The Prophet

by Michael Koryta

  He was right. The safeties were in the box and now even the cornerbacks were cheating down, trying to help stop the bleeding. All Pete Underwood had to do was throw it out there. But promise package was promise package. It told no lies.

  Adam was the right player for it, no question. Last one into the formation every time, always with that bouncing swagger, and if anyone spoke to him he didn’t respond, his focus was total, and he warned you of it with every step. I am the hammer. You’ll feel me shortly.

  “Coach Ward told me once that Adam should have been a boxer,” Kent said. “That he would have been a nightmare, because he fed on the taste of the canvas.”

  “Meaning, what, he liked being knocked down?”

  “It fired him up, at least. We scared teams with him out there. You’ll see it by the end.”

  On the screen the action had paused, because Angola took a timeout. The defensive coaches were screaming at their guys, telling them this was it, stiffen up and shut them down, show us some heart!

  The first play after the timeout was from the twenty-six, and it was prophet left, the eleventh straight running play, and on this one the instruction from the Angola coaches during the break showed itself. The linebackers weren’t trying to separate the ball carrier from the ball anymore, they were trying to separate Adam Austin’s head from his body. Two hits from two different directions, one a blatant helmet-to-helmet shot, and Adam rocked up and over and was on his back under the lights as the ball carrier ducked and spun and carried it to the fourteen.

  Down on the field, Adam rolled over until his face mask was resting on the ground, and reached out with his left hand. Squeezed the turf twice. Rose.

  Second and two, clock under five minutes. Prophet right and they lost a yard—the Angola defenders driving Adam straight backward and into the ball carrier to make the tackle.

  Facedown again, two squeezes with the left hand, then back up. Third and three. Prophet right. The offensive line blew it again, they were getting tired. Gained a yard.

  Fourth and two.

  The Chambers crowd was quiet. Down on the sidelines Ward stood impassively, arms folded, and next to him a fifteen-year-old Kent Austin stared at the ground.

  “Watch this,” Kent said softly. “Watch what Adam does.”

  Back into promise package, only Adam didn’t get down into his stance. He stood up tall and began bouncing on the balls of his feet, and against his sides he shook his hands.

  “He was screaming,” Kent said. “You could probably hear it at the top of the stands. Everyone thought he was just getting them fired up, and he was, but it was from the pain, too. See what he’s doing with his hands? He’s got broken bones sliding around at this point, and he started to shake his hands like that to call up the pain. He wanted to feel it, needed to feed on it. This was it, this was the ballgame, we had to get two yards.”

  The crowd saw Adam and heard him and found confidence in him, and now the roars were back, and feet were hammering on the aluminum bleachers and the play clock was counting down, and finally he dropped back into his stance, and then they went prophet right.

  Helmet to helmet, the impact staggering, and then one linebacker was down and another rose to replace him but fell as Adam drove forward and Evan Emory, the tailback, came in tucked behind him, chasing the tornado’s wake. They blew out of bounds with a gain of four—first and goal from the nine.

  For just a moment they’d been together then. Adam and Kent. The force of the play had carried Adam down out of bounds and right to where Kent trailed Coach Ward. When Adam got up, they were face-to-face, and Kent had said, “Nice hit,” and he remembered that his voice had seemed impossibly small and weak. Adam spit out his mouth guard and a streamer of blood came with it, and he said, “We’re almost there, Franchise. Almost there.”

  Back to the field, and Angola was broken. After that fourth and two, Angola’s defense was done and they knew it.

  “I wish Ward hadn’t run it every play,” Kent said. “Or he could have let him have a carry. Adam was on the field for every snap, we ran him fifteen straight times, seven of them with his hand broken, and on the stat line he never gained a yard. On the stat line, he’s standing still.” His voice had thickened, so he coughed to clear his throat and said, “Watch what the safety does here.”

  They took the snap, fifteenth of the drive, first and goal from the nine, and the line opened a nice gap and Adam came through it and the Angola safety, who’d dropped down in the box to stuff the run, winced ahead of the contact, stiffened up and turned his head a bit just before Adam hit him, just before Chambers cruised into the end zone for the score.

  “He tried to get out of his way,” Colin said. “He didn’t want any piece of him.”

  “No, they did not. Not by then.”

  “They make it close on the next possession? Have a chance?”

  “Nope. Turned it over on downs.” Kent was suddenly regretting his choice to screen the game, and he didn’t know why. He’d wanted to show Colin the way his brother played football, and Colin seemed impressed, so why did Kent wish he hadn’t watched that tape?

  “Let’s look at Saint Anthony’s,” he said, getting to his feet. “That Angola game’s more than twenty years old. We’ve got our own to work on.”

  37

  THAT NIGHT ADAM WAITED until Kent called to tell him that the kids were in bed, and then he returned to the house to occupy his post.

  “You haven’t heard anything from the police?” Kent said. “Still?”

  “Not a word. You get any updates?”

  “Not today. They don’t seem to be making much progress.”

  Adam didn’t say anything to that. He was looking at the pictures in the living room and was amazed by how old Lisa was getting, how tall Andrew was. He never saw them. Lisa would remember him, but he wasn’t sure that his nephew would recognize him. Adam had visited the hospital when he was born, and come by on his first birthday with a gift, but never again. He looked at the photographs and thought that the kid was getting old enough to be some fun.

  “They’re great kids,” Kent said.

  “I’m sure they are.” He almost said I’d like to get to know them, but he stopped himself, turned away from the photos, glanced out at the street, and touched the butt of his gun as if to physically remind himself why he was there.

  “You don’t need to stay awake all night,” Kent said. “Stay in the guest room if you’d like, or at least stretch out on the couch and get some—”

  “I’m good.”

  “Okay.” Kent hesitated, then said, “I watched the Angola game today.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Wanted to show Colin Mears. You know, last time the school won state, all that.”

  “You’ll get it this year.”

  “We’ll try.” Kent shook his head and said, “That was a hell of a game you played. That last drive… I mean, I remembered it, but watching it again was impressive.”

  “All I did was open some gaps. Evan Emory did the running.”

  “You opened craters. He could have done the walking, still would have scored.”

  Adam shrugged. “How’s Mears?”

  “Struggling.”

  “I’m telling you, let him hit.”

  “I know, I know.”

  Kent seemed to regret having brought it up now, which wasn’t Adam’s goal, but he didn’t know what he was supposed to say about a twenty-two-year-old football game. He searched for something, some lighter memory from the pitch-black year that was 1989, the only year they had played together, and said, “You remember Tater?”

  Kent smiled. “Tater Phillips? Yeah.”

  Tater was a backup offensive lineman who had earned his nickname for an unfortunate resemblance, in shape and speed, to a potato.

  “I’ll never forget the day Ward about killed him with the sled,” Adam said.

  That brought a laugh from Kent, and Adam was smiling, too, couldn’t help it. Walter Ward had purc
hased a used tackling sled at an auction, which he then proudly set up in an open grassy area just outside the field—and at the top of a gentle hill. Featuring six angled tackling dummies connected through a steel frame, the sled was a massive piece of equipment, weighing hundreds of pounds. And mounted on wheels. Ward hadn’t experimented with his acquisition yet, confident that he understood all there was to understand about a tackling sled, but he did not understand the locking brakes. They’d run through a few rounds of hitting before the sled began its trembling slide. Ward’s first reaction when he realized it was going to roll down the hill was to tell everyone to get out of the way. It was about two seconds later, enough time to allow it to build a good head of steam, when he spotted Tater Phillips lumbering up the hill, late to practice after a trip to the trainer, his helmet on and head down.

  “I thought I had heard Ward scream as loud as anyone could scream a hundred times before that,” Kent said. “But that was when he was angry. When he was scared? Wow, he hit a different level that time.”

  Adam nodded. “It looked like some piece of farm machinery going at Tater. A combine or a thresher. Tater somehow oblivious to the whole thing.”

  “Tater usually couldn’t get out of his stance in under three seconds, but I swear he covered fifty yards in three seconds when he finally saw it coming. He dodged it by an inch and then it wiped out the side of Byers’s truck. Always so lazy he insisted on parking it at the curb instead of the parking lot. He’s been in the lot ever since. I haven’t given him grief about that in years. I’ll need to do that tomorrow.”

  “Give him my regards,” Adam said. They held the shared laugh for a few seconds longer, but then it was gone, and Adam was conscious of the holstered gun again, conscious of his job in this house. “All right, Franchise. Go to bed. I should be paying attention to the street.”

  The street stayed empty. Clayton Sipes made no appearance. Rodney Bova did not leave his home. They were patient. That was fine. Adam could be patient, too. There was another word for his kind of patience—relentlessness.

  They would break at some point. One of them. And he’d be there when they did.

  The next day, while Adam sat in the office and watched a red dot, Chelsea went to prison to tell her husband that she was going to file for divorce. Before she left, she told Adam that she was going to let Travis Leonard keep the house.

  “You’re the one who’s been paying the bills on it for years,” he said. “Why in the hell would you give up the house? It’s the only thing he’s got.”

  “That’s why,” she said. She was dressed unusually formally, black pants and a long-sleeved white shirt, crisp and ironed, as if she felt a responsibility to look professional delivering the news. “He had two things. Me, and the house. I’m not taking them both from him.”

  Adam gave that a slow nod, then said, “Where will you live?”

  “It’ll take some time to get everything done, to move out. It will take some time. But when it’s done… we can talk about that, Adam. We’ve essentially lived together for a long time now. I’d miss that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Of course. I was expecting you’d stay with me.”

  She looked him in the eye. “Not at your house.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t live there,” she said, “and I think it’s time for you to consider moving on.”

  He didn’t speak.

  “You remember your sister, you think of her daily, you carry her with you,” she said. “That’s all good. Honorable, healthy. What you’ve created in that house is not healthy. Your brother is right about that. You’ve got felony charges to prove it.”

  “Cops break into my home and I’m supposed to—”

  “They did not break in, and you knew they would be there. Let me ask you this: Why did you really swing on that guy? Because he was in your home? Was that really the reason, Adam?”

  It was not. It was because the son of a bitch had been in Marie’s room. Chelsea watched and waited and Adam looked away without answering.

  “Okay,” she said softly. “These are things to think about. It’s time to move forward for me. I want to do it with you. But that’s going to require both of us being willing to move.”

  She came around the desk, dropped to her knees, and sat with her hands on his waist and waited until he turned back to face her. Her dark eyes searched his, dancing as if she knew she needed to evade some of the things his eyes would show her to find the things that were true.

  “Talk to Marie about it,” she said.

  His throat tightened. He had never told her, had never told anyone about his conversations with his sister. Chelsea would never have overheard so much as a whisper of Marie’s name, and yet there was no doubt to her voice. She knew that he spoke to Marie, and she was not alarmed by this, or even surprised. The realization, and the way she’d just suggested he talk to her about this, crippled him. Before he’d chosen not to answer her; now he could not.

  “Consider it,” she said. “Talk it out. But be fair to me on it, Adam. If you decide it isn’t the right thing for you, okay. I’ll stand by you. But give it fair consideration. I want us to be together, and that is not the right place. We need to find a new one, and make it ours.”

  He nodded. She studied him, then rose, leaned over to kiss him, and left. He stared at the door for a time, shook his head, returned his attention to the computer screen, and pulled up his tracking program. The red dot that was Rodney Bova held steady.

  He had not returned to the house since his arrest. Had planned to every day but found an excuse every day, and there was work to be done, searching for Sipes and guarding Kent’s house and trying to snag a few hours of sleep in the time between. This afternoon he found no police in sight, no media, no curious neighbors. He parked on the street and let himself in the side door, which opened into the kitchen. He’d had new appliances and countertops put in, replaced the floor tiles, but still it was the kitchen of his childhood; you couldn’t remodel that away. He could almost see his father at the table, the bottle of whiskey sitting between the two of them, could almost smell his mother’s Pall Mall smoke wafting out of the living room.

  It was a warmer afternoon, maybe sixty degrees, and he cracked some windows and let the fall breeze fill the house. Paused at the bottom of the stairs and took a deep breath and then went up, knocked, and entered Marie’s room.

  Nothing looked disturbed. Unless you knew where the stained-glass turtle belonged, you’d never have known it was gone. The police had been unusually respectful in their search, actually, although the cleanup probably improved substantially after Adam’s arrest, when they knew they were going to have to defend their conduct against his response in court. They’d swept up the broken glass. He wondered where it had gone. Probably into the trash somewhere. A shame, because he might have been able to put it back together. It would have taken time and care, but he might have been able to do it.

  He lit the candles one at a time, then cracked this window, too—autumn was Marie’s favorite season, no surprise in a football-crazed family—and let the fresh air come in and stir the flames. Took his customary seat on the floor, back to the wall, and began to talk.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been gone,” he said. “I’m so sorry they were here, and I’m sorry I’ve been gone. I wish it hadn’t happened in your room. I really do.”

  His head was bowed and his eyes closed now.

  “Let’s start off with good news, all right? Your little brother’s winning football games. They’re an awfully good team, Marie. They should get it done. There are some distractions that might be a problem, but I’m trying to help with that, and if anyone can focus through these sorts of distractions, it is your little brother. This week’s a big one. Saint Anthony’s. I’m scared for him against that team, but I’m also glad he drew them. I think he has to go through them if he’s going to get it. That’s part of it. He’s got to beat them. I think he will.”

  He paused, covered his close
d eyes with his bruised hand, and said, “Now for the bad news. There’s been some trouble with Kent. It’s nothing you need to worry about. I promise you that, Marie. I’m watching out for him. I will not let anything happen to him, or to Beth and Lisa and Andrew. I won’t. It’s a bad situation, but I’ll get it fixed. I can still get this one fixed.”

  Her favorite candles had smelled of cinnamon, and the scent was heavy now, drifting toward him on the gentle breeze, and he felt as if she’d pushed it his way, trying to relax him. He stopped talking and breathed it in for a while.

  “Chelsea wants me to move,” he said, and his voice was choked, so he cleared his throat and gave himself another minute. “She’s not pushing me on it, that’s not her way. She’s so patient, Marie. I wish you’d gotten to know her better. I think you’d have liked her. I really do. I think everyone would have liked her.”

  Another pause, wiping a hand over his mouth, and then he said, “I think she might be right. I think it might be time to go. If you’re unhappy with that… I hope you find a way to let me know. But I think she’s right. It could be… could be a good thing for me. For us.”

  He’d expected a greater sense of guilt and betrayal, but felt little of either. Felt clean, actually, far better than he had when he’d entered.

  “We’ll see what happens,” he said. “This is what I’ll promise you, though: I’m not going anywhere until I’ve taken care of the things that I need to take care of. When I know I can leave Kent alone at night again, when I know I can make a call to Rachel’s mother, we will see what happens. But I will set that right first.”

  He sat in silence for a moment, and then he blew out the candles, told her that he loved her and that he was sorry, and left the house. He needed some sleep before he returned to Kent’s, and, these days, he slept much better at Chelsea’s place.

  38

  IT WAS BETH’S IDEA TO invite Adam to dinner.

  “We’re sleeping while he sits down here awake,” she said. “And you know what, Kent? I’ve been able to sleep. He’s the only reason. I’d like to try and show him that. Not just slip him in and out under the cover of darkness.”