A Short Move

by Katherine Hill

  He’s calmer by the time they cart him out, maybe because he’s actually in shock. His head is fuzzy from hitting the ground. Riding backwards into the tunnel, he aims the obligatory thumbs up at the ramp to the upper decks, which it’s possible he’s never really seen before. A whole season in this house and so much is still brand new. The ramp juts out like a kiddie roller coaster that makes up for its gentle grade by looking really hi-tech and mean, and there are men on both levels of it, waving at him, and he can’t explain it exactly, but this is how he knows. He sees the future clearly, like he can when he’s at his best. Surgery, restless rehab, thunderous workouts, the birth of a son. In week nine, screw the doctors, a triumphant, dominant return. You’d never guess he tore his ACL. He’s playing unconscious; he’s playing furious; he’s better than ever before. On the whirring cart, D is surer of this than he’s ever been of anything. A fury like his has to live.

  9. MITCH, 2006

  By Mitch’s final season, it happened a couple times a game. That moment of gentle panic in which he felt he was faking football, while everyone else was playing for real. He was playing at playing, and the only way to avoid being caught inside himself was to stick to his assignment, stay in his lane.

  He usually found his target, even under these questionable circumstances. A read. A gap. A surge. An unh. Then he and his man would get to their feet and the panic that had gripped his inside self would leave him with a shiver of withdrawal. Before he knew it, he’d be back in his body again, back in motion, back in play.

  As for the panic, it tended to hang around. He could see it, sometimes, in his opponents’ eyes, transferred there by the hit. It was a look that said, “Oh God.”

  And, “Wow.”

  And, “None of this is real.”

  Day to day it was all too real. He awoke on Tuesday, Week 14, feeling like a man with a beating heart trapped inside a stone.

  Wake up you peace of shit. A text from Hardy, Hardy who was done: out there somewhere, living. Hardy who had a Super Bowl ring.

  Peace be with you you piece of s#!+, Mitch thumbed back.

  He had just four more regular season games ahead of him. Four more for the rest of his life. Though for the moment no one knew that but him and God. Not Kowalczyk, not his agent Phil, not even Lori or his mom. Even Mitch didn’t know for sure. God changed his mind daily. In the middle of a game he sometimes felt he could go on another decade. The day after, as a rule, he was ready to call it quits.

  A short week, in the home stretch, the players’ lot was packed when he arrived. Technically, it was their day off, but everybody was in the building, getting food, getting looked at by the trainers. Through the double doors at the end of the hall, he could see Matt Rainey, the QB, pacing the practice field with his dogs.

  When he arrived at his locker, D was already there, shirtless and fussing at his own spot, while Lowry and Griggs, both second-year defensive backs, and Moore, from the D-line, gathered around in their sweats.

  “Sup, Wilk.”

  “So early,” Mitch scolded him. “I know you’re not injured.” Since his rookie season ACL tear, D hadn’t so much as lost an eyelash. He was more committed to maintaining his body than most women were to marriage. Though he turned out to be committed in that way, too. He and Shawna had finally tied the knot that summer—a confident move for a guy in his contract year—and he’d spent much of the preseason bragging to anyone who would listen about the beauty and brains of his black wife. Still hadn’t found God, but that was fine, he would. In his heart he was a man of faith.

  “Naw, naw,” D said now. He aimed a small digital camera at Mitch. “Say hello to the fans, Wilk. You on TV.”

  “Is this media? You working for the enemy now?”

  D rocked his head, grinning. “Undercover brother, reporting to another.”

  “Spying for the networks or the Redskins, which is it?”

  “I don’t know, Wilk,” Griggs said, peering over D’s shoulder at the screen. “You looking kinda tired. You know how they say the camera adds fifty pounds?”

  Mitch swung his hand, “Man, get out of here,” and Griggs made for the nearest pillar, giggling. “None of y’all even need to be here today.”

  “But you do, Wilk. Tell the people what you came in for.” D refocused his gaze through the camera.

  “That thing on?”

  “You see the light, don’t you? Come on, you ain’t that old. You’ve seen a camera before.”

  “But I am old, is the point. I live in the training room because I’m old. Seriously, man, what’s this all about?”

  D hit stop and pulled the camera back. “Aight, so, last night I got to thinking. We just won a must-win game at home, on Monday night. Suddenly, we’re 6-6. We make the playoffs if we win out. But that doesn’t come fast, right? Remember last year, dog? People gotta want it. They gotta love each other.” He’d been stroking his chest unthinkingly, but here he tapped his heart. “You feel me?”

  D was right that they’d totally fallen apart the previous year, partly because of injuries, but mostly because everyone just hated each other. They’d cut a lot of the bad seeds, and this year had been better, if only because everyone was so much more relaxed. “So, what,” Mitch asked, “you’re gonna videotape the love?”

  D laughed. “Don’t get kinky now!”

  “You’re the one with the camera.”

  “I’m saying I’m gonna create a little fun for us. Give us a chance to reflect, player to player, on what this game means. Maybe also have some rap battles. Maybe upload it to my blog.”

  “Oh no, you got a blog now?”

  “I got it all, baby. Now you ready for your interview or what?”

  Mitch shook his head. “Come back to me later. I have to get looked at.”

  Days he felt pretty sure he was retiring, D was one of the few guys who could make him think twice. All he’d ever done was talk. From the moment Mitch met him in training camp, he was talking. It was awful at first. Grating, obscene, like Ricky Franklin in eighth grade. But over the years—this being their fourth—D’s words had come to feel essential, even the obscenities. Because he didn’t just talk trash. He talked the world to life. He explained things to the rookies, reported back on what everyone else was up to—in the cafeteria, in the laundry room—said hello to everyone he passed every single morning. He was the team’s soundtrack, their constant narrator, and while it could still be annoying in the moments Mitch sought silence, for the most part, D’s voice was something Mitch valued very much.

  His go-to trainer, Steef, was busy working a wideout’s hamstring when he came in, so Mitch sat on a table with his new phone and waited. It flipped open two ways, vertically for calls and horizontally for keyboard texting.

  Excited for dinner Sat, he wrote Alyssa, who was probably at that moment in class. At Washington had become his favorite game of the season because it meant he got to see her. She was in eighth grade now, in Maryland.

  “All right,” Steef said, “what’s your body saying?”

  “How much time you got?” His body was saying never again, and at the same time, more more more. He ran through his areas of concern: the standard hands, wrists, knees, and right foot, which he’d broken about fourteen months back, as well as a new tightness that wouldn’t let up in his back. Steef checked them, gave him a recovery pill and some advice, and then it was off to the whirlpools for rehab. Everyone who wasn’t in the locker room was in the whirlpools, competing for the crown of worst-off. Not that you ever wanted sympathy. You just wanted to hurt the most, to win.

  Sitting with his brothers in the cold tub, he was glad he’d stuck it out another season. He could’ve easily thrown in the towel after that ’05 disaster, in which he’d sucked and the team had sucked, no coincidence his thirteenth year. But there weren’t a lot of jobs where you could sit around shooting the shit with other men all day, and between last night’s win and D’s optimism, it was possible his fourteenth season might turn out lucky after
all. He thought of Ricky Franklin, who would love to hear him think it. Old Ricky, the acrobat, lucky number fourteen.

  “Okay, but say we’d gone on the road to Carolina,” one of the O-linemen, Kohler, was saying. “Where would we be going? Charlotte, right? Which is in North Carolina. But they don’t say that. They just say ‘Carolina,’ which has to mean both states. So aren’t we kind of going to South Carolina, too? I don’t know why no one talks about that.”

  “Man, you’re an idiot.” This was Hock, another guard.

  “But it’s the same thing with New England, right?” Kohler persisted, not that anyone wanted him to stop. You had to be talking in the cold tub; it was the only way to survive the chill. “How many states are in New England? Six?”

  “Yeah, six,” Mitch answered.

  “Boston, Massachusetts, Connecticut,” Kohler started counting. “I mean! Not Boston. Boston is in Massachusetts. Even I get confused when I talk about this. So it’s Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.”

  “What’s your point?” Mitch asked.

  “I mean,” Kohler laughed. He was always laughing at everything he said, because everything he said intrigued him, especially the stuff he knew was dumb. Hardy would’ve loved this guy. “When you’re playing for New England, aren’t you actually kind of in all those states?”

  “No.” Mitch scratched his beard. “You’re in Massachusetts.”

  “So literal,” Kohler said.

  After five minutes, he was out. Five minutes a day bought you five extra years. That was the promise the trainers made when they first introduced the tubs, and it was a prescription he would continue to follow, even with only four games left. Guys were still yakking as he climbed over them towards the bubbling hot tub, where he’d sink up to his neck and die a little, productively. Their voices filled the room over the power sounds; water filled the tubs. It was so much better when people liked each other. You could stay anywhere longer—the cold tub, the weight room, the sideline, the league—as long as you liked the people.

  He was half-dressed at his locker when Eddie Hatchett came to get him. “You got a minute?”

  Most GMs left the players to their spaces, but Eddie was a former player—and not just a former player, a former great. He wore mesh shorts all year long, even in winter, and he was as comfortable as any player in the locker room.

  Mitch threw on a shirt and went with him to the cafeteria, where they got a first lunch of smoothies to go. Back in his office, Eddie took control of the conversation, as only guys in management can. “We just wanted to get a sense of where you’re at,” he said. “You think you got another season in you?”

  It wasn’t customary to talk this way, GM-to-player, without an agent in the room, but Eddie and Mitch hadn’t had a customary relationship for years. In his first year on the job, Eddie had recruited Mitch himself, with personal visits to New England and weekend meet-ups in Miami, where they both had ties as former Hurricanes. He’d even encouraged Mitch to buy property in his neighborhood, and their kids—Mitch’s born early, Eddie’s born late—attended the same New Jersey school. Mitch hadn’t been much of an office guy in New England, but for his second team, it made sense to get closer to management, as though some portal were opening between their dimensions, giving him a glimpse of the afterlife. For his part, Eddie made it look good. His bowlegged stride was stiff but quick, and the ripples of bumps on his arms and legs were nothing too troubling, just a reminder that he’d made his name on the field, where it counted most to Mitch.

  Even so, Mitch wasn’t ready to take Eddie into his confidence. “Honestly, I can’t say. I’m trying to focus on Washington. All I see is the week in front of me.”

  “Wilk,” Eddie said. He leaned forward onto his elbows, demanding straight talk. “I’m not the media. You can tell me what you’re really thinking.”

  Mitch shrugged. He appreciated candor, but that didn’t mean he’d let Eddie rob him of his privacy. “I guess I’m choosing not to think. I’ll play better now if I don’t.”

  Eddie nodded, chewing his jaw. “If only everyone played like you. We’d win every week. A team of forty-five-year-old men would win every damn week.”

  “Quit taking more years from my life,” Mitch said. “I’ve been taking them back in the tub.”

  “‘Five minutes a day,’” Eddie recited. “So listen, no pressure, but I’ll have Stu make you a tape. We’re looking at linebackers and I want to hear what you think. When you can think.”

  “Foolish not to.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.” They stood, clasping hands. “And listen, don’t tell all your secrets to D. He puts that stuff on the internet?” Eddie made an explosion with his mouth, made his eyes jolt up in recoil.

  “How in the world do you know about that already?” Mitch laughed.

  Eddie tapped his temple, cocky. “I see all. I know all.”

  It was so pleasant talking to Eddie, who had a way of including you in his thoughts, as though they were somehow your thoughts, too, that it wasn’t until Mitch was back in the locker room, gathering his things, that he realized he was being pushed out.

  Which he then immediately second-guessed, and then immediately rethought. Over the course of his career, he’d had so many between-the-lines conversations with bosses, and this one was not even that opaque.

  Eddie wanted his view on the future; he’d called him forty-five.

  “Ready for lunch?” D asked behind him, and Mitch shelved the future for the moment, grabbed his protein shaker, said sure.

  You had to have superhuman willpower to tear yourself away from the facility, which had been built, ingeniously, to keep you. They would cut your hair here, do your laundry here, feed you. The young guys who didn’t have wives lived for the unlimited food and the endless sitting around the tables with dessert, all the more so because they knew that even endlessness was fleeting. By Week 17 there would be printed reminders in all the meeting rooms: “Players and staff are responsible for buying their own meals during the off-season.”

  Mitch had a family, though, and a players’ day off meant a family day on. There was no excuse for lingering, and he’d already hung around well past lunch. He drove back to Jersey, just beating the kids home from school. Madison was up from her nap and working on a block tower while Lori stood at the kitchen island with the laptop.

  He hadn’t intended to remarry so quickly. When he and Caryn called it quits, not long after that awful Super Bowl, it was sad, but it was also exhilarating. He was twenty-four and he could finally have some honest fun. The first thing he did was to end it with Angela in Patriots Publicity. That was too bad, because she was always down for fun, but he couldn’t risk her thinking she might be the reason for his divorce. The second thing was to fly to Vegas to throw away some money, and shortly thereafter, to Miami, where every model and bottle was free. When he tired of freedom, he went back to Vegas; when Vegas maxed him out, Miami saved him a seat. It was on one of these cross-country relays that he dropped in on Joe, whom he hadn’t seen since he was five. Mitch was living experimentally, down to try anything once, and going to stay at his hippie dad’s Montana compound definitely qualified as an experiment. But Joe had an inviting bliss about him, and so did Tammy, his half-Asian wife. Their home was a collection of brightly painted huts and shacks clustered around a geodesic dome, all of which they’d built themselves. When it got dark, they sat around the fire pit with the dogs, smoking weed and trading stories about Monacan. Mitch spent the night on a camping cot in Joe’s studio and left the next morning feeling higher on himself than ever—on his choices, his genetic strength, his great capacity for forgiveness. In Vegas he met up with Hardy and Gaines, and after a good night of blackjack, he rewarded them all with a charter jet to France, fully stocked with cognac and stewardesses. Hardy just talked to his stewardess, so he said, but Mitch’s kept leaning over him with her mouth half-open, and he felt so enormous he couldn’t help himself; he b
egged her to let him do her in the ass. Her name was Celine. She complied.

  It was barely a year of that life before he swung by a late-night Miami house party, summer of ’98, and found Lori Taylor swimming with some of her friends. They were twenty-two and all of them had gotten their hair wet, which made it hard to tell who was the hottest, let alone who was brown-haired or blonde, but he singled out Lori for her tits, bobbing amply in the underwater lights, and her laugh, which had the soft, microphoned quality of a pop star’s, pitched to capture the attention of crowds. He offered her a robe. She accepted it with a forthrightness that made him feel sorry for Angela, and for Celine, and for all the girls he’d nailed in Miami, a few of whom were at the party: Kim, the gymnast, who said she wanted to cut him, and who he fucked until she cried; Gina-or-Tina, who had been naked in a movie with Keanu Reeves; Nadia, a more successful actress and a klepto, weird stuff always disappearing from his possession whenever he was with her, not just cash but also CDs and personal products like deodorant, though he’d never been sober enough to catch her, so he didn’t know for sure. Lori was different from all of them. She was a model, with shoulders like a luxury hanger, but he could tell instantly she wasn’t a liar. He took her out for a Cuban sandwich that very night. Her hair turned out to be blonde.

  Before he knew what he was doing, he was following her to church. He’d grown up Christian, so he was familiar with God, but only in the way he was familiar with guys who’d played the game before he was born. At Lori’s church, people were casual, having coffee and doughnuts, coming in, going out, singing and praying together, yet on their own. During Worship, Lori liked to close her eyes and raise one long hand to heaven, resting the other one on her heart. She almost always cried, and it moved him, first, that she was so comfortable in the feeling, and second, that he felt no urge to tease her. The more he went, the more he realized how anxious he’d been, especially in that last year, when he’d lived so fast, without laws. All that time, there’d been a voice in his head, a gentle, worried noise just shy of audible that he’d always dismissed as an echo of his mom. But it wasn’t her; he knew now that it was God. As for his head, it wasn’t strictly his, but rather a place, like a playing field, where he could walk and talk with God. It wasn’t all immediately apparent, but the more time he spent with Lori, the lighter he felt in his body, and the more skilled he became at hearing God, at discerning who was who. It was something, he realized in his conversion, he’d always known he’d have the power to do one day. Like beating Tim in a sprint, like making the pros. All he had to do was practice.