Minibus

The programme was on the desk by the door at half past six, where he had left it the night before, in his worse hand, on a sheet of hotel paper from the pad on the lounge noticeboard.

06.30. Wake. 06.45. Water (Mr Luna’s rule). 07.00. Box: Kessler. 07.15. Breakfast (eat it, Lena made it). 07.30. Minibus. 08.45. Picacho Peak (look at it). 14.00. Kick-off. 16.45. Tempe wins. 17.30. Minibus. 20.00. Home. Sleep. Tick.

Alexander was sitting on the edge of the bed by the door, dressed, with the sheet on his knee and the pencil in his hand. He ticked 06.30. Then he read down the rest of it, and stopped.

“Sixteen forty-five,” he said.

“It’s a joke.”

“It is on the programme.”

“It’s a joke on the programme.”

Alexander considered the line for some time, with the pencil over it.

“I have never had a joke on a programme,” he said. “In Potsdam they are typed.” He drank the glass of water on the corner of the desk, beside the pill box from the pharmacy on Mill Avenue with its seven lids, and ticked 06.45.

“Thank you,” he said, to the programme.

---

The minibus was white, and it was under the arcade at a quarter past seven with its engine running and its door slid open, and Kessler was standing beside it in a dark suit with the keys in his hand, looking at the four palo verde trees as though they had been reported to him.

He had hired it on Wednesday. Nobody had seen him do it. On Thursday there had been a typed sheet under the door of every room that was going, with a seat for each name and a time, 07.30, signed K., which on the third floor had caused some confusion, because there were now two of them.

“Is that his?” said Tyler.

He had walked over from Ironwood in the dark with a six-pack of Glacier Freeze under one arm and his hood up, because it was fifty-one degrees.

“He hired it,” said Frederick.

“Like, himself? With a card?” Tyler looked at Kessler with real respect. “Brayden talked to a guy about hiring a car for an hour once. And then he didn’t.” He thought about it. “I left Brayden a note. He’s going to talk about it for a week. He was going to anyway.”

Across the road, over the dentist’s, the blind moved an inch.

---

Jack came down last, at twenty-five past, in the red sweatshirt and his grandfather’s white hat.

He had landed on Thursday morning at Terminal Four, an hour before Lukas went out of it, and carved Lena’s turkey on the two rings that afternoon for fourteen people in the lounge, standing, in an apron that said PROPERTY OF RESIDENCE LIFE, the way a man carves who has done the Sunday roast behind a bar since he was fourteen. Rhys, at the door of the minibus with a clipboard nobody had given him, looked at the sweatshirt and opened his mouth.

“I know,” said Jack. “It’s red. We’re going to Tucson. Tucson’s red. I’ll blend in.”

“You’ll blend in with them.”

“That’s the idea.” Then Jack unzipped his rucksack and took out, folded small, a gold T-shirt with FIRST YEAR across the back in maroon capitals a foot high, and pulled it on over the sweatshirt, there under the arcade, and stood in it with his arms out. “I learn,” said Jack. “I’m slow. But I learn.”

Rhys went pink, from the ears inwards.

“You kept it.”

“Mum washed it. It’s been on the line in Coln Saint Aldwyns. Purvis asked what a first year was.” Jack got into the minibus. “I said it’s what you are before you know anything. He said he’d been one for seventy years.”

---

They went south on the I-10, out of the Valley, into the flat.

Kessler drove. Felix sat beside him with a map open on his knee that nobody needed, because Felix liked maps the way he liked the hinge on the door of 314 and anything else with parts. Behind them were Lena and Rhys and Sam, with Lena’s breakfast in a cool box at Sam’s feet, each sandwich labelled in German with its contents and a time. Then Tyler and Alexander. Then the back seat, which was Frederick’s and Jack’s.

Sam handed the sandwiches back down the rows, reading out the labels slowly, and getting them right. Alexander ate his, the whole of it, in the short careful bites of a man doing a thing he has been asked to do, and then took the programme out of the inside pocket of the linen jacket and ticked 07.15.

Jack was asleep by Casa Grande.

He went the way he always went, between one sentence and the next, with his head tipped onto Frederick’s shoulder and the hat sliding forward over his eyes, like a man switched off at the wall; and Frederick sat very still under the weight of it, as he had in the backs of cars and on aircraft and once on a bench on the wold, and looked past the brim at the brown country going by, and did not move his arm for an hour.

In front of him Tyler had his headphones round his neck, not on.

“Is this, like, a state visit?” he said to Alexander, quietly, so as not to wake Jack.

“No.”

“Cool.” Tyler drank some Glacier. “I didn’t bring a tie.”

“Neither did I,” said Alexander, who was wearing one.

---

At a quarter to nine the cactus began.

It began at the foot of a peak that stood up out of the flat by itself like a broken tooth, and came down the slope and across the road and went on, on both sides, as far as anybody could see: the saguaros, green-grey and pleated, with their arms up, thousands of them, standing at the same unhurried distance from one another, like a crowd that has been waiting for something for a hundred years and will wait another hundred.

“Picacho Peak,” said Felix, from the map.

Alexander looked at it with both hands on his knees, and Frederick, behind him, saw his lips move very slightly, and knew what he was doing.

“Four hundred and twelve,” said Alexander.

“Four hundred and twelve what?” said Tyler.

“Saguaros. Between the sign and the bridge.”

“Dude, you can’t count cactus.”

“I can count cactus.”

From the row in front Sam turned round in his seat with his notebook already open, which meant that he had been counting too.

“Four hundred and nine,” said Sam.

They looked at each other over the back of the seat, the accountant from Detroit and the German Emperor.

“There were three behind the sign,” said Alexander.

“Behind the sign isn’t between the sign and the bridge,” said Sam.

Alexander considered this with great seriousness.

“No,” he said at last. “It is not.” He took out the programme, and under Picacho Peak (look at it) wrote small, 409 (S.O.), and ticked it. “Thank you, Sam.”

“You’re welcome,” said Sam, and turned round, and wrote something down.

---

The stadium was full at half past one, and the whole of it was red and blue except for one end.

The south end was theirs: a slab of maroon and gold at the bottom of a bowl, a few thousand of the University of the March who had driven down the I-10 that morning with their arms painted to the elbow; and from the other three sides, all round them, sixty thousand people who had been told since they were children what Tempe was had come to tell Tempe.

“NOR-MAL!” Clap, clap. “NOR-MAL!”

It came down from three sides at once, slow and enormous and pleased with itself, and the away end took it the way the Furnace took everything, with joy.

“WHO ARE WE?” shouted a boy in a gold wig on the wall at the front.

“THE BOOBY PRIZE!”

Jack had woken at the Tucson exit as though somebody had called his name. He stood on the bench in the gold shirt and the hat and looked round at sixty thousand people chanting NORMAL at him with an expression of perfect contentment; and on the next one he threw his fist up and shouted it with them, at his own end.

“NOR-MAL!”

A girl in the row in front turned round.

“No. That’s them. That’s what they call us.”

“I know, love,” said Jack, beaming at her. “I just like it. Where I’m from it’s the nicest thing you can say about anybody. My mum says it about the vicar.”

The girl looked at him, and at the man beside him, and at the man beside that, upright, in a linen jacket buttoned over a maroon shirt that Lena had bought on Mill Avenue on Wednesday and that was buttoned to the neck, with a hat held on his knee in both hands.

“Oh my God,” she said, quite quietly, and turned back to the field.

Jack got the forks wrong all afternoon, on purpose now, three fingers straight and then one and then a thumb, and Rhys bent them down at the knuckle every time without a word, as he had a year ago, and Jack let him, and winked at Frederick over Rhys’s head. Alexander did the forks correctly, three fingers crooked at exactly the angle of the boy in front, a fraction late, because he waited to see it done first. Kessler stood at the end of the row where the bench met the aisle, with his back to the stand and his hands folded, in the dark suit, in the sun, and was not there.

---

In the second quarter Tempe had three tries at it and got four yards, and on fourth down a boy in a clean shirt jogged out from the bench and stood back, a long way back, by himself, and the ball came to him and he kicked it high down the whole length of the sky to the other side; and then he jogged back and sat down.

Alexander watched him go.

“Why have they given it away?”

“It’s a punt,” said Tyler. “Fourth down. If you don’t make it they get it anyway, so you kick it, so they have to start way back there.”

“It is a procedure for losing well.”

“I guess.” Tyler watched the boy in the clean shirt take a drink of water. “That’s all that guy does. He stands there the whole game, and when it’s bad they send him on, and he kicks it away and comes back and sits down.”

“That is the whole of his office?”

“Yeah. Best job in the stadium. He never gets dirty.” Tyler drank. “Everybody’s always pretty glad to see him, though. When he comes on, everybody goes, okay, fine, at least it’s him.”

Alexander looked at the punter on the bench for a long time, with his head a little on one side. Tyler looked at him looking. Then he looked past him at Frederick, and back, at the two of them side by side on a bench in Tucson, with mild and uncomplicated interest.

“He’s basically the King,” said Tyler.

“Thank you,” said Frederick.

“Like, a good one, though,” said Tyler.

And Alexander laughed.

He laughed out loud. It came out of him all at once, before he could do anything about it, a short high helpless sound that turned into a longer one; and he put a hand over his mouth and it went on behind the hand, and his shoulders went, and the hat slid off his knee and Tyler caught it, and the girl in front turned round again, and so did Rhys, and Lena two rows down.

Frederick heard it.

He had heard it in March, at the whist table in the lounge. He had not heard it since. He had stopped listening for it in November, because listening for a thing that does not come is a kind of noise; and he heard it now, in Tucson, at a punt, and found that he could not look at the person making it.

He looked at the field.

He looked hard at it, at the green and the white lines and the boys in red and blue at the far end, for some time, until the sound beside him had gone back down into his cousin and stopped; and on his other side, without turning his head, Jack put the flat of his hand on the middle of Frederick’s back where nobody could see it, and left it there, and watched the field as well.

“Sorry,” said Alexander, behind his hand.

“Don’t be sorry, dude,” said Tyler, and gave him back the hat. “It was funny.”

---

At a minute and ten seconds in the last quarter a boy in maroon went over the line at the far end on his knees, and it was twenty-seven to twenty-five, Tempe, and the away end lost its mind.

Alexander took the programme out of his pocket.

Frederick watched him unfold it on his knee, with people standing on the benches all round him, and look at the clock on the scoreboard, and at the line in Frederick’s worse hand that said 16.45. Tempe wins, which had been a joke at half past six in the morning.

It was sixteen thirty-eight. He ticked it.

Frederick looked at the tick. He had never once seen him do it: tick a thing before it had happened. Alexander looked at it too, as though somebody else had made it, and then folded the programme away and stood up on the bench with everybody else.

“Dude,” said Tyler, who had seen. “Don’t. You jinx it.”

“What is jinx?”

Tyler looked at him in something close to horror.

---

Tucson had a minute and ten seconds, and it used all of it.

It went down the field in short ugly patient pieces, out of bounds, out of bounds, a time-out, and the bowl of red and blue rose with every yard, and the south end went quieter and quieter, until at four seconds Tucson was on Tempe’s twenty-four and the boy in the clean shirt came on for Tucson. He jogged out and stood back, a long way back, by himself. The whole stadium went silent, sixty thousand of it, so that Frederick could hear the boy in the gold wig saying come on, come on, come on into a megaphone he had forgotten was switched on.

Tyler had hold of Frederick’s sleeve and had not noticed he had it. Alexander was standing on the bench with the hat in both hands against his chest, quite still, the way he stood for an anthem.

The ball came back. The boy in the clean shirt kicked it.

It went up end over end out of the shadow of the stand into the last of the sun, where it turned gold, and it went on going up, and then it began to come down, slower than anything Frederick had ever seen, towards the two tall yellow posts directly in front of them, so that the whole of the south end watched it come at them out of the sky like something thrown; and it went between the posts, exactly between them, with room either side, and into the net behind.

The referee put both arms straight up.

Twenty-eight to twenty-seven.

The bowl went up like a fire.

And in the south end, on his feet on a bench in the shadow, among a few thousand silent people in maroon and gold, the German Emperor said, clearly, in the exact and beautifully articulated English he used for everything, with every consonant in it and the vowel exactly where it ought to be:

“Fuck.”

---

Everybody within four rows heard it, because it was the only sound in the south end.

The girl in front turned round for the third time with her mouth open. The boy in the gold wig turned round with the megaphone still on. Rhys went pink so fast that it went straight past his ears into his collar. Sam took out his notebook and wrote something down, quite calmly, and Frederick knew without looking that it was the time.

“Dude,” breathed Tyler, with enormous reverence. “Sick.”

Then, from the end of the row, there was a sound Frederick had never heard.

It was low and it was loud and it came up from somewhere very deep, from the chest that had filled Dr Pike’s room at eight in the morning in September with a bass that had made an old woman take off her glasses; and it rolled out over the away end, helpless, so that people three rows down who had not heard the word turned round to find out what the noise was. Kessler was laughing. He was standing at the end of the row with his hands still folded in front of him and his face doing something it had not been built to do, red, with his eyes shut and his shoulders going, and he could not stop.

Alexander turned round on the bench and looked at him.

“Matthias,” he said.

He said it carefully, trying it, the way a person says a name for the first time. Frederick had not known it. In five years he had heard Kessler called Kessler by everybody, by Alexander and Kimura and Jack and a night porter, and K. at the bottom of a seating plan, and he had never once thought about what came in front of it.

Kessler opened his eyes.

“Majestät,” he said, and stopped laughing, slowly, in stages, like a large engine. “Verzeihung.”

“Nein,” said Alexander. He looked at him a moment longer. Then he turned back to the field, where the red and blue were pouring over the wall from three sides onto the grass, and somewhere in the middle of it a plain silver bowl was being handed by the Lord Marcher to two university presidents who were required to stand together for exactly as long as it took; and he sat down with the hat on his knee, and took out the programme, and crossed the tick out with one short exact line.

“I ticked it before it happened,” he said.

“It was a joke,” said Frederick. “I wrote it as a joke.”

“Mate,” said Jack, who had sat down on Alexander’s other side with the hat pushed back. “It wasn’t your fault. The bloke kicked it. He’d have kicked it if you’d been in Potsdam.”

“It was not a question of fault. It was a question of procedure.”

“It’s a football match.”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “That is why it is so important to get it right.”

Jack looked past him at Frederick with his eyebrows up under the brim, and Frederick shook his head very slightly, and Jack left it, which Jack could do, when he was asked properly, better than anybody alive.

Beside the crossed-out line Alexander wrote, small, 28 to 27 (Tucson). 16.44. Then he ticked that.

“There,” he said.

---

The minibus left the car park at half past five, in the dusk, and went past Picacho in the dark, all four hundred and nine of them invisible and the three behind the sign; and by Casa Grande everybody was asleep but two.

They went in the order they had sat. Felix in the front, with the map on his knee and his head on the window. Lena, upright, with her arms folded, asleep the way she was awake, decisively. Rhys with his head on Sam’s shoulder, and Sam upright under it with his pencil still in his fingers. Tyler sideways across his seat with his hood up and a bottle of Glacier held upright against his chest in both hands, like something he had been given to carry in a procession. Jack against the window at the back, with the hat over his face.

Alexander was asleep with his head against the glass. He had the programme on his knee and the pencil in his hand, and in the lights of the cars coming the other way Frederick could see the ticks down the side of it, and the crossed-out one, and the last line, 20.00. Home. Sleep. Tick., with nothing beside it yet. The pencil lay across the paper at an angle, not parallel to anything. It was being held.

Frederick moved up to the seat behind the driver.

Kessler drove with both hands on the wheel, at exactly the limit, with the lights of the dashboard on his face.

“Sir,” said Kessler.

“Yes.”

The road was straight and black, and far ahead, low down on the line of the dark, there was a faint orange glow in the sky that was the Valley.

“He laughed,” said Kessler. “In the second quarter. At the boy.”

“I heard.”

“I have not heard that since March.”

“Neither have I.”

“No, sir,” said Kessler. “I know.”

A lorry came the other way, lit up like a ship, and went past, and the minibus rocked in its wind.

“Kessler,” said Frederick.

“Sir.”

“Matthias?”

Kessler did not take his eyes off the road. Something happened at the corner of his mouth, in the light of the dashboard, and went away again.

“Sir,” said Kessler, which was a whole sentence and meant no; and Frederick sat back and did not ask again, and watched the glow on the edge of the dark get larger and turn into lights, a whole flat lake of them from one side of the windscreen to the other. At eight o’clock exactly, by the clock on the dashboard, Kessler drew in under the arcade of Palo Verde Hall beside the four palo verde trees and switched off the engine; and behind him, in the dark, in the seat by the window, Frederick heard the small sound of a pencil on paper, once, as somebody woke exactly in time to tick the last line.