Muck City (33 page)

Going into the playoffs, natural athleticism could no longer carry the Raiders, who remained largely out of shape. The quarterback, in addition to the shooting pain he felt every time he threw the ball, still experienced occasional headaches as a result of the concussion, both of which he kept secret from the coaching staff. His weight also remained an issue. On a recent trip to Burger King for lunch, Mario had ordered like a linebacker, packing down a Triple Whopper, super-sized fries, a large soda, and an ice cream.

“I’m full as a bitch,” he’d groaned after putting it all away.

Hester had never wavered in his support for Mario, but couldn’t help sighing one afternoon at the sight of the quarterback’s sagging belly. “I mean, with his kind of fire, imagine what he could do if he were in top shape.”

For Mario and the Raiders, football practice was about to become harder, the runs longer, and “my bad” would no longer be acceptable. If Hester had his way, the boys would go to bed that week with every muscle sore and haunted by the little things.

•   •   •

AFTER FILM, THE
boys ran their normal laps, followed by cone sprints. After two sets, many were wilted and could hardly breathe. Coaches Fat and Randy ordered them back on the line.

“Do not be afraid to get better. Do not be afraid to be faster!”
Fat screamed at the boys, a few of whom appeared on the verge of vomiting.

The clocks had readjusted to standard time, meaning the sun was setting sooner. But instead of going home, the team moved to the adjacent baseball field and the coaches threw on the lights. Under a game-night glow that drew hordes of hungry mosquitoes, the boys continued to run.

“It’s football season now,
bwah
,” Randy shouted, his hands on his hips. “There’s boys in the rest of Palm Beach County who aint got practice tonight. Them boys are at home right now watching
Wheel of Fortune
. They probably went to the locker room after class, then remembered, ‘Damn, we done lost.’

“But
we
got practice. We may not have practice after Friday. Then again, we may be the only team in the county that
do have
practice. That’s right,
bwah
, smell that soot from the canefields. Feel that chill in the air. This when football season
really
begins.”

After a grueling night of running and two-minute drills, Hester gathered his team with a wild dance in his eyes. He bent down low, leaned in, and began to whisper.

Shhhh. Shhhhh
. The players hushed the others, then crowded around their coach, who had that sly grin they so loved.

“Here’s what I want,” he said, just above a murmur, “so listen up. I need this said properly now. I need that ‘HA-HA-HA.’ I need that said properly. Like you laughin at somebody. Say it after me:

“We gon’ hit ’em in the mouth.”

HA-HA-HA.

“We gon’ hit ’em in the head.”

HA-HA-HA.

“We gon’ hit ’em so hard.”

HA-HA-HA.

“They gon’ wish they was dead.”

HA-HA-HA.

“GON’ HIT ’EM IN THE MOUTH!”

HA! HA! HA
!

“GON’ HIT ’EM IN THE HEAD!”

HA! HA! HA
!

“GON’ HIT ’EM SO HARD!”

The chant rose to a screeching climax and the boys could no longer contain themselves. They exploded from the huddle and took off running across the baseball diamond, shouting and doing backflips under the lights. When they finally settled down, the team gathered for what could be their last football practice of the year, and, for some seniors, for the rest of their lives. They put their hands together and said it on three:

“PLAYOFFS PLAYOFFS PLAYOFFS!”

•   •   •

AFTER EVERYONE HAD
gone home that evening, Coach Andrew Mann walked across campus, switched on the lights over Effie C. Grear Field, and prepared it for play. He was a big man, a former Raider who’d suited two sons of his own in maroon and gold and now coached the offensive line. He was forty-six now, yet when he laughed, usually at one of Q’s dirty jokes, those giant shoulders would begin to roll and the years would fall from his face. He was a true muckstepper; his eighty-six-year-old mother, Eddie Mae, could remember when Okeechobee rolled her dikes and swallowed the town in the hurricane of 1928.

As head of field maintenance, Coach Mann had a ritual of his own. He began by trimming the grass, feeling the wheels of the riding mower sink into the spongy soil. But before he continued with the painstaking work of painting the lines, he stood at the edge of the field, no audience save the night birds that hunted in the lights, and he prayed. He asked the Good
Lord to bless the lines he was about to draw, that they’d guide his Raiders in an honorable game, one with no injuries or harm. Then, with the big business out of the way, and because he
was
a true muckstepper, Coach Mann asked for the victory.

The next morning, looked down upon from the press box, the field appeared as pristine as a birthday cake. A gust of wind shook the row of royal palms behind the visitors’ stands and carried the smell of burning cane. Flurries of ash spiraled through the air, leaving a light dusting. In the distance, beyond the trees and across the highway, wide plumes of smoke rose from the fields, blackening the bulbous clouds that hung in high relief against a blue sky.

It was around this time that Lester Finney arrived to add the finishing touch: painting the Raider head on the fifty-yard line. Finney was a local artist and musician who ran a youth program on Avenue A. He’d also been a Raider in December 1974 when Glades Central fans rioted on the field at Chaminade and put four policemen in the hospital. After the incident, Finney’s face was plastered across the
Belle Glade Herald
with the headline
A CRYING SHAME
. (“It’s a crying shame when high school students like Lester Finney are disgraced by the actions of their elders at a football game,” the editorial read.)

Standing at midfield, Finney—wearing a straw hat and a T-shirt that accentuated his sinewy, muscled body—free-handed the image of a Raider using Coach Mann’s paint machine and a hand nozzle. Finney’s Raider was once the official face of the team, he said, until former coach Willie Snead came in and replaced it with the current stock image. The new Raider had whiter features—almost Spanish-looking—and appeared more friendly. “A cartoon character,” said Finney, more
Pirates of the Caribbean
than Mucktown Destroyer.

Finney’s Raider was black with a wide nose. He had a wild, bushy beard, a gold ring in his ear, and a tomcat look in his eye. “That’s the Raider that’s gonna hurt somebody,” he said with a smile. “This one’s from the hood.” Within an hour, the fourteen-foot mascot was staring up from midfield at
the heavens—just as the cane fires reached the highway and blotted out the sun.

When the school bell rang, the team congregated around the flagpole for the pregame prayer. The boys locked elbows and became quiet. Eyes closed, head bowed, Pastor Dez lifted them up to the God of the Glades in another plea for triumph.

“Father, give them eagle eyes tonight,” he prayed. “Make them strong like lions and swift like gazelles. Brace them with the same power that you used to roll back the mighty Red Sea, the power that gave Joshua the victory over Jericho. We ask that the defense might be as a wall, and that the offense might be fierce and powerful, and that our opponents won’t be able to stand before us. They will come to us with a sword and a spear, but we will overrun them in the name of the Lord.”

•   •   •

THE RAIDER HOME
field was a fortress in late November. In postseason play, the Raiders were 29–1 at home. Of course, one of those playoff victories had come the previous year against the same Cardinal Gibbons Chiefs who now stepped off the bus just before dusk.

To the kids who didn’t know, there appeared to be a brief moment of revelation as they breathed the soot-filled air and adjusted to the red, spooky light from a land afire under the setting sun:
So this is the Muck, huh?
The ones who already knew simply stared ahead and walked to the lockers, trying not to acknowledge the gang of Raiders eyeballing them from the sidewalk.

Fans filed into the stands of Effie C. Grear Field and crowded the fenceline, moving to the anthem that blasted from the speakers:
“First down to the touchdown … Everybody knows: RAIDERS!”

The crowd cheered the Raiders as they bounced onto the field from the shop room. On the sideline, Hester lathered them up with his playoff-ready chant, so loud the fans were laughing
HA-HA-HA
. The team then paused
to observe the national anthem. As always, when the silk-voiced soprano up in the press box belted the lines
“O’er the land of the freee, and the home of the …”
the boys lifted their helmets high and cried,
“RAIDERS!”

•   •   •

THE CHIEFS, WEARING
all-white jerseys with red trim and lettering, lost the coin toss and kicked to Glades Central. The Gibbons coaches were no doubt harboring some hope that the Raiders would be weakened without their six-foot-six superstar receiver, who was nowhere to be seen. But the pliant Glades Central offense quickly demonstrated its ability to fill empty shoes. His name was Davonte Allen.

It was Davonte whom Hester set in motion on the first call of the game: 989 Rolls-Royce. The deep go route had become Jet’s signature airmail with the question
“Can yall run?”

The pass from Mario, whose eye blacks bore the name of his dead mother, sailed thirty yards downfield and landed in the crook of Davonte’s arm. The next play, Baker crashed through the line for twenty-seven more yards and the crowd chanted,
“Move them sticks!”

Now, on the Chiefs’ forty, Mario rolled out of the pocket and threw the ball on the run before getting slammed out of bounds. Davonte was already standing in the end zone. He leaped just as a defender clipped his thigh and spun him upside down, landing hard on his shoulder with the ball still in his hands. But his pain was for nothing; the touchdown was called back because the Raiders had jumped offsides.

On the very next drive, however, Davonte shot across the middle with two white jerseys on his tail, then dove across the goal line to meet a thirty-seven-yard bullet in midflight.

Raiders up 7–0.

The Glades Central defense was watertight from the start, quickly shutting down the Chiefs’ go-to running back, Denzel Wimberly, and forcing Gibbons to punt on its first two possessions. Coach Tony, the Raider
defensive coordinator, pulled the trigger on blitz after blitz, sending a swarm of maroon jerseys into the face of quarterback Chase Bender. After having been suffocated under double coverage most of the season, Robert Way took his vengeance tonight. He sacked Bender so hard in the first quarter that even the bloodthirsty mucksteppers in the stands had to wince. Before the night was over, Bender would go down seven times.

At the start of the second quarter, Jaime took a punt return and started home. But as he sliced up the sideline, the ball bounced loose from his hands. The Chiefs defensive back Dan Fitzpatrick picked it up and raced fifty yards for an easy touchdown to tie the game. But Jaime was quick to redeem his sloppiness. As soon as the Raiders had the ball again, Mario hit him on a short route for a fifty-one-yard play into Chiefs territory. The next snap, he found Oliver on a twenty-yard strike into the end zone.

After the extra point, the Raiders led 14–7.

There was something unusual happening to the short, fat quarterback. The panic and impatience, the
fear
that had once gripped him as soon as the ball touched his hands, no longer was there. No imaginary ghosts haunted his blindside, spooking him into the open. For the first time against an admirable defense, he felt relaxed.

And he knew why: his line was holding. After months, his boys up front—Brandon, Corey, Salt, and Gator—were finally giving him the game he’d always wanted. For once, there was rhythm. They were in sync. Here tonight on the hallowed muck, the quarterback could finally show his town that he was worthy of their tradition. Tonight, he was
man of tha city
.

Anything seemed possible. After the touchdown, LeBlanc made a spectacular, one-handed tilt-a-whirl interception with both feet kissing the grass before his body flew out of bounds, the very kind of play that sent boys from Belle Glade to college. Back on the field, Davonte told his quarterback, “Throw it as far as you can. Wherever you put it, I’ll get it.”

Hester nodded from the sidelines: 989 Rolls-Royce. From the Raider forty-seven, Mario took the long snap, cocked his arm with two short steps, and launched the ball. Davonte was already halfway to the goal and racing
to beat his man. Just as he broke away, he craned his head and saw the ball as it twisted under the lights, precisely on course. It dropped into his arms at the five, and Davonte trotted into the end zone. A fifty-yard bomb. The stands went wild.

“It’s pretty, aint it?” Jet said, smiling. “That’s the best pass he’s thrown all season.”

The quarterback rode the high all the way through the fourth quarter, throwing for over three hundred yards to eliminate Cardinal Gibbons 28–14 and take his team one week closer to a rematch with Cocoa. Up north, the Tigers had done their part, narrowly beating Orlando Jones 14–9.

Later that night, Mario went home and turned on his computer. Jeff Greer’s recap of the game was already up on the
Post
’s website, the whole article dedicated to the quarterback’s great transformation:

“The former linebacker gets so pumped up for big games that sometimes he forgets that he now plays a position that requires a steady hand,” Greer wrote. “But playing in his first playoff game as a quarterback, Rowley was as cool as ice, throwing three first-half touchdowns.… The Raiders will live and die with [his] arm this season.”

“It’s playoff time,” Mario told Greer, the arm in question feeling as though it were attached by a metal spike. “My attitude switches to a whole new mode now.”