Inexcusable (2 page)

I was unfairly famous one time, for a little while. No, I was infamous. No,
notorious.

Famous, then infamous, then notorious.

Then it all went away and things quieted back down and that's when the stuff really started happening.

But the thing is, it was all wrong. It was all unfair and incorrect and ass-backwards. None of it happened the way it should have.

Here's why I got famous. I got famous because I crippled a guy. No, that's not right. I didn't cripple a guy. He got crippled, and I was part of it. The difference is very important.

He wasn't even crippled, exactly, but he surely doesn't play football anymore.

I shouldn't even have been there. That's the thing, understand. I shouldn't even have been in that spot, in that game, that day. I don't normally play cornerback, see. I am second-string cornerback. Mostly I'm a kicker. I'm first-string kicker, third-string tight end, and second-string cornerback.

This is significant because of the league we played in. This was not a passing league. This was not a razzle-dazzle league where the ball and the buzz were in the air all the time and there were scouts here from big-time motion-offense colleges like Miami and Southern Cal looking for talent. This was just another lopey suburban league like a million other suburban leagues around the country, full of white wide receivers and built around fullbacks who got their jobs based on the fact that their backs were very full indeed, like the view of a grand piano from above.

So the passing game was not an important thing. Not important to the game, and surely not important to me. Understand, I could have been a starter for this team, as a cornerback or as a tight end. Coach wanted me, in fact, always badgered me, to play more. But I didn't want to play more. I wanted to play less. Because I was wasting my life at cornerback and tight end. Because I wasn't good. Good enough for this team? Sure. Good enough for any decent college in America?
I had a better chance of ice dancing in the Olympics.

Kicker, though, was a different story. There was a reasonable chance I could slip in as a placekicker on a respectable small-to-midsize program if I worked hard at it.

So I did. And every year I played a little less offense and defense where I might get mangled, and spent a lot more time on the sidelines kicking the air out of that ball, out of the hands of whoever would hold for me, into that practice net over and over and over.

Until Coach dragged me into the game. Other guys needed a breather here and there. And I was no liability on the field, so I had to do my bit when called upon.

Matter of fact, I was an improvement on the guys I replaced. Because I always did what I was told. I always did it by the numbers. I always followed the plan. And I always gave it full tilt.

That is me. If I am any good at anything it is because I do it just like that. Do like you're taught, do it by the numbers, and do it maximum, and you will do something well. I figure.

I wasn't looking for any full-time cornerback job, and I wasn't looking to catch the eye of some Division III scout looking for defensive backs. I was looking to get the job done the way I was taught, and get back to the sidelines where I could kick and kick and remain safe, and get the easiest possible college scholarship so that my dad could come and see me at Homecoming and not have to
remortgage the house to pay for the privilege. My dad could come on some excellent Homecoming day, my sisters would be up there, Mary on his right and Fran on his left, sitting up there in the sharp freezing November sun and then they would be able to see me run onto the field at the end of a big game and
bang
that ball through the posts, just as cool as you like.

That would be the moment, wouldn't it? That would be the best. Every eye on me, because the kicker is the only one who can do that, hold every eye, hold the game close to himself, and then Fran and Mary and Dad would be on their feet, screaming louder than everyone, so proud they could just expire, and I would wave dramatically at them, and later we would go to a nice restaurant and I would eat like a king and listen to the best people I knew telling me I was very good.

That was my dream. That was as far as my dream went, and I would have stacked my dream up against anyone's.

Which is why I shouldn't have been on the field that day. I should have been working on my field goals, because guys were starting to get their offer letters from schools and I wasn't. I had had some interest from schools, but you would have to call it tepid if you called it anything.

Understand. I should not have been on that field. They should not have had me on that field. I had to kick if I was going to get anywhere.

But first, there was business. It was late in the season,
in a game that didn't matter to the state championships or the league standings or even to any of the parents of the players beyond the twelve or so in the stands, but for some reason, the quarterback on the other team started going mental. One of those parents had to be his, and he must have been aware that one or more of the others was a scout with a desperate need for a quarterback and an offer letter in his fist, and that quarterback must have been opening his mail every morning just like I was, to the same screaming lack of interest from the college football fraternity with time whipping by at whiplash speed.

Because he started to throw. The sonofabitch started to throw. And throw and throw and throw.

I even had to stop kicking to watch. He was immense. He was a monster. I was thinking, jeez, if you had just thrown like this the last three years you could be sitting at home right now comparing illegal incentives from Nebraska and LSU instead of busting your hump trying to get somebody's attention now.

But he sure was kicking snot out of us. All our defensive players—from our tubbo linemen to our confused concrete linebackers to our backs who circled and flailed their arms looking like they were flagging down help for one car wreck after another—were absolutely ragged. They had their tongues dragging on the ground as they lamely pursued the quarterback, then when they missed him, missed the ball, then when they missed that, missed
the receivers. Replacement defenders were shoved onto the field after every play.

Which is how I came to be there, when I shouldn't have been. When fate and the coach and the devil shoved me in there.

I did what I was told. I did what I was taught. I did what I did, what I always did, what I still always do. I followed things to the letter of the law. And I followed things to the spirit of the law.

It is a game played to a particularly rough spirit. It's a fact. Some would call it violent. Functioning within that specific world is not the same thing as functioning within the regular one. Circumstances change things.

They were getting away with a lot of over-the-middle stuff. Anybody could see that. It's elemental. You cannot just let a team keep throwing the ball right over the middle, behind your linebackers and in front of your corners and safeties, and not make them pay for that. Everybody understands this, and if they don't, then they need to try.

They teach you that from very early on. I learn my lessons. I comprehend the game. I play as I am taught.

Stick 'em.

I saw it unfolding again, the same way I saw it unfolding from the sidelines, play after play, when the guys on the field could probably guess what was happening but were just too whipped to do anything about it.
The quarterback took the snap, took three quick long strides back into his pocket, and let sail with a motion too quick practically to even see, more like a baseball catcher throwing out a runner.

The receiver, my guy, my responsibility, was just slanting off his pattern, angling across toward the middle of the field.

You could see it from a mile. There was no decision to be made, really. There was not more than one possible thing for me to do. There was in fact exactly one thing for me to do.

I could have closed my eyes and hit him. I mean, right from near the start of the play, I could have shut my eyes tight and still run full steam, and still arrived at just the right spot at just the right time, me, him, and the ball, because they were doing it so textbook, so simply, so thoughtlessly. It had been too easy. We had made it too easy. They were getting too comfortable. Too lazy, spoiled, entitled. You need to never do that. Never, ever, ever. It is inexcusable. It is so dangerous out there, you can never ever get spoiled, just because it is coming too easy to you. If you do that, you create a situation of your own danger, of your own making, which otherwise would not have existed, and you put me in a position to do the only thing there is to do.

When you hit a guy with all your being, hit him the way
a car hits a moose, you would expect it to hurt both of you. But it doesn't hurt the hitter, if the hitter has hit perfectly. It is a strange sensation, almost a magical sensation. The car takes a crumpling, and the moose takes a mangling.

But not the hitter. Not if you do it right, do it the way you have been taught to do it by guys who have smashed into a hundred thousand other guys before and who were taught by guys who had smashed into a hundred thousand other guys.

It's like you smash right through him. Like he's not even there. You go in, you go down, and you just find yourself there, lying as if you are just getting up out of bed. You feel nothing bad. You feel relaxed, in fact, refreshed. You even hear a short soundtrack come out of him, a kind of a grunt- cry voice forced up through fluid, through his nose, that would be scary if you heard it anywhere else. It isn't scary when you hit a guy so perfectly, though, it is something entirely else. It almost sounds like ecstasy when you play it over in your head as you get up and trot off, just a little, little bit horny.

My timing was perfect. The defensive back hit the receiver at the instant the ball arrived. A beautiful pop and explosion, like fireworks.

And that was that.

I was already on the sidelines before I knew anything. I was already back, picking up my practice ball,
grabbing somebody by the jersey to come hold for me so I could kick a few and make up for lost time and get a yard closer to an offer, a college program, a Saturday game and a nice restaurant with my nice people.

I never received so many hard slaps on the back.

It wasn't a fumble, because he never had a chance to get possession of the ball. It just popped up in the air, straight up, just like the guy's helmet did, and somebody, some straggler from my team who was just standing around waiting to get lucky, got lucky, and caught the ball. Then he fell down, and a lot of other guys fell on top of him.

Great. We were on offense now, and I was off to the sidelines.

Where I became a small-time short-term hero.

“Way to bang him, Keir,” somebody said, and banged me on the back.

“Way to stick.”

“Mowed him, Keir. Absolutely killed him.”

Until it stopped. All of it. Nobody touched me then, nobody said anything more. Some goddamn monster vacuum came and sucked all the sound, all the air and life out of the whole field, as every eye turned to the spot. The spot where I was a few seconds earlier, where I did my job as well as it can be done, where all the coaches were now and all the referees, and several people from up in the
stands, and where people were looking back toward the school buildings and waving, waving for even more people to come.

I stood there, all vacuumed out myself, feeling like a head in a helmet floating above where my body should have been.

My holder walked away.

*  *  *

It was news. There were inquiries and investigations and editorials. I was home from school for a week, for my own good, for my peace of mind, because I couldn't possibly concentrate, couldn't hear a word with the constant roar in my ears coming from inside my own head and from all points around it. The phone rang all the time, and my dad answered it. He never put me on the phone, never shied away from a question, never lost his patience with school officials or local radio or whoever. He took off work and stayed there with me and played Risk, the game burning on all week as we took great chunks of continents from each other and then lost them again in between phone calls and lots of silence and lots of talks where he said not much more than that everything was going to work out all right and that it didn't much matter anyway what any investigation said because he already knew, knew me, and knew that his internal, in-his-own-heart investigation had cleared me.

“You're a good boy,” he reminded me every time I needed reminding.

I didn't look at the mail. He did that, too. I could tell, though, if he had opened any letters from college football programs. He hadn't. No acceptances, no rejections the entire week.

No acceptances, no rejections. It was as if I did not exist. No acceptances, no rejections. That's being exactly nobody, that's what that is.

By Friday of the week I stayed home, everybody had looked into the accident. It was an accident. And also, it was no accident, anything but an accident. Everybody concluded—though not happily—that I had not done anything wrong. I had not done anything out of line. I had not done anything blameworthy.

“An unfortunately magnificent hit, in the universe of football” was what the writer called it, in the article about my being cleared.

The game, Risk, was unchanged at the end of that sorry week. It was right back where we'd started it. In stock car racing, when there is a wreck on the track, they wave the yellow flag, which means everybody keeps driving, but nobody passes anybody else, nobody changes position, they just continue, motor on, high-speed float, until things are stabilized and you can race again. We ran that week under a yellow flag, me and Dad.

Quietly, I returned to classes the following Monday. Everybody made a great effort to put the incident away, back, in the background, one tackle, late in a game, late in
the season, very late in a high school football life. Very possibly the end of my football life.