This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
©2011 Sterling Watson
ISBN-13: 978-1-936070-98-5
eISBN: 978-1-617750-64-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010939102
All rights reserved
First printing
Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
[email protected]
www.akashicbooks.com
This book is dedicated to my students.
I hope they have learned as much from me as I have from them.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgments
Part I: August Summer Practice
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
Part II: September
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
Part III: September
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
Part IV: October
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
Part V: November
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
FORTY-TWO
FORTY-THREE
FORTY-FOUR
FORTY-FIVE
FORTY-SIX
FORTY-SEVEN
Acknowledgments
My thanks to the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, two serene places visited by the muse. Also to Jamie Gill, Helene Gold, and David Henderson for library research, and to Bob Fortosis and the incomparable John Feiber for guidance through the thickets and hard pathways of athletic administration and high school football. My thanks to Peter Frederick for help with the ancients; to Tom Bernardo, Jay Nicorvo, and Dean Jollay for generous and insightful criticism; and to Johnny Temple and all the wonderful folks at Akashic Books for the best trip I have ever had to publication. And, as always, a loving thank you to Kathy, the best reader of all.
PART I
AUGUST
SUMMER PRACTICE
THE AGOGE
In ancient Sparta, the agoge was the method by which male children were raised. After the age of seven, boys were removed from their families to live in herds. The agoge was intended to weaken family ties and strengthen individual identity. All adults were responsible for the actions of all children. Older boys supervised younger ones, teaching them to read and write and to devote most of their time to physical training and music.
When boys passed the agoge, they were voted into a mess, a group of fifteen men of all ages who ate and fought together throughout their lives. If a boy was not voted into a mess, he could not become a citizen.
ONE
Oleander, Florida, 1964
The huddle broke. Heaving, staggering boys, too tired for the touch of fists at the center of their ragged circle, scattered to their positions. Billy Dyer trotted to the slot between right tackle and split end. He rested scraped palms on thigh pads so hot they scabbed the blood that oozed from a ripped thumbnail. He set his feet at shoulder width and leaned to measure the daylight between his face and the tackle’s right heel. Ted Street, the quarterback, stepped into Billy’s vision of hot white space and socketed his hands between the center’s legs. He glanced left and right at the lines of cocked bodies, boys made into bombs about to go off. Street looked at Billy Dyer, seeing him first as one of twelve verses in a violent song, then seeing him differently. Street’s eyes told Billy the ball was coming to him.
Billy looked downfield, measuring the eight yards he would sprint before cutting left at a forty-five-degree angle between the cornerback and the linebacker. His calculations clear, he drew a deep breath of molten August air and stared off at the horizon. The haze. This time of year it hung above the city, smelling of orange peels burning at the juice plant east of town. Billy moved his gaze from the shimmering yellow sky and felt a moment of dizziness, of cold under the hot breastplate of his shoulder pads. His legs threatened to turn to water under him, so he did what the coaches told him to do. Shake it off! Shake it off, boy! Billy Dyer shook his head, sucked another chestful of scalding air through the cage of his helmet, and heard Ted Street call the snap count, “Hut! Hut-hut! Hut!” And everything was motion.
The hard, metallic slap of the football into Ted Street’s hands. The inches of daylight between the lines violently ripped away, helmets striking with sharp reports, shoulder and thigh pads clashing with a deeper, more living sound, like slabs of meat colliding, and all of this to the song of the gasping, groaning, grunting throats of exhausted, straining boys. Billy Dyer loved these boys and what they did more than anything else in the world.
Billy counted eight yards in strides he would bet against any yardstick and faked the cornerback outside, leaving the boy stumbling and cursing. Then, knowing he had wasted precious time on the fake to make the coaches notice, he cut inside, watching Charlie Rentz, the linebacker, change smoothly from high-kneed backpedaling to a sprint toward him. Billy glanced back at the scrimmage just as Ted Street disappeared into a collapsing pocket, taken down with a sickening smack by a fleet cornerback slicing in on a red dog. And then in the middle distance he saw it, rising and falling in the yellow haze, bouncing with each of his strides, a brown oval spiraling perfectly. He and the ball would converge somewhere in a terrain of danger. His only duty was to watch it, never them.
He sprinted on, feeling the cold at his chest which was, he knew, an early warning of heat stroke. And now the first urging of fear in his belly. The voice of fear said, Stop running. It told his hands to protect his belly, his thighs to drop him to earth before the hit came. But Billy begged his failing strength for one last long leap, dug his left foot into the churned sand of the practice field, and lanced into the air, right arm leading for a one-handed catch. He took the spinning nose of the ball in his palm, killed the spin with twisting fingers, teased and begged the ball back to him. His body still rising, he cradled the hot leather into his right armpit and covered it with his left hand.
CRACK!
The hot yellow sky shrank to a black dot in Billy’s eyes, then groaned wide again.
Head Coach Prosser was standing between the two formations, lecturing the offensive line. “Keep your feet under you! Keep ’em wide! Move your man to the outside! OUTSIDE!”
Billy had lost time. He pushed himself up and let go of the ball. He had gone to sleep for thirty seconds, maybe a minute. To his right, the defensive backs chewed their mouth guards and waited for him to leave their turf. Their faces, shadowed inside helmets, were striped with a weird war paint, gray dust streaked white by sweat. Charlie Rentz watched Billy with nothing in his eyes, neither challenge nor concern. Billy gave back the same empty gaze, then let himself look at Coach Prosser, hoping for a good word. He wanted Prosser to say, N
ice catch, son, or Way to take a lick, bud, but he didn’t expect it. Prosser was sizing him up. Maybe thinking of playing him this fall ahead of Sim Sizemore, the senior who never would have made that catch, who would have folded like a yellow flower at the sound of Charlie Rentz’s cleats cutting the ground.
Prosser called to the sideline, “Sizemore, get in here.”
Clean and fresh, Sim Sizemore trotted onto the field. He didn’t look at Billy.
On his way to the bench, Billy passed Mr. Leone, the math teacher and line coach, olive-skinned, hawk-nosed, and serious, and Mr. Rolt, the drivers ed teacher. Leone was all right, an army vet who had played pulling guard at Syracuse, but all the guys called Rolt a phony.
Rolt said to the hot yellow sky above the field, “You all right, son? We don’t want your mommer saying we didn’t take care of you out here.” He said it quietly so that no one in the bleachers would hear.
There was always a sneer in Rolt’s mouth, even when he said something kind. He was a fat jock-sniffer who had never played football, but he knew what coaches knew: They were making boys into men their own way. They wanted no tales told about what happened on this field.
Billy smiled at the pain inside his helmet. Fuck you, he said to the pain. To Rolt, he said, “Yes sir, Coach Rolt. I’m all right.”
Billy fell to his knees at a tub of lemonade. Oak leaves, fruit flies, and a single cockroach floated on the yellow surface. He sank his face into the cold, drank what he craved, then lifted his head with a growling gasp. He wiped his mouth on his forearm and stole a glance at the bleachers.
This Friday-morning scrimmage was the last chance for some boys to make the team and for others to secure starting positions. A small crowd had turned out, braving the blazing August sun. Men in white shirts and ties with black or gray suit coats folded across their laps sat at the top of the bleachers; with them, Doc Runkle, the team physician. Further down, students clustered by clan—jocks or fans. The jocks were baseball players, track men, and basketball players. They watched with a detached professional interest. The fans were girlfriends of boys on the field, student government, and cheerleaders who had just finished their own practice in the gym. Billy searched for his father in the small crowd, did not see him. Then, before his eyes swung back to the field, he noticed a girl. She was watching him. Not the scrimmage, but him. Billy Dyer. Dressed in black, she sat by herself, and now, sure that he had seen her, she lifted a pale, languid hand from the book in her lap and waved to him. He did not wave back—it was forbidden. He smiled in the dark cage of his helmet and turned back to the field.
Ted Street broke the huddle, and Sim Sizemore trotted to the gap between tackle and split end. The position Billy wanted. Sim Sizemore was tall, lean, fast, and so handsome the sophomore girls blushed and whispered when he passed them in the hallways. They called him Dreamboat. Ted Street, cool, aloof, with the hooded gray eyes of a thug, from a family of grove workers who lived in a trailer park south of town, was a different dream. Sizemore looked timid taking Billy’s place in the formation, lost inside that gift of a body, at least Billy thought so. He was taller and faster than Billy, but cutting across the middle where linebackers hurtled like trucks, his body begged for safety. The boys talked about him. They called his pass routes Chicken Shit Right and Chicken Shit Left. Billy wondered why the coaches couldn’t see it.
“Hut! Hut! Hut!”
The ball slapped Ted Street’s hands, and Sim Sizemore’s cleats sprayed earth as he cut across the middle too fast to bother faking, caught Street’s perfect strike on his number 19, and turned upfield. Chris Meeks, the free safety, arrived a step too late with a flying miss at Sim’s chopping feet. Sizemore sprinted to the end zone, spiked the ball, then turned and shook his fists at the yellow heavens. The crowd in the bleachers yelled, “Go Spartans!” A businessman at the top shouted, “Atta boy, Sim!” A sub near Billy muttered, “Fucking hot dog.”
Sim Sizemore trotted back to the huddle and paused before leaning into the circle that Billy longed to join. Sim looked over at the bench, pushed back his helmet, drew a finger across his forehead, and flicked sweat at Billy Dyer.
A tall man in a white shirt and black suit trousers stood up, stretched, and groaned, looking behind him at a bleached pine plank. “On these boards, my ole ass bones are pushing right through the flesh.”
Another man, not as tall, on the far side of handsome, with blond hair fading to white, smiled and said, “Like the bench you used to ride, eh, Blake?”
The tall man slapped the seat of his trousers twice. “I had my time on the field. What’d you do after you quit football, Cam, play tennis? Some sissy thing like that?”
Cameron Sizemore’s cheeks colored. “It was cross-country, Blake. I ran cross-country… after I got hurt. They called us harriers, God knows why. I didn’t think your ass was so sensitive.”
“This ole ass has spent more time on a horse, pushing beef cattle, than yours has in a swivel chair. So don’t be making fun of my ass.”
The two men stood together watching the field and the brief celebration that followed Sim Sizemore’s catch and run. “The team looks good, don’t you think?” Cam Sizemore asked.
Blake Rainey smiled and stretched his long neck in the sunlight. “Say what you mean, Cam. You mean your boy Sim looks good, don’t you?”
“I meant what I said. It could be a good year. A very good year.”
“I have to agree,” said Rainey. “You think Billy Dyer can give your Sim a run for the starting position?”
“Billy can play,” Cam replied, “but he can’t run with Sim. Nobody out there can.”
“I suppose you’re right about that, Cam. But Billy can hit. He can stick. And it seems to my powers of observation that your boy Sim don’t like to hit. He don’t like contact. And we both know you can’t play football without the love of violence.”
“Speed beats brute force any day.”
“Maybe it does… among the harriers,” said Blake Rainey. “We’ll see. We surely will.”
TWO
Billy sat on the bench with a dozen boys in sweat-sodden uniforms weighted with mud, steam rising from their shoulders. The offense was running sweeps, and Joey Olsen, a scrub fullback, was getting his last chance to make the team. Olsen was small, slow, and clumsy. His assignment was to lead Tommy Bierstadt, a fast, tough tailback, around end, throw his hundred and thirty pounds at Charlie Rentz, and free Bierstadt into the secondary. Olsen only confused Bierstadt, and Rentz was making a meal of him with forearms to the throat and a vicious spearing helmet that threw him like chaff under Bierstadt’s churning cleats. As Billy and the other subs looked on, Rentz plowed Joey Olsen, threw Bierstadt for a loss, and casually stepped on the back of Olsen’s hand as the boy tried to get up. Olsen shrieked, hopped from one foot to the other, cradling his hand to his chest. Rentz walked back to him and apologized elaborately, grinning inside the cage of his helmet. Behind Billy, one of the businessmen shouted, “Man up, Joey!”
Coach Rolt walked to the sideline. “How you doing, Dyer? That empty head of yours ready to take a lick?”
Through the cottony phlegm in his throat and the cold dizziness that had not abated in twenty minutes of rest, Billy answered, “Yes sir, Coach Rolt.”
Coach Prosser slapped his clipboard against his thigh. Without looking at Billy, he said, “Get in there and give Sizemore a rest.”
Sim Sizemore trotted insolently toward the sideline, his knees rising too high, forearms swaying, wrists angled downward in a way that Billy thought girlish. As he passed, cocking his helmet onto the crown of his head and breathing steam at the low, hazy sky, he muttered, “Give ’em hell, Billy boy.”
For a half hour they ran sweeps, draws, and off-tackle slants. It was a long, grinding thing, with no rest except the getting up, dusting off, and trotting back to the huddle. Billy’s job was to block linebackers and cornerbacks. He was a better blocker than Sim Sizemore. He loved the wild, fearful moment when you pulled everything you
had into the point of your helmet or the length of your rib cage and threw it at the other man. Billy made a game of grading his blocks good, fair, or poor. Sometimes he looked over at the sideline. Sim Sizemore stood there among the subs and scrubs, his helmet under his arm, the patches of muddy sweat on his jersey drying, getting smaller. Billy measured his success by the size of those patches. The wetter he got and the drier Sim Sizemore, the better Billy’s chances of starting in September.
When the noon whistle blew at the Honey Bear Orange Juice plant, Billy had graded twenty blocks good, five fair, and three poor. Charlie Rentz, who had taken Billy’s efforts at his knees and shins, hated the performance. Billy’s head burned with pain from Rentz’s knees and shoulders. It gave him strange cold spells and brief episodes of pipeline vision wrapped in warped, melting shapes.
The play was a sweep to the opposite sideline, and Billy could steal some rest. At the snap, he fired out, then drifted toward the spot where Rentz battered Joey Olsen. After the whistle, Olsen staggered dazed in the no-man’s-land between the reforming lines. Charlie Rentz shoved him to the ground, muttered, “Get out of my world, Olsen. You don’t belong here.”
Billy stood in front of Rentz. “Leave him alone, Charlie. After the whistle, leave him alone.” When he thought his words got through, he turned away.
Something hit the side of his helmet just above the earhole. He dropped and took another scything forearm on his face-guard with a shock that snapped his head against the yoke of his shoulder pads. Rentz came at him so lost in rage that he flailed bare fists at Billy’s armored head. Billy took the blows on his forearms and shoulders. Rentz grunted with each swing, “God! Damn! Pussy! Trash!”
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