The Legend of Jesse Smoke (28 page)

“Was he a quarterback?”

“No. I don’t think so. He was just a coach. He was a coach when I met him, and he was a coach when I … When we split up. He was a coach when he
died
.”

We watched films for a while, and she saw her daughter from a variety of angles, delivering passes. At one point, on a quick pass to Mickens in the flat, she said that Jesse looked a little flat-footed.

“Yeah, she did there a little maybe,” I said. It wasn’t true. Jesse’s footwork was always perfect. “You ever play quarterback yourself?” I said.

“In a women’s league,” she said. “When Jesse was real small.”

“Where?”

“Guam. At the base. We had a league.”

“Really?”

“I thought Jesse’s father would pay more attention if I was a player.” She looked at me with a wry smile and I turned away, slightly embarrassed. “Didn’t work,” she said.

I thought it would be better if we didn’t go any further into the subject, but then she looked at me as though she was making up her mind to tell me something. Only she didn’t, and after a long pause where I was feeling hot and stupid, I said, “I’m divorced, myself.”

“Jesse’s father, he was a legend in the islands.”

“Yeah, we had some publicity about him in the local papers when Jesse … You know, at the beginning of all this.”

“I left him for Ray Anne. That’s who I was with until last year. She passed away.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I’m a lesbian, case you were wondering.”

“No,” I said. “I mean, I don’t wonder about things like that.”

Back then a lot of gay people, women especially, felt compelled in the most public and unnecessary circumstances to announce their sexuality. I understand how it was back then. Even after gay marriage was legal all over the country, people were still pretty damn mean about it. All of the most liberal and well-meaning folks still made jokes about gays or being gay that made you see there was still a long way to go. Most of the humor was based on being mistaken for gay, and it was a punch line that came from the expectation that it would always earn a laugh. It was beyond me, how anybody could really believe that the work was done when gay people remained the butt of so many jokes in just about every venue. Still, it always embarrassed me to no end when I was confronted with a person’s sexual identity. It was none of my business or anybody else’s business either.

Anyway, when she said that about being a lesbian, I was too embarrassed for words. I mean, what
do
you say when somebody announces that to you? “I never would have guessed” sounds about right, but then you’re sort of making it clear that you make a
point
of guessing about those things; or, you know, that you have some idea what the hell a lesbian looks like. Or you might say, “Really. How’s that working out for you?” Or, “What a coincidence—I prefer women, too.” I felt like telling her that I liked to floss regularly, or that I preferred sea salt to the regular kind. Finally, I simply said, “I’m heterosexual, myself.”

“Jesse was just a little girl when I left,” she continued. “Twelve or thirteen.”

“You don’t remember?”

“Twelve.”

“She says she was eleven.”

“I guess she was.”

Again I didn’t say anything. It was quiet for a while, except for the whir of the fan on the film disk, but then the phone rang, startling me pretty royally. I picked it up and Coach Engram was on the other end. “Flores there yet?” he said.

“No.”

“Well, when he gets there, tell him we’re going to meet in the café across from the compound. Jesse’s coming, too.”

“She is?”

“She’s with me. We’ll be there in a few.” He hung up the phone without saying anything further.

“Jesse’s coming to breakfast, too,” I told Liz.

She seemed to straighten with apprehension when I said that.

As it turned out, I really liked Jesse’s mother. She had a sense of humor and could talk to almost anyone. I don’t think anybody else much cared for her, though. Not even Jesse. Especially not Jesse. She was polite, but … there was no embrace, no real reunion. This didn’t seem to bother Liz a bit. She reached out her hand and said, “Hello,” and Jesse nodded, shaking hands with her briefly. Just another fan to handle. Or business acquaintance.

“I’m very glad to see you,” Liz said.

Flores arrived then, and we all walked into the restaurant. The café was not much, a little breakfast and lunch hole-in-the-wall across from Redskins Park called Huddle Up. They quickly put some tables together so we could all sit down. Jesse sat next to Engram and across from me. She was wearing a long gray skirt, a white blouse, and flat black shoes. Her hair had started to grow out a bit so the curls were more pronounced and covered her ears and forehead with little dark ringlets. She wore sunglasses up on her head, held there on the
strength of her curls. Liz was on her left. Next to me was Edgar Flores, natty as ever, in a blue blazer and white pants, white shirt, and a yellow tie. All this he topped off with a yellow fedora hat and in his hand he carried a cigarette holder with no cigarette in it. Coach Engram said later he looked like a pimp from the islands. I thought he should be in the winner’s circle at a racetrack, standing in front of a big horse, with a couple of tall, shapely brunettes and framed by an array of bright flowers. Engram himself was in his usual coaching sweats, as I was, the two of us looking like Mr. Flores’s stable boys. We were definitely a unique-looking crowd, but there were so many of us, folks left us alone.

Flores went on and on at first about what a great player Jesse was and how glad it made him to bring her to the NFL. He seemed to want to impress Jesse’s mother, who listened politely enough. He really had no idea what he was dealing with, though. He appeared to expect some kind of Kleenex-teary reunion, some heavily emotional scene of renewal for which he could collect a little gratitude. He leaned back after the waitress brought us all coffee. “Well,” he said, beaming. “You two are the main reason for this little get-together.” A long silence ensued, and he looked at both of them as if they had suddenly frozen in front of his eyes. “So, here we are.”

Then, in a perfectly even voice, Jesse asked Liz, “Where have you been?”

“I’ve been in Tennessee, honey, with Ray Anne.”

Jesse turned away. Then Liz leaned over and started whispering to her. But Jesse wouldn’t have it. She faced her mother now with a petulant scowl on her face. I hadn’t seen that look since the Aztecs had bloodied her nose. “I don’t care about your lesbian
friend
.”

I saw Flores set himself back a little—as though he recognized a powerful odor in the room.

“What’s that mark on your nose?” Liz said, after a moment.

“Where have you
been
all these years?” Jesse pressed again.

“Where have
you
been, Jesse? Huh? I wrote to you every week or so for years. You never wrote back.”

Jesse looked down. I thought for a moment this was because we were all sitting there listening, but then she looked back at her mother. “You could have called me,” she almost whispered.

“I would have, Jesse. All you had to do was answer one letter, you know? One note from you and I would have been on the phone so fast …” she paused, looked around the table. I was so embarrassed for both of them right then, but I could see it was Liz who was feeling the brunt of it. “We don’t have to discuss this in front of the whole world, do we?”

All of the men at the table sat completely still.

I decided to step in. “Perhaps it would be better if we let you two discuss this in private,” I said, hoping Coach Engram and Mr. Flores would get up with me, but they just sat there looking at mother and daughter.

“Why are you contacting me now?” Jesse said.

“You’re famous. I didn’t know where you
were
for a long time. Who wouldn’t want to get in touch with a member of their family—”

“
Family
,” Jesse said. “Right.”

“Yeah, family.”

“So you’re after my money.”

“Heavens, no,” Liz said. “Of course not.”

“The first thing you said there was I’m famous.”

“That’s how I found you, I mean—”

“So what do you want then?”

“I want to make sure, you know, folks don’t take advantage of you.”

“Really?”

“You keep every penny if you want, Jesse. I don’t want any of it.” Liz by now appeared profoundly embarrassed. She kept looking around the table at each of us as she talked. “I just want you to know I’m
here
. I’m proud of you, okay? Proud as I can be. And I want to protect you from the vultures …” She stopped and surveyed the
room beyond us a moment. “Not you gentlemen, of course.” I saw Engram cover a smile that threatened to overtake his lips, unlike Flores who gave a hearty old chuckle. Liz turned back to Jesse. “But, see? You can’t be taken advantage of if
I’m
with you. I can make sure of it.”

“I already have three agents,” Jesse said. She glanced at me, and I thought she might point out that I had been taking care of her, too, but sadly she didn’t. “My head coach played for sixteen years in this league and he knows the business. I’m taken care of.”

“Agents can be crooks, too,” Liz said. “I have my real estate license. I’ve studied business law at community college.
And
accounting.” Her voice broke a little, here, and I felt truly sorry for her.

Jesse shook her head. “I can take care of myself.”

Flores started talking about the insurance policy, what it covered, how Jesse would not want for anything if something should happen. He spoke mostly to Liz, and she listened, perhaps relieved just to be rescued from the hard angles of her daughter, who simply finished her breakfast and then sat there sipping her coffee.

It was a long morning. The waitress cleaned up after us and we sat in silence a while. I drank more coffee and watched Jesse’s mother. In her own way she was quite stunningly self-possessed and attractive. She wasn’t sure who she should look at for a moment and the silence was getting to her a bit. Finally she asked Jesse again, “What happened to your nose?”

“It got cut in a game.”

“Liz,” Coach Engram said now. “It still isn’t clear what you want.”

“That’s between Jesse and me.”

Mr. Flores leaned forward. “You know that this can be bad publicity for your daughter, don’t you?”

“What could be?”

“Look, we’re in a precarious position, Liz. We have to be perfect with Jesse. Absolutely perfect.” He talked as if he knew something the rest of us didn’t.

“I still don’t know what you mean,” Liz said.

“Your— Your …” he paused. “Your lifestyle, okay? It could be a problem.”

I couldn’t believe he’d just used the word “lifestyle.” As if a person’s identity—a person’s
being
, her whole
self
could be reduced to such a silly notion. “Life style.” For Christ’s sake. Even back then, I’d thought, we might have gotten past notions like that. Flores’s words seemed about as retrograde as his fashion sense.

“I’m going to move to this area,” Liz said. “I will
be
here if Jesse needs me.”

Jesse would not look at her mother. She just sat with her hands in her lap, staring down at them, saying nothing.

“It’s not a good idea to reveal too much to the media,” Flores said. No one said anything. “It wouldn’t do to have this out there.”

“Aren’t we past that kind of silliness?” Engram said.

“No. Not in this case. There’s already talk about her”—he gestured toward Jesse and paused before finishing—“sexuality. As I’m sure you all know, the media, well, they can make a person’s life pretty miserable.”

All in all, it was about the most awkward breakfast I ever attended; by the end I think even Flores’s yellow tie had started to fade.

In our first offensive meeting after the bye week, I finally spoke to Jesse about calling her own plays. I told her it was okay to change the play now and then when it was clear that what we had called wouldn’t work, but that the rest of the time she was to do what we asked of her. It was the one way, I said, besides injury or playing badly, that she could end up on the bench.

She nodded and seemed to hear me, though she didn’t have much to say by way of a response. I could tell she was preoccupied, but I didn’t want to press her just then. As usual, Engram was working with the defense on our first day of preparations, having already worked with me to sketch an offensive game plan for the Browns. He wouldn’t join Jesse, Spivey, Ambrose, and me until the second day, when we were actually scripting things and setting up the sequence of plays for the first quarter and the beginning of the third.

I should mention a bit of what was going on with Ambrose. He claimed a shoulder strain and went around outside Redskins Park
with his arm in a sling, but there wasn’t anything wrong with him. Coach Engram kept reporting him on the injury list as “doubtful,” and Ambrose himself told the press he was still not ready to play, but the truth was, he was done. With Ambrose’s arm strength gone, Coach Engram wouldn’t have dreamed of putting him back in a game. Still, he was listed as the third-string quarterback, and though he never got a chance to work with the starters, or even with the scout team, he dressed for all of our games. Spivey was our second-string quarterback now, and everybody on the team knew it.

It was sad to see somebody as great as Corey Ambrose had been walking around trying to maintain his dignity with some stupid lie about his physical condition. Then again, he made himself useful; I can say that. He was always helping Jesse when he could, spent a lot of time with her on flares and quick outs, showing her how to look a safety off or move her throwing arm a few times before she let go of the ball. Moving her arm, faking the beginning of a throw, like only Johnny Unitas used to do, that was something Jesse really wanted to develop. It’s a lost art. Unitas would drop back to pass, his throwing arm moving up and down—just a hacking motion from the elbow to the wrist, with the ball there waiting, like he might launch it any second, and every time he moved his arm a defensive player would leave his feet, jumping high in the air to block a throw that didn’t come. And here’s the thing: Once a defensive player leaves his feet, he’s about as effective as a little cloud. You can push him in any direction you want and he goes down. The move almost always gave Unitas enough time to pick out a receiver and hit him. Unitas played before I was born, and he may have been the greatest ever to play the position, but almost no one imitated that feature of his play. Now, Ambrose helped Jesse to learn the art of the “pump fake”—which is what that move was called. Most quarterbacks don’t use it unless the play calls for a fake to a tight end or a quick out to the receiver or a stop-and-go that’s supposed to draw a defensive back up so the
receiver can then turn and run by him. But, by god, Jesse started using it like Unitas did. Every time she dropped back to pass, her arm was moving a bit, up and down, as though she needed to cock her arm before letting the ball fly. It made her that much more difficult to defend. To Coach Engram’s credit, he didn’t cut Ambrose. They were both old quarterbacks, of course, allies in that particular trench, and he must have known he could count on the old veteran to help prepare Jesse for each game.