Tight End

by Matt Christopher

  They broke out of the huddle, and Chuck started calling signals. On the third “Hike!” Steve centered the ball. Chuck took it, faked a handoff to Mark — who went through the line as if he were carrying the ball — then handed the ball to Tony. Tony sprinted behind the line toward the left side of the field, then handed the ball to Ed as the left halfback came sprinting toward the right side of the field.

  Jim blocked his man, fell to his knees, sprang to his feet again to follow up on a block against another oncoming Coral Town Indian. The man got by him. Jim made a last-ditch attempt to stop him and barely touched the player’s right ankle, but it was enough to make the man lose his balance and fall.

  “Shreeek!” went a whistle. The play stopped.

  Jim, still on the turf, glanced around to see what the call was.

  “Clipping!” said the ref, striking the back of his right calf to indicate the infraction. “Number eighty-eight! Fifteen yards!”

  Jim groaned, and took his time getting to his feet.

  “You’re really making a mess of this game, Cort,” Pat snapped at him. “Why don’t you pretend you got a twisted ankle or something?”

  A player came running out. It was Barry.

  “Out, Jim,” he said.

  Jim took a deep breath and let it out, then ran off the field. He sat down, expecting either Coach Butler or Coach Gibson to approach and remind him that clipping was one of the most foolish kinds of penalties; you just don’t block a guy from behind him.

  But neither coach came by, and Jim was thankful he had a few minutes to try to gather his wits together.

  The game went on, and he watched the Rams keep the Indians from gaining a first down, thus forcing the opponents to kick. Once again the ball was in the Rams’ possession, and in three plays Chuck got the boys to threaten the Indians again. His long pass to Ed netted fifty-four yards, getting the ball down on the Indians’ fourteen-yard line.

  Chuck tried two more passes in succession, but only gained a yard on the first and two on the second.

  Third and seven to go.

  “Jim, go in there,” Coach Butler ordered. “Tell Chuck to use the forty-nine fly. Send Barry out. Hurry.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jim sprang off the bench, fastening his helmet as he bolted out on the field. He pointed at Barry, jerked a thumb, and Barry sprinted off the field, not looking very pleased about the change.

  The team huddled. “Forty-nine fly,” Jim relayed the coach’s instructions.

  He felt ten pairs of eyes look at him as he relayed the message.

  “Okay,” Chuck said. “Forty-nine fly it is. On your toes, Ed.”

  The play called for Jim to dash straight up the field, then out to the right flat, and for Ed to do the same, except in the opposite direction. The pass was to go to Ed.

  The team broke out of the huddle and went to the line of scrimmage. Chuck barked signals. The ball was snapped. The men blocked, the halfs faked. The pass was thrown deep into the left flat, and Ed pulled it in just over the end zone.

  The whole play went off exactly as planned.

  Mark kicked for the point after, but the ball missed the uprights by inches. A sick groan came from the Rams’ fans and died away almost as quickly as it started.

  Indians 13, Rams 13.

  In the fourth quarter, the Indians got the ball down to the Rams’ twenty-eight and twice tried to rush for another first down and failed.

  Two minutes before the end of the game they were on the twenty-three with five yards to go. It was third down.

  They passed. Jim watched the ball and sprinted for a possible interception. He leaped for the ball just as it headed down toward the intended receiver’s hands, grabbed it — then dropped it.

  “Aw, man,” he said, disgusted.

  The Indians went on for a three-pointer and made it. They copped the game, 16–13.

  They and their fans whooped it up for a while on the field; a prelude, Jim thought, to the celebration they would have when they returned home.

  He headed off the field alone, feeling partly responsible for the loss. He had played a lousy game, and he’d be the first to admit it.

  Jim!

  He recognized the soft, warm voice and stopped. Margo approached, wearing her white sweater now with the large letters, PL, on the front of it.

  “Yeah?”

  “I just want to say you did all right,” she said.

  “I did lousy.”

  He turned away from her and continued on toward the exit. She grabbed his arm. “I learned something about a couple of the guys. Not much, but something.”

  He stopped again and looked at her. “About whom?”

  “Chick and Steve.”

  He frowned and pursed his lips. People were sweeping past them in droves: men, women, and kids.

  “This is no place to talk about it,” he said.

  “How about tomorrow?” she suggested. “At Freddie s, over a Coke or something.”

  “Okay. Meet you there at two o’clock.”

  She smiled, spun on her toes, and stitched her way quickly through the throng. What had she learned about Chick and Steve? he wondered. It was going to be a long time until two o’clock tomorrow.

  He went on to the locker room, undressed, showered, and met Peg at the exit door. They walked to the parking lot where their parents were waiting in the car for them. They got in.

  “Good game,” his father said as he started the car.

  “Don’t be so kind, Dad,” Jim replied. He was sitting in back with Peg, feeling clean and fresh from the shower. If he could only cleanse away the problem that plagued him as easily as he could the sweat and dirt, he thought dismally.

  “What do you think I’d say?” his father asked, backing the car out of the space, then shooting it toward the street. “That you played a terrible game? Under the circumstances you did well. Real well.”

  “You showed you had guts,” his mother added firmly. “In my book that comes before anything else.”

  Jim smiled. “Thanks, Mom.”

  “Now that, dear brother,” Peg chimed in, “comes from a real pro. Right, Mother?”

  “Right!”

  11

  Jim and Margo sat in a corner booth of Freddie’s Diner, each sipping Coke through long yellow straws. A recent country hit was blaring from the lavishly painted jukebox set in another corner of the restaurant.

  “Okay,” said Jim. “Chick was picked up for smoking pot when he was ten years old. What’s that got to do with those phone calls and the drawing?”

  “Don’t you see? He might be a guy who goes out of his way to get into trouble. Chick is no angel. Believe me. I know.”

  Jim’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. For a moment he ignored the main reason of their meeting here. “How do you know?”

  “I’m a woman, that’s how. And a woman instinctively knows certain things about certain kinds of men.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes, that’s so!” she declared.

  Her voice must have carried to the table across from them, because the patrons sitting there suddenly turned with interest to look at her.

  “Keep it down,” said Jim, slightly embarrassed. He cleared his throat. “What did you do? Go out with him?”

  “Do I have to go out with him to learn certain things about him? No, I didn’t go out with him. What I’ve learned about him is just from things he said, and things other girls have told me.” Her eyes widened. “Don’t you think that’s plenty of evidence?”

  “Margo, nothing you’ve said proves he is the one who’s been bothering me.”

  She glared at him. “Yesterday you were ready to hang him. Now you sound like one of those defense lawyers on TV.”

  “I’ve taken the time to think about things,” he told her.

  Not taking her eyes off him, she put her mouth around the straw and took a long drag on her Coke.

  “What did you learn about Newton?” Jim asked.

  Sh
e took the straw out of her mouth. Her tone was softer now as she answered him. “Steve Newton was in art class but dropped out because he couldn’t carry five subjects. He was a good artist and would have preferred to stay in it, but art carried only half a point against a whole point for the other subjects.”

  “Well, that proves he can draw,” Jim said. “What else has he done that makes you think he can be a suspect?”

  Margo laid her elbows on the table top, leaned forward, and whispered, “Did you know that about a year ago he was caught making harassing calls to people over the telephone?”

  Jim, leaning forward to hear what she said, shook his head. “No. Who told you?”

  She shrugged and smiled. “My source. And you know what newspaper reporters say about their sources. They won’t tell on them.”

  Jim wanted to remind her that she wasn’t a newspaper reporter, but, instead, said that he didn’t think that Steve would be dumb enough to pull a sick thing like that again after he’d been caught.

  Somehow he was disappointed. He thought that she might have discovered something more concrete.

  “That’s it?” he asked.

  “That’s it,” she echoed. She cupped her chin in her hands. “You don’t think that’s enough evidence to check them out any further?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “To tell the truth, I don’t know,” he said. “But I doubt it. Anyway, don’t give up. We still shouldn’t let any stone go unturned.”

  She smiled graciously. “I guess that’s my point,” she said.

  He finished his Coke, down to the last drop. “Know what? I think we’d make a pretty good detective team.”

  Her eyebrows arched. “Hey! What a terrific idea!”

  He thought about it a moment, and sighed. “Forget it,” he said, pushing his chair back with a grating noise. “The best ones are always married.”

  The day went by, and so did Monday and Tuesday without a phone call from the mystery caller. Jim began to have hopes that the person had gotten tired of his lousy joke and stopped it.

  But, on Wednesday, there was a letter in the mailbox addressed to him. The address was made up of letters cut out of a magazine.

  The hard lump that had begun to leave his stomach was suddenly back again. The jokester was using a different tack to get at him.

  But it was something more than just a letter he had written, Jim observed. The envelope was too thick for just a single piece of stationery.

  Jim started to head to his room with it. He preferred not to open it in the presence of his parents and Peg, feeling that whatever was in it would only stir them up again.

  “Jim?” His mothers voice stopped him. “Aren’t you going to open up that letter?”

  He looked around at her. They were in the kitchen: she, Peg, and he. His father was in the living room, probably studying his accounting lesson.

  “If you don’t mind, Mom, I’d rather open it up in my room,” he said.

  “It’s from that character, isn’t it?”

  She had brought the letter in from the mailbox. She had seen the address on it.

  “I think so,” Jim said.

  Peg gazed contemplatively at him, her white teeth biting down gently on a side of her bottom lip. “I think you should let us know what’s in that letter, Jim,” she said. “What’s been happening to you has been affecting us, too, you know.”

  “I know, Peg,” Jim agreed. “But I think I can handle it. And I’m not doing it alone.”

  “Oh? Who’s helping you?”

  “Margo. Margo Anderson. She’s in some of the classes that most of the football players are in, and is doing some checking for me. If you tried to do it, you might not get anywhere.”

  “Because I’m your sister, you mean?”

  “Right.” He turned and headed for the stairs. “I’ll be down for dinner.”

  In his room he read the address again. Then, his hands shaking, he tore open the envelope with his forefinger and drew out a folded picture and a sheet of plain white paper on which were two words: YOU SMELL! They were cut out separately from what appeared to be a page of a magazine.

  Jim unfolded the picture, which had also been cut out of a magazine. It was of a thief wearing a mask and carrying a gun. He was stepping out of a room through a window with a bag in one hand.

  Jim pressed his lips firmly together to suppress his anger. His fingers tightened on the picture. He was about to crush it and crumble it into a tiny ball, when a thought occurred to him. If the picture was taken from a magazine, which it apparently was because the paper was slick, then the magazine’s name might be printed somewhere on it. How its name might help him, Jim had no idea. But he could use every clue he could find.

  He met with disappointment. Neither the name of the magazine nor the date was on the page. Only the page numbers, 55 and 56, were on it. He turned the page over and found that the name and date were not on that side, either.

  Great. His chance of trying to figure out what magazine the page came out of was next to zero.

  Wait a minute. There were two two-column advertisements on the page. Both of them said something about stocks. Was it a clue? Maybe.

  He began to read the printed column that started off with: “(continued from page 52): investments pay lower yields than taxable investments. But you can adjust for the tax bite and end up with more money to keep, tax-free, than with income you have to pay tax on.”

  There was more, and all on the same topic: investments.

  Jim narrowed his eyes. There was hardly any doubt about it. The page was cut out of a magazine that dealt with investments. Or, in a general sense, stocks.

  Did the mystery caller buy the magazine from a newsstand? Or was he, or a member of his family, a subscriber?

  It was a clue. A thin one, but a clue.

  Jim saw a glimmer of hope shining on the horizon as he refolded the picture, stuck it into his shirt pocket with the YOU SMELL! message, and went back downstairs. He preferred not to mention the items to the rest of his family who were already congregating around the dining room table for dinner, but conscience, and the expression in his mothers and Pegs eyes, got the best of him.

  He showed all three the message and the picture. His mothers reaction upon reading them was consternation and anger. So was Pegs. And Jim was not surprised.

  What surprised him was the look on his fathers face when he saw the items. There was despair and pain in it, not anger, not hate.

  Handing the items back to Jim, he said compassionately, “It’s a sick person who’s doing that to you, Jim. Try not to get upset about it. The problem is his, not yours.”

  “Maybe it is, Dad,” agreed Jim, stuffing the folded pages back into his shirt pocket. “But I intend to find out who’s doing it. Sick or not, he’s driving me up a wall.”

  “You don’t have a single idea who it is?” Peg asked, placing a steaming hot dish of bean casserole on the table.

  “Not exactly. But it’s somebody on our football team. It’s got to be.”

  She focused her attention on him. “I hope you don’t suspect Chuck.”

  “You’re right. I don’t. But have you noticed how many plays I’ve been involved in in the last two games?”

  “I know. Not many,” she said. “But maybe that’s because you —” She paused, and looked away from him. “I’m sorry. Let’s drop it.”

  “Fine by me,” said Jim.

  His father and mother, he noticed, gave each other a long, speculative look. They said nothing, though, as if they, too, didn’t care to pursue the subject any further.

  After dinner, Jim telephoned Margo and asked her if she could meet him in fifteen minutes at the public library.

  “Sure,” she answered. “But why the library?”

  “’Cause it’s nice and quiet there,” he told her.

  12

  It was five after seven and already growing dark. The Port Lee Public Library, on Chickamaw Street, had all its lights turned on.

&
nbsp; Jim and Margo sat alone at a large mahogany table near the rack holding a variety of magazines. Jim had shown her the contents of the envelope he had received, had put the sheet with YOU SMELL! on it back into his pocket, and left the other, with the stock advertisements face up, in front of him.

  “What I think we ought to do,” he said as quietly as he could and still be sure she heard him, “is find out which magazine this page was cut out of.”

  “And then?”

  “Find out who subscribes to it.”

  Margos eyebrows arched. “You make it sound so simple.”

  “Okay. You got a better idea?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Let’s grab up the magazines dealing with stocks and bonds and check them to see which one has the same size page as this.”

  They got up, approached the magazine rack, and selected three magazines dealing with stocks and bonds. All three resembled each other in size, but only one of them had the pages the exact size as the one showing the picture of the thief. It was Stocks in Review.

  “One down, three to go,” said Jim, tingling with his success.

  Margo looked at him. “How do you figure?”

  “On the next down we find out which issue the picture was cut out of,” Jim replied, the order of progress clear in his head. “On the third down we find out whom we know who subscribes to it.”

  “And on the fourth?”

  “We score a touchdown.”

  Margo laughed. “Okay, quarterback! You’ve got the ball!”

  Jim saw that the magazine he was holding was the September issue. He flipped its pages and found, to his disappointment, that the page, 55–56, was not the same as the one mailed to him.

  “Rats,” he said, and returned the three magazines to the rack. He looked at the others carefully, and a glimmer of hope fanned in him as he saw that there was at least one more copy of each magazine. The August issue of Stocks in Review was one of them.

  He removed it, flipped its pages, and came to 55–56. It was the same page as the one mailed to him!

  “Margo!” he exclaimed. “I’ve found it! It came out of the August issue!”

  “Fine! Now what?”