Vince raised the town out of depression. Didn’t take that long. Football practice started in August, and by the time a hint of frost hung in the air again Coach sensed that, through his son’s leadership as quarterback, Eddie Rickenbacker High had a chance at the 2A playoffs for the first time since he himself captained the team. We took the Conference. The well-heeled downstate schools obliged us by picking one another off while we nibbled away in the far west, eking through some matches, annihilating our opponents in others. Reporters came from Raleigh and Charlotte and took our photos—Vince’s photo, actually, though sometimes we were gathered ’round as supporting cast. Game followed game, and when one ended in victory, kids in red and gold streamed down from the stands to lift us on their shoulders. Even Vince, who’d expected his life to turn out in something like this way, seemed taken aback. A clipping service sent him articles about himself from papers way downstate. He showed me when they mentioned me, as they, once or twice, did.
We lost in the sudden-death second round to some low-foreheaded glandular cases from Durham. Coach said they won because they were used to living around colored kids and fighting their way through the halls every day. What did we know? There were two black families in town, and where their kids went to school I had honestly no idea. It wasn’t Eddie Rickenbacker.
Coach hung publicity photos of the Durham squad in the locker room, so we could build up hatred toward them for the next match-up. They were mostly seniors and we’d never see those individuals again, but the sentiment mattered. We wanted to smash them into the ground and run our cleats over their broken spines. Nobody had heard them call us hillbillies, but we assumed they had, and were therefore determined to make that epithet one of fear and respect.
If I look at my old report cards, I see that I took chemistry and English and history and some pretty interesting stuff, but I almost literally have no memories of my junior year but Sherry and football. And by “football” I mean Vince and Tilden and the guys and the cheerleaders, all the sweat and bruises, and, when autumn came, the cries of victory. Dear God, I was in shape. I look at pictures of myself then and wonder if we were the same person.
No man is an entire team, but Vince came close as anyone could. His passes arced to his receivers like babies to their mothers’ arms. He ran the ball like a goddamn gazelle. He leapt over tackles as if they were lying down. When he got into the end zone he stopped and gazed kind of stupidly at the ball as if he were not quite sure he had made the touchdown, waiting for the voice of the crowd for confirmation. I’ve never seen anyone like him, before or since. We were golden, all of us that year, but Vince was diamond and uranium. Coach beamed at him even when nobody was looking. Walking down the hall at school was a march of triumph. I wonder sometimes if Sherry would have married me without the glamour of that season around my head. I’m too prudent to ask. I got voted Outstanding Left Tackle by the sportswriters of North Carolina. I have the certificate framed in my den. Vince collected so many certificates, so many trophies he stopped setting them out on his mother’s shelves. The newspaper ran a feature on how many articles they had run on him in the previous eighteen months, and it turned out to be more than the mayor. You could watch people just standing back and looking at him in the streets. The border mountains had never produced anything like him. Having Vince as my best friend seemed such a stroke of fortune that I would probably never ask anything else of the world.
It was that summer, the one between the first two championship years, that Glen went to Scout Camp out west. His life thus became temporarily more interesting than ours. Vince would gather us together and read letters Glen had written from his bunk under the Grand Tetons, or wherever the hell it was. Vince read the letters aloud, and when he did he made the salutation “Dear Vince and Arden and Tilden,” though you could see by the mark of the letters through the page that all Glen had written was “Dear Vince”:
Philmont is great, for the most part. JC, the guy who teaches rock climbing, is cool, and I’m getting good at it. The cliffs used to look a lot taller than they do now. Can’t wait to show you my bruises and sunburn, and even a snakebite, from something harmless, though, so the bragging rights aren’t so great. You have to shake your boots in the morning to make sure there aren’t scorpions curled up inside. I wouldn’t want to live in my boots, but there’s no accounting. Never ate so much in my life. When you’re climbing cliffs and riding horses all day, you build up an appetite.
Dad’s almost forgiven me for trying to get out of coming here this summer. I told him I wanted to spend the summer with you, but he didn’t even understand what I meant. Or maybe he did. I do like the Scouts, though, and I’m learning so much. You and Tilden and Arden are all the time showing me up in the woods. This is catch-up, sucker! Dad spent a lot of money and went to a lot of trouble, blah blah blah, so I make sure to tell him what good things we’re doing and how I’m really getting use out of his money. I am having a good time and all that, but I’m not glad I came. I miss you. I miss you like hell. Thank you for that last night together. I carry the feel, the touch, the sound of your voice with me everywhere. I’ll see you in twenty-six days.
Love, Glen
Tilden said, “What’s that touch and sound of your voice stuff?”
“Oh, he’s bullshitting. You know how we’re always bullshitting.” But Vince’s face was bright red. He hadn’t edited the letter first. He kept reading the letters as they arrived afterward, but you could tell by the way he moved his head that he wasn’t reading all of them like they were written.
One day in Youth Sunday School we had a visitor, a whippet-thin gent who had been a missionary in China, and sort of looked Chinese now, with a wispy beard and long eyes and a wise bald head. He was about a thousand years old. He’d taught the Chinese to grow better wheat, or something. We were talking about the things you talk about with a thousand-year-old missionary, when Doug Lazorn—ever the wise-ass—made the point that heaven must be boring after a while, since even the best thing drawn out to eternity is boring. The old guy smiled. He said we—or at least Doug—had gotten it wrong. You should think of paradise not as an infinite extension of moments, but one moment of perfect bliss in which you live fully, in the moment, of the moment, without thought for what came before or would come after. Before the end of the day I started applying this to my life, which was so good at the moment that I made a deliberate effort not to think of whatever might come after. Kids not in bliss might be picking out colleges and writing admissions essays. Not us. We were in the clouds and not ready to step down. Maybe we can be forgiven for thinking our lives would never change, that all was perfect and a gold haze lay on the encircling mountains. We were OK, I think; even our arrogance was a kind of gratitude.