The King of Oklahoma

I would never have answered the phone if I’d known it was going to be Buckwalter on the other end, wheezing through his polyps, wanting to know if I was free to stop by for a visit. I usually did

Original photo by Football Scoop

my best to ignore these calls, but this was not always possible, as Buck-walter liked to call on my landline, and his number came up unlisted. He was breathing hard and seemed worked up about something. I could hear the air laboring past his ruined septum. Whatever it was, I didn’t want anything to do with it.

I was home alone, waiting for Ann to come back from wherever she was. I didn’t know, but I had a few guesses. She was probably at her sister’s in Sabattus, blowing off steam. I was waiting on the screened-in porch, having a beer, looking out at the frost heaves rising up like white-caps in the rain, everything golden under the sodium lights. I was going to sit out there until she came back.

“Ann’s making dinner,” I lied. “We’re just about ready to chow down over here.”

“How about after that?” said Buckwalter. “After you eat? I can wait, Sam. I’m in no rush as far as that goes.”

I knew it was best in these situations not to put up too much of a fight. Visiting with Buckwalter was like going to have a tooth drilled; it was only worse to put it off, and it would have to happen sooner or later. Besides, I felt sorry that he had no one else to call.

“Okay,” I told him. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

Buckwalter was an old friend, but I tried not to think about him too much. We’d grown up in the same town, tied together by the geography of our neighborhoods, which were connected along a dense plain of coastal marsh. In high school, Buckwalter had been a big-time local football celebrity. He was first team All-State, ended up playing D-1, and eventually made his way onto a couple practice squads. He was a blue-chipper. I had once seen him hit this boy from Lake Region so hard he’d cracked his solar plexus in half like a corn chip. He enjoyed pain in both directions: giving and receiving. He was made for the sport. But he’d taken a bad hit some years back that had knocked him out for several minutes and left him permanently altered, and after that he couldn’t pass his physical. He moved back in with his dad, only a few miles away from the painted fields on which he’d sown his myth, and he spent the next few years sucking on big plastic handles of grain alcohol and loitering in various parking lots and drive-thrus across the county. Sometimes people saw him lurking around the side of the road with a football helmet on, trying to dodge traffic, howling imprecations.

Then one night, flaming drunk, he drove his car at ninety miles an hour down the turnpike going the wrong direction. He collided with a guardrail before he hurt anyone besides himself, but the accident had left him semidisfigured, with a mark on the left side of his face in the shape of parentheses that looked like something had tried to take a bite out of him. A lot of people said Buckwalter had done it on purpose, that it had been an act of willful destruction and botched suicide. But I couldn’t say one way or the other; I had never asked him about it, and I never planned to. I didn’t want to know, to tell the truth.

During the time of Buckwalter’s decline, I’d been away to college and back, without much to show for it besides a more realistic opinion of myself than I’d had when I left. It was a bad time in my...