by Lynn Shurr
That pushed their opponents to the one-yard line. Alix rose limping slightly. Vince offered her an arm back to the sidelines. “Sorry, Legs, I didn’t think he’d fall that way,” he said.
Tom, heart in his throat, rushed to meet her. “You should be taking better care of her, Barbaro,” he snapped.
Alix brushed away the apology and Tom’s statement. “I’ll be fine.” She pushed away both of their arms. “Let me walk it off. I probably have more natural padding on my behind than anyone else on the team.”
“You’re great, Alix, just like working with a dude.” Vince let her be, but Tom lingered.
“Yeah, keep moving. Don’t let yourself stiffen up. Remember, you aren’t playing with girls any more.”
“Some of those girls knocked me around pretty good, too.”
“Big difference between a woman shoving you out of the way and a three-hundred pound tackle coming down on top of you.”
“I know, I know, I know. Leave me alone, Tom.” Alix shifted her shoulders, much broader with their pads, in irritation.
The trainers snared her next and led her away for a quick checkup. Tom paced near the locker room entrance like an anxious father-to-be and missed the scoring of a safety by his team as the opposing quarterback was sacked in the end zone, ball still in hand. The Sinners didn’t need the points. Alix might have been hurt for nothing. She returned to the game with her right ankle taped and no sign of the limp. “Just a precaution.” She wasn’t called for another punt for the rest of the game, which ended with a zero score for Atlanta and a stunning opening victory for the Sinners.
Because of the afternoon scheduling and the close proximity of Atlanta by air, the team flew back to New Orleans that night. As usual, the biggest lineman claimed the seats in first class. Dean sat behind them with the mid-weight guys, and Tom moved to the back where he’d usually paired with Brian Lightfoot. He waited for Alix to join him, but she slipped into the seat next to Beef Bolivar, which Vince Barbaro usually occupied. Vince simply shrugged and moved back a row. Tom sat alone until Dean worked his way to the rear doing his usual pats on the shoulders for good work on the field, issuing compliments here and there, before he reached his brother and took the seat beside him.
“Good thing everyone else is turned the other way or they might notice that sucking-lemons expression on your face.”
Tom kept his voice low, real low. “Why is Alix sitting with Beef? What did I do to deserve this? Last night, it’s okay to slip out of the room I share with you and walk to hers cradling an ice bucket so I have an excuse to be wandering around if anyone sees. Alix welcomes me. We have a great time—more than once. Now, she’s taken up with Bolivar.”
Dean shook his head. “Evidently kickers have lots of excess energy to work off before a game, while the rest of us have to save our strength. Don’t expect me to pity you. Besides, I wouldn’t say she’s taken with Beef. They were looking at pictures of his little girl on his phone when I passed so show some maturity, huh?”
“Sweet, I guess. I forgot he has a wife and kid.” A weighty load of jealousy lifted from Tom’s shoulders like a large raptor taking flight.
“Had a wife. Got divorced last year. Don’t you remember?”
“I guess I didn’t.” The talons of the green-eyed eagle or condor or whatever creature it was came to roost again, digging into Tom’s flesh. “Is the daughter cute?”
“Adorable. Must take after her mother in looks.”
“Alix wants children. If she had a step-child, she could nurture and keep on punting.”
“I guess. Or the two of you could babysit for me and Stacy—and of course, Ilsa.”
Tom failed to see the humor. “I mean, why did she abandon me for Bolivar?”
“I don’t think she has. If Alix were a regular football player, she’d tell you straight out, but she’s a woman, too, so she’ll probably make you sweat and get it all wrong. You might just ask her, but if I had to guess, I’d say you are a tad too over-protective and possessive, maybe a trifle clingy.”
“Clingy. Me?” Tom shook his head in a red-haired frenzy of denial. “I don’t cling. I just protect my turf.”
“See, there you go. Aren’t you the one who told me women can’t be passed back and forth like footballs? She’s not turf. Seatbelt signs are coming on. I’d better get back where I belong.”
“Yeah. In front,” Tom said sulky as a two-year-old denied candy before dinner.
Dean leveled a finger at his best bud and brother. “Don’t take this out on me, bro. Work on it. I tell you this as both a friend and team captain.”
The landing was a little rough, and the plane bounced a time or two. Tom wondered if Alix felt that in the seat of her pants. He didn’t try to push through to her as the team deplaned, and he brought up the rear as usual when they walked the concourse to the bus. Clingy, not him!
Alix dropped back and fell into step with Tom. She made no excuses about her choice of seat partners, none at all.
“So, have a nice chat with Beef?” Tom tried to keep the sarcasm out of his voice but it slipped out between his gritted teeth.
“Yes. He has a beautiful little girl he’s very proud of, but says his ex is a bitch.”
“Good thing Dean didn’t hear him, or he’d get another fine. Even if all is forgiven between you and Bolivar, Dean won’t let it go. Rules are rules. He believes in respecting your fellow players—mostly. Prince Dobbs still gets on his nerves, but Dean holds it in.”
“Barton wasn’t talking about me, and his ex does sound bitchy.”
“Barton, now is it?” Tom caught a glimpse of himself in the plate glass window of a bookstore and attempted to smooth out a scowl that would have terrified his tiny nephew.
“It’s what his mother calls him. I’m trying to get to know Bolivar better.”
“If that’s what you want to call it.”
“I call it knowing my teammates so I can depend on their protection and their best efforts on my behalf.”
Tom studied Alix’s face. She wasn’t playing games or making him guess, just told him right out what she was doing and why. He owed her the same. “I suppose I was a little jealous.”
“Of Beef? I mean Barton.”
“Sure. I just assume every man on this team wants you, and I’m not the biggest or most handsome or the best paid or famous.” He hung his head as he clumped along in step with her.
They’d fallen way back of the pack. Suddenly, Alix bumped him hard with her hip into the alcove leading to the restrooms. She caged him against the tile with her arms. “Idiot. You’ve been famous since you were born and adopted by the Billodeauxs. You are the best kicker in the league and darned cute if not handsome. Besides which I don’t need your money. I’ve got my own.” She laid a kiss on him that drew giggles from a pack of teenage girls exiting the ladies room and a “Way to go!” from a college guy leaving the men’s. Tom was the one to blush.
“We’re still on then—for tonight?” he asked.
“I call dibs for the top position. My backside is bruised, remember?”
“I’ll kiss each cheek before we get started. We better catch up, or Coach will blow a fuse and have that stroke we keep anticipating.”
“I’ll claim a bathroom emergency. He’ll be too embarrassed to say anything.”
“Oh, I like the way you think.” As for his own thoughts, all the way home he couldn’t keep them from imagining being ridden by his own personal Valkyrie.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The season progressed well with the Sinners already looking like a sure thing playoff team. They’d lost a squeaker to the Seahawks, but only that one game. Alix “Legs” Lindstrom averaged fifty-four yards on her kicks and was probably the only punter in the league most fans knew by name. Announcers still made much of her sex. Naysayers who felt having a female player violated the sanctity of the game waited for her to break down in some way. She didn’t. Chants of Legs, Legs, Legs followed her onto the field. She knew she�
�d taken some of Tom’s shine, but he hadn’t mentioned it over ebelskivers or in bed.
Regardless, excitement filled Alix as the Green Bay game approached. Her family planned to attend no matter what the weather. Morfar would have it no other way. Ja, sure, he’d wear however many sweaters his daughter insisted upon, and a cap with earflaps just to see his granddaughter punt. The foam cheese head would stay at home this time around, he told her over the phone. Her anticipation grew.
So did the weather—into a lousy, sleet-filled rain. Dean muttered as he always did, “Why the hell don’t they build an enclosed stadium?” Coach Buck answered, “Because the climate is always on their side, no matter what the fuck it is.”
Only Alix seemed to thrive on the conditions. Her cheeks burned a rosy red, and the stadium lights gleamed in her blue eyes. She paced and swung her leg, getting ready for the first punt. It wasn’t long in coming.
Dean fumbled the snap on the second possession, regained it, but went down hard, sacked on the frozen tundra. They turned the ball over without a score when Prince Dobbs dropped a pass that simply slipped through his fingers like an elusive ice cube dropped to the floor. Alix came out and made their opponents start from the ten-yard line. Her grandfather stood, applauded with his mittened hands, and hooted to make up for the lack of sound. Green Bay fans asked him to sit down. A couple of less impressive but still good punts later, the Packers did score.
Dean answered them just before the first half ended with a touchdown accomplished by short, sharp passes and the running game, the only way to play in the wind and slippery field conditions. They’d kept a ball warm for Tom’s PAT, but as usual the other team called a timeout to freeze him, and there was some truth to the term. It wasn’t that Alix didn’t hold the ball right as she knelt in the slush or that he shanked it too badly, but a gust of Lake Michigan wind plowed down the field like a three hundred pound lineman and forced it to the left of the goal post.
Tom returned to huddle on the bench under his parka without the signs of appreciation that usually came his way. “Jesus, by the time I kicked that pigskin, it had gotten hard as that crystal Sugar Bowl trophy shaped like a football and just as unwieldy,” he told Alix. Because of his failure, they went into the locker room to thaw behind 7-6.
Warmed up, the Sinners scored early in the third quarter with Tom making adjustments for the direction of the wind before he kicked the successful extra point. By the end of the quarter, their opponents had pulled ahead again by one point. Deep into the fourth, the Sinners lost the ball again with two minutes to play. Green Bay would dawdle that time away and maybe go for a field goal at the very last second to win by four points.
Alix rose to punt the ball as far away as she could when Coach Buck drew her aside. They’d go for the onside kick to get the football back into their possession, no surprise there to either team. Alix nodded. She’d practiced these low, ten-yard kicks often with Tom but never executed one in a game. That deed usually fell to him. In fact, Tom had thrown off his parka and begun warming his leg for the crucial kick. She started for the bench, but Marty Buck called her back. “Lindstrom, I want you to do it.”
“No!” Tom protested. “It can get dangerous out there, especially in conditions like this. Besides, it’s always been my job.”
“Not today. Look at her. She’s used to this weather. She’s all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed like some kind of goddamned snow bunny while you’re all huddled up like you wish someone would give you a locker room pass to use the hot tub.”
“Just because I missed that first PAT—”
“Got nothing to do with it. Hell, I wish this game were over so I could soak my old bones in a Jacuzzi, too. Lindstrom, you’re on.” Coach Buck gave Alix an encouraging push toward the field.
She took her place fifteen yards behind Beef and knew she had to add another ten yards to that to make the onside kick legal. Her friend, Barton, delivered the ball to her right on target. She dropped it cold and hard as an ice-packed snowball into the air and gave it a good nudge, but not the full force of her leg. The football came down and took a bounce right into the hands of a Green Bay player. She’d failed—until the wet pigskin squirted from his grasp and took another hard bounce back in her direction. Somewhere out there, Beef and Vince were in pursuit of the ball, but it returned to her like a favorite pet to its owner making one more little hop before it jumped into her arms.
They were coming for her, all the big men, determined to rip away the prize. She saw no openings for a run and knew what had to be done. Alix fell on the ball, tucking it between her breasts just below her shoulder pads. Wasn’t but a few seconds before the first heavy opponent threw his weight on top of her, crushing, squeezing, trying to free the prize. Hands groped her, seeking not a cheap feel but a football.
The dog pile built above her, adding to the pressure man by man. Through a bit of daylight between someone’s elbow, Alix could see Tom on the very edge of the sideline with Dean right next to him, an arm thrown around his brother, his fingers digging in to hold the other kicker back. At last, the whistles sounded and man by man, the pressure lifted off her body. The refs sorted out the mess. With great relief, she heard, “Sinners’ ball” and one of them tapped her to get up. She’d kept that football safe as a mother hen sitting on an egg and just as proud of it.
Vince and Beef, standing nearby, came first to congratulate her with helmet bumps and back slaps and a triumphant procession to the sidelines. “You’re the real deal, Alix, a football player, not a girl,” Beef told her with deep sincerity just before Tom shoved him aside.
“You all right? Any injuries?” He swept his hands over her.
She pushed him away. “I am fine! Let me enjoy the moment, okay?”
“Jeez, I was just concerned. You on the rag or something?”
Vince and Beef stepped back with horror on their normally brutal faces. “I can’t believe you spoke to her like that,” the long snapper said, echoing Tom’s own words about the muff.
“Yeah, show some sensitivity, Tommy.” Vince backed toward the bench.
Alix’s hands went to her hips clearly delineated by the wet uniform. He was ruining her moment, not in the sun, but in the sleet, with his smothering over-protectiveness. “Well, you would know, wouldn’t you? There are lots of other reasons I can be bitchy, like putting up with your jealousy. You can’t accept I’m a real football player now.”
The announcer mimicked her words to the entire ice bound stadium. “Alix Lindstrom in her first onside kick has just proved that punters can be real football players, too.” A cheer went up from both sides. She was after all a native Wisconsinite even if she played for the opponent.
As the roar died down, Tom sputtered, “I’m not jealous, I…”
“Break it up.” Dean moved between them, leading the offense back onto the field.
Alix turned her back and moved away. Tom called out, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it,” but she gave no indication that she heard. The trainers cornered her and drew her inside to check her over as she accepted fist bumps, high fives, and back slaps all the way to the locker room. Alix watched the last minutes of the game on a monitor. Dean moved the team downfield in small increments. He got them within field goal range with ten seconds to play. The camera panned to Tom on the sidelines swinging his famous leg maybe harder than usual, getting ready to win the game for the Sinners. In the end, he wasn’t needed. Dean lobbed a short pass into the end zone. Game over, a Sinners’ victory by five points and no necessity or time to kick the extra point. Tom walked alone to the locker room.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Among the last of the stragglers, Tom entered a post-game locker room more chaotic than usual. In a corner, Dean and Coach Buck did the expected victory interview out of the pissy weather. Waiting his turn, another reporter glommed onto a feature story and held his mic to the cold, ruddy faces of Alix Lindstrom and Ancient Andy Mortenson standing fair cheek to grizzled jowl. Of course, the legendary
kicker had been allowed into the locker room. “Ja, sure, my granddaughter is a great kicker. How could she not be? I trained her myself,” Tom caught as he pushed through the crowd surrounding them and sat to untie his shoes. Usually, Alix had disappeared by now into a rented car that whisked her back to the hotel for bathing as most stadiums didn’t have the facilities she enjoyed at the Dome.
Over the noise of players shedding shoulder pads, steam rising from their chilled bodies in the warmer air, he heard a summoning. “Tommy, Tommy the Toe, get over here. We call this picture Three Fine Kickers.” The command came with a Swedish accent attached. Ancient Andy hadn’t forgotten him even if Alix had. He joined their group, and Andy immediately crushed him to his other side. The old man had put on some weight and gained strength since their last meeting now that he’d recovered from chemo. He’d shed his furry cap and revealed a scalp covered with thin white strands of hair.
“See, one, two, three.” Andy poked a thumb at his own chest on the count of one and squeezed Alix’s shoulders at two, then Tom’s, leaving no doubt where his loyalty lay. Flashes went off from professional cameras and cell phones. In seconds, his teammates shoved in for selfies.
Tom slipped away and had the showers mostly to himself. When he emerged, the players were heading unwashed to the bus. “Hey, Tommy, we’re all going back to the hotel to clean up, then heading to a place called the Weingarten. Andy reserved a room for us. Coach says we can use the bus to go back and forth because he doesn’t want any of his goddamned, idiot players crashing on these slick roads. That guy is all heart. With this ice, we ain’t flying nowhere until tomorrow afternoon,” Beef Bolivar said. “You coming?”
“I don’t know.”
Alix still stood in her cubicle stripped down to a black sports bra, the one he’d dreamed of once upon a time. She lowered a long-sleeved jersey over her head. Before it fell to her thighs, Tom noted the bruises blossoming on her back. Already without her cleats and stockings, Alix dropped her uniform pants. Tom knew if she bent over, he’d catch a glimpse of her Jockey for Women underwear, but she didn’t flex, simply sat on a bench and put on athletic pants and her sneakers.
