Hangman's Game

by Bill Syken

  Wee Willie Reckherd.

  I also see that he is not wearing any pants. Just boxer shorts and running shoes. As if he was woken from sleep and grabbed what he could and ran out the door.

  He looks menacing and unbalanced. I would bet that he was the weird-looking “homeless” man who approached Alice at Stark’s. She would have recognized the guy who offered her five dollars for information on Samuel if she had just looked up at their wall of fame.

  Willie’s breath is a controlled pant; I can see the tension in his muscled forearms. From the car Jessica screams “I’m calling the police,” but he shows no sign of caring. He crouches as he moves in, taking small but steady steps, keeping himself low.

  “You or me,” Willie murmurs in a high and soft voice. “You or me.”

  Then he lunges forward and swings the ax. I dodge to my right, and his other arm comes forward with the meat cleaver. I grab his arm in mid-blow and quickly shove him hard to the side. I can feel from the firmness of Willie’s shoulders that his body is in better shape than his mind. He stumbles back but remains on his feet. I dart to the side to create space between us.

  Willie’s display of balance is unnerving. More than two decades removed from the game, he still has his reflexes and athletic instincts. And two bladed weapons firmly in his grip.

  Then I see some sort of book fly through the air and hit Willie harmlessly in the shoulder. He turns toward my car. “Leave us alone, you crazy asshole,” Jessica shouts.

  The book, I see, is my Audi owner’s manual, apparently the best weapon Jessica could find inside my car.

  “Pop the trunk!” I call to Jessica. “Pop the trunk!”

  The trunk door rises as Willie makes a hard run at me. I dodge to the right again—I remind myself to go left the next time, in case he is scouting my tendencies. After again side-stepping to open up some distance between us, I run for the trunk and grab the shovel I have stowed in there with my bag of practice balls.

  Now I have a weapon, too. I raise the shovel, gripping hard on its handle with both hands, my heart pounding, every muscle awake. Willie and I face each other, and for a moment he stops in his crouch and assesses how this metal shovel might change the dynamics of our combat.

  I calculate, too. And I realize that by making it harder for Willie to attack me up close, I’ve invited the former quarterback to drop back and throw.

  A second later Willie rears back his left hand and hurls the ax at me. It spins through the air and I jump to the left. The axe hits my car, clanking hard against it before it drops to the ground.

  Willie charges me directly, the meat cleaver raised. I swing the shovel and hit him flush in the hand, knocking the cleaver to the ground.

  He is without weapons. Now Jessica jumps out of the car. She circles around and presents herself legs wide, skinny arms up. She must have picked up this pose from a kickboxing class at the gym.

  I move around, trying to place myself in between them, but before I can she attacks Willie with a roundhouse kick. He blocks it with a forearm, then swiftly grabs her by the neck and slams her face against the side window of his car, before she can even scream. Jessica drops limply to the ground.

  I cannot check to see how hurt she is, because I have to keep my eyes on the madman, but I do not hear any sound or movement coming from where she lies.

  I swing my shovel again at the empty-handed Willie. My shot is angry and wild, and glances off his shoulder. He drives into my body, pushing me back against the hood of my car.

  Then he punches me in the face. Which startles me, because despite working in a world of hard hits, I have never been punched in the face in my entire life.

  And then Willie grabs my head and plunges his teeth into my neck. He is gnashing around, searching for my carotid artery.

  I drop the shovel and stick my thumbs in Willie’s eyes—not enough to gouge them out, just enough to force Willie to loosen his grip. He pulls back, and then I grab him by the shoulders and push him, driving hard with my legs, and this time he tumbles to the ground.

  As Willie falls, I sneak a glance at Jessica and see that she is not moving.

  I look at Willie and see a new problem. I accidentally shoved Willie toward where his ax was resting on the ground.

  He picks it up. I back off, and he takes a couple of steps and throws wildly, with a near-sidearm motion. The ax sails high and wide. I hear it crash into the thicket of the woods.

  Now Willie and I both scan the ground, trying to locate his remaining weapon, the meat cleaver. I see its blade catching the gleam of the headlights. Willie’s eyes are on it, too. The cleaver is equidistant between us—about five yards in front of me and five yards to his left.

  I visualize my next move as clearly as if a coach has drawn it out for me on a chalkboard with Xs and Os.

  Willie lurches for the cleaver.

  As he does, I let my muscle memory take over:

  Step. Step. Step.

  Kick.

  I catch Willie just as he is bending down, and I punt him right in the jaw.

  And I feel a pain more violent than I have never known. Lightning rockets up my leg and shoots straight through the top of my head. I feel like I have been split apart.

  I stumble backward, helpless. I have kicked something I shouldn’t have kicked—an object that is hard and fixed, rather than buoyant and untethered. Reeling, I make the merest attempt to put my right leg underneath me, only to feel it scream out. The leg is broken, ruined. And so am I.

  I fall to the ground and howl in agony.

  I am mere feet away from a man who is trying to kill me and who, as soon as he collects himself, will have a meat cleaver at his disposal and an immobilized prey before him. I am done. As a punter, as a living being on this Earth. I have been taken down by, of all people, Wee Willie Reckherd. Another wannabe quarterback who couldn’t get his way.

  I let my head fall to the ground and close my eyes. So this is where I have been leading myself all along. I exhale a cold breath and think of my dad, dying on his own poorly chosen road through the woods. Here I am, one last time, acting just like him.

  CHAPTER 30

  TANNER STANDS OVER me, his blue eyes relaxed. He likes to present himself as a man who knows it all, but at this moment he allows some surprise.

  “There’s no way around it, Nick,” he says. “You saved our season. You’re our MVP.”

  “Thanks, coach,” I say. He has been here for a little more than ten minutes, but I am still adjusting to the weirdness of having Tanner standing in my living room, his hand resting on my armchair as I recline on the sofa. Not even the side effects of the Vicodin were this disorienting.

  Tanner arrived alone at my door at precisely 10:00 A.M., per the appointment arranged by his secretary, and I know that he is slated to leave at 10:15. I glance at my phone, resting on my coffee table, and see it is now 10:14.

  “I’ve got to get going,” Tanner says. “Listen to the doctors, Nick, do your work, and you’ll be back before you know it.”

  One minute left. Not an ideal amount of time, but I need to bring this up.

  “Before you leave, coach,” I say. “I have one question for you.”

  “Sure,” he says, though he keeps his body half turned toward the door.

  “It’s about Selia Sault,” I say.

  Tanner’s jaw tightens.

  “What about her?” Tanner says, his voice quieter than usual.

  “You didn’t get her pregnant, did you?”

  He looks down, head hanging. “I did not get her pregnant,” he mutters. Then he turns and meets my gaze. “She told me she could handle it, but she couldn’t. It was a mistake.”

  “She’s nineteen,” I say. “How could you think she has any idea what she can handle?”

  Tanner glares. “It was a mistake,” he repeats, biting off each word. “I will learn from it, and she will, too. I believe that. This is what life is, making mistakes and learning from them.”

  He glances a
t his phone.

  “Good-bye, Nick. Get well soon.” He turns his back to me and walks out, right on schedule.

  I walk nowhere these days. I fractured my right fibula and sprained my right medial collateral ligament as a result of my kick to the head of Willie Reckherd. Jessica’s nose was broken, though not too severely, and the bruising heals more every time I see her. Meanwhile, the doctors project that I will be dancing the tango—or at least, I will be physically capable of dancing the tango—by mid-September, a couple of weeks after the season begins. In the meantime, Woodward Tolley will be taking my place as the Sentinels’ punter. I try not to go crazy at the thought of him running onto the field for our opening game while I sit and watch.

  But for the most part I am enjoying my enforced downtime. My mother and Aaron have rented an apartment in the Jefferson for the month, and they bought a small outdoor barbecue and set it up on my balcony. She grills lunch here almost every afternoon—turkey burgers or chicken sausage or fish. Some days, I smell the charcoal and I ride the sense memories back to the summers of my childhood, when my mom would grill at the house we would rent for a couple of weeks on the shores of Lake Cayuga.

  Then I see Aaron sitting on my sofa, reading The Atlantic magazine while absent-mindedly scratching his inner thigh, and I jolt back to the present.

  I have been receiving people just about every day—Freddie, Jessica, and at least half the Sentinels roster have dirtied my rugs over the last few weeks. My teammates freely describe me with a word I have come to loathe—hero. It fits so poorly with what I have learned about what happened out in the woods, on what Freddie now likes to refer to as the Night of the Punter.

  In Willie Reckherd I know that I confronted not a man gone bad, but a mind gone wrong. I could see it his eyes that night, when he came at me in his underwear, swinging his blades, biting my throat. Science has since confirmed it.

  My kick snapped the neck of Willie Reckherd. He died instantly. The autopsy afterward revealed extensive brain damage, believed to be the result of having sustained multiple head injuries while playing the game. His thoughts had darkened, and he had lost his impulse control. I could not celebrate what I had done to Wee Willie because the man wasn’t evil. He was injured.

  And how did he receive this injury? By living by the same creed that I and so many other players did, that you play through the hurt. It’s just pain.

  With many former players, brain damage leads to suicide. In the case of Willie Reckherd, he turned his violence outward—with his choice of target becoming more inevitable, the more I learned about his final months.

  Rabidly competitive all his life, Willie has been a demanding restaurant boss in the best of times. But in the past couple of years at the Rib Revue, he had made the transition from hard-ass to asshole. If a table wasn’t cleared promptly, or if he saw thumbprints on a brass rail, Willie would dress down his employees in front of his customers. Among the locals, Wee Willie’s quickly became known as a place to witness an unpleasant scene.

  After a point, Willie’s partner—Gordon, who I met at the Rib Revue that night—convinced the marquee attraction to stay away from the restaurant. But still, Willie was living his life in Berry and getting into yelling matches with bank tellers and supermarket checkout girls. You tell enough locals to fuck off and there goes the profits.

  So Willie became a disreputable figure in the town where he was once adored, and his restaurant was falling into unprofitability. Then there was Luke, who went to Willie’s old school, who wore his number, and who was going to become the quarterback Willie never had the chance to be. Until Samuel Sault came along and sent his boy to the hospital not once, but twice. It would have been hard enough for him to see Luke get cut by the Hartsburg Hyenas, but Luke made it even worse by telling Willie he was going away to live in an ashram in the Kentucky hills and study meditation and healing—which, to Willie’s old-school ears, was about one step short of Luke saying he was going to Sweden to begin treatments for gender reassignment surgery.

  Then Willie turned on the TV and saw a press conference trumpeting Samuel’s arrival in Philadelphia, and his $64 million contract. He grabbed his rifle and drove to Philadelphia and visited, among other places, Stark’s, which he knew from his playing days, and enlisted a waitress as his sentry.

  After the shooting, Gordon figured out what had happened. He confronted his childhood friend and business partner, and Willie confessed every detail. Gordon took Willie’s gun from him, mostly out of fear that Willie would kill himself. He stayed by Willie’s side, on a suicide watch. Then Alice called Willie’s phone, threatening blackmail; Gordon spoke to her and offered her money in exchange not just for silence but reports. Our champagne picnic, it seems, was part of Alice’s reconnaissance work, a chance to debrief an eyewitness. And when it was clear that I had seen nothing and the police were focusing their attention on Jai, Gordon realized he had an opportunity to throw suspicion off Willie permanently. He executed the frame-up to save his friend and his business.

  The importance of Samuel in Willie’s imagination—the extent to which he had made Samuel the scapegoat for all his son’s shortcomings—became clearer when I received a letter from Luke Reckherd. Although “received” is the wrong word, because the letter was not delivered to me. Luke wrote me an open letter—which, like an open relationship, can leave you wondering exactly whom the openness is supposed to benefit, besides the person who suggested it. He posted his message on his Facebook page. Actually, it was on the Facebook page of his ashram.

  But its tone, at least, was welcome.

  Dear Nick Gallow,

  I write to you from a place of peace and understanding, a place in which people use their strength not to conquer and hurt, but to help and heal. I believe this is a needed antidote, the yin to the yang of the life I have led.

  The first time Samuel Sault injured me in college, my father guided my rehabilitation, and he motivated me with hate. He placed pictures of Samuel on my mirror and told me that Samuel symbolized all that I must overcome. Then Samuel hurt me again, and his message became more intense, more unhealthy. I was supposed to be angry at Samuel, but by this time, I was really angry at my father for this mission he was forcing on me. So I tried to ruin his plans indirectly. I would smoke pot on the library steps and get busted, but the school would keep giving me second chances, and my father would push me harder still.

  Even after I was cut by the Hyenas, my dad wouldn’t let it go. So I let him go. I told him his demons were his, not mine. I said this without realizing how many demons he had.

  I want nothing more than to heal. I am still learning how much I have to overcome. My dad had wounds that couldn’t be let go of, but I believe I can let go of mine. Nick, I hope you can as well. I want you to know that I bear you no ill will.

  Namaste, Luke Reckherd

  Jessica comes by regularly enough that I am able to monitor the slow fading of the darkness that Willie’s blow left around her eyes. On her first visit, she came in the company of her husband, Dan. She and I never did get to exchange notes about our wishes for the future, but showing up with Dan was message enough. He was wearing a sports coat, despite it being a warm Saturday when he visited.

  “It’s so nice to finally meet you,” he said. “Even though all we did is exchange e-mails, can I tell people that I knew you when?”

  To see Jessica together with her husband that day disturbed me more than I thought it might. He was wispy and physically weak, as I had seen in pictures, but in person he radiated a confidence and ease that was its own kind of strength. Jessica had talked about Dan so dismissively, for the most part, that I had come to picture them as two predatory animals at opposite sides of a cage. But seeing them side-by-side, occupying the same space so easily, he unthinkingly placing his hand on her arm when he asks her a question, and she not minding at all—they bore an uncomfortably close resemblance to a happy couple. Their marriage was missing something, obviously. But not everything.
r />   “Sure,” I told Dan. “Drop my name. Why not?”

  “I feel embarrassed about those e-mails I sent you,” Dan said, smiling sheepishly. “Invitations for dinner and all. As if I didn’t have some ulterior motive. I should have just come out and asked you what I wanted to ask. You probably guessed it from the very first.”

  I looked at Dan expectantly, waiting for him to fill in the blank.

  “Tickets,” Dan said. “I wanted to see if you could get me a block of tickets to the Washington game in October. I had this idea that I was going to invite the Open Market Committee staff up here. You wouldn’t believe how crazy the guys down in DC get about football.”

  “Oh, I’d believe it,” I said, almost disappointed it was all so simple. “Here’s what I’ll do for you, Dan. I promise that if I play for the Sentinels this season, I’ll round up every ticket for you I can.” His eyes lit up. And this is a guy who helps manage the largest economy in the world. I would have been able to really make Dan’s day by hooking him up with DaFrank Burns, but unfortunately DaFrank is no longer in Washington. He was cut after his team’s minicamp. He’s now hoping to hook on in Miami.

  “But you have to be back with the team, right?” Dan said, concerned. “The Sentinels can’t cut you. After all you’ve done, that would be a PR disaster for them. They wouldn’t do that just to get a little bit better a punter, would they?”

  A little bit better a punter. Such an insignificant position. This, in the middle of asking me for a favor.

  “I wouldn’t put anything past anyone at this point,” I said.

  Dan leaned in close, but not too close.

  “They don’t know, do they?” he whispered. No one else was in the room besides he and Jessica, but he seemed to think what he was saying was just too scandalous to say in full voice.

  That darn Jessica. She had definitely been watching too many Three’s Company reruns. But I guess telling her husband I was gay is, at this point, the entirely predictable explanation she would offer up to explain her jaunt to Maryland with another man.