Bleachers (12 page)

“You could call it an altercation,” Neely said, still prepping his first and only biscuit.

“No one’s ever talked about it,” Paul said.

“So what happened?”

“An altercation.”

“Got that. Rake’s dead now.”

“So?”

“So, it’s been fifteen years. I wanna know the story,” Mal said as if he were drilling a murder suspect in the back room of the jail.

Neely put the biscuit on his plate and stared at it. Then he glanced over at Paul, who nodded. Go ahead. You can finally tell the story.

Neely sipped his coffee and ignored the food. He stared at the counter and drifted away. “We were down thirty-one to zip, just getting the hell beaten out of us,” he said slowly and very softly.

“I was there,” Mal said, chewing without interruption.

“We got to the locker room at halftime and waited for Rake. We waited and waited, knowing that we were about to be eaten alive. He finally walked in, with the other coaches. He was way beyond furious. We were terrified. He walked straight up to me, pure hatred in his eyes. I had no idea what to expect. He said, ‘You miserable excuse for a football player.’ I said, ‘Thanks, Coach.’ As soon as I got the words out, he took his left hand and backhanded me across the face.”

“It sounded like a wooden bat hitting a baseball,” Paul said. He, too, had lost interest in the food.

“That broke your nose?” Mal said, still quite interested in his breakfast.

“Yep.”

“What’d you do?”

“By instinct, I swung. I didn’t know if he planned to hit me again, and I wasn’t about to wait. So I threw a right hook with everything I could put into it. Caught him perfectly on the left jaw, flush to the face.”

“It wasn’t a right hook,” Paul said. “It was a
bomb. Rake’s head jerked like he’d been shot, and he fell like a bag of cement.”

“Knocked him out?”

“Cold. Coach Upchurch rushed forward, yelling, cussing, like he was going to finish me off,” Neely said. “I couldn’t see, there was blood all over my face.”

“Silo stepped up and grabbed Upchurch by the throat with both hands,” Paul said. “He lifted him up, threw him against the wall, said he’d kill him right there if he made another move. Rake was dead on the floor. Snake Thomas and Rabbit and one of the trainers were squatting beside him. It was chaos for a few seconds, then Silo threw Upchurch to the floor and told all of them to get out of the locker room. Thomas said something and Silo kicked him in the ass. They dragged Rake out of the room and we locked the door.”

“For some reason I was crying, and I couldn’t stop,” Neely said.

Mal had stopped eating. All three were staring straight ahead at the little lady by the stove.

“We found some ice,” Paul continued. “Neely said his hand was broken. His nose was
bleeding like crazy. He was delirious. Silo was screaming at the team. It was a pretty wild scene.”

Mal slurped down some coffee, then tore off a piece of a biscuit, which he dragged across his plate as if he might eat it, or he might not.

“Neely was lying on the floor, ice on his nose, ice on his hand, blood running down his ears. We hated Rake like no man has ever been hated. We wanted to kill somebody, and those poor boys from East Pike were the nearest targets.”

After a long pause, Neely said, “Silo knelt beside me and yelled, ‘Get your ass up, Mr. All-American. We gotta score five touchdowns.’ ”

“When Neely got up, we stormed out of the locker room. Rabbit poked his head out of a door, and the last thing I heard was Silo yelling at him, ‘Keep those sumbitches away from our sideline.’ ”

“Hindu threw a bloody towel at him,” Neely said, still softly.

“Late in the fourth quarter, Neely and Silo got the team together by the bench and told us that after the game we were running back to the
locker room, locking the door, and not coming out until the crowd was gone.”

“And we did. We waited in there for a long time,” Neely said. “It took an hour just to settle down.”

The door opened behind them as one group of locals left while another trooped in.

“And y’all never talked about it?” Mal asked.

“No. We agreed to bury it,” Neely said.

“Until now?”

“I guess. Rake’s dead, it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Why was it such a secret?”

“We were afraid there’d be trouble,” Paul said. “We hated Rake, but he was still Rake. He’d punched a player, and not just anybody. Neely’s nose was still bleeding after the game.”

“And we were so emotional,” Neely said. “I think all fifty of us were crying when the game was over. We’d just pulled off a miracle, against impossible odds. With no coaches. Nothing but sheer guts. Just a bunch of kids who’d survived under enormous pressure. We decided it would be our secret. Silo went around the room, looked
every player in the eyes and demanded a vow of silence.”

“Said he’d kill anyone who ever told,” Paul said with chuckle.

Mal skillfully poured a pint of molasses over his next target. “That’s a good story. I figured as much.”

Paul said, “The odd part is that the coaches never talked about it either. Rabbit kept his mouth shut. Total silence.”

Chomp, chomp, then, “We sorta figured it out,” Mal said. “Knew something bad happened at halftime. Neely couldn’t pass, then word leaked that he was wearing a cast the next week at school. Figured he hit something. Figured it might’ve been Rake. Lots of rumors over the years, which, as you know, ain’t hard to find in Messina.”

“I’ve never heard anyone talk about it,” Paul said.

A pull on the coffee. Neither Neely nor Paul were eating or drinking. “Remember that Tugdale kid, from out near Black Rock? A year or two behind you boys.”

“Andy Tugdale,” Neely said. “Hundred-and-forty-pound guard. Mean as a yard dog.”

“That’s him. We picked him up years ago for beatin’ his wife, had him in jail for a few weeks. I played cards with him, somethin’ I always do when we get one of Rake’s boys in. I give ’em a special cell, better food, weekend passes.”

“The perks of brotherhood,” Paul said.

“Somethin’ like that. You’ll appreciate it when I arrest your little banker’s ass.”

“Anyway.”

“Anyway, we were talkin’ one day and I asked Tugdale what happened at halftime during the ’87 title game. Clammed up, tight as a tick, not a word. I said I knew there’d been a fight of some sort. Not a word. I waited a few days, tried again. He finally said that Silo had kicked the coaches out of the locker room, told ’em to stay away from the sideline. Said there had been a rather serious disagreement between Rake and Neely. I asked him what Neely had hit to break his hand. A wall? A locker? A chalkboard? None of the above. Somebody else? Bingo. But he wouldn’t say who.”

“That’s great police work, Mal,” Paul said. “I might just vote for you next time.”

“Can we leave?” Neely said. “I don’t like this story.”

______________

They rode in silence for half an hour. Still flying with all lights on, Mal appeared to doze occasionally as his ponderous breakfast got digested.

“I’ll be happy to drive,” Neely said after the car eased onto the gravel shoulder and flung rocks for half a mile.

“Can’t. It’s illegal,” Mal grunted, suddenly wide awake.

Five minutes later he was fading again. Neely decided conversation might keep him awake.

“Did you bust Jesse?” Neely asked as he tightened his seat belt.

“Naw. The state boys got him.” Mal shifted his weight and reached for a cigarette. There was a story to tell so he limbered up. “They kicked him off the team at Miami, out of school, barely got out with no jail time, and before long he was back here. Poor guy was hooked on the stuff and
couldn’t shake it. His family tried everything, rehab, lockdowns, counselors, all that crap. Broke ’em. Hell, it killed his father. The Trapp family once owned two thousand acres of the best farmland around here, now it’s all gone. His poor momma lives in that big house with the roof crumblin’.”

“Anyway,” Paul said helpfully from the rear.

“Anyway, he started sellin’ the stuff, and of course Jesse could not be content as a small-timer. He had some contacts in Dade County, one thing led to another and before long he had a nice business. Had his own organization, with lots of ambition.”

“Didn’t someone get killed?” Paul asked.

“I was gettin’ to that,” Mal growled at his rearview mirror.

“Just trying to help.”

“I always wanted a banker in my backseat. A real white-collar type.”

“And I always wanted to foreclose on the Sheriff.”

“Truce,” Neely said. “You were getting to the good part.”

Mal reshifted, his large stomach rubbing the wheel. One more harsh glance into his mirror, then, “The state narcs slowly crept in, as they always do. They nabbed a flunkie, threatened him with thirty years of prison and sodomy, convinced him to flip. He set up a drop with narcs hidin’ in the trees and under the rocks. The deal went bad, guns were grabbed, shots went off. A narc took a bullet in the ear and died on the spot. The flunkie got hit, but survived. Jesse was nowhere around, but it was his people. He became a priority, and within a year he was standin’ before His Honor receivin’ his twenty-eight years, no parole.”

“Twenty-eight years,” Neely repeated.

“Yep. I was in the courtroom, and I actually felt sorry for the scumbag. I mean, here’s a guy who had the tools to play in the NFL. Size, speed, mean as hell, plus Rake had drilled him from the time he was fourteen. Rake always said that if Jesse had gone to A&M, he wouldn’t have turned bad. Rake was in the courtroom too.”

“How long has he served?” Neely asked.

“Nine, ten years maybe. I ain’t countin’. Y’all hungry?”

“We just ate,” Neely said.

“Surely you can’t be hungry again,” Paul said.

“No, but there’s this little joint right up here where Miss Armstrong makes pecan fudge. I hate to pass it.”

“Let’s keep going,” Neely said. “Just say no.”

“Take it one day at a time, Mal,” Paul offered from the rear.

______________

The Buford Detention Facility was in flat treeless farmland at the end of a lonely paved road lined with miles of chain-link fencing. Neely was depressed before any building came into sight.

Mal’s phone calls had arranged things properly and they were cleared through the front gates and drove deeper into the prison. They changed vehicles at a checkpoint, swapping the roomy patrol car for the narrow benches of an extended golf cart. Mal rode up front where he chatted nonstop with the driver, a guard wearing as much ammunition and gadgets as the Sheriff himself. Neely and Paul shared the back bench, facing the rear, as they passed more chain link
and razor wire. They got an eyeful as they puttered past Camp A, a long dismal cinder-block building with prisoners lounging on the front steps. On one side, a basketball game was raging. All the players were black. On the other side, an all-white volleyball game was in progress. Camps B, C, and D were just as bleak. “How could anyone survive in there?” Neely asked himself.

At an intersection, they turned and were soon up at Camp E, which looked somewhat newer. At Camp F they stopped and walked fifty yards to a point where the fencing turned ninety degrees. The guard mumbled something into his radio, then pointed and said, “Walk down that fence to the white pole. He’ll be out shortly.” Neely and Paul began walking along the fence, where the grass had been recently cut. Mal and the guard held back and lost interest.

Behind the building and beside the basketball court was a slab of concrete, and scattered across it were all sorts of mismatched barbells and bench presses and stacks of dead weights. Some very large black and white men were pumping iron in the morning sun, their bare
chests and backs shining with sweat. Evidently, they lifted weights for hours each day.

“There he is,” Paul said. “Just getting up from the bench press, on the left.”

“That’s Jesse,” Neely said, mesmerized by a scene that few people ever witnessed.

A trustee approached and said something to Jesse Trapp, who jerked his head and searched the fence line until he saw the two men. He tossed a towel onto a bench and began a slow, purposeful, Spartanlike walk across the slab, across the empty basketball court, and onto the grass that ran to the fence around Camp F.

From forty yards away he looked huge, but as Jesse approached the enormity of his chest and neck and arms became awesome. They had played with him for one season—he was a senior when they were sophomores—and they had seen him naked in the locker room. They had seen him fling heavily loaded barbells around the weight room. They had seen him set every Spartan lifting record.

He looked twice as big now, his neck as thick as an oak stump, his shoulders as wide as a door. His biceps and triceps were many times the
normal size. His stomach looked like a cobblestone street.

He wore a crew cut that made his square head even more symmetrical, and when he stopped and looked down at them he smiled. “Hey boys,” he said, still breathing heavily from the last set of reps.

“Hello Jesse,” Paul said.

“How are you?” Neely said.

“Doing well, can’t complain. Good to see y’all. I don’t get many visitors.”

“We have bad news, Jesse,” Paul said.

“I figured.”

“Rake’s dead. Passed away last night.”

He lowered his chin until it touched his massive chest. From the waist up he seemed to shrink a little as the news hit him. “My mother wrote me and told me he was sick,” he said with his eyes closed.

“It was cancer. Diagnosed about a year ago, but the end came pretty fast.”

“Man oh man. I thought Rake would live forever.”

“I think we all did,” Neely said.

Ten years in prison had taught him to control
whatever emotions ventured his way. He swallowed hard and opened his eyes. “Thanks for coming. You didn’t have to.”

“We wanted to see you, Jesse,” Neely said. “I think about you all the time.”

“The great Neely Crenshaw.”

“A long time ago.”

“Why don’t you write me a letter? I got eighteen more years here.”

“I’ll do that, Jesse, I promise.”