Titans

by Tim Green

  Hunter began to chastise himself for even worrying about winning this game. For what was at stake didn't matter. The team could easily lose this and go on to win the championship again anyway.

  Too much was at stake for him to have taken a chance. Unexpected things were commonplace in the game of football. He shouldn't have taken the chance of letting it get this close. His mind whirled with the possibilities of what he could do now. If he fumbled again, it would make obvious what he was actually doing. If a running play was called, he'd simply have to change the play by calling an audible at the line of scrimmage and throw a pass.

  Since Murphy had recovered the ball on the five-yard line, Price called a pass play. Hunter called it, broke the huddle, and set his team on the line. Briefly he assessed the defense. He knew how they'd cover the pattern. He took the snap and dropped back. The strong safety was playing underneath on his X receiver, and Hunter gunned the ball just behind the X, right into the safety's hands. The unexpected ball bounced off the defender's hands and into the air. The X, who'd stopped in his tracks, now leaped for the wayward ball. It was actually between his hands when the Lions' big inside backer hit him from behind, upending him and sending the ball harmlessly to the ground. The play had been so close that Hunter almost vomited.

  It was third down and five from the goal now, and everyone in the stadium knew it would be a pass. Price called a roll right throwback to the tight end. Hunter dropped back, but this time he wasn't going to take any chances. He held the ball for a painfully long time, waiting for the Lions' rush to take him down. But his own line had risen to the occasion, and Hunter was jogging to his right, unmolested by defenders, with his tight end waving his hands wildly on the other side of the field in the end zone. In this brief instant of time Hunter thought he could even hear people in the nearby stands shouting, Throw it! Throw it!"

  Finally Hunter gunned the ball with such velocity that it rocketed over his wide-open man and almost went into the crowd. Hunter jogged off the field, passing the kicker who would make the field goal and extend their lead to just five. It was better than nothing. Detroit would have to score a touchdown now to win where before a field goal would have been enough. But had Hunter connected on what was an easy touchdown, the game, with only four minutes left, would be all but over. Price met Hunter at the sideline and took hold of his arm.

  "What the hell was that?" Price said coldly.

  "Hey," Hunter replied, shaking himself free from the coach and starting for the bench as if he were a million miles away from what was happening, "we're winning, aren't we?"

  Price followed his quarterback with a malignant stare, then turned his attention to his defense.

  Even from across Meadowlands Stadium, Cook could see without his scopes that Tony Rizzo was upset when Bert Meyer recovered the fumble. While the rest of the crowd, even Camille, were on their feet, gesticulating, cheering and celebrating, Tony Rizzo remained frozen in the same position he'd been in all game. A closer look confirmed Cook's suspicion. Rizzo wore a stone-cold frown and had begun to gnaw on a knuckle. Only when Hunter Logan blew the pass did Rizzo seem to relax. At least he stopped chewing his knuckle.

  "Fucking shit! Son of a bitch! Damn it all to hell!" bellowed the usher as the field goal team went out onto the field. Cook put his scopes aside and looked at the middle-aged man, who was in much need of a shave. His face was almost purple, and Cook quickly reviewed his CPR technique in his mind, thinking that this guy was surely going to blow a valve.

  When he finally stopped fuming and the blood left his face, Cook said, 'Take it easy, buddy, the defense hasn't let them do a thing all second half. Detroit might get a field goal, but they aren't going to score six."

  The usher looked at Cook as though he were mad. His bright green eyes shone from amid his bloodshot whites and his gray, saggy face.

  "It don't matter if they win or lose now," the usher said, his voice cracking with phlegm.

  "I thought you got a hundred on the Titans," Cook said without thinking.

  "Man," the usher said in his deep, rough voice, "the Titans got to win by eight. There's a line, man. Titans by eight was a sure thing. Detroit wasn't shit last year and besides, their quarterback got hurt in pre-season. All fucking Logan had to do was hit that fucking wide-open tight end in the end zone and I was laughing."

  The usher shook his hung head and jammed his thick hands into the bright yellow windbreaker that was part of his uniform.

  "Man," he said, "this game was a sure thing." Cook thought about that, then put up his scopes to watch. Rizzo for the rest of the game. The Titans defense held and the final was 19-14, Titans. Cook saw Rizzo smile for the first time, then rise with Camille on his arm and disappear into the crowd.

  Chapter 26

  Rachel was waiting for Hunter in the tunnel just outside the locker room. The air was filled with the electricity that always resulted from a victory. Everyone ? was happy. The upbeat attitude of the players would spill over into their lives at home. It would be a good week. All the Titans' wives and girlfriends were there, gossiping among themselves and waiting for their mates to shower and finish with the media. Since Hunter was always one of the last players to appear, Rachel was used to the wait. Bert and Amy Meyer would usually keep her company. Sometimes, especially after a win, the four of them would go out to eat before heading home. When Hunter appeared, dressed typically in a pair of jeans, cowboy boots, and a white T-shirt, they had already decided where they'd go for dinner.

  "Nah, I don't feel like it tonight, you guys," Hunter said sullenly when they informed him.

  Bert and Amy looked surprised. Rachel looked concerned.

  "Hey, man," Bert said, gripping Hunter's shoulder in his familiar way, "we won! Don't start getting down on us, you had a good game."

  "Yeah," Hunter said sarcastically, meeting his friend's eye, "two interceptions, a fumble, and only one time did I get us in the end zone. That's real good. Anyway, I just don't feel so hot."

  Rachel took her husband's arm and began to walk with him out of the tunnel. The four of them didn't say much. Bert had tried, but they all knew it was no use when Hunter felt he'd played poorly. The strange thing was that he'd really had a pretty good game. He'd made few big mistakes, but in the end they hadn't cost the team its victory. Usually Hunter got down only after a loss. Now they had finally gotten off to the start they had been waiting for, and Hunter was morose.

  Rachel knew not to argue about it or try to change Hunter's mind. After a game he was either in a good mood or a bad one, and nothing could be done about it except for him to get a good night's sleep.

  They finally got to the team's parking lot, which was a fenced-in area just outside the tunnel. Hunter looked around anxiously.

  "You looking for someone?" Bert said innocently.

  "Huh? No," Hunter said. "I'll see you tomorrow Bert. Bye, Amy. Come on, Rach."

  Over her shoulder, Rachel said to Amy, "I'll call you this week and we'll get together with the kids."

  "Hunter, what's with you?" she asked, trying to keep pace with him as he made his way through the rest of his teammates, who were milling around the parking lot.

  "Nothing," he said, still looking around. "I just want to get out of here."

  They sat in their car in traffic for almost forty minutes before the road opened up a little and they began to move. Hunter deflected Rachel's every attempt at conversation before finally switching the radio on. When they crossed the Verrazano Bridge, Hunter suggested they stop at a deli in Hewlett and eat before picking up Sara at Rachel's parents' house.

  The deli was crowded with people of all ages eating everything from stuffed cabbage to roasted chicken. It was a brightly lit place, and the animated buzz of conversation gave it a communal air. The bad news was that Hunter was recognized instantly. Parents and kids of all ages lined up at their table to get him to autograph napkins and scraps of paper that Hunter suspected would be lost or thrown away by the following week. Still, he signe
d and smiled, and generally played the part of the All-American football hero. Once in a while Hunter actually enjoyed a limited amount of attention. But it was never something he sought.

  Soon every autograph was signed, and Hunter signaled for the waitress and gave her their order. When she left, Hunter and Rachel lapsed into silence once again. With apparently nothing to say to each other, their attention was drawn to an elderly couple seated at the next table. The man was complaining loudly about the coleslaw while his wife tried to quiet him.

  "There's too much mayonnaise," he bellowed in a thick European accent.

  Hunter looked up and met Rachel's eyes. Something about the despair in the man's voice over something as innocuous as the coleslaw set them both to laughing. Then the man started up about how the pickles were so hard they were going to break his teeth and that he'd sue if they did. It was one of those rare moments when laughter compounded by silliness brought them to tears. When their laughter finally subsided, Rachel reached across the table and took Hunter's hand.

  "What's wrong, honey?" she said in a conspiratorial tone meant to suggest that there was nothing he couldn't say to her.

  Hunter paused, frowned, and seemed to consider the water in his battered glass. He drank up the water and then swirled the ice.

  "It's just football," he said blandly. "The pressure's getting to me, I guess. My shoulder, all the bullshit in the papers about whether or not I'm the man everyone thought I was last season ... it gets to me."

  "It's more than that," Rachel said with a certainty that made him wince. "I know how football affects you. I know that this is more than that. The way you were looking around today after the game ... what is it, Hunter? Something's bothering you."

  Hunter smiled nervously and squeezed Rachel's hand. "Nothing. Really, Rach, I'm fine. It really is football," he said, thinking to himself that it wasn't a complete lie. Football was the center of the problem if not the problem itself.

  Rachel just stared. Tears started to well up in her eyes. "I can't believe you're keeping something from me, Hunter," she said finally, almost choking on the words.

  Looking up with incandescent eyes, she said, "You've been so--so distracted. You're somewhere else half the time, Hunter. You're not with me . . . since before camp started. I know how you get about camp, but when you got back, instead of getting better, you got worse. Then I told myself you just needed to get the first game behind you, to win it and silence the critics. But now you did that, and today all you could do was look around after the game like you were guilty of something."

  "I'm not doing anything wrong," Hunter said almost angrily. 'You know better than that!"

  "I don't know what I know, Hunter," she said with tears running down her cheeks now, "unless you tell me what's going on."

  Hunter reached out and wiped the tears away. "Don't cry, honey," he said quietly, looking around. "Don't."

  Hunter took a deep breath and told her everything in a guarded whisper, from the betting with Metz to his first and second encounters with Rizzo, and finally what had happened today, what he'd been thinking, how he'd felt.

  'That's who that guy was," Rachel said, suddenly.

  "What?" Hunter said.

  'That guy I saw outside the house that day," Rachel said quietly, staring at her husband's face. "I knew something was wrong about that guy."

  Hunter looked confused.

  "Forget it," she said, "go on."

  Hunter continued to tell her about what had been going through his mind. When he was done, the food came. It sat untouched while the two of them sat silently holding each other's hands.

  Then Hunter said quietly, "I didn't tell you because I didn't want you to worry, Rach."

  Rachel met this with more silence. "We have to tell someone," she said.

  A forkful of kasha, halfway to his mouth, fell back onto Hunter's plate.

  "No!" he hissed. That's one thing we definitely can't do."

  "We have to, Hunter," Rachel said. "It's the only way."

  She responded vehemently to his hesitation.

  "I'm talking about our lives, Hunter."

  "So am I," he responded, still whispering. "If we go to someone, I'm done."

  "Football might be done," she whispered back, "And if it is, well. . . it's football. I'm talking about you and me and Sara. These people don't go away, Hunter. They come to stay. You can't get rid of them.

  We need to get help."

  "But they will go away," Hunter insisted. They'll go away as soon as I'm no longer any value to them. If I can just get through this season, Rachel, we'll be set. We won't have to worry."

  "Ha! Worry?" she said with a crazed expression of disbelief. "What do you call what you've been doing since the Fourth? What do you think I'm going to do knowing those people are out there? That they've already been to our house?"

  "You don't know that for sure."

  "I know, Hunter."

  "I did what they asked me to do," he explained quietly. 'That should be it with them anyway. Rizzo said 'a' favor. I've done it."

  "Hunter," she said, "you don't make the rules with these people. They make the rules. The only way to get away is to get help."

  "I'm not throwing this season away!" Hunter hissed with a scowl. "I've worked my whole life ... I've spent fourteen years in this league busting my ass, hoping, praying to make the big money and set myself, set us, up for the rest of our lives. If I have to take a few points off the outcome of a game, what's the big deal? Like you said, we won. Everybody's happy. It's not like I really did anything wrong."

  "Can you hear yourself?" Rachel said. "Did you hear what you just said? You're not doing anything wrong? Hunter, you're working with the Mafia--"

  "--I'm not working with anyone!" Hunter said, slamming his fist down on the table and drawing stares from all around.

  He leaned across the table and said in a lower but equally fierce tone, "I'm doing what I have to protect what I've worked for, Rachel. You don't know what it's like! You've always had it. You've always been taken care of. You haven't had to scrape and save and eat food from cans. You haven't had to watch everything your family owns stripped away from them while you stood by!

  "I've seen all that, Rachel," Hunter continued in a desperate voice. "I've seen it, and I won't see it again! I won't see it happen to you and to me! Not when we're so close!"

  He sat back now but held her eyes. He knew they were going to do battle over this.

  Rachel met his stare and held it. "No," she said, shaking her head. "No way, Hunter. Don't give me that crap about your family and my family. That's not what counts here. We've got to get help ... no matter what happens."

  "Huh!" Hunter snorted in disbelief. 'You're taking yourself a little too seriously, Rach. You don't make that call. That's my call. This is my career, and you aren't fucking telling me that it's over. Uh-uh."

  Rachel said nothing more but simply got up and walked out. Hunter scrambled to his feet and threw a couple of twenties on the table amid their plates of half-eaten food. He caught up to her halfway to the car and grabbed her wrist.

  "Don' t pull that shit," he said. "Don't walk away from me!"

  Rachel pulled free with a violent twist of her arm.

  "I'll walk away if I want! I'm not going to listen if you're going to talk macho bullshit to me! Those people will eat you up! You think they care who you are, Hunter? You're nothing to them! You're so used to everyone groveling at your feet because you're Hunter Logan that you can't understand that these people will use you up and then kill you! I'm not going to sit around while they do it, either."

  "What's that supposed to mean, Rach?" he said, almost yelling as he followed her along. "Huh? What's that? Don't you talk about not being around, Rach, that's not part of what we talk about..."

  Rachel got into the car and sat silently. Hunter got in, too. He started the car and screeched out of the lot and down Central Avenue. Then he pulled over suddenly and stopped. Hunter shut off the car and threw
the keys against the windshield, then pressed his palms tightly against the sides of his head.

  "My God," he whispered quietly. "What's going to happen, Rachel? What the hell is going to happen to me? I feel like I'm going insane."

  Rachel reached over and pulled his head to her breast. She could feel the energy draining from him. The stress, she knew, must be unbearable. She knew, too, that he was doing it for them as much as for himself. He really believed that they needed to live the way they did. She had told him time and time again that it wasn't necessary. She realized that it was he who could never live the other way. She held him for a few moments before picking the keys up off the dashboard and quietly handing them back to him.

  Then gently she said, "Let's go home."

  The paperwork on Cook's desk was beginning to pile up. He buzzed his secretary and asked her to bring him another coffee. It was his eighth cup of the morning, but he'd been out very late the night before watching Tony Rizzo celebrating the Titans win. Cook had never known Rizzo was such a fan, Maybe it was Camille. Maybe it was something more . . .

  "Hey, man," Duffy said, peering in through his door with Cook's coffee in hand. "Clara says this is your eighth cup. I'm getting ready to call a buddy of mine who works narcotics in the NYPD."

  Cook waved Duffy inside. His friend shut the door behind him and sat down, setting the coffee on the edge of Cook's desk.

  "I do like this view," Duffy said, gazing out the window. That's what you get when you're the boss man."

  Cook chuckled at his friend's southern po' folks intonations.

  "Good to see you can still laugh a little," Duffy said, "'cause you sure can't keep your eyes open."

  Cook stifled a yawn. "I'll be OK."

  "From the looks of this desk, you need another you," Duffy said, hefting one of the many heavy stacks of paperwork. "You need to lighten up on whatever it is you do when you skip outta here at eleven o'clock every day. By the way, what is it you do?"