Bleachers

by John Grisham

  Paul said, “The odd part is that the coaches never talked about it either. Rabbit kept his mouth shut. Total silence.”

  Chomp, chomp, then, “We sorta figured it out,” Mal said. “Knew something bad happened at halftime. Neely couldn’t pass, then word leaked that he was wearing a cast the next week at school. Figured he hit something. Figured it might’ve been Rake. Lots of rumors over the years, which, as you know, ain’t hard to find in Messina.”

  “I’ve never heard anyone talk about it,” Paul said.

  A pull on the coffee. Neither Neely nor Paul were eating or drinking. “Remember that Tugdale kid, from out near Black Rock? A year or two behind you boys.”

  “Andy Tugdale,” Neely said. “Hundred-and-forty-pound guard. Mean as a yard dog.”

  “That’s him. We picked him up years ago for beatin’ his wife, had him in jail for a few weeks. I played cards with him, somethin’ I always do when we get one of Rake’s boys in. I give ’em a special cell, better food, weekend passes.”

  “The perks of brotherhood,” Paul said.

  “Somethin’ like that. You’ll appreciate it when I arrest your little banker’s ass.”

  “Anyway.”

  “Anyway, we were talkin’ one day and I asked Tugdale what happened at halftime during the ’87 title game. Clammed up, tight as a tick, not a word. I said I knew there’d been a fight of some sort. Not a word. I waited a few days, tried again. He finally said that Silo had kicked the coaches out of the locker room, told ’em to stay away from the sideline. Said there had been a rather serious disagreement between Rake and Neely. I asked him what Neely had hit to break his hand. A wall? A locker? A chalkboard? None of the above. Somebody else? Bingo. But he wouldn’t say who.”

  “That’s great police work, Mal,” Paul said. “I might just vote for you next time.”

  “Can we leave?” Neely said. “I don’t like this story.”

  ______________

  They rode in silence for half an hour. Still flying with all lights on, Mal appeared to doze occasionally as his ponderous breakfast got digested.

  “I’ll be happy to drive,” Neely said after the car eased onto the gravel shoulder and flung rocks for half a mile.

  “Can’t. It’s illegal,” Mal grunted, suddenly wide awake.

  Five minutes later he was fading again. Neely decided conversation might keep him awake.

  “Did you bust Jesse?” Neely asked as he tightened his seat belt.

  “Naw. The state boys got him.” Mal shifted his weight and reached for a cigarette. There was a story to tell so he limbered up. “They kicked him off the team at Miami, out of school, barely got out with no jail time, and before long he was back here. Poor guy was hooked on the stuff and couldn’t shake it. His family tried everything, rehab, lockdowns, counselors, all that crap. Broke ’em. Hell, it killed his father. The Trapp family once owned two thousand acres of the best farmland around here, now it’s all gone. His poor momma lives in that big house with the roof crumblin’.”

  “Anyway,” Paul said helpfully from the rear.

  “Anyway, he started sellin’ the stuff, and of course Jesse could not be content as a small-timer. He had some contacts in Dade County, one thing led to another and before long he had a nice business. Had his own organization, with lots of ambition.”

  “Didn’t someone get killed?” Paul asked.

  “I was gettin’ to that,” Mal growled at his rearview mirror.

  “Just trying to help.”

  “I always wanted a banker in my backseat. A real white-collar type.”

  “And I always wanted to foreclose on the Sheriff.”

  “Truce,” Neely said. “You were getting to the good part.”

  Mal reshifted, his large stomach rubbing the wheel. One more harsh glance into his mirror, then, “The state narcs slowly crept in, as they always do. They nabbed a flunkie, threatened him with thirty years of prison and sodomy, convinced him to flip. He set up a drop with narcs hidin’ in the trees and under the rocks. The deal went bad, guns were grabbed, shots went off. A narc took a bullet in the ear and died on the spot. The flunkie got hit, but survived. Jesse was nowhere around, but it was his people. He became a priority, and within a year he was standin’ before His Honor receivin’ his twenty-eight years, no parole.”

  “Twenty-eight years,” Neely repeated.

  “Yep. I was in the courtroom, and I actually felt sorry for the scumbag. I mean, here’s a guy who had the tools to play in the NFL. Size, speed, mean as hell, plus Rake had drilled him from the time he was fourteen. Rake always said that if Jesse had gone to A&M, he wouldn’t have turned bad. Rake was in the courtroom too.”

  “How long has he served?” Neely asked.

  “Nine, ten years maybe. I ain’t countin’. Y’all hungry?”

  “We just ate,” Neely said.

  “Surely you can’t be hungry again,” Paul said.

  “No, but there’s this little joint right up here where Miss Armstrong makes pecan fudge. I hate to pass it.”

  “Let’s keep going,” Neely said. “Just say no.”

  “Take it one day at a time, Mal,” Paul offered from the rear.

  ______________

  The Buford Detention Facility was in flat treeless farmland at the end of a lonely paved road lined with miles of chain-link fencing. Neely was depressed before any building came into sight.

  Mal’s phone calls had arranged things properly and they were cleared through the front gates and drove deeper into the prison. They changed vehicles at a checkpoint, swapping the roomy patrol car for the narrow benches of an extended golf cart. Mal rode up front where he chatted nonstop with the driver, a guard wearing as much ammunition and gadgets as the Sheriff himself. Neely and Paul shared the back bench, facing the rear, as they passed more chain link and razor wire. They got an eyeful as they puttered past Camp A, a long dismal cinder-block building with prisoners lounging on the front steps. On one side, a basketball game was raging. All the players were black. On the other side, an all-white volleyball game was in progress. Camps B, C, and D were just as bleak. “How could anyone survive in there?” Neely asked himself.

  At an intersection, they turned and were soon up at Camp E, which looked somewhat newer. At Camp F they stopped and walked fifty yards to a point where the fencing turned ninety degrees. The guard mumbled something into his radio, then pointed and said, “Walk down that fence to the white pole. He’ll be out shortly.” Neely and Paul began walking along the fence, where the grass had been recently cut. Mal and the guard held back and lost interest.

  Behind the building and beside the basketball court was a slab of concrete, and scattered across it were all sorts of mismatched barbells and bench presses and stacks of dead weights. Some very large black and white men were pumping iron in the morning sun, their bare chests and backs shining with sweat. Evidently, they lifted weights for hours each day.

  “There he is,” Paul said. “Just getting up from the bench press, on the left.”

  “That’s Jesse,” Neely said, mesmerized by a scene that few people ever witnessed.

  A trustee approached and said something to Jesse Trapp, who jerked his head and searched the fence line until he saw the two men. He tossed a towel onto a bench and began a slow, purposeful, Spartanlike walk across the slab, across the empty basketball court, and onto the grass that ran to the fence around Camp F.

  From forty yards away he looked huge, but as Jesse approached the enormity of his chest and neck and arms became awesome. They had played with him for one season—he was a senior when they were sophomores—and they had seen him naked in the locker room. They had seen him fling heavily loaded barbells around the weight room. They had seen him set every Spartan lifting record.

  He looked twice as big now, his neck as thick as an oak stump, his shoulders as wide as a door. His biceps and triceps were many times the normal size. His stomach looked like a cobblestone street.

  He wore a crew cut that made his squ
are head even more symmetrical, and when he stopped and looked down at them he smiled. “Hey boys,” he said, still breathing heavily from the last set of reps.

  “Hello Jesse,” Paul said.

  “How are you?” Neely said.

  “Doing well, can’t complain. Good to see y’all. I don’t get many visitors.”

  “We have bad news, Jesse,” Paul said.

  “I figured.”

  “Rake’s dead. Passed away last night.”

  He lowered his chin until it touched his massive chest. From the waist up he seemed to shrink a little as the news hit him. “My mother wrote me and told me he was sick,” he said with his eyes closed.

  “It was cancer. Diagnosed about a year ago, but the end came pretty fast.”

  “Man oh man. I thought Rake would live forever.”

  “I think we all did,” Neely said.

  Ten years in prison had taught him to control whatever emotions ventured his way. He swallowed hard and opened his eyes. “Thanks for coming. You didn’t have to.”

  “We wanted to see you, Jesse,” Neely said. “I think about you all the time.”

  “The great Neely Crenshaw.”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Why don’t you write me a letter? I got eighteen more years here.”

  “I’ll do that, Jesse, I promise.”

  “Thanks.”

  Paul kicked the grass. “Look, Jesse, there’s a memorial service tomorrow, at the field. Most of Rake’s boys will be there, you know, to say goodbye. Mal thinks he might be able to pull some strings and get you a pass.”

  “No way, man.”

  “You got a lot of friends there, Jesse.”

  “Former friends, Paul, people I’ve let down. They’ll all point and say, ‘Look, there’s Jesse Trapp. Coulda been great, but got messed up on drugs. Ruined his life. Learn from him, kids. Stay away from the bad stuff.’ No thanks. I don’t want to be pointed at.”

  “Rake would want you there,” Neely said.

  The chin dropped again and the eyes closed. A moment passed. “I loved Eddie Rake like I’ve loved nobody else in my life. He was in court the day I got sent away. I had ruined my life, and I was humiliated over that. I had wrecked my parents, and I was sick about that. But what hurt the most was that I had failed in Rake’s eyes. It still hurts. Y’all can bury him without me.”

  “It’s your call, Jesse,” Paul said.

  “Thanks, but I’ll pass.”

  There was a long pause as all three nodded and studied the grass. Finally, Paul said, “I see your mom once a week. She’s doing well.”

  “Thanks. She visits me the third Sunday of every month. You ought to drive over sometime, say hello. It’s pretty lonely in here.”

  “I’ll do that, Jesse.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise. And I wish you’d think about tomorrow.”

  “I’ve already thought about it. I’ll say a prayer for Rake, you boys can bury him.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Jesse looked to his right. “Is that Mal over there?”

  “Yes, we rode with him.”

  “Tell him to kiss my ass.”

  “I’ll do that, Jesse,” Paul said. “With pleasure.”

  “Thanks boys,” Jesse said. He turned and walked away.

  ______________

  At four o’clock Thursday afternoon the crowd parted at the gate to Rake Field and the hearse backed itself into position. Its rear door was opened and eight pallbearers formed two short lines and pulled out the casket. None of the eight were former Spartans. Eddie Rake had given much thought to his final details, and he had decided not to play favorites. He selected his pallbearers from among his assistant coaches.

  The procession moved slowly around the track. The casket was followed by Mrs. Lila Rake, her three daughters and their husbands, and a handsome collection of grandchildren. Then a priest. Then the drum corps from the Spartan marching band, doing a soft roll as they passed the home stands.

  Between the forties on the home sideline there was a large white tent, its poles anchored in buckets of sand to protect the sacred Bermuda of Rake Field. At the fifty-yard line, at the exact spot where he had coached for so long and so well, they stopped with his casket. It was mounted on an antique Irish wake table, the property of Lila’s best friend, and quickly surrounded by flowers. When the Coach was properly arranged, the family gathered around the casket for a short prayer. Then they formed a receiving line.

  The line stretched down the track and through the gate, and the cars were bumper to bumper on the road that led to Rake Field.

  ______________

  Neely passed the house three times before he was brave enough to stop. There was a rental car in the driveway. Cameron had returned. Long after dinner, he knocked on the door, almost as nervous as the first time he’d done so. Then, as a fifteen-year-old with a new driver’s permit, his parents’ car, twenty bucks in his pocket, the peach fuzz scraped off his face, he had arrived to take Cameron on their first real date.

  A hundred years ago.

  Mrs. Lane opened the door, same as always, but this time she did not recognize Neely. “Good evening,” she said softly. She was still beautiful, polite, refusing to age.

  “Mrs. Lane, it’s me, Neely Crenshaw.”

  As the words came out, she recognized him. “Why, yes, Neely, how are you?”

  He figured his name had been mud in the house for so long, he wasn’t sure how he’d be received. But the Lanes were gracious people, slightly more educated and affluent than most in Messina. If they held a grudge, and he was certain one was being held, they wouldn’t show it. Not the parents anyway.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “Would you come in?” she said, opening the door. It was a halfhearted gesture.

  “Sure, thanks.” In the foyer, he looked around and said, “Still a beautiful home, Mrs. Lane.”

  “Thank you. Could I get you some tea?”

  “No, thanks. Actually, I’m looking for Cameron. Is she here?”

  “She is.”

  “I’d like to say hello.”

  “I’m very sorry about Coach Rake. I know he meant everything to you boys.”

  “Yes ma’am.” He was glancing around, listening for voices in the back of the house.

  “I’ll find Cameron,” she said and disappeared. Neely waited, and waited, and finally turned to the large oval window in the front door and watched the dark street.

  There was a footstep behind him, then a familiar voice. “Hello Neely,” Cameron said. He turned and they stared at each other. Words failed him for the moment, so he shrugged and finally blurted, “I was just driving by, thought I’d say hello. It’s been a long time.”

  “It has.”

  The gravity of his mistake hit hard.

  She was much prettier than in high school. Her thick auburn hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Her dark blue eyes were adorned with chic designer frames. She wore a bulky cotton sweater and tight faded jeans that declared that this was a lady who stayed in shape. “You look great,” he said as he admired her.

  “You too.”

  “Can we talk?”

  “About what?”

  “Life, love, football. There’s a good chance we’ll never see each other again, and I have something to say.”

  She opened the door. They walked across the wide porch and sat on the front steps. She was careful to leave a large gap between them. Five minutes passed in silence.

  “I saw Nat,” he said. “He told me you’re living in Chicago, happily married with two little girls.”

  “True.”

  “Who’d you marry?”