The Prophet

36

AFTER PRACTICE KENT AND his staff met for an hour to discuss the offensive game plan, considering tight end seam routes and quick slants and bubble screens and all of the things that might work if their number-one receiver was done catching the ball. Then they emerged from the locker room and found Colin Mears sitting on the hood of his car, pointing toward them like an accusatory finger.

“What’s he still doing here?” Byers asked, and then Haskins said he’d go talk to him, but Kent shook him off.

“I’ve got it. Go on home, guys.”

He crossed the grass to Colin’s car alone. It was cold out, and the boy’s breath fogged the air. He’d been waiting a long time.

“You all right, son?”

Colin nodded. He had a tennis ball in his right hand. Squeezing rhythmically. Working on his grip strength.

Kent propped one foot on the tire of the boy’s Honda. “Why are you sitting here in the cold, Colin? Last thing we can afford is for you to get sick.”

Colin shifted the tennis ball from his right hand to his left, kept squeezing.

“I want you to know I’ll make plays this week.”

“Don’t doubt it, son. You always have.”

“Not Friday night.”

“You worry more about your stat line or the scoreboard?” Kent said. He was studying the worn tire treads, not looking at the boy.

“Scoreboard.”

“Then you ought to be happy.”

“Yes, sir.” He stopped squeezing the tennis ball, passed it from hand to hand, and said, “What’s the deal with your brother, Coach?”

“Pardon?” Kent looked up now.

“Why were they searching his house?”

Kent was quiet, looking into the kid’s intense eyes, and then he said, “Because they thought it might help. That’s all you need to know.”

“What more do you know?”

“Excuse me?”

“You have to know what they were looking for. It’s your brother.”

“The police don’t always tell you what they’re looking for, Colin. Sometimes they don’t even know. It’s about gathering—”

“What sort of person punches a cop?”

Kent stopped talking. He stared at Colin for a few seconds and then turned his face back to the field, where the blank scoreboard stood in ghostly silhouette, bare-limbed trees weaving in the wind beyond, and, out farther, the gray-on-gray line of the horizon, Lake Erie.

“Adam has some issues with his temper. Always has.”

“The police went there looking for something, and he didn’t want them to find it. He punched a cop, Coach. Who does that? Instead of helping them, he tried to stop them. Why didn’t he want them there? Why didn’t he—”

“They were going through my sister’s things,” Kent said, and his own voice was angrier than the boy’s, it was his lace-up-those-shoes-and-head-for-the-bleachers voice. “That’s one of the things you don’t understand, son, and you should begin to consider them before you start theorizing. Tell me this—how would you feel if someone started going through Rachel’s room without explaining it to you? That’s how Adam felt. I’m not defending his reaction, and I won’t. It was a poor choice. He’d admit that. But he’s got some problems with his temper, and the police found a sore spot. That’s what happened. That’s all. He’s as committed to helping find this guy as anyone, Colin. I can promise you that.”

Colin nodded. “Okay. It just… it surprised me.”

“It shouldn’t have. You understand the situation better than most. Rachel went to see him asking for help and she… she was less than truthful. You already know this.”

“Yes, sir. I just wondered if he knew something. If you knew something. Because if there’s anything you can tell me, it would help so much to have an idea of what’s—”

“Police don’t make a practice of sharing information with civilians. I know that it’s hard. Remember that. I’ve been there. I wish to God you weren’t there right now, but there’s no stepping backward. We put our heads down and move forward. That’s the only choice.”

“I’m trying.”

“I know you are. It’s not a matter of effort, son. It’s not something you can control.”

The tennis ball slipped from Colin’s hand. He tried to catch it on the bounce, missed, and then it rolled under his car. Kent blocked it with his foot, picked it up.

“How many of those have you done?”

“Had three thousand when you came out. Lost track then.”

Kent had been ready to head home, but he looked at the kid now and then tilted his head in the direction of the locker room.

“Let’s watch some video, shall we? A lot to work on.”

Colin slipped off the hood of the car and they walked together into the locker room.

“You want to see Adam?” Kent asked, the words out of his mouth without a thought.

Colin looked both surprised and afraid. “Talk to him?”

“No. I mean on tape. See the kind of player he was.”

The kid looked anything but enthused, but he said, “Sure.”

“I’ll just show you the last drive,” Kent said. “Then we’ll look at Saint Anthony’s.”

He wasn’t sure why he wanted Colin to see it so badly. Maybe it was just a chance to leave a different image in the boy’s mind from the one on the front page of the paper. That image wasn’t fair to Adam, it was a preserved lie, nothing more.

The man’s name is Clayton Sipes, Kent wanted to say. He killed her, and I brought him here. It’s got nothing to do with Adam.

He couldn’t say that, of course. He could play the video, though, could show Colin what Adam had been once, before he’d been the man in handcuffs and bloodstains on the front page. Kent hadn’t watched it in years. He didn’t like watching it. Hadn’t even at the time, really; the only person in that stadium from Chambers who had not enjoyed every moment of the championship-winning drive was now their head coach. He’d had the tape converted to DVD years earlier, and now he slipped the disc into the player and turned on the projector and then it was 1989 and the Cardinals were playing Angola Central, the unbeaten and top-ranked Tigers.

“He played both sides of the ball. Fullback on offense. Best blocking fullback I’ve ever seen in high school. If you stayed behind him, you’d gain a lot of yards without breaking a sweat.” He fast-forwarded through the first three quarters—Chambers had scored first, Angola answered with two in the second quarter, then fumbled to start the third and Chambers converted and it was all tied up. The Tigers made a beautiful drive, meticulous and precise, put it in the end zone early in the fourth and then went for two and got stuffed: 27–21 with 10:41 left in the game.

“Here we go,” he said, and pressed PLAY.

The Chambers return man botched the kick, then got lit up and driven into the turf at his own four-yard line. The Angola fans were going crazy, and on the sidelines Walter Ward stood with his arms folded and his eyes flat. Kent was there, too, clipboard in hand, and he remembered that he’d felt sick, that he was suddenly just fine being the backup.

“What you’re about to see,” he said, “is not the brand of football we play. But it worked.”

Adam was the last one out, his teammates already lined up as he entered with trademark slow swagger, a gentle bounce to his step, shoulders swaying side to side, head bobbing.

“Promise package,” Kent said. “That’s what this was called.”

One wide receiver, split out right, one tight end, and a three-man backfield: two tailbacks, one left and one right, and a fullback ahead of them, a fullback who would never touch the ball, who was there just to lay the wood. That was Adam.

“Why ‘promise package’?” Colin asked.

“Because we never lied out of it. Never tried to fool the defense. It was Coach Ward’s baby that year. He loved it. From the first practice, he told us that we would never give them anything but what they expected when we went to that formation. It was a psychological thing, it was pure intimidation. We were saying, Here we come, and you can’t stop us. The fullback is Adam. We called him the prophet. Those were the plays—prophet left and prophet right.”

“Prophet?”

“When he took the field offensively, he told the defense exactly what was coming, that we intended to run it right down their throats.” The name caught on Kent’s ear now, though, it called up a memory of Clayton Sipes: If Gideon was the sword, then I’m the prophet.

Colin said, “Coach? What are you thinking?”

“Nothing,” Kent said, but what he was thinking was that he’d talked about this play in his visit at Mansfield, he’d talked about this season and this play and the way being steadfast and diligent led to victory, the way you had to absorb the hits and shake them off. Prophet right, prophet left, he’d explained it all, explained the reward of the grind, the reward of endurance.

Colin’s stare brought him back, and he tried to shift his mind from Sipes to football.

“It was a strange approach, because usually you treat play calling like a chess match. Out of this set, though, Coach Ward wanted it to be clear to every team that we were essentially saying, Stop this if you can. They usually couldn’t, and that’s the height of frustration for a defense. It breaks you down. Physically, sure, but more so mentally. Once you break their spirit, you own the ballgame.”

First snap, and on the first run, Adam caught a linebacker who was standing too high, planted him in the turf, and Chambers was out to the twelve already, eight yards on the play.

“Wow, he could hit,” Colin said.

Kent nodded. “Big kid, but just hard. Not gym muscle. There’s a difference. You know that. Some guys are naturally hard. Coach Ward always called it loading dock muscle.”

Second snap. A brutal collision. Three yards. First down. Now out to the fifteen.

“I was waiting for a change here,” Kent said. “I figured we’d gotten our backs away from the goal line, would open it up a little bit more. But…”

Prophet left.

This time Angola brought a safety on a blitz, and he got through the line almost simultaneously with the handoff and dropped the runner. Chambers went back into promise package, back to prophet left. Gained four yards. Walter Ward refusing to blink.

Sixth carry, prophet right, fifteen yards, first down. Adam hit an Angola linebacker so hard going around the end that, two decades removed, Colin Mears winced. Seventh snap, prophet left, a bigger hole this time, fourteen yards gained, getting across midfield. Even on the poor audio of the old tape, you could hear the buzz in the stands, because everyone got it by now—Ward was going to make Angola prove they could stop this.

Eighth snap, nine yards, and the Chambers fans were beginning to roar.

“He has a broken hand from this point on,” Kent said.

“Your brother?”

Kent nodded. “I was the only person who knew something was wrong.”

“How did you know?”

Kent picked up the remote and rewound. “Adam used Jim Brown’s technique.”

Colin understood, because they’d talked about it before. A lot of kids—a lot of pros, even—liked to pop up after suffering a massive hit, to show how tough they were, show that they weren’t hurting. The problem with that approach was that sometime you were going to be hurting. Then the defense knew, and they fed on it, grew strength from your pain. Jim Brown, the Cleveland legend, who took more abuse from defenses than maybe any other running back in history, had developed a system for that: he stayed down, rose slowly, and limped back. Every play. The defense never knew when he was hurting because he looked the same after every hit. He gave them nothing emotionally, nothing they could feed on. It was very different from the way Kent coached football—speed, speed, speed—but if you had the hitters, it was effective. Demoralizing. The defense played to hurt you, and they wanted to know when they had.

“Adam had a lot of adrenaline,” Kent said. “Getting up slow was hard on him. So he developed this technique where, once he was down, he’d make himself squeeze the turf, first with his left hand, then with his right. It slowed him down. On Saturday mornings, he had to spend twenty minutes digging dirt out from under his nails. Because of course he refused to wear gloves. Or long sleeves under his jersey. He was one of those. Now watch what he does here.”

On the replay, Adam cleared the hole, then got blown up by a linebacker and tumbled to the turf. One of the Angola players looked down—pointedly, obviously, and stepped on his right hand, then twisted the cleats.

Colin hissed in a breath. “Nobody saw that?”

“No. I missed it, even. But I saw this.”

Adam was down, supporting his weight with his right forearm. He reached out and dug the fingers of his left hand into the field, then reached out and did it again.

“Left, left,” Kent said. “He’d never done that before. That was when I knew.”

Back on his feet and back to the line, and now it was prophet right, six yards, Adam dropping a 250-pound defensive tackle, just splintering him as the tailback scampered through behind, clear and untouched until he stepped out of bounds.

Angola thirty-two-yard line now, clock under six minutes, and the Angola coach was screaming at his guys. They can’t run over us! They can’t run over us! Show some heart!

Prophet left, twelve yards, and Colin said, “They’re not even watching your vertical routes anymore. Those guys are open by ten yards.”

He was right. The safeties were in the box and now even the cornerbacks were cheating down, trying to help stop the bleeding. All Pete Underwood had to do was throw it out there. But promise package was promise package. It told no lies.

Adam was the right player for it, no question. Last one into the formation every time, always with that bouncing swagger, and if anyone spoke to him he didn’t respond, his focus was total, and he warned you of it with every step. I am the hammer. You’ll feel me shortly.

“Coach Ward told me once that Adam should have been a boxer,” Kent said. “That he would have been a nightmare, because he fed on the taste of the canvas.”

“Meaning, what, he liked being knocked down?”

“It fired him up, at least. We scared teams with him out there. You’ll see it by the end.”

On the screen the action had paused, because Angola took a timeout. The defensive coaches were screaming at their guys, telling them this was it, stiffen up and shut them down, show us some heart!

The first play after the timeout was from the twenty-six, and it was prophet left, the eleventh straight running play, and on this one the instruction from the Angola coaches during the break showed itself. The linebackers weren’t trying to separate the ball carrier from the ball anymore, they were trying to separate Adam Austin’s head from his body. Two hits from two different directions, one a blatant helmet-to-helmet shot, and Adam rocked up and over and was on his back under the lights as the ball carrier ducked and spun and carried it to the fourteen.

Down on the field, Adam rolled over until his face mask was resting on the ground, and reached out with his left hand. Squeezed the turf twice. Rose.

Second and two, clock under five minutes. Prophet right and they lost a yard—the Angola defenders driving Adam straight backward and into the ball carrier to make the tackle.

Facedown again, two squeezes with the left hand, then back up. Third and three. Prophet right. The offensive line blew it again, they were getting tired. Gained a yard.

Fourth and two.

The Chambers crowd was quiet. Down on the sidelines Ward stood impassively, arms folded, and next to him a fifteen-year-old Kent Austin stared at the ground.

“Watch this,” Kent said softly. “Watch what Adam does.”

Back into promise package, only Adam didn’t get down into his stance. He stood up tall and began bouncing on the balls of his feet, and against his sides he shook his hands.

“He was screaming,” Kent said. “You could probably hear it at the top of the stands. Everyone thought he was just getting them fired up, and he was, but it was from the pain, too. See what he’s doing with his hands? He’s got broken bones sliding around at this point, and he started to shake his hands like that to call up the pain. He wanted to feel it, needed to feed on it. This was it, this was the ballgame, we had to get two yards.”

The crowd saw Adam and heard him and found confidence in him, and now the roars were back, and feet were hammering on the aluminum bleachers and the play clock was counting down, and finally he dropped back into his stance, and then they went prophet right.

Helmet to helmet, the impact staggering, and then one linebacker was down and another rose to replace him but fell as Adam drove forward and Evan Emory, the tailback, came in tucked behind him, chasing the tornado’s wake. They blew out of bounds with a gain of four—first and goal from the nine.

For just a moment they’d been together then. Adam and Kent. The force of the play had carried Adam down out of bounds and right to where Kent trailed Coach Ward. When Adam got up, they were face-to-face, and Kent had said, “Nice hit,” and he remembered that his voice had seemed impossibly small and weak. Adam spit out his mouth guard and a streamer of blood came with it, and he said, “We’re almost there, Franchise. Almost there.”

Back to the field, and Angola was broken. After that fourth and two, Angola’s defense was done and they knew it.

“I wish Ward hadn’t run it every play,” Kent said. “Or he could have let him have a carry. Adam was on the field for every snap, we ran him fifteen straight times, seven of them with his hand broken, and on the stat line he never gained a yard. On the stat line, he’s standing still.” His voice had thickened, so he coughed to clear his throat and said, “Watch what the safety does here.”

They took the snap, fifteenth of the drive, first and goal from the nine, and the line opened a nice gap and Adam came through it and the Angola safety, who’d dropped down in the box to stuff the run, winced ahead of the contact, stiffened up and turned his head a bit just before Adam hit him, just before Chambers cruised into the end zone for the score.

“He tried to get out of his way,” Colin said. “He didn’t want any piece of him.”

“No, they did not. Not by then.”

“They make it close on the next possession? Have a chance?”

“Nope. Turned it over on downs.” Kent was suddenly regretting his choice to screen the game, and he didn’t know why. He’d wanted to show Colin the way his brother played football, and Colin seemed impressed, so why did Kent wish he hadn’t watched that tape?

“Let’s look at Saint Anthony’s,” he said, getting to his feet. “That Angola game’s more than twenty years old. We’ve got our own to work on.”