Forfeit

Here’s another short bit of fiction based on writing prompts from Jolene Rice. They are the following four items with the only rule being that you cannot kill off your main character

1. attacked by squirrels
2. what nobody wants to talk about
3. mascot for a professional team
4. animal psychic

Apologies offered in advance.

I do lost cats, mostly. Colic in horses if the vet’s backed up. Twice a year somebody’s parrot stops talking and I sit with it for an hour and tell the family what they already know, which is that the parrot wishes they would ask for more than “Polly wants a cracker.” One, in particular, had a secret habit of shouting “Fucking hell!” whenever the house was empty, it told me. Practiced it all day long, most days, by his reckoning.

So I want it understood that when I say I could feel a storm brewing, I am not claiming anything grand. I felt it the way you feel rain in a bad knee.

I mentioned something about my special skills in September at the church breakfast and Delilah Candlewick said, mmm-hmm, and passed me the creamer, and that was the last time anyone in Pell Creek let me say more than two words about the matter. They sure called me up quick, though, when Thomas O’Malley the Alley Cat got stuck in the tree. He weren’t stuck so much as tired of Little Lucy putting him in a dress and making him sit for tea — or that is at least what he told me. You cannot always trust an alley cat.

By the Dunmore game there was a pressure building behind my back teeth. I could feel it for miles.

❧

The Centurions came off the bus laughing. You could hear them from the top of the bleachers, that traveling-team laugh, and the first thing out of every one of their mouths was the name.

“Fighting Squirrels?“

“It was Sturgeon,” somebody’s uncle said, three rows down, and then didn’t say anything else, and the Dunmore folks waited for the rest of it the way you wait for the second shoe.

There is no second shoe. That is the whole civic arrangement.

They kept finding things and not being told. The concession stand hasn’t sold anything in a shell since 2019 and the hand-lettered sign says NO NUTS — ALLERGY POLICY, which is a lie so small and so load-bearing that I have come to admire it. The medical tent at the north end is forty feet long for a semipro football club that has never had more than one injury in a game. There’s a line on the back of the program, under the sponsors, that reads: Per league bylaw 14(c), suspension of play at the discretion of grounds staff is not subject to protest.

Nobody has ever asked what 14(c) is for. Well… that’s not exactly accurate. People have asked. Nobody has ever been answered, which in Pell Creek is the same as not asking.

And Ray Hollenbeck, who has ref’d here going on eleven years, does not look at the treeline. Not once. He turns his whole body to keep from doing it, like a man with a bad neck.

❧

Leonidas T. Squirrel came out at the top of the second quarter, which is late, because he’s forty-one years old and that suit weighs what it weighs and smells like a brewery. Don’t reckon anyone bothers wondering much about the why of that.

He is a giant squirrel, as I expect the name suggested. Chestnut, matted at the elbows. But the head still wears the sturgeon — the whole gray snout of it, shovel-flat, riding out over the squirrel’s face like a visor, four rubber barbels hung underneath on wire so they swing when he turns; and the row of bony scutes runs down his spine from the collar to about the small of his back, where it quits, because that is where the tail starts and the tail was not negotiable. He is the compromise made visible. Half the town voted to keep the fish. The other half wanted a name that would explain itself. Nobody voted for this.

The Dunmore side took pictures of him for a solid two minutes.

Around the middle of the fourth he stopped doing the cannon dance and went to the north sideline and started waving. Both arms. Big, slow, over the head — the signal you make at a boat. He kept it up for a while. Somebody in the Centurion section shouted that the squirrel wanted a beer, and that got a laugh, and Leonidas went on waving until his arms came down, which I understood, because the suit weighs what it weighs.

They weren’t wrong about the mascot wanting a beer. That suit gets hot too. And, well, the occupant being the drinker he was when he thought no one was looking.

❧

41–6.

That was the score with 2:14 on it, and the clock operator had already put his coat on.

Coach Petrakis walked out to midfield to shake, which is early, but Dunmore had their fourth string in and there was nothing left to be polite about. Our man, Coach Uhl, met him at the fifty.

I was close enough to hear it because I always sit low, on the aisle, on account of the seat cushion.

“Save yourself the embarrassment,” Petrakis said. “Forfeit. I’ll sign it, you go home, everybody eats dinner warm.” He was grinning. He had one hand out and the other on Uhl’s shoulder. It was not cruelty. It was worse than that; it was the friendliness of a man who has never once been outnumbered.

Uhl didn’t say anything for a second.

And the pressure behind my teeth let go all at once, the way a jar lid goes, and every squirrel inside a mile turned at the same time and pointed the same direction, and it was not at the field, it was at the fifty-yard line, it was at him, and it was not fear, it had never been fear, it was somebody’s arm being raised.

Uhl turned his head. His eyes were doing something eyes don’t normally do — all steel and sharp things.

“Oh,” I said, out loud, to nobody. “That’s what I’ve been feeling.”

Folks generally ignored me, like they always did. Except for a few who sat up in the bleachers and looked over at the squirrels, pretending like they was ignoring me.

“No,” Uhl said. “If anyone’s going to forfeit, it’ll be you.”

Petrakis laughed. He actually put his hands on his knees. “I’ll do what now?” he asked between sucking in breaths between guffaws.

Uhl waited for him to finish. Then he said, “You were given a chance.” He turned away and walked towards the sidelines.

The treeline came apart.

It doesn’t look like water, whatever people say. It looks like the ground deciding. It came off the north berm in one motion and the sound arrived a half-second behind it, and Ray Hollenbeck, who had not looked at the trees all night, looked at the trees.

What I want on the record is the order things happened in.

Nobody screamed. At first. A man in a Dunmore polo opened the rulebook. He got as far as the index. Second, the PA announcer said, in the voice he uses for lost children, that per league bylaw 14(c) fans should proceed calmly to the vehicles. Third, the clock operator stopped the clock, which I thought was very good work.

And out at the fifty, Petrakis was making the forfeit signal.

He was doing it wrong. It’s a small motion, palms crossing down at the waist, and he was doing it big and over his head, both arms, slow, the way you’d wave at a boat, and he kept on doing it after he went under.

Ray blew the whistle and accepted it.