Hit Count

by Chris Lynch

  The quarterback turned and handed off to the halfback, who took off around the left side but then handed off to the fullback, who was barreling around toward the right flank. Several of our guys went for the fake and were caught out of position, but I was zeroed in on every stride that fullback took.

  It was almost an open field tackle when I motored full speed to meet him just after he crossed the line of scrimmage and we both dropped low and brought our high-­caliber best into blasting each other away. It was an explosion, of muscle and bone, of padding, of helmet on helmet before we collapsed into each other and onto the turf and the ball skittered off someplace just to escape impact.

  I didn’t know if there had been a late surge of new fans showing up or what, but the sound levels just went off the charts. I was getting patted on the back, the butt, the chest, the shoulder pads by just about everybody within touching distance of me.

  Coach put me on the sidelines, and on the bench.

  “Well, Arlo, man, I never saw anything like that,” Dinos said, getting right up to my ear. My helmet was hanging from my hand. “I think the sparks that came off you guys’ helmets on that play must have set some cars on fire out in the parking lot.”

  “Ha,” I said, nodding carefully because my head wasn’t so great. I focused on the action on the field. “Our ball, yeah,” I said with a single clap.

  Dinos sort of curved around to look at me full-­on. “Yeah, our ball. You forced the fumble. We recovered.”

  “Shut up,” I said, pushing him sideways out of my view, then wishing I hadn’t because of the jolt that went through my skull. “I know that. I was there. Jeez, Dinos.”

  “Jeez,” he said in a funny tone. I didn’t look at him.

  Our offense didn’t get anywhere, so we were back to work on defense. I put on my helmet and started out there, until a grab at my shirt slowed and then stopped me.

  “I told you, Arlo,” Coach Fisk said. “I’m resting you. There’s only a few minutes left in the half, and we’re in good shape.”

  “But, Coach, I just rested already. Just then, just there,” I said, pointing to the spot where I had been idling next to Dinos.

  “Good, then you know how it’s done.”

  “Coach—”

  “Sit!” he barked, and I saw the light.

  I sat next to Dinos again, and got all worked up again when the brute fullback carried the ball off tackle, breaking for a fifteen-­yard gain and passing right by us.

  “Did he wave at me there?” I asked Dinos.

  “Jeez, man, no. He did not wave at you.”

  “What’s he doing in the game anyway? I’d think he’d need a rest by now.”

  “I don’t know,” Dinos said admiringly as the guy sprinted back to his huddle. “He looks pretty fresh to me.”

  He did, too, dammit.

  This would have to be addressed in the second half.

  They threw the ball a lot more in the third quarter and I realized I was going to have to work harder on my pass coverage. I didn’t have the same precision when I had to backpedal, and a few times I got burned badly when I turned my back to the ball to cover my man close. Actually, every time I turned I got a little off balance and the quarterback and tight end were starting to look at me like meat.

  The lack of control I was feeling was starting to get me crazy.

  I absolutely needed to get it back.

  Deep in the third I recognized the formation and the way the quarterback was checking, pointing, and calling audibles.

  This was the time to gamble. They had momentum and they had my number and they had a chance to tie it up with a touchdown. It was my fault, and it was mine to make good.

  So I threw in all my chips and ran like a radio-­controlled drone right from the snap. I tuned out the mayhem all around me and I just ran to the exact coordinate the ball would be if they had called the play the way I believed they had.

  I was right. Completely back-in-control right.

  The ball, the tight end, and I had a brilliant star-­spangled collision right at that coordinate.

  I pounded him right in the numbers, jolting him forward with enough good violence that his face mask pounded into the ground at the same instant that I collected the pass that had bounced off him and waited right there in the air for me to claim it.

  The noise cheering me all along down the sidelines made the sixty yards fly under my feet as if I was a hovercraft sailing right over it. I was clear for the touchdown when I became aware that someone was with me. I glanced over my shoulder to see the quarterback, who I knew was fast but didn’t know was this fast.

  He would catch me if I tried to outleg him, so I shifted hard inside, just as he was flying by. Then, rather than avoiding the passer, who was making a day out of tormenting me, I lowered my shoulder, drilled him in the ribs and off his feet, and together we crossed the goal line in the air and together we landed with a thump in the end zone. The momentum and the weight of me caused a great satisfying oof sound to come out of him.

  By way of a small compensation, as I got up I left the ball resting on his stomach.

  When I walked off the field, Coach shook my hand. “That was a lot of running,” he said. “You must be gassed.”

  “You try and take me out of this game again,” I said, laughing, “you’re gonna have to come right out onto the field and get me yourself.”

  He held up his hands in surrender, as if I wasn’t saying just what he’d want me to say.

  We were on fire the rest of the game, and I was in on every play. Gassed as I was, I’ll admit I was almost glad when it came to an end, feeling my head buzzing constantly now and my legs getting shaky.

  “Might want to start watching it with the illegal hits, pal,” the fullback said as we walked in opposite directions. Dinos was next to me.

  I had just enough extra juice to engage him in a little trash.

  “Sometimes helmets hit helmets. Get used to it. It’s a violent game, dude. Or did they forget to tell you that?”

  “Well said, sir,” Dinos said, patting me on the helmet.

  I could have done without that one.

  Out of Control

  “Have you changed your name? Starlo?” Ma asked, scaring me out of my socks.

  “Jeez, Ma,” I said, scurrying right past her and barricading myself in the bathroom. It was a bit of a Marley’s ghost thing, in my groggy morning state, to find her holding up a newspaper and springing a snap quiz. About myself.

  “Sorry, hon,” she said as I crept into the kitchen a few minutes later. “I was a little abrupt there. I made you some French toast. Good morning.”

  “Good morning,” I said, taking a seat opposite her. “Aren’t you a little late leaving?”

  She took an exaggerated swing around to the big clock above the refrigerator, then looked back to me again. “Yes, I am. One might say the same about you, as a matter of fact.”

  “Yeah,” I said, taking a big sip from my tall glass of orange juice. “I guess I was really tired. Slept right through my alarm.”

  She held up the newspaper again. It was the Citizen, the local weekly paper. This was the first time I had any idea Ma read the sports stuff. Apparently they’d written something about me, also a first.

  “Well, it’s no wonder you’re tired, Starlo.”

  Boy, did that sound embarrassing. And coming from my mother, somehow incriminating.

  “Oh, that’s just a stupid joke Dinos made up.”

  “Uh-­huh. Eat your breakfast. A ‘one-­man wrecking crew’ needs his nourishment as well as his rest.”

  “Please, it doesn’t say that,” I said weakly, addressing the French toast.

  “Tell you what,” she said, getting up and placing the paper next to my plate. “Read it yourself with your breakfast. I’ll finish getting ready and I can give you a ride to school.”

  I found myself eating faster as I read. It was only a couple of paragraphs, but that was one paragraph longer than any of the othe
r games got. And they had done that unhelpful thing of putting random significant names and adjectives in boldfaced type. Starlo jumped up at you like a neon billboard.

  “Exciting, isn’t it?” Ma said, jolting me for the second time.

  “I think the guy who wrote it is an old buddy of the coach,” I said. I remembered seeing a guy holding a notepad hang during the game. “He’s exaggerating here, a lot.”

  “You’re being rather modest for a guy with Star in his name,” she said. “Did anybody else on your team even play?”

  The guy had made it sound like our team was Arlo Brodie and the Forty Scrubs.

  “I should be going,” I said.

  “You’re right,” she said. “We can talk in the car.”

  “I think I’ll walk,” I said weakly.

  “I think I’ll drive you,” she said.

  Fortunately, it was less than ten minutes by car to school. Unfortunately, she seemed keenly conscious of this as she rapidly spoke.

  “My favorite was ‘bone-­cracking,’ ” she said. “What was yours?”

  “Ma, please? It’s nothing like as bad as he’s making it sound.”

  “He seems to think he’s making it sound good, not bad.”

  “He’s making it sound like mayhem,” I said, “and it wasn’t even close.” Not when I was so in control of the game.

  We hit a red light because that was the kind of morning it was. She turned to face me.

  “Even allowing for exaggeration, Arlo, that article makes it clear that you are putting yourself into regular and intense jeopardy.”

  It was a stupid thing to do, but I let out a little laugh. “Ma, if you really read it, you’ll see that I’m putting the other guys into regular and intense jeopardy.”

  “You know better!” she snapped, marking the third and biggest shock of the morning. “You know your brain doesn’t care whether you are the hitter or the hittee.”

  “Light, Ma,” I said, pointing at the green.

  She accelerated in a jump, zipped up the last bit of Centre, then I noticed her trying to calm both the car and herself as we rolled down Baker Street toward the front of the school.

  “What does Sandy think of all this?” she said.

  “She’s all right with it,” I said, supplying as much as she needed to know.

  She pulled up to the curb alongside the wall where Sandy and I liked to sit.

  “Huh,” she said. “She hasn’t been to the house in ages. Let’s have her over.”

  “Oh, jeez,” I said to her reasonable suggestion. I was getting out of the car at the right time, because her concern was suddenly filling me with anger. I knew it was wrong, and I knew I couldn’t help it. I had to get away from her.

  “Hey,” she said as I started to close the door.

  I stopped, sighed dramatically. She leaned across the seat and said, “My boy has better manners than that.”

  “Sorry,” I said, bending down to kiss her. The sidewalk seemed to swim up for a second.

  She stopped just short of my face. “Arlo, your eyes,” she said. “They’re all bloodshot and—”

  I gave her a hard, aggressive kiss on the cheek before pulling right away again. “I’m fine. Worry about Lloyd instead.”

  I couldn’t even believe myself that I had said that. She had been babying him, yes, overlooking the antisocial hours he was keeping, and overpraising his every successful venture out to make a delivery and come back unharmed, yes. So what about all that? So what if she couldn’t manage to appreciate what everyone else in the world could see as my stonking great success?

  I didn’t need to be bothered by all that.

  I slapped the door shut and scurried toward school like the rat I was.

  ***

  “Oh, Arlo, you didn’t,” Sandy said as we sat in the cafeteria having lunch. The acoustics in the place always irritated me, making two hundred kids sound like two thousand, even stupider than they were.

  “Oh, Sandy, yes I did.” I was trying to tell her how my mother had taken the article all wrong, but I didn’t seem to be getting my message across.

  She stared at me with one raised eyebrow. “You going to get snappy with me now?”

  “Was that snappy?” I asked, though I didn’t particularly care what the answer was. “Sorry.”

  “Well, that was one lame sorry. You’ll need to practice that before you apologize to your mother. Then you should also invite me over to dinner like she wants.”

  “I shouldn’t even have told you that,” I said. I speared a meatball off my plate and pointed to her boneless chicken and green salad with it. “You eat like a runner anyway,” I said, and popped the meatball into my mouth.

  “Okay. So?” she whipped back.

  I wanted to follow up, but I didn’t know what with. I shrugged instead and went back to work on my food.

  Sandy also concentrated on eating, faster than she normally did. And she stopped talking, which she normally didn’t.

  “What’s wrong with you anyway?” I said as she finished her last bite.

  She looked at me flatly as she chewed and swallowed before responding. “I don’t think I’m liking you very much today,” she said.

  “What?” I said. “You know, I was hoping for a little more understanding from you at least.”

  She stood, picked up her tray.

  “I do have understanding, Arlo. For your mother. Maybe she can see that Lloyd is damaged goods. That has to be hard for her. And maybe she’s trying to get through to you so she doesn’t have two punch-­drunk Lloyds on her hands.”

  With that, she took a step away from the table.

  My hand shot out.

  “What do you mean by that?” I said as I grabbed Sandy’s arm, forcefully.

  I grabbed Sandy’s arm, forcefully.

  I grabbed Sandy’s arm, forcefully.

  I grabbed Sandy’s arm. Forcefully.

  She looked at me, icy cold. She looked at my hand on her arm as I released my grip. Then she looked back at me as I opened my mouth to begin a lifetime of apologizing.

  “Sandy, I—”

  That’s as far as I got before she opened both of her hands, releasing the tray to crash and clatter, halfway onto the table and then all the way onto the floor.

  The students outside of our immediate area erupted with hoots and applause the way they were supposed to when someone dropped a tray. The ones right around us, the ones who could see, remained dead silent.

  “Clean up your mess, Starlo,” Sandy said, and left me there in that horribly bright light and ear-­blasting racket of the cafeteria.

  It felt like the evil mirror image of Saturday football as I squatted down to clean up the mess.

  ***

  I didn’t begin to feel right that day until I was headed to practice after school. The awful edginess was finally releasing, like when your hand or your foot regains feeling after falling asleep under you.

  So I already had a bit of bounce as I walked through the dressing room door.

  “Wha-­heeyy!” About eight or ten guys who were in there dressing erupted at the sight of me. It wasn’t any big mystery when I looked up at the far wall and saw the big banner reading STARLO TIME! In large neon-­marker lettering, clearly the work of six-­year-­olds or football players.

  I passed through the room, absorbing the love of my colleagues with my gracious Statue of Liberty wave. Then I got to my locker, started dressing for work.

  “Arlo,” Coach called as I was running toward the tackling sleds and the cluster of linemen around them.

  I ran back to him. “Yeah, Coach?”

  “It was a good laugh. Now put all that stuff out of your head, right?”

  “Of course, Coach,” I said, but apparently not seriously enough.

  He reached out and put a hand on my forearm. “Really, I mean it. That superstar stuff is all well and good, but it’s nothing but a distraction once you’re back between the lines. Right? Focus harder than ever. Keep your eyes pe
eled and your wits about you at all times. Pay attention to what’s important.”

  “And one game at a time. And it ain’t over till it’s over. Yes, sir, Coach,” I said.

  He shook his head dubiously as he let go of my arm, and I knew it was because I was smiling and wisecracking and he thought that meant I was taking it too lightly.

  But I was smiling because I was happy. Happy to be on the field, happy to be preparing to start banging bodies with the guys, happy to be taking orders from him. I felt good, as I sprinted into the afternoon’s practice.

  I didn’t feel good for long.

  The very first exercise, a one-­on-­one blocking drill, morphed at the whistle into a three-­on-­one mugging as the defensive players to my right and left froze in position. As I dug in against my man—Anderson, naturally—I felt an almighty thump as another lineman banged into my right side. I was straightened out again by another one thumping into my left. I heard roars all around as I did my best, hanging in there for maybe four seconds before they started driving me back, and back, and—Bam!—down on my back, mashed into the earth by about seven hundred pounds of offensive oaf.

  I was aching already as the guys got up, and there was laughter and camaraderie all around. Even my guys, the defensive unit I served side by side with so nobly, were all high-­fiving with my muggers.

  “Sad thing, I used to remember when he was great,” somebody called out. That somebody sounded awfully like my good friend Dinos.

  “Catch the falling Starlo,” somebody else called, to wild laughter. That somebody had a lot of Jerome in his voice.

  I got it then. Every drill was going to be some kind of survivor challenge designed specifically for me.

  “Okay,” I said, climbing to my feet, “so this is how it’s gonna be.”

  “Yeah, yeah” was the mob response, along with heavy slaps on the back, ass, and helmet.

  “Well then, bring it, boys!” I hollered.

  In retrospect, that was a questionable approach to take, really.

  I was battered all through blocking drills, never once winding up anywhere but in the dirt. I had to line up for sprints against every guy on the team who was faster than me. Then I lined up against the next one without a break. Then the next one. Then the next. Until every guy on the team was faster than me. Coach Fisk had the honor of taking me on for the last one, crossing the line only six yards or so ahead of me.