by Bill Syken
There were two injured quarterbacks the reporter could not immediately locate. One was Herrold McKoy, who played at Mobile State. Samuel ruptured McKoy’s spleen, and he needed to be rushed to the hospital for a life-saving operation. He recovered, but he never rejoined his team.
The other was Luke Reckherd, whose last name resonates with dedicated football fans. Luke is the son of Wee Willie Reckherd, who was a great college quarterback and even earned a couple of Heisman votes back in the seventies, despite having gone to a historically black college and standing only five foot nine. But what really distinguished Willie Reckherd was that he played quarterback ambidextrously—that is, he could throw equally well with his right and left hands. He played professionally, too, for Baltimore, though not as a quarterback. They switched him to receiver and punt returner. He performed respectably, but he was never the star he had been in college.
His boy Luke was a five-star quarterback prospect coming out of high school. At six foot five and 232 pounds, he had his choice of major college programs, but chose to attend his dad’s alma mater, Langston University. This landed him in the same conference of historically black colleges that included Samuel’s school, Western Alabama. Samuel broke Luke’s collarbone when Luke was a sophomore, and then tore his MCL when Luke was a senior.
After college Luke signed with a minor-league indoor football team, the Hartsburg Hyenas, but was cut after four games, and the Hyenas couldn’t provide the reporter with contact information. After that call, it was time to publish.
My takeaway from this story is that no one has any idea who shot Samuel and Cecil, or why.
* * *
Freddie’s bowling score drops to 151 in his next game, a sign that the tentacles of cannabis are entangling his mind. Afterward he takes a seat on the sofa—just a breather, he says. He closes his eyes, and soon he is wheezing a light snore. I shake him on the shoulder.
“Hey, buddy,” I say. “Maybe you should go up to bed.”
“Good idea,” Freddie says. His eyes flit open, and he pushes himself up with arms, just a couple of inches, before he drops back down into the softness of the sectional, defeated.
It is a little after eleven. I should go to sleep, too, but my mind is restless. I move Freddie’s laptop to the kitchen table and continue to noodle around on it. I don’t want to read about the murder anymore, so I look for some distraction. I am curious to see if Melody has a Facebook page. Maybe I can learn the identity of her mystery roommate.
It is then that I realize I do not know Melody’s last name. I search “Melody Stark’s,” but she does not turn up in any news stories, so that is a dead end. Then I think of soccer. Melody said that as a senior in high school she made it to the Class A state finals in New Hampshire. She is twenty-three now, so she would have been a senior in high school five or six years ago.
I go to New Hampshire’s high school athletics site, click around for a while and find the girls’ Class A soccer results for those years. I see no Melodys on the rosters. I find Camerons and Brittanys and Tiffanys aplenty, an Antigone and an Abigail and an Alice. But no Melody. I run the same check a year forward and a year back, but I still don’t find any Melody. Her story of athletic prowess suddenly looks as dubious as one of Jessica’s tall tales, such as the one about the U.S. Mint and the thousand-dollar bills. Except Jessica’s lies are just a passing amusement; she wasn’t trying to build herself up.
On a long shot, I search for “Melody Winking Oyster.” Nothing.
Then just “Winking Oyster Strip Club.”
The search doesn’t bring up the club’s page, as I expect, but it does direct me to a newspaper story: “Providence Strip Club Shut Down.” The story, from last summer, says that the Winking Oyster was closed by local law enforcement, and seven employees were arrested because the club had been serving as a base for drug and prostitution rings.
Melody neglected to mention any of this. I close my eyes and breathe deep.
The thing is, I often enjoy the company of people who indulge in what is forbidden to me. Freddie is a prime example. He is so spectacularly unmaximized. I will run into him at the end of a long practice, and he will tell me how he slept until one in the afternoon because he had been up late taking peyote and watching Japanese porn. Being friends with someone like Freddie reminds me that there is more to me than what I have been told to become.
I have to say, I got a similar kick when Melody told me about the network she had set up in the Philadelphia food service industry. Can I really argue to myself that it isn’t much of a leap from snaring free whoopie pies to selling whoopie?
I put the laptop to sleep. My capacity for rationalization is officially exhausted.
Perhaps Freddie has a point about my instincts with women.
Still hungry, I go to Freddie’s pantry. The lower shelves are crammed with cookies, crackers, potato chips, pretzels, jars of peanut butter, boxes of cereal, and flavor units for his SodaStream. The top shelves are lined with bottles of hard liquor, mostly Scotch and bourbon, but with enough gin and vodka to accommodate a guest’s preferences. I pull off a bottle of bourbon that is dimpled and shaped like a hand grenade.
The label announces in elaborate script that this is a bottle of Blanton’s Reserve. I know nothing about the brand, but I am sure it will do. I grab a glass and head outside to Freddie’s back deck. I sit at the poolside table, which has an umbrella protruding from the center. I close the umbrella and lash it tight and settle down for a drink.
I am on my third glass—though it’s hard to count precisely, because I am refilling before I hit bottom—when I think of my mother, and the way she reached under the table this morning to take Aaron’s hand.
All my life people have told me that I take after my father, and it’s an obvious analysis to make—because of the football, for starters, and also our competitiveness. But my mother can be competitive, too. After dinner we used to play hearts to see who would do the dishes, and it was almost always one of the boys who would have to attack the pile in the sink. When she left my dad, after years of having displayed nothing but contentment—to my brother and me, at least—it felt like she was shooting the moon one last time, swooping in unexpectedly for the win. If you can call it a win. But after all those years of apparent subservience when it came to setting the tone of our household, she turned it around with one deed, punctuated by her declaration: “I have a soul, too, you know.”
So do we all. I would bet the killer felt the same way, even after he had left a strapping twenty-one-year-old dead by the side of the road.
Samuel and my dad—two lives ending in the street like that. They say it takes three to make a trend, right?
I topped off my glass again, even as I observed, this is the problem with drinking. The drunker you get, the more you want to make all the details cohere into one story. As if my father’s car crash had anything to do with why someone killed Samuel.
“Long after tonight is all over, long after tonight is all gone…” The chorus of an Irma Thomas song from last night is stuck in my head. Oh, well. I could have worse earworms to live with.
Soon I have drained half the bottle of Blanton’s Reserve. I stand up, just to see if I can, and I am perfectly able. I think of the bourbon sloshing around in my belly. I need to rid my body of it as soon as possible, so it won’t drag on me tomorrow. I lift the bottle to my mouth and swig straight from it, with the goal of overloading my body’s systems.
I walk off Freddie’s deck and into the dunes, which is planted with clusters of reeds designed to prevent erosion. The planting is so dense that there is no good place for me to kneel, so I keep walking until I have crossed the dunes and I stumble down onto sand that is wet and soft enough to swallow my feet. The tide is higher than I expected. Blame it on the moon.
A wave climbs the shore and rushes in, soaking the bottom of my pants. I hike them up before they get too wet.
I take a couple of heavy steps toward the ocean and then I drop down to
all fours and tell myself that I need to do what I came here to do, and to do it quickly. I slide a finger into my mouth and press down on the back of my tongue, and this ignites the insurgence in my stomach. One heave, two heaves, a third, and then a fourth, as an ocean wave surges in and covers my calves and wrists with chilling water. My hands and knees sink into the wet sand as the wave washes back out, clearing away the vomit. Mostly.
I gather my will and rise to my feet before the next wave comes in. I wipe my mouth and then gasp the cool air. My insides feel wrung out, but quiet.
I turn, leave the water behind, cross the dunes, and walk across the deck, pulling off my dripping pants and flinging them over a deck chair to dry. Then I go into the house and I head up the stairs toward Freddie’s guest bedroom. I feel dead, but I keep climbing, one step and then another. Being pantless, I notice the definition in my quadriceps. My legs are the strongest part of me. I hear my dad’s voice: this is why you train.
CHAPTER 11
WHEN I FINALLY sleep, I am visited by a familiar anxiety dream: I am punting, and I miss the ball when I attempt to kick it. I’ve had this dream a hundred times. Other people dream about taking a test for which they are unprepared, and I have this.
The unease of the dream wakes me a little after six. The inside of my mouth is fetid, despite having brushed my teeth before I fell into bed. I raise myself up on my arms, and I feel surprisingly fresh, though a little dehydrated. Not that there are many other contenders, but forcing myself to throw up was the smartest thing I did last night.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed, stand up, and look out the window. The beach grass is flapping in the wind gusts. These are ugly conditions, but whenever I have this anxiety dream, my instant remedy is to go kick.
I have a practice ritual I’ve developed during my previous stays at the beach house. And fortunately, I have the necessary equipment in the trunk of my car—a bag of balls, and a shovel.
The tide is out and the beach is wide and empty, as it would be before seven on a chilly weekday morning in early June. At this point in the season the weather is still too iffy and the ocean too cold for discerning Philadelphians to have decamped to their summer homes full time.
I find a spot on the beach, drop my bag of balls, and begin digging. The shovel I am using is one I rescued from the garage when my father’s home was sold. It is old, with a wooden handle and a head of iron, and its heavy head plunges easily into the sand. Within a few minutes I have dug a hole five yards long, and one yard wide and deep—a little coffin corner. Then I walk fifty paces down the beach, pull the drawstring on the red mesh bag of balls, and roll them onto the sand.
Most kickers would hate practicing in the disruptive gusts that come off the ocean. But to me, the difficulty is the point. To nail a coffin corner kick in unpredictable winds is about as hard a thing as a punter can do.
My plan is to hit thirty-five punts, sinking as many as I can into the hole. I have tried this twice before; once I dropped two balls in the hole, the other time zero. But the success does not matter as much as the effort. My true goal is to make thirty-five solid contacts, and the elements can do with them what they will.
In each punt, I mimic my game routine as best I can. Even though no one is centering the ball to me, I get up on my toes, as if waiting to receive a wayward snap. I then call “Hike!”—out loud—and go into my motion as if a rush is coming. I have no timer clocking me, but at this point I would feel an extra tenth of a second as surely as Picasso would have known if he used too much blue.
My first kick, a low liner, amazingly goes in the hole. I imagine I might hit four into the hole today, maybe more. Maybe today is the day I sink all thirty-five.
But thirty-four kicks later, I have still only sunk one ball. Some of it is the wind—with a couple of kicks, the wind gusted just as I dropped the ball, and I considered it an accomplishment just to get my foot on it. But mostly, the problem is me. None of my kicks are horrible, but I can feel my micro-mistakes before the punts leave my foot. I watch the balls in flight as if am a lottery player, hoping a little luck can erase my errors.
When I punt, I inevitably hear my dad’s voice in my head. Punting has so few variables that all my mistakes are ones he has seen and tried to correct. Your first step is slow. You need to plant harder. Your line isn’t straight. I picture him watching me, bent over, hands on his knees, solid in his stance, emitting critiques with the regularity of homing beacon.
“Can you just shut up for once? I’m ten times the man you ever were.” That’s what I snapped at my dad one spring afternoon, when we were training and he was criticizing my punts with what was, in retrospect, nothing more than his normal severity. But that day, for whatever reason, I fired back, and wildly. I should have told him—if I was going to say anything at all—that I was ten times the athlete, but the word that came out was man. His answer to me, measured and unfazed: “Not today, bucko. Not even close.”
* * *
I come back to the house and Freddie is in the kitchen, still wearing his black kimono from last night. He is sitting at the kitchen table, head in his hands, fingers in his long hair, waiting for his coffee to brew. He is not normally up at this hour, even when he goes to bed relatively early, as he did last night. He is one of those people who can sleep for twelve hours at a time, whereas I count half that as a success.
“Did we really need that practice session today?” he asks sourly when he hears me enter. “Every time you kick the ball it sounds like someone is being shot.”
He says the word shot and I picture Samuel and Cecil, prone on the pavement.
“Sorry, buddy,” I say dryly. “Just being selfish, as usual.”
“Everybody is these days,” he says. “What the fuck is it with people?” He pushes his iPhone across the table to me. “Look at this.”
It is an e-mail from his dad.
Frederick, Everything is set with the family jet. Please be at the charter terminal at 9:30 am tomorrow. Arrange for a car service if you need to. Please express my regrets to the Saults that I couldn’t be there in person, and thank you again for representing the family. Love, father.
Freddie pouts balefully, his mouth hanging open. His blue eyes are bloodshot.
“Freddie,” I say. “Here’s a game that will cheer you up. While you drink your coffee, think of some things you can do today that you would enjoy. Then remember that you have the time and resources to do them all, and go do them.”
Freddie lifts his head. “Good point. Maybe I’ll get a massage today.”
“That’s the spirit. Regular massage, or the kind that’s illegal?”
“Illegal, of course,” Freddie says. “How else am I supposed to relax? And hey, did you see where I left my weed last night?”
“Your robe pocket, I think?”
He slides a hand down into the pocket of his kimono and he smiles.
On my drive home up the expressway, I wonder what I can do to calm myself down. I have to try something.
CHAPTER 12
I STAND IN front of a yellow brick town house on Seventh Street, just north of the bars and restaurants of South Street. This area will be much louder come nightfall, but in the daylight it is quiet and empty. The nametags on the buzzers of this building have been taped over many times, but the one I am looking for is crisp and white and neatly pressed on. Corina Aleksa, 3R.
I press her button, and I am admitted with a drone. Ms. Aleksa has made it here on time, which is encouraging. When I called the ad from the back of the alternative weekly in the Jefferson lobby, she told me in her Eastern European accent that she could see me in an hour and a half, at one o’clock—not because she was booked until then, but because she needed time to get to her office.
I walk up the narrow, creaking stairs of the town house, which looks like it had been a single-family home before it was cut up into smaller units, two per floor. I knock on 3R and the door is opened by a woman who is stunningly beautiful. She is about
twenty-five, and five ten, and slim. Her dirty blond hair hangs well below her shoulders and she wears a dark blue-and-green patterned sundress. She holds out a spindly arm to shake my hand.
“Welcome,” she says with a warm smile. “I am Corina.”
“I’m Nick,” I say. “Thank you for seeing me.”
“It will be my pleasure, I’m sure.” She radiates an inner serenity that I find assuring.
Her office is neatly kept. Her desk, facing the wall, has only a pad and a pen on it. Above the desk is a single shelf dense with books. On the opposite wall is a large black-and-white framed photo of a hummingbird in flight. I see nothing that would offend my sensibilities—no airy aphorisms purporting to explain, in one sentence, the mysteries of the mind.
At Corina’s invitation I sit on a wooden square-backed chair, and she shifts the chair at her desk to face me. Then I explain my situation. I attempt to be precise and clinical, but from the first description of the shooting, she reacts as if she is right there on the sidewalk, experiencing the horror with me.
“I read about this, of course,” she says, leaning forward, eyes wide with concern. “I am so sorry. How is your agent doing?”
“Looks like he’s going to be all right,” I say. Before I came here, I checked in with Vicki by text, and she said Cecil is healing well, and there are no signs of infection. The drainage tube is now out of the wound.
“Good,” she says, though her brow remains knit.
We stare at each other for a good five seconds. She seems to be studying my face and waiting to see if I might say more.