Dirty South

52

I remembered Jimmy Riggins as the white boy from Nebraska who carried defensive linemen on his back like children as he shot through blocking holes and scrapped for five to ten yards almost every time he touched the ball. He wore black reflective paint under his eyes like some leather-helmeted wonder from another era and after games often wore fur coats he’d made from animals he killed himself. Wildcats and Kodiaks from Alaska. He bragged once of making love to three women simultaneously and of outrunning a deer that he’d startled in a backwoods creek in rural Louisiana. He’d been on three Sports Illustrated covers, cut a locally produced country-western album, and made All-Pro for four years as if the NFC’s fullback was a position he owned.

But after a string of eight DUIs, even fans and front-office types in New Orleans became a little worn with his personality. And then five years ago, when he was photographed sunbathing nude with a sixteen-year-old singer who’d made a name for herself on a nationwide shopping mall music tour, the ride was over.

He was traded to the Cardinals, the worst of all pro football franchises, and soon disappeared. Replaced by a stable of fresh new runners with better knees and media-savvy personalities.

I never knew Riggins that well. After all, he’d been an offensive player, and even on the same team, folks tend to stick to their own kind. But through the Picayune stories I found yesterday, I learned of a lawsuit he’d filed against Trey Brill three years ago. And after calling around to some old teammates on Sunday, I found Riggins’s address – a rural route in Slidell, only about fifteen minutes out from the city.

The country road wound around a small creek and through a cattle pasture where fattened red-and-white cows chomped down grass. I followed my coffee-stained map through three or four country roads until I found the house.

The place was colorless, eroded clear of paint from decades of rain, with a ripped screen door hanging off a lower hinge. Behind the old house and under a live oak draped in Spanish moss sat a little squat trailer, the towing hitch held vertical by a pile of concrete blocks.

A yellow “No Hunting” sign had been nailed to a dying tree.

Two Big Wheels, a rusted-out Fiero, and an early-nineties F-150 with K-C lights had been parked in a muddy, grassland ground.

I knocked on the door and then hung back off his stoop beside some piles of two-by-fours and bricks. I listened to the crickets hanging into the woods of pine and large oak. In the deep woods, I heard feet shuffle.

Near the edge of the woods, a man giggled.

Then a shot.

I ran fast around my old truck, where Annie yelped to me from the passenger seat, and through a scattered patch of trees.

I squatted down into a ditch by the edge of the small forest. Pines, palmettos, and knotted old oaks surrounded me. Vines and broken branches and decaying stumps covered the forest floor. A thick black snake twisted out from a hole in a toppled tree and sauntered away. Overhead, only small pricks of yellow light broke through the leafy ceiling.

A flash of a plaid shirt showed deep in the woods.

Another giggle.

“Riggins,” I shouted. “It’s Nick Travers.”

My voice echoed as I crouched forward and moved out of the ditch and into the trees.

Another shot cracked farther away and I saw the driver’s side mirror of my truck explode. I moved slow, still bending at the waist, watching.

I only heard crickets. Soft feet crunched.

A woodpecker returned to a dead oak tree and a couple of squirrels scattered in the leaves and needles.

More feet ran and then slowed.

The woodpecker stopped.

Then returned.

Dry heated air ran through the woods. A small creek oozed through the uneven splice of a narrow muddy bank.

I crept over the water, several hundred yards from the trailer.

I thought I could come back on whoever was out there.

I was a silent Indian creeping through the land. I could not be heard. I imagined sneaking up behind this peckerwood and catching him. Maybe not.

I tripped over some fishing line tied to a bunch of beer cans, cutting into my palms, and fell to the ground.

A long bowie-knife blade found my throat and I heard a voice I remembered from a decade ago say, “When y’all gonna realize this is the U.S.A., not the U.S.S.R.? I don’t owe shit.”

I looked back. “Hello, Riggins,” I said.

“Travers?”