Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (11 page)

Doug fitted a plastic lid on his coffee before taking the magazine. As always he and Randy were at the 7-Eleven, getting their morning coffee. There was a regular crowd who turned up around five every morning: farmers who had finished the milking, the carpenters, electricians, and roofers who had found work in the housing developments in the counties that ringed Washington, D.C. They needed to be on the road early to beat the traffic. Randy and Doug were egg men. They got up early because Randy's three hundred thousand chickens got up early.

Usually everyone took their coffee out into the parking lot, leaning against their trucks, passing the time of day before getting on with things. But today it was raining, and most of the men grabbed their coffee and sprinted back to their trucks. Those heading into the suburbs knew that their long drives from the Valley were going to be even longer. Only a few lingered inside the store, staring at the magazines or scratching off the numbers on lottery tickets.

Doug looked down at the
People.
Three black-and-white pictures were printed in a row above the text. All had been taken at the same party. In the center photograph the actor Payne Bartlett, dressed in black tie, was leaning against a fake board fence, and sitting on a bale of hay at his feet was, according to the caption, "Jill Casler, the wealthy daughter of the late director William 'Cass' Casler."

Randy spoke. "Is it a good picture of her?"

Doug looked at the picture in the magazine again. If it weren't for the caption, he wouldn't have recognized her. In person he had thought her exceptionally attractive; her face had been lively and expressive, her manner unstudied. This picture, however, suggested a person with a personality only slightly north of a glazed doughnut.

"I don't think she's as dumb as this picture makes her look," he said.

Randy took the picture back. "You think this makes her look stupid?"

"Close to brain-dead."

"Oh, well." Randy flipped the magazine shut and tucked it back into the rack. "Guessing a girl's I.Q. was never my strong suit."

Truer words had never been spoken. Perhaps in a reaction to his negative mother, Randy was remarkably uncritical. He was a ladies' man, well acquainted with each year's crop of Young Lovelies. He liked girls who were lively and good-humored. They didn't have to be drop-dead beautiful, as long as they were fun. They needed to be bright enough to read the Pizza Hut menu, but beyond that, Randy wasn't too fussy.

As much as Doug valued discernment in people, he had found the last month of Randy's uncritical company refreshing. He had had enough criticism for the moment. In March he had resigned from his job as head basketball coach at Maryland Tech. This had not been any quiet, discreet parting. If Doug hadn't resigned, he would have been fired.

The path that had led him into a Division I coaching job had been steady as the path out of it had been swift. He had grown up the Valley's star basketball player. He spent every summer at the Five Star basketball camp. During his senior year in high school he had been named to the second-string Ail-American team. With grades and SAT scores that matched his basketball skills, he had left Virginia to go to college at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina.

Duke was one of the shining spots in college basketball. It had an honestly run program with no hint of the scandals that infected so much of college sports. Duke was known as the "Harvard of the South." All its athletes were smart, having SAT scores hundreds of points above some of their opponents' scores. Duke players didn't live in special dorms; they couldn't major in bogus fields like "recreational technology." They had to pass organic chemistry. And every one of the Blue Devils graduated—every one of them.

The school was arrogant about its excellence, and its student body was witty and energetic. After an N.C. State player was arrested for mugging a Domino's pizza delivery man, twenty Domino's pizzas were delivered to the State bench just before the start of the game. Whenever the bald Lefty Driesell, then coach of the University of Maryland, was in town, Duke students came to the game in bald skullcaps. When an opposing player with the last name of Hale was sidelined with a lung ailment, one side of the Duke bleachers shouted "In Hale," with the other answering "Ex Hale" until even the ailing Hale himself was laughing. In the national finals one year, Duke was opposed by the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, which was pretty much the sort of school one would expect to find in Las Vegas. The Duke mascot strutted over the U.N.L.V. fans with a sign reading, "Welcome Fellow Scholars." Of course, U.N.L.V. had its revenge; they beat Duke by the widest margin of any Final Four game ever.

But Duke had a cheer for even moments like that, one they used after plays by schools like N.C. State, Clemson, or Maryland Tech. "That's all right, that's okay," it went. "You'll all work for us someday."

Doug, quick and articulate, had thrived in this environment. Although the supremely gifted David Lyncton—now center for the L.A. Lakers and known nationwide as "the Lynx,"—was his teammate, Doug had been the team leader. He kept practice on an even keel, he encouraged the academic laggards, and he was the bridge between the bench and the starters.

On court he was the defensive star. At six feet four he was tall enough to guard the giants, quick enough to keep up with the little guys. His instincts were superb, and his determination total. "A fellow with four sisters," he was quoted as saying, "learns defense young."

Sportswriters noted his resemblance to the lead character in
Weary Hearts,
and occasionally someone would try to nickname him "the Ranger," drawing a parallel between his defensive skills and Phillip's ride with Mosby's Rangers. The nickname never stuck. Doug's personality was too open and sunny for such a dark appellation.

But, for all this skill, he had one limit—he couldn't shoot. There was no such thing as a routine layup for him, and he was never more than fifty percent from the line. He was always the one who was fouled in the final seconds of a close game. "I really could shoot better," he had quipped, "but then I wouldn't get so much television time."

So there had never been a hope of a pro career for him. After his senior year he had stayed at Duke as a graduate assistant, becoming an assistant coach a year later. His knowledge of the game and his remarkable motivational skills marked him as someone who would soon have his own program.

He was barely thirty when Maryland Tech called. Another school in the state, the University of Maryland at College Park, had received crushing penalties from the N.C.A.A. for such infractions as giving potential recruits a free T-shirt. The state had every reason to worry about the future of Maryland Tech, whose program, many insiders privately thought, was in far worse shape.

Maryland Tech was not the jewel in anyone's crown. It was a large commuter school, and even the best students got only an ordinary education. The athletic department did a startlingly inadequate job. Some of the students on athletic scholarships could not read an airline's in-flight magazine; none of them graduated—not one. They played out their eligibility, then left school after their final game. One a year might go on to the pros. The others had some good memories, but not much else. Certainly not an education.

Doug's mandate was to improve the team's academic standing without impairing its winning record. He did. Some of the kids graduated; the others were reading well enough to get jobs as assistant managers of shoe stores. In each of Doug's first two years the team had come into the N.C.A.A. tournament as a number-fourteen seed. The first year they got to the Sweet Sixteen, the next year to the round of Eight.

Then, in his third year—this year—it all came crashing down. Two weeks before the end of the season, N.C.A.A. investigators came to Frederick. It was the usual recruiting scandal, cash, and cars, but there was a twist—the money and cars had gone not only to the kids or their families, but also to their high school coaches. Influencing the kids' coaches, everyone agreed, was particularly heinous. These were
teachers,
the people who were supposed to be the kids' first line of defense.

Doug resigned immediately, saying farewell not only to his job, but to the fat Nike contract that had come with it. For days afterward the athletic director of Maryland Tech had not pulled his punches, boxing right up to the edge of the slander laws. "Coach Ringling was not up to the challenge... you never know what Division I pressure will make a man do... we regret that anyone associated with our fine institution would stoop to this."

Doug never answered those charges. He accepted responsibility for everything that had happened on his watch; whether he had known about it or not was irrelevant.

And, in fact, he had not known about the scheme to seduce the high school coaches. He was an excellent recruiter; this was not something he needed to cheat at.

But at any moment it would have taken him about ninety seconds to find out. He had known the alumni and boosters were up to something; he had chosen not to ask what it was. Trying to get the kids to go to class and learn something had been challenge enough. Doug had had a standing excuse for himself; he couldn't deal with everything at once.

His view of the experience was now simple: he had made a pact with the devil, trying to coach clean in a crooked program. Like everyone making a pact with the gentleman in red suspenders, he thought he was going to get away with it. Like everyone else, he had not.

He didn't mind for himself. After all, accepting reality was his strength. He did mind for the kids he had left behind. Each year he had recruited a class better than the school deserved. Then he had abandoned the kids to this large, anonymous institution; he was the captain who didn't go down with his ship. True, he had lost his job and his reputation, but those poor kids were stuck in Frederick. He had promised their mothers they would learn to read. Now there wasn't anyone there who cared about that.

The L.A. Lakers, prodded by the Lynx, his old roommate, had immediately offered him a job as a defensive assistant, but he had been raised by a Southern mother. He knew what a gentleman in the middle of a scandal was supposed to do: drop out of sight. He didn't think that coaching for the Lakers, even as an assistant, qualified as dropping out of sight. Also, he had never wanted to coach in the pros. So he came home, back to the Valley, and was living with Randy in a rattle-trap of a house that had belonged to Randy's now-deceased great aunt.

Randy was twenty-eight, five years younger than Doug. He had his own business because two years before, his grandfather, Jill's father, had died, leaving each of his grandchildren a startling generous trust. So Randy had had the capital to start up right. The egg collection was fully automated, so his labor force consisted of Doug and a few high school kids who came in before school each morning and a few others who came afterward. His henhouse was equipped with full-spectrum lighting that simulated daylight and ion chargers that kept down the dust. His specially developed feed got the hens laying larger eggs sooner than they would have otherwise.

Most egg farms were casual family businesses with the paperwork spread out on the kitchen table and a couple of fat dogs who roamed around eating the broken eggs. Randy had the fat dogs, but everything else was sleek and computerized.

He was interested in every new development in egg production, and on the afternoon of the day he had seen Jill's picture, he asked Doug to read some reports on research done on low-cholesterol eggs.

As the high school kids were helping to load the trucks, Doug took the reports back to the little office in the corner of the barn. They were not uninteresting. It did seem to be possible to lower the cholesterol in eggs, but not, Doug concluded, by enough to justify the expense. People with cholesterol problems still wouldn't be able to eat them.

He set aside the reports and took out a list of all the people in the Valley who had been extras in
Weary Hearts.
He sat back in Randy's chair, put his feet up on the desk, and stared at the list, wondering what else he could do, what other questions he might ask them.

The phone rang. Still looking at the list, he picked up the receiver and answered automatically, "Casler's."

He heard a quick gasp at the other end of the line, followed by a pause. The person calling must not have expected this number to be answered in this manner. Then a woman's voice—

"This is Jill Casler—"

And Doug sat up, his feet crashing to the floor. "—and I was given this number for Doug Ringling. Is he available?"

"Jill?" The print-out on Doug's lap spilled open into a long ribbon cascading to the floor. "My God, I never—" He stopped, took a breath, and started over. "This is a surprise. I didn't expect to hear from you."

"Waltz in with a story like that and then not expect to hear from me?" Her voice was light, teasing. "Come on."

"But you didn't believe me."

"No, and I'm not saying that I do now. But I do want to know how you know about stock footage."

Stock footage. So she had been to the studio. She might not believe him, but she had started checking.

This really did surprise him. Usually he was pretty good at sizing up what was happening in a room. It was—or had been—part of his job. Whether the room was a locker room or a recruit's parents' living room, he had to have a sense of what was happening, what direction people were moving in, what kind of push they would resist, what kind they would respond to.

And his sense of Jill Casler's plush hotel bungalow had been of steel shutters locking up tight. She had, he thought, written him off as a complete lunkhead, a good-looking-enough guy, but with carefully stacked lumber where his brains were supposed to be.

Clearly he had been wrong. He answered her question. "I did my homework. I read that book about A
Star Is Born.
That's where they found some of its footage. But, tell me, did you find out anything? I just threw airballs."

"I didn't do any better."