by Tim Green
"Of course not," Lunden said with a disgusted wave of his hand. "The worse he is the more money we make. If he attacks his coach the way that basketball player did a couple years ago, the stock goes up. If he beats his girlfriend or spits in someone's face, it goes up even more. No, the only clause I might ask you for is an immorality clause."
Lunden chortled quietly at his own wit. There was a cry from below, and both men looked down as the crew prepared to cast off the enormous dismembered shark. Dobbins watched, but his mind was on the deal. He figured that besides his and Trane's own free options he could invest the rest of his clients heavily in the thirty-cent stock. If the white mans plan worked--and there was no reason to think it wouldn't--then all his problems would be solved in one simple deal. There was another shout from below and the shark's white-bellied carcass went spinning off into the wake in a boil of blood before sinking out of sight. Conrad smiled at the white man and nodded his head in a way that let Lunden know he had a deal.
Chapter 15
Clark knew that part of his mission as a Christian athlete was to evangelize his faith. Ike Webber was a perfect candidate for saving. A bug-eyed kid liked to please and worked hard, Ike was pretty quiet in a crowd. He'd grown up in a small Mississippi farm town by the name of Titus, and his country manners had never left him. Although African American and a client of Conrad Dobbins, he clearly felt out of place with the jive-talking crowd of Juggernauts players that included Trane Jones. Ike fell naturally under Clark's wing during the team's minicamp in late spring, and during the summer workouts at the Juggernauts facility he stayed there.
Clark had already discussed the situation with Tom, who was always eager for players to spread the word and expand his flock. Together they had prayed about it and decided that God would tell Clark when the time was right. After a long, hard workout on a Tuesday not too many weeks away from training camp, the young rookie asked for a ride home.
"Lent my car to my brother an' my cousin," he sheepishly explained in his quiet country drawl. "They dropped me off an' went to see Disney. They're visitin' me for the week."
"No problem," Clark said. He was sitting on the stool in front of his locker unlacing his sneakers. He looked up. "Hey, how 'bout lunch? I know a great Tahitian place down in Manhattan Beach. They got great spicy fries with vinegar. I'm meeting my girlfriend there, but come with me. I told her about you."
"Okay by me," Ike said, raising his eyebrows as if he were slightly surprised.
"I gotta shower and then get some treatment on my neck," Clark said, "but I'll be ready in about forty minutes."
"Okay by me."
Because Clark and Ike ended up in the showers at the same time as Trane Jones neither of them spoke. The star runner soaped himself shamelessly while he belted out a dirty rap song that had something to do with raping thirteen-year-old girls for one's own pleasure. "Old enough ta bleed, old enough ta breed. Old enough ta bleed, old enough ta breeed ..." Over and over went the chorus.
It made Clark's ears hot, and he found himself wondering what Ike thought. Were Clark and a lot of his friends' distaste for rap and jive talk and loud bragging a racial thing or a religious thing?
There were a few black players in the Bible study group, but they talked and acted like whites. Clark didn't even think of them as black. Ike was somewhere in between, or at least he appeared to be. His dialect was more black than white, and sometimes if the morning was damp with fog he would wear a dark knit cap. He did not, however, wear baggy jeans that sunk halfway down the crack of his ass or sunglasses or thick gold chains or drive a foreign car that boasted the incongruent rims of a hot rod. But Clark could see those things coming if he didn't act fast. He'd heard Trane and Cushings, another Conrad Dobbins client, talking to Ike one day about a party they expected to see him at, so Clark knew the temptation for Ike to fall into that way of life was very real.
In a way, the prospect of saving someone so close to the edge was even more exciting to Clark than what had happened with Annie. Annie was almost too easy: a wonderful girl with great morals and values who simply hadn't had the exposure to Jesus Christ and his teachings. Clark figured Ike was a different story altogether. There was no way, as a college athlete, that Ike hadn't been exposed to Christianity. Either the Fellowship of Christian Athletes or Athletes in Action were in every locker room he'd ever heard of But for some reason the young runner was reluctant. It was up to Clark to find out why.
Clark got out of the shower as fast as he could, unaware that a tuft of foam was sliding down the middle of his back. Not that it would have mattered. He had to get out to keep from boiling over. There hadn't been a word between him and Trane since the first day of minicamp. That was nearly three months ago and just fine with Clark. He had nothing to say to Trane and didn't want to hear anything Trane might have to say to him. On the field and in the meeting rooms, it didn't matter. During those times, if they chose, players could go about the business of football without a lot of social interaction. Besides, Trane slept through most of the meetings. And when Clark was thrown into Trane's presence, like in the shower, he tried to ignore him.
After drying himself, Clark put on a pair of purple nylon shorts and went to see Jerry in the training room. Jerry hooked up the electrodes to Clark's neck and wrapped it in a cold collar.
"How's it feel?" he asked.
"Couldn't be better."
"Could've been better if you didn't have your vertebrae fused together," Jerry pointed out.
"Given the circumstances," Clark said. "That's what I mean."
"Ready for camp?"
Clark looked up at him from the table. "That's a whadaya call it . . ."
"Oxymoron," Jerry suggested.
"Yeah," Clark jibed. "Only a moron would ask it."
"Oh, come on, you guys are living the life," Jerry replied, turning up the juice. "All that money, all the time off. Where could you get anything like this outside of football?"
"Okay, I get you. But you know darn well there aren't a lot of people who'd do this for a living. Even for the money."
"There's millions who'd do it!" Jerry cried.
"They think they'd do it, until they had to go through it."
Jerry exhaled sarcastically. It was their ongoing debate, and Clark suspected the trainer did it just to get a rise out of him.
"Well," Jerry said with a puckered face, "is our neck going to hold up?"
"No problem with that," Clark said confidently.
"Uh-huh," Jerry said. "That's what I like to hear, no fear."
Clark snorted derisively. As if fear was ever an issue with him.
Clark would later describe lunch as a blessing from God. That's how he'd relate it to Tom, anyway. They sat upstairs in the open air. The ocean breeze gently rattled the dried palm fronds hanging from the roof. It was typically pleasant. Clark wore a pleated pair of tailored shorts and a brushed cotton shirt open at the collar. Annie wore a pretty summer dress, as if she, too, were going someplace important afterward. Ike, feeling underdressed in a simple pair of athletic shorts and a tank top, was soon put at ease by Annie's warmth and graciousness. She spent the first twenty minutes asking him about Mississippi, and Clark could tell that his teammate liked her.
After the waiter cleaned away the plates and set down two white porcelain mugs of coffee and one of tea, Annie said to Clark, "Why don't you ask Ike to come with us?"
"What?" Clark said, squeezing his lemon wedge so hard two seeds plopped into his steaming mug.
"Ask him," Annie said. "I know you want to share your faith with him. I can tell that."
Both men averted their eyes.
"Oh, come on, Clark," she said. "You're so obvious. Just ask him if he wants to come. Let him see what it's about. Let him feel the energy."
"It's not just energy, Annie," Clark said, feeling peevish as he spoke. "It's the Holy Spirit."
"Right! Let him feel it."
Ike looked at Clark now, puzzled.
Clark purse
d his lips. Annie sometimes did things like this to him, going off with people in directions he couldn't anticipate. She wore the smug, delighted expression of a small girl revealing a polished stone to her friends. He put it down to her being raised in California. Where he was from people weren't that open.
"Annie's being baptized today," Clark explained with obvious hesitation. Then with more zeal he said, "Of course, you're welcome to come. I'm sorry, I haven't even asked you about your faith. Sometimes Annie moves fast--"
"Come with us," Annie said, her eyes gleaming as she reached across the table and boldly placed her hand on Ike's wrist.
"I could," he said, quietly glancing down at her hand. "I got time. I been baptized."
"When you were young?" Clark asked.
Ike nodded. "Yeah, my mom, she had us all baptized. Then she died and Dad, he didn't go in much for church and all. We kinda got away from it, you know."
"Do you know if you were baptized by submersion?" Annie asked in a solemn tone. "Because some people think they're baptized, but they're not. Tell him, Clark."
"It says in the Bible," Clark patiently explained, "that to truly be born again you have to be baptized by submersion, put completely under water."
"I don't think that's how they did it in Titus," Ike admitted.
Clark looked anxiously from Annie to Ike. His hands were starting to sweat, and there was a spot on the left side of his upper lip that felt like it was being tugged toward the ceiling by an invisible string. This was it. He asked for strength.
"Ike, do you know Jesus Christ?"
Ike nodded that he did.
"I mean really know him," Clark said, exhaling the words, "as your Savior?"
"I think so."
"You don't then," Clark said somberly. "If you know him, you know it. If you don't, you just think so. But that's okay. A lot of people don't know him, really know him. I'd be happy to help you. It's not hard. It's a simple prayer. Believe me. Jesus Christ saved my life, He's saved Annie's, and he can save yours. . ."
Ike was listening. Clark could see that he was. It gave him strength to see that. Clark felt the power of the Spirit. It was what Tom talked about all the time. When you witness for Jesus, you feel the power of the Spirit.
"If you turn your life over to Jesus," Clark told him warmly, "acknowledge him as God's true Son and man's true Savior, then you're saved."
"That and being baptized," Annie pointed out.
"Yes," Clark said excitedly, "but you have to accept him first. That's how you change your life. It's not just me, Ike. It's Mitch Faulkner, Featherfield, Cobb, Deacon, McMann, Deuce, all those guys and lots more. Probably almost half the team is Christian.
"We're so close to the Super Bowl," Clark said fervently. "You know that, everyone knows. We think we'll win it, too. We think if enough of us have faith, God will help us win to glorify His name. We have a mission, Ike, we really do, and I know everyone would be really glad to have you join us."
That was it. Clark didn't know what more to say. It wasn't his nature to evangelize, to press. It was something though, as a Christian, that he had to grow into. Lead by example, that's what he'd always tried to do, in religion as well as in sports. But Tom made it clear that he needed to give more. "To whom much is given, much will be expected." If he closed his eyes and thought, Clark could hear the words in his mind the same way his father had once spoken his name.
He'd been given a lot. He knew that, and now Tom was charging him to give to others, to help save their souls. Clark had been pitifully negligent. Annie didn't really count. She was easy. He knew her and loved her, and he hadn't pressed her until he felt certain she had the same feelings for him. Then it was easy. But Ike, he was just a guy on the team. Clark wanted to evangelize, to reach out and grasp for wayward souls the way Tom taught them. He wanted to do what was right. But he didn't know what more to say. Under the table he wiped a sweaty palm against the pant leg of his shorts and then grasped Annie's hand.
Finally Ike spoke. "How?" he said.
Relief washed over Clark. He was almost too giddy to speak. Acceptance, this was the first and biggest step. Later would come tithing and real baptism, but Tom would take care of that.
"It's not hard," Clark said, the words bubbling out. "You just say this prayer with me, the prayer on the back."
Clark fumbled with his pocket and took out a credit card-size pamphlet. He flipped it on its face and laid it on the plastic tablecloth in front of Ike. In bold block letters on the back were the words that Clark believed could lead anyone to heaven. Ike read the words, moving his lips silently. Then he looked up at Clark, blinking.
"Here?" he said.
"It doesn't matter where," Clark told him. He held out his hands above the table, raising them palms up like a supplicating priest. Annie and then Ike each took a hand and then took each other's so the three of them made a triangle. Annie's fingers were warm and strong, and as they bowed their heads she looked triumphantly around the restaurant, noticing the people staring at them and smiling to herself as she watched the two men whose hands she held saying a prayer she had not long ago recited herself.
Ebullient with faith, the three of them snaked down the Pacific Coast Highway toward Newport Beach. At Tom's, people were already waiting. Normally, women were baptized in bunches, but Tom felt that Clark, with his citywide, almost national reputation for good works, was an especially important part of his ministry. It was in honor of Clark that Tom was going to baptize Annie the way the players themselves were baptized: alone.
Clark had privately fretted to Tom about how the other wives and girlfriends would feel. But Tom had quoted the Bible, saying something about God giving as He saw fit, and that had put Clark's mind at ease. Clark believed, as they all did, that the Bible was the literal word of God, Him speaking to them directly and unequivocally. For her part, Annie seemed delighted to be singled out. At first Clark had worried that she wanted to put her thumb in the other women's eyes, but then he checked himself. He had too magnanimous a view of Annie to imagine her involved in petty jealousies. Besides, Annie had nothing to be jealous about. She was prettier and smarter and more vivacious than any of the other women in their group.
Tom welcomed Clark at the front door with a quick embrace and led them hurriedly through the center of the house to the pool.
"You're late, my friend," he chided over his shoulder.
Clark beamed and introduced Ike to Tom on the move.
"I was witnessing to Ike at lunch," he announced with a broad smile. "He's accepted Jesus as his Savior."
Tom pulled up abruptly and directed his luminescent eyes at Ike. "Praise Jesus," he said warmly. "Welcome."
Ike shook Tom's outstretched hand, and Tom pulled the young player to him and hugged him with a warm slap on the back.
Then he turned his eyes toward Clark with a look that spoke of love, thanks, and admiration, a look almost beyond words.
Outside, nearly twenty of Clark's teammates and their wives or girlfriends stood clustered in groups around the pool. Their clothes were casual but expensive and stylish. Still, as she stepped into their midst, Annie stood out. The players themselves did battle with lustful thoughts while their wives looked fruitlessly for chinks in her veneer. Annie seemed to sense the focus of their attention, and it did anything but dull her.
Tom's backyard was luxuriously wide, with royal palm trees standing in a colonnade around the amorphous pool. Slashes of sunlight filtered through the upper reaches of the palm fronds and danced on the cut stone and the carefully manicured swatches of grass according to the whims of the breeze. Many of the players and their wives wore gold Rolex watches and fat diamond earrings that scattered the elusive rays of sunlight in a way that made the others blink.
Tom stepped forward and took Annie by the hand. He led her fully dressed in her pale yellow summer dress to the shallow end of the pool and walked her down the steps into the waist-deep water. The hem of the dress ballooned to the surface lilylike
in the water. Suddenly possessed by the Holy Spirit, Tom, who stood waist-deep in his own clothes, began speaking in an indiscernible gibberish that the rest of them knew was tongues, the same miraculous venting of the Spirit experienced by Christ's first disciples thousands of years before. Clark had never spoken in tongues, but he'd seen other players do it. Once when they were losing to the Broncos by three touchdowns Featherfield broke out in tongues on the sideline.
When Tom grew quiet and emerged from his trance, he put one hand on the small of Annie's back and gently palmed her face with the other. After a quick prayer he submerged her completely in the pool as he blessed her soul and welcomed her with a cry into the kingdom of eternal life. As Annie waded up the pool's steps, flushed and dripping, the pale yellow dress clung indecently to her marvelous shape. While many of the poolside players could forestall a lewd grin by clamping down on the inside of their cheeks, there was no cure for their racing hearts. But Clark didn't see Annie like the others. He was well familiar with the voluptuous curves of her breasts and the flat luxurious length of her stomach. He saw only the complete salvation of the woman he loved, and he couldn't remember a happier moment in his life.
Chapter 16
Just after dawn Madison's husband, Cody, shook her from a deep sleep.
"Madison," he hissed, rocking her entire frame with his hand on her rib cage. "Madison!"
"What?" she said, then grumpily, "What!"
"There's no salt," he said with evident disgust. "I can't find salt anywhere."
"Salt?"
"Salt."
Madison sat up and used her fingertips to dig the sleep from the corners of her eyes. Their bed rested on a raised platform facing a big mullioned set of cathedral-style glass doors overlooking a golf course. The dark gray light in the sky told her she owned at least half an hour of sleep before her day had to begin. Cody stood over her in . A drab cotton sweatsuit whose color matched the sky. His hair was tousled on top and matted with sweat around the edges. A bead of perspiration fell from the tip of his nose, leaving a dark blemish on the comforter.