Hit Count

by Chris Lynch

  “Every third step,” Coach snapped. “Pay attention.”

  The offensive linemen again did a pretty job of protection, dropping into a perfect sickle shape as they backpedaled in sync with each other and the QB. It would look impressive enough just as an agility exercise, but with each guy also manhandling his opposing lineman at the same time, this was real art.

  And Anderson the fat jerk was the artist of them all. Dinos was dogged as well as tricky with his hands and strong. And he was a great big tumbleweed sailing by as the quarterback stepped up past the rush, into the snuggle of that sickle, and threw a long bomb that connected and made all the offense boys hop and howl and party like the championship was theirs already.

  “He crosses over,” I said to Coach as I continued monitoring Anderson’s feet even though they were just taking him to the cooler for a drink. “Every third step, in pass protection, he crosses over.”

  “Whenever he’s working his man outside and past the play. It gives him almost an extra half step of momentum, makes him all the faster in his reverse. Adds a little hitch, too, that confuses the hell out of defensive linemen.”

  I was still watching Anderson’s feet as he walked back out to the field and formation.

  “And it leaves him open,” I said with breathless wonder and joy, as if I just caught Santa waving to me before going back up the chimney.

  “It does, for an instant.”

  “His left foot is off the ground and crossed behind his right ankle, he’s starting to lean heavy left, he’s vulnerable right there to a hard left forearm—Bam!—ribs, under his left arm . . .”

  In my head, of course, I was doing just that, and Anderson’s center of gravity shifted, tilted, and he toppled hard onto the ground to the outside of the play where Dinos was supposed to go.

  Coach was looking at me now, with my knees just slightly bent, my left forearm in follow-through. “Did it work?” he said with a grin.

  “Did it ever,” I said, grinning back.

  I straightened up and watched intently as they ran one more before switching to a few run-­defense scenarios to finish the day.

  “Does he know he does that?” I asked Coach as the punch-­and-­grunt of play resumed.

  “I made sure he does,” Coach said. “But he said to me, ‘Yeah, but Coach Fisk, it does a lot more good for my game than any possible bad. And we both know there ain’t anybody in this league who’ll be causing me any worries anyway.’ And thing is, he’s probably right.”

  Just for that one second, I wished I could transfer to another school within the league.

  “I’d cause him worries,” I said, sounding less like a human speaking than a dog guarding his house.

  “Teammates don’t talk like that, Captain.”

  “Sorry, Coach, didn’t mean it that way.” Though I absolutely did. “I just meant, if I had that kind of challenge presented to me, I’d like to think—”

  “I know what you meant,” he said. “It’s good for exceptional players, the few who are going on to bigger things eventually, to learn these things so they can test each other all year in practice. Makes everybody better and more prepared for the next level.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Pay closer attention. Arlo. To the fine details. Stay alert. Learn, and then use what you learn.”

  “I will, Coach.”

  Coach nodded, blew his whistle loudly to stop everybody where they were, and started walking out to point out the rights and wrongs of the details.

  “Oh, and by the way,” he said, stopping like he had just forgotten something important, “he knows you know. And he knows you know he knows. Thought it was only fair to tell him first, see if he could make any adjustments before you got at him.”

  He was smiling and pointed now at whatever giveaway expression I was making.

  “Ah, see, I can tell already. You’re already a better player. And so is he. It’s great when everybody wins, isn’t it?”

  He spun and jogged toward the team, barking at the guys who got flattened first.

  It’s great when I win. Everybody doesn’t have to win. In fact, everybody can’t, or else there would be no such thing as a winner.

  ***

  I woke up before five the morning of the first game. There was no chance I would get back to sleep, either. I knew that already from the adrenaline surging as the kickoff played itself out in my head.

  I stood up, did some cartoonishly fast stretching.

  “Pace yourself, Captain,” I said, stopping mid-­toe-­touch. I found myself staring up close at the little kid notebook that now was so obviously, embarrassingly, a little kid’s dream book.

  I picked it up and tore it, shredded it over my wastebasket until it was no kind of book at all. I watched it feather down, like at the end of the Super Bowl when all that confetti hails the winners and tortures the losers right there in front of the whole world.

  “Oh, I’m doing it right, pal,” I said as I dressed and gathered my gear. “I know how to hit, and everybody is going to know it.”

  I was glad it was so early as I crept through and out of the house. This was my time.

  I’d be there to greet the custodian when he opened up the locker room. I’d help load the equipment. I’d be first man on the bus. I’d drive the thing if they let me.

  Hit List, I thought as I strode down the silent street. Who needs a Hit List? I am the Hit List.

  ***

  We beat them 28 – 0, and I felt like I existed the whole time in some zone I never reached before. I just knew. I knew on the way to the bus, I knew in the bus on the way to the other side of town. I knew in the locker room before the game and during the kickoff.

  I especially knew when I stood upright, in the center of the field, in the center of our defensive unit—my defensive unit—and I stared straight through everything right into their quarterback’s eyes. I stared so deep into him that I not only knew I was breaking him before even the first snap, I felt like I had just downloaded their entire game plan directly into my brain.

  I was paying attention, like Coach told me to, to every little detail. I looked over to him just before that first snap, and he gave me just what I was looking for. I had the green light to blitz, on the first play of the game.

  It was like I was launching out of a sprinter’s starting blocks. I scorched on an absolutely straight line, past our guys, through their stunned defensive line, untouched until I smashed right into the quarterback as he tried to set up for a throw. He never saw me, but he felt me. I drove him hard, forward and down into the turf while the ball didn’t even make the trip with him.

  By the time I got up, there was a big scrum for the ball right where the quarterback had been standing. When the smoke cleared, we had possession of the ball and the game, right there. I looked back at the QB as he climbed slowly to his feet. Again, he looked at me, too. Good-­bye phony confidence, hello very long day.

  He was mine already. I was in his head.

  It went like that for all four quarters.

  I focused on punishment. I was hitting every other one of their guys hard enough to either force them to play harder, or put them on the Physically Unable to Perform list. Technically, the PUP list was strictly a pro thing, and high schools wouldn’t have them. But I liked the sound of it.

  Late in the third quarter the QB figured he’d catch us napping and dumped a quick pass over the middle to their tight end. He was taller than me, fast, athletic, skinny, and should have stuck with basketball.

  Bam!

  The collision was violent enough to make a sound that reverberated around the half-­empty stands and pop the other guy’s helmet right off. There was all kinds of noise, mostly from our players woofing and their guys screeching.

  I stood over the guy as he lay there flat on his back, looking dazed but holding on to the damn ball.

  I reached down and offered him a hand up.

  As I started pulling, the crown of my head started screami
ng pain like somebody was trying to open my lid with a screwdriver. I had never felt anything like this, and the sensation of tearing the top of my own skull away from my brain caused me to reflexively place my free hand on top of my helmet to hold everything together. The guy got up, but I remained hunched for several more seconds while the blood pulsed and pulsed hard enough to blast through the bone, the helmet, and the hand. Then it eased off, just enough. I lowered my hand, then looked straight ahead at players returning to huddles and a referee coming my way. It got tolerable when I straightened up again, and I could look the ref in the eye.

  I got whacked with a fifteen-­yard illegal hit penalty even though the helmet-­to-­helmet thing was accidental. Anyway, the fifteen yards meant nothing at all to the game. But the hit did. They didn’t attempt a single pass play for the rest of the day.

  By the closing two minutes, the game had become kind of hypnotic with its grinding regularity. You could see their team now just wishing the clock to wind down.

  Except for one guy, a stocky, slow running back everybody called The Plow, who never really quit, bless his Clydesdale heart. It was kind of sadly heroic, the way he just kept taking the ball, moving a couple of yards forward, and then absorbing one gang tackle after another. Last play from scrimmage with under a minute to go and those guys inside our thirty-­yard line, Plow broke through the line with the one short burst of speed he must have been saving all day.

  From the other side of the field, I saw that he had a legitimate chance to score, and that our guys seemed almost to be letting him have it.

  No. That is not how the game is played.

  Let him have it?

  Despite tiring legs, I turned on the jets and bolted for the far sideline, where he was chugging for that corner flag. I pumped and pumped, hauled, growled, and caught him at the two-­yard line.

  Bam!

  I let him have it, the way you’re supposed to let them have it.

  The Plow had been huffing so hard for the goal line he didn’t even look my way before I caught him full-­on, banging hard into his shoulder and sending him sprawling and crashing sideways, cartwheeling out of bounds, and landing a good ten yards away.

  That was it, really. The whistle blew and the other team finally got to slouch away.

  “Did somebody kill your dog or somethin’ man?” Jerome yelled as he bounded up the stairs of the bus and came my way. The bus was already rocking with rowdy celebration when I raised my hands for Jerome to slap and he ran right through them to bury me in my seat underneath 240 pounds of fullback.

  “Arrrrrr!” I called as he splatted me against the seat and I attempted to roll him off. “I don’t have a dog! But if I did I woulda killed him myself!”

  The team roared and I rolled Jerome and we crashed to the floor between the rows. We laughed and everybody else laughed as we struggled harder to get unwedged from the narrow aisle than we had struggled with anything out on the field.

  Jerome had had an excellent day, scoring three brute touchdowns and dragging four defenders the final twelve yards on one of them. But I was on another planet the whole game. When we got back up, Jerome headed for the rear of the bus. I got to my seat, saving the one next to me for Dinos, who had just arrived. He looked at the seat for a while before deciding to take it.

  “Good game,” he said flatly as he finally sat and the bus started off.

  “I know,” I said.

  “Make you feel like a big man, that last play, wrecking The Plow?”

  “Of course it did,” I said, turning away from him and looking out the window.

  We didn’t talk after that. We just rode. After the big man thing. We just let it go.

  A Violent Game

  “Would you stop that,” Sandy said, jumping up to pull my arm down. I had started doing this sort of spoof parade wave—like the Statue of Liberty with a rotating radar dish for a hand—whenever anybody yelled “MVP” or “Starlo” from the other side of the street or the other end of the corridor. When I did it in her kitchen when her parents said hello, she was finally provoked into action.

  “Can’t you just say, ‘Nice to see you, too,’ like a regular person?” she said, hanging on to the arm in case I had a relapse.

  “Now, Sandrine, if I was just a regular person, I’d never have made it all the way into the kitchen of a girl like you.”

  Her parents laughed.

  “Would you two stop that,” she snapped at her folks. “You’re just deliberately making him worse and you know it.”

  “Oh, just having some fun, honey,” her dad said. He closed up his laptop, took it and his drink to another location, giving me a big wink on his way.

  “And what did I tell you about the winking?” she snapped, letting go of me to take a swipe at his back as he scooted away.

  “You should just relax and enjoy the ride,” Sandy’s mom said, gesturing for us to take the two seats opposite her. “The boy is taking it for the big laugh it is.” She enjoyed referring to me as “the boy.”

  “No, ma’am,” I said, objecting with as much politeness as I could manage. “I take the football very seriously.”

  “Oh,” she said, nodding thoughtfully.

  “See?” Sandy said, bumping me sideways and almost knocking me out of my chair.

  “Well then, if you can’t enjoy it so much, then just have patience. How long can this kind of thing last, right?” She extended the bag of Chips Ahoy cookies she’d been nibbling out of.

  “Oh, no thank you,” I said, “I have to watch what I eat. Especially at night.” I checked my watch. Because it had started raining hard, we had abandoned the porch, but I needed to be getting home.

  Sandy took a cookie and menaced me with it before turning back to her mother.

  “A cookie, right, Mom? He has to watch his figure.”

  “Ah, you’re a picture of strapping good health,” she said, “cookie or no cookie.” She giggled, started sweeping up crumbs on the table just in front of her.

  “All the same,” I said, getting up and stretching, “I should probably be getting to bed.”

  “Fun guy,” Sandy’s mom said, taking her cupped hand of crumbs to the trash.

  “A barrel of laughs,” said Sandy.

  Out on the porch, I stood with my back to the weather and my forehead to Sandy’s forehead.

  “I think I should tell you,” I said solemnly, “your mom was doing strange things to me with her feet under the table.”

  Sandy sighed. “You know, big head, I wouldn’t be surprised if you thought everybody in the world was playing footsie with you.”

  “Well, they’re not. Not yet anyway. But when they do, I’ll tell every last foot that I am totally taken forever.”

  She shook her head, rolling it back and forth against mine. “Goof,” she said.

  “I guess I have to get going,” I said.

  “I guess,” she said.

  “Have you thought about it some more?” I said hopefully.

  We had left open the possibility that she would come and see me play once this season. So I was checking on that.

  The thing was, almost certainly we both wanted her to stay away now. We were good this way, and things could get complicated. She said the high-­impact parts of the game were just too difficult to watch. And at this point every part of my game was high impact. So I was asking, if I was being honest, less out of excitement for the idea and more just to get as much advance warning as possible.

  “We’ll see,” she said, making it sound a comfortable distance off. As for now, I could get quite comfortable living with our faces stuck this close.

  “All right then,” I said, trying to stare more deeply into her eyes, however a person actually does that.

  “What’s the matter with your eyes?” she said.

  I wasn’t aware of anything wrong with my eyes. Except maybe a little blurring. Possibly a small headache-­related pressure behind them. No big thing. “Um, love?” I suggested.

  “Your
eyes are darting around, like you’re expecting somebody to sneak up behind you. Does love make you shifty?” she said, her own eyes narrowing, penetrating.

  “You know,” I said, snagging a quick kiss and backing away down to the street, “I am sure it does. See you tomorrow, Sand.” I started running home through the rain.

  ***

  The second game of the season was our first home game, and the growing buzz about the team brought out a lot more spectators than we’d been expecting and they were crazy noisy.

  “This is the way it should be,” I said to Dinos. We were on the sidelines and pounding on each other’s shoulder pads like maniacs.

  “Well, you should get used to it, ’cause it’s gonna get louder and louder for the rest of your life. I’m just glad I got to hear a little bit of it before it’s all over for me.”

  The referee blew his whistle to get things going. “Don’t worry, pal,” I said before he rumbled out onto the field with the rest of the kickoff team. “It isn’t anywhere near over for you yet, and there’s plenty more of this ahead. I’ll make sure of it.”

  This week’s opponent was better than last week’s. We weren’t steamrolling these guys, but after the first quarter we had things in hand with a comfortable 14 – 3 advantage. Sideline to sideline, I followed every play, worked every angle, and delivered every hit I could. I even enjoyed the long pursuits more, because it felt like a hunt as I tracked the ballcarrier, and it felt like an explosion when I finally hit him with all that momentum.

  Coach pulled me aside just before I took the field for the second quarter.

  “Energy conservation, Arlo,” he said. “If you run around like a madman like you’ve been doing so far, you’re gonna be gassed when we need you the most. Trust your teammates. Let players make plays.”

  “Okay, Coach,” I said without any intention of changing a thing.

  What does adrenaline actually taste like? Something tangy and metallic was filling the back of my throat, and I could barely stand still as we waited for the snap.

  I read the play immediately. I read the guy, that fullback, and knew he’d be bringing it to me.