QB 1

by Mike Lupica

  The Shelby quarterback, Cody Bretton, came over to Jake and said, “We’re lucky they didn’t put you in sooner.”

  “You guys were better,” Jake said.

  “You really Wyatt Cullen’s brother?” Cody asked, making it sound like he wanted to know if Jake was related to the Lord himself. “Like Eli following Peyton?”

  “I wish,” Jake said.

  Finally it was time to leave the field, get back to the locker room, listen to what Coach McCoy had to say about the game, find out if there was any news about Tim’s knee, then hustle back home with Bear and Nate to watch the Texas game that had already begun in Austin, watch the star freshman quarterback in the family do it up big in front of the whole country.

  Jake looked around for Bear and Nate, saw them up ahead of him, nearly to the tunnel, at the front of a long parade of Granger Cowboys, a lot of them with their heads down, everything so much quieter now than it had been when they ran out of that tunnel a couple of hours before.

  Some of them had their helmets in their hands, what Coach McCoy called their hats. Same hats that had just been handed to them, big-time, by the Shelby Mustangs.

  It was then that Jake saw Casey Lindell, helmet in his own right hand, walking underneath the goalposts with Sarah.

  The two of them walking close, Casey casually reaching around with his left hand and putting it around her shoulder.

  Wyatt struggled for Texas in the first half, looked more nervous than Jake had ever seen him, throwing two early picks. One play he just flat missed a perfect snap when he was standing back in the shotgun. By halftime he had completed only five of his first seventeen passes, none for scores, Texas down 17–7 to Washington, the announcers talking about the high school hero from Granger acting his age.

  It was 24–14 for Washington going into the fourth quarter. And that was when Wyatt Cullen turned into, well, Wyatt Cullen, starting the Longhorns comeback by going six-for-six on the eighty-yard drive that got his team back to 24–21.

  The drive that won it started at the Texas forty with four minutes and change left and ended with ninety seconds left, Wyatt throwing a dead-solid perfect strike to his tight end over the middle, putting the ’Horns up 28–24. That’s the way it ended after what looked like the whole defensive backfield knocked down the Hail Mary pass the Washington quarterback managed to launch into the end zone on the last play of the game.

  A TV reporter interviewed Wyatt on the field when it was over, Wyatt as cool and calm as if he’d been practicing up for this moment the way he’d been practicing up to be a college quarterback.

  When the great-looking reporter—not much older than Wyatt himself—asked what it felt like to take the Longhorns down the field like that, bring them from behind to win his first college game, Wyatt grinned at her and said, “My daddy told me before the game he wanted to see if the boy could become the man today.” He gave her that aw-shucks look of his and added, “Guess I took that first step.”

  The sideline girl looked in that moment like she wanted to kiss Jake’s brother right there on TV.

  It was just Jake and his mom watching now, Bear and Nate having left.

  “Well,” Libby Cullen said, “quite a day for both my boys.”

  “Mom, are you serious?” Jake said. “You, like, get what Wyatt just did, right, winning his first game like that? On national TV?”

  “You won something today, too, Jacob.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “The respect of your teammates. Making them see you belonged out there in a varsity game.”

  “That game was over by the time I got in there.”

  “If it was already over, why was Shelby still blitzing you?” she said, winking at him, letting him know she had been paying attention, delivering the knockout punch again.

  She said she was going upstairs, saying she’d try to stay awake until Jake’s dad got home from Austin.

  Jake was watching the end of the Saturday night game on ESPN, LSU against Auburn, when his dad came through the front door. The trip from Austin, Jake knew, took three hours for a normal driver, which Troy Cullen was not. He liked to brag to his sons that he could make it in two if Jesus was willing and enough state troopers knew the plates on his Lincoln Navigator by now.

  Jake thought that most troopers in this part of the state had a pretty solid chance of recognizing those plates, since they read “CULLENQB-1”.

  It was the way Troy still thought of himself. As a dad, sure, went without saying. Husband. Rancher. Son.

  But a QB most of all.

  “Jake, where you at, boy?”

  Filling the front hall and maybe the whole house with his big voice.

  Jake came out of his dad’s den, their game-watching room, a screen in there so huge that Troy Cullen joked that it belonged hanging from the roof in Cowboys Stadium. He gave his dad a hug, his dad already getting right to it, even before he had his arms around his youngest son.

  “Did your big brother make the family proud today or what?” Troy Cullen said.

  “Always does,” Jake said.

  “All he did was take the damn Texas Longhorns down that field at the end like he was beatin’ on a bunch of pissant high school boys.”

  “Wyatt bein’ Wyatt,” Jake said.

  “Some boys get small as jockeys when the lights get turned up. Your brother, he plays bigger.”

  “Must get that from his daddy,” Libby Cullen said on her way down the stairs.

  “Oh, sweetie, did I wake you?”

  “Me and Oklahoma and parts of Louisiana,” she said, getting to the bottom of the stairs, getting up on tiptoes to kiss her husband on the cheek. “By the way? Your other son had a pretty good day himself for Granger High.”

  “And I want to hear all about it. But for now I got to get my boots off and start begging my beautiful wife to get me some of her special iced tea.”

  She headed off to the kitchen, and Jake and his dad went into the den, Jake grabbing the remote and muting LSU-Auburn, seeing how full of Wyatt’s day his dad was, like the game had just ended, knowing he was going to want to go over it, big play by big play, hoping he wasn’t going to ask Jake to crank it up on TiVo.

  He was about halfway through the winning drive when Libby Cullen came in with a pitcher of iced tea and the sandwiches she knew her husband wanted without his having to ask.

  “Jacob ended his game with a touchdown pass,” she said. “Did he tell you that? Threw one to Calvin.”

  “That so? What was the final score?” Troy said.

  Jake told him, and Troy Cullen grinned and said, “You know what ol’ Ricky Bobby says in Talladega Nights, right?”

  Jake knew this one the way he knew the way to school. “If you’re not first, you’re last.”

  “Least you got on the field,” Jake’s dad said.

  “It was pretty cool, not gonna lie.”

  Troy Cullen drank some iced tea, smacked his lips, and said, “You know what was really cool? That scramble your brother made before the touchdown pass won it for the ’Horns, starin’ fourth down square in the eye if he doesn’t get the first down, findin’ a way to get to the sticks.”

  What Jake wanted to say:

  How ’bout breaking free somehow after somebody has a whole fistful of your jersey, not going down when most quarterbacks—maybe even Wyatt—would have, getting loose, then throwing one across your body that felt like it traveled halfway ’cross the ranch and somehow hitting Calvin for a score?

  How about that?

  But he didn’t.

  Because he knew his place on the Cullen family depth chart the way he did at Granger High.

  “All about making plays,” Jake said. “Like you always tell us.”

  Libby Cullen said, “Tell your dad about the one you made,” and gave her husband a look as she did that t
old him to hush now and listen.

  Jake took him through it, fast as he could, feeling like he was reciting something in front of the class, saying he knew Calvin had to have single coverage somewhere over there, letting it go, getting his helmet knocked sideways on him, hearing from the crowd that he’d completed it.

  “How about that. Ain’t nothing better than hearing it from the crowd. Speaking of which, you haven’t heard a crowd till you hear it roar in Austin. Your brother had the whole stadium shaking today.”

  Jake heard his mom sigh even though he knew his dad didn’t, and grinned at his mom as he said, “I’m sure Wyatt’s got ’em all eating out of the palm of his hand.”

  Libby Cullen left them to football then, saying she’d had her share today.

  “Yee boy!” his father said, slapping his forehead. “Speaking of which, guess what your brother’s already gone and did at the U of T.”

  “What’s he gone and did?”

  “Gone and got hisself fixed up with the prettiest cheerleader on the squad, is all,” Troy Cullen said. “And an older cheerleader at that. Last thing I saw before I went to the parking lot was Wyatt and Miss Mindy walkin’ hand in hand away from the stadium.”

  Troy Cullen nodded, smiling at the image, talking as much to himself as Jake as he said, “Wasn’t a cheerleader born yet who doesn’t want to date the quarterback of the football team.”

  A few minutes later, he was snoring.

  Jake left him there, left the television on, went upstairs to his room, thinking nobody on Shelby had hit him harder than his own dad just had.

  12

  “THIS IS AN OLD-FASHIONED QUARTERBACK CONTROVERSY, IS what it is,” Bear said on the way to school Monday. “Plain and simple. If you can’t see that, you just don’t want to.”

  “Really,” Jake said.

  “Just callin’ it out for what it is,” Bear said.

  “An old-fashioned quarterback controversy,” Jake said, making his voice announcer-deep. “You sound like you’re practicing to sit around on one of those pregame shows where they all crack each other up.”

  “I wouldn’t last on those shows, I don’t laugh at everything,” Bear said. “And you can treat this like it’s funny all you want, but you didn’t play like a backup when you got out there on Saturday.”

  “Doesn’t change the fact that I am a backup,” Jake said. “And that Casey, no matter how much you don’t like his attitude sometimes, has the arm to back up his swag.”

  “Yeah, he does. Takes more than swag to be a quarterback, though,” Bear said.

  “I could work out with Coach J from now till the end of time and never have an arm like Casey’s,” Jake said.

  “Joe Montana didn’t have the world’s greatest arm,” Bear said. Bear knew his football and his football history. “Even Tom Brady doesn’t have the arm a guy like Casey’s hero, Brett Favre, did. But last time I checked, Brady had three Super Bowls and Favre had retired with but one. And even you know that Brady started out as a backup his rookie year with the Patriots, ’fore he ended up winning the Super Bowl.”

  “Now I’m Tom Brady?” Jake said. “From one touchdown?”

  “Didn’t say that,” Bear said. “I just keep tellin’ you: You didn’t look like no backup to me.”

  Coach McCoy didn’t treat Jake like one at Monday’s practice.

  And he sure didn’t treat Casey Lindell as his number one. What he did was divide the first-team snaps evenly between Casey and Jake. No announcement beforehand.

  Halfway through practice, it was clear that he didn’t need to say anything, about an official quarterback competition with the Granger Cowboys or anything else. There it was on the practice field, for all of them to see. He was treating his two quarterbacks like they were equals. They knew it, everybody on the team knew it.

  During a water break, Jake kneeling with Bear and Nate, Bear said to him, “Yeah, you were right on the way to school, you’re still a backup.”

  As they were walking back to the field, Coach Jessup, acting casual, walked alongside Jake and said, “I’m just gonna say this to you one time, son. It ain’t against the law for you to want this.”

  Jake said in a low voice, “I just don’t want this to work itself into something where it divides up our team.”

  “Not your concern,” Coach Jessup said. “You either want to compete or you don’t. And by the way, though I might be out of line for saying this, this ain’t your family.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by that.”

  “I mean,” Coach J said, “you don’t have to take a backseat on account of that’s where you think you’re supposed to be sitting.”

  He left it at that, walked away, blew his whistle, told the first-team offense they were about to work in the red zone.

  “Casey’ll get the first set of snaps,” Coach J said, “then Jake. Like we’ve been doing.”

  While Coach McCoy was setting his defense, Casey Lindell got next to Jake and said, “I don’t know what’s going on here today. But I’m not giving up this job.”

  Loud enough for only Jake to hear.

  Jake said, “I’m just doing what Coach tells me, is all.”

  Jake started to walk away then, not wanting this to turn into something real stupid, real fast, in front of the whole team.

  But Casey reached out, grabbed his arm. “I just want you to know where I’m coming from,” he said. “I wouldn’t have been a backup if we hadn’t moved, and I’m not gonna back up a freshman here.”

  Maybe it was seeing him with Sarah, maybe it was Casey’s tone of voice. Whatever it was, Jake decided in that moment he’d heard enough. He tipped back his helmet, looked Casey square in the eyes, and said, “It’s yours if you earn it. Same as it’s mine if I earn it.”

  Jake made sure to smile, in case anybody was watching them. But before he tipped his helmet back down, he said, “And Casey? Don’t ever put your hand on me again.”

  Showing him some rope right there, surprising himself, almost as if the words had come out of somebody else’s mouth.

  Jake didn’t wait for a response, just walked away for real this time, feeling good about himself, wondering if maybe this was some new Jake Cullen, one who didn’t just automatically take a backseat, certainly not to this guy.

  A Jake Cullen who did want the starting job.

  Bad.

  It wasn’t a game of one-on-one Jake and Casey played the rest of practice. This wasn’t basketball. It was football, Granger High football, Casey showing what he could do with the first team, then Jake getting his chance to do the same.

  There were no numbers on the scoreboard, but Jake knew everybody on this field, players and coaches, was keeping score.

  It was on now between Jake and Casey, all the players on the field knowing that this quarterback competition wasn’t happening if Coach John McCoy, the man, the legend, didn’t want it to happen.

  Wasn’t making it happen.

  Jake had always heard, starting when he heard it from his own daddy, that in football if you had two number one quarterbacks, you had no number two quarterback. Jake had heard it from Troy Cullen all over again when the Jets went and traded for Tim Tebow and said they were guaranteeing him a bunch of snaps every single game, way before that idea blew up on the Jets.

  “You know why that won’t work?” Troy Cullen said to Jake and Wyatt at the time. “Because it ain’t never worked, that’s why.”

  Jake wasn’t sure why it was playing out this way. And it wasn’t like he expected Coach McCoy to explain himself, because he hardly ever did, on the play he wanted you to run or the defense he wanted to be in or anything else. Bottom line, as far as Jake was concerned? If this was Coach McCoy’s last season, if this was it for him after all he’d done and all he’d won at Granger High, he wasn’t declaring the quarterback job wide open because he tho
ught it was going to hurt his football team.

  And for this one practice, it actually seemed to help everybody on the field, starting with Jake and Casey, who managed to raise their own games, along with everybody else’s. Sometimes Coach McCoy or Coach Jessup would even call the exact same string of plays for both of them. Like this was a game of H-O-R-S-E on a football field.

  Jake wasn’t sure how many passes he completed compared to Casey. At the end of practice, he figured they’d both put the ball in the end zone the same number of times. And both had looked real good.

  Two number ones, at least on this day.

  As they were walking toward the tunnel, Jake saw Casey jog to catch up with Calvin and Justice and Roy, the three best receivers on the team, high-fiving each one of them, saying in a loud voice, “Was that fun today or what?”

  Like he wasn’t just competing for the job, like he was running for it, the way you did for class president.

  Like he was ready to compete with Jake off the field as well as on it.

  Jake just let him go, waiting until he was inside the locker room. Then instead of going to the locker room himself, he went looking for Coach Jessup, knowing he’d be in his small office next to the equipment room.

  “You can’t possibly want to go back out there today,” Coach J said when he looked up and saw Jake standing in his doorway, still in uniform, helmet in his hand.

  “Nope,” Jake said. “I want to stay right here.”

  “And do what?”

  “Look at film,” he said.

  “Of what?”

  “Of Benton.”

  Their next opponent.

  “You haven’t even showered yet,” Coach J said. “You’re tellin’ me you want to look at game film now?”

  “What I want to do,” Jake said, “is learn.”

  13

  AS BAD AS IT HAD BEEN SEEING CASEY AND SARAH WALK OFF Cullen Field together, it was worse seeing them hang around at school. Every day now in the cafeteria at lunch. Walking away from practice together.