by Chris Lynch
She nods, a big, slow up and down that says she understands and doesn’t need—or possibly, want—me to say any more.
“I have to go,” I say.
“Well, if you didn’t say it, I was going to say it for you,” she says, then rushes up to me before I can get the inevitable wrong idea. She kisses my cheek and squeezes my biceps. “You want me to come with you?”
“Oh God, no,” I say.
“That’s what I thought. Now, listen, I’m buried with coursework. But if you get cut—and you won’t—then I want you to come back and stay here tonight. If you make the team, just send me a text. I don’t want some macho overconfident jock coming over and ruining my studies.”
My blood pressure decreases just slightly with that.
“I’m almost tempted to scratch my own name off the roster now,” I say.
She starts manhandling me to the exit. “Yeah? Well, that would nullify the terms of the offer, leaving you with no football and no—”
“I won’t!” I say, and rush out before I say anything else that stupid.
• • •
I pace like a madman, around and around and around the campus, killing time, slaughtering time, until the moment arrives and I march into the gym.
Some guys are ecstatic, hooting and barking, and the gym walls echo, making it sound like an old cowboys-and-Indians movie. Some guys are deflated, heads down and rushing out without making any sounds at all. Some guys make it very obvious that this was just a formality, like picking up the morning mail.
I stand for ages staring at the bland computer printout taped to the wall as other players come and go. I get bumped and jostled, I get backslapped by people celebrating their own good fortune, probably without even knowing who I am or what my outcome is.
Fabian was right this time, I should have taken my phone with me. I would love to stand right here and text the news to Joyce, but it’ll have to wait until I get to my room. At least it will give me time to compose something clever and modest and not at all jock-y.
Most of the guys have come and gone, but I am still soaking it in, way more than I would have imagined. My own sweet celebration.
Christian and Tory appear, one at each shoulder as we survey the roster together. Not that there was any suspense about their fate, but one has to make it official.
“Super,” Christian says. “You made it, Keir. So glad you made the cut. I would have felt awful knowing we made it, possibly at your expense.”
“You might have even done me a favor,” I say. “If it wasn’t for you guys, I might never have found my old passion and been reborn as a defensive back.”
“That’s what we hear,” Tory says, and slaps me firmly on the back. “Well done, Killer!”
“Yeah,” Christian adds, “way to go, Killer!”
Dear God, no.
No.
I almost made my clean getaway.
But the Killer tracked me down.
team spirit
I told myself I wouldn’t react, never mind overreact. Take the high road, don’t pay any attention, and it will die of its own no-big-dealism.
This is the beginning of all the better things I have traveled so far in so many ways to reach.
But as I stride across the field to begin my first full practice as a member of the Carnegie Saints football team, one after another of my new teammates on my new team in my new existence four thousand feet above sea level says the wrong thing.
“Killer!”
“Here comes the Killer!”
“Kill ’em, Killer! Kill ’em all!”
It’s only banter.
It means I am part of the team, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?
I smile ferociously as I stride with purpose and dignity straight into it. I smile harder and harder as I think about it, as I try not to think about it, about all the awfulness that comes here along with that name. I smile harder until I must look like Batman’s Joker, because I am petrified that I am going to burst into tears because it is all coming apart, all at once, after all this effort.
I march directly to where the receivers and running backs are clustered, with Kelly in the middle of it, clapping and laughing like it is such a big happy joke that even I am going to love it.
And I finally get to where he is, still laughing away, and I’m still telling myself not to react, never mind overreact.
“Kelly,” I say in a voice lower than I recognize, “tell them I’m not the Killer. Please, tell them there’s no reason to call me that, because I am not the Killer.”
The players who were chanting are now gathered around us and are totally silent. Kelly and I stand with about a foot of space between us. We can see each twitch of a face muscle and hear each quick shallow breath.
A smile unfurls across his lips, he gives me a gallant small nod, and then he calls out, “It is true, this man is not the Killer. But as a matter of fact, he is something else entirely. Something even worse than a killer—”
He cannot finish because I launch myself, fist-first, and punch Kelly McAvoy dead in the face.
He hits the ground like a felled tree but bounces back up just as quickly and bam, I take a clean shot right in the mouth. Coaches must be catching on, because we’re quickly separated and semi-covered by other players, who crowd around like nothing odd is going on.
They are assistant coaches, the special teams guy and the strength-and-conditioning guy.
“What’s the story, boys?” the strength coach asks.
Lots of murmuring goes into denying there is any story at all.
“Right, then,” the special teams coach says, pointing first at me, then at Kelly. “You with the bloody mouth, and you with the bloody nose, come with me.”
He takes us to the weight room, then gets straight to it.
“Okay, you want to tell me what the problem is?”
“There is no problem, Coach,” I say.
“No problem, Coach,” Kelly says.
“Uh-huh,” Coach says, checking his watch. “I thought as much. So, here’s how it goes. I’m gonna leave you two here for exactly five minutes. When I come back, you will have solved whatever problem it is that neither one of you has. You solve it any which way you need to, but when I come back, it is solved. It is not to linger beyond that point, because that would be a threat to team unity. We cannot have a threat to team unity, or else someone is going to have to go. Understood? Good. Ready . . . solve.”
“What if one of us kills the other one?” Kelly says as the coach walks away.
“That’s easy,” he says. “Problem solved.” He slams the door.
“Why did you have to do that?” I blurt. “I told you I didn’t want that name coming here.”
“Too bad,” he shouts. “It’s a nickname, boo-hoo.”
I take a breath, trying to rein myself, and this whole absurdity, back in.
“Listen, Kelly. This is probably a lot to do with my not remembering your name. You’re right, that was awful, but we shouldn’t let—”
“You want to know why you couldn’t remember me? First, because you were a big shit, varsity for three years, and I didn’t arrive till final year. You and your meathead pals were too good—”
“No, not true—”
“Entirely true. It was obvious, because you were the type of guys who wanted it to be obvious. And I wasn’t part of your jolly thug crew. I was never big into drinking, I kept to myself, I was too quiet, and I know that kind of attitude is just, like, total alien behavior to the thug-life society.”
“Hey, I was no thug. You know nothing. I was probably as much a quiet loner as you were. Sometimes I was a follower on this or that escapade, but it was all just—”
“Ha!” he blurts, spluttering spittle right in my direction. “Enough bullshit, Keir, all right? I was there. Were you? Sometimes I wonder what movie you were at. But the one you starred in was Keir Sarafian, Trouble’s Own Master of Ceremonies.”
“All wrong,” I snap. “All wrong.
You never even knew me. I was at some stuff, sometimes, that got a little messy, but it wasn’t me. You ask anybody and they’ll tell you—”
“I don’t need to ask, Keir. Did you forget again? I was there. Now, you can make shit up from now till the end of time for all I care. But you need to know that that is all ending here. You are going to have to put up and shut up for once in your life, Killer. Because you aren’t good enough to be pulling this precious bullshit. You’re not as good as you think, pal. Never were.”
“I’m not precious. I just didn’t want to be dragging old shit to a new place.”
“Oh, really? Well, how do you suppose it felt to run into you here, huh? You think you invented the whole idea of a fresh start in a new place? Gimme a break. You would probably be the very last person from that team I would want to see here. Did you ever stop to think what the other guys thought about playing in the middle of that circus you were always bringing to town? I’ll tell you what they thought, they wished you would just fuck off and take the circus with you.”
“Nobody felt that way.”
“Everybody felt that way. If it wasn’t for a couple of hot streaks on field goals, being pals with Quarterback Ken, and the big reputation you got out of a major cheap-shot tackle here and there, you wouldn’t even have been a big deal on our high school team, never mind being here.”
“Shut up, liar. You’re just jealous.”
“Of what? You got nothin’ I want.”
“I made this team, didn’t I? I made it by putting big hits on big boys like you, didn’t I?”
“You did it the same way you got away with everything before. You picked your spot. You took a moment when you needed to, you threw yourself into the one practice or the one game or the one play, and you just mugged your way through it. Dirty plays and intimidation at the right time got you a long way, but you are gonna get found out now. You are gonna have to do it every day, with the big boys, because there’s no kicking job for you to hide behind.”
I start to storm out, but I realize there will be none of that. I’m trapped.
“Yeah, right,” I say. “You’re a jerk, Kelly, you know that?”
“I may be a jerk, but you, Killer, are a fake. And I can’t wait to watch while everybody finds that out.”
“I’m sure you’ll make sure they find out, because you’ll spread it around, just like with the Killer thing. Big deal, big man.”
“I tell you what, Killer. Instead of trying to prove what a hard guy you are by starting fights with me, how ’bout letting your playing speak for you? How ’bout that, huh? ’Cause that’s what I’ll be doing. I’ll leave you to it and won’t say another word about you to anybody.”
It’s a reasonable proposition, and one any player worth his salt should be happy to live with.
I can only stare at him, because suddenly I have no words.
Coach bursts through the door. “Aw,” he says with grand mock disappointment, “nobody’s dead. I guess that means you two have worked things out like gentlemen. Am I right?”
“You are right, Coach,” Kelly says, and makes a big deal of extending his hand for me to shake.
“Right, Coach,” I say. And I shake.
• • •
I let him do it to me, so it’s my own fault. Kelly got inside my head, and immediately it started messing me up every which way.
Every last player on the team seemed to get bigger, stronger, faster, more clever with each day of practice. I lost ground every day, and it’s my own fault because I let Kelly get into my head. It’s the oldest, most obvious trick there is, and I let him get away with it.
The first day, I threw myself at everything that moved, I charged like a freight train full of malice, and I hit almost nothing. I was overthinking, was the problem. The only problem. I had to get back to playing naturally, instinctively.
Every day, the situation deteriorated.
Before the end of the first week of practice as a member of the team, I get the call to come to the head coach’s office.
“What’s the problem, Mr. Sarafian?” Coach Muswell asks from the other side of his massive oak desk. “Are you injured? You don’t do anybody any favors, son, by playing hurt and not telling anybody about it.”
“I’m perfectly healthy, Coach.”
“Have you been studying the playbook? Because you look lost out there. If you’re not in the wrong spot, then you’re in the right spot but about three seconds too late on every play.”
“I know the playbook by heart, Coach. I’m just taking time to get adjusted to things, that’s all.”
“Well, Keir, I have to tell you, you don’t have much time left for adjustment. Season starts next week, and if you don’t raise your game significantly, I can’t guarantee you’re going to still stick with the team. Frankly, I had to cut a couple of guys who were playing a whole lot better than you are now. Where’s that tackling machine I saw the day before cuts?”
“He’s right here, sir.”
“Is he? Well, okay, then. When you leave my office, make sure you take him with you. Because he’s useless up here. We need him down on the field, understand?”
“I understand, Coach.”
I don’t sleep at all. I roll around, trying to shake Kelly out of my head, trying to remember the right things I did that I need to do again. I need to do it all again, and then again, and again, and again, day after day . . . forever.
I have to do it. I will do it.
• • •
I bring everything I have to the practice field the next day. Kelly is strutting around, full of confidence and chatter as if he knows something I don’t, and it is making me demented. I see him sharing jokes with guys, making a big show of it, talking close into somebody’s helmet, then the two of them laughing like donkeys.
That is motivation.
I feel it all coming back, all the right stuff, the toughness and the feel for the game, the lust for hard contact. Then, right from the whistle, I’m all over it.
All over the field, mostly. Aimlessly. I am somehow worse than any day so far, and I know it. I feel the humiliation and futility and I cannot even get it out by hitting hard, because the more I try to blast through it, the more foolish I look when I miss and tumble past the play entirely. So I gradually slow everything down, trade hitting for grabbing, and as the day winds down, I can feel everything winding down.
The clincher is a play I follow reasonably closely, a dump pass to Kelly, who then has a lot of daylight down the sideline where he can rack up one more touchdown on me and make his victory complete.
But shockingly I find myself gaining on him for the first time all day. Energized, I turn on the jets and make my last stand, running him down, dragging him by the shoulder pads and planting him on the turf ten yards short of a score.
The adrenaline from this one tackle is making me light-headed, and I’m sure I can build on this. I can come back, I can climb back up to where I ought to be.
I look down on him with at least this small bit of triumph and hope before I let him off the ground.
He gives me a big generous smile. Then he hollers, “Rape! Help me, someone! He’s at it again! Rapist!”
I can hear scores of pounding feet like a cattle stampede, over even the laughter, as players and coaches come running.
But at least Kelly isn’t smiling anymore, and he’s not yelling filth while I whale and whale on him, shutting that mouth up for at least this moment.
Coach Muswell tells me to come directly to his office as soon as I’ve showered.
just a game
I put everything I’ve got now into moving along as if nothing unusual has happened. It is a college, after all, and people go to college to learn. I can learn.
When Joyce calls to see how I’m doing, it comes as a surprise. I haven’t seen her since I made and then unmade the football team, and I’m afraid to find out what she might have heard about my behavior. We’ve exchanged a couple of texts, but that didn’
t tell either of us much about where we are at right now. Naturally, I’m not there at the time she calls, since I have statistics, Spanish, and English composition classes and yes, they all seem like they’re markedly more difficult now that I’m an ordinary civilian post-athlete student.
But Fabian talks to her for forty-five minutes, so that puts the whole day in the win column, right? While everyone else in the world is playing football or talking on the phone, I’m listening to a stats lecture that sounds like Spanish to me, a Spanish class that sounds like an opera with the whole class suddenly in the mood to contribute all at once, all period, and an English class that I swear is nothing but the professor reading all twenty students their last rites one by one. The prof is lifeless, doesn’t care who knows it, and only perks up when he tells us—again—how he got tenure on the first day that tenure was invented and hasn’t had to work a day since. While my mind wanders, I come up with a prognostication, calculated in my head in Spanish, that everyone in that class is going to die two years earlier than they were supposed to just because of exposure to this man.
This is not what my mind should be doing. Joyce has her geology, and her devotion to it is a beautiful thing to behold. I can say for a fact that she has no issues with the word “love” when it comes to rocks. For a few seconds before I had anything to eat this morning, it occurred to me that it might be clever to point this fact out to her. Then I had a banana, a bowl of Grape-Nuts, and a glass of orange juice. This was followed almost instantly by the realization, coming up like a fiery sunrise, of the idiocy of revealing my jealousy. Of rocks.
Fabian has his “Transatlantic Literature from the Romantic to the Edwardian,” which when I say it, sounds like I made it up to make him sound dweebier than he already is. But the way he crows it all loud and proud, you could almost believe there’s crowd surfing in his classes.
