The Legend of Jesse Smoke

by Robert Bausch

  A man emerged from the shadows and walked toward me. He was wearing a business suit and dark glasses. I thought he was maybe a cop. He walked right up to me and stopped.

  It was Jesse, standing in front of me, frowning. “Well?” she said.

  “Now that is a better disguise.”

  “I can’t be talking to strangers tonight,” she said, gravely.

  We sat in the back, at a small table lit by a single candle. “How’d you discover this place?” I asked.

  “Dan Wilber and Darius recommended it. They come here a lot.”

  “He bring you here?”

  “No. It’s far from the city, and they said the food is wonderful.”

  A waiter came to the table with menus and asked us if we wanted something to drink.

  “I’ll have a bourbon and water,” she said, a slight rasp in her voice.

  I ordered one, too. When the waiter left the table, I said, “He didn’t recognize you.”

  “Or you.”

  I nodded. I’m about two inches taller than Jesse and, I have to say, when I saw our reflection in the glass as we approached the front door of the restaurant, I thought we looked pretty good together, even if she was dressed as a man.

  “I didn’t know that was you until you were right in front of me,” I said.

  “Good.”

  “You weren’t limping, either.”

  She smiled. A fine gift. I was beginning to relax.

  When we got our drinks and had sipped a bit, Jesse said, “How you think I’m doing?”

  She was doing wonderfully, I told her. “Were you in any doubt about that?”

  “The last two games I was awful.”

  “We won in Philly, Jesse. You played as well as anybody against the Jets.”

  “I was wobbly and stupid. Couldn’t hit anybody.”

  “Nobody could. Worst wind I’ve ever seen.” I thought she was above this kind of self-doubt, so it seemed really odd that she was not only talking to me about it, but that it had grown so acute in just two games. I told her what her play meant to the team. “We’re all in this together, Jesse, all right? Every time you get knocked down, the offensive line falls all over itself to get better—they’ve been playing so hard and so well, they may break the record for the fewest sacks ever allowed by an offensive line. We had a line here—years ago now—that gave up just nine sacks in sixteen games. This team? We’ve given up only five, and since you started playing, only two. These guys play hard for you.”

  She nodded.

  “You saw the film on Dave Busch. He played like a man possessed when Brooks got hurt. You think they go all out like that for somebody who lets them down? Come on, Jesse. You haven’t let anybody down.”

  “How bad is Brooks?” she asked.

  “We’ll know more on Wednesday. But … I think he’s done. I don’t know. Maybe if we get into the playoffs.”

  She looked away, and there was an awkward pause. With her hair combed straight back like that, and the tie gripping her throat, she did look like a young man, actually. And oddly kind of homely. With that broad splash of freckles across her face, she looked like a gangly kid, too afraid of his own coordination to lift a glass without letting his hand tremble. “What’d you think of my interview with ESPN?” she asked.

  “Just fine.”

  She shrugged her shoulders and got this scrunched look on her face.

  “Charley Cross is one of the good guys,” I elaborated. “I think he allowed you to, you know, be yourself.”

  Suddenly, she put her hands up to her face and I saw tears in her eyes.

  “Jesse, what’s wrong,” I said.

  I reached out and put my hand on her wrist. She only slightly moved her hands away from her face, but she waved me off. She seemed to shrink a bit there in the seat, then she picked up her napkin and covered her eyes.

  “There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” I said.

  “I’m not ashamed,” she said. I waited to see if she was going to start crying in earnest. Finally she looked at me, and the glitter of those tears in her eyes made her look feminine and beautiful again. “It’s just hormones,” she said. She touched very gently under her eyes with her napkin. People in the booth across from us noticed but politely stopped staring.

  “You okay now?” I asked.

  “Really, I am. It’s just … a bad time, that’s all.”

  “Oh.”

  She looked at me. “What do you mean, ‘oh’?”

  I said nothing.

  “I’m not having my period or anything, if that’s what you just ‘oh’ed about.”

  “Jesse,” I said. “I just need to— Don’t talk to me about things like that.”

  She was embarrassed. “It’s just … I’m dealing with my mother.”

  I nodded as if I understood more than she was actually saying.

  “And now, the way I’ve been playing? And my ankle and now my ribs—”

  “Your ribs hurt?”

  “Not too bad. Just when I take a deep breath.”

  “You’ve probably bruised something.”

  “It’s on my left side, so I can’t feel it when I throw. I just … I don’t want to get knocked down again, let’s put it that way.”

  The waiter came back to the table and took our order. He looked at Jesse a little suspiciously, but even now did not seem to suspect who she really was.

  We both ordered lobster ravioli and a tossed salad.

  While we were waiting for dinner, the waiter brought us each another drink. “So this injury thing,” I said when he’d gone. “Is this why you wanted to meet me for dinner?”

  “No.”

  “Then …”

  “Do I have to have a reason to have dinner with you?”

  “Well …”

  “I wanted to talk to you, Coach, that’s all. It’s just, a lot … a lot’s going on.”

  I waited.

  “You know my mother came to stay with me.”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “I felt bad about how things went. I even felt sorry for her in that meeting, so I talked to her over the phone a few times and then—well, she came to live with me.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, actually,” I said.

  I felt honored, too, that she trusted me enough to talk to me right now, under the circumstances. I wanted to find a way to express that to her, but then she met my gaze and said, “Yeah, well—don’t be. I just kicked her out.”

  I took this in. “Is that why you were crying?”

  “I was not crying.”

  I could see she hated that I’d seen those tears. She took a big sip of her bourbon and water, made a tight-looking face, and then shook her shoulders. “Forget about it,” she said. “It’s probably just that … I feel like I owe you everything, you know? So now and then …” She stopped there.

  “You kicked her out?”

  “This morning. We had a fight.”

  I thought she might start crying again, but she only took a sip of bourbon and stared into my eyes, as if she was looking for some kind of judgment or approval. I shrugged. “What was the fight about?”

  “Same stuff, I guess. She didn’t say it, but … I think she was kind of upset that I didn’t mention her in the Cross interview. She kept going on about how I talked about you and about my father. Said I sounded like I owed everything to the men around me.”

  “I don’t think that’s the way you sounded at all.”

  “Well, it really got me angry, I’ll tell you that. I started yelling. Let her know I owed her absolutely nothing. And then I told her to get out.”

  “You feel bad about that?”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t know.” She shook her glass around a little. “I mean, so—I’ve been feeling sorry for her all day. She packed her things without saying a word, then sort of skulked out. Before she left, she loaded the dishwasher. She was like a maid cleaning a motel room.”

  “Know where she went?”

/>   “Back to Tennessee, I guess.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I sat there, letting the silence build and build. Then I said, “Nothing’s permanent, Jess.” She looked at me, dry-eyed now but still a little red around the edges. “There’s no reason you can’t get in touch with her in a few days, right?”

  The waiter brought our food. We ate silently for a while, then I said, “You know when I was with your mother alone in the office the first day she was here, she told me that she played quarterback once, too.”

  The look on Jesse’s face changed. She seemed to brighten a bit, and for a second I thought she might laugh.

  “She said she thought it might get your dad’s attention.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “You don’t remember it?”

  She frowned. “I do have a vague memory of her in a uniform. But … I must have been pretty young.”

  “She didn’t play when you were growing up?”

  “No. She watched me play.”

  “So she was there for a while anyway.”

  “I guess.”

  “For a long while,” I said. “Right? I mean, you were almost a teenager when she left. Anyway, I was going to say that I liked your mother. After that conversation, I thought maybe I understood where you got your direct approach to people.”

  “Maybe she’ll start sending me e-mails again.”

  “Or, you could write to her.”

  She seemed to agree with that. We finished our pasta and then just sat there for a while sipping our drinks and staring at the high windows in the front of the restaurant. Finally, I started to talk about the Dallas game, but Jesse stopped me. “I don’t want to talk about football now,” she said. “Do you mind?”

  I wanted to tell her that right now, football was the only thing she should be concentrating on, but I said I didn’t mind one bit. I wished I hadn’t seen her tears. She had enough on her plate without a personal crisis. I was certainly glad Coach Engram had ruled out interviews with the press.

  Thirty-Two

  Dallas was going to be really tough. Having lost to the Giants in the last seconds, 17 to 16, they were now 7 and 5 on the year, still one game behind us. The Giants, meanwhile, were 10 and 2 and seemed unstoppable. Even at 8 and 4, we were clearly struggling. The Cowboys needed to beat us, and they were pissed off about that first game, the way we’d manhandled them.

  We were going in there on Thanksgiving Day, and we weren’t in the best shape to do it. Andre Brooks would not be back—his forearm muscle was not just torn; it had been separated from the tendon and bone. He’d be out for the year. Our left guard, Steve Henderson, was nursing a high ankle sprain he got in the last quarter of the Jets game. If Henderson went down, we’d have two fairly inexperienced players on the offensive line trying to keep Jesse healthy. Worst of all, Darius Exley had strained his hamstring in Monday’s practice that week. He couldn’t run full speed without risking pulling the thing entirely, which would put him out a month or more, so Coach Engram decided he was out for the Dallas game. Our best backup wide receiver was a guy named Sean Rice. He couldn’t block like Exley, and he wasn’t as fast, but he was the best alternative for the left side. Though not especially tall, he had decent speed and good hands and he’d been Jesse’s favorite target when she was playing on the scout team.

  Since we played the Jets on Sunday afternoon in New York, we had basically two days to prepare for Thursday’s game in Dallas—which is why we’d started preparing for it the week before, even as we were getting ready for the Jets. Monday is usually a day off for the players, but we practiced that day and Tuesday—then took Wednesday for the flight to Dallas and a walk-through Wednesday night before the game. It was all terribly rushed, but it was the best we could do.

  I wanted to run the ball against Dallas—especially to the right, Dave Busch’s side. He was a good enough run blocker that if I didn’t force him to pull and go across the field, he could handle whoever was in front of him. Coach Engram agreed with that. It would take Dallas at least two or if we were lucky three quarters to figure out we weren’t running very many plays to our left and that Busch was going to stay put. Also, in the weekly injury report to the league, we listed Darius Exley as “probable” to play so Dallas would spend a lot of time preparing for him. We put in a few quick slants and fades to Rice, but it would be Gayle Glenn Louis and Rob Anders who would have to carry the passing game. Also, I decided to put Louis in the slot on three-wide formations, and on some plays we’d run a four-wide-receiver set with Anders, Rice, Jeremy Frank, and our fifth wide receiver, a pretty tall, two-year veteran named Jerome White. He was fast, he had good moves, and he knew how to find his way into the open in a zone defense, which is what we expected to see a lot of from Dallas. White didn’t always catch what was thrown to him, but he could find his way to an open spot.

  Jesse was uncommonly nervous before the game. After those two bad outings in a row, she had something to prove, I think. I tried to calm her down, but she had this look in her eyes—like a man facing a firing squad after he’s heard the word “aim.” In pregame warm-ups she was happy about the weather at least. It was chilly, but there wasn’t much wind, and the sky was an empty, pale blue. Dallas still had a big opening in their roof, which made for odd shadows on the field, but that didn’t seem to bother her. In the offensive drills before the game she threw sharp, crisp, absolutely accurate passes—10-yard, 20-yard, 40-yard, and 50-yard passes—all right on the money. The gathering crowd, filing in to take their seats, actually began to cheer each time she launched a ball. (Of course there were a few loudmouthed rowdies who called her a “dyke” and so on, but we were used to that.)

  Things did not get off to a good start. We took the opening kick and Frank ran it out to the 28. On the first possession from scrimmage, I called a play that sent Mickens on a sweep to the right side behind Dave Busch. Jesse brought the team to the line, looked over the defense, then changed the play at the line. She faked a handoff to Mickens and fired the ball to the left, toward Rice running what looked like a quick slant. The corner on that side intercepted it. He dragged three tacklers all the way to our 18-yard line.

  Jesse came off the field with that look still in her eyes, but now she must have noticed the look in mine. I walked up to her as she was removing her helmet. “What was that?” I said.

  She looked at me, her hair all matted down by the helmet. “I thought the corner on that side was playing too close.”

  “He was close all right.”

  “If Sean gets in front of him and I put it in there right, it’s a twenty-yard gain. Both safeties were rolling toward Anders’s side.”

  “They’re going to be doing that all day. They don’t have Exley to contend with.”

  “That’s why I tried to hit the quick slant.”

  “The corner on that side is quite capable of handling Rice.”

  She said nothing.

  “And he did handle him, didn’t he?”

  “It was my fault. I tried to put it in there too early.”

  “Jesse, their corner would have been in Sean’s hip pocket all the way down that side of the field. He’s fast, he’s good, and he can cover Sean Rice.”

  She looked down the sideline at her offense as they took their seats on the bench. I think she was afraid Sean could hear what I was saying.

  “Hell,” I said, “he can do a fair job covering Darius. The guy’s a lot better than you think.”

  She shook her head. “I know Sean. He’ll break free.”

  “Forget about the interception, Jesse. Just play your game,” I said. “And run the plays I call.”

  While we were having this conversation, Dallas drove the 18 yards from the spot after the interception and scored on a run right up the gut. It was 7 to 0 now, and we weren’t going to quiet that crowd any time soon.

  On the next series, Jesse called exactly what she was supposed to, but again the offense was having trouble moving the ball. I could see i
t was starting to get to her. Mickens gained about 7 yards on his longest run, and after two first downs, we faced a third and 6 on our 48. I called a fake draw with both wide receivers fading down the sidelines and the tight end and running back cutting to the outside behind them. The fullback on that play is usually wide open in the middle of the field, but if he isn’t, then either the tight end or the running back should be open. It’s a pretty good play if everybody does what they should.

  Jesse dropped back, planted, and then in the face of a heavy pass rush launched it deep down the right sideline toward Rob Anders. The ball dropped beautifully over his left shoulder into his hands, but when he went down it squirted out and was ruled incomplete. It was a beautiful pass, but it was fourth and 6 and we had to punt.

  Dallas stubbornly drove it down the field, gaining little chunks of yardage on each play. They converted on third down four times, the crowd roaring louder and louder with each first down. Our defense put up a hell of a fight, but after an 11-play, 55-yard, 12 minute drive, Dallas faced a third and 6 on our 12-yard line. Their quarterback threw a little underhand shuttle pass to the fullback right between Zack Leedom and Nick Rack. Talon Jones was too far to the right, covering the tight end, so the fullback waltzed almost untouched the last 12 yards into the end zone.

  Now it was 14 to 0.

  Jesse took the offense on a pretty solid drive then. She completed 4 passes out of 5 tries, and Mickens ran behind Dave Busch and our right tackle, James Cook, for good yardage. We got stalled though inside the Dallas 10-yard line. On third and goal, Jesse tried to flip the ball over the right shoulder of Gayle Glenn Louis, but he couldn’t hold on to it.

  Shaking her head in disgust, Jesse kicked a 17-yard field goal.

  We stopped Dallas on the next series, but we still couldn’t get anything going on our next possession. We punted, and stopped Dallas, got the ball back. Same thing. Three and out. We kept getting stopped with dropped passes, or receivers falling down, or Jesse throwing it just a few inches beyond the fingers of a wide receiver. On one play she launched a perfect spiral toward Gayle Glenn Louis but it hit a referee in the back of the head and bounced to the ground. (So did the referee.) That stopped another drive, and Jesse kicked a second field goal, but then Dallas drove it down and scored again before the end of the half and we trailed 21 to 6.