Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 08 - Winning Can Be Murder

by Bill Crider

  Rhodes’ broken leg kept him out of the rest of the games that year, which was just as well, since the six to nothing win was also the last Clearview victory for a long time. In fact, the team lost several games by more than fifty points. Rhodes liked to think that the team would have won more had he been playing, but he knew he was only kidding himself. Even a will-o’-the-wisp couldn’t make that much difference.

  The next year, though Rhodes’ leg had healed completely, he had lost most of his speed. He tried out for the team again, but the coach told him that there really wasn’t any place for him. He was too small to play in the line and too slow to play in the backfield, either offense or defense.

  So he had gotten a job after school and determined not to worry about football, but of course he’d never forgotten about being the will-o’-the-wisp, though just about everyone else had. Ivy liked to twit him about it now and then, but no one else ever mentioned it, which Rhodes supposed was just as well.

  He wouldn’t want to be like some of the men he could see from where he sat, Jerry Tabor for one, who still wore his fraying, thirty-year-old Clearview letter jacket and stood as near the sidelines as he could as if hoping that someone would remember when he was one of the best running backs in the district instead of a not-very-successful used-car salesman for Del-Ray Chevrolet. These days, Tabor seemed to feel that he somehow shared in the team’s glory, and maybe he did. The team’s success reminded people vaguely of Tabor’s glory days, and he’d been interviewed by the newspaper and invited to speak at several pep rallies.

  The Clearview kick receiver this year wasn’t as fast or as tricky as Rhodes had been. He got only about ten yards before being swarmed by Garton Greyhounds.

  “Want some popcorn?” Rhodes asked Ivy.

  “Only if there’s no butter on it,” she said.

  Rhodes sighed, but he went to get the popcorn.

  Chapter Two

  The game wasn’t as satisfying as Rhodes had hoped. Both teams were so intense that a fight broke out practically every time there was a hard tackle. Nothing serious, nothing that required the ejection of a player, but tempers were high and Rhodes was afraid that it wouldn’t take much to set off a real melee.

  He was right. Late in the third quarter, with the score tied at twenty-one, the Garton punt returner broke free from the pack at the thirty and sprinted down the far sideline. A Catamount player had an angle on him, however, and caught up with him at about the fifty. He barreled into him, sending him flying into the Greyhound bench.

  Rhodes wasn’t sure, but it looked to him as if the runner might have stepped out of bounds just before getting hit.

  Unlike Rhodes, the Garton bench was sure. The Catamount tackler disappeared under a pile of red and white jerseys.

  The Catamount bench cleared in an instant as players charged to help out their teammate. The entire Catamount squad, including the trainers, tore across the field toward the heaving pile of Greyhounds. The coaches were right behind the team. Rhodes hoped they were trying to calm things down, but it was hard to tell.

  The Greyhound coaches were trying to drag players off the pile, or so it seemed. Later, Rhodes wondered if they might not have been encouraging them.

  Jerry Tabor, his frayed letter jacket flapping, clambered over the fence that separated the field from the stands and started after the coaches. Rhodes could see his mouth working, but he could not hear what he was yelling because of the crowd noise.

  “Uh-oh,” Ivy said, but Rhodes was already on his way out of the stands.

  Crossing the field, Rhodes was surprised at how little certain things had changed in all the years since he’d played football. The browning grass crunched under his feet, the sound of the crowd was still a dull roar, and the noise that really stood out was the thudding of pads and helmets. It was too bad that the thudding was taking place in a fight instead of in the course of a game.

  Ruth Grady, one of Rhodes’ deputies, was already in the middle of things when Rhodes arrived. She was short and stocky and well able to take care of herself in most situations. She had shouldered her way into the middle of the fighting that was breaking out along the sidelines and was trying to get to the pile that still writhed in front of the Greyhound bench.

  The situation bordered on bedlam. Players were screaming things about each other’s lineage and mental capacities as they tried to punch each other out. It wasn’t easy to punch out someone wearing a football helmet, but there was some damage being done to players who hadn’t had the presence of mind to put their headgear on. Most of the damage was inflicted by players who also had their helmets off but who were swinging them at other unprotected heads.

  The officials were trying vainly to separate the brawling players, but they were having no success at all. In fact, one of them was sitting on the grass with a dazed look on his face as if he might have been clobbered by a helmet.

  The Clearview coaches had managed to grab a few of their players and muscle them away from the main part of the fighting, but the players were still struggling, trying to get back to the fray.

  Jerry Tabor was engaged with a woman who had come out of the Garton crowd and run onto the field. She would be easy to pick out of a line-up if it came to that: the hair on one side of her head was dyed a garish red, while the other side was pure white, the Garton colors. Her face was also painted in contrasting shades, white on the side under the red hair and red under the white.

  Jerry was trying to get her off the field, but he wasn’t having much luck. She kept kicking him in the shins. Rhodes didn’t know who to rescue first, the downed Catamount player or Tabor.

  Suddenly he heard the opening notes of “The Star Spangled Banner.” The Clearview Marching Catamounts to the rescue, he thought, as the cheerleaders bravely tried to get the crowd to sing along. But the national anthem didn’t do a bit of good. The fight continued as if the band were not playing at all. Rhodes suspected that the only person in the stadium who was standing at attention was Hayes Ford.

  Rhodes started throwing players aside, trying to get to the center of things. He could see Ruth Grady grabbing at shoulder pads as she tried without much success to unpile the irate Greyhounds still atop the hapless Catamount tackler.

  Then Rhodes heard another sound that cut through all the grunts and groans and screaming and even the blare of the national anthem.

  Rhodes looked around. The ambulance that usually parked in the south end zone in case of emergency was headed across the field. The piercing siren got everyone’s attention, and the fact that the ambulance was bearing down on them at about twenty miles an hour did more to stop the fighting than anything else could have. Players, officials, and coaches scattered for the fence, jamming together in the gate. Some of the more agile ones, like Jerry Tabor, who had abandoned the painted woman, went right over the fence.

  Even the pile-up near the Garton bench broke apart, with players rolling wildly right and left to escape the on-coming ambulance. The driver threw on the brakes, but the tires skidded in the grass and the vehicle narrowly missed Rhodes, who hadn’t moved, before it careened into the Greyhound benches and sent one of them flying onto the track.

  The ambulance came to a stop then and Lawton, the Blacklin County jailer, got out. He looked a little bit like Lou Costello to Rhodes, though he was at least seventy years old.

  “Damn driver was at the concession stand, I guess,” Lawton said. “I had to drive this thing myself. Like not to’ve got it stopped.”

  “So I noticed,” Rhodes said. “Thank goodness you didn’t kill anybody.”

  Lawton was outraged. “Kill anybody? What’re you talkin’ about? Of course I didn’t kill anybody. What I did was save a bunch of lives, and you oughta consider yourself lucky that I was here at the game. What’d you have done if I hadn’t turned on that si-reen? Got your head knocked off, is what. But don’t thank me. After all, I’m just a worthless old man who’s tryin’ to do the best for ever’body. I’m just — “

&nbs
p; Rhodes held up a hand to stop him. “Thanks, Lawton. I didn’t mean to criticize. You did just fine.”

  “You don’t really mean that. You’re just tryin’ to calm me down so I don’t have a heart attack. Wouldn’t want that on your conscience, would you? The worthless old man who saves your life has a heart attack and dies right on the spot. That wouldn’t look good in the papers, now would it?”

  Lawton usually got into that kind of dispute with Hack Jensen, the dispatcher, but since Hack wasn’t around, Rhodes was an acceptable substitute. The sheriff didn’t mind. Lawton had a point, in a way.

  “I said you did fine, and I meant it. Now let’s see if we can get this mob straightened out and start the game again.”

  Lawton shook his head. “ ’Bout time you thought of that. Wonder how many of these boys the refs’ll kick out?”

  Rhodes didn’t have an answer for that one. The referees did, but only after a consultation that must have lasted at least fifteen minutes.

  They walked practically to the goalpost and huddled together with Rhodes and Ruth Grady standing guard to keep players and coaches at bay. Lawton tagged along, too. Rhodes didn’t try to stop him.

  What the referees eventually decided was to eject two of the Garton Greyhounds who in their judgment were the first two to leave the bench and attack the Clearview tackler. The Catamounts were not penalized, the officials having concluded that the runner was in bounds when he was hit.

  As soon as he heard the decision, the Garton head coach turned purple and hopped up and down like a kid on a pogo stick as an official tried to calm him down.

  “What do you think his blood pressure is right now?” Ruth Grady asked.

  “I’d guess about two hunnerd over a hunnerd and fifty,” Lawton said. “I expect there’s a stethoscope in that ambulance if you want to check it.” He put the accent on the last syllable of ambulance.

  The ambulance driver had come out onto the field and retrieved his vehicle, returning it to its usual spot behind the goalposts. He hadn’t said a word to Lawton about commandeering it.

  “I’m not much of a nurse,” Ruth said. “What about you, Sheriff?”

  Rhodes wasn’t much of a nurse, either, but he thought that the Garton coach might be an interesting study for some medical student. He hadn’t cooled off a bit, and he continued to scream at the referee and bounce around the field.

  Rhodes walked over, and between the two of them, he and the ref got the coach back to the bench, where his players and assistants had confined themselves to muttering vague threats, spiced up by the occasional vulgar gesture.

  “Just lettin’ the crowd know they think they’re Number One,” Lawton explained to Ruth, who managed to keep a straight face.

  Somehow order was finally restored, and the game picked up more or less where it had left off. Garton had the ball on their own forty-eight yard line, and the Greyhounds, possibly inspired by the fighting, the ejection of their return man, and the lack of a penalty against the Catamounts, promptly ripped off three first downs in a row. Then, on the next play, they scored. And they kicked the point.

  Score: Garton 28, Clearview 21.

  It stayed that way until the last minute of the game. The Clearview fans grew gloomier and gloomier as the Greyhound supporters became more and more cheerful and more and more vocal about their team’s prowess. The woman with the red and white hair even went down and joined the Garton cheerleaders for a yell, which made the fans even more gleeful.

  None of the Clearview followers left the stands, but it was obvious that many of them had given up hope. Things looked especially bleak after the Greyhounds punted the ball all the way to the Catamount five yard line. A draw play gained ten yards and a first down, but then two passes were incomplete and it was fourth down.

  Ivy touched Rhodes’ arm. “It’s all over, isn’t it?”

  Rhodes shook his head. “There are thirty seconds left. Remember what Yogi Berra said. “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

  Rhodes didn’t really believe that, however, nor did anyone else in the crowd, but then the Catamount quarterback took the snap, scrambled around for several seconds, and heaved a desperation pass from his own ten yard line. A skinny receiver flew past the defender, ran under the ball at the fifty yard line, and kept right on going, reaching the end zone untouched.

  The Clearview bench erupted in a fit of ecstasy unmatched in Catamount history and the fans screamed themselves hoarse, while the Greyhounds sat as stunned as if someone had hit them in the head with a wooden mallet. The Clearview fans were just as elated. There was so much screaming and yelling that Rhodes couldn’t even hear the band playing the fight song, though he could see the director’s arms waving.

  Rhodes wasn’t as happy as everyone else seemed to be. He could foresee a big problem for the Clearview team. If the game ended in a tie, Clearview would lose.

  Tie games were decided on the basis of two statistics: penetrations — the number of times one team had been inside the other’s twenty yard line — and first downs. Penetrations came first, and by Rhodes’ count Garton led on penetrations by a six to five margin.

  The Catamounts had to go for two points.

  The joy on the bench died down quickly and the Clearview head coach, Jasper Knowles, was in a heated discussion with his offensive coach, Brady Meredith.

  Knowles was about fifty-five, a short, bald man with a head like a bowling ball and a body to match. If he fell down, you could roll him across the field. Meredith, a former college quarterback about twenty years younger than Knowles towered over the older man, but Knowles wasn’t backing away.

  “What’s happening?” Ivy asked.

  “Looks like Jasper doesn’t like the play Brady called,” Rhodes said.

  The crowd roared as the coaches yelled at each other. Rhodes tried to make out the coaches’ words, but it was impossible.

  Then Meredith threw a punch at Knowles, who pulled his head to the side. The punch grazed his ear, and he stepped back, staring at Meredith in surprise. The younger coach took the opportunity to spit at Knowles’ feet and walk away.

  The stadium fell suddenly quiet, as if everyone there had taken a deep breath, all at the same time.

  Knowles took a deep breath too, and stood up as straight as was possible for him. Without looking at Meredith, he put his arms around the quarterback’s shoulders and whispered something to him. The quarterback ran onto the field, but not without a look backward as if he were seeking some kind of confirmation from Meredith.

  If that was what he was looking for, he didn’t see it. Meredith was already leaving the field, followed closely by Jerry Tabor, who’d had an excellent view of the whole proceedings from his place by the fence.

  All this activity had been closely observed by the Garton coach, but he didn’t have to call anything to the attention of the referees. They penalized Clearview five yards for delay of game.

  “That makes it harder, doesn’t it,” Ivy said.

  Rhodes nodded. He hoped that Knowles had called a good play. If he hadn’t, the fans, already stirred to a state of hysteria by the earlier fight and the excitement of the last- minute touchdown, were likely to storm the field and lynch him.

  The Catamount quarterback called out the signals, took the ball from center, faked a handoff, and dropped back to pass. Somehow a Garton linebacker slipped a blocker and leaped toward the quarterback, his hands upraised.

  The quarterback threw the ball straight up, or so it seemed from where Rhodes was sitting. It must have had a slight angle on it because it got by the linebacker’s hands and came down in the end zone, right among a cluster of six or seven players, Catamounts and Greyhounds, all of whom jumped into the air with outstretched arms.

  The ball landed somewhere among them, and they all fell in a heap as the officials converged on them.

  Before they got there, a player in blue and gold squirmed out of the stack, the ball clutched in his arms. He ran about five yards before he raised the ball
over his head and did a little dance that he must have invented himself.

  Ivy stood on tiptoe and put her mouth to Rhodes’ ear to tell him something, but the crowd had gone berserk. He couldn’t hear a word that she was saying.

  Chapter Three

  It’s an unfortunate part of the rules of football that a game must be played to its conclusion.

  After scoring a touchdown, even if only a few seemingly meaningless seconds are left in the game, the team that scored has to kick off to the other team because of the possibility that those final seconds could take on a meaning that was completely unexpected.

  For one thing, as small as the chances might be, the receiving team might actually be able to score by running the ball back for a touchdown as Dan (Will-o’-the-wisp) Rhodes had done so long ago.

  So the game clearly had to be played out to its conclusion. No one would argue with that. The problem with continuing this particular game, however, was the fact that after Clearview managed the two-point conversion, delirious Catamount fans poured out of the stands and onto the field without paying much attention to the clock.

  Some of the fans swarmed the players, while others tried to pull down the goalpost. Still others picked a dazed Jasper Knowles up on their shoulders and paraded him back and forth in front of the Catamount bench. The officials blew their whistles and tried to control the crowd, but they were having no more luck than they’d had before.

  “Is that Lawton headed for the ambulance?” Ivy asked. “You’d better get down there before he runs over somebody.”

  Rhodes had hoped at first that this time the crowd might settle down on its own, but it was clear within seconds that it just wasn’t going to happen. He walked out of the stands and jogged toward the end zone, getting there just as Lawton reached the ambulance. The driver was nowhere around.