by Trey Holt
He would leave the house with a paper sack under each arm, to return an hour later saying that he had let Percy off three-quarters of the way to Thompson Station. When my mother asked him why he had not taken him all the way, Lucky had not answered, but simply placed himself in his chair and turned his eyes to watch smoke rise over his head toward the darkened spot on the ceiling.“I guess it didn’t make a damn,”he told me early the next week,“he still came right back here. Or at least he did that evenin’. I don’t know why he did that.”
I wanted to tell Lucky that I had begun to believe that most of us didn’t know why the hell we did most things, especially the most important ones. But I didn’t.
Neither did I tell him that four days later after I sat on the sidelines, unable to lift my arm. The play had presented itself much the way the former ones had: the kickoff had floated down after they had once again tied the game. As the ball descended end over end through the night that had now grown clear, I could see the reflection of the stadium lights on its side.
My feet stopped temporarily as the ball first touched my hand. As I surveyed the kickoff team’s defense, I saw a hole close on the right to open on the left. The wall of blockers had begun to form in front of me, Collins shifting his position and leading the charge. Almost as if I were in someone else’s body, I moved laterally then began to move diagonally then south to north down the field. The defensive players and my blockers came together for the first time in front of me.
I watched as Van laid a hit on some guy that literally knocked him out of one of his shoes. Collins delivered a similar hit, on a number fifty-two that was coming within a few yards of attempting to make the tackle. Then Chester gave me a similar block. The wedge had completely formed now and the hole that I’d seen had been magnified two or three times. I must have been at the thirty-five when I made the cut that sent me through that hole…and when I noticed the last two men that I would have to beat at the fifty.
I could smell the bacon and eggs as Lucky came back after his first round out Monday morning and we all sat down and he read the paper aloud. He’d open the paper and there would be the article that Fred Creason had written about me…about the speed that this kid had shown by returning three kickoffs for touchdowns in one game. Wasn’t that a state record? Wouldn’t that finally get me out of Ronnie Langford’s shadow, his legend…Ronnie the hero, which I could not eclipse because there was no current war. Not only was I a scrappy, heart and soul-filled halfback, but I was a dynamic kick returner. And wouldn’t this put Nedler in his place? Nedler, the man who couldn’t keep his own wife satisfied, the man who had arrogantly taken his lack of power and apparent impotence out on someone who simply through strange fate became available.
It was at the forty that I would make the cut to move away from their kicker and the safety. You’d think I would have known his name, but I never did. I saw only that his number was one removed from my own, number twenty-five where I was number twenty-six, and that he was really no bigger than me. Neither he nor the kicker was, but I wasn’t concerned with the kicker, who I’d already outrun twice and I was certain couldn’t catch me.
As I approached them, the kicker was closer to the sideline, almost hinting that he did not care to try make the tackle again. The safety, for lack of a better term, was a half-dozen feet inside him, waiting for me to make the cut that threw the kicker off, the one he would react to in the opposite manner of the only other available tackler. I had played enough defense in my time, attempted and made enough tackles, to know that he’d play off the kicker, going the opposite way, knowing that I’d likely cut in that direction. In the split second it took to make the decision, I decided I’d cut toward the kicker, hoping both of them would collapse toward the sidelines. This would make my next cut easier, I knew that, that is, if I had their legs moving the opposite way. That’s the art of running a football, I assume, at least it always seemed to be to me: keeping the man who is trying to corral you off-balance, kind of like life does as you’re living it.
As I made my first step toward the sideline and the kicker’s feet tangled around one another, my eyes cut to the lower body of number twenty-five. In my imagination, I was certain they’d put him in to do exactly this, to make sure I didn’t run another one back. That was his sole job on this team. And I knew what the repercussions would likely be if he didn’t. I’d played football since I was in the seventh grade, baseball since then, too. I knew what men like coaches expected from kids in these positions. Somehow this world took on more importance than it actually had, meant more than it ever should have. Distraction, perhaps, so the real world seemed less serious. The real world as it was occurring probably around this time, down near the river somewhere. That real world. Everybody’s eyes were focused on me. It made them, me…us…forget.
The Little Man—that’s how I’ve come to think of him in the years that have passed—in my memory now looks like I did at that age, innocence and self-will still in his eyes. Determined he was going to make this play or be goddamned. His feet planted for that moment, two or three feet apart, waiting for his next move that would mirror my own. His eyes green and tired, his face expectant. As I had thought, he made the opposite move from the kicker, toward the inside of the field. I had then decided I would make the opposite cut of the one he’d suspect: back toward the sidelines. I could hear Nedler’s voice, Lucky’s voice, the voice of every coach I’d ever had, hollering at me, telling me to switch the ball into the other hand. So I could use the free arm to fight off the tackler if need be; so the ball would be harder to reach and more likely to go out of bounds if fumbled.
The ball moving from my right to left hand, I tried to make my way into the space that was created when number twenty-five had made his move the opposite direction. The space seemed have grown from six or so feet to probably ten, and I knew I stood more of a chance trying to shoot that gap than I would attempting to make another cut back toward the inside of the field. There would be one last surge that would take place that would, I suspected, include acceleration or impact. If the acceleration was quick enough, then there would be no impact; if impact came, then the chess match that had occurred within the few split-seconds that had passed would have been for all practical purposes useless.
By his number, he was a running back himself, I guessed, and probably played in the defensive secondary if he played defense at all. As the night had progressed, I had noticed little. As I sat on the bench on the sideline—no longer playing defense because of my“potential“—I had watched nothing but my feet, the eyes of my heart turned inward. If this man, boy, whatever he was, had been in the secondary, I would not had known it because I had yet to make it by the linebackers for the second straight week, trudging out two and three yards at a time until finally Nedler had elected to let Nance and Van and Collins try to produce some kind of offense.
“If you are gonna get hit,”Lucky had always told me,“use that arm first. Keep‘em at a distance so they can’t wrap you in their arms. If they ever get their arms around you then they can sure as hell bring you down!”
As I tried to make it through the space between number twenty-five and the sideline and he tried to close my space, I could feel my arm rising so I could make one last attempt to keep him off me. From the look in his eyes, I think neither he nor I really wanted to make this play. All things being equal, I imagine he would have just let me go. For the brief moment when my hand touched his chin, neck and upper chest and he was able to wrap his right hand in my jersey right below my shoulder pad, we made eye contact again. Even though I cannot remember what he looked like to this day, I just recall his eyes, that they looked like mine. Green. A million questions in them. Wanting this and not wanting it. Knowing that this would make him the hero or the goat. Somehow knowing that this play made a great difference…would probably make the difference of the game. And really, in the grand scheme of things, didn’t make a goddam.
The struggle began around the fifty, my arm l
ocked in the neck of his jersey and his tied up in the underarm of mine, each of us spinning the other, attempting to fight free from the binding force that held us. The other. On the second turn, almost as if we were dancing, our feet moved in unison, more lateral and circular than forward. On the second complete twirl between us, I knew I’d be tackled by other players who’d caught up to the play, that is, if he kept his hands on me for even another few steps. With my hardest push I was able with to loosen his hand from my jersey and break free for another three or four steps, mostly up-field. Once again, though, he was able to grasp me, this time by the arm.
Such major injury, I always thought, would perhaps take more time, play itself out more slowly. Something that prominent to the body should surely make itself more known, I always imagined, not just be the period at the end of a sentence but be the sentence itself. As he and I went around a third time, in desperation to make the tackle, rather than try to pull me down, he used our spinning to propel himself and me as he slung me toward the sidelines by the grip he had on my wrist. He was down now; there would be no other attempt at tackle unless someone else had made it up from behind us in the momentary struggle. As my feet slowed and my balance steadied, I began to believe I was, in fact, going to stay in bounds. As I tried to make the last step that would have moved my body in the north to south direction once more, the pain of hot coals on naked skin tore through my free arm, and almost as if someone had let the energy out of me like air out of a punctured tire, I began to melt into the ground. The ball hit at my feet and then made its way with a bobble and roll out of bounds. Just like it should have.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
On this Saturday morning, I had been surprised when I found him sitting awake in his chair when I descended the stairs into the kitchen. Initially, I had only seen his feet, flat on the floor, a foot or so part, as I glanced into the dimly lit room. Before I could make my way out of the kitchen and across the back porch, he put his hand on my shoulder, causing me to nearly drop the glass of milk in my hand.
“You wanna meet me down at the river after you get through with your papers?” he said.“You ain’t got nothin’else you need to do after that, do ya?”
In the last couple of days, I had come to believe he knew there was someone, just perhaps not her name. Sharon was at work all day this day, a Saturday, December 18th. There was nothing further that I knew to do, except sit around and wait for her to get off, shoot the shit with Van and Tully—which I knew I’d do later in the afternoon anyway—or be exposed to Jean all day, listening to her talk about this new boy she’d started going out with. She’d been going to school with him since she was six years old, but now for some reason he was big news. Jimmy Platt was all I’d heard for a week before the woman was found at the high school and for the two days after, since the situation had somewhat resolved.
“You gotta check again?” I said.
“I do,”he nodded.“I think it’s pretty much under control. But you know how that river can be. Damned unpredictable at best.”
I nodded and he returned to his chair, where again I could only see his feet and a cloud of smoke when I passed out the back door to go the paper office. My arm moved in rote that morning as I threw my papers, my mind making its way back to September, when he had for the first time asked me to meet him there.
Then and now, it was almost as if perhaps he were looking for him to return, for someone to tell him what had happened had not. For something to indicate to him that there is an answer past the hardship and strife of this life. It was now as if the water helped him to think more clearly, its movement somehow calming him, reminding him that there are forces far beyond those we perceive of our power and accord. I have no doubt that my uncle believed that. Many people, I am certain, thought what he did as a mere extension of his craziness, but on my good days I have always preferred to think about as if he lived with perhaps one foot in whatever it is that comes next. In some ways, saw more clearly than the rest of us, or at least most.
Fred Creason, though, did not think so. Although I will not affirm his journalism by repeating these years later what he wrote following my uncle’s disappearance and eventual recovery, it was neither kind to nor true of him. And the same, I believe, of Ms. Nedler, although I know little to nothing about her except what Van had told me and the fact that she and her husband would move the year following my breaking free from football and the Academy like a rusty cage.
I knew, perhaps if I had really wanted it I could have gone back…could have rehabilitated myself so I could have played once more. But, I also know, in my heart of hearts, I did not. What I wanted at the time, even though the reality would skew further away from pleasure than I could ever imagine, was her. That was all I wanted.
As we had sat at the river that day in September, my arm hung by my side in the makeshift contraption Dr. Guppy had placed on it, that in its own way reminded me of Fred Burkitt and his arm, Lucky did not ask why; he only replayed the scene over and over with words.“I thought you had that return. I thought you’d broke that tackle,”he told me as he watched his own hand flick ashes from the end of his cigarette, like he had done a hundred thousand times.
“Me, too,”I’d said, watching the river pass as we sat on the bank.
“How is it?” he’d asked.
“It hurts pretty bad,”I’d told him. The truth was that it had hurt so bad that I pissed down my leg twice: when Van had tried to help me pull my jersey and pads off over it in the locker room after we’d won the game…and the night before this day when I was trying to take my shirt off. I was always too embarrassed to tell anybody besides Sharon, and hoped against hope that nobody had seen me in the locker room. Van, in one of those brief moments of kindness he could display, had acted like he hadn’t noticed. Hadn’t mentioned the huge splotch of water that covered my crotch and the upper portion of my left leg.
“You want me to give you a ride on your paper route?” Lucky asked me.
“No sir,”I told him.“I’ve been makin’it.” The truth of this was that it had been taking me twice as long because I could neither control the Indian nor sling the papers with my right arm. I’d been throwing a lot of it parking and walking. But I wanted no one’s sympathy, including his. For some reason, the whole week had seemed to affect me that way: like I was in a trance almost, having the strength from somewhere to make it through the motions, yet remembering or feeling very few of them. There had been things to do; I had tried to help Lucky as much as I could, help my mother help him. Tried not to ask questions, knowing that there would be no answers. Even on this day, I had gone to the river with him at my mother’s suggestion, because there had to be one last going-over of what, I guess, though never mentioned, was called a“crime scene,”to see if there was anything else that suggested what was apparent. Just get through the day—that was the objective upon arising. Say as little about what had happened as possible. Only Jean and I would speak of what had occurred. Late at night, when we’d return from the visitation two nights before they buried him on a Thursday, Jean and I would retire to the upstairs and hash out what we believed…thought…knew.
“You know him well enough to know he wasn’t goin’to do nothin’to that woman. Percy didn’t have that in him,”she said.
“You know that you and I know that. But to a lot of this town, he was just the man who roamed around, protected by his brother the Police Chief, who had done‘that’to Christine Smithson not long ago. Twice.”
I turned my eyes to her, the first time I could remember in a long time looking in her eyes, blue like my mother’s. For all practical purposes, they were my mother’s eyes. I felt my pants pocket for my cigarettes but started not to pull one out in front of her. Then thought what the hell, that nothing seemed to matter much anymore.
“He was just lookin’in her winda’. Don’t her husband think it was likely that maybe it did happen like Percy said it did…that she motioned for him to come over there like she was gonna talk to
him.”
“I don’t know what he thinks,”I told her. I lit a cigarette and watched her through the smoke rising. I had to handle the thing with my left hand, which I could barely do. I started to tell her about what Van had told me, even felt the urge to explain to her that for once I believed him but then realized, or at least believed, it futile. Tears were dammed in the corner of her eyes when I looked back at her. She pinched them with her thumbs, tried to keep from smearing the mascara she still had on. As I watched her, it came to me that it was September, burning-ass hot September in the middle of Tennessee, and I was sitting in this attic, without even a fan running in the window. The air thick and syrup-like, almost solid, like it was sticking to me and then peeling off in sheets.
“You know what Todd Smithson told me?” she said.
As I shook my head, I immediately found myself wondering what the hell he had to do with any of this and knew it was probably no more than what he had to do with Percy and his own sister. Wrong place at the wrong time. Or maybe just a certain place at a certain time would be a better way to say it. Ever since Monday I’d found myself trying to find almost anybody to blame, besides the characters that really were culpable.
“What?”
“He told me that he saw Percy there when she was at her winda’ …said that he was just out walkin’ ‘cause he was lonesome and missed his sister and couldn’t stay in the house no more with his mean ole daddy. Said he passed Percy on Everbright…well, that he had been behind him and then he walked by after she had waved at him from her winda’. He said Percy looked bad, like maybe he’d been sleepin’somewhere it was muddy for a coupl’a days. But that didn’t stop that woman from wavin’at him. Said she waved and he stopped and jus’looked at from the road a little bit like maybe he was tryin’to remember who she was. Then he acted like he did and went up to her when she said somethin’to him. Todd said that they stood there and talked awhile…and that was the last thing he saw when he got to the end of Everbright and turned on Academy.”