Coach Sworley sits on the dunk tank platform he set up in the end zone of Whitfield Academy’s football field, 200 miles away from his home in Longpike. He stole the dunk tank from his now former school, place of his now former place of employment. He’s stripped down to his white V-neck and gym shorts. His feet dangle just below the water line, waiting for the kid with an eye patch to make his seventh attempt at the target plate. So far, three pitches hit the dirt, two sailed overhead and into the backstop net, and one rattled the cage.
Maybe just shut that good eye and use The Force, eh kid? Sworley thinks.
The kid nervously rolls the baseball between his palms. Already out fifteen carnival tickets for a string of lousy tosses. That’s a loss, right out of the box. This kid may never have a W in his life. So he motions the kid closer. “Listen up. If you make meatballs, you throw meatballs.” Does the kid know meatballs? Doubtful. Still: “Now hold the ball up so I can see it. That’s good. Now turn it so your first finger and fuck-off finger are on the two seams.” Should have said middle or bird finger. Too late. “Good. Now, cradle it with whatever digits aren’t doing anything. That’s OK, but don’t try to crack it like a nut. Loosen up. Better. Now let’s cock it. Arm goes down, up, and back. Do it again, but raise your elbow. Again. One more. Good. Now, the real thing, so step back to the line. That’s good. Eye on the target, arm down, up, back, and don’t forget to let go of the rock.”
The kid adjusts the patch covering his eye, goes into the funkiest wind-up Sworley has ever seen. His leg kicks straight out, no knee bend, high as a chorus-line dancer, then his arm comes over the top with almost no elbow bend, and the ball comes out flat with no spin. But, Sworley thinks, seeing that skillful Rockette’s-worthy leg lift, maybe this kid, who couldn’t out-pitch a pink flamingo, is a natural field goal kicker, or punter? But who else will ever see the potential in him? He figures: No one. And besides, for Sworley, his coaching days are over and done with.
The ball is on the way.
***
Whitfield Academy is his ninth carnival in a month’s time. In addition to school events, he’s also done church picnics, and a couple of corporate outings, where every company CEO wants to show how human they are to let the company underlings get them wet—if they manage to throw a decent ball, which they rarely do.
Luckily, he added a camper shell to his pickup a few months before he left Longpike, so now he sleeps on a blow-up mattress in the truck bed, and still has room for his camp stove, a few cooking utensils, a box for dry goods, and a camp shower bag. His clothes and toiletries he keeps in a duffle in the back seat. And he drives wherever he has to go the night before so he can set up early in a good spot near a water source.
He hasn’t been home once since he dropped the tongue of the dunk tank trailer on his hitch ball and drove away during halftime of Longpike High School’s homecoming game against the Barston Beavers. He coached eight-man football for six seasons: 1-11 year one, then 3-9 the next, with a promising .500 season in year three, before the whole program took a dive. Oh-and-six so far this season. When he left at the half of homecoming, his Longpike Langeliers were down 31-zip.
The Board fired him the Thursday night before homecoming, but asked him to stand on the sidelines for one last game before handing the reins, and his locker room and office keys, to Ronald Derr, the assistant coach and heir apparent. He did the first part, stood there with his hands in his pockets for two miserable quarters, but he didn’t give anything to Derr. Instead, he tossed the keys into the drainage ditch behind the softball field. Let them get a metal detector. Make them change out the locks for fear he’ll come back with a spray can of glitter paint and do some decorating.
After dispensing with the keys, he hooked up the dunk tank: a self-contained, 500-gallon, high-density polymer, with a grated steel surround cage, a high-dollar trigger mechanism, and six-inch target plate: an all-in-one unit, easily portable with its own trailer and storage box and hoses. Plus, he knew how to operate it. He made Derr sit on it at the back-to-school athletic fundraiser in September, and let the kids, and a few parents who had a general beef with everyone and anyone at the school, take shots at dunking the Assistant Coach/Computer Instructor (a job that required little more than turning the computers on before class).
He went home after the board meeting, sat in his recliner for three hours, came up with his plan, packed as much as he thought he might need, gathered photos of his late wife, Barb—dead the third year of his coaching tenure at Longpike—then showed up for the game the next evening. As soon as the scoreboard horn sounded to end the half, he fast-walked to his pick-up, drove around behind the softball field, tossed the school keys, hooked up the dunk tank, and headed out of town.
Now he imagines his house at night, no lights on inside, grass overgrown, mail spilling out of the mailbox. Sometimes he dreams Barb wanders through that dark house, in and out of the two tiny bedrooms, into the kitchen, the living room, looking for him, calling his name, asking for help. He tells her, I’m on the run.
She says, Where are you?
He says, I’m driving to Seiling. I’ve got a gig.
She says, I can’t understand a thing you are saying. It’s like you’re underwater. She says, I need your help with something, but she doesn’t always tell him with what.
A week after he packed up and left Longpike, he was in the town of Crescent for a fundraiser for the local fire department. There he saw his face on a Missing Person’s flyer tacked on a community bulletin in Bigsby’s Grocery. The photo used was his school photo. He wore the crimson and white polo shirt (school colors), his hair compressed by the ballcap he had just removed after morning practice. His head was still full of plays his offense couldn’t remember much less run in a game.
It was also the photo Barb framed of him and kept on her desk at the insurance agency where she worked. The owner of the agency, Fred Nichols, brought it to him in a box of other items after she died. The box was still in the house, under their bed.
Now there he was, the same image of him on the bulletin board in a local grocery store. Apparently, he was a beloved teacher and coach. Apparently, he was sorely missed. Apparently, he disappeared without a trace. And his family (who, he wondered? His sister, Sheila, he hadn’t seen in years?) also sorely missed him. Then he realizes it must have been Superintendent Dave who wrote the copy. Super Dave (as he liked to be called) was aways talking about the Longpike family. The kind of loyalty that is family. Yada, yada.
They’ll figure it out eventually. Someone will say to Super Dave, Hey, didn’t we use to have a dunk tank?
***
That night, in the lot of Bigby’s Grocer, where he parked and slept in his truck, Barb whispers, Next comes a wanted poster at the Post Office, then she asks for help reaching the sugar on the highest shelf in the pantry.
I’m not at home, he says. I can’t help with that. And I look like a dweeb in that photo, he tells her. I should have checked my hair. I should have stopped thinking about the gap-scheme to hit the B-gap, pulling guard lead-block instead of the fullback.
You looked very concerned, she says. What were you concerned about? Can you help me find the oregano?
That’s the end of the conversation. Sworley rolls over in his slowly deflating air mattress, suffering from a puncture not quite remedied by duct tape, and dreams in the silence.
***
The Crescent Volunteer Firefighters are mostly jerks. They line up, all eight of them, and drop him in the tank seventeen times before they ever even let a kid step up and take a shot. When he finally climbs out of the tank, sunburned arms, with an ache in his back, everyone has gone off to the Annual Pancake Supper at the firehouse. The mayor’s wife, Joanna or Joan, who smells of booze, brings him his take, which tallies up to only $36.
He knew he couldn’t go on the run much longer unless he ditched the dunk tank—maybe just back it into a lake somewhere?—or just leave the state entirely. But he figures if he moves every night, never checks into a hotel, pays cash, leaves his phone off, he might at least make it to early spring fundraising season, maybe in Texas or Kansas. After that, he doesn’t know.
He heads to Turley for a PTA carnival.
He sets up in the school parking between the cake walk and cornhole game. It’s hot for October, so when the occasional dead-eye, or sheer-lucker, comes round and drops him into the tank, he keeps his knees bent enough to fully submerge, and stays down in the cool, dark water until he can’t hold his breath any longer.
During one dunk, eyes closed, ears full of water, he hears Barb say, You never could hold your breath longer than your average eight-year-old. Or swim for that matter.
There’s a reason I wasn’t a swimming coach.
You don’t have to swim to be a swimming coach. Now, do you know where my letter opener is?
In a box. Under the bed.
When he comes up the woman who had been overseeing the Duck Pond is looking at him. She stands at the side of the tank cage, smoke curling from behind her back. She is hiding a cigarette.
“You good?” she asks.
“Just taking a mini vacation.”
“You scared Little Ronny, you know. He came over to the pond and says ‘he drownded the duck guy.’” She took another quick drag on her cigarette, blew the smoke out the side of her mouth.
Sworley lifts the platform, resets the release mechanism, hoists himself up. He takes the towel hanging from a hook behind the platform and dries his hair and face. “You a teacher here?”
“Cafeteria,” she says, takes another quick hit then flicks the cigarette behind the tank.
“You a fulltime carney?”
Sworley shakes his head. “Just a part-time gig to make ends meet.”
The woman nods. “Let me tell you, sometimes those two ends never meet. Not even close enough to be properly introduced in my case. Do you know I don’t get a nickel for this extra duty? They call it ‘extended contractual responsibilities.’ I call it unpaid overtime.” She runs her fingers through her hair. It is mostly blond but graying above her ears and forehead. A color job wearing off.
“I get that,” Sworley says. “When I pack up and move on, I’ll be lucky to pocket enough for gas to get me to the next.”
She stands by the target plate, then touches it lightly with two fingers. He thinks, at first, she is going to push it. “You ought to learn how to be a barker,” she says. “You know, Hear Ye, Hear Ye! Come give it a whirl! Win the lady a prize! That kind of stuff. Maybe get yourself a megaphone.”
Sworley sees a big kid standing at the orange cones that mark the distance line, impatiently tossing a ball up and down in his hand.
“That’s Brian Reinholder,” she says. “He’s our best outfielder. Rifle arm.” She holds her hand out toward the kid so he doesn’t throw until she’s clear. Over her shoulder she says to Sworley, “You’re about to take another vacation.”
***
The cafeteria woman is MayLynn. He doesn’t know if her first name is May, last name Lynn, or it’s all a first name. She sits in the truck cab with him. The windows are rolled down to let in the cool evening air. They split a cheeseburger she took from the concession at school, along with a bag of overly-salted popcorn, and two bottles of water that are still cold. He offers to pay, but she waves him off. “Call it workers’ compensation. And the popcorn would just sit in the popper until Friday night, get stale, and I’d have to throw it to the birds.”
Sworley has already hooked up the dunk tank, with Whitfield Academy, a private school out in the panhandle, up next. He plans to leave by midnight.
“You don’t strike me as the vagabond type,” MayLynn says.
“No?”
She brushes crumbs from her shirt, which is too big for her and hangs loose at her shoulders. “You talk like a PE teacher. Or maybe a coach. You walk like one, too.”
“Walk like how?”
She swings her elbows back and forth. “Like you’ve spent time on the sidelines with a clipboard. Long strides, a little cocky. That sort of thing.”
Sworley feels his throat tighten. Maybe she’s heard rumors about a coach gone rogue with a dunk tank. “I played a little ball,” he says. “But like I told you, it’s a part-time gig. My wife works for an insurance agent. Home and auto. I’m just trying to help out a bit.”
MayLynn drops her shoulders. She looks out the window, stays quiet, then says, “House hubby, are you?”
Sworley says, “Laundryman. Dishwasher. Cook. Grocery shopper.”
MayLynn folds her hands in her lap. Her hands are red and chapped. The breeze comes through her window, passes by her and Sworley catches the scent of her perfume.
“How long have you worked at the school?”
“Cafeteria? Three years. Before that, a substitute teacher.”
“And before that?” Sworley asks.
“Before that, I was student here. The whole fucking family went here. I feed the kids of the kids I went to school with.”
“Your kids, too?”
MayLynn shakes her head. “Two dogs. One belonged to my ex. The other to my ex’s mother. He lives with her now, in Tulsa. Do you want to hear this? Anyway, they drove the moving van with his stuff to her house, and I swiped the dogs and went to stay with my sister in Broken Arrow. When I came back here … well, they didn’t bother to ask for them. Can you believe that?”
Sworley lets out a soft whistle to show he can’t believe it.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she says. “I love these kids. Or most of them. Or some of them. Say, you wouldn’t happen to have a beer back there, would you?”
“No. Sorry.”
“Nah, don’t be sorry. That’s a hole that’s too easy for me to fall into,” she says, then, “I’m glad you found something you like to do with your time. Must be fun, really. Letting complete strangers throw things at you.” MayLynn breathes out a quiet laugh.
“It’s not bad,” he says. “I like the kids. Some of them. A few.” MayLynn smiles, nods her head. “The adults who come by have issues, though. Likely locked in a basement as toddlers. Didn’t get the date they wanted to go to prom. That sort of thing.”
“The Walking Disappointed,” MayLynn says. “This town is full of them. More than you’d even imagine.”
Sworley starts to say he’s cut from the same cloth, a small-town kid with bigger dreams. He decides to let it go. Plus, he has a sudden stab of pain in his left ear, and his jaw feels tight.
MayLynn stares out the windshield. She takes a drink of water from the bottle and holds it out to him. He drinks off the rest. “Been fun,” she says, then quietly opens the door, steps out of the truck, waves without saying anything else, then turns to walk to her car parked across the street on school grounds. She stops at the road’s edge to light a cigarette, then crosses the road without looking back.
***
He’s about 50 miles from Whitfield Academy when he has to pull to the shoulder and take a couple of aspirin. The left side of his face is swelling, and he hears his own heartbeat in his ear.
In the dark, beside the road, Barb says she can’t find her red blouse, the one with two breast pockets. It was hanging in the closet next to her purple sweater. Sworley says he has no idea.
You have an infection, she says.
From the water in the tank, he says.
Or maybe it’s new love, she says. The wound that never heals.
Swimmer’s ear, Sworley says flatly.
Barb says, Self-punishment is the toughest thing in life to avoid, and find help for. Speaking of which, will you help me find my violin? It’s in a black case, which is also missing.
You don’t have a violin. You were not musical in the least.
I’ll try under the bed then. And look for my letter opener while I’m on my knees.
***
The first sign something was wrong was when Barb dropped to her knees in the bedroom. It was a Tuesday evening, right after they finished dinner. Dizzy, she says, and asks for help getting up. He helps. She says, I can barely see.
As the Grade 4 glioblastoma advances, she loses most of her hearing, control over her bowels, can’t sleep, forgets where she is in the house, and sometimes insists they move back to Baltimore, where they never lived. She asks him to help find her slippers, her favorite pillow, the stuffed bear she had in her childhood, the car keys, although she can no longer drive, her deceased father’s phone number, and help remembering the name of her sister who died as an infant. She asks for help calling up her Uncle Steve so she can speak to him about what he did to her when she was only eight. She asks him to take away the headaches. She asks him to help her die more quickly. Then, when she is gone a day, she walks into his sleep and asks him to help bring her back. She says, You look very concerned in that photo I framed for my desk. Your hair is messed up because you forgot to fix it after you removed your hat. Your mind is full of plays your offense couldn’t successfully run without hours and hours of practice. Is that it? Is that the reason for your concern?
***
Sworley drives to Whitfield Academy, drops the dunk tank in the end zone of the football field, then is lucky enough to find a clinic. PA Ross Buchanan takes a look in his ear. “That’s a doozy,” says PA Ross, tells Sworley where the pharmacy is to pick up the antibiotics. “Try a heating pad, and avoid getting any water in it.”
He doesn’t tell PA Ross Buchanan about the dunk tank, or that he has no place to plug in a heating pad even if he owned one. He does pick up the antibiotics, takes twice the dosage, pops four ibuprofen, and drives back to Whitfield Academy to fill the tank with water.
He locates a spigot and just gets the hose hooked up when a tall woman in stiff red jeans, red sneakers, and wide-brimmed hat shows up and introduces herself as Headmistress of Whitfield. Her name is Joyce Runyon, she has three kids of her own who all attend the academy. Her husband, who has a doctorate in mathematics from Harvard, is also the coach of both the tennis and lacrosse teams. She looks at his swollen face.
Sworley tells her he has an ear infection and can’t hear very well. He tells her he is taking ibuprofen for it, though, so he should be fine by the time the carnival gets going. The wind slaps at her hat and she presses it hard on her head. She smiles. Her teeth are miraculously white. She asks him if, given his illness, he would like her to send for Groundskeeper Bob to help with the set up of the tank?
Sworley declines.
Groundskeeper Bob shows up anyway. “There’s a spigot closer by,” he says. Sworley says he’s already set up, so there’s no need, but Groundskeeper Bob unscrews the hose and moves it to the closer spigot anyway. Then he asks Sworley if he has any blocks to put under the trailer tires since the tires are making ruts in the grass turf. Sworley says he doesn’t have any blocks, so Groundskeeper Bob lets out a frustrated sigh and walks away.
He has the tank filled by four o’clock, and the backstop net strung, so he climbs onto his nearly flat mattress to rest. He tries sitting up to ease the pain in his ear, but nothing helps. He rolls to his left side, then his right. By five o’clock, he sits behind the wheel of the truck, hoping the cold from the air conditioner will help.
He is parked next to the field and the lot is beginning to fill up around him so he takes four more ibuprofen, climbs in the back of the truck to change into his t-shirt and shorts, and walks through the field gate, where he passes by Groundskeeper Bob unrolling red tickets from a wheel of tickets. The headmistress sits inside a small booth and takes money. She looks up, her floppy hat pushed back off her head, its drawstring pressed tightly against her throat. She waves him through, then activates her gleaming smile when a woman, a kid on each side of her, holds out a fan of bills and says she’ll need thirty tickets to start.
The football field has a scattered collection of games: ring toss, balloon darts, duck pond for the youngest, corn hole. There is a man wearing a red beret and blue smock sitting at a table next to the dunk tank. He has a fake moustache that curls nearly to his nostrils. Next to the table is an easel and a carry-all filled with paints and brushes. Face Painting, Sworley thinks. Or maybe caricatures. The artist nods at him, twists at his fake moustache.
Sworley steps off the distance, drops the marker cones and a bucket of baseballs, then climbs into the tank. The water is exceptionally cold. He is already shivering from fever, so he sits on his hands so his feet stay just out of the water.
A couple of girls, junior high age, walk up and hand him two tickets each. He put the tickets in a ziplock bag that hangs from the cage by a wire, and tells them they get two shots. He doesn’t expect much out of either of them, but the first girl, who wears a T-shirt with a Disney princess on it, rears back and nails the target plate on her first throw. Before Sworley can get his hands out from under his butt, he is in the water. It feels like he has fallen into a cylinder of knives.
Within the hour, he has gone down eleven times. His teeth are chattering and he wraps his damp towel around his shoulders between customers to try to warm himself. One side of his face is numb up to his scalp, and he feels an ache in his jaw worse than any toothache he’s ever had. But the money is promising so far, so he tries to think about something other than the pain.
He thinks about two offensive plays he wishes he had tried the season they almost defeated the conference champions. The defensive set-up was perfect, if only he called in the right play. He didn’t, they turned the ball over on downs and lost by one. Barb was sitting in the stands that night, just a week after her diagnosis.
Later, when she was much worse, he told her about the play he didn’t call. He told her how the defensive scheme the other team had on didn’t have a chance in hell of stopping them.
So why didn’t you send it in? Barb asked. She was on the couch wrapped tightly in a blanket. Her face was swollen like a loaf of dough. She was on a liquid diet, drinking from a vanilla protein shake with a straw, but having a hard time keeping even that down.
Second-guessed myself.
She pulled the blanket tight against her chin. You should have thought to dedicate the game to me, she said. Not out loud, of course. That would have been an embarrassment to have everyone gawking at me. But you could have done it just in your head.
Sworley said, How do you know I didn’t?
Because you would have told me. You wouldn’t have kept that quiet. You would have felt too guilty about losing to stay quiet. Headline: Coach Dedicates Game to Dying Wife. Loses His Nerve and the Game.
What happened, then? he asked.
You were too concerned. You were too preoccupied to think straight.
I knew it was all over.
She took a sip of the protein drink. It was the fourth quarter, she said. Almost the end of the game. The hour grew late. Darkness was falling all around us, she said.
***
The ball is on its way.
Not much spin, but it does have a little velocity, and surprisingly, Sworley notes, a slight rise. The ball limps the last few feet but catches the very edge of the target plate. Sworley feels the platform vibrate beneath him, then he is surrounded by the silence of cold water.
Barb says, You know what it feels like to have everything drop out from under you.
I do.
That’s why you always look so concerned. Even now. I’m going to find the box under the bed. I’m going to find my letter opener. She says, Maybe you can write me a letter? Otherwise, finding the letter opener is meaningless. Just write down everything you think I need to hear.
I will.
Write down everything. Don’t leave anything out.
I won’t.
Tell me about your ongoing concerns.
I will.
When he comes up and wipes the water from his eyes, he sees Superintendent Dave in the opposite endzone. He is wearing his usual tan sweater vest, despite how warm it is, and there are two Oklahoma Highway Patrol officers following closely behind him. Super Dave points. One of the officer’s points. They walk faster.
He thinks, MayLynn. Who else would have known he would be at Whitfield? Or maybe they just figured it out on their own. Maybe someone did go to Super Dave’s office, ask, Didn’t we have … etc? Wasn’t there a … etc?
Eye-Patch Kid takes another ball from the bucket. Sworley knows he’s out of tickets, but he gives the kid a wave to say it’s OK, take a freebie. He resets the platform and climbs up.
Super Dave, his face red from exertion is, along with the OHP, at the 50-yard line.
Sworley raises his hand and motions to the kid to hurry it up. He says, “Down, up, and back. Remember? Keep your fingers on the laces. Eye on the target. Good. Now, show me you still got it.”
***
Paul Bowers lives with his family on a small farm in northwest Oklahoma. He is the author of two short story collections: Like Men, Made Various (2006), and We’ll All Be Better People (2026); and three poetry collections: The Lone, Cautious, Animal Life (2016), Occasional Hymns (2018), and Ten Acres of the Universe (2022). His fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, Southwestern American Literature, and Porchlight: A Journal of Southern Literature, among others.
