by Bill Syken
“This is going to be a tough one tonight, Gallow,” he said gravely from across his desk. “Ten minutes into this game we could be losing by three touchdowns.”
“We won’t be,” I said. His eyelids lowered with my answer.
“I’ve heard the jokes you’ve been making around practice, Nick,” he said dispassionately. “Jokes have their place. But in the game tonight I want to see you lead. On every play, no matter what the score. I want to see you getting guys in the huddle, making sure they’re lined up right, keeping everyone on task. You do that, and no matter what the final score is, I’ll know I have my quarterback for the rest of the year.”
For the rest of the year. Which implied that if I failed, he would give the ball to the next man in line. We had a freshman quarterback named Travon Turner, a kid from the Bronx who could run like a track star and sling it through a brick wall. Dorie historically did not play freshmen, but he was letting me know that if I gave him reason to, he would.
Cut to late in the fourth quarter. We were on the road, and playing in a stadium that held about eighty thousand people—as opposed to our home field, which accommodated less than a third that. And we were losing 53–0. We hadn’t scored a touchdown, and I had twice been tackled for safeties. The stands, nearly full at the beginning of the game, were now half vacant. Many of those who remained were heckling to keep themselves entertained. And the stadium was empty enough that I could hear each lame taunt.
Hey, Gallow, I can see your vagina from here.
But I was doing what Coach demanded of me, rising above circumstance and situation. I was relentless in my command, even if that relentlessness had gotten us nowhere. With time for one drive remaining, I was determined to take our guys to the end zone. I strung together a few medium-length completions and first-down runs, and we had the ball down to the twenty-one-yard line with six seconds left in the game. We had no timeouts. I had one more chance.
I took the snap from the shotgun position and I looked to the right, where a flanker was running a corner route, but the defense had him bracketed. Then I looked to the tight end over the middle, but he was sandwiched between a linebacker and a safety. Another flanker was crossing underneath toward the left sideline—which was the wrong route. That wasn’t the pattern I gave him. He was open, but if I threw to him, he would be tackled short of the goal. Dipshit.
But I saw that the tight end had gone to his secondary route, and he was breaking open along the back of the end zone and …
That’s when it all went dark.
I know, only from having seen the film, what happened. A freshman linebacker, excited to be making his first sack, launched himself, and his helmet slammed me underneath my jaw. My head snapped back. I was unconscious before I hit the ground. I lay on the field for a good five minutes while the stadium emptied, the game over. When I eventually came to, I could not identify the man standing over me, who turned out to be Coach Dorie.
I stayed in the hospital for three agonizing days. Because of the concussion, any light felt like a high beam shining in my face. I had no energy at all. What solid food I ate that first day I vomited right back up. I felt like a newborn, unsuited to a harsh new world.
My parents, then divorced just a few months, couldn’t be in the same room together, so they divided up my visiting hours. My mother would come first, and she would sit by my bed and tearfully plead for me to quit football. Then my dad would take his turn and act as if my condition was no more serious than a paper cut. On his second visit, he brought me a squeeze ball so I could exercise from my bed.
When I left the hospital, I returned to practice right away. In fact I returned too quickly, not wanting to cede my starter’s role for even a week. I vomited in the locker room beforehand and tried to pass it off as nerves, but during warm-ups, when the trainer saw me shielding my eyes despite overcast weather, he pulled me from practice. After that Coach Dorie told me that he didn’t want to see me near the field until I was fully healed, and he assured me that no one in his program lost his spot because of an injury.
But Travon Turner took over at quarterback, and the kid played great. Before long people were all abuzz about “The Bronx Bomber.” Within a couple of weeks the lights didn’t bother me, I could inhale chicken burritos without upchucking, and my thoughts were running clear as a high mountain stream. I was acing my human origins 101 midterm and I could read The Crying of Lot 49 and recognize that it was Thomas Pynchon, and not my brain, who had scrambled the letters in the word potsage. But no display of mental acuity mattered. The team won eight of the ten games Turner started, and Hudson Valley made the post-season for the first time in four years, and I was done.
I sat on the bench my junior year, watching Turner light up the scoreboard from the sidelines while my college eligibility faded away.
Then during winter break my dad and I were at the house—my mother left it for him to haunt—and we were eating turkey chili and watching some forgettable college bowl game on television when he asked me, “How badly do you want to get back on the field?” He said this casually, not taking his eyes off the TV set. But his proposal clearly had some thought behind it.
My dad’s plan was that I convert from quarterback to punter. I would come to spring practice and win the job from our regular punter, who seemed to botch at least one kick every game. On weekends I would make the hour-long drive home from college and spend my Sundays drilling with my dad at my old high school stadium.
The transformation was not a pleasurable one. Punting drills can be insultingly mundane, especially when you have been a quarterback and your job requires understanding what every player on offense and defense will be doing on every play. The first session with my dad I spent an hour doing nothing but drop the ball repeatedly to the ground, without ever kicking it.
During our long training sessions I sometimes wondered about my dad’s motivations. He had not dated anyone since my mother left, and he never would. The one guaranteed result of his plan was that he and I would spend every weekend together. I thought that might be the point as much as getting me back on the field.
One day our practice was particularly trying. It was spring break and most of my teammates had gone to Cancun. But with spring practice not far off, I decided to spend the entire week training in Waverly.
It was maybe forty-two degrees out that day, and there was a light rain. We were doing an accuracy drill. I lined up on the sideline while my dad positioned himself thirty yards down field and told me to kick the ball directly to him.
We had done this before and it had gone fine, but that day I just couldn’t place the ball in his hands. First my kicks were going off to the left. Then I overcompensated, and everything went right. If I hit one good punt, the next time I would chunk a low-liner. The goal had been for me to hit five good kicks in a row, but after a while my dad lowered the mark to three. Still, it was too much.
Finally I hit two in a row straight to my dad. “Okay, this is it, Nicky,” he said, clapping his hands and then sniffling. “Nail this one and we can go home.” I took my step-step-step, dropped the ball and shanked it colossally to the right. The ball hammered the metal bleachers with a mordant clang.
The echo seemed to reverberate for an unusually long time. Instead of picking up another ball, I walked forward to my dad.
“I think I’m getting sick,” I said. “Can we go home?”
“No,” he said, immediately and without hesitation, even though his eyes betrayed weariness.
“But if I’m sick…”
“Not until you get it right. Go back to your spot.”
“Maybe this isn’t the best idea,” I said. “Me becoming a punter.”
We stood silent, eyes locked, as those words hung in the air longer than any ball I would ever kick. Because we both knew their import. If I wasn’t punting, my football career was done. And we had been building my football career ever since I could grip a Nerf. It was what we did together.
My dad was
not the tallest or the stoutest man, but he was wiry and had outstanding posture. He entered a room chest- and chin-first. With his narrow eyes, thin eyebrows, and pointed nose coming at you, you looked down expecting his fists to be balled. Every morning he would begin the day with push-ups, sit-ups, knee bends, and jumping jacks by the side of the bed.
Perhaps it wasn’t the biggest surprise that my mother needed to get out of the house.
My dad came to me and pulled back the hood on his yellow rain slicker. I was a good six inches taller than him. His thin gray hair was matted down, his skin was raw, and he was looking older than I had ever seen him. He sniffled deeply before speaking.
“You wish you were with your friends down in Mexico, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do.” That afternoon I had received a picture from Cancun showing our team’s tight end judging a hot legs contest; the woman in the photo was allowing him to conduct an investigation that went to the highest levels of her government.
“You think those guys are having the time of their life, and you’re missing out.”
“Yes,” I say.
“You still don’t get it, after all these years,” my dad said, more sad than disgusted. “If you quit tonight, it will be the biggest mistake of your life. You’ll look back ten, twenty, thirty years from now, and you’ll wish you could come back here to this moment and keep on working. I know it. I absolutely know it.”
He sniffled again, and turned to the empty stands, as if he was looking for someone he expected to be sitting there. “But it’s up to you, kiddo.” He folded his arms, trying to warm himself. “You’re twenty-one years old, you’re not mine anymore. The choice is yours. And if you really want to quit, you’ll never hear me say another word about it. You’ll still be my boy.”
I stayed. And my dad’s plan worked, better than he imagined. I won the punting job that spring, I worked even harder that summer, and I went out as a senior and I made All-Conference. Among the people who noticed was Cecil Wilson. He put together a DVD highlight reel and sent it to every personnel man in the league, and one of them actually invited me to camp. That chance turned out to be all I needed. I went to Philadelphia and I killed it.
I still remember when Coach Huff called me into his office and told me I had made the Sentinels. My expectations coming into camp had been low. The team’s incumbent punter, Cory Veal, had been in the league eleven years. I was sure Huff was calling me in to cut me. But he said, “Congratulations, Nick, you’re a Sentinel. Don’t let me down.”
After I gushed the appropriate thanks, I went out to my car, still in my uniform, away from the locker room where several freshly cut players were packing away their possessions into garbage bags, and I called my dad. My hand was shaking so much, I had to prop my elbow against the car door to keep the phone steady as I told him I had made the team. I was a pro. “I knew it!” my dad said, his voice rising. “I knew they’d have to keep you! You gave them no choice. You’re too damn good.”
He went on and on, nearly babbling. We both recognized the grand joke of it all. If I hadn’t been concussed, if I hadn’t lost my quarterbacking job, if I had never become a punter, I wouldn’t be a Sentinel. It’s the rare quarterback who goes from a small school like Hudson Valley State to the pros. But we punters perform our tasks in relative isolation, which means the level of competition we faced in college doesn’t matter. We can come from any damn place.
My dad and I talked until my phone battery died. I’d never heard him happier. It was the greatest day of my life.
CHAPTER 15
THE AIR CONDITIONING in the rental car dies about halfway to Vickers. Even with the windows open, the ride is a steamy one, but I don’t care. The closer I come to the church, the more my heart rises. I am happy to be doing this. Or if not happy, at least excited. It is a long shot, it might not make sense, but at least I am doing something. When I was talking to Kaylee Wise back at the funeral, when I was scanning the bumpers for quarter-moon stickers, when I climbed onto that plane this morning, I felt like I was taking control, instead of waiting for someone else to solve my problem.
If you are trying to categorize people, you can do a lot worse than to sort them into two groups—those who enjoy responsibility and those who avoid it. Some people want to be presidents and CEOs and star players. Others hope that someone else will make good decisions for them, give them a job, and lead their team to victory.
Which one do you want to be? This is the last line of the “first practice” speech that my dad gave every August to his players at Waverly High.
I arrive back at the church almost three hours after I left, with the daylight tempered in late afternoon, and I am encouraged to see plenty of cars lining the road.
About two-thirds of the people are still at the funeral. Most sit in folding chairs in makeshift circles on the grass. Some men are actually tossing a football in a clearing across the road—among them, I notice, Herrold McKoy. I watch Herrold drop back to pass, his belly jiggling under his mustard-colored dress shirt. I see Udall’s point about Herrold’s windup being too long, but he still throws a beautiful spiral.
I also notice, propped against the far wall of the church, a set of four Port-O-Lets. The ones for which Freddie had “looked everywhere.”
Unbelievable.
I scan the crowd, looking for Luke Reckherd, but I don’t see his white suit. I am standing among circles of seated mourners, my hands on my hips, when an older woman, walking with a four-pronged cane, stops and asks me, “You looking for someone?” She wears thick glasses and a black polka-dotted dress and peers up from under a wide-brimmed white straw hat with a black ribbon on it.
“Luke Reckherd,” I say.
“I’m afraid I don’t even know who that is,” she murmurs. “But then I guess I don’t know who you are either.”
“My name is Nick Gallow,” I say. “I was a teammate of Samuel’s.”
“I’m Mrs. Louis Malone,” the woman says with a nod.
“Are you close to the Sault family?”
She smiles, revealing what look like store-bought teeth. “I’ve been living two doors down from the Saults for half a century.”
“Wow, that’s amazing,” I say. “The place I live in, my neighbors don’t last fifty days.”
She looks confused, as if I am explaining a concept out of science fiction. “Samuel’s parents were actually about to leave me. They were going to move up to Philadelphia with their son.” She sighs. “Now they’re not going anywhere. Maybe you can ask them about that boy you’re looking for.”
She raises her cane and gestures to a man and woman seated together at the head of a circle of chairs. It is the people Tanner and Udall were talking to earlier. The father, whose name I remembered as Morris, wears a simple black suit. He has a broad nose and sunken eyes, and a wide physique that must have filled the cab of the trucks he drove cross-country. The mother, Eugenia, shares her son’s light skin. She is engaging in give-and-take with the people near her, while Morris sits stonily, looking exhausted and dispirited. The mother is clasping hands with her daughter, Selia, and wiping a tear from the young’s girl’s eyes—which are broad-set and, viewed from this angle, remind me of her brother’s. Whereas Samuel—when he smiled, at least—had a sort of hangdog handsomeness, Selia has the severe beauty of a couture model.
While Samuel’s parents are composed, Selia is nakedly distraught, making no effort to mask her anguish.
I walk toward their circle and heads turn as I near, and Morris’s eyes lock onto me with a glare. “No more interviews,” he barks.
“Easy, Morris, easy,” says Eugenia Sault, standing up and letting go of her daughter’s hand.
Samuel’s mother is nearly as tall as I am. Her black dress hangs loosely on her, as if she’d just lost ten pounds. Her eyes are streaked with red. She places her free hand on my elbow. “Maybe one or two questions. It’s been a hard day.”
“I’m not a reporter, actually,” I say. “My name is Nick
Gallow, I’m…”
“You’re the punter!” she says, hand to her heart, and with a smile that frightens me, so jarringly does it contrast with her bloodshot eyes. “Selia, this is the Sentinels punter.” Selia looks up at her mother hollowly. “So what?”
Samuel’s mother places her hand on my arm and we move a couple of steps from the circle. I offer her nervous condolences and she politely inquires about the health of Cecil. I want to ask her if she has any idea what might have happened to Samuel, but of course if she had even a hint, she would not be standing here with me.
“Do you know Luke Reckherd?” I ask.
“Luke Reckherd?” she says, puzzled. “Is he with the Sentinels?”
“No, no,” I say. “I saw him at the service. Was he a friend of Samuel’s?”
“Not one I ever heard of,” she says. “And I was with that boy every day he was on this earth.” Her eyes fill with tears, and she adds, “At least until the last few.”
Her jaw begins to quiver and she turns away. I place my hand on her shoulder, which is startlingly bony. “Thank you,” I say. “And again, I am so sorry.” Without a further word she returns to her seat and buries her face in her hands.
I walk away, feeling stricken, and also disgusted. I sit down for a moment to collect myself and think this through.
After a while my eyes are drawn to the football flying across the road, and so I drape my jacket over a folding chair and walk across the road with the intention of speaking to the game’s quarterback, Herrold McKoy. But before joining the action, and without making too much of a show of it, I stop behind a car and dig my heel forward and lean back in a hamstring stretch. My leg feels, if not perfect, at least passable. I have certainly played through worse. Tomorrow afternoon, with some luck, I will be back in Philadelphia and I can have a massage from the team trainer to get me ready for minicamp. I soon join the group of guys milling about, waiting for a pass from Herrold.