by John Grisham
seconds to go.”
Neely: “With Bond out of the game, I knew I could score. I figured two more scrambles and we’d be in the end zone. In the huddle, I told them to make sure they put somebody on the ground.”
Silo: “I told ’em to kill somebody.”
Neely: “They blitzed all three linebackers and I got nailed at the line. We had to burn our last time-out.”
Amos: “Did you think about a field goal?”
Neely: “Yeah, but Scobie had a weak leg—accurate but weak.”
Paul: “Plus, he hadn’t kicked a field goal all year.”
Silo: “The kicking game was not our strongest suit.”
Nat: “Thanks, Silo. I can always count on you.”
The final play of the miracle drive was perhaps the most famous in all of the glorious history of Spartan football. With no time-outs, twenty yards to go, eighteen seconds left, Neely sent two receivers wide, and took the snap in the shotgun. He quickly handed off to Marcus Mabry on a draw. Marcus took three steps, then abruptly stopped and pitched the ball back to Neely, who sprinted to his right, pumping the ball as if he would finally throw it. When he turned upfield, the offensive line released and sprinted forward, looking for someone to level. At the ten, Neely, running like a madman, lowered his head and crashed into a linebacker and a safety, a collision that would have knocked out a mere mortal. He spun away, free but dizzy, legs still churning, got hit again at the five, and again at the three where most of the East Pike defense managed to corral him. The play was almost over, as was the game, when Silo Mooney and Barry Vatrano slammed into the mass of humanity hanging on Neely, and the entire pile fell into the end zone. Neely sprang to his feet, still clutching the ball, and looked directly at Eddie Rake, twenty feet away, motionless and noncommittal.
Neely: “For a split second, I thought about spiking the ball at him, but then Silo flung me down and everybody jumped on.”
Nat: “The whole team was down there. Along with the cheerleaders, the trainers, and half the band. Got fifteen yards for excessive celebrating.”
Couch: “Nobody cared. I remember looking at Rake and the coaches, and they didn’t move. Talk about weird.”
Neely: “I was lying in the end zone, getting crushed by my teammates, telling myself that we’d just done the impossible.”
Randy: “I was twelve years old, and I remember all the Messina fans were just sitting there, stunned, exhausted, a lot of them crying.”
Blanchard: “The folks from East Pike were crying too.”
Randy: “They ran one play, didn’t they? After the kickoff?”
Paul: “Yeah, Donnie blitzed and nailed the quarterback. The game was over.”
Randy: “All of a sudden, every player with a green jersey was sprinting off the field—no handshakes, no postgame huddle, just a mad rush to get to the locker room. The entire team vanished.”
Mal: “We thought y’all’d gone crazy. We waited for a spell, thinkin’ you had to come back to get the trophy and all.”
Paul: “We weren’t coming out. They sent someone to retrieve us for the ceremony, but we kept the door locked.”
Couch: “Those poor kids from East Pike tried to smile when they got the runner-up trophy, but they were still in shock.”
Blanchard: “Rake had vanished too. Somehow they got Rabbit to walk out to midfield and accept the championship trophy. It was very strange, but we were too excited to care.”
Mal walked up to Silo’s cooler and pulled out a beer. “Help yourself there, Sheriff,” Silo said.
“I’m off duty.” He took a long sip and began walking down the steps. “Funeral’s Friday, boys. At noon.”
“Where?”
“Here. Where else?”
Thursday
Neely and Paul met early Thursday morning in the rear of the bookstore, where Nat brewed another pot of his highly addictive and probably illegal Guatemalan coffee. Nat had business up front, near the tiny and semi-hidden occult section, with a sinister-looking woman who had pale skin and jet-black hair. “The town witch,” Paul said somewhat proudly, as if every town needed a witch, and very softly, as if she might fling a curse their way.
The Sheriff arrived a few minutes after eight, fully uniformed and heavily armed and looking quite lost in the only bookstore in the county, and one owned by a homosexual at that. Had Nat not been a former Spartan, Mal would’ve probably had him under surveillance as a suspicious character.
“You boys ready?” he growled, obviously anxious to leave.
With Neely in the front seat and Paul in the back, they sped away from downtown in a long white Ford with bold lettering along the doors, announcing that the car was the property of the SHERIFF. On the main highway, Mal pushed the accelerator and flipped a switch turning on the flashing red and blue lights. No sirens, though. Once everything was properly configured, he cocked his weight to one side, picked up his tall Styrofoam cup of coffee, and laid a limp wrist over the top of the wheel. They were doing a hundred miles an hour.
“I was in Vietnam,” Mal announced, selecting the topic and giving the impression that he might talk nonstop for the next two hours. Paul sank a few inches in the rear seat, like a real criminal on the way to a court hearing. Neely watched the traffic, certain they were about to be slaughtered in some gruesome two-lane pileup.
“I was on a PBR on the Bassac River.” Aloud slurp of coffee as the setting was established. “There were six of us on this stupid little boat about twice the size of a nice bass rig, and our job was to patrol up and down the river and make trouble. Anythang that moved, we shot it. We were idiots. A cow gets too close, target practice. A nosy rice farmer raises his head up from the rice paddy, we’d start firin’ just to watch him hit the mud. Our mission each day had no tactical purpose whatsoever, so we drank beer, smoked pot, played cards, tried to entice the local girls to go boatin’ with us.”
“I’m sure this is going somewhere,” Paul said from the rear.
“Shut up and listen. One day we’re half asleep, it’s hot, we’re sunbathin’, nappin’ like a bunch of turtles on a log, when, suddenly, all hell breaks loose. We’re takin’ fire from both sides of the river. Heavy fire. An ambush. Two guys were below. I’m on the deck with three others, all of whom get hit immediately. Dead. Shot before they could get their guns. Blood flyin’ through the air. Everybody screamin’. I’m flat on my stomach, unable to move, when a fuel barrel gets hit. Damned thing wasn’t supposed to be on deck, but what did we care? We were invincible because we were eighteen and stupid. The thing explodes. I manage to dive into the river without gettin’ burned. I swim up beside the boat and grab a piece of camouflage nettin’ that’s hangin’ over the side. I hear my two buddies screamin’ inside the boat. They’re trapped, smoke and fire everywhere, no way out. I stay underwater as long as I can. Whenever I pop up for air, the gooks spray gunfire all around me. Heavy gunfire. They know I’m in the water holdin’ my breath. This goes on for a long time while the boat burns and drifts with the current. The screamin’ and coughin’ finally stops down in the cabin, ever’body’s dead but me. The gooks are out in the open now, walkin’ along the banks on both sides, out for a Sunday stroll. All fun and games. I’m the last guy alive, and they’re waitin’ for me to make a mistake. I swim under the boat, pop up on the other side, take some air, bullets everywhere. I swim to the rear, grab the rudder for a while, come up for air, hear the gooks laughin’ as they spray me. The river is full of snakes, these short little bastards that are deadly poisonous. So I figure I got three choices—drown, get shot, or wait for the snakes.”
Mal placed the coffee in a holder on the dash and lit a cigarette. Mercifully, he cracked his window. Neely cracked his as well. They were in farmland, speeding through rolling hills, flying past farm tractors and old pickups.
“So what happened?” Neely asked when it became apparent that Mal wanted prompting.
“You know what saved me?”
“Tell us.”
&nb
sp; “Rake. Eddie Rake. When I was hangin’ on for my life, under that boat, I didn’t think about my momma or my dad or my girlfriend, I thought about Rake. I could hear him barkin’ at us at the end of practice when we were runnin’ sprints. I remembered his locker-room speeches. Never quit, never quit. You win because you’re tougher mentally than the other guy, and you’re tougher mentally because your trainin’ is superior. If you’re winnin’, never quit. If you’re losin’, never quit. If you’re hurt, never quit.”
A long pull on the cigarette while the two younger men digested the story. Meanwhile, outside the car, civilian drivers swerved onto shoulders and hit brakes to make way for this law enforcement emergency.
“I finally got hit, in the leg. Did you know bullets can get you underwater?”
“Never really thought about it,” Neely admitted.
“Damned right they can. Left hamstring. I never felt such pain, like a hot knife. I almost passed out from the pain, and I was gaspin’ for breath. Rake expected us to play hurt, so I told myself Rake was watchin’. Rake was up there somewhere, on the side of the river, watchin’ to see how tough I was.”
A long cancerous draw on the cigarette; a halfhearted effort to blow the smoke out the window. A long pause as Mal was lost in the horror of this memory. A minute passed.
“Obviously you survived,” Paul said, anxious to get to the end of it.
“I was lucky. The other five got boxed up and shipped home. The boat burned and burned and at times I couldn’t hang on because the hull was so hot. Then the batteries exploded, sounded like direct mortar hits, and she started to sink. I could hear the gooks laughin’. I could also hear Rake in the fourth quarter, ‘Time to suck it up and go, men. Here’s where we win or lose. Gut check, gut check.’ ”
“I can hear him too,” Neely said.
“All of a sudden, the shootin’ stopped. Then I heard choppers. Two of them had seen the smoke and decided to explore. They came in low, scattered the gooks, dropped a rope, and I got out. When they hauled me in I looked down and saw the boat burnin.’ I saw two of my buddies lying on the deck, burnt black. I was in shock and finally passed out. They told me later that when they asked me my name, I said, ‘Eddie Rake.’ ”
Neely glanced to his left as Mal turned away. His voice cracked just a little, then he wiped his eyes. No hands on the wheel for a couple of seconds.
“So you came home?” Paul said.
“Yeah, that was the lucky part. I got outta there. You boys hungry?”
“No.”
“No.”
Evidently Mal was. He stomped the brake pedal while veering to the right, onto a gravel lot in front of an old country store. The Ford fishtailed as Mal brought it to a violent stop. “Best damned biscuits in this part of the state,” he said as he yanked open his door and stepped out into a cloud of dust. They followed him to the rear, through a rickety screen door, and into someone’s small and smoky kitchen. Four tables were packed close together, all surrounded by rustic-looking gentlemen devouring ham and biscuits. Fortunately, at least for Mal, who appeared to be ready to collapse from hunger, there were three empty stools at the cluttered counter. “Need some biscuits over here,” he growled at a tiny old woman hovering over a stove. Evidently, menus were not needed.
With remarkable speed, she served them coffee and biscuits, with butter and sorghum molasses. Mal plunged into the first one, a thick brownish concoction of lard and flour that weighed at least a pound. Neely, on his left, and Paul, on his right, followed along.
“Heard you boys talkin’ last night up in the bleachers,” Mal said, shifting from Vietnam to football. He took a large bite and began chewing ferociously. “About the ’87 game. I was there, so was everybody else. We figured somethin’ happened at halftime, in the locker room, some kind of altercation between you and Rake. Never heard the real story, you know, ’cause you boys never talked about it.”
“You could call it an altercation,” Neely said, still prepping his first and only biscuit.
“No one’s ever talked about it,” Paul said.
“So what happened?”
“An altercation.”
“Got that. Rake’s dead now.”
“So?”
“So, it’s been fifteen years. I wanna know the story,” Mal said as if he were drilling a murder suspect in the back room of the jail.
Neely put the biscuit on his plate and stared at it. Then he glanced over at Paul, who nodded. Go ahead. You can finally tell the story.
Neely sipped his coffee and ignored the food. He stared at the counter and drifted away. “We were down thirty-one to zip, just getting the hell beaten out of us,” he said slowly and very softly.
“I was there,” Mal said, chewing without interruption.
“We got to the locker room at halftime and waited for Rake. We waited and waited, knowing that we were about to be eaten alive. He finally walked in, with the other coaches. He was way beyond furious. We were terrified. He walked straight up to me, pure hatred in his eyes. I had no idea what to expect. He said, ‘You miserable excuse for a football player.’ I said, ‘Thanks, Coach.’ As soon as I got the words out, he took his left hand and backhanded me across the face.”
“It sounded like a wooden bat hitting a baseball,” Paul said. He, too, had lost interest in the food.
“That broke your nose?” Mal said, still quite interested in his breakfast.
“Yep.”
“What’d you do?”
“By instinct, I swung. I didn’t know if he planned to hit me again, and I wasn’t about to wait. So I threw a right hook with everything I could put into it. Caught him perfectly on the left jaw, flush to the face.”
“It wasn’t a right hook,” Paul said. “It was a bomb. Rake’s head jerked like he’d been shot, and he fell like a bag of cement.”
“Knocked him out?”
“Cold. Coach Upchurch rushed forward, yelling, cussing, like he was going to finish me off,” Neely said. “I couldn’t see, there was blood all over my face.”
“Silo stepped up and grabbed Upchurch by the throat with both hands,” Paul said. “He lifted him up, threw him against the wall, said he’d kill him right there if he made another move. Rake was dead on the floor. Snake Thomas and Rabbit and one of the trainers were squatting beside him. It was chaos for a few seconds, then Silo threw Upchurch to the floor and told all of them to get out of the locker room. Thomas said something and Silo kicked him in the ass. They dragged Rake out of the room and we locked the door.”
“For some reason I was crying, and I couldn’t stop,” Neely said.
Mal had stopped eating. All three were staring straight ahead at the little lady by the stove.
“We found some ice,” Paul continued. “Neely said his hand was broken. His nose was bleeding like crazy. He was delirious. Silo was screaming at the team. It was a pretty wild scene.”
Mal slurped down some coffee, then tore off a piece of a biscuit, which he dragged across his plate as if he might eat it, or he might not.
“Neely was lying on the floor, ice on his nose, ice on his hand, blood running down his ears. We hated Rake like no man has ever been hated. We wanted to kill somebody, and those poor boys from East Pike were the nearest targets.”
After a long pause, Neely said, “Silo knelt beside me and yelled, ‘Get your ass up, Mr. All-American. We gotta score five touchdowns.’ ”
“When Neely got up, we stormed out of the locker room. Rabbit poked his head out of a door, and the last thing I heard was Silo yelling at him, ‘Keep those sumbitches away from our sideline.’ ”
“Hindu threw a bloody towel at him,” Neely said, still softly.
“Late in the fourth quarter, Neely and Silo got the team together by the bench and told us that after the game we were running back to the locker room, locking the door, and not coming out until the crowd was gone.”
“And we did. We waited in there for a long time,” Neely said. “It took an hour just to settle dow
n.”
The door opened behind them as one group of locals left while another trooped in.
“And y’all never talked about it?” Mal asked.
“No. We agreed to bury it,” Neely said.
“Until now?”
“I guess. Rake’s dead, it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Why was it such a secret?”
“We were afraid there’d be trouble,” Paul said. “We hated Rake, but he was still Rake. He’d punched a player, and not just anybody. Neely’s nose was still bleeding after the game.”
“And we were so emotional,” Neely said. “I think all fifty of us were crying when the game was over. We’d just pulled off a miracle, against impossible odds. With no coaches. Nothing but sheer guts. Just a bunch of kids who’d survived under enormous pressure. We decided it would be our secret. Silo went around the room, looked every player in the eyes and demanded a vow of silence.”
“Said he’d kill anyone who ever told,” Paul said with chuckle.
Mal skillfully poured a pint of molasses over his next target. “That’s a good story. I figured as much.”