Muck City (13 page)

Gail would not leave. Every fifteen minutes when nurses opened Mary’s door, she would swoop in and stand over her sister, shouting,
“Fight, Mary! Wherever you are, YOU FIGHT!”
She would sing, “God has smiled on me, he’s set me free,” and remind doctors as they made their rounds, “My sister is gonna walk out of here.”

When Mary finally awoke, the children whom she adored surrounded
her bedside, tear-streaked and jubilant. Her oldest daughter, Canisa, then fifteen, had been charged with caring for Mario, keeping him in her bed at night to feed and rock him back to sleep. Canisa stepped forward with the bundled newborn and handed it to her mother.

“Ooh, that’s a pretty little baby,” Mary said. “Whose baby?”

Gail said, “That’s your baby!”

“Who, Jamal? ’Mal bigger than that.”

“Jamarious.
Your
baby.”

Mary walked out of the hospital, just as Gail had promised. Doctors later opened Mary’s chest and installed a defibrillator in the event her heart ever stopped again. One afternoon, Mary told Canisa she was feeling dizzy. She flopped down on the sofa, then jumped as if a bear trap had sprung inside her. It was the defibrillator, kicking her heart back into gear.

Her disability checks couldn’t cover expenses, so Mary briefly returned to teaching. But the chaos of a classroom proved too stressful for her heart, as did caring for her own beloved children at home. The responsibility now fell on Canisa, who took young Mario as her own. Living for a time with Gail on doctor’s orders, Mary would tell her sister, “My baby’s never gonna know what happened to his mama.”

Gail was a dreamer. She’d had an awful one the night James arrived to take Mary home: someone had kidnapped one of her granddaughters, just babies at the time, and left her clothes strung along the back porch. The dream haunted her all the next day, until she realized it hadn’t been her granddaughter at all, but Mary. The clothes in the dream were the ones Mary had forgotten in Gail’s closet.

Two days later the phone started ringing: relatives saying something had happened when Mary was at the doctor. Her defibrillator’s not working.
Gail, pray
! Then, five minutes later:

“Gail, you got somebody in the house with you?”

Oh Lord, why?

“Mary just died.”

She’d been to the hospital for bloodwork, Canisa wheeling her through
the halls, when her mother craned her head and said, “I’m tired, I wanna go up there,” and pointed up, the strangest glow across her face.
Where
, Canisa thought,
upstairs?
Canisa took her mother to the ER, just to be safe, and the minute after leaving her with doctors she heard them shouting,
“Code Red!”

Mario, just seven years old, was outside playing football when he heard the horrific wail of his sister Jamekia. Told his mother had just died, he ran screaming down the street. A neighbor woman found him at the filling station, lying on his back in the parking lot, a scene of bloodcurdling sadness.
“My mama! My mama!”
he cried.

James had just arrived in Georgia and rushed home. In the weeks after the funeral, he fell into a black fog, utterly consumed with shame. Wouldn’t eat or rise from the sofa. Told his daughters he’d never been the husband his wife deserved, never taken the brief seconds to tell her he was sorry. Now she was dead. Five months later he collapsed one morning while shaving and never woke up. They called Canisa to release the body. Gail held Mario as he trembled and cried, as all sense of the world left him and spun out of reach.

It was Canisa who raised her brothers and sisters, forgoing her own youth to shuttle back and forth from football to band practice, to help with homework and fill out college applications. It was Canisa who froze in her tracks when Mario told her flatly one day, all of ten years old, “I don’t wanna live no more.”

Sometimes after dinner, she would still open Mario’s door to find him fetal on the bed, that emptiness inside him having spiked like a fever. She would take her brother in her arms and hold him, assure him that it was not his fault, that God took those we loved for reasons unknown. Yet in the middle of the night, she would often wake to find her mother standing by her bed, an apparition lamenting softly, “I was supposed to be here, I was supposed to be here.”

•   •   •

FOR MARIO, THERE
were a pair of absolute truths that had remained constant throughout his life: that his parents were never coming back, and that one day, whatever it took, he would win a championship with the Glades Central Raiders. These two lines of truth did not run their separate courses, but fused to form an ironbound obligation.

His father had played baseball at Lake Shore, but threw himself into Raider mania once the team won back-to-back titles in the early seventies. As long as any of his boys could remember, he’d waxed enthusiastic about one of them belonging one day to that superior order of men—a champion who could always trade upon that status in the muck and float upon its everlasting memory.

With three other boys playing football, his odds were at least favorable: His oldest, Tori, was a blue-chip strong safety in 1990, but none of his Raider teams ever made it past the semifinals. It was the same story with Frank, the next oldest, who graduated in 1992. Five years after James died, his son Jamal’s team also made it to the semifinals, only to lose to Sarasota Booker High by three points. After Jamal, there was only Mario.

“He was the last in line,” said Jamal. “So he felt like it was up to him.”

Ever since his parents died, Mario had wanted to be a quarterback. It was the position he began choosing in the pickup games outside his family’s three-bedroom home on Northwest Avenue G. His constant teammate was Canisa’s son William Likely, who was two years younger and would later play safety and running back with Mario on the Raiders. On afternoons and weekends, the two would trade off threading passes through oncoming cars and the farm trucks parked along the street.

And whereas many boys christened themselves a Jerry Rice or Randall Cunningham, Mario always played himself. “He never pretended to be nobody,” said Jamal. “He always said, ‘I’m my own man.’ ”

In Belle Glade’s youth league, he quarterbacked for the Eagles, who practiced in Pioneer Park. In those immediate years after losing his mother and father, playing quarterback gave him purchase in the bottomless world. To him, there was no feeling like having the game in his hands,
like charging downfield with a squad of friends and managing a victory. Winning made people happy, and helping others to win made him generally less inclined to want to die.

“There is a void there,” Gail would say. “He needs to fill a void.”

Unfortunately for Mario, his body had not grown much by the time he arrived at Glades Central. The JV coaches saw his wrestler’s physique and immediately slotted him at defense. But the desire to play quarterback still burned inside him, and by then he’d found someone who possessed that same kind of fire.

At the University of Florida, quarterback Tim Tebow had just won the Heisman Trophy. The coverage surrounding his stellar season profiled the quarterback’s life as the son of Baptist missionaries and his breakout career at Allen D. Nease High School in Ponte Vedra Beach, where his state records for total career offense (13,042 yards), career passing (9,922 yards), and touchdowns scored (161) still remained.

But the story that pulled Mario off his seat involved the night Tim Tebow broke his leg. The Panthers were down 17–0 in the first half when the quarterback took a brutal sack that snapped his fibula. His coach thought it was a charley horse, telling him, “Toughen up. This is the stuff legends are made of.” Not only did Tebow finish the game on one leg, but he ran for a twenty-nine-yard touchdown through traffic.

“Tebow’s a dog,” said Mario. “That guy never quits. He’s got the fight in him. That’s what I aspire to be.”

But there was a story about Tebow and his mother that provided an even deeper kinship. Pam Tebow had discovered she was pregnant with Tim while she and her husband were serving as missionaries in the Philippines. The exact details of the story have changed over the years. In one version, the discovery of her pregnany came while recovering from amoebic dysentery. The heavy drugs used to treat the illness had damaged the baby, the doctors said. The fetus had separated from the uterine wall, and the baby would most likely be stillborn. The doctors advised her to terminate the pregnancy for her own safety.

“They thought I should have an abortion to save my life from the beginning all the way through the seventh month,” she told the
Gainesville Sun
in 2007.

She refused, relying on prayer and faith instead. She carried the baby to term and gave birth to a “skinny, but rather long” son, who, of course, grew up to become one of the greatest college quarterbacks in history.

In a 2010 interview with the organization Focus on the Family, Pam Tebow said doctors advised an abortion after discovering not a baby, but “a mass of fetal tissue.” Whichever story is true, the message remained the same: like Mario, Tim Tebow wasn’t supposed to be born. Which could only mean that he had purpose; he was here for a reason.

The confluence of everything that had happened in Mario’s life seemed to occur on that sorrowful night the Raiders lost to Cocoa. He’d played his guts out. Half a dozen tackles, two for a loss. Not only had he not delivered his father a ring, but he’d watched his quarterback lose his confidence after throwing a costly interception in the third quarter—a casualty at the bow that sank the entire ship.

While the rest of the team tossed their helmets and retreated to the locker room, Mario stayed on the field watching Cocoa receive their gold medals. And when that was finished, he just sat there and stared at the scoreboard. That’s when Hester tapped him on the shoulder.

“Come on, let’s go.”

“It hurts,” Mario said, crying. “It hurts bad.”

“Believe me, homeboy, I know. I’ve been there.”

“We’ll be back next year,” he told him. “We’re comin back. And I’ll bring us here.”

It was that moment, looking into his linebacker’s eyes, when the coach recognized something in himself, that player with a swollen heart standing alone in the end zone. In Mario, Hester saw that kid who would run into traffic, the player who would lower his shoulder and charge headlong into a house on fire.

“Some people think it’s just a game,” Mario once said. “But it’s more than a game for me, it’s about my life.”

•   •   •

THE SECOND ROUND
of the Florida-versus-Texas showcase matched the Raiders against Denison High School, a regional 4A power north of Dallas. The team would have to fly to Texas, and for many on the Glades Central squad, it would be the first time they’d take an airplane into the greater world beyond the canefields.

The morning of the flight, the team gathered in the dark school parking lot to await the bus. Night sounds still seeped into the predawn stillness. Bullfrogs moaned in the canal, and egrets flushed from the cane in search of food. Headlights sliced through the darkness, dropping off boys and bulging equipment bags.

Daylight revealed fresh haircuts—high, clean fades still with the whiff of the barber’s oil. They wore starched khakis, sneakers scrubbed white, and polished loafers. Their maroon sport jackets—bought years ago for one of those fabled gladiator squads of yesteryear and recycled—drooped over shoulders and swallowed skinny wrists.

Few boys had slept the night before, their minds reeling over air travel. A group discussed:

“I hear you not supposed to fall asleep on the airplane. If you do, you crash.”

“Man, that superlicious.”

“
Superstitious
, fool!”

They squeezed aboard a yellow cheese wagon at 5:00 a.m., sitting atop suitcases, with arms and legs folded in the seats. The bus cut a straight line down the cane and sawgrass prairies toward Fort Lauderdale’s Hollywood International Airport. Three hours later an American Airlines jet lifted off the runway as if bound for deep space. A chorus of moans and whimpers rose from the cabin.

Don’Kevious Johnson, a hardened linebacker who’d grown up amid gangs and gunfire in the trailer park near Glades Central, now covered his head in a blanket. Another carefully pulled down his window shade and announced he was going to be sick. For the businessmen on board, it was a rare and welcome bit of entertainment. Each one turned to the terrorstricken young man in the oversized coat beside him and chuckled. “First time on a plane, huh?”

•   •   •

AFTER THE RAIDERS
freshened up at their hotel, a bus dropped them for practice at DeSoto High School’s Eagle Stadium, the site of the following day’s game. Standing in the parking lot, the Raiders gazed upon the $12 million brick monstrosity that sparkled under the sun, and concluded that Texas was where God had intended high school football to be played.

A local coach guided the team to the indoor field where they’d practice, along the way passing a state-of-the-art training room where a staff of student trainers waited eagerly, dressed in matching polos. The stadium had been a bond issue approved by voters, the coach explained. It was like hearing another language. Outside one building sat a row of white Chevy Tahoes, emblazoned with the school crest.

Coach Q could only shake his head. “Only time yall be riding in something like that, it be taking you to jail.”

After dinner that evening, the Raiders sat in the stands to watch one of the most heavily hyped matchups of the showcase. Their archenemy Cocoa High School was playing the Abilene Tigers, who were ranked number two in the nation. The brawny west Texans and their locomotive running game were the heavy favorites and took an early 10–0 lead. But just as they’d done to the Raiders nine months before, Cocoa patiently and methodically came from behind and picked them apart. Cocoa running back Chevelle Buie, who’d run for two hundred yards and two touchdowns
against the Raiders to seal the victory, found the end zone three times in the second half against Abilene. Before the Texans knew what had happened, the clock was at zero and they were no longer winning. It was a thing to behold.