by Tom Perrotta
That could have been me, Todd thought, shifting uneasily from foot to foot in the secondary. He made this observation without shame or regret, accepting the truth of it with an almost perverse sense of pride. He felt okay about where he was, over on this side of the line with Larry and DeWayne, men who eked out forty or fifty grand a year and struggled to scrape together the down payment on a two-bedroom cape that needed work, men for whom a new car was a twice-a-decade extravagance.
On the first play from scrimmage, the Controllers ran straight up the middle. From his godlike perspective at free safety, Todd watched a hole open in the Guardians’ front line, a momentary gap between Olaffson and Correnti just big enough for the Controllers’ halfback—a wiry speedster who supposedly competed in Iron Man triathalons in the off-season—to shoot through. Reading the play perfectly from middle linebacker, Larry rushed forward on a collision course with the ballcarrier. Somehow, though, the collision never occurred. Dancing a quick little stutter step that left his would-be tackler with two handfuls of air and a faceful of artificial turf, the Iron Man slipped into the open field, loping straight toward Todd, the defender of last resort.
He was one of those shifty runners, a virtuoso of jukes and misdirection, eyes going one way, shoulders another, legs somewhere else, but Todd knew enough to stay put and focus on the hips, (Gentlemen, Coach Breeden used to say, in one of his rare aphorisms that had worn well over the years, the hips don’t lie. Not in the boudoir and not on the field of play.) Realizing he wasn’t going to elude his man with fancy footwork, the halfback tried to do it honestly, veering toward the sideline with a sudden and disheartening burst of speed. He almost turned the corner, but Todd just managed to trip him up from behind with a desperate, diving tackle that almost certainly saved a touchdown.
The girlfriends on the Controller bench rose as one, whooping it up like cheerleaders as the Iron Man bounced to his feet, brushing nonexistent dirt off his hairless, freakishly muscled legs with his gloved hands.
“Way to go, Zack!”
“Controllers rule!”
“Go team!”
Todd picked himself up a little more gingerly, trying to ignore the burning sensation in his right knee, which he’d skinned on the unforgiving carpet. The Iron Man pulled out his mouthpiece and grinned.
“Dude,” he said, bestowing a comradely pat on Todd’s shoulder, “I’m gonna keep you busy.”
Jogging back to the huddle, Todd couldn’t help noticing the wilted expressions on the faces of his teammates, the sense of impending doom that had replaced their irrational exuberance of a moment ago. All it had taken was one bad play to wake them from their collective dream, to remind them that they were a bunch of losers due for an ass-whipping. But Todd wasn’t in the mood to fold just yet.
“Come on!” he said, clapping his hands sharply. “Buckle down! Let’s play some D!”
“That was my bad,” Larry said, picking up the thread. “It won’t happen again.”
“Damn straight,” said DeWayne. “Next time you hit that sucker.”
“Let’s tighten the fuck up!” Correnti growled.
Like the cocky bastards that they were, the Controllers repeated the exact same play on the next snap, and it unfolded in the exact same way, except that this time Larry didn’t fall for the stutter step. He plugged the hole like Dick Butkus in some grainy highlight film from 1971, slamming into the halfback with a chest-to-chest tackle so bone-crunchingly ferocious that Todd felt a shudder of sympathy pass through his own body from ten yards away. The Iron Man took his time getting up, and when he did he had the look on his face that Larry had described in the van: the woozy, unhappy expression of a guy who suddenly realizes that his cakewalk has just turned into a street fight.
To Todd’s amazement—not to mention the amazement of the Controllers and their girlfriends—it turned out to be a game, a low-scoring, evenly matched slugfest that stayed interesting right to the end. The Controllers scored first, after recovering a Bart Williams fumble deep in Guardians’ territory near the end of the second quarter. The Guardians evened things up early in the second half, moving methodically down the field on an eighty-yard touchdown drive. Late in the fourth quarter, the Controllers kicked a short field goal, leaving them with a precarious 10–7 lead as the Guardians took possession of the ball for what was probably their last offensive series of the game.
On a rational level, the Guardians were the team who should have been worried. They were losing; time was running out. But as Todd stepped up to the line on first down, he understood, along with everyone else on the field, that it was their opponents who were running scared. With a little under two minutes to go, the Controllers looked battered and demoralized. The Iron Man’s right eye was swollen shut; the quarterback sported a fat lip that made it increasingly difficult for him to call signals. The wide receiver—an Asian guy with a buzz cut and blazing speed—had his jersey ripped open halfway down to his waist, as if he’d inexplicably failed to complete his transformation into the Incredible Hulk. All through the second half, the whiz kids had been carping at one another, taking their frustration out on themselves instead of on the Guardians. Even more telling, their foxy cheering section had fallen into a stunned and gloomy silence.
The Guardians, on the other hand, had jelled as a unit for the first time all year, coming together in a spirit of teamwork and mutual admiration. They’d played over their heads the entire game, shutting down the league’s most fearsome offense and moving the ball up and down the field with surprising authority, despite their frustrating inability to put more than seven points on the scoreboard. Everyone had contributed—DeWayne had caught six passes from Todd, including one for a touchdown; Olaffson and Correnti had had five sacks between them; Bart had saved a touchdown with a spectacular interception—but Larry had outdone them all. He was all over the field, making plays he had absolutely no right to make, batting down passes, anticipating reverses, one time even catching the Iron Man from behind on a crucial third down sweep. If the game ended with the Guardians still down by three, they’d go to a bar afterward and celebrate a job well-done, while the victorious Controllers would drink in gloomy silence, knowing they’d taken a thrashing from a team they were supposed to dominate.
With nothing to lose, the Guardians went for broke on first down. Todd faked a handoff to Bart and lofted a bomb down the left sideline, overthrowing a wide-open DeWayne by a heartbreaking couple of inches. On second down, he completed a quick slant pass for a pickup of five. The Controllers blitzed on third down, forcing him to throw the ball away to avoid a sack.
So this was it, their last chance—fourth and five on their own thirty-five, fiftysomething seconds to go. Todd called for a flood pass, all three of his eligible receivers breaking toward the right sideline, each about five yards deeper than the other. He took the snap and bootlegged right, looking first for Richie Murphy, his short man. Covered. Ditto on Bart, the middle receiver. He cocked the ball, ready to throw to DeWayne, his last and best chance, only to watch him slip and fall as he made his cut.
At almost the same moment, Todd heard footsteps from his left, the unmistakable thunder of a rampaging defensive lineman. He held his ground a little longer, standing up straight and gazing doggedly downfield, letting his assailant zero in on his upper body. It was the oldest trick in the book. He ducked at the last possible second, crouching as low as he could go, and the Controllers’ 250-pound defensive tackle flew right over him, landing with an elephant-sized thud near the sideline.
Now it was anarchy, an official broken play. Todd looped back to his left to avoid the rest of the pass rush, hoping to scramble long enough for his receivers to reverse course and get themselves open. But what he saw as he drifted back toward midfield forced him to rethink his plan on the fly. There was so much green in front of him that it felt like a dream, yards and yards of open field, way more than he needed for a first down. He tucked the ball and ran.
He was ten yards downfield befor
e anyone even seemed to understand what he was up to. Fifteen yards, twenty, twenty-five, the field pitching toward him and away from him with each pounding stride. He heard a dull drumbeat off to the right, the staccato of hot pursuit.
Don’t look, he told himself, just keep going. One leg in front of the other. Big steps. Eat the yardage.
Someone was breathing down his neck by the time he crossed the Controllers’ thirty yard line, a development that didn’t surprise him—there were at least two of them he knew he wouldn’t be able to outrun. What did surprise him, as he gave in and glanced over his shoulder, was the sight of DeWayne pulling up beside him to run interference, his stumpy arms and legs pumping at a cartoonish frequency, his breath coming in big raggedy gulps. A little bit farther away, but gaining with every step, were the two Controllers he’d expected, the Iron Man and the Asian guy, each of them moving with long, graceful strides and expressions of fierce determination.
He had just crossed the twenty when DeWayne turned suddenly and took out the Asian guy with a textbook open-field block, a tumbling blur in the corner of Todd’s eye. Now it was a footrace, Todd and the Iron Man, a race he knew he’d lose. Calculating the angles as he ran, he came to the conclusion that he’d be pushed out of bounds around the ten yard line, an outcome that seemed as unacceptable as it was inevitable.
Unless.
Crossing the fifteen, Todd slammed on the brakes, somehow managing to slow down so drastically and unexpectedly that the Iron Man simply went zooming past him with a desolate cry of protest, stumbling out of bounds and pitching face first onto the synthetic lawn, leaving Todd with a clear path to the end zone.
He spun on his heels and jogged backward across the goal line, the ball raised triumphantly overhead, a gesture that looked arrogant when the pros did it on TV but felt right just then, allowing him to watch his teammates as they came charging joyfully down the field to join him. Todd spiked the ball and waited for them, his arms stretched wide, his chest heaving as if he were trying to suck the whole night into his lungs. All he wished was that Sarah had been there to see it, to know him as he’d known himself streaking down the wide-open field, not as some jock hero scoring the winning touchdown, but as a grown man experiencing an improbable moment of grace.
And then he saw her.
He wasn’t sure what made him glance up just then at what he thought were the empty bleachers—a reflex of habit or hope, some kind of magnetic charge she was emitting—but there she was, a wish made flesh, sitting by herself in the top row, in the shadow of the announcer’s booth. She was waving to him, her face shining like a beacon, her mouth forming words he found he could understand quite clearly, as if there were no distance between them at all, words he would have said right back to her if he hadn’t been buried just then beneath a stampede of ecstatic teammates, a swarming pile of jubilation.
“What the hell happened to Todd?” Correnti wondered. “I wanted to buy him a drink.”
Larry shrugged. “He said he was coming.”
“Guess he got a better offer,” said Richie Murphy.
“Shit.” Bart Williams shook his head in wistful reflection. “Was that a beautiful run or what? Sixty-five yards on a broken fourth-down pass play. They should put it on ESPN.”
“He couldn’t have done it without the little man’s help,” Olaffson pointed out, polishing DeWayne’s already gleaming scalp with a paper napkin. “You see him take that sucker out? Pow! He hit the ground like a tumbleweed.”
“Ol’ Todd was truckin’,” laughed DeWayne. “That white boy was running for his life.”
“I don’t care what anybody says,” declared Bart. “I don’t begrudge him a thing. Guy deserves to get laid after a touchdown like that.”
Correnti raised his beer bottle.
“Here’s to the Toddster. Even if he did ditch us for a little late-night pussy.”
Larry joined the toast, but his heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t think it was right, Todd skipping out on their only victory celebration of the year, especially since he was the man responsible. The whole thing felt half-baked without him, a party with no guest of honor.
“You sure that wasn’t his wife?” asked Olaffson, his brow furrowed with concern. Pete was a born-again who refused to watch R-rated movies, abstained from alcohol, and never forgave Clinton for that blowjob.
“I got news for you,” said Correnti. “You wanna grab your wife’s ass, you don’t need to do it at midnight on a football field.”
Larry was no prude like Olaffson, but even he was shocked by the brazenness of his friend’s behavior. He’d lost track of Todd in the immediate aftermath of the game, distracted as he was by the highly gratifying spectacle of the Controllers slouching off the field, heads bowed in shame, their sexy girlfriends comforting them with maternal pats on the back. It wasn’t until the Guardians began drifting toward the parking lot that he realized he’d misplaced his passenger.
“Anyone seen Todd?” he asked.
DeWayne pointed downfield, toward a couple of shadowy figures in the end zone, a man and a woman making out like teenagers beneath the goalposts. Even from that distance, Larry realized right away that the woman wasn’t Todd’s wife. He’d met Kathy in the supermarket about a year ago, and though he’d be the first to admit she was a total babe, he’d also found her to be disturbingly tall—i.e., taller than he was. The woman in the end zone had to stand on her tiptoes and crane her neck just to be able to kiss Todd on the mouth.
Larry gave them a few minutes to finish their business, but they showed no sign of winding down, let alone wrapping it up. Not seeing any choice in the matter—he’d be damned if he was going to stand there all night, watching Todd fondle a short woman’s ass—he strolled back onto the field and made his way over to the lovebirds. He stopped near the ten yard line, at what struck him as a reasonably discreet distance, and cleared his throat as loudly as he could.
“What?” Todd sounded pissed, as if Larry had barged into his bedroom. “Whaddaya want?”
“The guys are going to Casey’s. You comin’?”
“Oh, Christ.” Todd’s sigh was audible twenty yards away. “I’m gonna be a little while. Why don’t you go ahead. I’ll catch up later.”
“You’re gonna come, right? We need to celebrate.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll be right there. Just give me fifteen, twenty minutes.” He hesitated, and it was possible the woman had whispered something. “Half hour tops.”
“You promise?”
“Jesus, Larry. I just told you.”
“I don’t mean to bother you,” Larry said. “It’s just—I’m heading over to Blueberry Court later on. I was hoping you could ride shotgun.”
“What about the other guys? Why don’t you ask one of them?”
“They’re cops. They can’t get involved with this kinda shit.”
Todd let go of the woman and took a few steps in Larry’s direction.
“Do yourself a favor, Larry. Just stay away from there. You’re gonna get yourself arrested again.”
Larry stared at the woman for a second or two, trying to place her. He was pretty sure he recognized her from somewhere, that messy hair and cranky expression. She should be with someone like me, he thought, not someone like him.
“I don’t care,” he said. “Let them arrest me. They wanna lock me up for protecting my kids, then bring it on. Make me a fuckin’ martyr.”
Long after the rest of the Guardians had gone home, Larry sat like a jilted lover on the hood of his minivan in the almost empty parking lot of Casey’s Bar and Grille, knowing that Todd had blown him off but waiting for him anyway.
It wasn’t like he needed help. On a purely operational level, Larry had no doubt that he was better off working solo. All Todd ever did was hide in the car and try to talk him out of whatever it was that needed to be done. It’s late, Larry, you can’t ring the doorbell now. You’re not really gonna set that bag of shit on fire, are you, Larry? Come on, Lar, give the old lady a break
. She’s not a criminal. But maybe that was what Larry needed—a reality check, a voice of reason whispering in his ear, keeping him from doing something that he’d end up regretting. If Todd had been with him at St. Rita’s, maybe he wouldn’t have lost his temper; maybe he wouldn’t be in the shitload of trouble he was in right now.
On the other hand, stupid as that had been, Larry didn’t exactly regret hurting Ronnie. He wasn’t going to spill any tears over a pervert’s broken arm—even if it was a nasty compound fracture—and the majority of his fellow citizens seemed to feel the same way. Most of them were more upset with the D.A. for pressing charges against a Concerned Parent than they were about the fact that a convicted child molester had suffered a few bumps and bruises during an involuntary trip down the stairs. For every letter to the editor criticizing Larry’s “rash and violent behavior,” and demanding to know who had elected him “judge, jury, and executioner,” there were two more defending him for his “completely justified reaction,” and a third going so far as to call him a hero.
After living through an ice age of private hell and public disgrace, Larry had, in the past week and a half, begun to notice a distinct thaw in the air. Women waved to him when he walked down the street; men went out of the way to shake his hand. He felt like he was entering a new phase of his life, shedding the image of Larry Moon, the trigger-happy, possibly racist cop, and trading it in for something a whole lot better: Larry Moon, the avenging father, defender of the innocent, the guy who’d enacted the whole town’s secret fantasy.
“Don’t give up,” his neighbors told him. “Keep on fighting.”
That was exactly what Larry intended to do; he just couldn’t help wishing Todd was there to do it with him. It must have been a holdover from his cop days, the feeling of security he got from having a partner, the knowledge that someone he trusted was watching his back. Tonight, though, he wasn’t going to have that luxury.
“WAKE UP!”
