The Legend of Jesse Smoke (38 page)

“No.”

“I thought it was in Guam you met her.”

“Yeah—the
first
time.” He looked around as if he was afraid somebody would overhear us.

“What do you mean the first time?”

“See, I met her in Guam the first time. It was in the school, the high school there.”

“And what about the second time? That wasn’t Canada was it?”

“The first time I met her was in Guam. But yes, later I ran into her on a ski trip to Canada.”

“Where in Canada?”

“One of the ski lodges. Near Toronto. I can’t pronounce it.”

“Really.”

“Why?”

“So maybe she
did
play in Canada,” I said.

“She played in Guam. A women’s team in Guam. Just for the last year of high school.”

“Coached by her dad?”

“Yeah.”

“You play football too?”

“Not really—I mean, I played a little.”

“Nate I need the truth here, all right? Are you telling me the truth?”

He looked offended.

“I thought you said you never played football.”

“I never played
well
. I don’t think I ever said I didn’t play at all.”

“But you knew Jesse when she was a young girl.”

“Well, a teenager. In high school.”

I nodded. He got this look on his face. “She’s not a
man
,” he said. “Jesus Christ. Anybody can see that.”

“I know. We’re going to have to prove it, though.”

He shook his head, but he had nothing more to say.

That Thursday, while the team went through its last full-contact practice for Tampa Bay, Flores sent his private jet to Dulles Airport at six o’clock in the morning to pick me up and fly me to New York. It was an emergency, he said. Jesse had refused to appear in court Wednesday afternoon, and when he’d tried to persuade her, she’d insisted she had to talk to me.

Flores himself met me at LaGuardia at a little after seven in the morning. It was barely a day yet—the sun seeping weakly through low clouds over the East River.

“What’s going on?” I said, surprised to see the boss as my welcoming committee.

“There’s no birth certificate. Not for Jesse
or
Robert Ibraham.” It was a long walk from the gate out to the car line, and as we walked he told me what had gone on the day before. Four former Alouette players had apparently identified Jesse as Robert Ibraham. “They were sure,” he said. “They testified that
his
hair was different back
then, looked right at her and said that
his
hair was blond when
he
played with them, that
he
wore it in a close-cropped crew. They kept calling her a
he
. It was goddamned insulting, you can’t imagine, and Jesse just sat there staring at them.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Not that their goal was to be insulting. They all commented on how they wished they could have played with him, how much they admired his skill at quarterback: his quick feet, instantaneous release, his accuracy. His toughness. Not one of them knew him personally. All of them talked about how
shy
he was.” Apparently, according to Flores, the Alouette players testified that Robert Ibraham had stayed away from all of them. Didn’t talk to anybody, and didn’t spend much time in the locker room either. One of them testified that he had heard from one of Ibraham’s friends—he couldn’t remember who—that Ibraham had already started the procedure to make himself a woman, so he skipped out after those early drills in his sweats and never did shower with the men.

“Well, they sure did a good job then,” I said. “Making her into a woman.”

“Level with me here, Skip. Have you ever had sex with her?”

“Of course not,” I snapped, offended at the question.

“You know anyone who
has
?”

“I don’t know. She may have dated a few of the players at first. You’d have to ask them.”

“This is getting to be more trouble than it’s worth,” he said. “The very day the Canadians identify her in court—the very day!—she refuses to testify.” Flores was wearing a gray suit, a dark brown scarf around his neck, no overcoat. When we got outside, the frosty wind sent his hair flying. “We managed to get a recess until this morning at ten a.m.” He kept brushing his hair back with his hand as we walked to where his limousine waited for us. “You get her to that courtroom today, you hear me? She’s going to answer these charges.”

“I’ll do what I can,” I said.

When we were seated in the leather backseat of his car, he said, “This could be our whole season, Skip. You got that? We’ll lose her for good if this lawsuit is allowed to go on. So just—
do
something.”

“Sir, we’ll win the Super Bowl
with
Jesse or without.”

He could see I didn’t believe it.

“But we’ll get her back,” I said.

“You better. Or both you and Engram’ll be hunting down some new jobs.”

I couldn’t help myself. “Is that a promise?” I said

Again, he withdrew into himself. He was sitting right next to me in the backseat of that huge limousine, but it was like he took his mind and went somewhere else. I was just sitting with this well-dressed, intrepid mannequin.

It was a little past eight in the morning when we got to the Ritz Carlton, where Jesse was staying. I had one hour to talk her into testifying, and if she didn’t show up then, Judge Lorenzo could declare her officially in contempt of court or simply rule that the case could go on and extend the temporary restraining order.

I left Flores in the lobby. On the ride from the airport the new day had emerged more fully; it was a clear, bright morning, the sky blue and fresh looking, the air shifty and cold. I thought it might be a good idea to get Jesse out of the hotel, take a walk maybe. But when I got to her room, I realized she wasn’t prepared to go anywhere. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt as always, but her hair was flat and dirty looking and her face had a wrung-out look to it—as though she’d trekked a great distance without water.

“You all right?” I said, as she backed away from the door.

“Sure. Come on in.”

I was glad to find Liz sitting in a comfy chair next to the television. She was sipping some sort of fruit drink. She looked up and smiled when she saw me.

“What’s going on?” I took a seat on a chair by a desk in the room. Jesse sat on the edge of the bed.

“I guess I’m done with all of it,” Jesse said.

Her mother gave a loud, exasperated sigh. “Talk to her. Would you?”

“You’re
not
done, Jesse,” I said. “You’re too good.”

“No?” she looked at me. For the first time I saw defeat in her eyes.

“Jesse,” I said. “I don’t care if you’re a man, or you
used
to be man, or if you’re planning on being a man. None of that matters to me.” She smiled a little but said nothing. “It doesn’t matter to anybody else on this team either, okay? We just want you to continue playing for us.”

“I don’t have her birth certificate,” Liz said. “But I brought a video of when she was a little girl, throwing and kicking the ball. I can walk into that courtroom tomorrow and—”

“You have a video of her?”

“At nine years old, when she won the Punt, Pass, and Kick competition. In two categories.
She
doesn’t want to use it.”

“I’m not going to show them that film. It’s irrelevant. And it’s humiliating, dredging up my little kiddie films.”

“How on earth could it be irrelevant?”

“It just is.”

“
I’d
sure like to see it,” I said.

“I knew something like this would happen,” Jesse said. “I just … I just wanted to get through this season before it did.”

“We haven’t lost yet.”

“That video of you,” Liz said. “It proves—”

“It proves nothing, Mother.” There was no softness in the way Jesse said this, but at the sound of the word “Mother,” Liz could not hold back a little smile of satisfaction.

“The tape is irrelevant,” Jesse went on. “It doesn’t matter what’s on it.”

“Except, how could you be this fellow Ibraham if your mother testifies with the video and proves you’ve always been a girl?”

“The tape’s irrelevant,” Jesse said again. “So is my mother’s testimony.”

“Why?” I said.

“I’m not a man and I never
was
a man,” she said. “But, let’s put it this way—I know who Robert Ibraham is.”

That stopped me cold. Liz and I both looked at each other and almost in unison said, “You do?”

And then Jesse met my gaze with the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen. They were almost gray with sadness. “I lied to you about him.”

My mind reeled a moment. “Well, who
is
he?”

She folded her arms across her chest. “How much trouble
would
I be in if I—if I …” She stopped. I waited. She took a deep breath, then she said, “
I
am. I’m Robert Ibraham.”

It didn’t register with me at first, what she was saying. I thought at first she was confessing to the whole thing. There was a long pause where none of us seemed to be looking at anyone. Then I said, “So … you
were
a man once?”

“I
pretended
to be a man. It was the only way I could play football.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. Liz, eyes wide in amazement, just stared at her.

“I used the name of a guy who really did play college football. Robert Abraham took over my father’s team in Guam when— Anyway, he was the coach there when I left and … I didn’t think he’d mind if I used his name. I changed the spelling to
Ibraham
.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said.

“I just thought—I just thought, you know, I might fool everybody and get to play. And maybe when they saw me play I’d … Only then I had to leave. Right after I signed that contract, one of the players— See, I had a fake ID with Ibraham’s name on it and my picture. I was so scared all the time, I finally broke down and told one of the other players on the team. He convinced me I’d never get away with it.”

“That was Nate?” I said.

She nodded. “How’d you know?”

“Just a guess.”

“He was a backup tight end.”

I started to laugh.

“How much trouble am I
in
?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said, still laughing. “Kinda funny, though, isn’t it? And ironic to boot. I mean, here they are, trying to prove that you’re this man, and that you’ve had this operation and all, and you—you … Do you see how
funny
that is?”

“I guess.” She clearly didn’t.

“I’m surprised this isn’t killing you.”

“Glad
you’re
having fun.” Now she did laugh a bit.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “We’ll blow this town before the end of the day. I don’t think they have a case.”

“But then … haven’t I committed fraud?”

“Jesse,” I said. “There’s not a damn thing that’s fraudulent about you. You’re
the
genuine article. You’re about
the
most genuine article there is in the world. It’s the rest of us—the league, the media, the players and coaches, hell the whole damned world—that’s guilty of fraudulent behavior.”

“What do you mean?” Liz asked.

I turned to her. “The bullshit that gender means a damn thing. That women are the weaker sex and need to be coddled and protected. Because, all along, right under everybody’s nose, it’s pretty clear, isn’t it?—which gender has had to be coddled and protected …”

“You got
that
right,” Liz said.

“To tell the truth,” I said, “we are all of us—from the moment we’re born until the minute we die—pretty well and truly in the shit.” I laughed a bit more, and then I said, “You and I are going to court right now, Jess. Okay?”

She gave me a sad smile as she nodded yes.

“Court” turned out to be a large, rather plush conference room in the judge’s chambers. But there was a big table in there and we all sat around it—our people on one side and the plaintiffs on the other. I was not surprised to see Corey Ambrose there, as a representative of the players’ union. I couldn’t even look at him. The commissioner sat directly across from Edgar Flores, and next to him was the attorney for the Montreal Alouettes—a very gray, jowly faced old man with wire-framed glasses, named (and I’m not kidding) Crook, who kept making notes on a legal pad in front of him. The head of the players’ union was a former offensive lineman named (improbably) Judy Harold. The guy was still in great shape, his sports jacket bulging in the upper arms and chest, and to his credit, he seemed ashamed to be there. Next to him was the players’ union lawyer, a lean, snakelike fellow named Zabriskie who was constantly rubbing his hands together on the table in front of him. On our side were Charley Duncan, Ben Frail, Edgar Flores, Jesse, and me. Jesse had changed her
clothes and brushed her hair, but she still looked a little washed out. She was clearly tired and oddly pensive. She didn’t see the thing as I saw it.

Judge Lorenzo sat at the head of the table. A great tall window loomed behind him and sent angled beams of light over his shoulder and across the table. He looked like a deity preparing to establish justice. He was dressed in a gray business suit with a black bow tie. He wore gold cufflinks and a gold ring on his pinky finger, and like his attire, he was all business.

Across from the judge, at the other end of the room, was a disk projector and whiteboard screen and next to that a table and chair for witnesses. Enormous blue curtains surrounded the windows on both sides and the curtains behind the screen were closed. Apparently they had already watched a lot of the film on previous days, but the whole apparatus was still there for our side.

Ben Frail, too, had laughed when we told him the full story that morning, but the humor of the situation did not distract him from what he saw as certain real legal problems remaining. Jesse’s integrity was going to be on trial now and he didn’t want any of us to forget that.

The first thing Frail did, with Jesse’s permission, was show the Punt, Pass, and Kick footage. Then he asked me to tell Jesse’s story. I did so, fighting laughter the whole time.

Lorenzo did not laugh. In fact, when I got to the part about Jesse pretending to be Robert Ibraham, he leaned forward and gave her what can only be described as a scathing look. But he said nothing. Then Frail brought up the issue of the contract with the Alouettes, and Judge Lorenzo interrupted him. “You’ve already presented your case on that counselor.”