The Prophet

21

FRIDAY AFTERNOON, DURING the pep rally, Lorell McCoy took the microphone and told the student body what Kent had been anticipating for days: the season was officially dedicated to the memory of Rachel Bond, and when the Chambers Cardinals took to the field tonight, they would wear her initials on their cleats and on their helmets.

The crowd cheered, faculty joining the students, and Kent wanted to look away but he was standing out there in front of the whole school, and there were many eyes on him, so he just gave a small nod and kept his hands folded in front of him, head down.

Colin Mears did not address the fans, and Kent was glad of that, but Lorell had said his piece for him, and now Lorell led the school in a moment of silence in Rachel’s memory, reminding them all that while the Cardinals intended to go out and win a state championship, none of that really mattered. What mattered was Rachel.

All the right things to say. He sounded good, poised and mature and well reasoned. Kent should have been proud of him, probably. Instead he just felt uneasy.

They had their moment of silence, and then the pep band started to play. Just like that. One murdered child recognized, one game to play. On to the next one. There was nothing wrong with it. How else were they supposed to do it? You put one foot in front of the other, you honored the past while you went to meet the future, that was the only way. Otherwise you turned into… into Adam.

That was the end of the day, there were only fifteen minutes left before the final bell rang, and Kent let them walk out of the gym with its smells of trapped sweat and polished hardwood and go on to do whatever it was they each did before kickoff. He made no claims on them before five thirty, when they were required to arrive in the locker room. He didn’t even make claims on his coaching staff before five thirty. As he told them every year, if we aren’t ready to go by Friday morning, we’re already beaten.

His own game day rituals were simple. A run, a shower, and then a retreat into his office until game time. He went to the locker room and changed clothes, put on shorts and running shoes and a hooded sweatshirt and a soft, flexible brace for his left knee, and then he went out into the fall day.

Perfect football weather. Perfect. The sky was cobalt blue, a fringe of dark gray encroaching from the northwest, but not here yet, and the clouds were high and clean and white. There was a breeze that carried the scents of autumn out of the wooded neighborhoods past the school and down to the field, and the temperature was mid-fifties, brisk enough to energize. Kent stretched in the end zone, then paced off to the sideline, where he would not cross the playing surface, and began to run.

There was a track that ran between the bleachers and the field, but he never ran the track. He loved the feel of the turf beneath his shoes, loved the memories each step brought. The track featured gentle curves, too, and by running around the field in rectangles, he was forced to make hard, ninety-degree cuts, each one putting a stab of pain through his left knee. He needed that.

The knee had ended his playing career. He’d played D-1 ball but for a small school. The knee began to give him problems his freshman year, when he was a backup. Over the summer he visited a joint specialist in Cleveland and was told that it wasn’t so serious, he had a partially torn MCL and some damaged cartilage that needed to be scraped, but once that happened, he’d have only a couple of months of rehab and be back on the field, good as new.

A couple of months took him out of the starting competition, though. A couple of months set him back maybe a full season.

He didn’t let them scrape the knee. Thanked them and said he’d make an appointment but never did. Showed up in the fall and won the starting job, and the team won four of their first five games before he began to hobble. Trainers recommended an MRI. This time the test showed that the cartilage damage was getting worse, should already have been removed, and that the ACL had begun to fray because it was absorbing extra stress from the already weakened ligament on the inside of his knee. They braced him up and shot him full of cortisone and he tore both ligaments all the way through in the third quarter of the final game of the season. Missed a year rehabbing it, and there was a big, strong-armed kid behind him who claimed the job and never relinquished it. Kent finished his career pacing the sidelines with a clipboard in hand, validating what he’d always known, the reason he wouldn’t take the time off for proper treatment—there was always somebody better than you waiting just behind you.

After college he’d come right home. Walter Ward had a position waiting for him, and it was supposed to be a temporary gig, a filler, because Kent was done with football, and willing to let the game own him for only a few more months, while he determined the best course of action for the future.

Then he met Beth. Well, got reacquainted with Beth. He’d known her during his high school years, but Walter Ward’s daughter was three years younger than him, and nobody was dumb enough to look too long at the coach’s freshman daughter. By the time he was part of the staff, Beth was in college, and Walter Ward approved, on one condition—Kent needed to get his ass into church. Case closed.

Between the church and Beth, Kent found things to fill holes that the game could not. As his family disintegrated around him, first with his father’s death, then his mother’s slow, sad, booze-soaked decline, and Adam’s inability—no, refusal— to move beyond Marie’s death, these were critical new pillars raised to support Kent. The flares of emotional pain faded to a dull, manageable ache, the surges of anger became soft waves of sorrow, and he was able to turn, for the first time, back toward the loss of his sister instead of away from it. And then, finally, to move on, marked by loss but not defined by it.

It was Walter Ward’s idea to bring Kent into a prison. It was him walking out with Kent when he couldn’t take the place, on that first trip. But they went back. And back again, and then, several years later, Kent sat down with Gideon Pearce and prayed for him while the man laughed.

But still he had his games. The mission he’d given himself at twenty—find a way to live that didn’t require football as oxygen—had never truly been accomplished. He insisted, and believed that he succeeded much of the time, on diminishing the importance of the game, that he had turned it from a pathological need to win into something truly healthy, and the boys who came back each year with degrees or good jobs or fine families or simply good attitudes, they were the result that mattered, the only reward he needed.

He lengthened his stride, a good sweat coming now, and tried to tell himself that he didn’t want to win as badly as he felt he did, tried to tell himself that it wouldn’t prove anything about him. A win or a loss made no difference. Chambers had enjoyed a good year and he was sending good boys out into the world better prepared to be good men.

More wins did not matter.

But, oh, how he wanted them.

I will not be defined by a trophy, he often said, but it was easy to say you would not be defined by something you didn’t have.

It was a packed house, and by arriving late, Adam and Chelsea lost any chance at finding a comfortable seat in the bleachers with a decent view. He didn’t like crowds, anyhow, so they just stood at the fence, positioned behind the end zone. If Chelsea minded having to stand, she didn’t say anything about it. Casual fans loved to be centered up on the field—ticket prices for pro games rise every ten yards between the goal line and the fifty, the fifty being considered the best seats in the house. But in Adam’s opinion, the difference between someone who just enjoyed football and someone who truly knew the game was that someone who knew the game wanted to watch from a position that put him in synch with the action. The game moved vertically, so why sit in a position where you were always at right angles to the action? There was such disconnect. Adam had played middle linebacker, and the way he wanted to see the game was the way he’d always watched it unfold from the field—facing down the quarterback and the offensive line, reading his keys, trying to determine the play calls.

Walter Ward Field had bleachers for twelve thousand. Not bad for a small town, but it wasn’t Massillon, either, where the population was the same but the stadium seated almost twenty thousand, the band was essentially a Rose Bowl Parade every week, and there was a live tiger on the sidelines. Massillon had won fifteen state championships in twenty years at one point. Their rivalry with Canton McKinley was, in Adam’s mind and much of America’s, the greatest high school rivalry in history. Both schools were in Stark County, and during one thirty-two-year stretch, the two combined for twenty-eight state championships. It was the gold standard of high school football, and his brother was obsessed with the program’s history, always had been, but their field hadn’t been good to him. His division played the championship game at Massillon. He’d lost both of those tries on the hallowed ground he so adored.

Now, the pep band banging away and cheerleaders screaming and twelve thousand people clapping and shouting, Adam stood with his arms folded behind the north end zone and watched his brother’s squad. They’d gotten the kickoff but somehow did not have the ball any longer; it appeared they’d punted. Kent’s script, of course. Another Walter Ward technique, and one Adam hated. Football was played best when it was played fast and loose, and scripts were the enemy of fast and loose.

The Chambers defense was solid, though Adam thought they should be playing a 4–3 base and not the 3–4 that Byers always used. The 4–3 allowed for better flexibility and adjustments and, the way Adam would approach it, more aggression. Chambers had enough athletes and hitters to put better pressure on the quarterback than they did. All that said, the kids didn’t make mistakes. They knew their responsibilities and upheld them. Nobody prepared a team quite like Kent. If he ever let the kids know that it was okay to want it, to really play with a desperate need to win, he’d start putting trophies in the case. But to do that he’d have to admit it to himself first.

Hickory Hills punted; Chambers got the ball back in great position and went to Colin Mears on a stick route—sprint ten yards out, spin back, know that the ball would be there. The ball was there, but he didn’t catch it. Adam watched him slap his helmet and didn’t like what he saw. Too much tension.

In the rest of the half, they threw to Mears five more times. He caught one of them—barely. Bobbled it and probably would have dropped it again if he hadn’t taken a shot from the cornerback that actually drove him back toward the floating ball, and he got his right hand on it and pulled it in when he went down. The crowd gave that a standing ovation, and Adam could tell the kid hated it. Sympathy applause. The kid understood just what it was, and it hurt him.

The running game was strong, though, and the defense was better, picking off two passes and forcing a fumble. It was 20–10 at the half. All was well with the Chambers Cardinals.

Most of them, at least.

“Rachel’s boyfriend doesn’t look too good,” Chelsea said.

“No,” Adam answered. He didn’t speak much during the games, and she never intruded. Now that the action was paused, though, she turned to him and said, “Do you miss it? Being out there?”

“Hell, yeah.”

“Did you ever want to coach?”

“I would have liked to coach with my brother. Defensive coordinator, that’s what I would have liked.”

“You could have let Kent be your boss?” She said it like she didn’t believe it.

“Absolutely. Nothing about being head coach appeals. All the bullshit that goes with it, the school boards and the parents and the boosters, the media, that’s not for me. Kent’s good at that stuff, he’s got the right temperament. He needs a good defensive coach, though. Byers isn’t bad, but I’d be a hell of a lot better. He doesn’t see enough. You watch the second half, you won’t see many defensive adjustments. It’s why they need to score so damn much. Kent likes that, of course, he’s good at it. The passing game, he’s in love with that. Most men dream of women and riches. My brother dreams of the play-action post.”

She was watching him with a curious gaze, and he said, “What?”

“I’m surprised you would have been willing to work for him.”

He shrugged. “Would have been fun, I think. He’s the right head coach. I could have helped, though. I’m pretty sure I could have helped.”

In the locker room, Kent praised his secondary and chewed out his defensive linemen for not getting better pressure on the quarterback, reminding them that Hickory Hills was going to have to try to pass their way back into the game, and the less time they had to do that, the better. He made a few changes offensively, instructing Lorell to be aware of the way they kept shading a safety over the top to help on Colin—it was leaving opportunities in the slot that he was missing. Lorell nodded, but he wouldn’t look at Colin, and Colin wouldn’t look at anyone. They were all thinking the same thing: it was unlikely that safety was going to be helping out on Colin in the second half, not when he couldn’t catch anything.

“You’ve got to close it out,” Kent said. “This is a team that can put points on the board in a hurry if you give them chances. Let’s not give them chances.”

There were claps and shouts and then they were on their feet and headed out, and Kent got a hand on Colin’s shoulder as he went by.

“Look at me, son. Look at me.”

Colin lifted his head. “I’m sorry, Coach. I’ll get it fixed.”

“I know you will. Drop it down a gear, okay? You’re running routes like there are scouts with stopwatches on you. Run them like it’s a football game instead. Your fourth gear is more than those guys can handle, anyhow. Slow it down, start with the football and then think about the end zone. All right?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll get it fixed.”

They left the locker room then, and Kent held back, turned to Steve Haskins, and asked if he’d heard a halftime score in the Saint Anthony’s game. Haskins always checked the scores, and Kent had chewed him out for it before, so he wasn’t surprised to see a flicker of a smile in his assistant’s eyes.

“They’re up ten.”

Kent nodded.

“Here they come, right?” Haskins said.

“No.” Kent shook his head. “Here we come.”

Chambers scored twice in the third and ate the clock in the fourth.

Four times, McCoy found Colin Mears. Four times, Colin Mears couldn’t handle the pass. Adam wasn’t surprised. Had expected this after the first drop, seeing the boy’s reaction to a ball he’d always caught and somehow had missed. After the last drop, Mears got into a shoving match with the Hickory Hills cornerback and got flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct. Kent took him out then. Mears stood at the end of the sideline, alone, and refused to take off his helmet.

When it was 34–13 and Lorell McCoy took a knee, Adam left the field as the rest of the crowd rose in raucous applause. He passed behind the home bench on his way out, but Kent had his back turned.