Perfectly Ernest

Chapter Two

The Walrus paced around the empty locker room, muttering expletives and kicking every piece of gear in his path. First, he rocketed a mitt into the side of a trashcan. Then, he toppled a sack of dingy balls over in an avalanche. Finally, he caught a jockstrap with the edge of his shoe and flung it in a wide, floating arch into a urinal. His face cycled through various shades of purple. He still hadn’t said a word to me directly.

What was I feeling as I witnessed a middle-aged man throw a tantrum that made the word epic seem small? Nothing.

Well, I registered a few things. I felt every drop of cold-water that trickled off my hair to drip onto my bare shoulders, tickling its way over the muscled ridges of my abdomen. The cheap towel wrapped around my waist was soaked through, and chaffed against my skin with every movement. The tile floor might as well have been ice under my feet after exiting the warm shower only a minute or two before. But all of that sensory information was only skin deep.

All the things on the inside, the things that really felt anything, were walled off in a familiar cocoon of I don’t give damn.

The Walrus charged. His fists clinched into sizeable balls of iron rage. I actually thought he would swing at me, so I flattened my back against the wall and waited for the blow. Our eyes met. I stuck out my chin to take the punishment, not fight back. He pulled up. A man after my own heart … guess he liked a challenge. All I could muster right then was an aggressive apathy.

I deserved an ass kicking for what I’d done, but the Walrus had too much pride to beat up a punk kid who wouldn’t fight back. I was a little disappointed.

Coach Ramirez stepped between us, his leathery brown skin clashing with the white of the Walrus’s mustache as he put a forearm across the much larger man’s chest to stay him. The Walrus looked at him as if he’d been shaken from a bad dream.

“Fuck.” The Walrus spun away from Ramirez and kicked one of the benches that ran down the middle of the narrow room.

It was the first thing he’d struck that didn’t move. I didn’t know if that defeated him or what, but he collapsed on the seat and ran his hands through his snowy hair over and over.

“Maybe it’s best if we take the bus ride home to cool down,” Coach Ramirez said in his pleasantly thick Spanish accent. “Give Ernie time to explain his side of things. I’m sure—”

“No.” The Walrus’s voice was strained, coming out like the forced growl of a jungle cat. “I want answers. Now. That boy cost his team—his community—a chance at something they’ve dreamed of their entire lives. He owes them that much.”

I let my head bounce against the concrete wall behind me, creating more feeling, but still not the important kind. The inside kind.

Coach Ramirez sighed. “Ernie, what did happen out there? You were rocking and rolling, hermano. Then, nada. You hit a batter and gave up a homerun on the next pitch. That’s not the Ernie I know. Nerves?”

The Walrus laughed.

“Bullshit it was nerves. He doesn’t give a damn about anyone or anything. This was another opportunity for him to show up his coach. I haven’t forgotten the times you’ve walked out of team meetings … your blatant disregard for team rules at every turn.” He thrust his hand out. “Look at him. He’s sitting there stone-faced and freshly showered when some of his teammates were so torn up, they went straight to the bus in their gear. Your buddy Junkyard’s eye black was streaked with tears. But you don’t care about all that, do you, hotshot?”

I swallowed back a boulder-sized lump in my throat. Junk hadn’t even looked at me after the game. No one had. The other team had stormed the field, forcing all of us off in a shameful exodus. Just like that, our team, such an unbreakable bond of brotherhood only moments before, shattered into twenty-eight disillusioned pieces.

A warm tear tickled its way down my cheek and mingled with the cold remnants of shower water. I felt something at last, and it wasn’t sweet freedom from being released from the dreams of others, but rather the bitter and unfamiliar taste of failure. I’d failed everyone.

Ramirez held up his hand. “Coach, I don’t think Ernie—”

“Stop taking up for me.” I smacked my palm against the wall. “He’s right, okay? I’ve got no excuse. I did it on purpose.”

Ramirez’s mouth hung open. “You … you can’t mean that, Ernie.”

Sniffling out a mirthless chuckle, I said, “I swear, it’s like she sent you to chaperone me from the grave. Quit believing in me. You fought so damned hard to get me on this team, did it ever occur to you I might not want to be?” 

“You sure took the scholarship,” the Walrus snapped.

“I did.” I tugged at the damp curls of my hair. “I’ve regretted it every day since.”

“You ungrateful piece of—”

Coach Ramirez cleared his throat loud enough to create a slight echo. “Why didn’t you come to me, Ernie? We could’ve talked about it.”

I shrugged. “Guess I felt crushed by the weight of living. Getting booted from the team was the only way I knew how to get out from under it short of … other things.”

Ramirez sighed. “We’re getting you some help—”

“No. I’m done with him. He’s off the team.” The Walrus pointed at me. If the finger had been loaded, he’d have shot me dead right there. “No more scholarship. No more rolling around campus like you’re the biggest shit in the toilet. I’ve put up with your shenanigans long enough. We’re not running a home for boys with momma issues. You’re officially someone else’s problem.”

Their eyes swept over every inch of me, one man searching for threads of strength, the other probing for fatal cracks in my armor. They should have been looking for holes. I was full of them.

“I fucked up. I’m sorry.” My voice could have been one of those computer generated, phone voice recordings. It was that alien sounding in my own ears.

The Walrus’s face went full red. Time for liftoff.

He stood and turned his back to me. “Not good enough. You’re done. I don’t want to see you in the facility the rest of the semester, and I’ll run any of your teammates until their mommas puke if they so much as speak your name around me. Bus leaves in fifteen with or without you.” He glanced over his shoulder at me. “See? I can not care, too.”

He exited quickly and quietly, as most violent storms do. I was left a broken mess in his wake. All in one day, I’d stood atop a mountain only to have it crumble underneath me. Brought down by my own hand.