“If it’s dangerous we’ll just come back.” He was always saying flippant things like that: matter-of-fact answers to an apocalypse, as though he could snap his fingers and start from scratch. “They have signs. How bad can it be?”
More than Vicki, more than Alyssa even, he was the one person she couldn’t resist, especially when he was excited about something. So, with towels over their shoulders, they made their way down a muddy lane to a rushing creek, beyond which lay a shelf of snakes. She stood there, petrified for a moment, before she understood they were only tree roots and it was fine to walk across. They abandoned their flip-flops on the other side, at the slick boulders leading down to the oceanfront. “We’ll get ’em on the way back,” Mitch said. “Or we’ll get new ones. Who cares?”
Caryn clung to the first boulder, stretching to reach the next one down, half-hoping Mitch would just come and pluck her off it, if they were really going to do this. But Mitch was already several boulder-jumps away, on a vast shelf of darker rock overlooking the ocean. She found her footing and made her way over, the wind catching her towel and whipping it into her face until she managed to bat it down and stuff it into a ball she wedged underneath her arm. It really bellowed, that wind. No way Mitch could hear her from where he stood.
Waves slammed against the rock shelf, shooting spray well above their heads. She felt moisture on her skin and watched water trickle among the crevices under her feet, from the ocean or the recent rain, she couldn’t say, nor could she bear to contemplate it, since she had no choice, since she was here. Again, she was chasing him, but this time, he paused often enough to check out the surroundings, which gave her a chance to catch up.
“Don’t stand so close to the edge!” she called, approaching.
“This is intense!” he shouted back.
They stood on adjacent rocks looking out. In a cove below them the ocean rose and fell precipitously, slamming itself against the ledge.
“I don’t think we’re going swimming,” she said, relieved. She was still wearing the rainbow bikini, which she now considered good luck.
“This isn’t it,” he said. “See how it opens to the ocean? Queen’s Bath is enclosed. It’s a pool.”
“It’s probably not here.”
“I think it’s just around this bend,” he said, pointing. “See those people?”
There were indeed people filing back among the rocks, having come from somewhere with towels. She looked at their hair—was it dry enough?—looking for something, anything, to bail her out. “They don’t look like they’ve been swimming.”
“Which way?” Mitch called, and they pointed.
Off they went again, overlooking more tumultuous coves, some of them rounder and more bath-like than others, all of them violent. Alone now on the rock shelf with no one to guide the way, they peered at one cove, then another, then back at the first.
“It’s this,” he said. “It has to be.”
“But it’s so shallow. And all that water is rushing in.”
“That’s the point.”
“No, I mean.” She shook her head, understanding perfectly but unable to explain herself to him. What were the words she needed? “In the summer no water rushes in,” she managed. “But it still has to be deep enough to swim in.”
“It’s this,” he insisted. They stood together looking at it. “We’re here. Let’s sit.”
They found a spot that seemed connected enough with the heaving hollow below them to be considered a part of Queen’s Bath. They were there now, if this was there. She thought again about the moment. Though what a moment was, exactly, she was no longer able to say. This was, and this. She struggled to think without words.
“Ricky’s in a bind,” Mitch said, suddenly, meaning his buddy from high school. “He lost his job at Frito Lay. He needs a loan to tide him over for a while.”
This was abrupt, but it was always that way with Mitch: a piece of grown-up information brought home, already worked through and decided.
She sighed. “So what are we giving him?”
“Ten grand.”
“Ten grand?!”
“How much that bikini cost?” he asked.
“Not ten grand!”
“I’m saying we have enough money to buy you a thousand bikinis. The way I see it, we have enough to help Ricky, too.”
“I didn’t buy a thousand; I bought three,” she snapped, knowing she was answering the wrong question. “But of course we’ll help Ricky. Of course. What happened? Layoffs?”
Mitch nodded absently.
She sighed again, thinking of Ricky, a wiry guy who’d stayed fit, much younger looking than Mitch, which made her feel old to even notice. “I hope he gets another job. We can’t keep rescuing him.”
“This is the first time!”
“I’m just saying you know how hard it is down there. And you know Ricky doesn’t exactly love to work. We have to think about Alyssa.”
Mitch flicked his hand scornfully as though her sense of responsibility were just another irritating gnat. “Alyssa will be fine. She has everything. We can share a little with the folks who got us here.” No wonder he’d acted so Christian before, when they were talking about Vicki and the snacks.
“I thought you were a natural,” she said, bitterly. “I thought you did it all on your own.”
He hoisted himself to his feet. “All the more reason to be generous. I’m going down there.”
“No!” she cried, but he was already moving, feeling his way closer to the rim of the bath. She scooted over to watch him descend, as profligate with his body as he was with his money. How could she ever feel safe with someone who distributed himself so widely, to friends and football and other women, as though he were some endless natural resource and not a man with a bank account, and a child, and bones? She had to tell him at some point. She had to say, palms out: this is it. This is all I can stand.
He was looking up at her and his mouth was moving. She could never hear him when he went ahead like that. He was only a few rocks away from the edge of the pool, and the water was all worked up behind him, a frothing secondary poised to crush the developing play. “Don’t look at me!” she shouted. “Look at the ocean!” She pictured a wave leaping out to seize him, and bashing him into the hard, black rocks. She pictured herself beside him. Would it be so bad to die here with Mitch, she asked herself, crushed together into the natural world? The question answered itself the moment she’d asked it: yes, yes, it would.
He hurtled back up to her, laughing. “Look at you!” he said. “You’re freaking out!” He loved to scare her, put the fear in her, he sometimes called it, when he was feeling especially Southern. He lunged at her, and she shrieked, pictured them toppling down into some deathly hidden crevice, a backdoor to the ocean, arms torn, hearts burst, brains dashed among the rocks. What the hell was he thinking? Nothing! He was thinking only of fun.
She had to tell him, but all season long he was overworked and in pain, and then after the season a wreck of another sort. Now he was feeling better and actually enjoying himself. And he was enjoying himself with her.
She tried to enjoy herself, too. She let him swallow her in his arms, and they didn’t fall, they stayed upright, because Mitch knew the strength of his body, the resistance it encountered in space. He was as large as a planet, his force gravitational, his behavior outside the power of a mere woman to control, and she hated him for that, because hate was the one, sad weapon she had, and even it was totally useless.
“Stop it,” she said. “Just stop.” She stood pressing herself into the topography of his chest and understood that there was never a good time to talk to Mitch about her sadness. The time to bring it up was not now or soon or sometime later; the time for it was never.
PRIME
Mitch moved through his prime as he moved through everything, making it his event. Eyes, feet, hips. Caryn, woman, woman. Feet, hips, hands. Pats, Eagles, contact. Woman, woman, Lori. Hips, hands, head. Lori, baby, b
aby. Contact, contact, contact.
There was a saying in football about playing unconscious, and it was as true of Mitch in his prime as it was for anybody else. It wasn’t literal. It didn’t mean he actually blacked out, nor did it mean he wasn’t keeping track. At any given moment in any given season, he could always tell you how many points his defense had allowed, how many tackles he had, how many picks, and which of those was the game-changer, and which was gritty but not pretty, and which was beautiful but too easy, and which was a helicopter and which was a derecho and which was a couple’s dance.
But in the sense that he was deep inside all that, and in the sense that his body was always moving, both simultaneously, and in sequence, from Foxboro to Philly, from Caryn to Lori, from x to o, and x to o, and x to o, in that sense he really was unconscious, for the entire action of his prime.
8. D’ANTONIO, 2003
D’Antonio Mars has an eye for patterns, and he sees them everywhere his first year in the NFL. For starters, there’s the dim, full-team auditorium where Kowalczyk, the head coach, lectures, which is just like the dim, full-team auditorium back in college at CSU. The cinderblock walls painted white with team color runners are just like the walls of his high school, only with different colors. The Purell dispensers are the same, the vending machines are the same, though here they have Coke instead of Pepsi. Even the janitors have the same rolling metal buckets, emitting the same artificial lemon fumes. A lot of individual things are nicer—there’s more money here, of course things are nicer—but at the end of the day, the NFL still feels a lot like school. Just another, richer institution. And it occurs to D that this is how he’s spent his entire life, parking in designated lots, prowling halls in a backpack and shorts, checked by trainers, talked at by men whose job it is to boss him.
They have every kind of football guy on their team. Big-smiling black guys who love to talk, who love God, and who love to talk about their love of God. Bearded white guys who put their stinky feet on the desk in team meetings. Long-haired white guys with tattoos. Dread-locked black guys without tattoos. Guys who like to fight. Guys who specifically like to fight guys from other races. Guys from California, guys from Georgia, guys from Iowa. Guys, like him, from Texas. Guys from Florida, Pennsylvania, Utah, Texas, Florida, and Texas.
They have nicknames, too. The rookie lineman, who’s so big and nervous, they call him Muffin, for reasons no one can really explain. But that was only in training camp. He got his legs under him and he got his hands out, and now they call him by his name, which is Kohler. The QB is Rainman. The strong safety is Lucky. Informally, everyone is bro.
Mitch, who’s from Virginia by way of Miami by way of New England, is just Wilk, short for Wilkins, but whenever anyone says it, it sounds like a whole lot more than that, like an animal you don’t want to meet in the woods. He’s the biggest, baddest middle linebacker in the league, and he shows up at minicamp with a beard, a fact D makes the mistake of pointing out. “Aw, I’m sorry,” he says, after he steps backwards into Wilk at their first team meeting, their first meeting, period, ever. “I didn’t recognize you with that beard.”
“How would you recognize me when you don’t know me?”
“Huh?”
“I said how would you recognize me when you don’t know me?”
“It’s just, um. I mean, you Mitch Wilkins. Like, I’d have to be under a rock not to know who you was.”
“Yeah.”
“And you still got that long hair but you got a beard now, too.”
“Yeah, all right.”
Technically, in camp, D’s still working to make the team, but he’s pretty sure he will. He’s the only rookie linebacker and he knows he’s been undervalued. Coming out of the tumbleweeds at Colorado State he only got looks from a few pro teams, but the scouts who worked him out were pleased. In the interviews they asked about his mouth. “It’s the truth,” he told them. “That’s who I am on the field. I also work hard, and I’m skilled, and I have passion. The talk is part of the passion. It’s also, to be honest, a skill.” Eyebrows went up. Elbows appeared on the table. These coaches: he could read them like a book.
When the draft call came, he was deep inside Shawna, his former high school tutor who was bold enough to look him in the eye when he ran into her at Target, and even better, to let him look back. He couldn’t just sit there at his mom’s house with everyone pestering him nonstop. Better to try to get out of his own head. Better to fuck himself senseless with a baby-faced older woman, the kind who clearly had sense enough to spare. His brand new cell phone was in his shorts pocket on the floor and for some reason he didn’t hear it even though they were doing their best to keep it down because Shawna’s little sisters were home. Luckily it rang again a few minutes later, and the second time he was post-coital, and lucid, and he heard it loud and clear.
“D’Antonio Mars, where the hell have you been? Are you ready to be an Eagle?”
It was Eddie Hatchett, the legend, former running back turned Philly GM, calling him by his full legal name. D swallowed drily and told him that yes sir, he was. He absolutely was.
“Hold on then, it’s going through. And next time answer your phone. I can’t draft you if I think you’re dead.”
Hatchett was his first new boss, but soon enough came the head coach, Kowalczyk, and the president, Pastore, each of whom spoke stock encouragements to him on the phone.
Now he’s also got Delahanty, defensive coordinator, and Schmidt, special teams coordinator, not to mention Tripp, the linebackers coach, and Woodson, the strength and sideline coach. And then, of course, there are all the veterans, who make him sing in the cafeteria, and bring them sandwiches whenever they feel like it, and the chief tyrant is none other than the bearded Wilk, who earns, like, ten times D’s salary, and seems to think some significant fraction of his extra income is tied to bossing D.
“What was that, Mars?” Wilk likes to say. And, “Get it, Mars!” And, “Look at my feet, Mars!” And, “Mars!”
His last name is his real last name and fierce enough to stick. The Martian, Lucky sometimes calls him. Or, when he does something especially killer, Mission to Mars. His favorite is The God of War. “But that one’s all me,” he tells his mom on the phone. “No one wants to call a rookie God.”
“They will, baby,” she assures him, a church-going woman all her life. “Just you wait. They will.”
There’s a lot to learn in minicamp: a whole system of plays, and a whole language for calling them. D writes everything down, because that’s what the coaches say to do, his hand cramping as he races to keep up. But when he reviews his notes later, the words only throb a bit, like the bruises that cover his body from all kinds of contact he can’t recall. They mean something, he knows that much. He just has no idea what. And it isn’t only the learning that has to be fast. They practice at top speed, too, so that the games will feel Matrix-time slow. “Look at the linemen’s knuckles,” Wilk says. “If they’re leaning forward on them, it’s a run, if they’re lifting up, it’s a pass.” D looks; he tries to read the subtlest shifts of position. He hardly has time to talk, he’s working so hard to keep pace.
“Give me a nice pause at the bottom,” Woodson tells him in the weight room as D bows his head to work his neck. “Then control the motion back up to the top. We want clean reps. Eliminate that momentum.” He works all four planes, bowing, looking to heaven, listening right, listening left. It’s for his head that he’s doing all this, building a cylinder of iron to keep it in place.
“Football,” Kowalczyk tells him, “is a change-of-directions sport.”
At least he’s not a camp body. The other Texas rookie is, a safety named Brandon Stackhouse. D is at his locker, borrowing a wad of Kleenex, when they come for him. “Oh no,” Brandon says, and then he walks out the door and D never sees him again. The Kleenex dampens in his hand, and it’s as though Stackhouse has just evaporated, turned to sweat in D’s own palm. He’s a good man, Stackhouse. Liked to freesty
le in the recovery pool after practice to keep everyone’s mind off the iceberg cold. Good heart. Scary-looking quads. Just wasn’t quite fast enough. The data did not add up.
D’s data does. At the end of the preseason, when they cut the roster to the final fifty-three, he’s on it, a back-up linebacker and a key player on special teams. “Every single one of you has earned your spot,” Kowalczyk tells them in the auditorium, his soft voice belying the hardness of his words. “Some of you really busted your asses to get here. Some of you have been superstars from day one. But starting now that can’t be anyone’s mentality. Not if we’re going to be successful.” He taps the yellow cover of the business book he’s given them. He’s a man with vision, arctic eyes that see clear to the poles, and to the end of the winning season he’s painstakingly constructed for this team. Week by week, he outlines the season that has, for him, already occurred. “An integrated team depends on every single individual doing his part. That means knowing your role on every possession. It means stepping up when guys go down. We all do our part, we go to the Super Bowl. It’s that simple, gentlemen. We’re in the Super Bowl because we all did our part.”
D thumbs the cut edge of his book and looks around at all the blank meeting faces. If someone gets hurt, there’s a chance that he could start. Someone will get hurt; someone always does. It’s a future that’s guaranteed.
Actually, Wilk says at their lockers, everyone gets hurt, it’s just a question of how bad, and when. He’s been there himself—torn a hamstring, broken a wrist—and still he says it nastily, like he’s almost rooting for it to happen to D, which makes D want to get nasty right back. He’s lucky Cam’s locker is between them.
“Won’t be me,” D tells him in anger, an emotion he’s spoken fluently for as long as he’s known how to talk. “I ain’t going down.” D knows himself to be an exceptional specimen, a singular mind aligned with its singular body, a living letter i. I am, he thinks, and all the i-words apply: integrated, intelligent, intimidating, intense.
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