Empire Falls

turned the whole fucking game around. Coach hadn’t come right out and said it, but Zack was pretty sure he blamed Zack for all the bad publicity. The Fairhaven quarterback hadn’t played since, and in the paper last week it said his parents were taking him to Boston to see if they could find out why his headaches wouldn’t go away. Zack could’ve told them why. The headaches wouldn’t go away because then the pansy would have to play again. One good shot had separated the kid from his desire to play football.
    A late hit, they were calling it now, after they’d watched the game film, which didn’t even really show it, since the camera had followed the flight of the ball. Coach got asked about it in an interview and said the tape wasn’t conclusive, but in the locker room before the last game he’d given a speech about wanting all good clean hits, and a lot of the guys had glanced over at Zack, and then down at the floor. Which had pissed him off so much he’d immediately gotten into a shoving match with a kid on the opening kickoff, resulting in offsetting penalties. He’d spent the rest of the game at the very end of the bench. Coach hadn’t even looked his way, except to shake his head. So maybe things would be better next year, and maybe they wouldn’t.
    Zack studied the house, now visible in silhouette through the trees. Which was weird, if you thought about it. The Voss kid, who at first hadn’t wanted them to give him a ride home the other night, and then didn’t want them to turn down the dirt drive, claimed his grandmother was sick and shouldn’t be disturbed. But the house had been dark, just like it was now. Was the old woman so fucked up she couldn’t get out of bed to switch on the light, or so completely out of it she didn’t know when it was night?
    “So what’s the deal with Tick?” he said, without looking at his passenger. “She got something going with this John Voss?” The reason he wanted Justin along, he now recalled, wasn’t just to have somebody keep watch. He wanted to think this whole situation through one more time. Double Dibble was in art class and sat at the same table with Tick and John Voss—and that fat pig Candace—so maybe he could help Zack out a little.
    Justin shrugged. “She just feels sorry for him.”
    Zack considered this possibility. True, Tick was like that, big-hearted when it came to losers. She had this idea she was going to be an artist, but unless Zack missed his guess, she’d probably end up opening a home for three-legged dogs. He’d recently seen a story on TV about some shit-for-brains woman in California who took in wounded animals of every description, even big fuckers that ate like fifty pounds of dog food a day, and let them limp and hop around her ranch like an army of spastics. Instead of begging donations to feed them, what she should’ve asked for was enough bullets to put them out of their misery. “So how come she got him a job at her old man’s restaurant?”
    Justin shrugged, clearly thinking he’d just answered that question. Getting the kid a job was something you might do if you felt sorry for him. “She’s in love with some kid she met on vacation, is what I heard,” Justin answered instead. “He lives in Indiana or someplace.”
    “Or someplace ? Like, one or the other? If not Indiana, then someplace ? You sure about that? You sure it’s not, like, someplace else ?”
    “I’m just saying what I heard.”
    “Heard from who?”
    “Candace.”
    “The blow-job queen.”
    “Hey,” Justin said, “she wants to give me a header, I’ll take it.”
    “That’s because you got no standards,” Zack explained.
    “You telling me you wouldn’t like to nuzzle those tits?”
    “She’s a fat cow, is what I’m telling you.”
    “Big tits isn’t the same as fat.” Justin appeared to have strong, confident views on this particular subject. “Fat is stomach and waist and thighs. Big tits is a whole different thing.”
    Zack wasn’t terribly interested in this abstract physiology argument, or any of Double Dibble’s other opinions, either. So what if Tick was in love with some faggot from Indiana or Someplace? Like he was supposed to care? Zack was fast coming around to his father’s point of view on the subject of girls, who seemed to inhabit this earth for the sole purpose of fucking with your head. “They’re not happy unless they get under your skin,” was how his father had explained it, back when he