by Mike Lupica
Melvin Braxton, his cousin, was with him. Melvin was a defensive back and kick returner who was more like a brother to Calvin than either a bud or a teammate, as quiet and nice as Calvin was loud.
The third member of the group—no shocker there, the way the two of them had been buddying up at practice—was Casey Lindell. Why not? Calvin had already made it clear, just one week into practice, just by some of the comments Jake had overheard, that Calvin thought Casey was the best quarterback on the team.
To Calvin, that just meant the quarterback with the best chance to get him the ball as often as possible, make him look as good as he possibly could to college recruiters.
Didn’t mean Calvin didn’t want to win. He did. Jake knew that he hated to lose as much as he hated it when the ball wasn’t coming to him. But Calvin believed that Granger High was just the beginning of the process for him, that he was going from here to be a big star in college football and then the pros after that. A big, fast guy going places. Mostly out of Granger the first chance he got. The opposite of Barrett that way.
And now that Wyatt Cullen was gone, he was the star of the team, at last.
Long as somebody could get him the ball the way Wyatt had.
“Look out!” they heard Calvin say now, looked over and saw him point at their table with both hands. “Cullen in the house.”
He waved at Jake now, who gave him a quick wave back, trying not to do anything that would encourage him to come over. Jake liked Calvin, he did, thought he was a show. Just didn’t want to be part of the show tonight. So he turned away, asked Barrett about a cutting horse his dad had been working, trying to act as if he were a lot more interested in that. Not ignoring Calvin—that was pretty much impossible—but making sure he did nothing to engage.
Too late.
Calvin was as fast getting across Stone’s as he was in the open field, turned out.
“Man, look at you, the last Cullen in Cullenville,” he said, “sitting here like y’all are in the middle of a family photograph.”
“Yeah,” Jake said, “they like my dad and my brother here. I keep waiting for them to put their pictures on the menu.”
“I been askin’ Mr. Stone,” Calvin said, “when he’s gonna clear a wall for me.”
Nate grinned. “You sure one wall will be enough?”
Calvin seemed to notice Nate for the first time. “How you goin’, big man?” Calvin said. “See Jake’s got his number one with him.”
“We all know you’re the only number one around here, C,” Jake said, trying to keep it light.
“Only way I stay that way is when I got somebody throwin’ the ball to me,” Calvin said, “not over me.”
“That last throw was crap, no doubt,” Jake said. “But I think I found something on my mechanics after practice.”
“Yeah,” Calvin said, putting on a big smile. “I saw you out there, acting like teacher’s pet with Coach Jessup.”
“Whoa,” Jake said. Honestly surprised. “He asked me to hang around.”
“Course he did, dude; like I said, you’re the last Cullen in Cullenville.”
Nate said, “You seemed to do all right with a Cullen throwing to you last season.”
“Was a different Cullen.”
In a quiet voice, Barrett said, “You think Wyatt looked like an All-Pro after his first week of practice, back when he was a freshman? Maybe you could cut Jake a little slack.”
Barrett had no use for Calvin, didn’t think he was a show, just a show-off. Oh, Barrett liked him fine as a teammate, knew Calvin would do as much as anybody to help Granger win games this season as the Cowboys tried to defend their title. But he stayed out of his way at practice, and rarely spoke to him.
There was no rule book for the way you were supposed to act when you were part of a team. But somehow everybody knew his role. Knew his rank, like they were in some kind of army.
“I’m sorry,” Calvin said, still smiling, “was I talkin’ to you, Bear?”
Barrett stared at Calvin, not saying anything, keeping whatever he did want to say inside. Like he’d remembered his rank.
It was Nate who spoke next. “Now, you be nice to my boys, Calvin, you hear?” Nate was smiling, too, but there was something in his voice telling Calvin to stand down now, not asking.
Calvin must have heard it, too.
“C’mon, I was just playin’,” he said.
“Yeah,” Nate said. “Me too.”
“You know I love you, big man,” Calvin said. To Jake he said, “You keep workin’ on those mechanics, case I need you ’fore this season is over.”
“I’m third string,” Jake said.
“Right,” Calvin said, then turned and walked back across the room, Jake watching him go, wondering what all this had really been about, why Calvin had come over in the first place.
“Does he really think I wanted to stay out there on that field today one minute longer than the rest of y’all?” Jake said.
Nate was busy mixing up what looked like the whole butter plate and sour cream into one of his baked potatoes.
“You may not think you got a chance to play, but you sure seem to be on Calvin’s radar,” Nate said.
“But I’m third string!”
When they had finally finished eating, Jake signaled for the check. Emma Jean came over and said to him, “On the house. Compliments of Bobby.”
Meaning Bobby Ray, the owner.
“Emma Jean,” Jake said, “he doesn’t have to do that. I don’t want him to do that.”
Emma Jean looked over to where Bobby was standing near the hostess stand, smiling and waving at him. “Yeah, Jake, but Bobby wants to. So please don’t make a big deal of this, okay?”
“Okay,” he said.
They all got up, started walking over to thank Bobby for the food. Jake acted as if he’d forgotten something at the table, went back there and slid a ten-dollar bill, what he’d brought with him for dessert, underneath the saltshaker as a tip. Then he went over and shook Bobby’s hand himself, Bobby saying, “Make sure you say hi to Wyatt, you talk to him.”
“Sure will.”
When they were in the parking lot, Nate and Barrett were talking about their free meal like they’d won some kind of lottery.
“Maybe there’s no such thing as a third-string Cullen in Cullenville,” Barrett said.
06
THEY DROPPED OFF NATE FIRST, AT HIS SMALL TWO-STORY house on the outskirts of town, almost to the border of Ashton. Nate’s dad drove for UPS and his mom worked as a teller at the same bank, Granger National, that Libby Cullen’s dad had once run.
On the way back to the Cullens’ spread, all hundred acres of it, a working ranch that raised Black Angus cattle and horses, Barrett was still talking about Calvin.
“You know what bothers me the most?”
“None of it should bother either one of us,” Jake said. “That was just Calvin being Calvin. He’s fine.”
“If he’s already made up his mind that Casey’s gonna be our starter, what’s he stressed out about you for?”
“Maybe it’s just another way of him looking up the field,” Jake said. “Maybe he’s worried that if Casey can push Tim out of a job, I can do the same to Casey.”
“Well, maybe he’s right about something then,” Barrett said. “Like a blind squirrel finding an acorn.”
“Except I’m not as good as Casey,” Jake said. “So Calvin doesn’t need to go hunting more acorns. Casey seems to be feeding him just fine.”
“My daddy says that if you think of yourself as a backup, that’s all you’re ever gonna be,” Barrett said.
They had made it to the other side of town now, the west side, were on the bumpy back road that felt like dirt, getting close now to the ranch. It was one of those Texas summer nights, under what they called the big sky, when you
felt like you didn’t even need headlights. All the light you needed came from the stars and the big moon hanging in the sky.
“Bear,” Jake said, “I only think of myself as a backup because I am a backup.”
“Sounds more like a backup plan to me,” Barrett said.
“More like a basic truth. There’s nothing wrong with being a backup.”
Barrett took a deep breath, blew it out so hard it put a circle of fog on the windshield.
“No, there’s nothing wrong with it. Unless you tell yourself you’re not good enough to start, in which case maybe you don’t have to be good enough.” He paused, like he was deciding whether or not to keep going. Then he did. “And if you’ve spent your whole life believing your daddy didn’t think you were good enough, then maybe you can’t let him down.”
Jake turned his head and looked at Barrett, his eyes on the road, lit by the dashboard and the sky. He was never a big talker, even when Nate wasn’t around. So this was the same as a long speech for him.
“I never said anything about not wanting to let my dad down,” Jake said.
“So maybe I’m saying it for you,” Barrett said. “You got him. You got your brother. Everybody in this town acts like y’all are some kind of football royalty, like y’all just fell into it like a pig in slop. But they don’t take time to think what it must be like to be you. Have to walk in their football shoes. I don’t know a whole lot about the Mannings. But I know their dad Archie never favored one son over the other. Wish I could say the same for your daddy.”
Not even Jake’s mom had ever come out and put it straight to him like this, the truth that Jake carried around inside himself. You heard people all the time, grown-ups mostly, telling you to speak from the heart. Only now Barrett wasn’t just speaking from his heart.
He’s speaking from mine, Jake thought.
They passed through the main gate to the ranch. Barrett pulled over and stopped the truck next to a fence that Jake had painted last summer to earn extra money. No cattle around now, no horses, just open fields on both sides of the gravel drive where Jake and Wyatt used to come down and throw the ball around, sometimes their dad with them.
“C’mon,” Bear said to Jake, “let’s see that fancy new throwing motion of yours.” Like he was reading Jake’s mind.
Jake said, “Even if I did want to throw, where would I find anybody this time of night good enough to catch?”
“Ha-ha,” Bear said.
Jake got out, and the two of them climbed over the fence, the way they’d been climbing this fence to play football since they were kids. And after just a few minutes, Jake knew, just by feel, that he was already more comfortable throwing the way Coach Jessup had shown him at Cullen Field.
Barrett had trained his headlights on the field they were on now, and with that and the light from the sky, they could follow the flight of the ball just fine. It was late, and neither one of them cared, acted like they didn’t have a care in the world, laughing and woofing on each other, Barrett not only looking like a guy who could be a decent tight end, but doing some funny imitations of the little shimmy Calvin would do after he caught a touchdown pass.
“Need two favors,” Jake called out to him at one point.
“You got ’em.”
“Don’t ever shake your hips like that in front of anybody except me,” Jake said. “And don’t ever dance fast with Emma Jean.”
“Later it gets,” Barrett said, “funnier you get.”
They weren’t under the lights of Cullen Field on a Friday night of Texas high school football. But it was all right, Jake thought. More than all right. Out here with his friend, under the lights they had, Jake was happy.
Tonight he loved it.
07
THE NEXT SUNDAY, THE DAY BEFORE SCHOOL BEGAN, WYATT surprised his family by showing up at about three in the afternoon, no advance warning, just walking through the front door.
His coach had given the Longhorns the day off, and one of Wyatt’s freshman teammates lived two towns over. So Wyatt had hitched a ride and here he was, his hair shorter than when he’d left for Austin a few weeks ago, a little soul patch of hair under his lower lip, something his mother noticed immediately.
“You must be a college man now,” she said, pulling back from hugging her oldest son. “Seems to me you still couldn’t grow facial hair when you left.”
“I could,” Wyatt said. “I just chose not to.”
“I think it’s cool,” Jake said. “Coach McCoy said no facial hair for us, that the times might change but he won’t.”
The brothers didn’t hug each other, just did lean-in shoulder-bumps.
“Maybe someday if you’re starting,” Wyatt said, “you can be the one to get him to change some of his ways. I never could.”
Troy Cullen, just in from a ride on his favorite cutting horse out to check some broken fence at the far end of the property, said, “You know in my day—”
Far as he got before Wyatt, grinning at Jake, said, “In his day.”
“The only day that really mattered,” Jake said.
“Couple of comedians I raised,” Troy Cullen said, taking off his black Resistol cowboy hat and banging the dust off it. “But in my day, we’d want to shave first thing after the game, when the girls would start to come around.”
Libby Cullen smiled. “And, Lordy, weren’t they always around you like bees around honey?”
He put his arms around his wife, his sweetheart since Granger High, and said, “Who can explain the power Cullen men have over women?”
“It’s almost like a scent you give off, dear,” their mom said, waving her hand in front of her nose. “Unless that’s just the smell of horses.”
Then she said for the Cullen men to go sit down and get reacquainted in the den while she made up a batch of iced tea for them.
Jake wondered why they needed to get reacquainted, leastways his dad and Wyatt. Wyatt had only been gone a day under three weeks, and Troy Cullen had been in Austin more than half that time watching the Longhorns get ready for their season. The last time he’d been over there had been on Thursday, watching a nighttime practice.
Now he wanted to know if the left side of the offensive line had gotten any better, and if Wyatt was on the same page finally with his senior tight end, and whether or not they’d put in more play-action.
Wyatt said, “Yes, yes, and yes,” then was telling them both—but really telling his dad—how they’d strapped on their helmets the last couple of days and practiced for real, Wyatt scrambling yesterday and taking such a hard lick from an outside linebacker, he thought it would take till the middle of this week to catch his breath.
“Hits’ll get even harder when you’re wearing the orange for real,” his dad said.
“Tell me about it,” Wyatt said.
“Hey!” Troy Cullen said, turning to Jake. “Why don’t you go ask Mom to fix us up some guacamole and chips to go with that iced tea?”
Jake nodded, got up, and left the two of them there, Wyatt telling their dad now that he was throwing the ball as well as he ever had in his life, didn’t matter who he was throwing to these days. And saying he felt that more and more the coaches were tailoring the offense around him even though he was just a freshman.
From the hall he heard his dad’s big voice telling Wyatt, “Everyone’s got to stop thinking of you as a freshman and understand you were a college QB when I dropped you off there.”
When Jake got to the kitchen, he grabbed a dish towel and put it over his arm like he was a waiter and gave his mom the order.
“I think your sense of humor was one more thing you got from me,” she said.
“I think Dad was afraid I might interrupt while he and Wyatt were game-planning for Washington,” Jake said.
“Oh, you know your father and Texas football,” she said. “He’s never gotte
n over that the Longhorns didn’t want him when he was coming out of Granger High.”
Jake grinned. “You think Wyatt’s coaches are gonna mind when dad starts trying to explain football to them?”
Libby Cullen turned around at the counter and smiled now. He’d see it sometimes when his dad was going on about something or other, being an expert on something new because he was an expert on everything, usually in a voice you could hear all over the property. It was a smile that loved her husband, understood him, and made fun of him all at the same time.
“He’s an involved football parent,” she said.
“Well,” Jake said, the words out of his mouth before he could stop them, “at least with the other quarterback in the family.”
The smile disappeared off her face, wiped clean, as she said, “Jacob Cullen, your father loves both his sons, and you know it.”
Do I? Jake wondered, thinking about what Bear had said the other night.
But that was a thought that stayed inside him, the way it always did. He dropped it, just like that. Jake understood something about himself: He’d always hated tension, his whole life. Had always gone out of his way to try to make things right with the people around him, even when he knew they were wrong. Even when they were a part of his own family. “My pleaser” his mom had always called him, always letting him know that she thought that was a good thing.
But the truth was, Jake didn’t know how much his father loved him. Just knew he didn’t love him the way he wanted him to.
The way he loved Wyatt.
He carried the guacamole and a bowl of chips back to the den. His mom carried a tray with the pitcher of iced tea on it, glasses, cut-up lemon and lime and even oranges, because she knew Wyatt loved orange in his iced tea. Libby Cullen, Jake knew by now, never did anything halfway, not even a snack, where her family was concerned. Jake had always thought she was the one who really did know everything, in her quiet way, that quiet way she said Jake got from her.
She sat with them for a few minutes, listening to Wyatt’s report from preseason practice, the one she had been getting practically on a daily basis from her husband, who had been living the whole thing right along with Wyatt.
