“No.” Rick clasped his hands. His knees rose and fell like he was keeping time. “If you’re hurting her, it sure is. If you’re taking pictures, filming, doing shitty things to her…” He rubbed the stubble on his chin, his hand looking powerful.
“It ain’t anything she don’t want,” said Beaufort, genuinely confused. “She’s got no objections.”
“Not sure I believe that.”
They stared at each other. Bill wondered what he’d let himself get pulled into. It was only now, stoned eyes wandering the room because this scene was so uncomfortable, that he spotted amid the clutter of the coffee table a wicked knife resting on, of all things, a Guns & Ammo. The knife looked like something a Klingon would carry, curved and jagged with a mean black grip. He was sure Beaufort had picked it up when he heard the dogs barking.
Now the linebacker murmured a laugh. “That why you came out here? To play moral police with me and my girl? Sure this ain’t about your girl?”
Bill would always wonder what Beaufort meant by that, was never even sure if he heard the kid correctly, but Rick rolled over it too quickly.
“Nah,” he said. “It’s about what you’re doing to someone you got power on. And it’s over, man. You’re done. I’m telling you you’re going to break it off with her. You’re not going near her again.”
Beaufort leaned forward, amused. The dog tags he always wore dangled, two stiff, lazing flags. Bill saw how the ugliness would grow in his face when he aged: his wide nose, heavy brow, and thick, buttery lips. They looked firm and boyish right now but in a few years they’d go Mongoloid. By contrast, Rick looked brutishly heroic.
“You should ask me who gave me all the help popping that cherry, Boy Scout,” said Beaufort, a depravity in the hard contours of his jaw. “Doesn’t matter though. Season’s over. We ain’t teammates anymore.” He jerked a thumb toward Bill. “Take your faggot boyfriend and get out. Or me, Curt, and Strow can make Kaylyn our fuck pig instead.”
Bill stared at the grotesque beige of the carpet and saw chip crumbs. He knew he had to look up, and when he did Rick’s face was a haunted mask, maybe fear there, maybe panic, but certainly grim determination.
“It’s like I go to all these camps,” said Rick following a long pause. “And I see these black kids from the cities, and they’ve just got something in them that I don’t. It’s like they know this is it, this is what they’ve got to get themselves out of where they’re from, and if it doesn’t work out, they’re fucked. So when the moment comes, they don’t flinch. You can be big, you can be athletic, but when you’re running the ball, it’s all about that moment when you’re about to get crushed, and you can’t hesitate. You can’t think about your family or your friends or your home or your girl because then you’ll flinch and the guy coming at you will pop your fucking head off. I feel like I got so many reasons to flinch. So sometimes I do.”
His tricep twitched, and it sent a pulse through his whole arm.
“Now you got a reason to flinch, Todd. You break it off. Leave Tina alone. The other guys, they don’t go near her either. You delete all the pictures, all that shit you took of her. You do it by the end of this week. And if you don’t, I got a copy of that video. The first one you made. And if you think you’ll be able to hold on to your scholarship after I hand that over to my dad, the school board, her parents, everyone, then you’re even stupider than you look. You’ll never get outta here, you’ll never have a shot at the pros, you’ll never do fucking anything. You’ll grow old and fat and broke in this house with your mom, and that’ll be that. This ain’t a negotiation, man. This is me telling you how it is.”
Bill watched the cloud of doubt descend over Todd Beaufort, and it frightened him. He’d never seen the dark clarity of having another person’s fear in the palm of your hand. Rick stood. Bill’s eyes passed over the knife. He imagined Beaufort buying the dagger, trying to dream up what opportunity might allow him to stuff it between somebody’s ribs. He wondered if he should make a move for it.
“Brink.” Beaufort hadn’t moved from the couch. He sat draped onto it. Relaxed. “I ain’t spending another minute in New Canaan, man. You fuck this up for me, I won’t have a reason to do nothing but kill you.”
Rick stopped just long enough to shrug. “Alls I’m saying is do what I tell you, and we got no problem.” Then he popped open the door and Bill followed him out, glancing back at Beaufort one last time. What he saw there rearranged some things. As his cold blood mingled with the frigid winter air, he saw how much uncertainty this kid lived with. When Beaufort plowed into Bill in the hallway, it was because he was utterly without control over his own capacity to respond to his circumstances, getting played over and over again while believing fervently he had a grip on his own fate. He figured Beaufort would probably do what Rick asked. Then he would go to Columbus and get his head pounded to jelly for the NCAA, and when his body gave out, he’d wind up as a cog in some other machine. He’d live feeling only brief respites from confusion, and even these would pass quickly, like the gaps of sunlight in a massive anvil thundercloud.
On the drive back into town, out of the entombing darkness of the country, on their way to Harrington’s to be with their friends and lovers, he said to Rick, “The tape? You don’t have any tape.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t know that. And those guys made enough copies, he thinks I might.”
“What’s even on it?”
Rick shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.”
“What, so Todd Beaufort is suddenly going to see the light and behave himself? Treat his girlfriends and everyone else with empathy and respect? Fuck, Brinklan, you’ve got a worldview like an eight-year-old watching a bad action movie. Steven Seagal doesn’t really save young girls with karate.”
Rick chewed his tongue. “Someone had to give that guy some consequences.”
“Yeah, so he can get to college and do it to another five, seven, ten women. You probably just doomed some other poor moron to getting used by him. At least Tina Ross is dumb enough that she probably doesn’t even know the difference.”
“Man, what is it with you?” He snatched a hot, furious look at Bill.
“Keep your eyes on the road. This is like the deer holocaust strip.”
“You know…” He gritted his teeth, hissed through them. “Jesus, Ashcraft. You think you have all these friends and admirers, man, but that’s not what they are. You think you’re this charming, slick dude. People think you’re arrogant, man. They think you’re full of yourself. They all talk behind your back about how fucking phony and unpleasant and unhappy you are. They feel sorry for you, Bill. I guess that’s what makes it that much more disappointing. Because I am your friend. I stick up for you when people talk shit, man. This will always make me wonder about that. The fact that I asked you to try to do something halfway decent for a person you know and grew up with, and you kicked and screamed the whole friggin way. It’s cowardly.”
That was what really started their unwinding. That little speech on their drive back from Beaufort’s. Bill put it away, but he brought it back out. When he took Kaylyn to her grandma’s that March, for instance. Every time he needed to resurrect the unbridled, unhinged hatred he had for his friend, he just called up that moment and he had it in his grip again. He knew how you could grow resentment for a person over time, water it, care for it so that every word exchanged in every interaction—every glance even—could be loaded with this enmity.
He barely even remembered their final exchange the summer of ’03. It had been late July, maybe a month after he woke up at Rick’s with the diaper on. A huge group of guys from their senior class had been drinking at Mike Yoon’s house, and he and Rick had ended up jawing about the war, as usual. He had been so loaded he didn’t recall the lead-up, just that somehow it escalated. They’d been in the backyard, the woods looking as dark as a black hole fallen to Earth. For whatever reason, Rick had called him a coward, and this reminded him in a savage way of the year before, when he’d used the same word driving back from Beaufort’s. Then Bill was screaming—and sure, it might have been incoherent at the time, but if you dressed it up without the alcohol it would be something that hurt, something like: You’re the one who talks all his patriotic blood-and-honor bullshit and then goes to OSU to become a fucking math teacher. Go coach your high school football team someday, Brink. What a warrior! Yeah, Saddam and al-Qaeda are shaking in their boots at you. Talk about a fucking coward.