The Eleventh Man

by Ivan Doig

  There was more than one audience for this. Ben risked a glance toward the near sideline where Ted Loudon, Bruno's pet sportswriter and nobody else's, was taking in the coach's every word hungrily. Why? He'll keep making up whatever he wants to about "the team that can't find itself" anyway. Loudon even trigged himself up in camel-colored topcoat and snap-brim hat in imitation of Bruno but fell short as a fashion plate due to newspaper pay.

  "Listen up, people," the coach intoned, as if they had any other choice, "do you know what you want to be as a team? Slick. Operating together smooth as shit through a goose. I want teamwork from you so slick the sissies across from you won't be able to see straight, you hear me?"

  Nearest across the scrimmage line from Ben, Purcell uncomfortably did. The lanky sophomore was blushing red-hot at the coach's choice of language. Where the hell was he raised, in a Sunday school? A walk-on from six-man nowhere, Merle Purcell had been turning pink since the first day of practice when he stepped into the locker room wearing a droopy high school sweater that showed he had lettered in football, basketball, and track. Instantly he became known as the three-letter man and crude suggestions were made as to what those letters stood for. He wasn't necessarily hazed any harder than any other sophomore scrub, but on him it seemed to stick. On the field the freakish kid could outrun anything said about him—Ben, who was quick, comprehended the cosmic difference between that and fast—yet when he wasn't in motion he lapsed into a sitting duck. Purcell was a handful in more ways than one, but right then Ben had everyone else on the squad to worry about.

  Bruno paused again, then resumed like a thunderclap:

  "There is not, I repeat, not an opponent on the schedule that the Treasure State University Golden Eagles of nineteen hundred and forty-one can't beat the living piss out of, if you will merely play this game my way. If! Do you hear that word? I-F! And now that I have your attention, may I point out to you something there is no goddamn if about. It is one week from today to the season opener. One week! That gives you seven days to pull together into a team that devotes itself heart, soul, and fart hole to this ball."

  Now—Hollywood could not have cued him better, Ben had to admit—the coach put the football down gently as an egg. By then varsity and second-stringers alike knew Animal indeed was prophetic, here it came. "People?" the coach addressed them as if dubious about that. "To help you concentrate on the loving care of this miraculous object, you are now playing under the Golden Rule."

  Despair followed those words like jackal tracks behind a caravan. The only thing biblical about Bruno's Golden Rule was that it was blunt-edged and carried the whiff of Hell. The dreaded maxim was actually a catchall for his wrathful coaching canons—no fumbling the football, no missing a tackle, no messing up a play, no time-outs to fix shoulder pads, no anything else that could conceivably offend the exacting eye on the sideline—but what sane person in a football uniform was going to stand out there arguing singular and plural with the gridiron lord and master?

  Not Ben, not quite yet. Not in front of everybody. He'd run the legs off all of us up to those big white sons of bitches just to show me.

  His involuntary glance toward the butte looming out there beyond the end zone stands was not the only one. The Letter Hill was roundly hated. Of all Bruno's raging innovations this year, trickier drills, tougher calisthentics, full-length slam-bang practice games that pitted the varsity against the scrub team twice a week, the punishment runs up to those pale letters halfway into the sky were the hardest to take. Penalty laps around the field were a custom as old as football cleats, but nobody had signed on to clamber up a junior mountainside any time a volcanic coach blew off steam. Dex would be his bet, for the first to shove the Golden Rule in Bruno's face and walk off the team, followed immediately by Animal and Jake. Today could be the day. Even the Butte hard case at left guard, Kenny O'Fallon, looked mutinous. Sig Prokosch, the other guard, built like an engine block and usually as imperturbable, showed similar signs. Stan Havel would stay; hiking the ball was the one thing he was fluent at. Moxie Stamper and Nick Danzer were Bruno's cubs, they couldn't be driven off this field by any means known to mankind. Carl Fries-sen could tip either way, easygoing but with a razor streak of sensibility underneath. Ben himself—God damn it, this isn't football, it's Russian roulette.

  Still looking supremely disgusted at what he had to work with, the coach gathered himself to go. "All right, Stamper"—another mark of Bruno was that he did not acknowledge the existence of first names—"show us something that resembles football."

  Instantly Moxie yapped at the varsity, "You heard the man, huddle up, everybody get your ass in gear." In his ornery pirate-captain style as quarterback, he had in his favor a quick slinging way of passing that made it hard for the defense to see the ball coming. On the first play now, he hit the right end, Danzer, with a screen pass for ten yards. Right away he caught the scrubs by surprise with the same play again, good for a dozen yards this time. The second-stringers, no slouches, did not like being patsies on such calls and Danzer didn't help the matter any. Physically flawless as a swan, the lithe receiver preened past them with an exceedingly leisurely trot back to the huddle. Ben by contrast, with no action on his side of the field but to block the daylights out of Purcell, was starting to feel like a paying spectator; his hands itched for the ball but he couldn't argue with first downs.

  It did seem to cross Moxie's mind tangentially that there were others in the backfield besides him, and on the next play he handed off to Jake for four yards up the middle. Then, though, like a roulette player repeating his bet on one lucky number, he called yet another screen pass to Danzer.

  "Christ, Mox, again?" Animal panted. "What the hell you trying to prove?" The tackle, guard, and center had to check-block on the play, then muscle their way downfield to form a blocking wedge in front of the pass receiver; this meant Animal, Sig, and Stan were pulling double-duty on every one of these right-side trick plays. "Is Danzer the only guy who gets to handle the precious little old ball besides you?"

  "I'll do the play calling, Angelides, you just do the blocking," Moxie snapped. Ben could feel the tightening circle of tension in the huddle. Stamper and Danzer were the only ones on the team who weren't fed up with the Stamper-to-Danzer aerial circus in these practice games. But he couldn't say anything without looking like he wanted more catches for himself. Which was true enough.

  Animal muttered something to Sig and Stan as they left the huddle. When Moxie took the snap, all three blocked no harder than feather pillows and scrambled on through, leaving the line of scrimmage wide open. Barely did Moxie have the football in his hands before he was smothered under a gleeful avalanche of scrub-team players. Interestingly, the whistle on the sideline stayed silent over this, and Animal sent Ben a wink of triumph. Moxie got up slowly, wiping at a trickle of blood out the corner of his mouth and glowering at the right-side linemen as everyone shambled into the huddle. But this time the play he called was "Reinking, left-side slant pattern long."

  Precise as the moment the center snapped the ball to Moxie, Ben feinted and broke free as though catapulted. The exhilaration of momentum took him over, the field flying under him so instinctively sure that he knew to the instant when to veer past the scrambling pass defender, and at top speed aim himself to the unknowable but sure spot where he and the airborne ball would intersect. He looked back only then, the looping pass coming to him as if in a recurrent dream, from backyard lobs by a bespectacled father when he was ten to the Gros Ventre high school field's skyful of leather pluckings to this supreme stadium's ordination of sure-handed catches, another one now. How miraculous it always seemed, then and when the war trained him into the beginnings of a pilot, the grace of gravity that kept a propelled object aloft; the substantiality of air that some first human eye surely mused on with lasting wonder at a leaf floating by. It all gathered into him, half-known half-sensed, with the conclusive feel of the ball finding the skin of his hands. The pass secured, he raced final y
ards and was in the end zone.

  Still whooping after that and the extra point, the eleven of them lined up across the green field to kick off to the scrub team. And in that permanent moment, time previous going to shadow and all else now lit from what they were about to become, Vic boomed the kick high and far, and the Treasure State University varsity raced down the field.

  By chance the kickoff sailed to Purcell, and everyone bayed a warning and went into high gear to head him off. Vic himself managed to nail the scrub-team speed demon at about the thirty-yard line, and they all exhaled in relief.

  Eyes downcast as the second-stringers broke their huddle and flooded to the line of scrimmage, Purcell lined up opposite Ben. As ever, Ben felt like he was looking across at wasted evolution. Reedy, long-limbed, big-eyed, Purcell resembled some creature Nature shaped for speed but forgot to give fang or claw. Bred to flee, but not to block and tackle in the flatten-'em-into-the-ground manner preached by Bruno. No coach could resist that tantalizing speed entirely, so he stuck Purcell in at right end on the scrub team. Until the varsity wised up in a hurry, the wispy speedster caught a few passes in the open and gained so much yardage it began to look like mileage. But from the very first pass that the kid juggled and dropped, Ben divined what was going to be Purcell's problem: he heard footsteps. When a defender closed in on him, Purcell would flinch—maybe infinitesimally, but that was enough. It was a matter of guts: the one necessary requirement for an end was to hang in there and catch the ball first, however much of a hit was coming at you. Anybody, Ben included, could look at Purcell's leggy insubstantial build and sympathize, but sympathy couldn't make up for a leak in fortitude.

  True to form, Purcell flitted all over the field on the next series of downs, but the scrub quarterback played it safe and let his backs pack the ball. Ultimately the scrubs had to punt and managed to contain Dex on the runback. Moxie was impatiently ragging the varsity into the huddle when the whistle blast from the sideline cut in.

  Now what? As startled as everyone else on the field, Ben swung a look toward where the coach was standing. Bruno kept to game conditions when the Golden Rule was in force, and that meant no substitution except for injury. But as they watched, Purcell was imperiously waved in to the sideline by the coach. Bruno jawed hard at him for a minute, Loudon hovering right there lapping it up. For the life of him, Ben was unable to understand why Bruno constantly went so rough on the sophomore. That speed of his alone qualified as true talent. Why wasn't the kid being brought along with encouragement, as Ben and Danzer had been before Bruno ever entered the scene, to groom him for one of their positions after the only thing left for them to catch was their diplomas? What is this, pound him into the ground to make him grow? What if he shrinks instead?

  At last Purcell, head down, jogged back onto the field and crossed the scrimmage line to the varsity huddle.

  Puzzled, Moxie watched him approach. "Look who's here from Cow Pie High. You trying to set a record for being farthest offside, Purcell?"

  "Coach sent me in for Danzer," Purcell reported bashfully.

  "The hell you say." The quarterback's face clouded. As Ben read them, though, most other faces in the huddle showed no dismay.

  "I could use a rest," Danzer said languidly if unconvincingly and sloped off to the sideline.

  "Let's get to business," Moxie snapped out. "Our fancy sub on a fly pattern." Purcell's Adam's apple bobbed for everyone to see, but he looked determined as he took his stance at right end.

  On this pass play to the other side of the field Ben was to knock the defensive end opposite him off balance, which he thriftily did, then Carl Friessen rotated onto the man, springing Ben loose into the secondary to block as needed when the catch was made. From the corner of his eye he saw Purcell already was twenty yards downfield. The kid did travel like a flash.

  Moxie's pass was one of his patented flings, not that much on it but it somehow sailed and sailed to give the receiver time to get under it. Almost. Purcell not only got there but had to pull up a bit and, off balance from broken momentum, he juggled the catch, the ball bouncing on and off his fingertips, those phantom footsteps distracting him just enough. Racing toward him from the opposite direction Moran, an ambitious scrub, snatched the ball before it could settle into Purcell's hands and lit out up the sideline for the end zone seventy yards distant, the entire TSU varsity strung out behind him like barnyard puppies trying to catch up with a coyote.

  If Bruno whistled the play dead, no one heard it. But before everyone had even stopped running, the coach had stormed the middle of the field, his jowly head swinging back and forth as if trying to clear away what he had just witnessed.

  Unexpectedly, when he spoke there was clemency for some. "Second-string, head for the showers, you at least have earned it." Then, though, he turned ominously to the varsity.

  "The passing game, people, only works if the receiver hangs on to the ball." Bruno was enunciating now like a coroner giving a tutorial. "Can you grasp that, Purcell? Along with the football, perhaps? Purcell, I did not hear your answer."

  "Yup, Coach, I—I'll do better."

  "You will also do the Hill," Bruno decreed, "you heard me invoke the Golden Rule. In the meantime, get your dropsy butt over there to the bench and wait for me. The rest of you," the coach swept a hand as if to get them out of his sight, "head for the locker room and while you're there, see if by any chance you can talk each other into playing some actual football next week. Seven days, people!" he flung over his shoulder as he stalked toward the sideline.

  The team, half of whom had flubbed chances to teeter Moran out of bounds, stood rooted in surprise that Purcell was the only victim among them, Ben more caught by it than any. Then and there, he gave up on waiting for the right moment, there did not seem to be such a thing around Bruno. Of course Loudon had been absolutely sopping all this up on the sideline. Just what we need, a slobbering columnist spending the next week ranting about the sputtering TSU football machine and its noble mechanic of a coach trying desperately to fix it. Sportswriter be damned, Bruno and his Letter Hill had to be dealt with somehow, the faces of the team were saying as much to Ben.

  Four-fifths of them, rather. Already jogging to the locker room, Moxie Stamper looked piously murderous, while Purcell, the object of that, went slinking off the field in the opposite direction. The other eight teammates hung on around Ben. "Purcell got the shaft on that," Carl Friessen stated the case from the linemen. "Could have been any of us on any old thing."

  "Moxie underthrew that pass," Vic said quietly.

  "Maybe not by accident," Dex fitted on to that.

  Jake and Animal were not saying anything, worse than if they had.

  "All right, I know. I'll try my goddamnedest to make Bruno hear us on this," Ben promised. "But I want to do it out of range of Loudmouth."

  "That'd be good." Sig Prokosch seldom spoke up, so when he did everyone pointed an ear. "Coach has got his hand up Lou-don's butt, he operates him like a puppet."

  All around Ben the expressions moodily backed up that assessment. "I'll be a while, guys." Everyone else filed off the field, and he trudged over to speak with the gesticulating coach in one-sided conversation with Loudon.

  "Off the record for now, Ted, but what does it take? You heard me lay into the entire bunch of them to shape up or else and look what—" Bruno broke off his grousing to the sportswriter when he became aware of Ben approaching. Up close, the coach was thickset and biscuit-faced, but there was always that slick hat and concealing coat. Now he brushed a dark speck, probably a gift of the smelter stack, off a camel-hair sleeve and looked up, farther than he seemed to want to, at the taller younger man. "Look who's honoring us with his presence. Reinking, I was just discussing the mob you are unlucky enough to be the captain of. Can't you do anything to jack them up?"

  "I need to talk to you about some of that, Coach." Ben glanced at Loudon and stepped away a few paces. "All the way off the record."

  "Excuse us, Ted," Br
uno adjusted to that in the bat of an eye. "Catch me in my office later." He jerked his head at Ben and strode to the middle of the field, out of earshot of the sideline just in case the sportswriter was slow to withdraw. At the fifty-yard line, the stocky coach halted and gazed around the stadium as if he couldn't get enough of it. "So what's on your mind?" he asked Ben in a narrow tone. "It better have to do with how to win football games."

  It did and it didn't. That always seemed to be the case where Purcell was involved. Resolutely Ben indicated to the troublesome figure slumped on the bench waiting for his Letter Hill fate. "It's him. That was his first play on the starting team, remember, and he didn't have any time to settle down. Besides, Moxie didn't get quite enough zip on that ball." He watched the eyes that should have seen that, but the coach yielded nothing. "The guys pretty much think you ought to go easy on Purcell this once."

  Bruno's scowl gave off cold. "Is that what they think." He looked at Ben oddly. "I'm surprised at you, sticking up for Purcell. You're a grab-ass buddy of his, are you?"

  "Not so as you would notice. The Hill is on everybody's nerves, Coach, we all think you should lay off it now. You've made your point." And made it and made it.

  "That again." Bruno managed to sound put upon. "Your touching concern for Purcell is misplaced. The dumb damn kid comes out and runs the Hill himself Saturdays and Sundays, you know that."

  This was true enough. Gawky Purcell trying to build himself up with a struggling solo run to the base of the letters was a common if sad sight. Ben stuck to the obvious. "That's different from doing it when he's pooped out after sixty minutes of a practice game, and with full pads on."

  There still was something strange in Bruno's expression as he faced around to Ben. "You're an interesting case, Reinking." The impression was he could have said vastly more on that score, but that was not what came out: "It's getting late, and I have to deal with a rube three-letter man. You can tell your friends in the locker room they needn't worry about themselves so goddamn much." The coach spun away in a manner that warned off any impulse to follow him. Ben watched his receding back as he stalked toward the gangly figure on the bench, but not needing to see more than that, did his own angry pivot toward the locker room and the task there.