Lori had flirted with danger as a kid, sneaking out with her friends, letting older boys touch her between her legs in movie theaters, and generally not thinking too much of herself, until one night she lost her virginity like an extra hair tie, just put it down on a metal playground slide with an opportunist who gladly took it. She was fourteen, her testimony went, and as she sat up in her own bed the next morning, fully recognizing her sin, something inside her flicked on. She understood that she would destroy herself if she couldn’t resist the darkness that was so attractive to her friends, that until that moment had been attractive to her, too. It was so easy to hide in darkness, to not have to look too closely at herself. But she understood then, tossing the covers aside to reveal her toes, that most of the easy things were bad, while the good things, starting with honesty before God, would always require work. Hard work, even. She looked at her hands, spread them gladly into the morning light, and then, falling to her knees by the bed, clasped them together in prayer. She was imperfect, she had sinned, but the same body that had sinned could work. That belief had saved her that very morning, and it served her well as a football wife.
“There’s Daddy,” she said to Madison now.
Mitch scooped up their daughter and puffed kisses into her neck, which she received with an obliging giggle. Maddie was the only one of his babies he’d actually known as a baby, having spent six weeks at home with a broken foot last season, right after she was born. He’d been changing her when her umbilical stump fell off, a little piece of burnt cheese on the blanket. He’d been tempted to taste it. He’d fed her breast milk from a bottle, which he did taste. Because of this he was more comfortable with her than he’d ever been with the others: Kaylie, the little general; Tyler, the problem child.
With Maddie on his hip, he went around the kitchen island to kiss his wife. “How are you feeling?” She cupped his beard in her hands.
People constantly asked him how he felt. It was one of football’s biggest questions. How’s the knee, how’s the head, how’s the body holding up? He always told the truth in some measure: some constructive, useful portion of the truth, the portion that would tape him up, keep him around a bit longer, allow him to keep wreaking havoc. But to Lori, as he had done to all the women in his life, he just surrendered. Every hit, every lost hour of sleep, caught up to him. He didn’t know how he was still standing.
“I’m beat, baby,” he told her, pulling her with Maddie and him to the couch. “I quit.”
Maddie cried out and wriggled free, back to her blocks.
“That’s a lie,” Lori said. “Don’t even get my hopes up.”
He considered telling her, and wasn’t that a dumb idea. If she really was hoping, and he changed his mind, it would only break her heart.
His pocket buzzed. Alyssa, responding to his text. Good for her, she’d waited until school got out. Maybe that was a rule, the kind of thing he’d know if he’d been around enough to raise her.
Can we go to Osteria on Sat? Italian in Capitol Hill
He reread the text. It hadn’t been that long since he’d seen her. Was she into classy restaurants now? She was only thirteen. But maybe that was what happened when you grew up in the city. He’d had Hardee’s. She had Osteria.
Wherever you want, he texted back, as long as I can eat meat
Lori sat there next to him, chastely, her leg millimeters from his, her elbow on the couch back, propping up her head. She never invaded his space. She never demanded anything. The year Kaylie was born, in New England, she didn’t even live with him, spiriting the baby away to Florida like some tribeswoman, returning to her village to nurse. He saw her as the end of the line, his final woman, the one he might not disappoint.
“You want to come to dinner Saturday?” he asked her.
“No, you go,” she said. “She never sees you. I spoke to God today, and He left me feeling calm. I think He was saying, Let Alyssa have her dad to herself.”
He nodded. That was settled, on to the next thing. “D brought in a video camera today.” He didn’t want to discuss Hatchett’s request.
“Oh no.”
“He wants to make a team movie. Celebrate us. I think it’s all right. Some guys’ll love it. They’re clowns. And the quiet ones will probably appreciate the attention.”
“Sounds nice then.”
It shamed him sometimes that there were so many things he didn’t tell her, but he also knew his secrets helped make their marriage work. She knew he’d sinned before he met her, as she had, but she didn’t know the extent of it, or how far back it went. With Lori he really was faithful, so he found it better not to shake her faith in him. Better to keep all that old baggage locked away, between himself and God.
DFW: Drug-Free Wednesday. He was sitting on the leg press where the taped note read “Reps 10” and D was aiming the Canon right at him.
“Come on, man, you know I hate the camera.”
“It’s me, though. How you feel about leg days, Wilk?”
Mitch took a breath, closed his lips, took his mind off his nagging back. Rather than talk, he started his set.
“Come on, man.”
He had to focus on clean, timed reps, every bit of his detoxing body checked in for every count. But D’s face was still there beyond his feet. He was making no demands, just the assumption that Mitch liked him enough to talk.
After his fifth rep, halfway there, he managed to offer him something. “I feel my legs.” Then he waited for the next pause before spitting out a bit more. “Can’t hate ’em. They hold you up. But some days they let you down.”
“That’s why we in here, though, right?”
“Recovery and maintenance,” Mitch said.
“Tell the fans what you mean by that.”
Mitch pressed out the set and sat back. “After a game,” he said, “your muscles are pretty beat up, so during the season it’s important to get back in here and take care of them, get the blood flowing again.”
“Buy yourself time.”
“Always.”
“How long you think you got, Wilk? People want to know.” D was grinning, nothing serious.
“That’s my secret,” Mitch told him, grinning back. “You think I’d tell you?”
“If not me, then who?”
They’d talked about it, of course, in the off-season. Maybe this one will be my last, et cetera. Just a little experiment, just testing out the words. But nothing public, nothing ever on the record where it could hurt. “I’m not telling your camera anyway.”
“My camera is my conscience. Come on, we’ll do something funny. We’ll bleep it out.”
“Nope.”
“Come on.”
“Uh-uh.”
This time, he made the grin vicious, and D, like a pro, took the hint.
“All right then, what’re you doing to stay competitive? What’s your secret? What’s your voodoo?”
This, he liked. “Well, it’s interesting,” Mitch said. “I recently paid a visit to a healer and he gave me a little bottle of something. I think it started with an H. There was a G in there, too, and maybe another H. Gosh darn it if I remember. But, boy, I tell ya, it must’ve been some kind of magic. If I had to go by the way I feel right now—which is awesome—I’d say I probably have another fifty years of football in me.”
D was letting his laughter escape through his teeth. “Your wrinkled ass on the blitz?”
“That’s what I’m saying, bro, there will be no wrinkles. I’ll be elastic. A walking football uniform.”
“You found the fountain of youth, dog.”
“God’s supplement.”
“How has no one thought of this before?”
Mitch held a finger to his lips. “Shh. Don’t go spreading it around. I don’t need them bringing LT back to interview for my job.”
They installed the game plan after lunch, walking through each new call, working it into their legs and brains, rubbing out the old patterns and plays. Mitch also tried to rub o
ut his doubts. It was not a familiar state of being: doubt. But he kept seeing D’s camera, with its stern recording light, and he kept hearing himself joke about HGH. He shouldn’t have talked that way, even to D. He’d made it a rule never to talk much to reporters, because words could be used against you, none more harshly than your own. That had been his rule. Why had he let himself talk to D?
“You’re dangerous,” Mitch told him when they were back at their lockers. “Getting me to joke around like that.”
“I love it,” D said. “You’re more honest when you joke.”
“Just erase it,” Mitch said. “I have to ask you to erase it.” D shook his head. “You say so.”
“I mean permanently. For real. I can’t have anyone thinking I use HGH.”
“And I said all right,” D said, abruptly, which put an end to the conversation, but not to Mitch’s doubts.
Thursday’s practice was in pads. “Missy Sixteen!” Delahanty called, and they knocked it out, a middle blitz for his daughter’s birthday.
“Gemini Zone!”
“Nickel Shake 1!”
“I should’ve had you make one for Alyssa,” Mitch told him at the break.
“A’s hard,” Delahanty said. “But I can work on it. She coming to any more games?”
“Just this one that I know. But there’s always playoffs.”
“And next year.” Delahanty’s smile took up a considerable portion of his face. Mitch tried to decide if he was fishing for info, then figured, no, that was how he smiled, it was just how he was built.
“Hey—hey.” D ran over, elated. “You see Force’s new endorsement? It’s some kind of fruit roll-up that’s supposed to recharge your muscles and make your sweat taste like cherries. He’s handing ’em out over there. ‘Compliments of ReGrowth.’”
Mitch looked at Griggs, who D called Force. “Name could use some work. A little generic.”
“Yeah, but get this. So he’s giving them out, he’s working on his spiel. And he gives me mine, and he looks at me.”
“No no no,” said Griggs, who had joined them, and was twitching like a sidewalk worm. “Don’t tell Wilk.”
“Oh, I got to tell Wilk.”
“Yeah,” Mitch said. “No turning back now.”
“He says, ‘This has camouflage so it won’t hurt your stomach.’”
“Camouflage?”
“He means chamomile, dog!” D could not contain himself.
“I just thought that was, like, for my grandma,” Griggs said. “She’s got her glasses and her Sudoku and her chamomile. You can see how I got confused.”
“But that’s it, though!” D insisted. “It’s, like, ‘Here, eat this fruit roll-up. It tastes like gum on the bottom of your shoe, but it’ll hide your injuries from yourself.’”
“You can’t put that on camera, though,” Griggs said. “I won’t say it again.”
“Not even if I pay you? Think about your brand.”
“Ask Kohler about New England,” Mitch told D, his way of saying he’d forgiven him. “Seriously, ask him.” Just because he hated the camera didn’t mean he didn’t want to help. Kohler could talk enough for them all.
They had visitors on the sideline for the second half of practice: a well-dressed woman and three matching men, one of whom was the owner, Greg Goldman. In all the time that Mitch had been an Eagle, he’d found Goldman to be an admirably unobtrusive presence, an investor who left the football to the football people. He was not old, but bedecked with hair that was comfortably white, the kind of man you instinctively addressed as Mr., genial whenever he greeted the players at the official functions they were occasionally required to attend. He knew the names of all of Mitch’s kids, and not in a creepy way.
At a water break, Mitch found himself standing beside him. They watched the offense put together an irritating little series of screens.
“Just have to chip away at them,” Mr. Goldman said. His voice was crisp and dry, almost papery.
Mitch wasn’t wild about screen passes. He considered them cheap college tricks, easy to execute, easy to stop. But he wasn’t wild about tattling, either. “They really believe in this scheme,” he said, neither a statement nor a question.
“Gives our receivers a chance to make some plays. They’ve got the speed.”
“Sure they do.”
Mr. Goldman cleared his throat: a man used to winning arguments. Mitch recognized the assurance because he was the same type among players, the veteran who got the last word. There was a structure, and people organized themselves to maintain it. But an owner trumped a player any day. That was also part of the structure. It was in the org charts, right there in plain English, in the words they used for themselves every day. You played for him; he owned you.
“I think,” Mr. Goldman said, “that everyone in this organization just wants to do his part to win.” His face had a philosophical cast, like this was a truth he’d come to recently, after many hours of rigorous meditation. His tall spread collar was pulled close around his throat, which contributed both to his monkish demeanor and to his appearance of having something to hide. Was it possible it was just his neck?
He turned to Mitch and gave him a direct order. “’About time you and I had a meal together, don’t you think?”
He’d phrased it as a question, but Mitch hadn’t been a fool for some time. “Yes, sir, it is.” His water break was up. He had plays to call in the next defensive set.
“How’s tomorrow night for you and Lori?”
“She’d love to,” Mitch said. “Absolutely.”
Mitch lived on a nice street, each house with its own private drive, so you almost didn’t realize you were on a street. Mitch’s had ten acres and a three-car garage, and it wasn’t even the biggest. Those belonged to the guys with real money: Goldman money, the kind you couldn’t make on salary. Not that he’d seen them all. Every one of them was out there for the privacy, for the unspoken understanding that I will not ring your doorbell and you will not ring mine. He knew they wanted to; in New England, they did. But these guys, in this neighborhood, they had class. He’d seen them in their understated BMWs, their feminine haircuts. One guy, had to be at least sixty years old, jogged every morning at dawn. As the sun rose later, he rose later; when it jumped back, he did, too. He wore a wristwatch that tracked his strides per minute, and he would glance at it every now and then as Mitch drove past him into the city, an early riser himself. He often saluted Mitch in the rearview mirror, the mildest of acknowledgments. When it got cold, as it suddenly had that Friday, he wore an Eagles skullcap—just, Mitch liked to think, so he would see.
In the locker room there was every kind of feeling about the temperature, in the twenties for the first time that year.
“Oh no,” Moore was saying. He was from Florida, and he was old like Mitch. “Oh, hell no.”
“Are you kidding?” Griggs cried. “I can finally wear my worsted three-piece!”
“Your worst what?” D asked.
Griggs flicked his chin at D’s camera, tugged the collar of his workout shirt. “My Italian wool, son. The finest.”
“You sure you’re not talking about your coverage?” Moore said.
“We gotta get Delly to do something with that,” D said. “A Worsted Three-Piece for Force.”
“Now just a minute.” Moore again, always enforcing hierarchies. “Wilk’s already got him working on a call for Alyssa. Force is gonna have to wait his turn.”
“Tell the fans about your wardrobe,” Mitch said to Griggs, feeling the charitable effects of his morning Naproxen.
“Suddenly I got a co-host!” D said. “Tell the fans.”
“Aight, look.” Griggs snapped into character. “As a rule, wide receivers get all the attention for fashion. But the Paris of this locker room is right here in the two-deep zone, number 24.”
Kohler poked his crew cut into the frame. “I’ll be naked in approximately five minutes. After that, I’ll be wearing clothes.”
&nb
sp; “Worsted wool is finer and more durable than your everyday Walmart wool,” Griggs continued, unfazed. “Not unlike yours truly.”
“I’m a big guy,” Kohler responded. “Walmart is the place for me.”
“Tell me the last time you bought a suit at Walmart,” D demanded.
“Well let’s see…” Kohler’s voice trailed off as he flicked through his fingers, performing an attempt to recall. “It had to be…never. What’s wursted wool? Do you eat it with mustard?”
“Only in New England,” Mitch said.
“I’m telling you,” Kohler said, delighted to have come full circle on camera. “It’s a whole geographical concept.”
When Mitch turned around, Eddie Hatchett was behind him, waving a DVD. “As promised,” he told Mitch, ruining his festive mood. “No hurry.”
Because of the short week, and the cold, and the scent of playoffs, Friday practice was all business. No position group contests for better seats on the next day’s train, no standing around any longer than anyone had to. Mitch inhaled the stinging air, clapped his hands coming out of the huddle. Sunday was supposed to get up past fifty, and that was fine, that was preferable. But part of him was hoping it wouldn’t. In winter, hits sounded like hammers on steel, that was something he’d learned in New England, and he liked that, that the music he made just kept getting better the longer the season went on.
You never tackled in practice, but you did collide, and today Mitch couldn’t help it, he had to plank a guy. Rookie on the practice squad, thought he could make an old man miss.
A Short Move Page 18