CHAPTER 15

It was hot then, the hottest day of the training period. My skin crawled with sweat under the jersey and at the rim of the shoulder pads, which scratched and rasped as I moved. Friday Macklem brought the station wagon down and parked it in the shade by the side of the practice field. George Wilson ordered water breaks; the players clustered around, spouting the water from plastic bottles against the roofs of their throats, and applying towels dipped in pails of ice across each other’s necks. I thought about the pails of lemonade that would be waiting in the training room, the ice cubes floating on top, and the big tin dipper to pour it into the paper cups.

The scrimmage was scheduled for late in the afternoon. The spectators, many of whom had been sitting under the big elms while the units practiced separately, began collecting along the sidelines. Don Doll said, “You’re going in for Night Train for the last plays of the afternoon. OK?”

“Right,” I said.

“D’you talk to him last night?”

“Sure,” I said. “My head’s stuffed.”

“You got it straight then.”

“Well,” I said. “I’m not so sure.”

Doll said, “You probably got some sort of headache.”

The scrimmage was run periodically—with the coaches talking with their units after every play. The concentration was on the pass attack. I watched Train at his position. Two passes came out his way. One he knocked down, and the other was caught on him, which made him giggle sharply, like a boy about to be tagged in a schoolyard game—an unexpected sound in the rough, noisy rush of other defensive backs coming up to push the receiver out-of-bounds. It occurred to me that Night Train had such confidence that such a mistake could only be treated as ludicrous, and therefore comic.

“OK,” Doll said. “In you go.”

I wrenched on my helmet, wincing as its edges slid painfully past my ears, and I trotted out to Train.

“Here I am,” I said.

He skinned off the red shirt—the light scarlet canvas jersey that the defense wears in a scrimmage—helping me slide it down my upright arms, over the helmet, and across my shoulder pads. It was covered with drawings and graffiti, most of them obscene, doodled on with ballpoint pens.

“Train, I’m carrying around an art gallery,” I said.

He gave a last haul to the jersey. “Get on in there,” he said. He pointed to the defensive huddle forming behind the line of scrimmage.

“You’ll be around, Train?”

“I’ll be on the sidelines,” he said.

In the defensive huddle they did not seem surprised when I trotted in and joined them. A few helmets turned. Past the helmet bars the eyes looked tired, staring from faces slick with sweat. We leaned toward Schmidt. “The coverage is red, George,” he said to me. “That means you stick with the flanker—one-on-one, you just stay with him. I’ll have your ass if you don’t.”

The huddle broke and I trotted back to the cornerman position. I looked over at Night Train, close by, fifteen yards or so away, standing on the sidelines. He offered up an encouraging smile, a shine of teeth in his dark face.

“It’s red,” I hissed at him.

“Stick with the flanker,” he called back, cupping his hands to his mouth. “Scramble back when he come, and don’ give up.”

A knot of spectators had collected around him, looking out. All of them, in Bermuda shorts, seemed to have soft-drink bottles in their hands. I avoided their stares. I felt the heat build up inside my helmet. I jogged in place, working the stiffness out, and watched the offensive huddle break finally with a crack of hands in unison and move up to their positions. Jake Greer was the flanker and he came loping out along the line of scrimmage, split ten yards or so from his nearest lineman. I moved along opposite, watching him.

Plum began to call the signals. At the hike of the ball, Greer started toward me with his high, bouncy steps, slow at first, like the slow-motion advance of a klipspringer, coming head-on. Then his speed picked up.

“Fetch him!” I heard Night Train yell. “Scrabble aroun’!”

I began to backpedal, trying to keep my eye on Greer’s belt buckle. He sailed up to me, and then cut to my left for the sidelines, with a little grunt, and I could hear the shu-shu of his football trousers as he went by, and the creak of his shoulder pads. I was leaning left to the outside when he cut, just chancing he would move for the sidelines on a down-and-out pattern, and when I reached after him I was not too far behind. He pulled up after two or three strides, and I almost cracked into him. The play was over—a pass to the other side had been knocked down by a lineman rearing up. Greer started trotting back to his huddle. I doubted he noticed that I was opposing him at cornerback. I had not seen the pass thrown—the action there as distant as if it had taken place on another practice field. I had no sense of identification with the play. Greer and I had been alone in my zone. My confrontation with him could have been an inadvertent bumbling into the track of a high hurdler out practicing in the evening.

Night Train came hurrying up to give his précis. The whole action hadn’t taken more than four or five seconds. I was left with a sense of anticlimax.

“I didn’t feel part of that play,” I said.

“Not too much to quibble,” he said. “You scare the man so much they throw to the other side.” He grinned. “Now,” he said, “you mus’ keep the angle so you see the quarterback. Look,” he said. He showed me how I should have controlled Greer, a fast crablike scuttle that allowed him to keep facing downfield to watch the play, both the flanker and the quarterback in his field of vision.

I began to see what he meant by the angle of the receiver.

“Get on up there,” he said. The defensive huddle was forming. I trotted up in time to hear Joe Schmidt call out a red coverage—man-to-man again.

Back in my position, Night Train called to me from the sidelines: “Jawge, this time, recall to shout out there… talk it up.”

The spectators, their soft-drink bottles poised, leaned in behind Train, listening.

It was awkward, their being there, but I called to Train nonetheless: “What… what sort of thing do I say?”

“Disclose what your man doing,” he called out. “If they float your zone with people, disclose that. Disclose the defense what is goin’ on.”

The offense was alternating flankers, so Terry Barr appeared opposite me on the next play. Staring downfield, being sure not to give away a move by a flick of the eyes, he stood upright, with hands on hips, his right leg slightly bent to push off. At the hike signal, he was immediately in high gear, quite unlike Greer’s klipspringer bounce; with his sprinter’s run, his head steady as he came, he was nearly up to me before I had a chance to plan what to do. “Barr! Barr!” I called out as he came—an identification being all I could think of to divulge. Having to announce his maneuvers nearly rooted me to the ground. It was difficult to react physically and keep up a shouted commentary at the same time, particularly as I was unsure of the appropriate vocabulary. So Barr went by me very fast, straight downfield, as I stood announcing his name, calling those loonlike wails, “Barr! Barr! Barr!” before I turned and lit out after him, with one arm outstretched in the classic pose of hopeless pursuit.

Once again, the play itself was to the opposite sideline, but as Barr came by on his way back he looked at me, perhaps puzzled to have heard the demonic repetition of his name, and he said, “Well, now, look who’s here.”

“For God’s sake, keep it to yourself,” I said, breathing hard from the run.

I could see him grinning behind the cage of his helmet, before he turned and began trotting back to his team. Train was at my elbow as I stared after him.

“I think he’s got something to disclose,” I said. “Things may get a little warmer.”

“It’s possible. Interception time,” Train said hopefully. “You got to scatter them feet around some, and move. Yo’ look a little stiff las’ time.”

As I walked in toward Schmidt I watched the offense’s huddle form, keeping a nervous eye out for helmets turned in my direction. Most were turned toward Scooter McLean, just on the periphery of the huddle, still criticizing the last play; Aldo Forte was with him, talking to his offensive linemen. A play would run, and the coaches talk about it for five minutes, the players shifting their weight from foot to foot, getting their assignments straight.

Finally, the coaches backed away. “OK, the last play of the day,” George Wilson called out. Schmidt had given the same coverage, and I was back at my position. I saw the helmets duck down in the huddle, then one of them, Plum’s I supposed, rise and face in my direction, just briefly, the egg-smooth surface of the helmet, its cage pointed at me, adding to the sense of that impersonal scrutiny, like a robot monster’s, and I thought, “I’m for it. Barr’s told Plum.”

“Train, I’m a goner,” I called out.

“Get yo’ angle right,” Night Train replied through cupped hands. He offered a last odd flurry of instructions: “Scrabble ’roun’! Don’ regard the jukin’! Recovah! Disclose! Inform!”

The huddle broke. The flanker coming out opposite me was Barr again—being rewarded, the thought crossed my mind, for suggesting that there was a flaw, a serious one, in the defense. His face was no longer expressionless. I suspected a big grin behind the helmet bar.

The strength was lined up to his side. Bent over his center, Plum began the signals, his the only helmet turning as he surveyed the defense in that cataleptic instant, around him the whole frieze of his teammates’ helmets motionless, and then he unleashed them as the ball slapped back into his palm, yielding them to the quick imperative of action.

Since the two preceding plays the concentration of the play had been elsewhere, I had felt alone with the flanker. Now, the whole heave of the play was toward me, flooding the zone not only with confused motion but noise—the quick stomp of feet, the creak of football gear, the strained grunts of effort, the faint ah-ah-ah of piston-stroke regularity, and the stiff calls of instruction, like exhalations. “Inside, inside! Take him inside!” someone shouted, tearing by me, his cleats thumping in the grass. A call—a parrot squawk—may have erupted from me. My feet splayed in hopeless confusion as Barr came directly toward me, feinting in one direction, and then stopping suddenly, drawing me toward him for the possibility of a buttonhook pass, and as I leaned almost off balance toward him, he turned and came on again, downfield, moving past me at high speed, leaving me poised on one leg, reaching for him, trying to grab at him despite the illegality, anything to keep him from getting by. But he was gone, and by the time I had turned to set out after him, he had ten yards on me, drawing away fast with his sprinter’s run, his legs pinwheeling, the row of cleats flicking up a faint wake of dust behind.

“Ball! Ball! Ball!” I could hear Night Train yelling.

I looked up as I ran, and straight above, against the sky, I could see the football heading downfield, as high as a punt it seemed—the bomb!—and I put up a hand instinctively though the ball must have been twenty feet over my head. It was astonishingly distinct—I suppose because my eyes were concentrated on it with such longing—the white laces turning, a faint wobble to its nose, even the literature on it discernible, the trade name “Duke” turning, DUKE, DUKE, DUKE. It sailed downfield, then seemed to drift down, and there was Barr running under it, barely having to reach up for it as he collected it to him. He kept on sprinting with the football, across the goal line, never looking back, finally slowing to a trot as he headed for the gym.

I stopped and waited for Train to come up. The other players walked by, all of them grinning.

“Well, that’s that,” I said dispiritedly.

“The referee’d blown the whistle on that play,” Night Train said cheerfully. “The whole lef’ side of their line was offside. They’d blown it back for a penalty.”

“Sure,” I said.

He grinned and set off to do some laps around the field, always working, even in that heat.

Bruce Maher trotted in beside me and we started the walk across the fields.

“Well, I sure got beat,” I said. “I got beat like a drum,” I said, slipping into the jargon.

“It’s not easy,” said Maher. “And what’s worse is what happens after a guy catches one on you and goes for the score. You run towards the bench and you know you’re going to get hell there. You can see the coaches, with their clipboards, watching you come. Then, as you run in, you’ve got to pass all these big linemen going down to kick the extra point—your own linemen, looking at you like you’re a worm, and then the other team’s line, and they have sort of a half grin on their faces, conspiratorial-like, like you conspired to fall down and let their guy score.”

“Football’s all humiliation, isn’t it?” I said. “Gonzaga was telling me that playing opposite Doug Atkins was like having your pants taken down in front of sixty thousand people.”

“Someone’s got to be humiliated,” Maher said. “The other guy sometimes. If you intercept and you get stopped back near their quarterback, you can see, if you can spot him, that he’s got that same awful look on his face, like he’s falling off a cliff. And you find yourself with that half grin, looking at him as if you wanted to thank him for throwing the ball to you, and that you’re sure available any time he wants to do it again. After all, it’s probably his mistake that’s made you look good.”

We went up through the pines toward the gym. It was quiet in the shade, but it was hot, the dust kicked up by the cleats, everybody tired and silent, hearing only the click of cleats against an occasional stone as we moved up the path and the creak of football equipment like harness along a dray horse’s back.

“Bruce,” I said, “the humiliation isn’t so bad if you have something to look forward to. It’s that lemonade,” I said, “that lemonade sitting waiting in those big pails in the training room, with the ice cubes floating in there, and the big dipper along the side, and the paper cups…”

“Roger Brown makes that lemonade,” Maher said. “With his feet.”

“Cut it out.”

“He stomps on those lemons just before practice,” Maher went on.

“Come on, now,” I said.

“Big old Rhinofoot. He hops around on them like he was in a wine vat.”

“That’s terrible,” I said.

I was going to aim a sort of fake kick at him, but it was too hot.

“Hell,” he said, grinning. “Hot day like today, we’d drink the stuff if we knew it’d been made by a real honest rhino.”

“Well, you’re right,” I said.