N.D. Brown: SUICIDES • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by N.D. Brown
SUICIDES

Mitchell moved into his mother’s double-wide in time to sign up for Freedom Run High School’s summer football program. The sprints were called “suicides,” and when seen from overhead, the football players’ movement along the horizontal white stripes of the football field looked like abacus beads deep in god’s arithmetic, and the sunburnt fathers gathered together against the fence surrounding the high school football field, watching their progeny and thinking of the past as a thing that should be repeated, referencing a sentimental light that hadn’t ever existed but had brightened through the natural dimming of age. It only took the first afternoon for all the other fathers to notice Mitchell. And by the time the summer’s final practice was coming to a close, they looked at Mitchell not as a boy or a fatherless son, but a myth. A Greek hero not born of man but abandoned by the god that had given him such powers. Powers their sons, regrettably, did not have.

At the conclusion of practice, the hundred or some odd players gathered around Coach Akelie. He was a muscularly fat man who, at six feet eight inches, towered over all the players and so created a natural paternal scene whenever his boys gathered around. His forearms were larger than most of the wide receivers and running backs’ thighs. He always held a clipboard with forty or fifty pages of paper, earmarked with color-coded tabs that he constantly flipped through. His eyes were covered by sunglasses even in the shade. He had no wife and no children, and had made it on an NFL team’s final roster, though he never played, and was released before the end of the year. Then he joined the army and jumped out of airplanes for a while, but he had found his calling in coaching.

Coach looked down and flipped to the green tab. All were silent. The smell of freshly cut grass. The fathers had sunk toward the periphery of the circle with neon Gatorades to hear the final sermon and relive their youth when they were the ones on single knees hearing about a future that hadn’t yet come, and possibilities that hadn’t yet expired. Coach still waited, eyes down. Analyzing. Figuring his notes.

“Boys. There’s a saying I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been watching us this summer. The mind is a great servant, but a terrible master. And that means, on the one hand, I want you to use your heads, eat right, stay hydrated, stretch. Be smart. Play smart. If we don’t start using our heads, we’ll get our asses kicked come State. However, that same mind I want you to use will also tell you to take it easy during suicides. But all growth is a form of suicide. You must destroy the old muscles so that stronger muscles can take their place. But your mind doesn’t want any part of you to die. Your mind will tell you that you’re sick. That you’re going to pull something. Sometimes that’s true, and sometimes that’s false. Tonight, I want you all to go back home and think: Am I controlling my mind, or is my mind controlling me? Go Braves on three. 1. 2. 3. GO Braves.”

Mitchell began walking home from football practice with his pads in hand, his sleeveless white t-shirt plastered and wet. The sun was red, and the sky was not one warm color, but many. Once Freedom Run High School’s silhouette faded to the back, there wasn’t much left in the square. Students were bused in from all around the county to the one-stoplight town that had three stoplights, but the other two were at either side of the train tracks, and so no one counted them. The center square held a single row of stores and shops. A Chick-fil-A had been built to great fanfare the previous year. Each morning before breakfast stopped being served, the cars in the drive-through ran out into the street.

The parking lot was still full when Mitchell passed the restaurant on his way home just as a blood red Tacoma pulled up beside him and lowered the window. Chris Tyrne sat in the passenger seat while his father drove. Chris was an All-American linebacker chomping on a fried chicken sandwich in the passenger seat. Chris’s father was angular, austere, aggressively void of fat, wearing shades that reflected blue under a black visor. He was also an assistant coach who largely sat dormant, trying to keep his anger inside, except toward his son. His favorite line to say to Chris was, “All American my friggin’ ass.”

“David, you need a ride, son?” Chris’s father said. “Where’re you heading?”

“Paradise Meadows just outside of town.”

“You gonna walk there? That’s gotta be three miles?”

“It’s not so bad.”

“Come in. You get yourself a biscuit to eat. Chris, get him a biscuit.”

Mitchell jumped into the black-leather seat, and Chris tossed him a foil-covered chicken sandwich. The inside was howling, which felt good to Mitchell as he unwrapped the foil and took a large bite and felt the warm saltiness of the chicken.

“For a freshman, you’re looking damn good out there. Don’t you think, Chris?”

Chris swallowed a big bite. “Yep. A little slow off the line, though.”

“But that comes with time,” Chris’s father said. “What team you play for in peewee?”

“I haven’t,” Mitchell said. “Back yards with older kids.”

“No teams? Then you’re doing real, real good,” Chris’s dad said. “You want another biscuit? Give him another biscuit, Chris.”

And Chris tossed Mitchell another chicken sandwich, looking at that one longingly and crunching up the to-go bag filled with the other foil wrappers.

“I ain’t seen your dad out there at practice, what he do?”

“I don’t know. He’s not around.”

“Sorry to hear that. You could be good, Mitchell. You could be good, you know that, right? You may even have what it takes to be real good. You want to be real good?”

“I want to be real good.”

“Good. See, Coach and I have a plan for you this season.”

Mitchell lived with his mama in a shit trailer in a shit trailer park, but it had a small pool surrounded by fencing that held vague amoebic impressions of drunk bodies. A small line of bobbers separated the shallow end from the other, nearly just as shallow, end. The trailer itself was smaller than his Pop Pop’s, which his mother had sold years ago before getting clean, the money from which had long since run through her veins. But there was a small porch where his mother chain-smoked and drank iced tea after a twelve-hour shift of ringing and bagging groceries. Her body hung frail and prematurely wrinkled like the pleats of a valence. She seldom smiled, but when she did, it was for Mitchell. She’d bought a small box TV and hooked it up outside and spent most of her free evenings and Saturday and Sunday mornings drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and watching re-runs of old movies.

“Okay. Here we are,” Chris’s dad said. Mitchell thanked him and jumped out of the truck and began walking to the porch where his Mama was watching TV. The lights on the Tacoma had just automatically clicked on with the impending twilight.

“Your boy’s making quite a name for himself on the field,” Chris’s dad yelled out. Mitchell’s mama stood up, opened the small porch door, and walked out to meet her son.

“Is that right?”

“It is. I can give him a ride if he needs it, but it’d be nice if you could come and see him sometime. He’s really something.”

“Thank you. I’ll try to make it out sometime soon.”

“Good to hear. Have yourselves a good night,” and the Tacoma backed up, turned, and disappeared down the road.

“Seems that you’re doing well,” she said, but Mitchell heard tears bubbling in her throat, and this made Mitchell mad. All Chris’s father had said was that she should come and see him do well. Why did that make her so sad? Mitchell didn’t even realize that he wanted her to see him do well until Chris’s father had suggested it. He didn’t understand why that made her sad.

From thereon, the mornings for Mitchell began with the great headlights of Coach Tyrne’s truck. They worked out before the team’s morning workouts while the sky was still dark. “Be smart in how you work out,” Coach Tyrne often said. “Get after it and get out.” These special workouts focused on form and repetition and cardio. By the time the rest of the team sidled into the gym, Chris and Mitchell were already halfway broken down. Mitchell felt like he was in some sort of secret club. Special.

In front of the other players, Coach Tyrne began to treat Mitchell like his son, with an expectation of unyielding perfection. When Mitchell struggled to get that last rep up, Coach Tyrne would yell at Mitchell, “Come on. I thought you were supposed to be something special. Get it up. Freshman phenom, my ass. GIT IT UP.”

Over time, the taunts mattered less. Mitchell’s muscles solidified and ballooned, but the taunts faded behind the foregrounded iron bar or plate. The yells became a mechanism that would raise his adrenaline levels so he could heave that final rep. His mind hardened and became implacable as he had not yet found the line his body didn’t immediately rebound from, stronger. He compared himself only to Chris, and Chris beat Mitchell every day in every exercise.

Practice after school was full of pads and hitting and water ejected out of nippled containers. Mitchell developed the mindset that everything was imbued with the intent to win. Sprinting. Lifting. Digesting the playbook. Honing technique. He would win it all, and that meant that his confidence grew with his belief in his ability that he could win. Becoming a starter ceased to be a question. His eyes were on beating Chris because he idolized Chris.

“Look at the Freshman phenom, pancaked like a fifth-grader in peewee,” Coach Tyrne said. So, Mitchell tried to win again. Feet set. Silence became Mitchell’s affirmation. Coach Akelie usually stood in observance in a tower that overlooked the field from a bird’s-eye view. Behind sunglasses he chanted “To live you must die. To live you must die. To live you must die,” through the staticky sound system.

After practice, Coach Tyrne took Mitchell and Chris to grab bags of chicken sandwiches, which they ate with the kind of deep hunger that caused the food to taste better than any fine cuisine. When Mitchell was dropped off at home, the sky looked the same bruised color as it had begun where Mitchell’s mother usually waited, smoking a cigarette, staring at the TV’s glow, and drinking a solo cup of sweet tea or ice water. Once Mr. Tyrne and Chris drove home, Mitchell sat next to his mother. And even though Mitchell was wet and sweaty, it didn’t seem to matter when he curled into her like a much smaller boy. Then she put out her cigarette and wrapped the now free arm around Mitchell, but could only get to the center of his shoulder blades. Sometimes he fell asleep. Other times he watched TV with her. Still, other times he talked to her about his day. She did not like talking about hers.

On Friday night the stands were full of all the prettiest girls from school, and Mitchell liked to see their tomahawk-painted cheeks turned towards him. Mitchell’s mother often took off early from work to sit in the stands in her comfy jeans and Grateful Dead t-shirt. Mitchell was a tight end, so when they ran the ball to the power side, he was the final lineman to bulldoze the other team’s bulldozers. And, when they stacked the box with more people than could be possibly blocked, the plan was to fake the handoff, releasing Mitchell down the field to a long or skinny post. A quick slant if third-and-short.

Mitchell’s mother howled with the excitement of every play, spinning in a little dance that caused the hotdog-eating parents on either side of her to curl away. She learned the cheers and screamed them so loudly that before long she had the space to twirl seamlessly as she chanted, “Who-you-got? Who-you-got? Braves-Yeah. Who-you-got? Who-you-got? Braves-Yeah.” By half-time the Braves were up by twenty-one points and hadn’t had to throw the ball once, much less to Mitchell. Every play was a part of a slow, but steady march down the field. Three yards. Five yards. Eight yards. Each time the ball moved into the quarterback’s hands the offensive line created a convex opening. Sometimes, the running back was flung backward and other times he was able to get a few more feet, twice breaking all the way through for a touchdown. Mitchell’s mother climbed down to the foot of the bleachers and laced her finger through the chain-linked fence that outlined the rubber track where the cheerleaders encouraged the crowd as cowbells tolled in the cooling night.

By the end of the third quarter, the other team had their hands on the sides, breathing hard. Their eyes not on the game but on the scoreboard. Some of the opposing players’ eyes grew distant and allowed the plays to take place, trying to not get beaten too badly, but no longer willing to put themselves in a position to be in pain. Others lost their tempers. Yellow flags were removed from referee pockets. Unnecessary roughness. Mitchell’s mother used her hand to make a cone of amplification around her mouth because she wanted the refs to understand the degree to which she thought they sucked. The stands cheered on her son, and thus she felt that they were cheering her on in some obtuse way.

The Braves won 36-0. The game was over. The stands emptied and Mitchell turned to his mother lighting a victory cigarette and blowing a large grey cloud up into the night. He wished she didn’t do that.

As football season progressed, Mitchell wished his mother would just sit down. Wouldn’t smoke so many cigarettes in the school parking lot or smart off to the administration who told her she couldn’t smoke on school property. He wished she could wait for her “victory cigarettes” until they got home. He wished she wouldn’t come up with reasons to always do that.

Then, midway through the season, came the unexpected exaltation of whistles. The opponents urged the sideline to get someone onto the field. To hurry out to the tight end. Out to Mitchell, writhing on the ground, screaming like the young, fourteen-year-old he was. Crying. Hands to his face. The EMT had to be driven onto the field so Mitchell could be carted away. No one was quite sure what happened.

When Mitchell broke his tibia and fibula, he would have cut off his leg or beaten the doctor with a baseball bat to stop the pain. It wasn’t until the medication that the pain became less. But for his mother sitting next to him, her coat draped over her arms, her memory betrayed her. Her memory recalled those little white pills of her past. What they truly could do.

“It’ll be okay,” she said to Mitchell, her son’s chest rushing up and down. Then shallowing. Eyes lowering. Lowering. Lowering. The pain going. Going. Gone. And she saw that she could feel better too.

It didn’t take Mitchell long to realize that his mother was stealing from his pills. At first, she took a couple with a glass of wine, for old times’ sake. And a couple more. A week later Mitchell awoke from a pain-riddled nap to the orange bottle missing half its contents. He looked at the refill date and reverse-engineered how many pills he should still have. He yelled for his mama and told her about the missing pills. She counted the remaining pills with Mitchell.

“Those sons of bitches must have shorted me half the bottle for themselves,” she said. “You know those pharmacists do that. Then sell ’em on the side of a little profit.”

“You mean shorted me?” Mitchell said, head sweating with the aching leg.

“Of course, baby. I just meant that I was the one who went up there is all. Are you in pain? Here. Take a pill. Take a pill and feel better. Your Mama’s gonna take care of you.”

And Mitchell took two pills and swallowed them both deeply with a cold glass of water and tumbled into sleep not long thereafter and dreamed of his mother’s hungry face on the other side of Pop Pop’s screen door when he was a kid before she had gotten better.

Unmedicated, Mitchell rarely left the house except during football games. During football games, Mitchell stood on the sideline, far enough away to not get in tangles with any of the players by Coach Akelie. But Mitchell wore his pad-less jersey and clapped vigorously at Chris and the other players. Coach Akelie said, “Hey, Mitchell. “What should the quarterback do here?”

“He should audible to the left side.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re stacked on the right.”

But the quarterback didn’t do that, and they ran the play to the right and dashed for fifteen yards before being knocked out of bounds. “You were right, Mitchell. He should have audibled. The play worked because we’ve got more talent. We could probably run it left or right or throw it and, chances are, it would still have worked. So, I ask again, did he make the right choice?”

“No.”

“We can afford to not learn lessons. That’s the most dangerous thing, Mitchell. What lessons did you not need to learn? What do we all not need to learn, because we don’t need to?”

The night was cool and wet when Mitchell returned home from the football game. He wore a boot over a cast, both of which extended up to just below his hip. He had gotten a ride home from the Tyrnes. They ate same chicken sandwiches, but a spectral distance had begun to grow between Mitchell and the rest in the cab. The Tyrnes built intimacy through repetition, and Mitchell couldn’t go to workouts or be a part of their regimen anymore and so the sharpness of their connection had already faded.

Mitchell hobbled up the slick, black porch stairs and leaned a crutch against the doorframe so he could open the door himself before collapsing onto the couch of the dark room. His leg ached without distraction. The new pill bottle was empty. Mitchell resigned himself to this burden of pain. At least he knew what it was now. The pain. It was a sacrifice of sorts because he wouldn’t rat out his mother for what she was doing. He would protect her. He laid on his back between sleep and not, the TV flipping forward and slowing down as pain-induced nausea rose and fell like a tide. Just because he loved her didn’t mean he didn’t hate her too.

At some point in the night, she stumbled through the doorway, smelling like booze and dressed like she did when she had been going to his football games, and she crumpled onto Mitchell’s leg. The white-hot pain caused him to throw her off of his elevated foot. She clunked to the ground, sideswiping the coffee table, and ending up below it. Her eyes closed and her head shaking. Her face smiling. A hand gripped around the cool wooden leg of the table. Mitchell let her lie there. He wanted her to wake up there, looking up to him. He wanted her to know that he knew, but he didn’t want to be the one who told her.

Then her head stopped bobbing. With no noises remaining in the house, he could hear her breath quicken and struggle as it gave way to a hideous gurgling. Her smile fell to a slit and turned to the color of slugs as she began to convulse. Mitchell knocked the table over to its side and pulled her up to him, trying unsuccessfully to still her body. Then, all at once, the body stilled too much, and she melted between his arms. He pulled her to the bathtub and turned on the cold water, ruining his cast as he called 9-1-1. They asked if she was breathing. If she had a pulse. “No.” Mitchell said over the rush of running water. “Her heart’s not beating.”

Mitchell watched the paramedics bring his mama back to life. For a moment, he saw his mother alive. Her eyes bugged out of her head for one last swell of breath. A quiet scream. She was not ready to go. She did not want to leave. She had made a mistake. A mistake. She had been doing better. She had been doing so much better. And then, she died.

After Mitchell’s mother’s death, the world became different for Mitchell. He newly felt the value of not hurting. Of sleeping well. Of eating food and not wanting to vomit it up. Even in retrospect, the pain wasn’t redemptive the way it had been during his workouts. The pain wasn’t exchanged for progress. That had just been pain, and that was the only meaning to any of it.

When Mitchell heard that a deal had been struck that would keep him in school for the remainder of his high school career, he was sure it was the Tyrnes. He had long since daydreamed about what it would be like to be a part of that family. What did they eat, other than celebratory chicken sandwiches? But it wasn’t them who wanted Mitchell. After this year, Chris would be on his own in college, and Mr. Tyrne would focus his energy on Chris’s little sister, Gwen, who at fourteen already showed great promise as a soccer player, already starting and leading scorer for the high school team. The next three years were for her. It was Coach Akelie who agreed to take Mitchell in.

Inside Coach’s house were a collection of individual purchases. The living room was missing a couch. Only two Lazy Boys waited. One black. The other, a leathery brown. The interior smelled like a freshly cut football field. All this to say that the house was clean and orderly and ugly.

They sat in opposite chairs, looking at each other face-to-face. Mitchell, unable to feel the depth of thankfulness he knew he should have, because he didn’t want to be, once again, a visitor in a different home, on his best behavior until he couldn’t be anymore. He wanted to be on his own.

Meanwhile, Coach Akelie simply munched on an apple, tossing a second he had brought from the kitchen into Mitchell’s lap. For the life of him, Mitchell could never remember what it was they talked about. Or if he ate the apple. Or if he had even said a word in response to the words Coach said. What he did remember was that Coach didn’t ask him if he wanted an apple or if he was hungry. He just tossed it to Mitchell and didn’t demand that he eat.

N.D. Brown is an educator living in Georgia with an MFA from the University of South Florida. His work can be found in the North American Review, River Teeth, Maudlin House, Tulane Review, and Rejection Letters, among others. His work has also been included as a Notable essay in Best American Essays 2023.