Hangman's Game

by Bill Syken

  This morning Cordero wears a crisp black business suit and has a tall cup of Wawa coffee on her desk. Her workspace is decorated with framed pictures of her curly-haired daughter, Ana, who Eleanor must have had when she was in college. She also has, hanging on the wall behind her, a crucifix that depicts Jesus as contorted and in violent pain; it is as if, when crucifix shopping, she asked the clerk for the one that showed Jesus in the greatest agony. Cordero is such a chipper and efficient young woman that the extreme and tortured icon leaves me wondering what lurks behind her ever-present smile. I had always liked her, but I also sensed that hers was not a territory to be entered lightly. She did not do much just for the fun of it.

  “I am so amazed that you are even here,” Cordero says as I take a seat across from her desk. “If I was in your place I would be running home to my mother.”

  Her comment reminds me that I don’t know for sure where my mother is.

  “Any news on Cecil?” I ask.

  “Serious but stable,” she says, and then adds, pained, “I’m so sorry, Nick. Cecil is the sweetest man. I remember the first time I met him, he was with your dad at a game. Those two just cared about you so much.”

  I muster up a smile. “Thank you, Eleanor. What can I do for you?”

  “You have about a thousand interview requests,” she says, with a look that is both apologetic and pleading.

  “The answer to all of them,” I say, “is no.”

  “I figured,” she says. “But I just wanted to let you know.”

  “Now I know.” I understand that players are required by contract to talk to the media and thus promote the league, but what happened last night doesn’t seem like it belongs in the sales brochure.

  “How about a statement for the cameras?” she asks, as if I might find this a reasonable compromise. “It could be short, I could even write it for you. You wouldn’t have to take any questions. Just a few quick words, to give them a little something and make them go away?”

  “I have a plan for making them go away,” I say. “Tell them to fuck off.”

  Cordero’s head pulls back as if she is dodging a face slap. I normally wouldn’t use such harsh language around her.

  “We should at least issue a written statement,” Cordero says cautiously. “You won’t have to do anything or talk to anyone except me. I’ll write it up and distribute it.”

  “Okay, let’s do that.”

  “Thank you so much, Nick,” she says, relieved. “I know this is the last thing you want to be dealing with now.”

  She clicks a few keys on her desktop computer and then signals to me that she is ready to take dictation.

  “What kind of statement does one make in a situation like this?” I ask.

  “How about I throw out some questions to get you started?”

  “Please.”

  “Are you sad?”

  “Sure.” And getting sadder. Three seconds in, and this process is as empty as I feared it might be.

  She begins typing, her long fingernails clacking at the keyboard.

  “Shocked?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Condolences to the families of all involved?”

  “Of course.”

  “Prayers?”

  “Not really.” I didn’t think false piety would help anyone right now.

  She paused.

  “Did Samuel say anything about how he is looking forward to being a Sentinel?”

  Lest we forget to push the product at a time like this. “Honestly, no.”

  Eleanor looks up, flummoxed.

  “Can we say that you were looking forward to having him on the Sentinels?”

  “Sure,” I allow. Especially since our defense could very well be fucked without him. Although perhaps that part is not for the release.

  “Do you have a sense of what sort of person he was? Kind, decent…?”

  “Both of those.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Honest. Actually, put honest first. And get rid of ‘kind.’ I don’t know about that, really.”

  Cordero checks my eyes as if to debate the matter, but then she lets it go. It’s not as if reporters will notice that the word “kind” is absent from the boilerplate.

  “Anything else you’d like to add?”

  I think for a moment. “Should I be saying anything about Jai?”

  Eleanor shakes her head. “Not now. We’re going to wait a little bit on him. Jai Carson is usually handled exclusively by Jim O’Dwyer, but this morning we put a crisis consultant on retainer, so I imagine anything we have to say about Jai will come from them.”

  “A crisis consultant? Whose idea was that?”

  “Arthur Gladstone himself,” Eleanor says, and that is interesting. Mr. Gladstone is notoriously hands-off with his Sentinels, but then he might be more comfortable managing a business problem than making a draft pick. “We all had a conference call at eight thirty, and their emissaries should be arriving from New York by one or so.”

  “Wow.” If they’ve brought in these consultants, they are expecting Jai to be arrested.

  “Yes. I have a couple very competent”—she holds up her crossed fingers as she says this—“junior staffers converting Conference Room B into an office for the consultants. I’ll be checking up on them after we’re done.”

  I nod as if I’ve ever been in Conference Room B. It must be the province of the team’s ever-growing business staff.

  “In that case,” I say, “I think we’ve pretty well said it all.”

  “Great, I’ll have a draft to show you in a half hour.” She quickly types a few words and then studies them on the screen. “Maybe sooner.”

  “No need, Ms. Cordero,” I say. “Just type it up and get it out there. It’s news. A nation awaits.”

  I walk up to the second floor, where the coaches have their offices. I don’t use these stairs often. I have never been up to visit Tanner, who defers heavily on special teams to our unit coach, Perry Huff, the one holdover from the previous coaching administration. Huff has an office up here, too, but he rarely calls me in. “My favorite thing about you, Gallow,” he once told me, “is that you don’t require too much attention. You’re like a cactus.”

  I approach the reception desk, where a heavyset woman about my mother’s age, with short dark hair and librarian glasses, sits focused on her computer screen, not looking up, even though the building is nearly empty.

  “Is Coach in?” I ask.

  “Since six A.M.,” she sighs.

  The poor woman. I don’t know her name, but I have heard the story—the first week Tanner was on the job, she complimented him on his haircut as he walked by her desk. Tanner paused, confused, before continuing to his office. A few moments later Tanner’s staff assistant came out and told the secretary, “Coach prefers that you not speak to him unless he speaks to you first. It breaks his train of thought.”

  Have I mentioned that I really don’t care for our coach?

  Tanner was a quarterback in his playing days. A backup quarterback, actually, for his entire eleven-year career. He spent two decades as an assistant before being hired here as head man. He is conventionally handsome, and he keeps himself meticulously arranged—clear blue eyes, brown hair always in place—and he spends an hour in the gym every day, making sure that when he is seen in side profile, his chest protrudes further than his belly. No love handles allowed. His physical appearance mirrors what he likes to project as a coach: a man in total control.

  Tanner is reading a printed report. His head snaps up when I knock on the door.

  “I really appreciate you coming in today, Nick,” he says. “Have a seat.”

  I settle into the chair across from him. He is wearing a gray Sentinels polo shirt, tight enough to show off his musculature. Tanner’s office also has a long black sofa, on which he reportedly sleeps at least a couple of nights a week during the season, rather than waste time traveling home to his wife and three daughters in the suburbs. On th
e left side of his desk is a monitor that is wired into all the coaching rooms and allows him to look in on meetings.

  But the ultimate reminder of Tanner’s authority is a tackboard on the side wall of his office, blanketed with eighty index cards. Each of those cards has on it a player’s name and uniform number. Over the summer he will cut the roster down to fifty-three, and twenty-seven of those cards will land in the circular metal trash can by his desk.

  He slides the report he was reading into a yellow folder and focuses his blue eyes on me. “You’ve had a hell of a night. How are you holding up?”

  “As best I can, Coach.” And my eyes fill with tears. All from a mundane expression of concern from an authority figure I don’t respect. I drag my hand across my cheek, trying to look like I am rubbing my eye out of exhaustion.

  “That’s all you can do at a time like this,” Tanner says, not seeming to notice. He rests his toned forearms on his desk. “It’s such a fucking shame about Samuel. I’ve never seen anyone like him. Great athlete. Great kid, too.”

  Tanner spent much of the spring studying Samuel in advance of the draft—interviewing not just him but his coaches and family members, and watching film of every snap Samuel played in college. And I’m sure the digging didn’t stop there. If you’re going to invest $64 million in a post-adolescent, you have investigators look into what coaches refer to as “character questions”—such as whether a prospect might have ever cheated on a test, or gone on a coke binge and strangled a hooker.

  “Do you have any idea why anyone would have wanted to kill Samuel?” I ask.

  “No idea,” Tanner says. “Samuel had the cleanest sheet I’ve ever seen. Lived with his parents. He dated only one girl, a friend of his sister’s. He was a nice, quiet kid, simple as that. He’s the last one of you guys I would expect to get a call about in the middle of the night.”

  There is a pause, as we both think of the player who is surely the first guy Tanner would expect to be woken up for.

  “Do you think Jai did this?” Tanner asks. I am guessing this question is the reason he called me in here.

  “I don’t think so,” I say. “Do you?”

  He leans back in his chair and sighs. Behind Tanner, outside the window, I see a young man I don’t recognize jogging from the practice fields into the building.

  “Who the hell knows with that dick-for-brains?” Tanner says, massaging his wrist. “I sure hope not, but I wouldn’t put anything past that guy. If we lose him too, we’re…”

  And then Tanner cuts himself off. The last thing he would do is allow himself to admit in front of a player that he thinks the team is screwed.

  I look at the yellow folder on the desk. It has the letters DES written on it in black marker—DE as in defensive end, which is Samuel’s position. Tanner is looking at scouting reports, already evaluating potential replacements, less than twelve hours after the twenty-one-year-old’s body was zipped into a bag.

  “Why don’t you go home and rest,” Tanner says.

  My eyes drift over to the tackboard with the index cards and seek the one marked 11 GALLOW. My card is toward the bottom. Immediately underneath it is a fresh card marked 10 TOLLEY. My newly signed camp competition.

  “I’m going to go downstairs and get some work in,” I blurt out, though this had not been my plan at all. “Since I’m here, you know.” And now that I have said it, I have to do it. I like to keep my word that way.

  “Good for you,” Tanner says slowly, eyebrows raised. “Good for you. Keep your mind on the business at hand. That’s the message we’re going to need to send to everyone. That would be a great example.”

  And he picks up the folder and goes back to reading his scouting reports.

  I leave Tanner’s office and pause halfway down the hallway. Just thinking about how I teared up in Tanner’s office, I begin to do so again. I blame it on the sleep deprivation. It’s all of a piece with my cursing at Cordero. I’ve read that even one restless night causes a noticeable degradation in brain functions.

  I collect myself in the empty hallway, dry my eyes, and then I go around the bend and peek into Huff’s office, hoping to find my unit coach. He isn’t there, but I see that his computer is on and his knapsack is in the corner, so he has to be around somewhere.

  I head downstairs to the locker room to change into my gear. As I go, I talk myself into being okay with practicing now. I did need to kick at least a couple of more times between now and my minicamp face-off with Woodward Tolley. I suspect I won’t feel like driving back here tomorrow, so I might as well go ahead and knock out a session now.

  I enter our capacious locker room, with its lush gray carpet and wide wooden stalls for each player. In the middle of the carpet is the team logo of a vigilant-looking man in a colonial tricorner hat. I see Huff in the far corner, near my stall, talking to the same young man I saw running in from the practice fields.

  “Hey, Gallow, how you doing, buddy?” This is Jacque Newton, the team’s fullback, calling at me from his stall to the left of the locker room entrance. Jacque, along with Huff and the young man, are the only people here on what is scheduled as off-time for players. Jacque is wearing on his knee a heavy black brace—he is still healing after tearing his ACL last October. I imagine he is here for a rehab session with a team trainer.

  “How is your agent?” Jacque asks.

  “Out of surgery, I’m told.”

  He shakes his head sympathetically. “He’s going to make it, I know he is.”

  “I hope you’re right,” I say, though of course Jacque couldn’t know anything.

  “Do they have any idea who did it?” he asks. “Did you see anything?”

  “It all happened very fast,” I say, shrugging. “I wasn’t much help to the police, I’m afraid.” In short, I didn’t rat anyone out.

  “This team is cursed, man,” Jacque says, shaking his head. “After a while it’s like, what’s the next thing that’s going to happen around here?”

  I shake my head, too.

  “How’s your knee doing?” I ask. “You going to be ready for next week?” I steal a glance toward Huff, who I don’t want to miss, but he is still in the corner, talking to that young man.

  “I hope so,” Jacque says. “I’ve been targeting this minicamp as my comeback date.” As well he should have. The Sentinels drafted a fullback in the seventh round, and teams rarely keep two of at that position.

  “Good luck,” I say.

  “Good luck to you, too.”

  Huff is now limping across the locker room to greet me. He is African American, in his late fifties, with short salt-and-pepper hair. He is a former linebacker, and his souvenirs from his playing days include an artificial hip, false front teeth, and two crooked fingers. He wears these disfigurements as proud signifiers of a kamikaze abandon, the kind he wants to instill in his players.

  “You should be at home, Nick,” he says. Then he hugs me. In five years together we have never hugged. “How are you doing?”

  “I’ve been better,” I say.

  I hang my head, fighting to stay composed. Huff looks away.

  “Stay strong, Gallow,” Huff says, squeezing my shoulder. “You’ll get through this, I know it.”

  And then Huff leaves. His abruptness is surprising, and bracing. I turn and watch him limp off.

  When I reach my stall, still dazed by this brush-off, the young man to whom Huff had been talking is staring up at me. He sits on a stool a couple of stalls down, in an unmarked space traditionally used by the most transient players. He is wearing only gray underpants and one sock that he has just pulled on, and his dark hair is still damp from the shower. He looks as if he wants to speak to me.

  I glance at his leg muscles, and I know right away. Huff only had a few seconds for me, but he had plenty of time for this young man who has come to take my job.

  For here is Woodward Tolley. Hunter, meet hunted.

  “Hello,” I say evenly. “I’m Nick Gallow.”

 
; “Hi, I’m Woodward Tolley,” he says, standing up quickly. His brown eyes are aglow, but he strains to maintain a respectful somberness, as befitting the morning news. His lean and gangly frame carries some muscle, but he still has plenty of filling out to do; I would guess that he only began working out with professional seriousness in the past year.

  But even in his immature state, Woodward has a competitive advantage over me. Woodward will play for the rookie minimum, which is about a third of my $970,000 salary. Plus, I’ll be due a roster bonus of $350,000 if I am with the Sentinels for the first day of full training camp in late July. I thought the idea of the bonus sounded cool when I signed my contract, but as its date of payment approaches, I now see it as a reason for the team to get rid of me. I suspect the front-office folks see it that way, too.

  “Welcome to the Sentinels, Woodward,” I say. We shake hands, firmly. Very firmly.

  “Thank you, Mr. Gallow,” he says. “How are you doing? How is your agent?”

  “I’m okay,” I say. “Cecil made it out of surgery. And please, call me Nick.”

  “That’s great, Nick,” he says, hands on his hips. “I’ll be praying for the best.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I know it’s a strange time, but I just have to say, ever since they signed me, I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. I am such a big fan of yours. I mean, that hit on Dez Wheeler last year, that is just about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen a punter do.”