If he could take it back, he would.
In retrospect, it was an inconsequential remark, but it pissed Troy off big-time.
Lots of punches get thrown in locker rooms. Lots of punches get thrown in locker rooms with minimal consequences. The coaches rant, but hands are reluctantly shaken and incidents are forgotten. This time, however, there was a dislocated jaw and permanent nerve damage.
No amount of anger management counseling could take back the punch that Troy wished he had never thrown.
No charges were filed, and nothing hit the papers about the star wide receiver's indiscretion, but the word got around. The NFL scouts never said anything, but that is the point. They said nothing. They stopped calling. The draft came and went.
"You had that one offer…" Barbara said, her voice shaking a little.
"The CFL?" Troy replied as though his mother had just cursed at him. The goddamn CFL?"
The Saskatchewan Roughriders of the Canadian Football League called, but Troy refused even to consider the humiliation of playing in a second-tier league.
"So you're too good for Canada, and you go out and throw your life away by goin' into the military?" Carl said disgustedly.
Troy almost reminded his father that he himself had once made this same life choice over his father's objections. Once Carl had made the decision to become part of the toughest of the tough and join the Marines, there was nothing that his father could say.
Troy almost mentioned this, but he knew that it need not be said.
"Why don't you just get a regular job?" Carl asked.
"It's the Air Force, Dad. It's Officer Training School. It's not like I'm joining the Army to be cannon fodder somewhere. This is something that when I get out, y'know, my job prospects are a whole lot better after being an officer… you know that… you always say that the best hires you've ever made were former officers."
"Yeah, I know," Carl said reluctantly.
The whole family just stood in silence. The venting was over. There was nothing more that could be said.
Chapter 2
"Maybe we should just… y'know… get married," Troy Loensch suggested.
"That was the lamest proposal I could ever imagine!" Cassie Kilmer said with mock disgust that hid the real disappointment.
It was a warm Southern California afternoon, and neither of them had any classes. Cassie had suggested that they just go take a long drive down the coast and jump into the surf for a while.
"We've been talking about it since before—" Troy began.
"We've been talking about it since before you decided that you were going to take off and leave me for four years." Cassie laughed, finishing his sentence.
"You're the only one who supported my decision at all."
"I supported your decision, big guy, because I thought it was the right thing for you at this point in your life."
"So, does that mean you don't wanna get married?"
"No, it just means that I don't wanna get married before you go off for four years to fly jets or whatever you do in the Air Force."
"I thought you've been saying that you thought this was the right thing for me to do with my life?"
"Yeah," Cassie said. "I think it's the right thing for you to do at this place in your life, but it isn't the right thing for our lives… right now."
Cassie and Troy were at a crossroads in their intertwined lives. In a matter of weeks, they would both graduate from UCLA and step into a distinctly different phase in which their lives would no longer be intertwined. They had long since considered themselves a couple, and with that, there had been a comfortableness and talk of commitment, of permanence and of marriage. Yet, as much as these things were a topic of many conversations, they remained just that. Each knew that with graduation, their lives would change, and both of them wondered whether there would be a place in those changed lives for the comfortableness they had enjoyed, and the permanence they had once craved.
"Does that mean…?" Troy asked as he stopped at a red light, pushed up his sunglasses, and looked at Cassie.
"That you wanna, y'know… does this mean you wanna break up?"
"No, big guy, I don't wanna break up with you… It's just that I want to marry a guy and be with a guy…. I want to not have you gone or out of town for the first four years I'm married to you. We talked about getting married when we both thought you'd sign with some franchise or other… y'know… and we'd be together somewhere."
"Lotsa guys in the Air Force are married—"
"I sure as hell don't wanna be living in some barracks somewhere."
"We shoulda talked about this before you talked me into joining up."
"I didn't talk you into joining up," Cassie said crossly. "You talked you into it. You wanted to have some purpose in life, some big way for you to shine like the star you've always been… I just agreed with you."
Troy pulled the car into the parking lot at Huntington State Beach, and they both got out. He looked at Cassie as she took off her sunglasses and marveled at the way her tan torso slithered out of her T-shirt.
"What are you staring at, big guy," Cassie asked as Troy admired her body in the skimpy, coral-colored two-piece. Even after knowing her for nearly three years and sleeping with her for almost as long, he just couldn't keep his eyes off that body.
"You're really awesome." He smiled.
"Don't you forget it, big guy." She winked, playfully snapping at him with her beach towel.
She allowed him to grab her and relished the feel of those wide receiver arms as he wide-received her.
As she rewarded his bear hug with a wet and passionate kiss, she thought about how much she would miss him. She resented not having tried harder to talk him out of joining the Air Force, but she realized that it would have been impossible. She knew, as he did, that it was a decision toward which the momentum of his life had propelled him. She also admitted to herself that it was something that could not be altered without a change in his essence that neither of them could accept.
She wondered — as she imagined that he was wondering too — how the relationship they shared would look as it emerged from those four years.
She gently touched his cheek and saw him start to relax. For now, though, there was only now.
Chapter 3
Lieutenant Troy Loensch was in the middle of the wilderness, seventy miles north of Spokane, Washington, and running for his life.
Over the dozen months since he'd put his future with Cassie Kilmer on hold, his life had gone through so many twists and turns that he found it hard to remember the long-ago simpler days.
Not that he had time to think about it. At the moment, there was no opportunity for reflection. Troy was on a slippery mountainside with a sprained wrist, a complaining companion, and an unknown number of bad guys on his trail. He was wet, cold, and hungry. During four years of football, his body had been tested and he had triumphed. But out here, there were no time-outs, no locker room, no ice chests full of Gatorade, and no steak dinner at the end of a couple of hours of exertion.
"Man, this is awful," grumbled Lieutenant Halbert Coughlin as he stumbled up the hillside. "How far you suppose we've come?"
Walking up a forty percent grade on wet rock and mud was bad enough, but with the tangle of brush, half the time you couldn't see where you were stepping. It seemed like there was as much slipping and falling as stepping.
"Not far enough," Troy replied. "We gotta make the top of the ridge before dark."
"Shit, man," Coughlin replied, looking up the slope. "I don't see how…"
"We made it this far, Hal," Troy said, taking a deep breath and looking back into the spruce-choked chasm from which they had been climbing all day. "At least it's not a hot day."