by Eric Kester
At least Nate got a small break when it was my turn. On Coach Crooks’s whistle, my blocking partner, a junior lineman named Justin, charged into Nate’s chest, but I made sure my half of the double-team was nothing more than a whimper. It was a relief not to railroad Nate, but my weak hit was yet another example of what was quickly becoming one of my biggest shames. Over tryouts I was starting to realize that the real difference between me and Trunk (or Brett, or any guy on varsity) wasn’t mass or acceleration. The difference was heart, grit, balls—whatever it is that gives you the ability to throw your body with reckless abandon, to hit with anger and without hesitation. I’m sure you’ve heard the saying that football is a game of inches. But I played football like I lived my life: a game of flinches.
As usual, Coach Crooks responded to my pathetic block with the worst reaction a coach can have, which is to say that he had no reaction at all. If I’d been a typical player, Crooks would’ve yelled, screamed, kicked dirt, said Do it again. With me, though, he just blew his whistle. Next.
Crooks’s intensity started to pick up when Brett, flanked by his entourage of assistant coaches and backup quarterbacks, stopped by our drill on his way to the water station. Brett always had a royal air to him that made everyone stand a little straighter, hit a little harder, and dig a little deeper.
We continued our drill while Brett watched quietly, his piercing green eyes underlined in bold by smudges of eye black. Coiled around his right arm was a long scar. Bright pink and wormlike, it somehow seemed fresher now that Brett was back on the same field where the scar had been born.
Each time Crooks blew his whistle, Nate absorbed the full weight of revenge. Impressively, he kept scrambling back to his feet. Dude didn’t say a word.
“Stop tiptoeing around and hit,” Coach Crooks shouted at us between reps. “This is Derek Leopold here!”
As I got closer to the front of the line for my next turn, my heart began racing, keeping pace with the mantra that was now pulsing like a siren in my head:
Brett’s watching. Brett’s watching. Brett’s watching.
I didn’t even notice that Trunk was standing next to me in line—my next double-team partner—until he grabbed the side of my face mask and yanked me within inches of his seething red face.
“Enough of this crap,” he hissed as Crooks cursed out two more linemen for not hitting Nate hard enough. “It’s time to end this kid. I’ll go low and tee him up for you.”
In the span of ten seconds, about a hundred considerations ignited in my head. My first thought was, That sounds a lot like an illegal chop block. Next I thought, But, man, would it be an impressive hit. And my last thought was, And Brett’s watching. Brett’s watching. Brett’s watching.
When it was our turn, I approached the line and looked up at Nate. A chunk of grass was wedged in the corner of his face mask and a dark splotch of brown blood began to ooze through his chin strap. He flashed me a goofy grin that said, Don’t worry, I’m alright, followed by a subtle roll of the eyes that said, The meatheads have really taken it to new heights, huh?
I didn’t know what I was going to do as I crouched into my three-point stance. I didn’t even know what I was going to do when Crooks blew his whistle.
But it turns out that my body knew.
Trunk and I shot out of our stances, and Trunk immediately dove low. His shoulder swept out Nate’s legs, leaving the live bait dangling in midair for me. It was just too easy. Everything was right there for me to take.
I threw all of my mass into Nate. Combined with the equal and opposite force of Trunk’s low hit on the other side, my impact caused Nate to flip ass over teakettle. When his body finished cartwheeling, he landed on his chest with a spectacular crunch.
All the guys erupted in wild cheers. Nate, meanwhile, was curled up and wheezing.
I was gut-punched with instant regret for the personal foul. Even worse, the regret was coupled with guilt when I realized the hit—the surge of power, the raw immediacy of it—felt good. Really good.
The guys had surrounded me, cheering various forms of “fuck yeah” and “that’s how we do it.” They awarded me with enthusiastic butt slaps that in the football world are basically a form of social currency. But the dirty hit made it all feel counterfeit to me.
As crappy as I felt, though, it could’ve all been worth it. Life is about difficult trade-offs, and I’d made my choice. I spun around, looking for Brett, waiting for his pat on the shoulder, his fuck yeah, his that-a-baby.
Finally, I saw him. His back, actually. He was on the opposite sideline, getting a drink at the water table. He hadn’t even been watching.
I turned back to Nate. He was still on the turf gasping like the wind had been knocked out of him. He motioned over Coach Crooks, and after a few failed attempts, he choked out one word: “Trainer.”
This was unprecedented. Asking for the trainer was so frowned upon, so against everything Grayport stood for, that our team doctor stopped bothering coming out to the field. He just read magazines in the training room, the most deserted place in the entire town.
But Crooks seemed unusually sympathetic. He knelt by Nate’s side and put a hand on his back. “Yeah, kid,” he said quietly. “Let’s get you up.” He extended a hand to Nate, who got to his feet and started slinking toward the training room.
“Oh, and one more thing,” Crooks called after him. “When you’re done with the trainer, go ahead and pack up your locker.”
Nate didn’t respond. The rest of us stood in silence and watched the dead man walking.
I took a few steps forward. “Nate!” I yelled, unsure of what I was going to say if he turned around. I think I wanted him to yell at me, scream at me, kick dirt at me. Anything.
But all he did was slowly raise a hand up to the side of his helmet. For a second I thought he was going to flip me the bird.
Instead, he just unbuckled his chin strap.
CHAPTER
FOUR
The only argument Nate and I ever had took place behind the poncho booth our freshman year, the next home game after Brett got injured. The fight was over Haley. Like, we were literally over Haley, or rather her Facebook picture on Nate’s phone, examining it like scientists at a petri dish. Nate said something like, “Wyatt, how can you be so obsessed with a girl who has such a bad case of sorority arm?,” to which I calmly replied that I liked sorority arm—loved it, in fact—and that I’d explain why if he just quickly reminded me what sorority arm was. Nate grinned his black-and-orange Halloween braces and said, “Wyatt, my friend, you have a lot to learn about women,” then explained that sorority arm happens when a girl in a group photo places one hand on her hip and juts out her elbow, forming a sideways triangle with her outer arm. It’s a bit of optical wizardry that makes said arm appear skinnier in the picture than if it’d been hanging down flat like a dead fish. Sorority arm, Nate explained, is a technique every woman knows instinctively, like how birds are born with the ability to fly or how dudes are born with the ability to sit down without crushing our nuts.
Ultimately, sorority arm just made me want Haley more. I always saw her as a pristine picture of confidence, but it turned out that she might actually be insecure about her appearance, kind of like me. I wondered how and why a girl as pretty as Haley would feel such pressure to make her arm look skinnier, then I thought about what Nate and I were doing at that very moment—staring at her pictures and dissecting her appearance—and I knew who the real culprit was.
Anyway, now that I think about it, that wasn’t really an argument at all. A disagreement, more like.
* * *
The roar of cheers and life-affirming butt slaps from my teammates did not echo into the next day. Just the opposite, actually—I was met with icy silence. The only person who spoke to me was Justin, who was standing next to me during team stretch.
“How’s that kid?” he blurted all of a sudden. His eyes remained locked ahead on Brett, who faced the team as he led us through stretche
s. Practice was already buzzing with a tense urgency. Opening night against Blakemore was just four days away, and I overheard some of the guys speculating that today we’d be installing a much-rumored special play into the offense. A big, big deal, this secret play. Our coaches had spent most of team stretch pacing the field, nervously looking over their shoulders for Blakemore spies.
It took me a moment to realize that Justin was addressing me, and that he was asking about Nate. “He’s fine,” I muttered, though I wasn’t sure.
“Wasn’t he your buddy?” Justin asked coldly. Clearly this was more of a statement than a question, so I didn’t answer.
Nobody said another word to me until the end of practice, when Coach Crooks ordered me to stand in front of the first-string offense. “More live bait today, boys!” he announced. “But no double-teams. Today we’re cooking up something special.”
Crooks grinned, and I could sense everyone lean in, just slightly, toward him. Here, finally, after several days of rumors and speculation, was the unveiling of the secret new play.
“On Friday we’re going to punch Blakemore right in the mouth, but we’re also going to beat them with our brains.” Crooks tapped his temple with a thunk of pruney fingertips. “And how are we gonna do that? Well, I got two words for you fellas: Tackle. Eligible. Pass.”
Upon hearing that he’d be the target of a pass play, Trunk clapped his giant hands together and unleashed a “WOO!” that could be heard all the way in Blakemore.
Next came a walk-through of the play. Crooks had the offensive lineup on the ball, their backs to the oceanfront end zone. I remained facing them, arms outstretched in a T.
With Grayport’s constant shroud of mist and with its rain always going sideways into your eyes, it’s common to think you’ve seen something and only later discover it was an illusion conjured by a few twirling wisps of fog. That’s why I kept my mouth shut when, during Crooks’s walk-through of the super top secret tackle-eligible pass, I thought I saw two dark figures lurking on the top row of bleachers behind the seaside end zone. One form was sitting while the other was standing. But after blinking away the moisture that had collected around my eyes, they had vanished. Maybe they disappeared behind a cloak of mist, but more likely they were just another vague illusion courtesy of the Grayport coast.
Meanwhile, Coach Crooks was walking Brett and the offense through a fake handoff that culminated in a rollout left, Brett’s non-throwing side, a move that would require some fancy footwork and throwing mechanics that even some NFL QBs can’t do, but which Brett could pull off no problem.
Next came the blocking assignments. “We’ll go with standard zone blocking,” Crooks explained. “’Cept for you, Trunk. Now everyone listen up here, ’cause this next part is the most important point you’ll hear all season.” Crooks was standing behind me now, and I jolted with surprise when he slammed a hand onto my right shoulder pad. “This here is the opposing outside backer, in other words that scumbag-piece-of-shit bastard Derek Leopold. Now Trunk, when you release off the line to run your pass route, you must, must, must first put a shoulder into Derek Leopold. You gotta at least slow him down, else he’s gonna have a free run at Brett and rip his head off, and if that happens I’m gonna rip your nuts off, if you even got ’em. Understand?”
Trunk nodded firmly, like, Murder Wyatt: check.
“Alright, enough chitchat. Let’s run the damn thing live!”
Crooks waddled his creaky frame over to the wall of backup players.
That’s when I saw them again. The figures. The fog clouding the bleachers had lifted just enough for me to see a flash, or a glint, more like, from a shiny silver object (a knife?) dangling from the hand of the sitting figure. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them. The two figures were still there.
Tackling dummies aren’t supposed to speak, but this was probably a good time to open my mouth for the first time all preseason. “Um, Coach?”
Coach Crooks didn’t hear me. His old-man ears were big enough to hold the mysteries of the universe within their labyrinths, but they were pretty rusty, hearing-wise.
The offense approached the line of scrimmage. Brett crouched down and put his hands under the center. Trunk stared at me like he was already debating where to hide my carcass.
“Coach!” I shouted again. “Coachcoachcoachcoach!”
Crooks blew his whistle and the offense rose from their three-point stances. “Christ, Wyatt! This better be good.”
I pointed toward the bleachers. The entire team swiveled around.
An army of Russian battleships could’ve been in the harbor and Crooks would’ve reacted less dramatically than when he saw the two lurkers. His jaw dropped so far the entire wad of tobacco fell out of his mouth. He fumbled for the whistle hanging from his neck and in his panic yanked it clean off the chain, then began frantically blowing into it.
Clearly this was a matter for Coach Stetson, our head coach.
“Everyone back to individual position drills,” Stetson shouted. “And in the meantime, someone’s gotta check out what’s going on with our visitors.”
Stetson paused like he was considering which player he could most afford to lose via murder from knife-wielding spies.
“Hey, Wyatt,” he said, addressing me for the first time ever. “Hustle over there and report back.”
CHAPTER
FIVE
The dark figure with the knife didn’t even look at me as I approached. He was perched on the edge of the wooden bleacher, completely absorbed with our practice. In his right hand he held the glistening blade, which even from a distance I could tell was a fishing knife. A fillet knife, to be exact, which any Grayport kid knows is about eight inches long, slightly curved, and sharp enough to gut a seven-hundred-pound tuna with a quick flick of the wrist. The man was leaning forward. He held the knife vertically so its point dug lightly into the wooden bench in front of him. As he observed practice he’d casually spin the knife, using the tip as its axis, then grab its handle just as the blade’s rotation slowed to a wobble.
I looked at him from the bottom row of the bleachers and saw a thin face peppered with blades of black and gray stubble. The face was intense, focused. But you could sense a deep exhaustion in it, too. As I got a closer view, I realized that I knew this face well, better than I wanted to. I still wasn’t sure about the second dark figure, who was a few rows above, but this man here was no Blakemore spy. He was a Grayport legend responsible for three of the championship flags hanging on the ship masts high above us.
I tentatively climbed up a few rows toward him.
“Hey, Dad.”
My father nodded. His eyes remained locked on the field. Locked on Brett. “Hey.”
“Coast Guard shut down the harbor again?”
“Fog.”
I winced. This meant there’d be no fresh fish for dinner. Instead we’d fry up our small reserve of frozen mackerel, a fish that tastes like, to put it politely, the ocean’s grundle.
Back on the field, the team had started some generic passing drills to kill some time until they knew whether we had a spy situation. From the stands I heard a loud cheer from the field, and I turned around to see a receiver, about sixty yards downfield from Brett, striding toward the end zone with the ball. The row of assistant coaches behind Brett subtly extended their hands to each other for low fives. Brett, meanwhile, was already calling a new huddle like, Come on, let’s get to the next rep already. Dad didn’t react one way or the other. He continued to spin his knife.
There was also another sound mixed in with the cheers, a sound that you never heard in Grayport: a man giggling. With delight.
I knew of only one man in Grayport who laughed like that, and sure enough, when I looked through the fog at the second mysterious figure, there was Murray Miller. He was waddling down the bleachers toward me.
“Holy cannoli, did you see that pass? Must’ve traveled fifty yards on a line.” Murray Miller giggled again, this time with childlike wonder
.
I waved down to the coaches and gave a thumbs-up. No Blakemore spies here.
I turned back to Murray Miller. I liked talking to the guy, even though he never remembered my name. He was super short (the top of his head barely came to my chest) and shaped like a bowling ball. He was always fidgeting with a pair of thick glasses that rested snugly upon his round chipmunk cheeks. Basically, Murray Miller was the answer to what a Cabbage Patch Kid would look like if it were fifty years old, balding, and sporting a fuzzy mustache. I sometimes had to suppress a weird urge to tickle Murray Miller.
“Um, this isn’t a big problem, Mr. Murray Miller, but I don’t think you’re supposed to be here. This is a closed practice.”
“Whaddya mean? It’s Media Day! Practice is open to the press. Or did the coaches forget again? Please don’t tell me the coaches forgot again.”
It was funny hearing Murray Miller refer to “the press” and “the media.” As the lone reporter in all of Grayport, Murray Miller was the media. Like, all of it. And I have to say, he was pretty good at his job. People devoured his annual Football Preview in the Grayport Gazette. He was the oldest of the old school—dude wore a fedora on his head and kept a pencil behind his ear. He referred to news stories as “scoops,” and I once heard that he still used a typewriter. I think if poor old Murray Miller discovered that most written communication these days was through something called “emojis,” and that spitting a good emoji game could even get you a date, his head would explode into a confetti of a million little frowny faces.
“No, no, the coaches didn’t forget,” I lied. “It’s just that, well, we’ve got this new secret play, right? And—”
Here I got distracted by Murray Miller’s eyes, which had widened to three times their normal size. I’d made a big mistake letting it slip about our new play.
“It’s just that our coaches want some privacy,” I quickly added. “So maybe you can just, you know, quickly get the info you need and then, like … leave.”