Fight Song Read Free Page B

rammed you with my car. Technically, I only almost rammed you. But I can overlook this inconsistency. I can take one ramming for our team. Don’t go faster than my speed from earlier—seven miles per hour.”
    “You’re saying I can hit you with this SUV right now?”
    “Only if you want to. There’s no obligation. If you don’t feel up to it, I’m totally fine with that.”
    “No,” Bob says. “I’d like very much to hit you with a car.”
    “And then we’re even.”
    “Why would you do this?”
    “Psycho Schumann’s not doing anything. You’re doing something.” Schumann opens his door. He walks in front of the SUV, stops about fifteen feet down the road.
    Coffen crawls over the console and into the driver’s seat, plock riding shotgun.
    He looks at Schumann standing out there in the headlights.
    Looks and thinks about how rare it is when a fantasy comes true: Bob’s secret yearnings to inflict pain on his subdivision foe are about to be realized.
    He revs the engine.
    “I am not afraid of anything,” Schumann says. “I’d take a grizzly bear’s temperature rectally. I’d tickle Sasquatch’s ass with a feather.”
    “You ready?” Bob asks.
    “Are you ready?”
    “I can’t wait,” says Coffen.
    He means it—or really, Bob wants to mean it. A certainpart of Coffen is excited by the impending violence, but unfortunately, that faction of his psyche is outweighed by a more empathic caucus, a body of voices all whispering the same thing in his head: You can’t do this. No matter what, this is a road too low for you. Don’t go down to this disgusting level .
    “Hut, hut, hike!” Schumann says, eyes closed, arms flexed.
    But the SUV doesn’t move, continuing to idle.
    “I can’t do it,” Bob says.
    “What?” Schumann says, his eyes still closed.
    “I can’t ram you, even though I really want to ram you.”
    “Why can’t you?”
    “I’m not insane.”
    Schumann lopes back to the driver’s door; Coffen climbs back over into the passenger seat, holds the plock in his lap. Schumann starts driving and says, “I think I can coach you, Coffen.”
    “How’s that?”
    “Imagine you’re on a football team and you get a new special teammate. Imagine that every player on the opposing team is not on steroids, and they are sort of weaklings, staggering around and not really doing very good out on the field. And this new special teammate of yours is on steroids and sculpted like a Roman statue and having him on your team is going to guarantee a stampede into the play-offs. Does this sound like the kind of teammate you might want on your side?”
    Bob doesn’t respond. He should’ve hit him with the car.
    Schumann continues, “What I’m saying is that I’m like your new teammate.”
    “What are you getting at?”
    “You see this all the time in sports,” Schumann says. “Heated competitors in one season get swapped onto the same team the next, and once teammates, they transcend any grudges of yore.”
    “Yore?”
    “It means things that happened in the past.”
    “I know what it means,” Coffen says.
    “So what I’m saying is, I can help you. I know lots of things that maybe might help somebody like you.”
    “Like what?”
    “I can coach you to always act like the guy who threw that flagpole at my house. Not the pansy you usually are. You’ll always be a fearless warrior.”
    Schumann looks at Coffen, awaiting acknowledgment, but Bob doesn’t say shit, the clang in his brain getting worse. Words are far from his lips, locked behind some sort of window painted shut. Coffen will soon find out that a concussion is the culprit, but maybe it’s other things, too: Maybe it’s this new way Schumann speaks to him—with, what, respect? Deference? Equality? Bob’s not quite sure, only knows that he digs it.
    “How’s your head?” Schumann asks. “Your eyes aren’t focusing, I don’t think.”
    Bob sees the inherent merits in Schumann’s suggestion: Having him as a kind of