There were former cheerleaders and volleyball players and stars of the girls’ basketball team. One still held the record for points and assists, for three years using her ample rear end to back defenders down all the way to the basket. Some were loaded from a breakfast of Stoli and orange juice, a few kept watch for estranged children they saw only at public gatherings, and one twisted a cheek-shredding ring on his finger: it depicted the archangel Michael, commander of the Army of God, blowing his horn and leading a battalion of angels into battle, all crammed into the hard gray metal of this one enormous ring. Some dreamed of making a home in California or vanishing down southern highways or pointing a finger at a map and lighting out for wherever the digit landed, while others lived on the beneficence of an SSDI check. Many were at the cellar floor of the country’s economic ladder.
A few, who’d grown up playing among the wreckage of salvage cars on a family property known as Fallen Farms, cooked methamphetamines and sold pills at a markup. They shot at bottles and old engine blocks and the kick of the weapons would dispel ancient anxieties for seconds at a time. Some made money hocking stolen merch on craigslist, laptops practically attached to their hips. Others posted to Internet message boards about the coming invasion of babies from lesser civilizations and white people’s last chance to turn the tide.
Many came home to find an orange Sherriff’s Notice on their door. These were the days of foreclosures and evictions from one end of the county to the other. Some of the homes the banks took had the usual roaches and water stains but many had skylights and plasma TVs. They left value behind: gas grills, furniture, jewelry, vinyl albums, Beanie Babies, plaques with framed prayers, frozen steaks, the entire Bible on a set of CDs, bikes, and one eccentric left thirty-odd ducks penned in beside a small backyard pond. Some people just vanished, whole families blinked out of existence like the Rapture. Some moved in with parents, siblings, or friends, some into motel rooms and cars. Others had to be chased out of the city park or the Walmart lot. Marty Brinklan would tell you why serving an eviction was his most hated responsibility: how hurt and angry and truly terrified a man or woman who lost a home could be. One old man, widowed, well past his working years, had fallen into Marty’s arms in tears, no dignity left, begging him not to do this because he had nowhere to go. Marty would see that guy everywhere now, trucking around his worldly possessions in a shopping bag that said BIG SALE on the side.
A few in attendance saw something gravely wrong with the whole scene, while others twirled those small flags in cold, chapped hands and felt paroxysms of pride and ownership and faith. A ceremony for a fallen soldier was an opportunity to decorate and reinvent the town as its residents wished it to be. Cradled in the state’s northeast quadrant, equidistant from the cities of Cleveland and Columbus, one could envision her home as an imaginative space, a specific notion of a white-picket-fenced (and let’s face it, white-skinned) Ohio. Far from the redlined black neighborhoods in Akron or Toledo or Cincinnati or Dayton, distant from the backwoods vein of Appalachia running along the borderlands of Kentucky and West Virginia, most of the parade’s attendees clung to a notion of what their town was, what values it embodied, what hopes it carved out, though by 2007 its once-largest employers, a steel tube plant and two plate glass manufacturers, were over twenty years gone and most of the county’s small farms had been gobbled up by Smithfield, Syngenta, Tyson, and Archer Daniels Midland. Many of those residents who had not been born in this country but who’d made their way from Kuala Lumpur or Jordan or Delhi or Honduras waved those flags the hardest when the casket went by.
Nothing spoke to this imagined homeland quite like the 2001 football team. Led by Rick’s fearsome running game, a reliable quarterback, and the merciless hits of one particular linebacker who everyone thought would make it to the NFL, it was New Canaan’s first team ever ranked in the state. In a community of roughly fifteen thousand, the high school always held on to its D-1 designation by a thread, but as Coach often pointed out to boosters, no one moved there. The athletes all came from the same pool of peewee football kiddos, and if a couple weak years went by where the teens were more into skateboarding, you were screwed.
Most of the famed team was there that day, except the reliable quarterback, who’d died of a heroin overdose half a year earlier. He simply cooked up too much, shot it into his knee pit on the stoop of his stepfather’s trailer, and that was the ball game. One minute he was admiring icicle-mimicking strings of Christmas lights, the next, he slumped into a puddle, face smacking its mirror image. As the casket passed them by, many remembered how Rick and the quarterback used to wrestle in the locker room before games to get hyped. Pure horseplay, but they would slam each other violently into lockers. Slick with anxious sweat, wearing nothing but a jockstrap, his ass like two flower bulbs spilling out of white elastic, Rick would grapple with the QB until their skin was pink from meat slapping meat, the cheers and hoots of their teammates egging them on. Then they’d all strap their pads tight, punch lockers, smack helmets, and storm across the parking lot to the field. They’d fought as brothers to earn the enormous plaque that still graced the glass display case at the entrance of the high school, yet few of them had the skill or the grades to make it to the next level. Eighteen years old and no more Friday nights under stadium lights, pep rallies, bonfires, or freshman girlfriends. No more dances, forum shows, homecomings, or raucous trips to Vicky’s Diner, slinging fries at each other across the booths. Now they worked at Cattawa Construction, at Jiffy Lube, as line cooks at Taco Bell, as real estate brokers. They spent paychecks quickly, smacked pool balls or blew raspberries on their babies’ bellies. They recounted long-ago football games, which seemed to produce hard evidence that they’d once been something. Many suffered from lovely high-gloss dreams where they were back on the field. A few lived with constant sub-audible guilt about what they’d gotten up to with the girl they called Nasty Tina.
Rick’s short life had intersected with a great many people in this place, partly due to his father’s status in the police department and the salon his mother owned, but his family went back generations in New Canaan. His mother could trace her ancestry all the way back to the first settlers who’d come to farm land grants after the Revolutionary War. One great-grandfather had emigrated from Bavaria, and he and his people brought with them glass-cutting skills that would eventually become Chattanooga Glass. Another great-grandfather made a living as a canal worker in Coshocton County, moving timber through the locks. Rick had farmers and bankers in his lineage, factory workers at Cooper-Bessemer, which eventually became Rolls-Royce. The parade-goers knew Rick from when he and his friends were just little ones, hellions around town, always running off to play with grape jelly still smeared on their faces. They’d watched him grow up. They’d watched him crash through defensive lines. They’d watched him play a sexy Amish farmer in the senior skit. Five young women could call Rick their first kiss. One had been paired with him for Seven Minutes in Heaven, and in the closet he’d drooled all over her chin and grabbed a handful of everything there was to grab. Another got so keyed up after kissing him beneath the bleachers at an eighth-grade basketball game that it was all she thought about for the next month.
Many were hungover from toasting Rick in the Lincoln Lounge the night before. Over cheap beer and well drinks, they shared classic stories, brave recollections, and dark musings. The rumors, the gossip, the urban legends ran wild. New Canaan had a curse, their peers decided. Their generation, the classes of the first five years of the infant millennium, they were all stepping through life with a piano suspended above them and bull’s-eyes on the crowns of their skulls. This was different from (but probably a companion to) the garbled small-town myth known as “The Murder That Never Was.” Whoever came up with that particular phrase wasn’t much with grammar, but it stuck nevertheless, debated and ruminated in bars, salons, and diners, sometimes whispered, sometimes not—particularly that night when the speculation was belted out across the dim pall of the Lincoln. The Murder That Never Was held that there was someone who went missing or not, who died accidentally or not, who was gruesomely murdered or not, who faked his own death or not, who made off with a heist or not, who burned rubber out of town laughing like a demon or not. Now in the light of day, in the queasy suffocation and sluggish eternity of a hangover, how silly that all sounded.