Chapter 13 Randal
Randal
Randal Askens sat in traffic on the main drag and waited for a group of smiling, excited Chamber folks to move boxes of Christmas decorations across the street so they could decorate the town.
In a few weeks, they’d have the annual tree-lighting ceremonies, transforming the tall pines to bright greens, blues, and golds.
Randal picked up his phone off the passenger seat when the screen lit up. Damn phone, he thought. Even though he had the ringer turned on, it never made a sound, so he ended up missing calls.
He listened to the voicemail, waiting for the last pedestrian to carry her box across the intersection. The message was from Principal Hopkins, asking him to come in for another meeting. Coach Lawry would be there, too.
God, he was so damn tired of it. It was the Seattle Times article, of course. The third one. It came out in the local paper yesterday, once again accusing him and the head coach of all sorts of inaccurate bullshit.
For God’s sake, he couldn’t help it that Coach Lawry wanted to help those kids, that he took it upon himself to open his pocketbook to help the students with travel, food, and rent. Sometimes you need to take matters into your own hands.
How were they supposed to remember every rule in the hiring handbook? How was he supposed to know that assisting low-income Black kids from Mississippi could be a violation of the Interscholastic Activities Association’s recruiting guidelines?
And to paint the whole thing as illegal? That was downright bogus. A stretch so huge, it was criminal itself.
In fact, he was going to march right in there and take charge. No more meek, jump-through-the-hoops Randal. No more yes-sir Randal. He was sick of it all.
It had been giving him bad dreams lately.
He had this recurring one where he was hunting out in the woods and kept seeing a buck he’d like to shoot, but odd shit that didn’t belong in the forest kept getting in the way: couches, chaise lounges, desks, weight machines—all this crap that kept him from taking a clear shot, from even being able to move freely at all.
That was his life in a nutshell lately. Cluttered with a capital C. He ran his hand through his thick hair, noting that he needed a trim before the holiday party next week, and thought of the previous day’s article again.
It wasn’t helping in the decluttering department.
The piece made all sorts of accusations, that he and Lawry had brought these boys up only to win the championship, and later stranded them without return tickets home, without assistance in helping them get scholarships into colleges as initially promised, without even help in making sure they were fed properly or could pay their rent.
He was going to blow in there and tell Hopkins that enough was enough.
That both Coach Lawry and he consistently modeled respect and brotherhood.
That they valued family and team cohesion.
That the championships they’d won for the school didn’t magically happen.
They were direct by-products of the community and dedication they created.
To suggest otherwise was sheer crazy political correctness. He was going to demand that the school sue the Times for misrepresenting the facts.
Okay, sure, he’d admit he was a little surprised at how Lawry stranded the athletes he brought in once the season was over, not even getting them a ticket to return home.
He’d leave them a little destitute and sometimes homeless, but at least they had the experience of coming to the Northwest, seeing and experiencing something different from the South and receiving the confidence that came with helping pull a team to the championships.
He steamed into the office, ready to set Hopkins straight. He smiled at Becca, who looked sad and depressed, so he wished her a merry Christmas and told her to smile.
She didn’t. In fact, she looked like she wanted to tell him to go eff himself, but instead pointed him to the principal’s office. She was probably still mad that he never called after their last hookup.
He silently slid past her desk into Hopkins’s office. “Look, Mr. Hopkins,” he started, “how many times do we have to go over this? We as a school need to issue a reply to that article in the paper, something that counters—”
“Coach Askens. Please sit. This isn’t about that. It’s about that incident at the team retreat.”
“Shit. That again.” Randal removed his hat and ran his fingers through his hair.
“Yes.” Hopkins glared at him. “That again. It’s about Ryan Petronis. You haven’t heard?”
“No, what about him? Don’t tell me they’re suing the school now. I thought we had control over that, that they understood it was horseplay. Roughhousing.”
“We’ve just gotten word.” He laced his fingers together and looked down at them when he said it: “Ryan shot himself this morning.”
“What?”
“At home, in his room.”
Randal sat. He felt bad. Hell, he’d liked Ryan, but how was this his thing? Was this going to be Lawry’s and his fault, too?
Bullshit. Just because he was in the next room, in the kitchen in the main cabin, and heard scuffling sounds didn’t mean he should have interfered.
He couldn’t micromanage everything their boys did.
He needed to allow them to have some fun, build up a little camaraderie.
That was the entire point of the team-building retreat.
“I wanted you and Coach Lawry to know before word spreads.”
He swallowed and nodded, kept bobbing his head up and down, trying to process it. Jesus, Petronis. Was it that bad? Was it worth taking your life? For God’s sake, hazing was a ritual that’d been going on for hundreds of years. Thousands, probably!
Hopkins drilled his eyes deep into Randal’s.
“I expect you and Lawry to handle this with your boys as delicately as possible. Tell them no social media posts, no commentary, no gossip. Tell them to respect Ryan’s family.
Lawry’s teaching a weight training class right now, but when he finishes, I want the three of us to meet to discuss strategy at one thirty. That work for you?”
He nodded. Yes-sir Randal was back. “Yes. Yes, sir, it does.”