Ethan Rutherford - The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

One of them, the taller one, holds a hair clipper that belongs to his father, a clipper that has been rescued from the dank recesses of an upstairs closet in the Laurelhurst house, a closet that smells like soap and shoes and motor oil and is as dark as dark gets, and he is saying to the other that now is the time to do this; now, while his father’s at work in the motorcycle garage where he’s employed on Saturdays; now, while his mother is at the market getting groceries that will include, per the boys’ special request, Fruity Pebbles, Gushers, Dr Pepper, and frozen pizza (which is the reason they are always at this house; the other house is nothing but wheat germ and raisins, wooden cars and make-your-own-fun, early bedtime and no TV, ever); now is the time, he says, now is the time . It is 1987, and Brian Bosworth, the terror from Oklahoma, has arrived in Seattle to play for the Seahawks; it’s time to make the magic happen. They love Walter Payton, they love Jim McMahon, they love the Bears (mostly because one of the boys’ fathers, the father they idolize, loves the Bears), but it’s more accurate to say they loved, because now the Boz is here, a hometown hero, an eleven-million-dollar man who will unify the city and bring a form of gilded greatness to the Northwest, and his arrival has obliterated everything else in their orbit of likes and dislikes.

Think of the Boz, the boy holding the clipper says. The haircut was his idea. Think of the Boz, he says again, as if they were capable, at this moment, of thinking about anything else. He’s theirs now. The Boz, picked in the supplemental draft, belongs to them. He has hair from the future, spiked on top, bare on the sides, and in back a flowing river of awesomeness that sneaks out from under his helmet. The Boz wears his torn jersey outside his pants. The Boz marks his ankle-tape with his college number, 44, because the NFL won’t allow that to be his official number, which is 55—an echo, certainly, but a pale one. The switch is flipped; the clipper’s mosquito hum fills the second floor. This will not be just any haircut. This will be the haircut, and with it they will become part of something bigger than themselves. This, one of them thinks, is a pivotal moment. It’s a jumbotron experience, a statistical miracle, and they are doing it together. It’s not about being like someone. It’s about becoming him. And with a few swipes and a scalp reveal you can make it happen. They are tender, precise with each other. They take turns. Concentrate on the line. Hair falls to the tile, dirty snow-clumps on the bathroom floor.

Do they look like the Boz, with their torn jerseys and markered-up shoes? Do they look like the Boz, when they have brown hair and he’s decidedly platinum? Does anyone care? Before this, they were just friends, certain of their affection, uncertain of its expression. Before this, one of them, the worrier, was afraid that his hours in the Laurelhurst house were numbered, that he would overstay his welcome, that he would be exposed as an interloper, but that worry is now gone. The haircut is proof. The haircut is a leveler. So do they look like the Boz, who could curl their combined weight without so much as a lip-twitch? Who cares! They look like each other, and that, for one of them, is good enough.

Their hair clogs in the sink; they leave it there. Hair, impossible, at this point, to say whose, is on the counter; they leave it there. Hair, little splinters of it, covers every bathroom surface, including, somehow, the mirror, and they, the two of them, are down the stairs like future linebackers, swinging their weight around the shoddy banister, obliterating the weak side run. The grandfather chair on the first floor becomes Bo Jackson. The screen door is the Broncos porous offensive line. Outside the sun is high, and the front yard is the Kingdome. Plays are called, random numbers, slow huts, sharp hikes, and the trees lining the street, the great oaks and elms that have been watching over this particular block for who knows how long, who have seen how many plays called, how many errant, throwing-starred punts go up on the roof, who hold, in their branches, a generation’s worth of Aerobies too high to knock out—these trees, who have enjoyed, for centuries it seems, those magical on-the-lawn hours when balls are drawn heavenward, who have stood in rapt attention for those endless minutes before the car-door-slamming parents return from the outside world to ask their kids what the hell, just what the hell is going on, these trees, they whistle their applause.

Stop rubbing your dicks together, says the boy’s father when he gets back from the garage and sees their hair, he’s not that great . They are sitting at the dinner table, he has just pulled up a chair, and his voice is like the phlegmatic roar of a garbage disposal. Each word a lifetime of cigarettes. One of the boys is used to the sound of this voice. The other is not, but wishes, thinks, he could be. The two of them take all criticism delivered from the mouth of this man seriously, this man who rides motorcycles and has promised to teach them, soon, to ride, this man who carries in his limbs the promise of casual violence and who wears a look of weary surprise upon entering the rooms of his own house as if he can’t quite believe what his life has handed him, this man, they are attuned to him—but this time one of them can’t take what he’s said seriously, because he’s just heard the word dick said aloud. Inside! In the presence of a mother who doesn’t bat an eyelash as she slaps the molten pizza on the table. To his relief, he sees his friend is already laughing. Words like this send the two of them into hysterical revelry. Butt, crack, nuts, ball-peen, these words are everywhere, and they’re hilarious. A family history of angina, the recent and casual mention of it, was close enough to the real thing that the one boy’s mother told them to go ahead and get it out of their system and then knock it off. The father’s more indulgent, telling them now through monstrous bites of pizza that their one and only Brian Bosworth received the Dick Butkus award not just once but twice, and try saying that five times fast. They try, of course they try, and the effort almost brings them off their chairs. Later this father buys his son a Land of Boz poster to replace their now unloved and forgotten Jim McMahon on his bedroom wall. Their tank-topped hero: wide-stanced, implacable, and domineering in wraparound shades. Across his chest it reads “Monster D.B. 44”— defensive back, the father explains—and he’s flanked by menacing kids their own age wearing shades, a menacing Tin Man, a stepped-on Scarecrow, and a Dorothy pinup who has laced her small arm around his just so, in that perfect way. It’s an invitation that for now does nothing for the two boys, not just yet, because directly below where she has placed her hand in the crook of his elbow the Boz is palming a football helmet, his fingers dug in, the helmet an egg, the helmet not going anywhere. The father hadn’t been leveling criticism, judgment, at all, the boys understand. It’s just the way men talk to each other. The friends stare at the poster for hours, and imagine that instead of there being only one Boz standing guard at the foot of a road that leads, behind him, to a spired and mysterious Emerald City, there are two.

Weeks pass and here’s how the boys talk to each other: What do you like? What do you like? Is that something we should like? Every day is a disputation of taste, and nothing ascends without the explicit approval of both. When they wrestle, one wins. The next time they wrestle, the other wins. Some things they can do nothing about (chins, eye color, hand size); others (shoes, hair, room decoration, lunch box) they can. For one of the boys, the unworried one, this equilibrium seems a natural, effortless state; for the other, it’s become everything. What do you like? I like what you like. Up in one of the trees in the yard, on a climbable but out-of-the-way branch, they’ve carved their first names followed by a last name they made up.