Winter and Night (12 page)

Across the field, quarterbacks-in-training threw passes to each other, high and long. I watched; the kids receiving stretched for the ball but didn't move their feet. If the passer didn't hit them with a bull's-eye where they stood, it was his bad, not theirs, and he did a cross-field sprint, too.

Everywhere, fierce concentration, full-out effort, grunts from the kids, whistles and shouts from the coaches. I walked up to stand on the edge of the track with a small knot of adults in civilian clothes. I looked for Lydia; in this entirely white, largely male group she'd have glaringly stood out, but she was nowhere in sight.

I stopped, stood with the others looking over the field. Near us, at full speed, a line of kids ran a zigzag course between close-set orange cones, cutting left, right, left, right. The man next to me turned to look at me, then turned back to the kids. He said, "Which one's yours?"

"None of them."

He gave me a sideways glance. "You're not from Warrenstown?"

"No. Where's the other team from?"

"Westbury. That's my boy there." Seeming to relax when he found I wasn't a parent of the competition, he pointed to a big kid in blue, part of a group throwing block after block against a line of kids in maroon. The long golden light of the late fall afternoon glinted off their helmets as they pounded each other again and again.

"He's big," I said, realizing that even allowing for the padding, most of these boys were huge. "He looks good."

"You're good, this place makes you better. You stink, they can make you good. Frank Edwards." He offered me his hand. "You thinking of sending your kid?"

"You'd recommend it?"

"My kids have been coming here for years. Gives them an edge. I don't think Frankie'd have made varsity otherwise. My younger son, he plays hockey. Best goalie in the county, twelve-and-under." He swelled with pride.

"Congratulations."

"What does your kid play?"

"My nephew. Football. Wide receiver."

I stood with Edwards, watched two lines of Warrenstown kids set up. An assistant coach behind one line shouted, "Down. Set!" and held the football the center snapped him. He dropped back the way a quarterback would, then stood waiting to see if the enemy would get through to him, or if his own men could protect him.

The defensive linemen mixed up their moves, and the offense tried to read and counter. The kids on offense were quick and strong, for the most part, stopping tackles and ends as they tried with spin moves and swim moves and sheer muscle and will to break through. But the defensive line was well-coached and well-led; the first time they ran the stunt the left guard didn't read it and the assistant coach was left face-to-face with a kid who'd have laid him out flat if he hadn't had a whistle around his neck. So the defense mixed it up and ran that play three more times, and the left guard missed it every time.

After the fourth missed stunt a whistle shrieked: not the assistant coach behind the line, but another man in a Hamlin's jacket, a man who'd been watching the drill with a deepening frown. The kids and the assistant coach all stopped, faced the man with the whistle.

"That's Hamlin," said Frank Edwards, beside me.

"The man himself?"

He nodded. "Hell of a motivator. The kids love him."

Hamlin walked slowly down the line of kids, looking them over. He turned, walked back, stopped in front of the left guard.

"Tindall!"

"Coach," the kid answered.

"Tindall, what position do you play?"

"Left guard, Coach."

"You throw the ball?"

"No, Coach."

"You carry the ball?"

"No, Coach."

"What the hell do you do, Tindall?"

"Protect the quarterback, Coach."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"Oh. Thanks for telling me, because from what I just saw, I wouldn't know that! Take a lap, Tindall. No, two. Brown—" to the assistant coach— "get someone in here who knows how to play this position. Okay, back to work!"

He blew the whistle again. Tindall took off on the track around the field, another kid filled in his spot, the assistant coach shouted, "Down. Set!" and practice resumed.

"What do you think?" asked a quiet voice beside me. I turned; there was Lydia.

The late sun picked out the blue-black highlights in her hair and the silver snaps on her leather jacket. I looked at her and suddenly felt a strange sensation, as though I'd spent a long time in a foreign place, gotten used to it, had forgotten what it was like to be home.

Lydia stood on tiptoe, gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, and looked back over the field. "Does this look like fun to you?"

I looked with her at the boys, sweating and panting, charging, cutting, running in the golden autumn light. All that energy, speed and strength, all that reckless power. All that belief that effort mattered, that focus and concentration and trying mattered, that talent could be developed into skill and that skill brought good results.

"It's a practice," I said to Lydia. "Practices aren't supposed to be easy."

"I didn't say easy," she said. "I said fun."

One of the coaches down in the end zone was waving his arms and yelling at three kids, who stood silent, eyes ahead. To our left a group adjusted their helmets, prepared for the blocking sleds. Tindall finished his laps, rejoined his line, read the stunt the first time they ran it, but missed it the next time. The assistant coach ordered him on the ground for push-ups while the rest of the kids watched. On the next play he was hit hard. He started to stand, fell back, made it to his knees, then suddenly collapsed. He lay for a moment on the grass of the field, managed to rise halfway to his knees before he threw up.

"Ah, shit!" said Hamlin. His words rolled forward on a wave of contempt, but he smiled tightly, a man satisfied with today's accomplishments. He checked his watch, blew his whistle, three loud blasts. All over the field boys and coaches stopped, turned, jogged in. When they'd gathered, Hamlin stepped forward. He threw a disgusted glance at Tindall, who was dragging himself up from the grass to stand, shakily, with the others. "You men," Hamlin called, looking over the line. "Warrenstown and Westbury. Westbury, you won county, Warrenstown, you took your division. You other men, you're from winning schools, too. Because only winners come to Hamlin's Seniors' Camp. Am I right?" He paused. "Am I right?"

"Yes, Coach!" the boys yelled, their chests heaving, their voices raw.

"Then what the fuck happened?" He gave them a beat. "Too much partying? Beer and boobs? You fuck yourselves silly, drink yourselves stupid, because you thought the season was over?" Some of the boys snorted, jabbed each other. "All right!" Hamlin shouted. "The season is not over! Anyone wants to blow this game off, step out right now, you can go home!" No one moved. Hamlin swept his gaze down the line of boys, back again. "Warrenstown's juniors and sophomores, and some of their JV— their JV, for Chrissakes! —are coming here Saturday. They expect to lose. Even the way you men are playing right now, you might beat them. But winning's not the point, is it? Is it?"

"No, Coach!" the boys chorused, giving him the answer he obviously wanted, but looking confused.

"And what is?"

The boys were silent, their faces stricken. Giving your all and failing, any coach will respect that. But the player who doesn't get it, doesn't know what his job is, is the player the coaches despise.

Then a Warrenstown boy shouted, "Killing them, Coach!"

"What?"

"Killing them, coach!"

"I can't hear you!"

"Killing them, Coach! Killing them! Coach!" And then it was all the boys, in a rising, swelling shout: "Killing them! Coach! Killing them! Coach! Killing them! Killing them! Killing them!"

The shriek of Hamlin's whistle cut off the chant. "All right! And the way you're working now, you gonna kill them?"

The Warrenstown boy who'd started it knew his job and jumped to it: "No, Coach!"

"Damn right! So what am I gonna see tomorrow?"

"Work, Coach!" A Westbury kid, getting into the act, yelled, "We're gonna bust our asses, Coach!"

"You are?"

"Yeah, Coach!" the boys shouted as one.

Hamlin smiled, looked at them all. "Good," he said.

Hamlin blew the whistle again, three long loud blasts. The boys turned and jogged away, disappeared through the doors into the field house.

The men and women around us started to walk away. None made any attempt to talk to the kids.

"You can't," Lydia told me when I pointed that out. "I told you, it's a rule. You can only come watch after three in the afternoon, and you can't talk to them. 'While they're here, they're Hamlin's.' " She took a brochure from her pocket, handed it to me.

I glanced at the brochure, a glossy four-color job full of ringing endorsements, statistics, pictures of uniformed boys playing hard. "So you never got near the Macpherson kid?"

"Right."

"Even an investigator?"

"Mr. Hamlin wasn't impressed," she said dryly.

"You told him a girl had been killed and these kids might be suspects, at least witnesses?"

"He said suspects or witnesses, they're football players and they're not going anywhere, so whatever they have to say they can say at the end of the week. I told him the cops were coming out here so he might as well let me start, but he said sorry, this was practice." She added, "I guess he'll have to let that cop from Warrenstown— Sullivan? —he'll have to let Sullivan talk to them, but it won't make him happy."

"He doesn't seem like a very happy guy."

"He's sour and he's mean."

"One of the fathers told me the kids love him."

She gave me a long look. "If they do, it's because they're afraid not to."

We stood at the edge of the field as the lowering sun blazed in the windows of the gym. I was exhausted, I realized, as wiped out as if I'd done all that running, that cutting, all those push-ups that come from failure, myself. I rubbed my hand over my face, tried to clear my head. Gary's face came back to me, his tired, haunted eyes.

Maybe this was dumb, the idea that Gary would come here, that he really did have something important to do and it had to do with something, someplace, someone besides himself. Maybe he was just, as Sullivan had said, running away.

Lydia touched my hand. I hadn't realized what a chill had crept into the air until I felt her warmth.

"God, you look tired," she said. "What do you want to do? You want to see if we can find a way to talk to the kids anyway?"

I looked up and down the field, silent now, and empty. I reached into my jacket for a cigarette. "Well," I said, "maybe you could join them in the showers and distract the coaches, and I could get the kids to come out one by one and talk to me."

She looked at me, then turned away with a smile and a shake of her head. Sighing, she appeared to consider the suggestion. "No," she finally said. "I don't think so. If you want a distraction, you'd better come up with a different one."

"You mean, something more likely, like the Martians landing on the field house?"

"Exactly. Besides," she asked innocently, "if I joined them in the showers, why would the kids ever leave?"

"Good point." I smoked, said, "I don't know what to do. I'm not even sure what I want to do, what I want to have happen."

"I suppose," Lydia said, and now her voice changed, grew more gentle, "I suppose the best thing would be if we found Gary, and we found he had nothing to do with that girl's death."

I nodded. "For Gary, for my sister. But that town, that girl." On the empty field, the sinking sun picked out the sharp edges of each blade of grass, cast tiny shadows from each rough lump of chalk on the lines. "Helen said Scott brought them there because it was a great place to grow up."

"Maybe it is. Bad things happen everywhere. Even something like this doesn't have to change the place forever."

"I'm not sure," I said, "how much a place changes. Like a person."

"What do you mean?"

"If Warrenstown's such a great place, why did Scott leave as soon as he graduated and not go back for twenty years?"

"You left Louisville when you were nine," she said. "You never went back."

"I didn't want to leave; I was a kid. And I never went back because by the time I could've gone back there was nothing to go back to."

Cars started up around the other side of the buildings, parents driving away. I found myself thinking, but that's not true. If a place holds nothing, you might find yourself passing through there or not over the years, as currents take you. A place you avoid still holds something; and whatever that is still holds you.

Lydia said, "You never went back because you were happy there."

I stared at her. A breeze ruffled her short hair. I wanted to reach out, smooth it down for her, but I didn't.

"I'm sorry," she said. "It's none of my business."

"No." I shook my head, spoke slowly. "No, I think you're right. Those memories kept me going a long time, after we left. By the time I could have gone back everything was different there."

"So it did change."

"Not Louisville, I don't think. Just the little part of it I knew. I didn't want to see it."

"Don't," she said. "You don't want to see it."

"What?"

"Those memories still help keep you going."

The breeze came back, colder now. I turned again to the football field. The goalposts at one end were tipped with sunlight; at the other they were already in shadow.

After a minute Lydia said, "You're wondering what kept Scott away from Warrenstown for so long."

I wasn't; and it probably didn't matter. But I knew why she said it. I was grateful and I went along.

"Helen says Scott always talked about what a great place it was," I said. "But twenty-three years ago— while he was there— they had a rape and a suicide at the high school. It wasn't Eden then, and I don't think it is now, either." I watched the breeze fan the burning tip of my cigarette. "I think," I said, "I'll ask him."

"Ask Scott?"

"Ask him what his hometown was like, years ago."

Lydia tilted her head. "Are you sure you need to do that?"