Skip paused and stood up.
“Coach?” Skip’s killer expression faded and he angled his head at Landon.
Bent over with his hands on his knees to watch the action, Coach Furster looked like a man awakened from a pleasant dream. His mouth tilted open in confusion, and it looked like the whistle might slip loose from his lips as he considered Landon. “Yeah. No.”
Coach Furster looked around for someone else, his lips dragged down by a frown and the whistle dropping to the end of the lanyard around his neck before he pointed to the back of Skip’s line. “Nichols! You’re the runner!”
“Coach?” Landon said. “What’s wrong?
Coach Furster ignored him as Nichols looked confused and said, “Huh?”
“Nichols! You jump to the front of the line. Now!”
Nichols shrugged, waddled up to the front of the line, and accepted the football from Skip. Before Landon could think, Nichols crouched in a much less ferocious manner than Skip, Coach Furster blasted his whistle, and Nichols barreled right toward Landon.
Landon’s feet did a little dance in place. He took half a step forward and opened his arms before Nichols punched a shoulder pad into his midriff. The air left his body in a great gust. He staggered sideways, shocked by the impact, but aware of Nichols slipping past him. Landon couldn’t let that happen. He grabbed for anything to hold. His hands locked onto Nichols’s jersey. Like a great felled tree, Landon tipped and went down, dragging Nichols with him.
Nichols collapsed without a fight in the end zone. Landon lay on the grass, looking up at the blazing hot sun. A beam of light cut through the cage of his face mask like a gleaming sword. Coach Furster appeared standing over him in a nauseating funk of cologne and baked dirt.
“Okay, Landon.” Coach Furster seemed like he was talking to a kindergartner. “You did it. You got him down. Your first tackle.”
Coach Furster turned away, his face cast into darkness by the shadow of the sun, and returned to normal. “Next! Let’s go, ladies! This isn’t a fashion show! This isn’t a candy store!”
Landon scrabbled to his feet and Nichols bumped him with a shoulder that seemed intentional before Landon jogged to the end of the line of runners. No one looked at him. No one celebrated his tackle, and as he watched the backs of his teammates’ helmets queuing up in front of him, he realized it wasn’t much of a tackle, if it was a tackle at all, because Nichols had made it into the end zone.
Landon stood still at the back of the line, his teammates jumping in front of him without so much as a glance. He was frozen with disappointment. The glorious tackles he had imagined himself making, blowing people up like Karlos Danby did, now seemed utterly impossible. He had barely brought down Timmy. What would Guerrero do to him? Or Brett Bell? It wasn’t fear that froze him, but bewilderment. He felt like he was suddenly walking on the moon without gravity.
Because he stood still, people moved in front of him to get their turn to run the ball. Soon a pattern was established, and although no one said anything to him, he found himself standing at the end of the line and watching the tackling drill, big and hot and sweaty and forlorn.
It made him sick to just stand there, but the idea of taking the ball and having someone blast into him full speed suddenly seemed ridiculous. He’d never be a running back anyway. He was too timid to cross the open grass and go back to the line of tacklers in the end zone, so he stood there, and no one said a word, including the coaches. They must have been thinking the same thing he was thinking. Everyone on the same page. A-okay.
Landon grew slowly more comfortable, and he began to entertain the idea that when they got to the blocking drills, that’s where he’d prove himself. That’s where he belonged.
“I’m a hog,” he whispered to himself, and straightened his spine. “Hogs are made for blocking.”
Everything seemed just fine, until Coach West looked around as if he’d dropped his keys. When he spotted what he was looking for, it was halfway across the field. Coach West pointed to the water bottle carrier and looked toward Landon from behind a pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses. “Hey, Dorch! Don’t just stand there. Make yourself useful and go get me that water, will you?”