Downtown Owl

  What she said: “But why was this play on TV?”

  What she almost said: The concept of a high school football game being on national television is insane. I’m not going to say that directly, but come on—that’s fucking preposterous.

  What he said: “I have no idea. It just sort of worked out that way.”

  What he didn’t feel like explaining: Because Langdon High was going to the play-offs that winter, the game was being covered by WDAZ-TV, the Grand Forks affiliate for ABC. They weren’t televising the game in its totality; they just wanted a few highlights for the nightly newscast. What this meant is that WDAZ sent one cameraman to Owl with instructions to videotape the first ten or fifteen minutes of that particular contest. (This is so that they could glean one or two key moments from the affair for the 10 o’clock news.) The cameraman was supposed to show up in Owl for the 7:00 p.m. kickoff, shoot the first two offensive sequences, drive to another high school game in another town (in this case, Cavalier), tape fifteen minutes of that game, drive to yet another town (possibly Ellendale), tape the final minutes of the game that was happening there, and then rush back to the WDAZ headquarters in Grand Forks in order to edit all the footage by 10:22 p.m. But on this specific evening, this specific cameraman’s Chevy Blazer died in Owl (it was the alternator). Unable to drive anywhere else (and seeing no other way to spend his evening), the cameraman elected to film the entire Owl-Langdon game, including its memorable, impossible conclusion. It proved to be a fortuitous breakdown. On the following Monday, WDAZ replayed that two-point conversion three times in a row. It was, they argued, the play of the century. I have no idea what play it allegedly usurped. They showed it again on Wednesday, supposedly because of viewer response but probably because nothing ever happens on Wednesday evenings. (Wednesday is church night.) That weekend, the footage was picked up by an ABC station in Minneapolis. “You will not believe what you are about to see,” the mustachioed sportscaster said as a prelude. “The following fourteen seconds will quite possibly change your life. These fourteen seconds are, in many ways, what high school football is all about.” That, of course, was not true; those fourteen seconds represented nothing about high school and very little about football. But people loved it, and things took off from there. It was like a fourteen-second version of Rocky. It made average people happy to live in America. It was outrageous and impossible and authentic, and it seemed as if every TV market in America (and especially those in Texas) found an excuse to show it whenever there wasn’t any real sports news. This was before normal people had VCRs, so every replay was an event; you had to wait for it, and that made it better. The fact that this play happened in a tiny North Dakota town no one had ever heard of didn’t hurt, either: It turned watching TV into rural sociology. Even before Brent Musburger said my name on The NFL Today, it had become the most important event in the ninety-eight-year history of Owl. Most of the world does not know that Owl exists—but if they do, it is almost always because a Chevy Blazer broke down on the only night I ever played football like one of my brothers, at least for fourteen seconds.

  What she said: “I bet that was exciting.”

  What she assumed: Everybody wants to be on TV.

  What he said: “It was okay. It was different.”

  What he meant: Everything is fucked now. If I had just let one of those pricks tackle me, I wouldn’t even be here. I was good in school. Nobody remembers this, but I was awesome in math. I should be an engineer right now. Wouldn’t it be cool to build a bridge? I always wanted to do that. That would have been a satisfying way to live. I was going to go to college in Arizona—ASU had already accepted my application. All I needed were the student loans and some khaki shorts. But something happened after that episode of The NFL Today: All of a sudden, I was a good football player. Everybody seemed to come to that conclusion. I made the All-Conference team, even though I was only the third-best quarterback in the conference. I made the All-Region team, even though I was probably the tenth-best quarterback in the region. It was like everyone in North Dakota received a concussion from watching television, and my mediocrity was erased by the collective amnesia. The Grand Forks Herald wrote a huge story about the history of Owl quarterbacks, describing me as “the third Druid legend.” They even took a photograph of me with my brothers, standing in front of a cardboard diorama of Stonehenge; my mom framed it for the living room. People who had never spoken to me before had no qualms about reinventing my existence. I had never had a girlfriend in my entire life. I had never kissed a girl with my mouth open. Now I was dating the hottest sophomore in school, and she would regularly take off most of her clothes in my car. Older dudes would toss me beers for no reason and buy me hamburgers. I would walk into Harley’s Café to buy a Kit Kat, and all the old codgers would put down their coffee mugs and compare me to deceased athletes I’d never even heard of. It’s hard for Americans to differentiate between talent and notoriety; TV confuses people. It confused me, too. It made me naïve. That March, I received a phone call from the offensive coordinator at the North Dakota State School of Science. NDSSS is a two-year junior college in Wahpeton. It’s really just a high school with ashtrays. You could smoke cigarettes in class—that was the institution’s main selling point. This unknown man on the telephone claimed I could “potentially” play quarterback for NDSSS, even though he’d only seen fourteen seconds of my entire career. He insisted I had “intangibles,” which seemed like a nice compliment at the time. I believed him. The man convinced me to believe I possessed intangibles, and I enjoyed being convinced of this. I enjoyed the possibility of being a less tangible character. So I went to NDSSS to play football. And this—of course—was a disaster. It was instantly obvious to everyone (including the offensive coordinator who had convinced me to go there) that I could not compete at that level. I could not compete at all. I was slower than most and weaker than all. I’m not sure I even completed two passes in any given practice. Most of my teammates hated or ignored me, except for the black guys—they thought I was hilarious. They called me Barney Fife. I eventually became the second-string holder for the field-goal unit. Let me reiterate the reality of that designation: I was the back-up holder. This is like being a prostitute’s intern. During my two seasons at NDSSS, I played exactly one down of football, and the kick was blocked. I did, however, spend a lot of time getting drunk in my dorm room, never going to class, and eating half-frozen corn dogs twice a day. To be fair, life in Wahpeton wasn’t so terrible. I had some good times. But I never earned a degree and I never learned a goddamn thing, and I moved back home because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I felt like a failure. But everyone in Owl still loved me; in fact, they seemed to worship me more than when I had left. And that made me feel worse, because it proved how confused they had been all along.

  What she said: “Well, I’m going to get back to the booth with Naomi and Ted. They probably think I fell down a ditch. But you should come over and hang with us. It was nice to have a chat before one of us got drunk. Or both of us.”

  What she resigned herself to: You know, this was not the conversation I was hoping we’d have. You didn’t tell me anything meaningful about yourself, and you didn’t ask me a single question. Our sentences seemed forced and innocuous, and now I feel weird and aggressive and uncomfortably sober. It’s actually kind of impossible to talk to you when we’re both not intoxicated, which is undoubtedly why I just said the exact opposite. Sometimes I say the reverse of what I feel, and I don’t know why. But still…I like you, man. How obvious do I have to be about this? I will give you two hundred chances to be interesting. All you have to do is try.

  What he said: “It was. A rare pleasure, I suppose. At least for people like us.”

  What he meant: This woman makes me nervous, and I suspect she might be making fun of me. But I wonder what it would be like to have sex with her?

  What she said: “Check you later, Famous Mr. Bison Man.”

  What she meant: Sometimes I can be
snotty. You love it.

  What he said: “Whatever.”

  What he meant: What can I do to make you like me?

  NOVEMBER 23, 1983

  (Horace)

  Edgar Camaro was Lucifer. Or at least an idiot. Or at least he was when he rolled dice, or at least that’s how it seemed to Horace.

  Horace had two great secrets in his life. One of them was dark and sinister, as most noteworthy secrets tend to be. The second was less awful but more embarrassing, which is why it became the secret he despised more.

  Horace’s wife, Alma, died on the morning of June 5, 1972. That was a Monday. The funeral was the following Friday. Because she was only forty-four, the turnout was larger than the church could hold: Overflow guests sweated in the building’s social hall, silently mourning the passing of an acquaintance without being able to hear any of the actual service. It was ninety-six degrees. Horace wore a brown suit and had the same conversation with all 477 guests. It was the most complicated thing he’d ever done; he smoked two packs of cigarettes and vomited twice. “Thank you so much for coming. It means a great deal,” he said over and over and over again, and—every time—it was true. “Alma always liked you so much,” he told all the mourners; this statement was true about 60 percent of the time. Alma was sweet, but discerning. Horace knew just about everyone in attendance, including most of the visitors from out of town. He had met nearly all of them at least once; in fact, Horace encountered only one new, unknown person at the burial of his wife. The man’s name was Chester Grimes.

  He was, as far as Horace could tell, the nicest man he’d ever met.

  “I feel so terrible about your loss,” Chester said while he slowly shook Horace’s right hand with both of his own. “What an awful way for someone to pass. She was an amazing woman, and you were the love of her life. The love of her life. I know this to be true.” Horace thanked Chester for coming to the funeral. He wanted to ask how Chester knew his wife, but he did not need to pose the question. “I suppose I did not know Alma very well,” Chester admitted. “Most of my personal memories are from when we were schoolchildren: I would see her at family reunions and at Easter, and we would play childish games around the yard. We made up this silly game called Rah, where you collected piles of grass and leaves and crawled around on your hands and knees like a mountain lion and sometimes you yelled Rah! at the other players. It seems foolish now, but I miss those afternoons of Rah. We were distant relatives—I am not sure if we were second cousins or if we were third cousins. Maybe we were only related by marriage. Who remembers such details? I don’t think I’ve seen her more than twice since I moved out to Fargo in ’61. But family is family. Right? Family is family. So how could I not go to her funeral? How could I not go? She was such a wonderful woman.”

  “Alma always liked you so much,” said Horace, and he hoped he wasn’t lying.

  There was something about this Chester Grimes fellow. Horace didn’t know what that quality was, but he knew he liked it. There was something about the way he talked; he seemed unnaturally open and unpretentious. He was conversationally fearless. Moreover, Chester was handsome in a manner that was almost confusing; he looked like someone famous, but it was impossible to say whom. It was equally impossible to estimate his age; Horace didn’t know if this man was twenty-nine or forty-nine.

  All the other guests liked him, too.

  After Alma’s casket was covered with dirt, everyone returned to the church social hall to solemnly consume ham and scalloped potatoes. (This is standard funeral fare.) Such a meal is always uncomfortable for the widower, as he is inevitably surrounded by female relatives insisting that he eat more ham. However, Horace got lucky: For reasons that he would not understand until later, he found himself eating with Chester. They had met only ninety minutes before, but Chester sat right across from him. Despite the circumstances, their conversation was outstanding. This Chester Grimes could talk about anything, even at a funeral. “I just have to be honest: Your pastor seems like a nice enough guy, but that eulogy was subpar,” he said. “I realize a funeral is ultimately for the living, but let’s not forget the dead. Dammit, give the dead their due! Is that too much to ask? I don’t feel like the portrait he painted of Alma was very sophisticated. I didn’t hear much genuine insight.” Horace agreed with this man. He had opinions.

  “I deliver booze for a living,” Chester told Horace as they walked toward their respective vehicles at day’s end. “Can you believe it? That’s my job. Every week, I drive a booze wagon to Wahpeton and Grand Forks and Bismarck and every other crazy city in this whole crazy state. I have driven through Owl every Saturday afternoon for ten years. Can you believe that? I drove through downtown Owl once a week for a decade, and I never stopped to see Alma once. What a fool I was.”

  “You can’t blame yourself for that,” said Horace. “Nobody can predict the future.”

  “Actually, we can,” said Chester. “The only thing we can’t predict are the details. I knew Alma was going to die. I didn’t think she’d die this young, or in such a bizarre, horrific manner. But we’re all going to die eventually. So what was my plan? Did I think I’d start stopping over to say hello when she hit her sixties? Of course I didn’t. I had no plan, because I didn’t realize I needed one. And now she’s dead. What a fool I was.”

  “Well, let’s not make that same mistake, Chester.”

  “You’re goddamn right we won’t,” he replied. “I will see you tomorrow, friend.”

  The next afternoon, Chester’s beer truck pulled into Horace’s yard at 6:30 p.m. This happened every single Saturday evening for the next four months. A new friend! It was precisely what Horace needed during his period of stoic sorrow. Every Saturday night, the two men sat in the kitchen and sipped a little scotch, chatting about the news of the world. They rarely talked about Alma or farming or Owl. They had big talks about big things. It was refreshing. Chester dominated these conversations, mostly because he seemed to understand things that no one else in America could possibly know. His insights were electrifying and wildly specific. He knew why America didn’t have an effective light-rail system. (It was killed by GM, the Nazi-controlled Daimler-Benz, and the Nazi-influenced Ford Corporation.) He knew that FDR had been aware of the December 7 attack on Pearl Harbor on November 28. He knew the precise location where Marilyn Monroe had sex with Robert Kennedy (a swimming pool at the Biltmore Resort in Phoenix, Arizona). He knew an inordinate amount about deep-sea fishing, despite the fact that North Dakota is a landlocked state. But the subject Chester really understood was sports. He could talk about any sport, in any context, for any length of time. Moreover, he knew the kind of arcane details than only an insider would have access to. He knew, for example, which major league baseball players were closeted homosexuals, and he knew which NBA players were addicted to narcotics. He knew exactly how low they cut the grass at the Augusta National Golf Club (1.25 inches on the fairways, 0.4 inches on the putting greens), and he knew the reasons why those lengths were selected (they were specified in Bobby Jones’s will). And the main thing he knew—the thing that he somehow managed to slide into every conversation they ever had—was that virtually every professional football game was fixed.

  “The NFL is a league run by gamblers,” he would say. “So was the AFL—they were even worse. There’s probably never been an Oakland Raiders game that wasn’t fixed. Going to a pro football game isn’t that different from going to a Broadway play. It’s theater, my friend. It’s scripted.”

  “But how can that be?” Horace always countered. “How can every football player in America be corrupt? It’s unthinkable.”

  “They need the money,” said Chester. “For every $400,000 contract they give to Joe Namath, there are 50 guys making $40,000 and 300 more making $14,000. It’s the casinos that have the money. It’s the gamblers. Every week, the men who run Las Vegas find themselves a quarterback and a cornerback and a couple referees, and they throw ten grand at each of them. What, you think Len Dawson was fra
med? If you’re making $14,000 a year by working your ass off, how would you feel about making an extra $10,000 in one day, just for being lazy on a few plays during the third quarter? Why would those slaves care about the integrity of the sport? What is football doing for those fellows, besides giving them a few moments of glory and a lifetime of arthritis?”

  “It just seems like such a complicated conspiracy,” said Horace. “I don’t even know how it would work.”

  Chester, of course, understood completely. It was all about point spreads. “Let’s say Minnesota is playing Dallas,” he would explain. “In a legitimate situation, the Cowboys would probably be favored by four points. As such, the bookies would hope that fifty percent of their clients picked Minnesota and the other half would pick Dallas. This is referred to as a balanced ticket.” Chester seemed amazingly familiar with the lexicon. “In a legitimate situation, bookies want a balanced ticket, because they still get their piece of the action from the Juice. That’s what bookies call their commission: the Juice. If you bet fifty dollars on a game and win, you don’t win a hundred—you only get ninety-five. That extra five dollars is the Juice. In other words, the house takes everything from losers, but they still skim a little off the winners. So if you operate at a high enough volume, the house never loses.”