All Happy People, Pt.2

New fiction

The last segment both of this novella and of my All Happy People project. Hope you’ve been enjoying these. Lots more fiction to come over the next few months. This is just the end of this arc.

I didn’t realize— not during the writing, not during the endless editing and revising, not until this morning as I formatted this last section for publishing— how much I loved writing this one. Riding it where it went.

So I both really, truly hope you enjoy it. And simultaneously don’t care all that much, to be honest. My favorite state to be in when I publish something. My happy place.

If you haven’t read Pt.1, you should do that first. This one picks up right where that left off. Also, several of the characters here appear in the earlier All Happy novellas, which you can find by scrolling back to the earlier posts.

Just as a reminder, if you’re in the area, I’ll be reading from and signing Infinity Dreams, my latest novel-in-stories, at Village Books in Bellingham, WA on Saturday night.

And yes, as a reminder, I’m experimenting with making new posts free to everyone while encouraging anyone who can to subscribe and support the endeavor. Anything you can offer would be so much appreciated.

If you want an explanation of the cover photo, see Pt.1.

Alright, here goes…

ALL HAPPY PEOPLE, Pt.2

Isaac waited for the Huckleberrys. Jim, still muttering about not being King, strode right past, shaking his head. But Fin stopped by Isaac. He was still wearing his shirt, and plucked at the fabric now so that the stick figure in the wheelchair had a wrinkle-free path over whatever waterfall he was plunging.

“Are you going to swim in that?” Isaac asked.

Fin shrugged. “I made extras.”

So…yes, then? “It’s good to see you, Fin.”

“Also, does Stick really count as swimming?”

Which has what bearing, exactly, on whether to wear the shirt in the Jacuzzi?

Finally, Fin looked up. “Good to see you too, bro.”

From the showers, Jim yelled, “Fuck! Cold! You got hot water in your shower, King?”

Isaac shook his head. “Got to give it to your brother, Fin. He plays by his rules.”

“Well, they’re the rules.”

“Yes. Okay. Sure. But…”

Jim had scurried for the Jacuzzi by the time Issac and Fin reached the showers, but Gary lingered. He remained the only person Isaac had ever seen who obeyed the directive about wetting hair, too, before pool use. Twisting the nozzle under the nearest showerhead, Isaac stepped back, stuck a hand in the spray, and shuddered.

“Yep,” Fin said from behind him, and Isaac realized he had no plans—saw no need—for starting his own shower, which would have involved unfolding his arms and opening his clothed chest to the frigid air. He’d bolt through Isaac’s shower when Isaac was done, counting that as his rinse-down on his direct beeline to the pool.

“You okay, Fin?” Isaac heard himself ask, though even he wasn’t sure about what. The divorce? The end of his design career? Living with Jim again? He hadn’t intended to inquire, wasn’t sure they were close enough friends anymore for him to do so.

But Fin was too busy staring at the mist and shivering. “Is anybody, really?” he asked.

Isaac blinked. Cynical Fin?

“Some people, I think. Sometimes.”

“Are you?”

The answer came automatically, and was also true. It almost always had been, even when…or, not then, obviously, and not in the aftermaths, which lasted longer every time, especially for Reenie. Really, he and Reenie had been living in aftermath since they’d first started trying to get pregnant nine years ago.

Nine years.

But even so. Most days. More days than not, for no good reason except biology, certainly none he could explain…

“Mostly. I think I am, yeah.”

“Be better if I was King,” said Fin. With a yowl, he darted past Isaac, through spray that barely spritzed his neck and face, and straight out of the locker room. His t-shirt flapped on his back like a clipped wing.

With a sigh, Isaac stepped into the shower stream. By holding out his hand all this time, he’d convinced himself the water wasn’t actually that cold. He was wrong.

“Come, son,” said his father, appearing at the side of his stall.

“Yes, your Grace,” murmured Isaac. He shut off the water. Gary put a wet arm across his shoulders. It surprised Isaac how good that felt. How comforting it was to have his dad’s cold, thin, living skin against him.

Because he wasn’t as okay as he thought? Or because this whole year, since turning 40, he’d thought almost not at all about his own mortality, the way he’d been assured he would, but instead had brooded almost constantly about Gary’s? His mom’s, too, but especially Gary’s, for whatever reason.

“Everything all systems go?” Gary whispered.

Isaac drew away without meaning to. His father’s arm slid off, and Isaac had to resist the urge to grab it and put it back. The only real surprise, he decided, was that it was Gary who’d finally voiced the question, not Ruth. He should have sent a pre-emptive text to the whole group the moment he’d landed:

Taxiing to gate. Still pregnant.

“All hail!” boomed a new voice from the Jacuzzi. “Rise, you Huckleberrys.”

There was a yip—from Ruth, scrambling away from the edge of the whirlpool where she’d been dipping her feet—and a slosh of foaming water as both Huckleberrys and the Mess stood to face Gary. The Mess bowed, his chest hair seeming to spread on the surface of the pool like a raft he was inflating, the mop of newly graying curls on his head bobbing as he ducked them. He straightened, raised a mighty eyebrow through the water rilling down his face, and waggled it. Only the left one. In high school, that had been his proudest skill.

“Welcome, King. Happy birthday. Isaac, get in here. Welcome home!”

With a tap of his hand on his father’s back, Isaac stepped forward, his smile instantaneous. He’d had almost no direct contact with the Mess since the last time he’d been to Missoula. The Mess did not e-mail. The Mess did not text. The Mess liked postcards. The ones he sent—all Montana historical, mostly of mines, for some reason—always included a rating of the last postcard he’d received from Isaac. B- for condition and unerased $.49 price mark. B+ for amusing anecdote about Reenie backwards. 1/3rd grade bump for marrying Reenie in first place. A- for flapper-hats of the women in front photo. I want one.

As far as Isaac had heard—mostly from his mother, there wasn’t space in Mess missives for detailed explanations even if he’d had the inclination—the Mess’s path to divorce had been stranger, shorter, and sweeter than either Huckleberry’s.  He had also been on it since the day he’d married Shannon when she was 38 and new in town and drifting. He’d just published what he swore would be his one and only book, was finally finishing his long-delayed M.F.A. and M.A., and still spent his non-softball weekends touring Idaho and Alberta bars with his bluegrass band and joking about opening a meatball sub shop so he could eat free every night.

They’d all thought he was joking about writing just the one book. Especially Shannon.

Ruth fell in beside Isaac now. “What took you so long? You left me out here with the savages.”         

“I was long?”

“Are you done splashing?” Ruth snapped at all three guys in the Jacuzzi. “Can I come in now? It’s cold out here.”

“It’s warm in here,” said the Mess. “So our splashing would only make you warmer faster. Really, young Ruth, I’ve talked to you about your willful self-defeatism.”

Ruth’s twitch could have been shivering. Isaac didn’t think so and winced on her behalf. They were about to step into the Jacuzzi on either side of the step-railing when Gary called, “Halt. Hold it. Boys, stand again, please?”

“It’s warmer sitting,” Fin said.

“Your King commands,” said Gary.

When Isaac looked up, he was surprised to see a phone in his father’s hand, held sideways so he could snap the picture. His father always called Isaac and Reenie from his home landline, and texted so rarely that Isaac had all but forgotten he owned a cell.

“For Mom,” Gary said, as though reading his mind.

“He texts Mom?” Isaac muttered to Ruth.

“King says smile,” said Gary, and they all did. He held the phone further out in front of his face to check the image, then leaned over, mouthing autocorrect curses as he thumbed his message. A chilly wind swept down Mount Sentinel and across the pool deck, bringing Isaac an all-new disconcerting thought.

“Ruth,” he whispered. “How do you play Stick again? What are the rules?”

Immediately, she whispered back. “I remember how to play. But how do you score?”

“Sssh. Don’t panic. Someone will know.”

“Also, Isaac. Did someone bring the sticks? To Stick with?”

But those Isaac had already spotted: three brand new drugstore pool thermometers were spinning in the eddies of foam on the surface of the hot tub like dynamited fish. Poor little pool tools, destined to sacrifice their already brief thermometer lifespans for a few glorious, tumbling moments in the air. And just maybe one single, perfect…

“I remember,” Isaac said abruptly.

Ruth lowered herself into the Jacuzzi. His friends edged right and left to give her room on the underwater bench. They were her friends, too of course. In fact, if only because she’d stayed, they were probably more hers than his, now. But they’d been his first, in third or fourth grade, and so still felt like his, at least to him. To them, too, while he was here, he suspected. That magic trick again. Isaac stepped down into the heat.

Laying his phone atop beach towels someone had brought, Gary followed. The swim coach guy sidled by, barely glancing at the Jacuzzi, shaking his head. He did wave to Gary. Gary barely lifted a hand in return. Not his father’s typical answering gesture, to anyone. At least, not back in the days when Isaac had regularly seen his father around other people.

A long time ago, he realized, the deliciously too-hot foam sealing itself around his chest, encasing him. So much had happened around this campus lately with the scandals, the coverups, that devastating book. He’d asked his father about it, of course. His father rarely answered except to say, “It’s bad, Isaac.”

“Mess. How do you score, again?”

“You don’t score,” Jim Huckleberry said. “You Stick!” Grabbing the nearest thermometer by the thin end, he did a few ritual wrist flexes, then flipped the thermometer way too high in the air. Fin and Ruth flinched sideways. The thermometer reached its apex and somersaulted down, bellyflopping so flat on the surface that it barely even splashed, let alone submerged.

“Well, you don’t, apparently,” Fin said, and Jim shoved him.

“Let me refresh your memories,” said the Mess, snatching up another thermometer that disappeared into his hairy hand like krill into baleen. He did not practice or flex, nor did he fling. His toss proved surprisingly gentle, peaking barely above his head before arcing downward.

For a second, Isaac thought the Mess had actually done it, stuck a Stick on his first try in years. Unless he’d been practicing? Coming to Grizzly Pool on his own to do this for fun? That seemed much more Mess-like, especially post-divorce. Especially if he had company.

Like my dad?

The thermometer landed narrow end first, all right, vanishing momentarily below the surface. But it went in slanted, and it raised a splash.

“Meh,” said the Mess before Isaac could. “B minus.”

It was in the act of his first fling of the morning that Isaac remembered how they’d thought up this game, during some Summer Olympics summer. They’d been watching diving and arguing about what the judges were judging. Gary had wandered through the tv room and dropped a Garyism, minor if only because it was downright comprehensible:

It has a judge. It isn’t a sport.

So they’d devised a diving game minus judge, diving, and divers, but retaining what they’d decided was its essence, its only objectively measurable elements: height, straightness of drop, cleanness of entry. Most of all, absence of splash.

By now, Isaac and his friends had all taken a couple turns. The Mess kept coming closest. As usual, Ruth was by far the worst. She had in fact broken the first thermometer of the morning by accidentally banging it off the step railing. “Wow, on the way up, no less,” Jim pointed out, earning him a much harder shove from Ruth than he typically got from his brother. For the thousandth time, Isaac wondered how his sister could be so flexible, athletic, in the best shape of anyone here, and yet so consistently awful at games.

Only Gary hadn’t thrown. He’d just leaned against the wall of the Jacuzzi, entirely submerged except for his head, watching his children and his children’s friends fail to Stick.

“Dad?” Isaac murmured.

In one motion, Gary surged to his feet, swept a thermometer into his hand, and flung it high. The rest of them froze, gaping as the implement soared into the blue, seemed to tuck into itself as it turned over—like an actual diver, Isaac thought, folding into pike position—and then plunged straight down, right into the middle of the circle they’d formed. It not only raised no splash, it barely even slowed as it punctured the whirlpool’s surface and shot to the bottom.

“RIVER!” both Hucks shouted, and not just them. Gary shouted it, too.

“Wow,” said Ruth.

“Thuuup,” said the Mess, the sound remarkably close to the noise the thermometer had made as it hit. “Would have known that was a Stick with my eyes closed. Bravo, King.”

“All right, all right, one-nothing-nothing-nothing-nothing-nothing,” Jim said, grasping Gary’s thermometer as it bobbed back to the surface.

Gary, though, shook his head and retreated to the bench. “That’ll do her for me, sorry guys. Wisdom of age. You Stick first throw, you stop.”

For a moment, Isaac thought someone might protest. Actually, he thought he might protest, if only because he definitely didn’t want Stick to be over yet. He’d just gotten here, had been back less than an hour with his father and sister and friends, in this home that apparently really was still here for him. Like a coat in a closet, older, more raggedy, too small. But here.

Only Fin spoke, in the end, and all he said was, “River.”

Gary acknowledged the tribute with a royal nod.

Sometime in that next twenty or minutes or so, as the rest of them tossed thermometers and occasionally Stuck one, Isaac remembered the origin of River, too. His father had coined it himself (if it was a nickname), or started it himself (if it was a catchphrase). He’d shout it whenever he did something good during one of their games. Any of their games. What he meant—and he’d meant it at 34, 35, however old he’d been when the parents Huckleberry and Mess went back to adulting, leaving only Gary still playing with the kids, still welcomed by the kids, vaguely frowned upon by the other adults—was Old Man River. So Gary had decided he was that when he was at least five years younger than Isaac was now.

Had he had that same facial expression then? The Kingly one with only some of his smile in it?

After Stick and another Bernice’s break—Ruth had apparently bought out the toffee bar case—they got dressed again and went straight across the nearly deserted campus to University Center and up to the ping pong room. As a kid, Isaac had always expected that room to be crowded, and usually they did indeed have to wait a while before they could get the side-by-side-by-side tables necessary for MerryGoPong. But today there was hardly anyone on the second floor, and the ping pong room was not just dark but locked.

“Wow,” Isaac said to his father as they approached the door. “Budget cuts? Generational dwindling of interest?”

“Both,” Gary said, hands in the pocket of his windbreaker. “Also, I reserved the whole room.”

“You can reserve the ping pong room?”

“You can’t,” said Gary. He pulled a ring of keys that weren’t his from his pocket. “One of the very few perks for thirty-eight years of service. Also, they felt sorry for me.”

“For your birthday?” Fin asked.

“This birthday.” With a flourish, Gary pushed open the door and flicked on the lights.

Seventy, Isaac thought. Which, until the scandals hit, might not have signified anything to his father except an excuse to eat toffee bars and play Stick with his kids and his kids’ friends all day. Now, it signified the end of work. No one had forced him; it had been his choice.

My dad is seventy. And no longer works. Isaac and Reenie’s child would be barely out of college, assuming there was still such thing as affordable college, when Isaac retired. Assuming there was still such thing as retirement. And that he and Reenie actually got to the child part. Reflexively, his hand slipped again to his phone. It didn’t kick. In the perverse, upside-down days he now inhabited, that was the sign of life he constantly checked and prayed for.

MerryGoPong didn’t last long. Even before they started, the Mess eyed his paddle, stared at the three tables shoved together, watched Fin Huckleberry abruptly straighten into what Isaac finally realized was meant to be a tree pose—the toes of the lifted leg pointed forward and his hands atop his head, as though his body was a bottle he was trying to twist open—and muttered, “We really did this?”

“For hours,” Isaac muttered back. “Weekly.”

“Stick seems more sustainable. Less likely to be catastrophic.”

“From what I remember, you used to be good.”

“Isn’t that funny? That’s what I remember, too. About pretty much everything.”

In the end, the Mess didn’t even get a swing. Ruth, who had joined Team Huckleberry, banged her thigh into a table corner on her very first circuit, in the middle of the very first volley—which, remarkably, had actually lasted to that point, though Jim was slow out of his start and had to lunge halfway onto the middle table to return his ball before sprinting off to the side and around for his next go—and cried out, flinging her racket in the air and doubling over in pain. It was the way Fin looked up mid-sprint, letting Gary’s slow-motion lob bounce past him for a point, and then moved immediately to put a hand on Ruth’s back, that clued Isaac in at last.

“No,” he said, stopping dead. The Mess pummeled into him and drove him half off his feet. Gary caught and steadied him.

“Shit,” said the Mess. “Sorry. You stopped, idiot.”

“Cardinal sin,” said Gary, one hand still on Isaac’s shoulder. But he was looking where Isaac was.

Without the surprise, though, Isaac noted, feeling for the new bruise in the small of his back with his palm. “Oh, Ruth,” he heard himself murmur.

While Fin was still married? Afterward? Surely afterward. A second glance at his father provided the answer to that one.

“Fuck,” he said. “Really?”

The summer Isaac had left for good, when his sister was sixteen, Ruth had announced she was a lesbian. That would have been fine, Isaac was convinced, even for their instinctively conservative mother, if not for the thirty-one year-old forestry grad student with whom Ruth decided to explore the possibility. Gary eventually scared that woman away with a single phone call, endured an impressively sustained six months of silence from his daughter, and then, during the first post-truce conversation, told Ruth he wanted to be clear that he was fine with any legal liaison she decided to form.

Sometimes, Isaac thought it had become Ruth’s mission ever since to test her father’s resolve.

But most times, Isaac suspected Ruth was just lonely. And now she was thirty-seven, yoga-toned, witty, game, and still lonely, at least as far as he knew. Why did so many people avoid Ruth? How did even she seem to suspect—at sixteen, let alone now—that that might always be the case?

It was in the middle of forgiving her again—which, again, wasn’t his job or his business, just something he always found himself doing in his own head—that he remembered she’d slept with Jim Huckleberry, too. Before his marriage, at least, on the heels of some late-night brains-and-eggs gabfest at the Ox diner, when they’d both been drunk and not just lonely but hopeless.

“He’s surprisingly good at fucking,” Ruth had told him afterward, over Isaac’s fevered, strenuous objections. “Got a serious mouth.”

She saw him staring at her, now, recognized the look on his face. Straightening, she shook off Fin’s hand, then patted his elbow, which made both of them awkward. Fin turned toward the back wall as though searching it for something. Slowly, holding Isaac’s gaze, Ruth shrugged.

“Do over,” Jim announced. He was also staring, or possibly glaring, at Ruth. For a nauseating moment, Isaac wasn’t sure what he meant.

“What are you babbling about?” said the Mess. “No one made Fin stop. That’s our point. One-nothing.”

“Fin would have crushed that. You know it. I know it. If Ruth hadn’t…” He caught himself, but too late.

The Mess and Isaac grinned.

“Goddamn it,” Jim said.

“Walked right into it, Jimmy,” said Gary, shaking his head, and not without sympathy.

“Don’t say it. Please don’t say it.”

“Slammed into it harder than Ruth hit the table,” said Isaac.

“I’m begging you,” Jim said. But he bowed his head to the inevitable.

The Mess opened his mouth. But it was Ruth, laughing through pain tears, who delivered. Her cadence was practiced, perfect.

“Hand...position…”

“My gift to you, Gary,” Jim muttered. “Happy fucking birthday.”

“...would…”

The rest got drowned out by spontaneous applause that erupted from all of them. Gary had his eyes half-closed, his head tilted sideways again as he clapped. It had been a while, years maybe, since Isaac had seen his preternaturally buoyant father quite so at ease. He felt another surge of gratitude for his friends, who’d stayed friendly enough to give Isaac’s father the 70th birthday he deserved.

Because Gary hadn’t been so lucky with his own friends?

That thought got slapped away by the Mess clapping his shoulder. “Still the best sentence I’ve ever heard another human being utter in my presence.”

“A Garyism for the ages,” Jim acknowledged, crouching to hunt under adjacent tables for the ball.

“What game were we playing, again?” Ruth asked. She was still rubbing her leg and wincing.

That question, too, was part of the ritual. They never remembered. It didn’t matter. At some point on that epochal Saturday, Fin had been confronted with a choice, two ways to move a piece or flip a card. The right move combined with the right die roll would have won him the game. He made his move. The die roll would have been the winner for the other choice.

“Poop,” Fin had snarled (this was during one of his self-imposed no-profanity summers). “If I’d gone that way, it would have been game over.”

And Gary had scooped the dice from the board, patted Fin’s head, and said, “You can’t think that way, son. And it isn’t true. Hand position would have been different.”

As in, you wouldn’t have shaken the dice in just that way. Couldn’t have thrown them with just that weight, or might not have.

Of all people, Fin had been fastest to grasp the significance. While the rest of them leaned over to examine next moves, Fin had tilted back on his haunches and nodded solemnly. “The Word of Gary. I thank you.”         

“Hand position would have been different,” the Mess echoed now. “A maxim to live by if ever there was one.”

Ruth refused more MerryGoPong and retired to a bench near the door to rub her leg and poke at her phone for a while. Team Huckleberry tried continuing as a twosome, but within half a game, they’d started whacking balls at each other’s heads instead of winning rallies. In the end, everyone acquiesced to a round robin, one-table tournament. To his surprise, Isaac won. He’d never once beaten his father straight up at ping pong before. The sensation was strangely disappointing.

“Ruth. Boys,” Gary said as they stowed paddles on the hooks on the walls, dragged the tables back into their positions, and packed up. “Hold it again.” He waved them together around Ruth. In the picture Gary took and texted them all, Ruth was still wincing, Jim in the midst of grumbling something at his brother, and the Mess rearing behind Isaac with both hands overhead in grizzly pose. Collectively, they reminded Isaac of some not-quite-deserving grunge band who’d broken up bitterly and reunited for a completely unexpected Hall of Fame induction.

“For mom again,” Gary murmured. “Thanks.”

“Well, get in here,” Ruth barked, shaking out her bruised thigh. “It’s your birthday.”

Gary shrugged. “She’d rather see you.”

“Got a new word for you, officially old wise man,” said the Mess. “I’ll spell it. Ready? S. E. L. F. I. E.”

“Says the man who won’t even e-mail, let alone text,” Isaac said over his shoulder, and the Mess dropped his arms around him and hugged him from behind.

“We miss you, dude. I miss you, dude. We’re all happier when you’re here.”

Me, too, Isaac almost said. But it wasn’t true. He was happiest where Reenie was, in the life they’d built and might—just might—get to share with someone else, after all. Maybe this time, hand position really had been different.

They managed a selfie. In that one, everyone was smiling, even Gary. Isaac liked the Hall of Fame shot better.

When they’d shut down the lights and locked the room, Gary accepted the last half of the last toffee bar and sighed. He stood at the staircase railing, gazing down into the Center below, which was still Spring Break-empty. Isaac started toward him, but he turned and nodded at all of them. “Very nice, everybody. I thank you all. Especially you, Ruth. I’m assuming this was mostly your doing?”

“My organizing,” she said. “Isaac’s idea.”

“Just seemed like the obvious and most appropriate plan,” said Isaac.

“Nowhere we’d rather be,” Jim added, sounding surprisingly earnest. A little too truthful for comfort.        

“Well. Grand. A perfect birthday morning. Is that it?”

Glancing sidelong at Isaac, Ruth raised an eyebrow, then aimed a slow, sly grin at her father.

That’s the look, Isaac was thinking. How is it possible no one but us has wound up loving that look?

“It?” Ruth said. “This has been the fucking tailgate. Pre-kickoff festivities.” She waved a hand toward the stairs. “Move it. Mush.”

Even outside, as they angled along the walkway that skirted the base of Mt. Sentinel and led toward the stadium, Gary just looked confused, or maybe bemused. Fin and Jim, a little behind the rest of them, had already produced one of the rolled-up pom-pom hats essential for the next game—bought specially for this occasion, Isaac thought, because it was new-Griz colors, beer-can silver and maroon instead of matted-fur brown—and were surreptitiously flipping it back and forth, hiding it fast behind their backs every time Gary seemed about to turn. Isaac thought about holding out his hand for a toss, then decided to catch up to his sister instead.

“You actually pulled this off?” he whispered.

“It wasn’t hard. Timing’s good. Spring practices are over. And they love Dad.”

Almost, Isaac accepted that answer. A few years ago, before the scandals that had ripped through the football program, the university, the town, and, obviously, the tiny legal compliance office, he wouldn’t have doubted it. But now he shook his head. He was about to ask, Who does, exactly, when Gary whirled on them.

He wasn’t confused or bemused, Isaac realized. He was controlling himself. Barely.

“Kids. I have not set foot in Washington Grizzly Stadium in six years. Even now, I don’t think I feel comforting supporting—”

“You’re not supporting, Dad,” Ruth said. Her casual aplomb shocked Isaac more than any other thing he’d noticed about his sister this morning. When had she developed that? “They’re supporting you.”

“I don’t want…” Gary started.

But they’d reached the gate, which was already open. The second they passed through it and under the GrizVision Jumbotron that crowned the bleachers built over the grassy hill from which Isaac’s family had watched every Grizzly home game during their childhoods, a new voice boomed from the p.a. speakers. Not a practiced p.a. announcer’s voice, and so unexpected and out of place that they were all the way to the bottom of the stands before Isaac realized who it was.

“LADIES AND gentlemen,” it bellowed, way too loud and then too quiet as the woman up there alternately bent into and ducked back from the microphone. “Griz and Cats. Please welcome…I can’t do this with you doing that, babe.”

She was talking about the Mess—to the Mess—who’d clambered atop the concrete barrier between bleachers and field and launched into some sort of bobbing, ducking hip-hop dance. He’d also acquired both pom-pom hats, the Griz and Cat ones, from the Huckleberries. When he saw Isaac looking, he started juggling them.

“Jesus Christ, Mess, you’re going to hurt…” the p.a. voice said.

Staring up into the press box, hand over his eyes against the glare, Isaac could just see her through the slid-open window. Gray coat, gray gloves, her short blond hair tight to her scalp. The sadness Isaac felt then wasn’t just for his friend or the break-up of his friend’s marriage, either. Shannon had never been part of this crew, exactly. She’d always watched more than played. But talking to her had been yet another fantastic thing about coming home. And now he and Reenie would see her almost never. Only on special occasions. Like at the GarOlympic Centennial Pom-pom Football Classic they’d decided to stage, just once, on this field.

“Oh!” Shannon called, too loud again, crackling the speakers. “Welcome home, Isaac.”

The Mess slipped, almost plummeting off the barrier, and Gary caught him. They helped each other over and down. Isaac waved to the box.

“Do you guys want… I mean, am I doing player introductions?” She hit the last syllables harder than she meant to, and “…ductions…” echoed around the bleachers.

“Oh, for shit’s sake,” the Mess called up, his unamplified voice small against the space. “You’re not exactly maintaining the illusion, babe. Weaving the fantasy. You’re the writer. Tell our story!”

Isaac half-expected Shannon to stick her head out the window and start bickering right there. But he’d never actually seen Shannon and the Mess bicker, now that he thought about it.

In the nearer maroon-colored endzone, kneeling between the G and the r, Gary was running his hand back and forth through the painted rubber filaments that simulated grass. The movement created furrows that vanished as soon as his fingers passed. When the gang left here today, Isaac thought, they would leave no trace, no telltale footprints or torn up tufts. No sign that any of them had ever walked here at all.

“It’s true,” Gary muttered, scowling. “This shit is even harder than SprinTurf.”

“Whatever that is,” said Jim.

“Can we run on it?” crowed the Mess. “Can I destroy all y’all in the Greatest Pom-Pom Football Classic ever played? Then it suits me.” Rearing back, he tried overhanding the Bobcat pom-pom at Isaac. The hat caught a wind current and dropped to the ground at his feet.

Up in the press box, Shannon launched into surprisingly credible pre-game chatter. She’d even prepared (or just now improvised) a pre-game Tom Brady-style controversy about the Griz pom-pom being several grams heavier than the Bobcat one, potentially skewing play. Somehow, she kept talking for the full ten minutes it took the rest of them to get ready to play. Mostly, that meant stretching, plus some light jogging down the middle of the field while staring up at the stands.

“If we were twelve,” Jim told Isaac as they stood together at midfield and stared at the blank JumboTron, the sunlight streaming down Mt. Sentinel and turning it springtime gold, “this really might be the greatest day of our whole lives.”

“It’s still pretty good,” said Fin, darting past with a pom-pom hat tucked tight to his chest, cutting right to avoid imaginary tacklers, breaking for the sideline. The heaving breath he emitted worried Isaac momentarily, until he realized it wasn’t a gasp; Fin was imitating crowd noise. Cheering himself.

No one even attempted to remember the rules for Pom Pom Football. Arguing over rules was mostly the point. Each team had a hat. Each team ran simultaneous plays in opposite directions. The object was to gain possession of and score with both hats on the same play. There was some sort of Australian footy component about not taking more than five steps without having to lateral or pass. Sometimes, for reasons that had become obscure now (if they were ever clear to begin with), someone counted Mississippis. If you scored with your own hat, you got a point. If you intercepted and scored with the other team’s hat, you got a point. If you scored with both hats, Isaac was pretty sure the game ended, a la grabbing the Golden Snitch.

There had been days, in their youth, where they’d played this for entire afternoons. Long into evenings. They’d had leagues, with standings. Isaac couldn’t imagine it lasting more than fifteen minutes, now.

They were in their first huddle—he and Gary and Ruth with their arms around each other and the Griz hat in Gary’s hand—when Isaac abruptly squeezed his dad’s shoulder. “Just enjoy it, Dad. We are.”

“I am enjoying it,” he said, visibly startled.

“Don’t take the shit so seriously.”

“It was pretty serious shit, Isaac. What happened here. It still is.”

“That’s not what he meant,” said Ruth.

“I know.”

“Any decade,” called the Mess from the line of scrimmage, the 25. Overhead, Shannon announced something about the Griz team apparently abandoning their hurry-up offense plan.

“This field,” said Isaac. “This university. This place. It is not worthy of the game that is about to grace it.”

“Turns out it never was,” said Gary.

“Except when we decided it was, and made it that way.”

As they clapped and broke huddle, Gary patted Isaac’s back. “You have the makings, kiddo.”

“Makings?”

“I see River in you.”

Isaac might have teared up, was starting to. Then Shannon said, “Mon-TANA,” into the mic, but she did it in Fin’s crowd-noise hiss, and he laughed instead as Fin, Jim, Ruth, and the Mess all looked up and roared back, “GRIZZLIES.”

Assuming his position at center, Isaac held the hat, faced the Mess. They eyed each other. The Mess was graying, close to all the way gray. Isaac almost put a hand to his own head and wondered what the Mess was seeing.

“Okay, first and…is there ten? Does ten even matter in this game?” Shannon said. The stadium echoed.

“How is it that you two divorced?” Isaac asked quietly.

“This isn’t how she is. Or how I am. Except when we are.”

“Um,” said Isaac. “Do we hike at the same time? Do you remember?”

For answer, the Mess flicked the Bobcat hat over his shoulder to Jim and bolted half past and half through Isaac, yelling, “Maybe you do” as he bumped him aside and started waving his arms for a pass.

The actual game did indeed last less than ten minutes. More than half of that was one play, a glorious, sideline-to-sideline round of keep-away-from-the-Mess that started with Ruth and Gary and then involved both Huckleberries, too, even though they were on the Mess’s team, while Isaac just kept jogging back and forth from the end zone to the 50 with the Griz hat. Every time he touched one boundary or the other, Shannon would call out, “Touchdown Mon-TANA,” and the Mess would pause long enough to yell, “You can’t score more than once on one play” or “He’s not Montana just because he got that hat first,” and someone on the field would call back, “Says who?” or “Since when?”

The end came when the Mess, with an impressively mighty spin-and-leap, snatched the Bobcat hat from Ruth’s upraised, outstretched palm, whirled like he was about to break for one goal or the other, stood up straight, announced, “Nope. Too far,” and collapsed to the turf with the hat clutched to his chest.

“And there it is,” Shannon said into the microphone, but in her normal, vaguely detached Shannon voice. “A mighty, sustained, futile effort. A moment of glorious, half-realized success. A collapse that shakes Washington Grizzly Stadium to its foundations. It’s your whole life in Pom-Pom Football metaphor, babe.”

Flat on his back, hat on his chest and his eyes to the sky, the Mess raised a middle finger toward the press box. Laughing softly, Shannon shut down the p.a. system.

The laughter continued, though. The Hucks and Ruth were running some sort of rugby-style swinging-gate play with the Griz hat they’d stolen from Isaac, except they kept cutting back and forth across each other’s path. It looked more like they were weaving a giant cat’s cradle than enacting any game even this particular bunch had thought up, yet.

Then there was a new laugh. Glancing into the stands, Isaac saw his mother perched a few rows up on the side of the stadium across from the press box, bundled tight in her coat, blowing into her gloved hands. When she saw him looking, she blew him a kiss.

Gary appeared at his elbow, held up a wait-a-sec finger to his wife, and tugged Isaac with him down the field toward the other end of the stadium. “Come on,” he was saying. “Just for a minute. It’s so good having you here.”

“Where else would I be?”

“In your life. With your wife, and your real friends.”

“Not today,” Isaac said. Gary squeezed his shoulders. “See, Dad? Mom came. She’s cheering for you.”

“You really think she came for me?”

“Partly?”

They wound up sitting side by side against the far goal post, their hands swooshing back and forth in the rubber filings as they took in the tableaux. Most of the running had stopped down at the other end of the field. The Mess dragged himself upright, dropped the hat where he’d lain, and moved off toward the press box stands down which his ex-wife was descending. The Huck brothers had bookended Ruth, all three of them laughing and shoving one another on the 50 yard-line. But as Gary and Isaac watched, the brothers detached themselves, on no particular signal and with no obvious impetus, and drifted away, arguing.

And there was his sister alone again, somehow.

The Mess and Shannon didn’t touch or kiss, but they leaned together at the concrete barrier between bleachers and field. From where Isaac and Gary sat, the tops of brick buildings from the north end of campus were just visible under the bottom of the Jumbotron. The scoreboard blotted out the Clocktower, and it was too far away, anyway, but Isaac could picture it. The sun had climbed all the way up the sky, and the air was warming.

“I love it here when it snows,” Gary said.

“Me, too,” said Isaac. “I miss snow, Dad.”

“I mean here. I love the way football looks in flurries. In the mountain’s shadow, with the university all around and kids everywhere…”

Again, Isaac almost said, Me, too. But he didn’t. Because he didn’t, he realized. Or he did, but not like his father. What Isaac loved was Stick, MerryGoPong, Ruth, the brothers Huckleberry and the Mess, the Clark Fork river and the miles-long paths on either side where biking and hiding and hand-holding happened. The walks home in the dark to his house where he was loved.

“Reenie okay?” Gary asked again, having resisted for over an hour.

Isaac panted his pants pocket. “So far.”

Gary nodded, blowing out a breath. “I really do see River in you.”

“What does that even mean, Dad?”

“I don’t know.” He let loose his regular laugh, low and easy. “We’re buoyant, you and me. Tough to sink. Gliders.”

Abruptly, Isaac wanted to get up, walk away. He also wanted to cry and hold onto his father, who was seventy years old today.

“Gliders,” he murmured.

“It’s not an insult. It’s healthy. Maybe. It’s good. It’s even…I think it’s valuable to other people, too. It reminds them not to…”

“Yeah,” said Isaac, less because he understood (though he almost did) than because he wanted his father to stop.

“But there’s cruelty in it, too. You need to remember that. Ruthlessness. That’s what it takes sometimes to keep the world and the people in it—even the people you love— from destroying your days. I’m not saying that’s good or bad. I’m saying what it is.”

Isaac’s hands gripped and twisted in the rubber filings as though seeking a hold. But there was nothing to grab, just synthetic nothing that slipped through his fingers and settled back where it had been.

“Jim and Fin don’t have it. The Mess either, although he pretends he does or maybe even thinks he does. Your mom doesn’t.”

“Ruth doesn’t,” said Isaac.

Gary sighed. “Ruth definitely doesn’t.”

“Is she okay, Dad? How sad is she?”

“Pretty sad, Isaac. Mom and I worry about her all the time.”

Isaac thought about that. Thought about his parents in their house in this still-small place where the two of them had been content for so long and weren’t anymore. Or maybe they still were in their house, but in spite of the place.

“How sad are you, Dad?” he finally asked.

The question seemed to surprise Gary. He leaned back, eyebrows up. “Me?” He shook his head, gazed back across the field at his wife and his daughter and his children’s friends who were also his longtime playmates. He shrugged. “All sad people are sad. All happy people are sad in their own way.”

He glanced at his son. Isaac felt a smile twitch the corners of his mouth. The always-flickering thing his father had given him. His own private Eternal Flame.

“The Word of Gary,” he said.

“River,” said his father.

“The Word of the River.”

“Just River,” said his father.

Patting Isaac’s knee, he stood, wincing at his popping joints, then made his slow, gliding way across the field toward his wife, who’d stood too, looking both bemused and amused but happy enough to see him. She didn’t come down, just waited as he climbed into the stands to tell her another new story about a good day.