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  More Praise for A Short Move

  “A Short Move is an expansive and beautifully written novel. Through the story of star linebacker Mitch Wilkins, Katherine Hill explores the sacrifices men make to become legends, and the toll their fame takes on everyone close to them. This book is about more than just the complicated and contradictory life of a football star who wishes he were a better man; it is a profound depiction of masculinity, obsession, power, and the unexpected beauty we find even in our darkest hours.”

  —Tom McAllister, author of How to Be Safe

  “I submit that there is nothing you can’t get to about American culture through sports, and I further submit, as evidence, Exhibit A: A Short Move, Katherine Hill’s splendidly written and smartly observed second novel.”

  —David Shields, director of Marshawn Lynch: A History and author of Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season

  “Fans of sweeping family epics will enjoy this dissection of fame, sports, and the drive for connection.”—Publishers Weekly

  A

  SHORT

  MOVE

  A

  SHORT

  MOVE

  A Novel

  KATHERINE HILL

  Copyright © 2020 by Katherine Hill.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquires to:

  Ig Publishing

  Box 2547

  New York, NY 10163

  www.igpub.com

  ISBN: 978-1-632461-04-9 (ebook)

  The following chapters have been previously published, in different form: Chapter 6 as “Draft Day” in The Common and Chapter 10 as “The Finest Milled Cotton” in n+1.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, entities, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events, entities, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  For Matt

  Contents

  1. JOE, 1971

  2. MITCH, 1977

  3. TIM, 1983

  4. MITCH, 1990

  5. MITCH, 1990-1992

  6. CINDY, 1993

  NAME

  7. CARYN, 1997

  PRIME

  8. D’ANTONIO, 2003

  9. MITCH, 2006

  10. ALYSSA, 2012

  11. MITCH, 2019

  12. SARAH, 2030

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “To be alive meant to continually collide with the existence of others and to be collided with, the results being at times good-natured, at others aggressive, then again good-natured.” —Elena Ferrante

  1. JOE, 1971

  Eight months before the legendary linebacker Mitch Wilkins was born, his father Joe stood at the edge of the Briarwood College pasture, gazing at a huddle of black-and-white cows. Joe had left his jacket at his girlfriend Cindy’s, and he was cold, though apparently the cows, those living radiators, were not. Even from his distance, he thought he could see the heat rising from their backs. He whistled a little, trying to get their attention. When the right one looked at him—say, the near one in perfect silhouette—he’d go to Cindy, explain about the ring, and ask her if she’d have him anyway. He didn’t know what he’d do if one of the other cows looked—the ones with their bony butts to him, or the ones already kind of facing his way. Try again, maybe, with a different cow?

  He whistled again, louder this time, and the next thing he knew, the cows were all stock-still, but in slightly different positions, a head here, a belly there. He registered some noses, and above each, a pair of big, bored eyes, and yet it was impossible to say if any of these faces belonged to his original cow. He’d blacked out, missed the crucial shift, perhaps he’d even missed it twice, and with this realization he found himself seized with panic. He was nineteen and staring at cows. He had no jacket, no engagement ring, and no idea how he’d messed up so bad.

  Part of him wanted to blame his brothers. Rob: the oldest, with the chin scar and the hippo hands. Tim: the veiny one, younger by a year, shorter by an inch, and true to all lazy assumptions more pugnacious by a mile. They’d always been a trio with him, the Wild Williams Boys, but then, out of nowhere, the older two broke ranks, voluntarily deploying to Vietnam when Joe was still in high school. Everything fell apart after that. His dad seemed to be drunk more often, even in the mornings, and his mom slowed down, then simply stopped cleaning the house. Next thing Joe knew, she had breast cancer and a forecast of six months to live. He coped by throwing himself into his final season of Monacan County High School football and Monacan County High School parties. His dad coped by trying to get Joe a college scholarship, a scheme that involved a lot of loud, beer-battered phone calls and one sideline chat with a suit-wearing “scout,” whose gospel Joe actually allowed himself to believe. In the end, despite a solid senior season, Joe graduated with zero scholarship offers. Then his mom died, leaving him all alone with an increasingly belligerent dad, and no brothers around to tell him what to do.

  He really could’ve used them in his present situation, especially Robbie, who didn’t get mad like Tim. The present situation was that Cindy was pregnant. Cindy, who was so new to Joe she’d never even met his mom, and so studious and respectable she’d barely met his friends, though they’d all gone to school together all their lives, and she’d even played volleyball, walking the halls in her shorts and high socks. He’d noticed her then, how could he not notice an extravagantly tall and pigtailed creature like Cindy Wilkins, but he’d been too hamstrung by stereotypes—she was a good girl, he was a degenerate—that he mostly pretended to ignore her. All that went out the window after his mom died, and he was feeling raw and open to anything, especially to women who seemed healthy and good, and it was in this frame of mind that he ran into Cindy at a bonfire, and she turned out to be exactly his type, confident in herself and surprisingly eager to fool around. Just like that, she forced him to re-evaluate his understanding of goodness and by extension his understanding of himself. Maybe he didn’t have to be a degenerate. Maybe he could be his own type.

  But then came her pregnancy, and with it another re-evaluation. You’re gonna run now, she said, aren’t you. Stung, he promised to marry her that very night, while she, in all her decency, tried to talk him out of it, saying don’t be hasty, marriage isn’t a game, I’m not telling you to pressure you, maybe you’re not done being wild. But what the hell else was he supposed to do with such serious information? He rushed home, which was by now a genuine junk box of a living situation, cluttered with his old man’s empty beer bottles and half-eaten containers of food, not to mention towers of unread newspapers, used tissues and suspiciously smeared man briefs, to claim the one thing his mother had left him, her engagement ring. His dad was in his usual spot, passed out on the couch, which gave Joe a clear lane to the stairs. What wasn’t choked with dust was sticky and crawling with fruit flies, and the entire house smelled tuberish, a mixture of exfoliated skin and fart and the sour tang of days-old booze. But amid the master bedroom mess, his mom’s ring was still there in its faded velvet box: gold band, diamond crown, a tiny piece of indestructibility. He held it in his hand and thought maybe everything would be all right.

  It was a short-lived happiness, because the next thing he knew his father was awake and before him, already ranting, demanding to know what the hell was going on. In recent months he’d been harder on Joe than ever, though Joe had never shown more direction, hauling peat, planting shrubs, clearing branches, and generally disposing of the natural debris that menaced the prim grounds of Briarwood College, where his dad ran the physical plant. He loved the sweat, the muscle groups firing, the little-kid thrill of sticking his ha
nds into dirt, and he loved bringing home milk from the dairy. What he didn’t love was coming home to his father, who devoted his down time to heavy drinking, ruthless criticism, and goading Joe into useless fights. The old man was spry for a congenital alcoholic, could get a good grip, every now and then wriggle out of a hold, but Joe’s reflexes were sharper, his balance better, his brain not made of mush. He pinned his father every time, lightly held him down kicking and yelling until the old man just ran out of gas, which was exactly what happened again that night, when he came upstairs to find Joe, “taking priceless things without asking,” except this time Joe was so buzzed on his sudden new future, so certain the ring was rightfully his, and so finally fed up with his father’s distortions, the catastrophe of his inflated belly, the aftershock of his blood-shot eyes, his empty speechifying and his human smell, all the beers he drank while his wife lay dying, all the petty and regular ways he had of making Joe feel stupid and small, that he might’ve overdone it, thrown a real punch or two, and finished off with some personal accusations that reduced the old man to tears. And to top it off, after Joe finally disentangled himself and got the hell out of that miserable house, he discovered, driving in darkness back to Cindy’s, digging into his pocket with one hand, the other loosely guiding the wheel, that he hadn’t even managed to hold onto the ring. That he’d sought it and fought for it and won it—but then he’d lost it, slipped from his hand in the scuffle maybe, or dropped in the grass on the long way out.

  “Come on,” he called to the college pasture, where he’d finally pulled over around one a.m., too disgusted with himself to face Cindy just yet, and where he’d awoken that morning in his car, his neck bent almost to his chest, his body rigid from trying to clench in its heat. He leaned into the fencepost, desperate for a decision. The one on the middle-left, in perfect profile. That was his new magic cow.

  He knew he ought to quit playing and just go to Cindy. What did she care about the ring? He’d buy her a better one later, and while he saved up for it, they could live with her parents, a sort of helpless but honorable pair, Mrs. Wilkins on disability from arthritis, Mr. Wilkins without an arm from World War II. It wouldn’t be so bad. Her bedroom even had a private entrance.

  But the problem, he was beginning to understand, was bigger than the ring. Say he married her and they had a son. Say he spent every day in a tidy house, teaching that kid how to treat people—didn’t even make him play football, but didn’t stop him either, if that’s what the kid wanted to do. Say his brothers came home and raised families of their own, and in the meantime Joe completely turned himself around, got a million degrees and became a doctor or something. Even then, there’d be blind spots, gaps in coverage, things he plainly couldn’t control. And whatever his situation, he’d still be himself, the degenerate son of his own failed father. Try as he might, he couldn’t reason his way out of that one.

  A cow was approaching him now with surprising velocity, like a time-lapse film of the cow’s whole day. She stood before him, a woolly tank with a nose like a giant rubber pad and ears that fired straight from her head. Finally. It was almost uncanny, after all that time she’d spent standing around. He placed a hand on her neck, and she tolerated it, even seemed to authorize a transfer of warmth. In that moment of weird skin-to-skin contact, he had a memory of being a kid on his dad’s shoulders, back when his dad was muscular and fast. Together, they were the Monacan Maniac, the strongest man that ever lived. They tore through the yard like that, stalking Joe’s terrorized brothers, especially Tim, the spiteful middle one, who always made a point of pinning Joe. He remembered his legs hugging his father’s neck, his father’s hands cupping his ankles, so that Joe could be the big one for a change, so that Joe could sense in the grown man beneath him all the power his body would one day contain. His father had done his best for him, he could see that, but it hadn’t made much difference.

  Because how much bigger was he now, and how much better, if he could stand there as long as he had touching the cow, the one he supposedly sought, the one that meant it was time to go to Cindy, and already know that Cindy had been right, that he was scared and he wasn’t going to marry her, because he barely knew her and he’d rather be wild, because the main thing his body contained, and would no doubt contain for the rest of his life, was nothing but an urgent and genetic need to punish his child, to be like his father, to be like his brothers, to ruin the good things, to run?

  2. MITCH, 1977

  Mitch Wilkins did not remember his first ball. He did not even remember the first one he remembered. It was too constant, simply part of the this that was everywhere and had always been with him: ball, grass, feet, sky, ball, hands, grass. His mother tossing it to him in his grandparents’ backyard. His grandparents cheering from their plastic chairs.

  There was one particular time, though, when his Uncle Tim, who he’d just met, held out a ball, an object Mitch saw by then as his own organ, and said, “All right, kid, let’s see what you got.”

  Mitch was five and about to start school, and Tim was in jeans and a t-shirt, hucking the ball his way: shoulder, chest, elbow, wrist. Mitch had a grandpa with one arm and he didn’t have a dad, but now, all of a sudden, he had an uncle, his dad’s brother: a man with two arms in his own endless backyard, where he and his mom had just moved.

  He caught the ball, reset himself, hucked it back. A movement so short and fast he immediately wanted to do it again.

  Mitch had waited his whole life for kindergarten—significance began, it seemed, with school, with the sequence of one grade after another—and now he was finally there, one of the bigger kids, at the end of the alphabet, almost six. He wanted it to be the great event he’d always heard about, so he was frustrated when Miss B told him he had trouble paying attention, especially since he knew that the opposite was true. When he wanted something, his focus was fierce. He would be seized as if by a hand in the head, squeezing from his brain all other thoughts until he had the thing, and the squeezing at last released. He wanted the ball and he wanted to be good at school, and what he wanted most for his sixth birthday was a set of Rock’Em Sock’Em Robots. One was blue and one was red, and they stood in a square yellow boxing ring.

  “Aren’t you a bit young?” his mom said, when he told her. And when he insisted, she got even stricter: “I don’t like these violent games.”

  “It’s not violent, it’s robots!”

  “What if I got you one like this?” she asked, showing him a picture of a blocky silver figure with owl eyes and senseless dials on his belly. “It looks more like a real robot.”

  He was in agony. He could not explain to her that it was the shape of Rock’Em Sock’Em Robots that he liked. The dukes up, the bent knees, the way they were positioned across from each other so that every punch landed, because that’s what Rock’Em Sock’Em Robots were built and meant to do. It wasn’t about knocking the head off, though that was how you won. It was about the heads themselves, which were covered in bolts and bent forward, and came to a neat V at the back. It was about the upper arms and legs that were rounded at the joint, like giant drumsticks, almost human. As far as he was concerned, Rock’Em Sock’Em Robots were the real thing; any other toy robot was fake.

  But she must’ve understood, she was smart, because she got it for him, and for many days after his birthday he was late to dinner because he was busy manipulating the triggers, trying to figure out how to play both sides, get both heads to pop at once. Sometimes Tim was red and he was blue, and then they were late together.

  She also got him a dog, a puppy from a stray litter the neighbors had discovered under their deck, and this was smart too, because he hadn’t even realized he wanted a dog until she put it in his lap, at which point he wanted it so much he thought his own head might pop. The puppy was mostly black with a head that was mostly white and a butt that was tough and a mouth that was often open and pink as raw meat inside. She would train him if Mitch would feed and walk him. That had to be the deal. Mitch c
alled him Spike, and he did feed him, most of the time, and when he didn’t, she yelled, and he knew he couldn’t complain. He also chased Spike around the yard and threw him sticks that the dog only sometimes brought back. For his part, Spike liked to sit at Mitch’s feet while he ate, but wasn’t too fond of his bed. Every time Mitch put him there, he took off, his black eyes completely fixed on something urgent and invisible. He got into things, too. Garbage, stuff in the woods, certain pairs of his mom’s nice shoes.

  One day Mitch was in the yard with his mom and Tim and Spike, and Tim and his mom were hugging each other nonstop, and his mom was in such a beautiful mood she said why don’t we all get ice cream after dinner, even though it was no longer summer. Mitch in his excitement started jumping up and down, and apparently it was too much excitement for Spike, because out of nowhere he let out a growl and leapt at Mitch’s leg. It hurt, but that was not as scary as the blood, which came rushing up from some dark, endless place inside of him, soaking through his jeans, and it was not as scary as the look on his mom’s face when she came rushing over to help. The endlessness was scary because he thought he was contained, but so was the thought of running out, because once you were out of blood, you were dead, even from your leg, even he knew that.

  He got two stitches from the doctor, and in the end everything was fine. His grandpa, though, was furious. He threatened to shoot the dog. Mitch screamed and cried and begged him not to and his mom flung her hands and said, “No one’s shooting anybody” and “Jesus, Dad, why do you talk like that?”

  Spike ran away soon after that anyway. He’d never been too good at staying where Mitch tried to put him, and he’d been acting guilty ever since the bite. They’d only had him a few weeks. A little later Tim got him another dog, a smaller, cuter one called Daisy who didn’t like to wrestle so much. But Daisy wouldn’t stay in the yard. Where she went was a mystery to all of them, and eventually she ran away, too.