Karl Nastrom
The Willows
Before everything happened, when she was still almost faster and stronger than the boys, Alison Stenner came down the rise from the willows where the girls always played and beat Marty Haugen at football.
It was 1974 along the Minnesota River, out on the prairie. They were both eight.
Alison didn’t want to make trouble, but she needed to teach Marty a lesson. Just last summer, she and Marty were such good friends. Riding their bikes around town, picking up other friends, grabbing candy from the corner shop. Then Marty started teasing. About her dad and his gimpy left leg, how it sagged off his body and hitched when he walked. Marty showed what he meant, mimicking Alison’s dad, limping and dragging. Boys laughed along, which just made Marty’s taunts feel meaner. Alison didn’t understand how Marty could be so mean. She told him to stop. She begged, almost in tears. He laughed. “It’s just a dumb joke. You gonna cry?”
Alison told her mom about Marty’s teasing, but not what Marty said. She didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, or get Marty in trouble. From the other room, from his chair in the corner, Alison’s dad said, “Don’t take that shit. Kick his ass.”
“Stop that,” her mom said. “She’s not a boy.”
“I know,” her dad said. “She’s my daughter.”
Alison tried Marty again, but he kept on until she had no choice but to walk down the rise and onto the field where the boys clumped together, hunching over to draw plays in the dirt.
“One play, Marty,” Alison said, kneeing his shoulder to get his attention.
“One play what?” Marty said, standing and stepping toward Alison.
The other boys got to their feet and gathered around.
“Football,” Alison said. “Me and you. One play. So you’ll stop teasing.” She stooped and picked up a ball. She squeezed tight to stop her hands trembling.
Marty laughed like he was amused, but he dodged her eyes and looked side to side at the boys who stood staring. “Stop playing, Al,” he said, using the name that he used when they played as friends. That made her so angry that her hands stopped shaking.
By then the rest of the girls had come down as well. The whole class was watching.
“I get the ball,” Alison said.
“So?” Marty said.
“If I win, you stop teasing,” Alison said.
“Yeah right,” Marty said. “If I win, then you’re a big baby who can’t take a joke.”
They looked at each other.
“You’re gonna get hurt,” Marty said.
Alison looked down at her hands that were holding the ball, holding tight, holding as hard as she could with her hands that were strong because she’d been practicing in the backyard for so long, not for football, but to hold the bat off her shoulder so her dad would go to the park and pitch underhand for her. He wouldn’t take her unless she could handle the bat. He offered to buy a small model for her, but she wanted his, the bat he’d used before he went to Vietnam and his leg got exploded, when he was still almost good enough to go straight to the Yankees, straight out of high school. He’d been that great, people said. Like Mickey Mantle. Like God. Her dad never said what that was like, to be like Mickey Mantle and God. He didn’t say much, mostly sat in his chair in the corner. She could tell he was sad, but he never cried. Once Alison asked why not. He said that she shouldn’t cry either, that tears never did a damn bit of good.
On the dirt field where the boys always played while the girls were off in the willows, the boys made up the rules. They called it a game, but it wasn’t. Alison got the ball. Six steps apart, she and Marty would run at each other. She’d get past Marty, or he’d drop her like a sack of potatoes. And she couldn’t fumble. That was it, the boys said. The girls didn’t argue.
She and Marty stepped off their paces. Someone said, “Go.” They charged at one another. Marty was right, she’d get hurt. It didn’t matter. She lowered her shoulder. When her head hit Marty’s, Alison heard a loud crack inside her skull, like a bat hitting a ball. She saw stars. Not cartoon tweety-bird-on-a-blue-sky stars, but flat-black-filled-with-angry-stabbing-sharp-white stars. Her jumbled brains were about to explode. It was like dying, but worse. Alison bit her lip and stumbled forward seeing those stars, tasting blood in her mouth.
Her eyes cleared. She saw Marty sprawled in the dirt, face down, unmoving. She swallowed the blood and wanted to ask who’d won, but she began throwing up. She collapsed to her knees. Reaching to break her fall, she saw the ball slip from her grasp. So she’d won.
Things went fuzzy and dark. She awoke on a cot and saw a hand reaching down. It was her dad.
“It’s okay, Peanut; I got you. I’ll bring you in.”
*
Five years later, Alison turned thirteen and barely thought about beating Marty Haugen at football to get him to shut his big mouth. Too much had happened, since that day at the willows. So many little leaves of sadness and hurt, browned and brittle and collecting, that Alison could crawl into the warm heart of the pile and sleep forever, if she had that chance and was willing to take it. Like her dad took it. Even her mom, tall and calm in the face of her own sadness, said Alison could stay home from school on her birthday, if she wanted, in case she got sad. “It’s okay to cry,” her mom said, yet again. “You won’t die, I promise.”
Alison went to school, simply because mom had given her the option to stay home. Before her mom could give her a lecture, Alison stomped off, leaving the front door to swing in the wind. Her mom had no business saying what Alison should or shouldn’t do now that she was practically grown. She’d be driving in three years, legally drinking in six. She’d chugged stolen beers with her friends a few times already, and as far as she knew, she was the first in her grade to learn how to roll her own joints.
She was fine through the morning at school, minding her lessons, not thinking at all. Then at lunch her mashed potatoes were lumpy. She picked up her fork to press out the lumps and was taken by a memory of her dad long ago, when she was small and not strong enough to fix her potatoes herself. So he did it for her. His big hand swallowed her hand wrapped around the fork handle. She got to watch from his lap while he smoothed out her spuds.
Alison felt tears coming on. She jabbed her arm with the fork. She shook her head side to side. The tears pushed. She didn’t want to cry in the school cafeteria with everyone watching.
She saw Marty, two tables away, clowning with friends. He shoved an entire cheeseburger into his mouth and tried to drink milk through a straw. His mouth was too full to swallow or get any suction. Milk dribbled down his chin. Chunks of unchewed cheeseburger fell out. Alison almost laughed. At that moment, Marty was the only person in the world who could make her almost laugh, even when he didn’t know she was looking. He didn’t have to try. That’s just how he was. Such a good friend.
But the effort it took to hold back the laughter brought her tears even closer to flowing over the edges that had been keeping them in. Alison bit the inside of her lip hard enough to taste blood. That didn’t help either. She squeezed her eyes shut, tasting blood in her mouth. The tears were about to pour out.
She heard Timmy Jernigan. “Hey, everybody. Look at Alison.” Alison hadn’t talked to Timmy since fourth or fifth grade. There’d been no reason. Yet there he stood.
She opened her eyes.
“You cryin’, Alison?” Timmy said. “Cry, baby, cry?” He squinched his face. He whimpered. He sniffled. He mimed baby hands at his face.
Alison could only watch Timmy. More tears gathered. But then she heard Marty, two tables away.
“What did you say, Timmy?” Marty’s voice carried easily; the confidence of scrimmage calls and midfield directions gave his voice a commanding note, the cafeteria silenced.
She turned and saw Marty stand, then rush toward Timmy. Marty had grown up so fast. He was so big and strong now. At twelve, he played varsity football. He closed on Timmy so hard it was scary. “You teasing her, you little fuck? You gonna tease on her birthday?”
Timmy’s eyes went wide. So did his mouth. But no words came out. Marty’s fist hit Timmy’s jaw so hard that it cracked, like a ball off a bat.
Alison swallowed the blood in her mouth.
Timmy spun around and went down like a sack of potatoes.
Marty stood, chest heaving, nostrils flaring, his hand stuck sideways, his wrist broken or worse. Alison wanted to go to Marty, to say something. To thank him. But she couldn’t. Once she saw his wrist, she had to look away.
Before they found her dad in the garage, when Alison still almost believed he’d pull himself up and be okay, he told her about this kid Jerry Connor from Chicago who’d reached down from a helicopter and saved his life. “He brought me in, Peanut, hanging off that skid, or I never would have met you.” Her dad said Jerry Connor had done that with a busted wrist. “That had to hurt like a mother, Peanut. Like a mother.” Her dad said, “Maybe he shoulda just left me there.” He tousled her hair. “Woulda been better for his wrist, at least.”
“Dad, please don’t say that,” Alison said with a lump in her throat.
“I’m just teasing,” her dad said. “It’s a joke.” He laughed like he was amused, but Alison saw that his eyes were all gone.
In the lunchroom, Alison looked back at Marty to check out his wrist, but she couldn’t see. She was crying. With her class all around, she was crying, her tears filling and flowing, falling all over, all down her face and neck and soaking with snot into the front of her shirt. She was a mess. But it wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe her dad hadn’t wanted to cry, but that wasn’t her. She wasn’t her dad. She was his daughter.
Marty was another thing. The vice principal escorted him out like a criminal while the nurse triaged Timmy Jernigan, trying to revive him. Alison worried that Marty would get in big trouble—suspended or locked up or kicked out of football—and it would all be her fault.
Walking to class, she decided that her mom had been right. She should have stayed home. Yes, her mom was annoying, but Alison didn’t really mind her.
At the same time, Alison wasn’t about to have any heart-to-heart conversations with her mom. She might slide in for a hug, all soft and maternal, or fold her arms and say something parental. Worse, her mom might laugh. Her mom was sad, too, since her dad, but her mom always tried to keep laughing, more than Alison liked, as though her mom knew some private joke that she didn’t bother explaining because Alison was too slow to get it, and, even if Alison got it, she wouldn’t be able to laugh.
Her mom kept threatening that if Alison didn’t lighten up a little, someday she’d die with a frown on her face.
That was no problem. Alison was ready. In the willows, when they were younger, the girls played a game they called dying. They lay on the ground without moving or smiling or crying. Frowning was fine, as long as they kept the frown forever, like a painting or drawing. Kids took turns staying alive to say who was out. Last person dead was the winner.
After a while they quit playing because Alison won every time. Kids said she cheated, but that wasn’t true. Alison won because dying never felt like a game. It was easy and natural, like a joke so good that she couldn’t help but laugh on the inside until she’d been dead longer than the last girl alive.
“I knew from the start that the story opens with a violent showdown that Alison wins. That took a few minutes to outline. Within days, I wrote most of the rest. I felt the semi-elation of almost-completion. Then I remained stuck for over two years, unable to locate the conclusion, until I allowed myself to question why I’d been so certain that Alison would always beat Marty in a heads up fight at the age of eight. Seeking that answer led me to a time before the story’s beginning, at which point I could finally write an ending.” —Karl Nastrom
Karl Nastrom grew up in Minnesota and began writing in 1996, while stationed in Germany as a USAF intelligence officer. When not writing, Karl has represented clients as an attorney in federal, state, and tribal courts in Alabama, California, and Minnesota. He has also taught math at public high schools in Maryland and Mississippi. He currently lives in Minneapolis, where he works at the Indian Child Welfare Law Center, serving Native families involved in child protection. “The Willows” is his first published work of fiction. His website is: www.karlnastrom.com.