Creature (6 page)

“We know that,” Jenkins said, his voice icy. “And no one expects that there won’t be some injuries now and then. But this one was absolutely inexcusable.”

Collins frowned. “It was an accident, Bob. You know it.”

“It wasn’t an accident,” Jenkins objected. “I saw it perfectly. Your boy was going down, and he deliberately threw himself onto Rick.”

Collins took a deep breath, then rose and walked to the television set, on top of which sat a video-cassette recorder. “Why don’t we just take a look?” he suggested.

Jenkins gazed at the other man in surprise. “You’re kidding. You mean you tape your games?”

“Every one of them,” Collins replied. “How can you correct errors if you can’t even show the guys what they did
wrong?” He pressed the play button on the tape deck and a moment later an image of that afternoon’s game flashed onto the screen. As both men watched, the penultimate play of the game unfolded before them.

“Right there!” Jenkins suddenly said. “Play it again. You got slow motion?”

Collins rewound the tape a few feet, then started the play over again, this time in slow motion. As they watched, they could both clearly see Rick Ramirez tackling Jeff LaConner. Jeff twisted slightly, then collapsed heavily onto Rick. And for just a split-second, before the rest of the two teams piled onto the heap, both men could see Rick’s head twist at an unnatural angle. They watched the tape again, and then once more.

“Well?” Collins finally asked.

Jenkins was chewing his lip thoughtfully, but Collins could see that much of his anger had drained away. “I don’t know,” he said at last, his voice betraying his pain at having to make the admission of uncertainty. “But it looks to me like he deliberately threw himself on Rick,” he insisted.

“And it looks to me like he lost his balance,” Collins replied, rewinding the tape yet one more time. “Let’s watch it again.” Once more the image came on the screen, and once more the two men watched in silence. When it was over, Collins spoke again, choosing his words carefully. “Look, Bob, I know what you’re thinking, and I know how you feel. But all that happened there is that Rick—what’s his name?”

“Ramirez,” Jenkins replied almost tonelessly, his eyes still fixed on the screen, where Rick’s head was frozen in a painfully grotesque angle.

“Ramirez,” Collins repeated. “Well, it looks to me like he just did his job, maybe a little too well, and wound up under LaConner when he went down. But it wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

Jenkins nodded slowly and finally turned away from the television set. “Maybe,” he said softly, “I’ll change my
mind about that beer.” He picked it up from the coffee table and jerked at the tab on its top, then took a long swig. “It’s been a bad day. Rick … well, if I had my way about things, Rick would be my stepson.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Phil Collins groaned. “I’m sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. If there’s anything I can do—”

Jenkins abruptly met Collins’s eyes. “There is,” he said. “You can tell me what kind of insurance your school carries and if you’ll fight a claim on this case. Rick’s mother has no money at all and—”

But Phil Collins was already holding up a hand. “Enough said,” he assured Jenkins. “I don’t think any of us wants a lawsuit—mind you, I don’t think the boy could win one, but I wouldn’t want to have to fight it. All any of us wants is what’s best for the boy. I’ll start things rolling tonight and keep you posted. And if there’s anything I can do personally, you just let me know. Okay?”

Jenkins hesitated a moment, then nodded, and standing, extended his hand. “I guess I owe you an apology,” he began.

But Collins brushed it aside. “Don’t even think about it,” he said. He flopped back into his chair, then shrugged. “In a way,” he went on, “I can’t say I disagree with you. Sometimes I think the game
is
getting too rough. And every year it seems like the boys are getting bigger and bigger. But what can we do about it? For a lot of the guys in this part of the country, football’s the only way they’re going to get to college, and they can only get there if they play for a winning team. So they keep trying harder. But you can bet,” he added, “that my team will see that film and get a talking- to about dropping when they know they’re hit. We shouldn’t have accidents like today’s.”

A few minutes later, when Jenkins had gone, Collins picked up the phone and dialed the number of the principal of Silverdale High. As briefly as possible, he recounted the conversation he’d had with Jenkins. When he was done,
Malcolm Fraser, whose concerns about the dangers of football were well known to everyone in Silverdale, clucked fretfully.

“I don’t know,” he sighed. “Perhaps we’ve been putting too much emphasis on winning—”

Collins cut him off. “Winning is the whole point of the game, Malcolm. If we’re not out to win, there’s no point in playing at all. So we’ll just do what we can for Ramos, or whatever his name is, and forget the whole thing.”

“Unless they decide to sue,” Fraser replied.

“If they sue, they sue,” Collins said flatly. “And that won’t be our problem. That will be the lawyers’ problem.”

“I see,” Fraser replied after a long silence. Then: “And what about Jeff LaConner? What are you going to do about him? He’s playing awfully rough, isn’t he?”

Collins chuckled hollowly. “That he is,” he agreed. “And if he keeps it up, I can tell you what I’m going to do. Name him Most Valuable Player at the end of the season.”

He was still chuckling when he hung up.

   Charlotte LaConner watched her husband open another beer and pass it over to Jeff, then pop the top on yet another can for himself. It was the third beer for Jeff, the fourth for Chuck, and finally she could contain herself no longer.

“What do you think Phil Collins would say about that?” she asked, nodding toward the Bud her son was emptying into his glass.

But Chuck only grinned at her. “Come on, honey,” he protested. “It’s a big night for Jeff! First game of the season, and a perfect pass on the last play! And it was Phil who told the boys to go out and have a good time.”

Charlotte took a deep breath, then let it out again. There was no point in arguing with Chuck, not after he’d had a couple of beers. And the fact that he knew as well as she did that the coach hadn’t intended to include drinking in his
lifting of the training strictures that afternoon wouldn’t make any difference. But still, the whole thing bothered her.

The image of the injured boy lying motionless on the ground was still strong in her mind, and though Chuck had insisted she was wrong, she still felt that as Jeff’s mother, she should have gone to the hospital to see if the boy from Fairfield was all right. But Chuck had wanted to go out with the parents of some of the other boys on the team, and in the end, as always, she had gone along.

As always, Charlotte had sat in the group of celebrating parents, feeling terribly alone amidst the talk, which never varied from an unending replay of that afternoon’s game. Finally she let her mind drift away entirely, and Chuck had to shake her out of her reverie when the group at last began to break up.

Then, when Jeff had come home an hour ago, it began again. Play by play, father and son had relived the game.

At last they had come to the moment when Jeff plunged through the line, dropped on the other boy, and disappeared under a heap of other players.

“Did you see it, Dad?” Jeff asked now, his eyes glinting with the memory, a wide grin spreading across his face. “Thought he had me, but I fixed him! Just twisted around and dropped on him. Put a knee right into his kidney!”

Charlotte felt her stomach tighten, and suddenly knew she could put it off no longer. Wordlessly, she turned and left the room, went to the bedroom and closed the door. Taking the phone book out of the top drawer of the nightstand, she riffled through it, then dialed the number of the county hospital.

“This is Charlotte LaConner,” she said. “I’m calling about the boy who was brought in this afternoon. After the football game?”

There was a momentary silence before the voice at the other end spoke coolly and impersonally. “And what is your relationship to the patient?”

Charlotte hesitated, then replied tightly, “It was my son who tackled the boy.”

“I see,” the voice said tentatively. Then: “Perhaps I’d better connect you with the duty nurse.”

A few moments later, after explaining once more who she was, Charlotte listened numbly as the nurse summarized Ricardo Ramirez’s injuries.

“But—But he’ll be all right, won’t he?” Charlotte finally asked, the question coming out as a plea.

“We don’t know, Mrs. LaConner,” the nurse replied.

Slowly, Charlotte replaced the receiver, too unnerved to do more than sit still on the bed. Minutes passed as she tried to collect her thoughts. Then, when a raucous laugh echoed from the den, she made up her mind. She stood, straightened her back, and left the bedroom. She paused at the door to the den and waited until her husband noticed her. For a moment he seemed puzzled, but when he saw the expression on her face, his smile began to fade.

“What’s wrong?” he finally asked. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”

“I just called the hospital,” she said. She turned to her son. “The boy you tackled. His name is Rick Ramirez.”

Jeff frowned. “S-So?”

Charlotte licked her lips nervously. “He might die, Jeff. His neck is broken and one of his lungs collapsed.” Despite herself, her voice hardened. “And when you put your knee into his kidney, apparently you ruptured it.”

Jeff’s eyes widened, and Charlotte could see his fingers tighten on his beer glass. “Jesus,” he whispered. But then, as she watched, a curtain seemed to fall behind his eyes. “It wasn’t my fault,” he said, his voice taking on a note of belligerence.

From his chair a few feet from Jeff, Chuck shot her a warning glance, but Charlotte chose to ignore it. “Not your fault?” she asked, no longer trying to contain the anger she was feeling. She moved closer to Jeff. “I heard you say you deliberately kneed him.”

“Well, what if I did?” Jeff demanded, rising to his feet. He was big, nearly six-foot-three, and he towered over Charlotte’s five-foot-four-inch frame. “Shit, Mom, he’d just tackled me, hadn’t he? What did you expect me to do? Just stand there and take it?”

Charlotte reached out to grasp her son’s arm. “But that’s part of the game, isn’t it? You try to get through, and he tries to tackle you. But you don’t try to hurt him on purpose …”

Jeff’s jaw tightened and his eyes blazed with sudden fury. “And you don’t know a goddamn thing about football!” he shouted. Abruptly, he shook his mother’s arm off his own and hurled his still half-filled glass into the fireplace. The stein shattered against the bricks, then Jeff stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

“Jeff!” Charlotte called too late. Already the back door had slammed as well. A moment later they heard his car start up and roar down the driveway. Furious, she spun around to face Chuck.

“That’s it!” she snapped. “No more football! On Monday morning he’s quitting the team. I’ve had it.”

But her husband was staring at her as if she had lost her mind. “Hey, slow down, honey,” he said, standing up and moving toward her. “Maybe he shouldn’t have yelled at you and thrown the glass like that, but how do you think he feels?”

“Him?”
Charlotte blazed. “What about Rick Ramirez?”

“Jeff didn’t mean to hurt him,” Chuck replied. “In the heat of a game, these things happen. And whose side are you on, anyway? You just as good as accused him of trying to kill that kid. Your own son! How the hell do you expect him to react?”

Charlotte was silent for a second, and when she spoke, her voice was tight. “I expect him to behave the way we brought him up. I expect him to be a good sport and to keep in mind the fact that he’s a lot bigger than most kids and could hurt someone. And if he can’t do that, I expect him to stop playing football.”

Chuck LaConner gazed silently at his wife, then shook his head. “You mean you want to keep him tied to your apron strings and you don’t want him to grow up,” he said. “But you can’t do that, Charlotte. He’s not your little baby anymore.” Picking up his own empty beer glass, he left the room.

Charlotte, not quite certain of what had gone wrong, but knowing that she had mishandled the situation very badly, began to clean up the shards of glass scattered across the floor of the den.

4

There was a sharp snap to the air on Monday morning, and as Mark Tanner stepped out the back door into the brilliant sunlight, the first thing he noticed was the sky. Cobalt blue, it had a depth to it that he’d never seen in San Marcos, where no matter how clear the day was, a vague haze always seemed to hang over the world. Here, the mountains to the east were etched sharply against the sky, and there was a different odor, too—not the pungent aroma of the bay, sometimes briskly salty, but more often carrying the faintly nauseating stench of the mud flats—but the clean scent of pine. Chivas, too, seemed to feel the difference, and uttered a joyful bark as he shoved his way past Mark and raced out to the rabbit hutch next to the garage.

But as he fed the rabbits, Mark’s sense of exhilaration began to fade, for already he suspected he would have trouble fitting himself in with the rest of the kids in Silverdale.

He had begun thinking as much Saturday evening, when he’d seen Robb Harris. He’d tried to pick up their friendship where it had been left three years before, but quickly realized that it wasn’t going to work.

Robb had changed.

He towered over Mark now, and it seemed he’d lost interest in a lot of the things they’d shared when they were growing up.

The rabbits, for instance. Robb had glanced at them for a moment, then asked Mark—and Mark was certain he hadn’t mistaken the contempt in Robb’s voice—why he was still “messing around” with them. Mark had frowned.

“You used to raise guinea pigs,” he’d pointed out.