The Penalty for Holding

by Georgette Gouveia

  "You must be crazy," a passerby shouted. "Do you know how many germs there are?"

  Quinn didn't care as he sat back on his heels—his hands to his temples as he arched his back, his laughter turning to sobs.

  "I'm here, Aunt Lena," he said. "I made it."

  PART III

  nineteen

  Quinn's visit to Dr. Matthew changed nothing. He looked a dozen times at the website for the domestic abuse agency Dr. Matt referred him to. A dozen times he started to punch the number into his cell. A dozen times he told himself this time would be different; he would be different. But nothing changed.

  He told himself it needn't. After all, he was at the top of his game. The Temps were winning big and winning small—eking out victories against teams they had no business beating, shocking a few rivals and pouncing on weaker opponents.

  And since Quinn was driving himself—punishing himself—there was little Smalley could do or say, although he still found ways to criticize. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how compassionate you were and the team ran the gamut from very to not at all—Smalley had a new whipping boy in backup QB Lleyton Starling.

  Lleyton was a big, buff blond with an adoring family and an equally beautiful and adoring college sweetheart. Quinn should've been jealous of the guy, who was in many ways Quinn 2.0. But he wasn't. For one thing, Quinn knew that as much as Smalley hated him, the last thing he wanted was yet another QB who could detract and distract from his beloved, injured Lance. For another, Lleyton was such a preternaturally cheery, limoncello-out-of-lemons type of guy that you couldn't help but like him. Unless, of course, you were the teammates determined to break him.

  "Hey, easy on him," Quinn told the team, "or I'll be hard on you."

  He watched to make sure the hazing rituals weren't Kazmerekian in scope. But Lleyton seemed impervious. When teammates held him down to shear off his stunning blond curls, he just ran his fingers through his stubby hair, smiling, and arrived for the team's workout the next day with a short do that peaked fashionably on top. When Smalley barked at him to step into his office, he was there in a shot, iPad at the ready, as if he were a particularly efficient executive assistant.

  He was like the Roadrunner, always triumphing over the Wile E. Coyotes of the world no matter how many traps they set. The most amusing was the Starbucks' gantlet, which involved Lleyton's daily purchase of increasingly elaborate coffee concoctions for the team. The idea was that the order—with its triple-shot this and no foam that—would flummox the rookie. Unfortunately for the team, Lleyton's many gifts included a phenomenal visual and auditory memory.

  "That's one decaf venti skinny vanilla latte; one grande skim vanilla latte, no foam; one tall skinny vanilla latte, extra foam and that sprinkle of cinnamon you like, Derrick, cinnamon being very healthy for you; one grande decaf latte with vanilla powder and a pinch of chocolate for you, Jeremiah…"

  And that was just the order for the vanilla guys, Quinn marveled. Through mocha frappuccinos and green tea chai lattes, Lleyton—who had worked his way through Harvard at the Harvard Book Store's Philosophy Café—never missed an order and never wrote one down.

  "How does he do it?" Greg asked Derrick. "No, really, I want to know why his toast is always butter side up."

  "Beats me," Derrick said. "Maybe if we were nicer to him, his luck would rub off on us."

  "He's just good is all," said Jeremiah, who took a fatherly interest in Lleyton, patting his shorn curls and always giving him a five dollar tip. He laughed indulgently at the team's hazing, which only served to make the guys even more caffeine-dependent.

  "Damn it," Greg would yell, "where the hell's Starling with the fucking Starbucks?"

  As if on cue, Lleyton would appear with the carefully balanced cups. Finally, he drafted a memo to team owner Jimmy Jones Jefferson—which he showed Quinn for his preapproval as he did everything. In it, he requested an espresso/cappuccino machine for the locker room, backing up the request with a cost-efficiency analysis.

  At first, the guys balked at being Starbucks-less. Soon, however, they were lining up for Lleyton's signature brews. Such was the machine's hold on the team that it traveled with the players, becoming the subject of one of Brenna's more amusing columns.

  Unable to rattle Lleyton with the Starbucks' gantlet, the team set about to humiliate him by forcing him to sing in the locker room. It was a ploy that had weakened the knees of many a rookie linebacker. But no, it turned out that Lleyton, who had also been president of the Harvard Glee Club, had a crystalline tenor that he was delighted to use.

  He was particularly fond of Seal's Amazing:

  Say you don't know how to do it now

  So you run.

  It's not that you're bleeding but you're through with it now

  So you run, so you run.

  It became an anthem at Templars Stadium, played after every touchdown Quinn or Lleyton scored. And Lleyton could sometimes be seen leading a chorus in the end zone himself, jumping, an arm overhead, as he twirled around on the words, “Run, so you run.”

  Quinn, who kept his post-touchdown ritual limited to a quick sign of the cross, punctuated by fingers to lips and thanks to God and Aunt Lena—no point in ridiculing and, thus, riling the opposition—made sure that Lleyton didn't overdo it.

  "You know what they say," Quinn reminded him. "You get into the end zone, act like you've been there before—with class."

  Still, Quinn couldn't help but indulge him like the baby bro he never had. The fans were equally enchanted with Lleyton, which had the added bonus for Quinn of annoying Smalley, particularly when Lleyton improvised the read option, often with stunning success.

  "Starling, when you finish with your waitressing and your warbling, haul your faggotty ass into my office."

  Through the door, Quinn and the rest of the team could hear: "How dare you run fucking plays that I don't approve. You do that again, and I'm going to shove a pole so far up you that it's going to push out the white puss that passes for your brain." Afterward, Lleyton slumped down in his locker, put his head in his forearms and wept.

  Quinn placed a hand on his shoulder. "Hang in there," he said softly.

  Lleyton looked up, brightening through glistening tears. "I'll never find approval there, will I?" he asked.

  "None of us will," Quinn said, shaking his head. "And yet, we keep seeking it, don't we?"

  Such incidents apart, Lleyton offered the comic bright spot in a season that despite its success was a long, sad slog. Nero had been convicted of illegal handgun possession, yet thanks to Drew Harrington's legal wizardry had been given a sentence of only one year in an upstate New York prison. To Nero, it might as well have been life.

  "Don't forget me. Don't abandon me," he said, sobbing and reaching for Quinn's hand in the visitors' lounge.

  "Nero, Nero, listen to me: If you show fear here, these people will eat you alive. You have to act brave even if you don't feel brave. My aunt always said, 'Have courage and life will meet you halfway.' Pray, and I will pray for you, too."

  When Quinn was out of town, he called or sent care packages. Otherwise, he visited him once a week. Nero had somewhat improbably joined a poetry workshop at the prison led by a birdlike woman, Gloria Halstead. He invited Quinn to Poetry Day. What struck Quinn first, as it always did, were the small windowpanes and the barbed wire, coiled atop the fences like so many crowns of thorns. On a winter day more like spring, guards escorted Quinn and the other guests into the prison yard, where the beefy inmates made Quinn momentarily uneasy.

  Not Gloria. "Let's have a poem prayer, shall we?" she said, and Quinn watched, moved, as the hulking inmates bowed their heads under a seamless sky while that slip of a woman read from e.e. cummings’ I thank You God for most this amazing.

  Shuttling between Nero and Dave, Quinn couldn't decide which was worse—prison or a hospital. "I want no funeral," Dave gasped as he lay in a Jersey hospital bed. Quinn could see his soul quitting his body, like a mollusk lea
ving its crusted home. All that remained was a trace of bitterness. "I want no service, no Mass. Just cremate me and throw me to the wind."

  How sad, how awful, Quinn thought, to be in such despair, to feel so alone and abandoned by God that you seek to desert him in kind and wipe any trace of yourself from the face of the earth. Quinn understood—even Jesus felt forsaken on the cross—but he also knew, cruel as it was, that funerals, like life, were for the living.

  "Dave, please, I know how you feel," he said as he doled out ice chips to him with a tweezer. "No, no, forgive me, I don't know how you feel. But remember—and I'm sorry to have to say this—but this won't be for you alone. This will be for Kelly and the kids and me and the team. Don't deny us this. That way, some day your children will say, 'My dad was a great man, and I remember how all these people came out for him,' or 'I remember my mother saying how beautifully everyone spoke at his funeral and how lovely it was.' Please, Dave, if for no one else, do this for the wife who loves you so."

  What Quinn didn't tell Dave was that he couldn't bear him taking leave of this world without God's blessing. He knew it was insane. And he knew it was hypocritical. How often had he blamed God for Aunt Lena's death, cursed him for casting him deeper into the land of the unwanted and the unloved?

  "Couldn't you show me some tenderness, some kindness, some real love?" The question was not only a prayer to God but a reproach to Mal whenever he pressed Quinn’s hot, naked flesh against his bedroom wall or bit his plump lips, drawing blood as he kissed him.

  "What kindness do you deserve?" Mal said, grabbing him by his thick hair. Quinn knew he was right; knew, too, that even if this lacked the gentle caress of the butterfly's wings—"Look, Quinnie, he likes you," he always remembered Aunt Lena saying as a white butterfly alighted on his shoulder and she photographed him in Singapore Harbor—at least it was touch, a man's hands on his body, and a man's hands were what his body craved.

  "I know this is how you like it, good and rough," Mal rasped in his ear as he pulled hard on his cock, drawing the head back while Quinn leaned against the shower wall and Mal thrust into him wildly.

  "Yes, that's just how I like it," Quinn said, panting. "Find me. Take me. Need me. Make me."

  Afterward as he lay curled up in a ball, he wondered at himself—embracing brutality and yet speaking with a gentle eloquence so admired at Dave's funeral.

  "What is the measure of a man?" he told the packed church—the so-called sea of humanity that included a shell-shocked Kelly, so pale, so lost; the unabashedly sobbing Jeremiah; and even a surprisingly subdued Smalley. "Can you measure him in passing yards or dollars earned? Or do you measure him in the love of his family and friends as you would surely measure David Francis Donaldson?"

  But Quinn knew it was all bullshit said to comfort his frightened teammates, suddenly, rudely confronted with their mortality, and a young widow who should have never been left to raise two young children alone.

  What was the real measure of a man, Quinn thought as the priest intoned over Dave's remains and he flashed on Mal's rough embrace, but his weight in dust?

  Twenty

  In a mid-winter that was already one of the coldest and snowiest on record, the Temps found themselves in the unenviable position of having to win three games on the road to go to the Super Bowl.

  "We are road warriors," the ever-optimistic Lleyton said as he set up a makeshift shrine to Dave Donaldson in an empty stall of the Omaha Steers visitors' clubhouse.

  It was no small irony, Quinn thought, that Lleyton, who never knew Dave, should take it upon himself to become the keeper of his flame. At Templars Stadium, Dave's former stall was like a Buddhist temple, teeming with tribute. There was Dave's uniform, photographs, fan letters, teddy bears, candles and, always, fresh flowers. This drove Smalley nuts.

  "Starling, you ship all this crap to the Widow Donaldson as fast as you can, or I swear I'm going to nail your balls to the wall."

  But before Quinn could intervene, Lleyton dug in. "No, Coach, I will not. To dismantle this locker, well, it would be as if Dave never lived at all. A man ought to be remembered, not just by his family but by the people he worked with. We were his brothers, too. And we need to remember him so everyone can see that it mattered he passed this way at all."

  Wherever the team went, Lleyton set up a memorial—nothing as elaborate as the one at home but a few items that the players would touch before the game, the way they touched the patch with his number on their jerseys and continued to flash his number with their fingers in the end zone after touchdowns.

  Lleyton's gesture—along with Quinn's leadership on and off the field—had a galvanizing, bonding effect on the team when the players needed it most. It was so cold at The Steerage—as The Omaha National Bank Stadium was more colorfully known—that Quinn's face felt like a pin cushion, with icy needles pricking his eyes. He was never more keenly aware of the deep-blue sleeves that were a second skin on his sculpted arms.

  "Lance was always bare-armed, even in this weather," Smalley said in the locker room, sneering at Quinn.

  "Then he's 'a better man than I am, Gunga Din,'" Quinn said, smiling at a Rudyard Kipling reference that he knew would sail right over Smalley's head.

  "I don't know if this Gunga Din ever played football," center Austin Stevens said to Quinn. "But I do know all this mind-over-matter stuff is bullshit in this weather. Cold is cold and hot is hot. Wear the fucking long sleeves."

  Tugging at them to make sure they could not be grabbed by the opposition, Quinn watched the players' breaths curl like white arabesques as they strained to be heard over the chanting, cursing crowd and tried not to wince. Each inhalation was like a knife to the core. He wondered if this was what it was like in the Roman Coliseum—so much pain, so much hatred.

  The Temps, though, were beyond that. They defied both.

  "Who is like you?" Jeremiah screamed, his thick, eye black sporting Dave's old "35."

  "No one," they shouted, raising their fists to the night sky.

  "Who is like me?" he added, thumping his chest.

  "No one," they cried.

  "Who is like us?" he added, spreading his arms wide.

  "No one," they shouted, beating their chests as their voices rose as one. All that was missing, Quinn thought, were sabers to rattle.

  It would take more than bravado to beat the Steers, who had the beefiest D-line in the league. There was a part of Quinn that was afraid—not of being sacked or hurt but of losing.

  "Have courage, and life will meet you halfway," he kept repeating to himself.

  But how do you have courage? Was it something you could just summon at will, or was it innate? Many people talked the talk but failed to walk the walk. They were all parade, no battle—so great in the regular season, so disappointing in the postseason. The reverse was also true. What was the secret of those who were so clutch?

  Quinn had always believed that you were but a strand in the pattern of the universe, and that what you perceived to be good or bad luck—or a good or bad performance—was but the fulfillment of your individual destiny. Yet he realized now more than ever, he couldn't act on that belief. If the Temps were to have a chance, he and the rest of the team would have to believe that destiny was theirs for the making and the taking and simply refuse to be defeated.

  And so when they were down 21-7 in the third quarter at the Steers' 20-yard line, with no one open for Quinn to throw to, he powered himself through a portal in the Steers' defense. It might as well have been a wormhole transporting the team to the far side of the universe, for it enabled him to dive over a sea of Steers into their blue end zone, much as he had seen Dylan Roqué and Daniel Reiner-Kahn do at Stanford swim meets time and again, much as he remembered himself doing as a twelve-year-old in the pool of the Mandarin Oriental, Singapore on the last leg of his fateful voyage to America.

  That touchdown, with the score now 21-14, proved to be the game-changer as apple-polishing linebacker-turned-commentator Rufus Washin
gton kept saying over and over on the postgame wrap-up. Quinn threw a brilliant cross-body 70-yard touchdown to Greg to tie it, then led two third-down drives that set up a touchdown to Derrick. With the Temps in control 28-21, Lleyton came in and gave the guys insurance, 35-21.

  He twirled in the end zone with joy and more than a bit of defiance, Quinn thought gleefully, as his equally defiant teammates sang Amazing at the crowd:

  Say you don't know how you do it now

  So you run.

  It's not that you're bleeding but you're through with it now,

  So you run, so you run.

  Afterward, Quinn thought of seeking out Tweedle Dee Dum and Tweedle Dee Dee on the field and rubbing their noses in the Temps' victory, but why kick a dog when he's down? He was bigger than that. It was enough that the Temps won.

  In the locker room, Lleyton was still riding that high.

  "OK, apart from girlfriend time, that was the most fun I have ever had," he said to any teammate who would listen. "I mean, are you guys not jazzed? Are you not overwhelmed by the sheer momentousness of it all?"

  "Overwhelmed by the sheer momentousness of it all," Jeremiah repeated, never looking up from his iPhone as he texted one of the many Jere juniors who Quinn imagined were marauding The Steerage.

  "If I see even one of those goddamn kids in this locker room, I'm gonna grab him by his little Afro and hurl him into the end zone from here," Smalley had warned before the game.

  It was all the team could do to keep Jeremiah from going for Smalley's throat. Though the team hated Smalley, loathing his prejudice, contempt, and toxic commentary—which were equal-opportunity employers—Quinn realized the players feared him, too. They were grown men, multimillionaires for the most part, and yet they were still afraid of their disapproving daddy, Quinn thought, shaking his head.

  The visitors' locker room at The Steerage wasn't overrun with Jeres but with reporters, many of whom sought out Lleyton, who was only too happy to oblige.