shower before.

  Yes, I used soap.

  You don’t smell so good.

  Neither do you.

  Did you change clothes?

  Stop with those goddamn questions already

  Maybe wash them again.

  Both were quiet then for a few minutes, the streetlamps passed burn marks.

  You miss that girl, his father said.

  Some.

  Terry didn’t know how to miss her; she was there some weeks, for only a few moments. Sometimes he didn’t know if she was anything at all, but something maybe he came across during sleep.

  His father followed a house with his eyes when they passed.

  Every day when I went to school I walked by this river, he said. In the mornings it was green, bright green sometimes, like algae in a swamp.

  Terry scratched at his knee through the jeans.

  But then in the afternoon, when I came back along that same river, it was red.

  There’s no such thing as water like that.

  What do you know about it?

  I’m just saying.

  In all your fourteen years of fucking expertise.

  Almost sixteen, dammit.

  Terry scraped the grass burn on his knee with his fingernails, the throb gave to the scratch, and when he stopped it went back the other way.

  I know when your birthday is. Two months you’ll be sixteen.

  Benjamin Webber changed hands on the steering wheel, left to right, wrist settled above the finger grooves. He looked quick to the passenger seat, square chin banded in yellow streetlight, and then he turned back.

  Stop picking your goddamn knee, he said.

  It’s eight months anyway, not two, Terry said.

  I knew that.

  You didn’t.

  Terry leaned back, put a hand over his eyes and shut them. He pictured the pain in his knee, growing then, a red sun, and he focused on pushing the edges of it, shrinking it to nothing, but it stayed, and grew brighter.

  Goddammit.

  You’ve got a mouth like a damn pirate.

  Just stop man.

  I told you a valuable story

  Tell me what it means then.

  Maybe nothing. Or, you know, whatever you want. The fact that a river was one color in the morning and another in the afternoon? Sometimes the world goes against what you’ve got set in your mind, you know, the path you’ve laid out for things. See I was little. Second grade, maybe third. I didn’t understand downriver there was a factory spitting out dye every day at noon.

  Terry put his face to the window and the dark trees passing. He thought to speak, but did not.

  The church was brick and Episcopal, stained, glowing, named for a saint, or many saints, and he didn’t mind it then because it was quiet, and he was high, and there was a great deal of color.

  He sat with his father in a pew near the back, listened to the priest and long prayers everyone stood up to say. Terry couldn’t understand any of it; communion of saints, resurrection of the body, right hand of God the father almighty, the quick and the dead and all that. He read the origins of songs from the list in the back of a hymnal; Danish, Korean, Welsh. He scribbled on the bulletin with a pencil from a slot on back of the pew, and then he wrote fake names on small cards used to request membership, general information, or a pastoral visit; Copernicus Donleavy, Roscoe Barakas.

  The priest spoke low and even up front, palmed a small brass bowl. He said the ashes filled inside were made from burnt greens used at Christmas to decorate the sanctuary during advent; the big tree and the smaller ones, wreaths tied with wire and ribbon at the doors and the altar rail. He faced the small table below the pulpit. The ones he named stood up from the pews and walked silent to the front; he gave one the heavy brass candlesticks, another one the cross, and then he folded the green veneer cloth from beneath all three like a flag and handed it over; at each one he said our lord is dying. These are his limbs, he said, this is his heart.

  He stood in line behind his father, watched his shoulders click beneath the white oxford dress shirt, one of two he owned, both of them old, full of starch and sweat, stained yellow at the neckline and on the chest. His face was newly shaved, hot water pink. Terry felt at his chin and cheeks, the sharp hair come in a little, wondered how the body knew when, how much, how to stop.

  The priest spoke of dust, and when they got to the front of the line he crossed their foreheads with ash; when they were back in the pews he said our lord has begun the long walk, the long cold walk, and he does it every year, our lord, every year he sees his death, and he dies anyway, and then he does it again forever.


  Benjamin Webber opened the front door, and Terry went inside. He rubbed his forehead and looked at his fingers. His father still had the lopsided and flaking cross above his eyes. He closed the door.

  You shouldn’t rub it off.

  Terry stopped in the hall and looked back at him.

  It’s dirt.

  It’s not. It’s not at all.

  ON A Tuesday the team ran one mile. During drills he kicked with the dirty looking kid.

  I’d like a cigarette, the dirty kid said.

  Terry kicked the ball flat and straight.

  I’d like a cigarette please.

  The dirty kid spoke to the air. He let the ball get past, turned on his left heel and took a step, and then he brought it in and kicked it back. He turned his face and looked at some of the others. The coach yelled at them while they kicked. Terry saw a scar on his forehead, a skinny, jagged white line moving from his left eyebrow to the opposite temple, glossed in the light. Terry figured with all the weeks gone by the kid had seen his hands.

  You can’t smoke here, the dirty kid said. You can smoke everywhere in Russia, hospitals, even. That’s the thing.

  Why don’t you go on and move then? Terry said.

  All I need is the money.

  The ball passed between them. By then Terry forgot anything he liked about the game. He had played a year some time back, quit, and none since, but on the sideline, during the second scrimmage in two days, he thought it was watching he liked, sitting crossleg on the sideline; calm grace in the ball’s movement over field, through air and light.

  Where did you come from, anyway? the dirty kid said.

  Issaqueena.

  That’s upstate?

  Three hours, a little more.

  I was born in Atlanta, near the baseball field, I think.

  I’ve never been there.

  There’s a building with a gold roof. The capitol, so they say

  Both were quiet a few moments, and then the dirty kid pointed at a tall gangly one who kicked a ways off, near the treeline. He bent down and set a ball carefully in place on the grass. He backed up a few feet, dropped his head, stepped quick and put his foot hard against the white and black checked rubber. The ball ran fast over the ground, popped at the ruts. The other one, ten feet off, gathered it in and held the ball still at his arches. The tall gangly kid bent down and picked something from the field. A ream of smoke came from his head. The other kid then sent the ball hopping back, came over and bent to the ground, same spot as the tall gangly one. After a few moments smoke came from his head, too. Both of them, Terry and the dirty kid, stared that way.