Suitcase City (37 page)

Billy counted eight yards in strides he would bet against any yardstick and faked the cornerback outside, leaving the boy stumbling and cursing. Then, knowing he had wasted precious time on the fake to make the coaches notice, he cut inside, watching Charlie Rentz, the linebacker, change smoothly from high-kneed backpedaling to a sprint toward him. Billy glanced back at the scrimmage just as Ted Street disappeared into a collapsing pocket, taken down with a sickening smack by a fleet cornerback slicing in on a red dog. And then in the middle distance he saw it, rising and falling in the yellow haze, bouncing with each of his strides, a brown oval spiraling perfectly. He and the ball would converge somewhere in a terrain of danger. His only duty was to watch it, never them.

He sprinted on, feeling the cold at his chest which was, he knew, an early warning of heat stroke. And now the first urging of fear in his belly. The voice of fear said,
Stop running.
It told his hands to protect his belly, his thighs to drop him to earth before the hit came. But Billy begged his failing strength for one last long leap, dug his left foot into the churned sand of the practice field, and lanced into the air, right arm leading for a one-handed catch. He took the spinning nose of the ball in his palm, killed the spin with twisting fingers, teased and begged the ball back to him. His body still rising, he cradled the hot leather into his right armpit and covered it with his left hand.

CRACK!

The hot yellow sky shrank to a black dot in Billy’s eyes, then groaned wide again.

Head Coach Prosser was standing between the two formations, lecturing the offensive line. “Keep your feet under you! Keep ’em wide! Move your man to the outside! OUTSIDE!”

Billy had lost time. He pushed himself up and let go of the ball. He had gone to sleep for thirty seconds, maybe a minute. To his right, the defensive backs chewed their mouth guards and waited for him to leave their turf. Their faces, shadowed inside helmets, were striped with a weird war paint, gray dust streaked white by sweat. Charlie Rentz watched Billy with nothing in his eyes, neither challenge nor concern. Billy gave back the same empty gaze, then let himself look at Coach Prosser, hoping for a good word. He wanted Prosser to say,
Nice catch, son,
or
Way to take a lick, bud,
but he didn’t expect it. Prosser was sizing him up. Maybe thinking of playing him this fall ahead of Sim Sizemore, the senior who never would have made that catch, who would have folded like a yellow flower at the sound of Charlie Rentz’s cleats cutting the ground.

Prosser called to the sideline, “Sizemore, get in here.”

Clean and fresh, Sim Sizemore trotted onto the field. He didn’t look at Billy.

On his way to the bench, Billy passed Mr. Leone, the math teacher and line coach, olive-skinned, hawk-nosed, and serious, and Mr. Rolt, the drivers ed teacher. Leone was all right, an army vet who had played pulling guard at Syracuse, but all the guys called Rolt a phony.

Rolt said to the hot yellow sky above the field, “You all right, son? We don’t want your mommer saying we didn’t take care of you out here.” He said it quietly so that no one in the bleachers would hear.

There was always a sneer in Rolt’s mouth, even when he said something kind. He was a fat jock-sniffer who had never played football, but he knew what coaches knew: They were making boys into men their own way. They wanted no tales told about what happened on this field.

Billy smiled at the pain inside his helmet.
Fuck you,
he said to the pain. To Rolt, he said, “Yes sir, Coach Rolt. I’m all right.”

Billy fell to his knees at a tub of lemonade. Oak leaves, fruit flies, and a single cockroach floated on the yellow surface. He sank his face into the cold, drank what he craved, then lifted his head with a growling gasp. He wiped his mouth on his forearm and stole a glance at the bleachers.

This Friday-morning scrimmage was the last chance for some boys to make the team and for others to secure starting positions. A small crowd had turned out, braving the blazing August sun. Men in white shirts and ties with black or gray suit coats folded across their laps sat at the top of the bleachers; with them, Doc Runkle, the team physician. Further down, students clustered by clan—jocks or fans. The jocks were baseball players, track men, and basketball players. They watched with a detached professional interest. The fans were girlfriends of boys on the field, student government, and cheerleaders who had just finished their own practice in the gym. Billy searched for his father in the small crowd, did not see him. Then, before his eyes swung back to the field, he noticed a girl. She was watching him. Not the scrimmage, but him. Billy Dyer. Dressed in black, she sat by herself, and now, sure that he had seen her, she lifted a pale, languid hand from the book in her lap and waved to him. He did not wave back—it was forbidden. He smiled in the dark cage of his helmet and turned back to the field.

Ted Street broke the huddle, and Sim Sizemore trotted to the gap between tackle and split end. The position Billy wanted. Sim Sizemore was tall, lean, fast, and so handsome the sophomore girls blushed and whispered when he passed them in the hallways. They called him Dreamboat. Ted Street, cool, aloof, with the hooded gray eyes of a thug, from a family of grove workers who lived in a trailer park south of town, was a different dream. Sizemore looked timid taking Billy’s place in the formation, lost inside that gift of a body, at least Billy thought so. He was taller and faster than Billy, but cutting across the middle where linebackers hurtled like trucks, his body begged for safety. The boys talked about him. They called his pass routes Chicken Shit Right and Chicken Shit Left. Billy wondered why the coaches couldn’t see it.

“Hut! Hut! Hut!”

The ball slapped Ted Street’s hands, and Sim Sizemore’s cleats sprayed earth as he cut across the middle too fast to bother faking, caught Street’s perfect strike on his number 19, and turned upfield. Chris Meeks, the free safety, arrived a step too late with a flying miss at Sim’s chopping feet. Sizemore sprinted to the end zone, spiked the ball, then turned and shook his fists at the yellow heavens. The crowd in the bleachers yelled, “Go Spartans!” A businessman at the top shouted, “Atta boy, Sim!” A sub near Billy muttered, “Fucking hot dog.”

Sim Sizemore trotted back to the huddle and paused before leaning into the circle that Billy longed to join. Sim looked over at the bench, pushed back his helmet, drew a finger across his forehead, and flicked sweat at Billy Dyer.

* * *

A tall man in a white shirt and black suit trousers stood up, stretched, and groaned, looking behind him at a bleached pine plank. “On these boards, my ole ass bones are pushing right through the flesh.”

Another man, not as tall, on the far side of handsome, with blond hair fading to white, smiled and said, “Like the bench you used to ride, eh, Blake?”

The tall man slapped the seat of his trousers twice. “I had my time on the field. What’d you do after you quit football, Cam, play tennis? Some sissy thing like that?”

Cameron Sizemore’s cheeks colored. “It was cross-country, Blake. I ran cross-country… after I got hurt. They called us harriers, God knows why. I didn’t think your ass was so sensitive.”

“This ole ass has spent more time on a horse, pushing beef cattle, than yours has in a swivel chair. So don’t be making fun of my ass.”

The two men stood together watching the field and the brief celebration that followed Sim Sizemore’s catch and run. “The team looks good, don’t you think?” Cam Sizemore asked.

Blake Rainey smiled and stretched his long neck in the sunlight. “Say what you mean, Cam. You mean your boy Sim looks good, don’t you?”

“I meant what I said. It could be a good year. A very good year.”

“I have to agree,” said Rainey. “You think Billy Dyer can give your Sim a run for the starting position?”

“Billy can play,” Cam replied, “but he can’t
run
with Sim. Nobody out there can.”

“I suppose you’re right about that, Cam. But Billy can hit. He can stick. And it seems to my powers of observation that your boy Sim don’t like to hit. He don’t like contact. And we both know you can’t play football without the love of violence.”

“Speed beats brute force any day.”

“Maybe it does… among the harriers,” said Blake Rainey. “We’ll see. We surely will.”

TWO

Billy sat on the bench with a dozen boys in sweat-sodden uniforms weighted with mud, steam rising from their shoulders. The offense was running sweeps, and Joey Olsen, a scrub fullback, was getting his last chance to make the team. Olsen was small, slow, and clumsy. His assignment was to lead Tommy Bierstadt, a fast, tough tailback, around end, throw his hundred and thirty pounds at Charlie Rentz, and free Bierstadt into the secondary. Olsen only confused Bierstadt, and Rentz was making a meal of him with forearms to the throat and a vicious spearing helmet that threw him like chaff under Bierstadt’s churning cleats. As Billy and the other subs looked on, Rentz plowed Joey Olsen, threw Bierstadt for a loss, and casually stepped on the back of Olsen’s hand as the boy tried to get up. Olsen shrieked, hopped from one foot to the other, cradling his hand to his chest. Rentz walked back to him and apologized elaborately, grinning inside the cage of his helmet. Behind Billy, one of the businessmen shouted, “Man up, Joey!”

Coach Rolt walked to the sideline. “How you doing, Dyer? That empty head of yours ready to take a lick?”

Through the cottony phlegm in his throat and the cold dizziness that had not abated in twenty minutes of rest, Billy answered, “Yes sir, Coach Rolt.”

Coach Prosser slapped his clipboard against his thigh. Without looking at Billy, he said, “Get in there and give Size-more a rest.”

Sim Sizemore trotted insolently toward the sideline, his knees rising too high, forearms swaying, wrists angled downward in a way that Billy thought girlish. As he passed, cocking his helmet onto the crown of his head and breathing steam at the low, hazy sky, he muttered, “Give ’em hell, Billy boy.”

For a half hour they ran sweeps, draws, and off-tackle slants. It was a long, grinding thing, with no rest except the getting up, dusting off, and trotting back to the huddle. Billy’s job was to block linebackers and cornerbacks. He was a better blocker than Sim Sizemore. He loved the wild, fearful moment when you pulled everything you had into the point of your helmet or the length of your rib cage and threw it at the other man. Billy made a game of grading his blocks good, fair, or poor. Sometimes he looked over at the sideline. Sim Sizemore stood there among the subs and scrubs, his helmet under his arm, the patches of muddy sweat on his jersey drying, getting smaller. Billy measured his success by the size of those patches. The wetter he got and the drier Sim Sizemore, the better Billy’s chances of starting in September.

When the noon whistle blew at the Honey Bear Orange Juice plant, Billy had graded twenty blocks good, five fair, and three poor. Charlie Rentz, who had taken Billy’s efforts at his knees and shins, hated the performance. Billy’s head burned with pain from Rentz’s knees and shoulders. It gave him strange cold spells and brief episodes of pipeline vision wrapped in warped, melting shapes.

The play was a sweep to the opposite sideline, and Billy could steal some rest. At the snap, he fired out, then drifted toward the spot where Rentz battered Joey Olsen. After the whistle, Olsen staggered dazed in the no-man’s-land between the reforming lines. Charlie Rentz shoved him to the ground, muttered, “Get out of my world, Olsen. You don’t belong here.”

Billy stood in front of Rentz. “Leave him alone, Charlie. After the whistle, leave him alone.” When he thought his words got through, he turned away.

Something hit the side of his helmet just above the earhole. He dropped and took another scything forearm on his face-guard with a shock that snapped his head against the yoke of his shoulder pads. Rentz came at him so lost in rage that he flailed bare fists at Billy’s armored head. Billy took the blows on his forearms and shoulders. Rentz grunted with each swing, “God! Damn! Pussy! Trash!”

Boys milled and yelled. Some looked about to join the fight. Coach Leone blew his whistle and Prosser bellowed, “STOP!” Billy stepped inside the circle of Rentz’s windmilling arms and slipped his right fist up hard under Rentz’s chin. His knuckles thudded chin bone, and Rentz’s teeth cracked together. Blood burst from Rentz’s chinstrap, spraying Billy’s face.

Prosser shoved between them, a hot wind of man sweat and sour breath, swatting them apart as though wasps beset his angry red face. He flung Billy like a rag to the ground. Took Rentz by the cage of his helmet and forced him to his knees like a hobbled bull. “YOU! YOU! Fighting on my practice field! Goddamn you two.” Prosser pushed Rentz’s face all the way to the dirt, put his foot on the back of the helmet, and leaned, thigh muscles bulging.

A few seniors, scared, wanted to step in, stop this. Coach Leone moved up behind Prosser, then stopped. Coach Rolt watched Prosser, smiling. The silence of held breath in the bleachers pressed down onto the field. Prosser stepped back, releasing Rentz. “You two shake hands in front of me right now.” His voice was menace.

Billy got up on unsteady legs and offered his hand. Rentz took it, glaring his grudge at Billy through the mud-caked cage of his helmet.

Prosser looked around at the boys relaxing now, some of them grinning. Charlie Rentz stood trembling, shamed. Billy could see that some boys sided with him. Admiration for the punch he had thrown glittered in their eyes. He picked at the bloody knuckles of his right hand. Was the blood his or Rentz’s or both? He held the smarting hand against his belly and watched Prosser.

Now Prosser would have to save the moment, turn it into a lesson. His cursing and manhandling the boys would get around, Billy knew that. Not that it would matter much to people in Oleander. What mattered was winning football games and teaching virtue to boys who would later run the town. Prosser said, “All of you listen to me. We don’t fight amongst ourselves. We save our anger for the people we meet on the field. And there, on the field of honor, in a measured and certain way, we deliver to them…
destruction
.”