Hangman's Game

by Bill Syken

  “We have to get out of here,” he says, standing over me and tugging anxiously on my sleeve.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “I have a very urgent need,” he whispers. Then, in case his meaning is not clear, he adds, “I have to take a shit. Really bad.”

  “Just go inside,” I say. “The church must have a bathroom.”

  “It does,” he says. “It’s the locked door with the sign that says OUT OF ORDER.”

  “No Porta Pottys?”

  “No!” he says. “I looked everywhere.”

  Freddie pogoes gingerly from one foot to another. Denying him is not an option.

  Or is it? He wanted a great anecdote to tell.

  “Fine,” I say, and I stand up. “Let me just figure out where to put my plate…”

  Freddie snatches the plate from my hand and marches it to a nearby garbage barrel and dumps it, along with my food, and then continues urgently toward the car.

  I catch up to Freddie, whose strides are narrowing as he squeezes himself tight.

  Soon we are in the car and on our way.

  “Where are we going?” Freddie says. The sweat is beading on his forehead.

  “The gas station.” Which is a good seven minutes away, and Freddie does not seem confident he will last that long. “Unless you have any better ideas.”

  “How about one of these houses,” Freddie says, looking out the window. “Southerners are famous for their hospitality, right?”

  “Everyone’s at the funeral,” I say. “I don’t think we want to go door to door, hoping to find someone who’s home.”

  Freddie frowns.

  “I wonder if this is one of those small towns where everyone trusts everyone else, and so no one locks their doors?”

  I keep on driving. I have no interest in being part of a break-in, especially one with the most embarrassing motivation ever.

  We arrive at the gas station with Freddie about to squirm himself in half.

  “Can I have the men’s room key?” I ask our pal Elvis.

  He is watching a baseball game. Without taking his eyes off the television, he opens a desk drawer and begins feeling around inside. After about ten seconds of clatter—he would have found it in one second if he stopped watching the game—he fishes out a key, attached to a wooden ruler, and hands it to me.

  Freddie is stationed by the entrance to the bathroom, his feet crossed. I quickly walk over and hand him the key. He uncrosses his feet and takes a half step toward the restroom, then freezes.

  “Goddammit,” he says.

  “What?”

  “I’m stuck.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t move,” Freddie mutters through clenched teeth. Sweat is beading on his forehead. “If I take a step, I’m going to lose it.”

  Oh, hell. I grab the key from his hand and open the bathroom door for him. And what a bathroom it is. It looks more like a storage closet that happens to have a toilet and sink in it. The cement floor is foul and stained. Elvis should have been in here cleaning instead of watching the game.

  “You can do this, buddy,” I say to Freddie. I pace out the walk for him. “Three steps. Three steps and I’ll close the door behind you. You can do this.”

  “I can’t,” he says. He scrunches his face. “I won’t make it.”

  For lack of any better ideas, I place my hands on Freddie’s hips and lift him up—“Gentle, gentle!” he shouts—and deposit him in the bathroom. Then I close the door behind him.

  That should do it. Now all Freddie has to do is turn and drop his pants.…

  Then I heard a big whoosh and a splat. Like oatmeal shot out of a spray gun onto cement.

  “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

  Oh, Freddie. So close. So close.

  Elvis approaches, having been drawn outside by the shouting. He and I exchange uncomfortable glances.

  “If I was in the market for a clean pair of pants,” I say, “which way would I be headed?”

  Elvis’s face goes grim. “There’s a Walmart a few miles up the highway,” he mumbles.

  I go to the bathroom door.

  “Freddie, I’m going to head up the road, get you a change of clothes,” I call. “You just hang out.”

  “Oh, great,” Freddie says bitterly, as if I am the person responsible for this mess, rather than the one helping him out of it.

  A quick trip up the road and there I am, in a Walmart. It occurs to me this is the same Walmart where Samuel’s mother’s car broke down, and the thought of him pushing her Malibu that same distance I just drove, in the middle of summer, is now positively astounding.

  I grab the first pair of khakis I see, then a blue button-down shirt, and boxers. And some socks, and sandals, because I don’t want to guess on shoe size, and I return to the gas station. Freddie is still in the bathroom. I knock on the door and he opens it wide enough for me to hand him the bag of clothes.

  Elvis emerges from his office, hands on hips, glaring at me. I pull out my wallet and hand him $200.

  “For your trouble,” I say.

  He grabs quickly at the bills. “Thanks,” he says, surprised, folding my cash into his chest pocket. “If you’re going to pay like this, you can crap on the floor any time you like.”

  Now that is true hospitality.

  * * *

  I text Cordero to see where the rest of our crew is. They are still at the funeral, she says, and they are wondering where we are. I write that Freddie has “stomach troubles.”

  She texts back: Nice euphemism.

  Freddie emerges from the bathroom, looking about as bad as I have ever seen him—both spiritually and sartorially. My guesses on his clothes sizes were off, especially with the pants, which are so billowy he has to cinch them by hand at the waist. Instead of hiding his shame, my purchases are accentuating it.

  “If I ever hire a personal shopper,” he says, “don’t bother applying.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  My phone rings. It is Cordero.

  “Tanner’s clock has hit zero,” she says. “We’re headed to the airport.”

  “Okay,” I say. “We’ll meet you at the charter terminal.”

  I take the wheel for the drive back. Freddie slumps in the passenger seat and distracts himself with his iPhone.

  As we retrace our route back to the airport, I am frustrated. I talked to Kaylee Wise, but that has only served to close one avenue of suspicion. I never had a chance to speak to anyone else, to learn anything more about Samuel, all because Freddie had to stop for barbecue. This trip was a waste. I should never have let Freddie go into that restaurant.

  To make this car ride even more uncomfortable, the fecal odor has not been entirely left behind in the gas station bathroom. Freddie has thrown away his soiled clothes and washed himself as best he could. Still, the smell lingers.

  The thing about Freddie is, he wasn’t always like this. He would drink, of course, and get high, and every now and then he would dabble in the party drugs, and he always had women coming and going. But it never felt out of control. He didn’t used to have “incidents” like this one at the gas station. He wouldn’t have reacted so immaturely to a simple request from his father to attend a funeral in his place. It strikes me that Freddie, hopping continuously from one diversion to another, is as lost a soul as I’ve known.

  “Hey, listen to this tweet,” he says, holding his phone up to reading position. “Police source says charges against Carson ‘a matter of time.’”

  “Who tweeted it?”

  “A reporter,” he says. “Who is actually retweeting it from some other reporter, it looks like.”

  “Is there a story link?”

  “I don’t see one.”

  However muddied the sourcing, this is discouraging. It suggests that Rizotti has locked in on his target.

  Meanwhile, Rizotti didn’t bother to come to Samuel’s funeral. He is too busy running in the wrong direction. Not that I saw anything down here worth seeing. But
then, I really didn’t have a chance to look. I feel like I often do on the sidelines during games, watching bad throws and missed tackles, and wishing I could run out onto the field and make the damn plays myself.

  “So where are you going to get my ten million dollars?” Freddie says. “You better line up some seriously high-paying skills clinics. Maybe the sultan of Brunei wants to learn the coffin corner.”

  “If the police actually had evidence on Jai,” I say, “they would have arrested him already.”

  “Oh, it’s coming, Hangman, it’s coming,” he says.

  “Freddie, why do you seem happy about this? Jai plays for our team. Your team, actually. You kind of own it. Remember?”

  “Yeah, well,” Freddie answers sullenly, “who gives a fuck?”

  “About what?”

  “About any of it,” he says. He shoves himself upright in his seat. “You know, everywhere I go, all anyone gives a shit about is the goddamn Sentinels. Who you drafting? How’s the team look? Here’s all anyone needs to know: every year we put a bunch of guys out there and they play somebody else’s guys and somebody wins and somebody loses and the next year we do it all again. That’s it. It’s all a giant pile of bullshit.” Freddie picks something out of his teeth with his pinkie fingernail. I hope he washed those hands well. “And no one even cares who wins,” he continues. “No one. The players are just here to make money, and the fans are just pretending to care so they don’t have to think about their lives. It’s like this huge Ponzi scheme of caring, of people pretending that something is extremely important when we all know that it doesn’t matter one bit. I’d love it if the whole damn structure just collapsed. So if it turns out that Jai killed Samuel, and people have to think about that for a while, what kind of heads are underneath those helmets, what craven hearts beat underneath the uniforms they salivate at the sight of, maybe it would break the illusion, let everyone see what a big pile of crap it is they’ve been building their lives around.” He presses some buttons on his iPhone, toggling over from Twitter to a video game. I roll down the windows, but the heat only amplifies the odor.

  “There’s a shower on the plane, right?” I ask.

  “Yup,” he says.

  “Thank the lord.”

  “You said it.”

  * * *

  We arrive at the charter terminal ahead of Tanner’s party. Credit that to our head start, and my heavy foot, because I was not going to have an impatient Tanner waiting on me again. The terminal is a humble space with only a few banks of seats and a drugstore and a sandwich shop. Freddie and I take seats on the contoured plastic chairs.

  “Wanna see some pictures?” Freddie says, holding out his iPhone. “From the funeral. Pretty good stuff.”

  Before his bowels betrayed him, he had been collecting images of eye-catching characters. He has a few pictures of older women in ostentatious formal wear, complete with feathered hats and loud costume jewelry. He has a shot of a little boy in cornrows and a bright green tie. Then he shows me a sequence of pictures of a particularly rotund man: the first shot is a close-up of the back of his shaved head—specifically the collected rolls of fat, which look like a pack of hot dogs. Then come photos of the same guy as he turns around and smiles eagerly, his gold front tooth glinting in the sun.

  “I really just wanted the neck-roll shot,” Freddie says. “But the guy heard the click sound effect on the camera and turned around. For a second, I thought he was going to pop me, but it turned out he was happy to pose.”

  The poor guy had no idea he was a prop in Freddie’s condescension. Maybe he was better off not knowing.

  My hamstring, which had been quiet for the drive, is panging again.

  Before too long, a swift-moving Tanner leads his crew into the terminal.

  “Where the fuck did you disappear to?” Tanner snaps at me, with surprising anger.

  “Helping out Freddie,” I say. “He wasn’t feeling well.”

  Tanner glares at me for a moment and then says, “I need to buy some antacid. Wait right here.” He heads for the terminal store, while O’Dwyer, Cordero, and Udall, in uncomfortable silence, quietly register Freddie’s change of wardrobe, probably notice the smell, and try to act like everything is normal. No one, of course, says a disparaging word. Such are the privileges of ownership.

  “Wanna see my pictures from the reception?” Freddie says to Udall, changing a subject that wasn’t ever raised. “They’re kind of funny.”

  Udall takes the phone and thumbs through the pictures. “This is really unbelievable,” he says, shaking his head. He tilts the phone in my direction. “Do you know who this is?”

  He is showing me a photo of the neck-roll guy who posed for Freddie. “Should I?”

  “Not really,” Udall says. “But I scouted him. A couple years ago he was a quarterback. Now look at him.”

  A quarterback? I am not surprised to learn that Freddie’s objet d’art is a former player, but with his girth I would have guessed he was a nose tackle. “What the hell happened to him?” I ask.

  “Samuel happened to him,” Udall says. “He’s one of the infamous eleven. Samuel ruptured his spleen—in the last game of his senior season, too.”

  “Really?” I say. “What’s his name?”

  “Herrold McKoy,” Udall says.

  Herrold McKoy. I remember the name from that story that tried to track down the players Samuel had injured. McKoy was one of the two who couldn’t be found.

  “Was McKoy any good?”

  “As a college player he was actually outstanding,” Udall said. “He put up some huge stats, made big plays, won a bunch of games. But I didn’t see him as a prospect. His throwing motion was too long by half, and he took way too many chances. In the pros he would have been picked apart.” He shakes his head. “It’s funny,” he says. “I counted five of Samuel’s victims at the funeral today.”

  “Five? Who were the others?”

  He rattles off the names. The one that jumps out to me is Luke Reckherd—the other missing player from that story, the son of the great Wee Willie.

  “Which one was Reckherd?” I ask.

  “I bet you saw him, he was hard to miss,” Udall says. “Tall guy, white suit, shaved head. He was sitting and praying while everyone else was hitting the chow line.”

  So that’s who that was.

  “Didn’t he go to Langston?” I ask. Up in Maryland.

  “Yup,” Udall says. “Just like his dad.”

  “So he would have had to travel a ways to get here?”

  “I guess so,” Udall says. “If he’s still in Maryland.”

  That strikes me as odd. Kaylee hadn’t recognized Luke, which suggested he hadn’t visited Vickers during the time when she and Samuel were together. And Samuel spent nearly every night of his life up until a few weeks ago sleeping under his mother’s roof, so it was difficult to figure out how a relationship between he and Luke would have developed. There might be a simple explanation. Perhaps Luke and Samuel met in some setting that Kaylee wouldn’t have known the details of—a photo shoot for conference stars, or something like that. I wish I had had time to ask Luke about it, so I wouldn’t have to stand here and wonder.

  “Were people still hanging at the church when you took off?” I ask Udall. “I was told the funeral could last into the night.”

  “The reception was still going strong,” he says. “But Jerry wanted to leave. So we left.”

  Tanner returns from the airport shop holding a roll of Tums. “You all didn’t have to stand here and wait for me,” he says. “You could have been on the plane already. Let’s go! Time to move out.”

  Even if the funeral is supposed to go into the night, there is no guarantee Luke Reckherd and Herrold McKoy are still there. And there is a one-tenth-of-one-percent chance they would have anything useful to tell me. The easy choice for me is to climb into this private jet and go home. Tomorrow morning I could be at the team facility, having a trainer massage my panging hamstring.
r />   Still, I linger as the others cross the tarmac.

  “Gallow!” Tanner barks from midway up the plane’s steps. “Let’s go!”

  Freddie, O’Dwyer, and Cordero all turn their heads, looking back at me, waiting.

  “Actually,” I say, “you all go on ahead without me. I’ll get home on my own.”

  CHAPTER 14

  I RENT A car and begin the drive back to Vickers. As I traverse these flat and featureless roads for the second time today, I immediately begin to question my choice—not just about staying in Alabama, but also about expecting to learn anything of value from talking to Herrold McKoy or Luke Reckherd. My justification for staying is: it is a starting place. They are two among the many people I can talk to, to learn more about Samuel and his life, and what might have really happened the night of the shooting.

  Herrold and Luke and I also have something in common. Our quarterback careers ended with a hit. In my case, at least, it was a blow that indisputably changed my life.

  I was a junior at Hudson Valley State, and it was our season opener, and I was starting my first game after having sat on the bench as a freshman. We were playing on national television, on a Friday night, against a school from one of college football’s power conferences. We knew we were in for a beating—on the scoreboard, and physically. I had been making cracks around practice all week that the players should be getting a chunk of the athletic department’s paycheck for this game—$400,000, according to the school paper—given that we were the ones who were going to be bruised and broken the next week.

  Before the game our coach, Vernon Dorie, called me into his office. Dorie had coached at Hudson Valley State for thirty-two years after having played center there. The joke was that his parents dropped him off as a freshman and he never left. He was not what you would call a man of expansive interests, but he knew football, and how to handle young men.

  I sat in Dorie’s office, with its white cinder block walls, studying the Coach of the Year awards behind him—he had been winning them long enough that the certificates had gone from plain black-and-white lettering to color with hologram insignias. He was a potbellied man with thin black hair and age spots from decades of afternoon practices. He wore his authority lightly, but he was decisive in his pronouncements. If your effort at practice was sluggish, he would stand over you and, in a calm but firm voice, ask: You’re wasting my time, and even worse than that, you’re wasting yours. Why are you here, if you’re not giving your best? Seriously, why?