Irreversible

by Chris Lynch

  He’s giving me a funny expression here, his lips pursed and pushed out in either a contemplating mode or maybe preparation to blow me raspberries.

  Then he points at me with a football-for-life finger that is so gnarled it looks like it has knuckles in four different places. “Free safety.”

  “Yes!” I hoot. “All right, Coach. I won’t let you down.”

  “I will expect you not to. Now, Keir?” The finger is sort of wagging, more like chopping. “Focus. Commit. Read and react rapidly. And I cannot emphasize this enough: do not miss an open field tackle, not once. Players who miss open field tackles play for somebody else, because they don’t play for me.”

  “Can’t be fairer than that, Coach,” I say, popping my helmet on my head so aggressively it could be the hardest hit I take all day.

  That’s not how it turns out, as it happens. Because that’s not football. And I am so glad for that.

  I’m reborn at safety. It was true, every word of what I said to the coach. Every word, that is, after I stopped turbo-lying about why I was late. I can see the field, and every single play the offense tries to run, so clearly it feels as if I am watching the tape replay of a game I already played a hundred and fifty times. It’s as if I have inside information, like when one team manages to steal the opposition’s playbook and gives them a mauling, come game time.

  No disrespect to Coach Muswell, but to be honest, his sets and schemes and play-action tricks are not as hard to decipher as he seems to believe. As a consequence, I am not far off the ball at the end of almost every passing play they attempt. And as for the running plays, I’m there on all of them.

  Bam! Our fullback, who isn’t massive but sure is one solid squat block of granite, erupts straight out of the backfield and right up the middle. It was a broken play, where the middle of the offensive line was supposed to have opened up a hole for him to squeeze through. But they got stuffed and manhandled by our two gigantic defensive tackles, so the hole isn’t there. Until the fullback makes one for himself. Blam! Big guys from both sides of the line bounce and stagger as the ballcarrier shoots through like a cannonball. Our middle linebacker was caught out of position but makes up ground fast. He catches the guy, almost strips the ball off him as he gets a grab on him from behind.

  That slows him down just enough, and I have him lined up from twenty yards away. He’s grappling, looking down as he tries to maintain control of the ball, and that’s where I get him, carraaack!

  I’m so torqued up and tuned in that I am aware of every gasp from the sidelines and on the field. I bounce right up and bash my chest with my fist once as the fullback gets slowly up, and the ball finally comes to a stop in western Canada somewhere.

  There is a lot of woofing going on because this is football, and that is the football that football players like. A slap on the ass here, a smack on the helmet there, and I am lined up once again in my spot, at my position, where I belong.

  A bunch of running plays follow, and every single one of them is directed through the central highway, the stretch of the field that runs between the hash marks. That’s the zone, our zone, where the middle linebacker patrols ten yards in front of me, and after that I am the only lawman left between the ballcarrier and the goal line border he needs to cross to collect six points over my dead body.

  As a unit, we are not bad, the defensive B squad, and the running game is not getting much off us. A yard or two per carry, then one goes for seven, then the quarterback gets cute and fakes the run, dumps a quick short pass to the slot receiver, who’s gained eight yards just by making the catch, but he’s not getting a single yard more.

  I actually sprint right past the linebacker who’s going for it, but I get there first. I hit the guy just at the point where he’s collected the ball, tucked it in, and turned upfield. But there is no upfield for him as I crunch him with all the strength and desperation and kinetic malevolence I had generated from that full-tilt run from those twenty yards out. And from a long way beyond that, too.

  It’s a deadly, textbook hit, but so is the catch and hold. He’s lying on his side as I push myself up off him with both hands on his rib cage. “Good grab,” I say, offering him a hand up. “Way to hang on.”

  “Thanks,” he says, ignoring my hand and hopping to his feet. “I never drop.” He gives me a sly grin that I recognize from thousands of competitive moments with hundreds of competitive guys.

  The grin says, That didn’t hurt, and Show me what else you got, and the grinner is Kelly McAvoy.

  There are some guys who can make that face, who are so masterful at it, they make you feel like you’d run across eight lanes of highway traffic, through razor wire and a plate-glass window to hit him again. Kelly McAvoy is one of those guys.

  It’s a thing of beauty.

  “And all that time, I thought you were a big hitter. Huh,” he says, turning his back to me and jogging back to his squad.

  Oh. Oh, yeah. He’s good. Good for me, especially.

  I think I forgot, sometime fairly long ago, how much fun football could be. I won’t be forgetting again, not if it keeps going this way. This is the right way. I’m playing the right way, I’m feeling the right way, and when you’ve got that going, life should cooperate. Life should be fine, and it is fine, today, the finest day.

  They have switched their approach. We came off the field for a good, long, welcome breather while the A offensive and defensive lineups took over. Now we’re back on the field, and the coaches’ strategy is picking up right where it left off. Having tested our mettle against a primarily running attack, they are mixing it up now but favoring the passing game heavily. It’s a much more demanding task than it was, as the quarterback is doing an excellent job of spreading the field, throwing short passes and long ones, across the middle and straight down the sidelines. He’s using all his weapons, releasing his halfback to catch a pass, connecting with his tight end after sending both wide receivers flying downfield and drawing all the coverage that way. Including me. By the time both myself and the strong safety recover and scramble back into the play, the end has picked up twenty-five yards—twenty-five of our yards, specifically, as he gallops right along through the very heart of my patrol zone.

  “That was your read, Sarafian!” Coach roars, making sure I know what he’s noticing, that what I was promising I’m not now delivering.

  I think I am overall having a stellar session. I’m making reads, making hits, hitting my spots. I don’t know what he’s thinking, but whatever I’m doing, I have to do more of it. Do it stronger, do it better, do it more ferociously. Because I hear him. Maybe it’s my imagination, or maybe it’s not, but I hear Coach screaming me out, a lot, and I don’t hear him doing it to anybody else.

  I have to turn it up, several notches.

  I’m thrilled every time they put the ball on the ground, because I am totally locked in on the running game. I sniff it out, I get a ridiculous jump on the play, and before the runner gets more than a few yards past scrimmage, I am there to stop him, sometimes with the help of my slower-reacting teammates, sometimes not. Several times, many times, I find myself sprinting right past our middle linebacker to make a tackle he should have made. He is a senior, one of the team’s defensive captains, and because of his position at middle linebacker he’s supposed to be sort of our general, our mastermind, our quarterback leading the B-squad defenders. He is not a B-squad defender, and he can’t be getting shown up by one.

  After one of those plays, one of my best plays all day, I am running past him to get back to my position when suddenly his shoulder surges forward, crashes into me, and I am flat on my back looking up at his angry mug.

  He doesn’t say anything, just glares at me with glowing orange eyes through his face mask, trying to stare me down.

  Notwithstanding how clearly down I obviously am, I’m not having this. I don’t say anything either but spring to my feet, bumping my face mask with his as I do, then spin back in the direction of the free safety�
�s home office.

  However, I don’t care. I don’t care how big he is, or how fearsome he is or how established on and within the team he is—the answer to all three, by the way, being extraordinarily.

  If you don’t do your job, then somebody else will do it. Too bad. I have no time for you, pal, no sympathy, and, regardless of how much you try to intimidate me, no respect. It’s just too bad.

  “Too fucking bad,” I call to the back of the linebacker, my teammate, my supposed leader, just before the snap of the ball for the next play.

  It’s a pass play. It’s a quick release to the sideline way to my right, and I am hauling full tilt in the direction of the play, along with everybody else. The receiver makes a nice jumping one-handed catch, pulls the ball in, and immediately fakes the cornerback right out of his socks with a slick shimmy move. Strong-side safety is right there as the receiver cuts to the inside. He’s got him lined up, but the guy cuts again to the outside, which nobody was expecting, and our safety loses a step, lunges and bounces harmlessly off the guy, who sprints away like a racehorse, never to be troubled by any of us again.

  I continue the pursuit anyway, because that’s what you’re supposed to do, probably forty-five yards in all. By the time he crosses the goal line, there is about fifteen yards more space between us than when I started chasing him.

  I am utterly winded, with my hands on my hips, as I make the long trip back to the sidelines while the kicking team comes running out for the point-after attempt. I see both Tory and Christian running out, both with a weird high-stepping leg motion where they’re practically kneeing themselves in the stomach and could only have come from soccer. I don’t even want to know which one is going to be kicking and which one is the holder.

  “Looking good out there,” Christian says, slapping my stomach as he passes.

  “I know,” Tory says. “He’s a new man. Somebody must have got laid last night.”

  “Ahhh, ha-ha,” the whole of the point-after unit of the special teams bursts out laughing. They seem to have bonded together into a close-knit bunch already.

  Would I be part of that now, if I had done a better job kicking?

  Or would the whole thing be totally different if I were part of it?

  • • •

  When I trot onto the field with the B squad again, I’m feeling it, and the it I’m feeling is not what I was feeling earlier.

  I’m fatigued, and I’m sore. The passing game is running me ragged, trying to figure it out mentally and keep up physically. I know the situation is deteriorating when I find myself starting to guess. That’s the worst, when your instincts go fritzy so you can’t read the play, and your legs are quitting on you so you can’t cover up mistakes by finding that extra gear.

  Except, I find that extra gear.

  I am borderline insane with the awareness that my whole new life is on the line right now. Very few people get a second chance like I got, and I’d bet nobody gets a third. As the notion hits me that it all could come apart in the next half hour, I get a surge of maniacal energy.

  I still feel the strains and bruises everywhere, but now I like them. They are welcome, because the contusions are football, and they keep me company like old teammates and pals.

  Right from the go, the offense is targeting me now. Every pass play, every run, is either coming straight up my alley or faking one way before slanting in my direction.

  Good. I’m dead on my feet, but good. Coach wants to know if I’m for real.

  Bam!

  I catch a receiver getting cute, about to lateral the ball to the tight end three yards away, and I absolutely level the guy. I hit him so hard there’s a sound like a fire alarm sounding from inside my own helmet. I don’t even know if the tight end received the ball, scored a touchdown or not, but in this instance that was not my problem. My problem was this guy lying on the ground in front of me, who will never again try a gimmick with me chugging full tilt at his chest.

  That’s what I needed to do, that’s what the coach was looking for me to do, and that is what I did to perfection.

  I extend a hand to the guy as he spends an extra several seconds on his back. He declines my sportsmanship, so I turn to walk away.

  I bump right into Kelly.

  “Tone it down, man,” he says.

  “What? You know how this works, Kelly. Nobody tones anything down, not at this point. Especially guys who are on the bubble.”

  But I was never supposed to be a bubble type. This was not the way it was supposed to be.

  “A lot of these guys are gonna wind up being your teammates, remember.”

  “If I don’t keep popping these guys, I won’t be anybody’s teammate. And if they can’t take it, maybe they won’t either.”

  He gives me a strangely offended look as he backs away toward the offensive formation again. I don’t know if maybe Kelly lost his edge between high school and here, but that’s for him to deal with. But it’s not going to happen to me. I’m not going to set any sprint records on this team, so I have to show what I can show. But if they have some kind of Richter scale for registering the magnitude of hits, that’s a record I’m going for.

  And for the rest of the session I do exactly that. I stomp and crash around the field as if the whole place belongs to me. I play smarter as I get more tired, old tricks coming back to me from when I played DB regularly. I hedge this way or that to get an early jump on a play I sense is coming, because otherwise I won’t have the legs to catch up. I don’t guess right every time, but I do well enough to look like I belong.

  And, most of all, I make sure that when I am in position to make a tackle, I make that tackle.

  A few times Kelly is my man, and I do stop him but not always without help. I hit him first, but he absorbs it, fights through it, pulls me along until one, two other defenders come along and drag him down.

  He’s bigger than I thought he was, and he is in beastly shape. He plays a sort of hybrid receiver–tight end, and he will give a lot of teams fits trying to match up with him because of his speed-size-agility package.

  “Man, you bulked up over the summer,” I say as it’s his turn to offer me a hand up after a collision. I, however, accept the offer out of good sportsmanship and a concern that I might not get up otherwise.

  “Not really,” he says, and goes back to work.

  How could I not notice that I was playing on the same team with a specimen like Kelly McAvoy? How was that possible?

  I have to admit that generally the players here are bigger, stronger, faster, and quite obviously more committed to training than what I encountered regularly in high school. This was to be expected, so why do I feel like I wasn’t expecting it? Where was I? Was I thinking I was just about good enough to hold my own at Norfolk? And that small-school NAIA Carnegie was going to be such a step down that the whole thing would be a stroll for me?

  I hope I wasn’t thinking that. I don’t think I was thinking that, and I don’t want to think that, because that guy, with that thought, would be a grade-A shithead. These players here, and naturally, players at decent well-run programs all over the country, are legitimate athletes. It would be like, if you took the top tier, the very best half dozen or so guys from every team I saw in high school, including my own, took all the best guys, the guys you stopped everything to watch, the guys who could do the spectacular things like lifting houses right up off the ground, like running a lap of the school’s four-hundred-yard oval track so fast it was earlier when they returned than when they left, stuff that normal players couldn’t do and that normal people in the street couldn’t even dream of ever doing, it was like if you skimmed all those guys off the top of the athletic cream, those would be the guys who wound up at all levels of all kinds of college programs all over America.

  Those are the guys I have to compete with for a spot on the team, for the privilege of playing against all those same guys every week in games that count. I’m no dunce. I’m not a chump or a dreamer. I knew this
was what it would be like.

  I also think I more or less know what it would be like to have a surface-to-air missile shot through my stomach. You can know every damn thing there is, but until you get hit by it up close and murderous, you don’t know shit.

  But right this second all that matters is that one of those guys is motoring straight at me, having caught yet another pass going right across the middle and into my area of responsibility. I have plenty of time to see him come, and he’s making no move to avoid me, so I do what I’ve been taught and I plant my feet, start my surge forward, toward him before he can get me first and send me hurtling backward like a tumbleweed. When the impact comes, it’s not like it was two or three or six years ago when I discovered that the well-executed tackle does not feel like anything at all no matter how hard you crash it.

  No, this one I feel, in every last one of my body’s bones. I’m sure if I had the time, I could even count all of them, as they individually crackle and squeal.

  At some point this became a man-to-man competition between Kelly and me. We are isolated, play after play. Even when he is not the target receiver, he’s coming at me as a blocker, and we spend practically the whole time in what has quickly become a war. I have been hitting harder than he might have been expecting, but too bad. He should have been expecting it or he’s a fool. Behind the face mask, his face has been getting redder, his eyes more bulgy, and this just makes me happier because it means I’m doing my job.

  This time, though, despite my perfect planting of the feet, I get blasted by him. I hurtle backward and roll like a tumbleweed. And this time, as he walks over me, he doesn’t bother picking me up.

  “What happened?” he says coldly. “I thought the Killer was supposed to be a famous big hitter.”

  “Do not call me that,” I say, with multiple varieties of shame packed into it and a fresh sizzling layer of anger on top.