We studied each other for a second. I couldn't tell if he knew how startled I'd been out there, and why.
"Well, Joey's the one who caught it," I said.
"That's right. Team spirit, Danny. Everybody's in this together. All the same, nice pass."
Beside him, close, its lock shut, was the box.
***
We played eight games that season. Sometimes I had nightmares about them — double images of Joey or other players, the images coming together. I felt as if everything happened twice, as if I could see what was going to happen before it did.
Impossible.
But that's how it seemed. One night I scared my Mom and Dad when I woke up screaming. I didn't tell them what the nightmare was about. I didn't talk to Joey about it, either. After that first time I'd tried to, I sensed that he didn't want to listen.
"We're winners. Jesus, it feels good," he said.
And the scores were always lopsided. We always let the other team score a few points when we were way in front.
Except one time. The sixth game, the one against Central High. Coach Hayes didn't call us names that night before the game. In the locker room, he sat in a corner, watching us put on our uniforms, and the guys started glancing at each other, nervous, sensing something was wrong.
"It's tonight," a kid from last year said, his voice tense.
I didn't understand.
Coach Hayes stood up. "Get out there, and give it your best."
Joey looked surprised. "But what about — " He turned to the cabinet at the end of the locker room. "Mumbo — "
"Time to go." Coach Hayes sounded gruff. "Do what you're told. They're waiting."
"But — "
"What's the matter with you, Joey? Don't you want to play tonight?"
Joey's face turned an angry red. His jaw stood out. With a final look at the cabinet, he stalked from the locker room.
It could be you've already guessed. We didn't just lose that night. They trounced us. Hell, we never scored a point. Oh, we played hard. After all the training we'd been through, we knew what we were doing. But the other team played harder.
And it was the only game when I wasn't spooked, when I didn't see two images of Joey or what would happen before it actually did.
The after-game dance was a flop.
And Joey was mad as hell. Walking home with me, he kept slamming his fists together. "It's Coach Hayes's fault. He changed the routine. He got us used to him making us pissed at him before the game, calling us names and all that shit. We weren't prepared. We weren't worked up enough to go out there and win."
I tried to calm him down. "Hey, it's just one loss. We're still the winning team in the league."
He spun so fast he scared me. "He didn't even bring out that dumb-ass statue! He wanted us to look like fools out there! He wanted us to lose!"
"I can't believe that."
"Maybe you like being a loser! I don't!"
He surged ahead of me. When I reached the corner where we always talked for a bit before splitting up, he was already heading down his street.
"Joey!" I wasn't sure what I wanted to say to him. It didn't matter. He didn't shout back.
***
And maybe you've guessed the rest of it too. The next game, everything was back to normal. Or abnormal, depending on how you look at it. Coach Hayes cussed us out before the game. He set Mumbo Jumbo in the middle of the locker room.
"Why didn't you do it the last time?" Joey demanded. "We could've won!"
"You think so?" Coach Hayes squinted. "Maybe you'd have won. Then again maybe not."
"You know we could've! You wanted us to — "
"Joey, it seems to me you've got things turned around. You're supposed to get mad at the other team, not me. I'm on your side, remember."
"Not last time you weren't."
Coach Hayes stood awfully straight then, his eyes blazing. "I'll forget you said that. Listen, I'll explain this only once. Last time I broke the routine to make a point. It doesn't matter what tricks I use in the locker room to prepare you for a game. What counts is how you play. And last time you guys didn't give your best. It's your fault you didn't win, not mine. You got that?"
Joey glared.
"Besides, it's good for you to lose once in a while."
"Bullshit!"
"Don't try my patience. It's good for you to lose because it makes you try harder next time. It makes you hungrier. It makes you appreciate how sweet it is to be a winner. Don't say another word. Believe me, if you want to play tonight, don't say another word."
We walked around Mumbo Jumbo, touched him, and started the game. Of course, I saw things again. And of course we won, finally letting the other team score.
One more week, the final game. And after touching Mumbo Jumbo, we won that too. City High's ninth winning season. Yet another gleaming trophy stood in the glass case in the lobby near the principal's office.
***
A lot had happened. My parents couldn't get over my B's and A's. They raised my allowance. They let me borrow the family car more often. Rebecca Henderson and I started going steady.
And Joey and I continued drifting apart. He was obsessed with being a star, with having attention directed at him all the time. So when the football season was over, he couldn't get used to being treated the same as everybody else. He tried out for the basketball team — Mr. Emery, the science teacher, coached it — but he didn't make the squad. "So what?" he said, but you could tell how disappointed he was. "They lose more games than they win. Who wants to be a loser?" He hated how everybody crowded around the new student council president. He finally decided to try out for the drama club — it figured, I thought, being on stage, everybody looking at you — and he made it. He didn't get the starring role in the big production they always put on in December, but he did have a half-decent part. He had to fake a German accent and play a maniac doctor called Einstein in a murder comedy called Arsenic and Old Lace. I took Rebecca to it, and I have to say Joey did okay, not great but pretty good. I mean at least he made me laugh at the jokes, and I hoped that now he'd be satisfied, although I heard later how he was always grumbling in rehearsals about not being on stage enough and wanting more lines.
***
I'll skip to all the trouble — the following year, our last one at City High. Our grades had put Joey and me on the junior honor role. He and I had stayed in shape all summer. Rebecca and I were spending even more time together. Maybe she was the reason I tried out for the football team again, even though I hated the prospect of seeing that ugly statue again, not to mention getting spooked seeing that other stuff on the field. But I knew we wouldn't have gotten together if I hadn't been a football player, and I didn't want things to change between us, so I tried out again and made the team.
Joey did too, and his reasons were obvious — getting attention, being a star.
Coach Hayes did everything the same. I dragged myself home after practice each day. I heard the same old speeches about grades and diet. I listened to him cuss us out before the starting game (but he didn't make me mad anymore), and watched him bring out Mumbo Jumbo. "Our mascot," he explained, swearing us to secrecy, the same routine (but that squat brown ugly thing still made me feel creepy). And on the field, I saw the double images again and felt the chill creep up my spine. If it hadn't been for Rebecca cheering on the sideline, I'd have…
But I didn't, and because of that, sometimes I think I might have caused what happened, partly anyhow.
We won, of course. In fact, it seemed too easy. Maybe that was why the next game Coach Hayes didn't cuss us out and didn't show us Mumbo Jumbo.
As soon as I noticed he was changing the pattern, I said to myself, "It's tonight," only then realizing I'd heard the same thing last year from a kid who'd been on the team the year before that. The kid had graduated now, and I suddenly realized that next year after my own graduation some other kid would repeat what I'd just said. And I wondered how many others had said it before me.
"No!" Joey shouted, furious.
"One more word, and you're benched!" Coach Hayes shouted back.
Joey shut up. But leaving the locker room, I heard him mutter, "God damn him. I'll show him. We don't need that frigging statue. We'll win anyhow."
But we didn't. And I didn't see the double images. And Joey went nearly out of his mind with rage. He didn't go to the aftergame dance, and he didn't say a word in Saturday's game analysis or Sunday's practice. All he did was keep glaring at Coach Hayes.
***
And me? How did I help cause all the trouble? I got curious is all. I started thinking about patterns. And patterns.
So what do you do when you're curious? What I did, I went to the school newspaper. Your school probably had one just like ours. The student reporters were the same bunch who put together the yearbook and belonged to the creative writing club. A gossip column, a hit parade column, a humor column. Plenty of announcements. A report from the student council.
And a sports column.
All of this stuff was typed on stencils and run off on a mimeograph machine. Three pages, on both sides, orange sheets stapled together. The City High Examiner. Original, huh? It came out every Monday morning. Mostly I think the school administration set aside money for it because of the weekly "Report from the Principal." School spirit and all that.
Anyhow I decided to do some checking, so I went to the newspaper office, which was also the yearbook office. A cluttered room on the third floor between the typing classroom and the janitor's closet. The place smelled sickish-sweet, like that white liquid goop you put on stencils to hide your typing mistakes. The editor was a kid named Albert Webb, and I guess he'd seen too many newspaper movies. He was always talking about the student council beat and the drama club beat and going to press. All of us called him "Scoop," and he took it as a compliment instead of a putdown.
He was sitting at a desk, shoving his glasses back on his nose, glancing back and forth from a handwritten sheet of paper to the stencil he was typing. He had a pen behind his ear and a zit on his chin. He turned as I walked in.
"How's tricks, Scoop?"
"I just got the word on the nominations for homecoming queen."
"Nobody's supposed to know that till next week's assembly."
"No kidding." He grinned. "Maybe you'll be interested. Rebecca Henderson's one of them."
"My, my." I grinned right back. "Somebody's got good taste. So listen, have you got any old editions of the paper?"
"All the ones I edited. Plus a bunch from a couple editors before me."
"How far back do they go?"
He was proud. "Fifteen years."
"Hey, swell. So where do you keep them?"
"In the morgue."
"Huh?"
"That's what newspapers call where they store old issues. Over there." He pointed past some boxes to a rickety bookshelf in one corner.
"You mind?"
He spread his arms. "Hey, be my guest. What do you want to look at them for?"
I'd figured he'd ask. "A couple of us on the football team have been thinking about a reunion game with former players. An exhibition thing. You know. The old guys against the new."
"Yeah?" Scoop's eyes brightened. He reached for his pencil.
"Now wait a minute. We're still just talking, Scoop. If you put this in the paper and it doesn't happen, you'll look dumb. You might even screw up our chances of convincing those guys."
"Right." He nodded. "I'll make you a deal. You look at the former issues, but if the plans for the game look definite, let me know so I can break the story."
"Anything you say."
So I went to the corner and started sorting through the papers. They smelled like a mouldy cellar. I almost sneezed.
Fifteen years of them. How many weeks in a school year? Forty? A lot of issues. But looking through them wasn't as hard as you'd think. See, the only issues I wanted were the ones in the football season. And I only wanted the issues since Coach Hayes had come to the school eleven years ago. It took me less than half an hour. And this is what I learned.
The first two seasons when Hayes had coached were awful. Worse than that. Disastrous. The team never won a game. A total zip.
But after that? Winning season after winning season.
With these facts in common. The games we won had lopsided scores in our favor, but the opposing team always managed to get on the board. And every season, we lost one game, the first or the seventh or the third, no consistent pattern there. And the teams that beat us varied. But the score was always zero for us.
Because he didn't bring out Mumbo Jumbo?
I know that's crazy. Next thing you'll figure I believe in horoscopes and fortune telling and all that crap. But I swear it made me wonder, and remember, you weren't on the field to see those creepy double images. In my place, you'd have started to wonder too.
By then, Scoop was leaning over my shoulder, squinting at the paper in front of me.
"Something the matter, Scoop?"
"Just nosey."
"Yeah."
"I see you're reading about the game the team lost three years ago."
"I wasn't playing then."
"I know. But I was a cub reporter for the paper then. I was there that night. I remember thinking how weird that game was."
"Oh?"
"All those perfect games, and then a real dog."
"Well, nobody plays good every game. Hey, thanks, Scoop. Anything I can do for you, just — "
"Let me know about the reunion game."
"Believe me, you'll be the first."
***
And that's what started things. With some bad moves from a new kid on the team whose name was Price. See, he wouldn't keep his grades up. Maybe he was just stupid. He soon started acting that way.
Coach Hayes followed through on his threat. No grades, no play. So Price got kicked off the team.
But Price had a father with a beer gut who'd been a jock when he was in high school, and when Price started whining, the father went whacko over what he said was an insult to his kid. "I don't care about his grades. You think I want him to grow up with ulcers, trying to be a brain. Football's been good for me. It gave me character, and I know it's good for my boy's."
No major problem. Just your basic asshole father sticking up for his kid. But Coach Hayes wouldn't budge, and that's when Price broke the rule.
You might remember reading about it back then, and I'm not talking about the high school paper. The local Courier. Then the major paper in the state. Then… FATHER OF HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL PLAYER ACCUSES TEAM OF DEVIL WORSHIP.
Well, you can imagine, there wasn't any stopping it after that. The city council wanted to know what the hell was going on. The school board demanded an explanation. The principal got angry phone calls.
My father put down the Courier and frowned at me. "Is this story about the statue true? Mumbo Jumbo?"
"It's not like Price says. It's just a mascot."
"But you touch it before you go out to play?"
"Hey, it's nothing. It's only sort of for good luck."
My father frowned harder.
The other guys on the team got the same bit from their parents. Joey told me his father was so upset he wanted Joey to quit.
"Are you going to?" I asked.
"Are you kidding? Christ, no. The team means too much to me."
Or winning does, I thought.
By then, the week was over. Friday night had come around. Another game. One of the first-aid guys came down to the locker room, excited. "The bleachers are packed! A record crowd!" Sure, all the publicity. Everybody wanted to see the team with the voodoo statue.
At first, I thought Coach Hayes would leave it in the cabinet. Because of the controversy. But as soon as he started insulting us, I knew he didn't intend to break the routine. Looking back to that night, I wonder if he guessed that he wouldn't have many more chances to bring it out. He meant to take advantage of every one of them.
So he went to the cabinet. I held my breath as he unlocked it. The publicity made me self-conscious. Certainly all the talk about devil worship made me nervous about the double images I'd seen.
I watched as he opened the door.
His throat made a funny sound, and when he stepped to the side, I understood why.
"Where is it?" Joey blurted.
Several players gasped.
"Where's Mumbo Jumbo?" Joey's cleats scraped on the concrete floor as he stalked to the empty cabinet. "What happened to — ?"
Coach Hayes looked stunned. All at once his neck bulged. "Harcourt." His lips curled. He made the principal's name sound like a curse. "The school board must have told him — "
"But the cabinet was locked," someone said.
"The janitor could have opened it for him." Coach Hayes stomped across the room toward the door.
And suddenly stopped as if he'd realized something. "We've got a game to play. I can't chase after him while — " Turning, he stared at us. "Get out there and show them. I'll find the statue. You can bet on that."
So we went out, and maybe because we'd been spooked, the other team killed us. We couldn't do anything right. Fumbles, interceptions, major penalties. It must have been the worst game any team from City High ever played. The fans started hissing, booing. A man shouted, "Devil worship, my ass! These guys don't need a voodoo statue! They need a miracle!" The more we screwed up, the more we lost confidence and screwed up worse. I saw Rebecca wiping tears from her eyes and felt so humiliated I couldn't wait for the game to end so I could hide in the locker room.
Coach Hayes kept scurrying around, talking to the principal and anybody else he suspected, gesturing angrily. They shook their heads no. By the end of the game, he still hadn't found the statue.
***
We sat in the locker room, bitter, silent, when somebody knocked on the door.
I was closest.
"Open it," Coach Hayes said.
So I did.
And stared at Mumbo Jumbo on the floor. There wasn't anyone in the hall.
Black Evening Page 17