Downtown Owl

  Horace deeply enjoyed this brand of banter.

  “But here’s the twist,” Chester continued. “At some point, bookies decided the Juice wasn’t enough. They realized it made more sense to just manipulate the spread and fix the outcome: Instead of making Dallas a four-point favorite, they might make Dallas a nine-point favorite. Every small-time gambler sees a spread that size and immediately thinks he’s a genius. He thinks he understands what everyone else can’t see. He assumes picking Minnesota is a lock, so all his money goes on the Vikings. And there are dupes making that same bet in every city in America. That’s when two guys in Nevada get on a plane, fly to Minneapolis, and deliver a suitcase full of money to Fran Tarkenton or Alan Page or Bud Grant. Whoever needs it the most, you know? Whoever’s willing to take it. Tarkenton inexplicably throws three interceptions in the second half, and the Cowboys win by two touchdowns. There’s nothing subtle about it. It’s that easy. It happens all the time.”

  “Incredible,” said Horace. It did seem incredible. “I can’t believe that Fran Tarkenton would ever do something like that. His father was a minister.”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Chester. “It’s just business. And the players obviously can’t talk about it, because it would kill their careers. Remember what happened to Karras and Hornung in ’63? By being such a fascist hard-ass, Pete Rozelle guaranteed that no one would ever admit they’re in bed with gamblers. Still, everybody gets what they need. Nobody gets hurt. And the guys who really clean up are the Drones.”

  Chester took acute pleasure in discussing the Drones. The Drones were the true geniuses, he said. According to Chester, Drones were accidental insiders to the world of high-stakes gambling. They were people who did not play a role in the fixing of games but occasionally knew when a fix was happening; typically, they were employed by bookies in some minor capacity and would simply overhear the right kind of gossip. Once they knew a few key secrets, they were fiscally unstoppable. All they had to do was find a different bookie in a different city, make a huge bet on a guaranteed winner, and await an outcome that was never in question. They were the cheaters who cheated the cheaters, and Chester spoke of them with reverence. And over time, Horace began to suspect what Chester eventually admitted: Chester was, in fact, a Drone.

  “It’s true,” he said one Saturday in September after consuming a thimble more scotch than usual. “The only reason I run the booze wagon is because I need an excuse to drive all over the state every week. I’m a bet collector. I work for a guy in Fargo named Keith Beetle. He’s a bookmaker. And bookmakers are hard to find in rural areas, so we have to cover the whole state. We do okay, all things considered.”

  “Do you ever have to beat people up?” Horace was excited. “Do you ever deal with deadbeats? Do you break legs?”

  “Oh, Jesus. Never,” said Chester. “Everybody pays what they owe, unless they honestly don’t have it. North Dakota gamblers are still North Dakota citizens.”

  Once this confession was on the kitchen table, it became the only subject Chester and Horace discussed. One might have guessed that Horace would have been dismayed by this unlawful revelation, but the opposite was true; he loved being friends with a criminal. A criminal! That’s what Chester was. He committed crimes. But his crimes didn’t seem that bad to Horace. Being a Drone seemed smart, and intelligence warranted a reward. The criminal world, suspected Horace, was probably more fair than the one in which he lived. Chester told a story about the time he made fifteen thousand dollars on a 1969 Browns game. “I wasted every cent of my winnings on a twenty-two-year-old whore named Laura Lawless,” he said. “Every penny was gone in six weeks’ time, and all I had to show for it was a busted box spring and a drawerful of jewelry receipts. But that was still the greatest fifteen thousand dollars I ever made. Nobody could figure out why Jim Brown was so easy to tackle that afternoon. He was devoid of heart. He gained forty-four yards on twenty carries, and nobody could understand what his problem was. But I knew what his problem was. His problem was that he didn’t have any problem whatsoever.”

  This, at its core, was what made Chester Grimes the most dynamic personality Horace had ever encountered: He was inside. For the first time in his life, Horace was aligned with a person who knew consequential secrets. The possibility of every pro football game being rigged was crazy, but maybe it was true; sometimes crazy things are true. There was even a cliché about that. Perhaps Horace had been wrong about everything. Maybe the world was controlled by conspiracies, and maybe that was immoral. Maybe that was depressing. But maybe it just meant the world was complicated, and maybe he was just starting to understand the complications. Which was why he found himself fantasizing about the day when Chester would let him become a criminal, too.

  That conversation happened on September 30, 1972.

  “I have some information,” Chester said almost immediately upon his arrival. “Nine days from now, Oakland is playing Houston on Monday Night Football. The Raiders will be heavily favored. The spread is going to be set at fifteen points. It won’t be that high in the Vegas casinos, but it will be fifteen on the street. That kind of number is unheard of. Everybody and their mother is going to take Houston, especially since they’re playing at home. But Oakland will cover the spread. They will win by more than fifteen points. I can assure you of this.”

  “How do you know?” Horace asked. In truth, he did not really care.

  “I overheard my boss on the telephone,” said Chester. “He was talking to someone in Reno, and he kept using the term jailbreak. That’s code. That means they have at least three Oilers on the take, plus a zebra.”

  “Code!” said Horace. “You speak in codes.”

  “When my boss went to the can after he got off the blower, I glanced at the legal pad that was sitting on his desk. The wheels are already in motion,” Chester said cryptically. “Now, I realize this might not be something you’d want to be involved with. Maybe this makes you uncomfortable. It is, after all, illegal. And what we’d be doing is not only illegal, but also unethical. But if you have money, and if you can reconcile your own conscience, we can make a lot of cash in a short amount of time. We’re gambling, but we cannot lose, which means we’re not gambling at all. I will drive to Minneapolis the day before the game. I know people there, but they don’t know me. They might suspect I know something, but they won’t be able to decline my bet, even if it’s massive.”

  For a moment, they silently looked at each other like criminals. It felt important. At the end of the pause, Chester spoke again.

  “How much money do you have?”

  “I have most of Alma’s life insurance.” Horace felt no apprehension. “I have $22,000.”

  “That’s perfect,” said Chester. “That will get us forty-four grand, minus the Juice, which will put us at—what—$42,000? No, wait…more like $41,800. I will give you your original $22,000, plus fifteen grand. I’ll keep the last $5,000 for myself, if that’s acceptable.”

  “Oh, absolutely,” said Horace. “In fact, you should take a bigger cut. I insist that you take more. You’re doing everything. I’m just lucky to be involved with any of this. I’m just lucky to have met you.”

  “Absolutely not,” said Chester. “The opposite is true. You may not be working for this money, but it’s money you deserve nonetheless. Whether I make $5,000 or $50,000 for myself, it will be gone before Christmas. But God owes you money for taking your wife. And I know you are worried about this, because you’re trusting me with a lot of your retirement. But here is the terrifying truth, which I cannot stress enough: This is a crime, Horace. And in order to commit a crime, you need to trust at least one other person. You have to trust them completely. In order to live outside the law, you have to be honest. I heard those words in a song, and the words are true. The words are true.”

  Horace had never met a man as noble as his criminal-in-law.

  Because this transaction required cash, Horace went to Owl National Bank on Monday morning and tried to w
ithdraw twenty-two thousand dollars from his savings account in hundred-dollar bills. It took the bank four days to fulfill this request; he claimed he was considering buying some quarter horses from a Mennonite colony and they did not accept checks. It was an extremely solid lie. When Chester’s booze wagon finally arrived on Saturday night, Horace hoped they would get profoundly drunk together, which had never really happened; he even bought some Dewar’s, which was expensive. Chester nonetheless declined the offer of a third drink, stating that he still had too many miles to drive that night, not to mention the following day’s trip to Minneapolis. Horace delivered the cash in a metal lunchbox. They shook hands, and Chester drove away.

  Forty hours later, Oakland defeated Houston 34–0 on Monday Night Football.

  But something occurred to Horace as he watched this game.

  It did not seem fixed.

  It seemed like Oakland was a vastly superior team, but not in any sort of nefarious way. They simply had better players. He started to wonder how a football game could be successfully rigged. Wouldn’t such a ploy seem obvious to everyone watching? There were always twenty-two men sprinting and colliding on every single play—how could this be scripted? And how could he have been blind to this reality for so long? How could everyone in America not know this was happening?

  His stomach started to feel strange. It felt the way stomachs feel when your wife dies, or when you reach your hand back to get your wallet and realize it is no longer there.

  At midnight, he found himself wanting to call Chester for reassurance; he could claim it was a celebratory call. But he could not find Chester’s phone number. Had Chester ever given him his number? He must have. But if he did, why couldn’t he remember this exchange ever happening? Horace’s neck was getting warm. He could feel his heart beating, and then he could hear it. Where did he keep his phone numbers? This was bad. He picked up the phone and dialed 0. It rang eleven times. It was 1972. When a woman’s voice answered, he asked for the number of Chester Grimes in Fargo. There was no Chester Grimes in Fargo. There were two listings for Grimes, but no Chester. Was it possible he still lived with his parents? How could he not know these things? What in the hell had they talked about on all those Saturday nights?

  It was too late in the evening to try the two Grimes numbers at random, so he sat in the kitchen and waited for the clock to say 7:00 a.m. He called both. The answering parties did not recall anyone named Chester living at their respective residences. Horace tried to remember what liquor distributor Chester worked for. He had no idea. Wasn’t the company’s logo written on the truck’s door? He could not recall. All he could remember was that the truck was red, or possibly orange. He called the operator and asked for any residence or business involving the surname “Beetle” in the Fargo-Moorhead area. Nothing. There was nothing.

  All week, Horace tried to talk himself into normalcy. “I’m overreacting,” he repeated inside his own mind. “Chester will show up on Saturday. He is not listed in the phone book because he is a criminal. A criminal would not list himself in the phone book. I’m overreacting. This is an overreaction. We’ve never spoken on the phone before, so why would we start now? Everything happened as he predicted. It was a jailbreak. All we will lose is the Juice. I am overreacting. I am overreacting. This is how it feels to overreact, which is what I am doing.”

  But Horace never saw Chester Grimes again.

  That red (or possibly orange) truck did not pull into the yard on Saturday night. Horace waited five hours, the last four hours and fifty-eight minutes devoid of hope. He drank most of the bottle of Dewar’s but did not feel drunk. He felt like a child who had been beaten with a wooden spoon without being told why. He wondered, Did this actually happen? Is it possible that Chester Grimes never knew Alma at all? Is he just a person who looks for funerals in the newspaper and trolls them for vulnerable marks? Could such a human exist? Was he brilliantly calculating, or was he simply amoral? Had all of their conversations been fake? Had Grimes consciously manufactured a four-month friendship? Wouldn’t that be as much work as holding down a regular job? How did he know that Horace would give him the money? How did he know that Horace wanted to break the law? What did Chester Grimes immediately know about Horace that Horace did not know about himself? It all seemed so impossible.

  And yet…it was still more plausible than the likelihood of every pro football game being fixed, which is what he had chosen to believe when he gave a con man twenty-two thousand dollars before shaking his hand.

  This was Horace’s most despised secret.

  He thought about this secret all the time. This was usually because Edgar Camaro was an idiot, or at least he was when he rolled dice. Whenever Edgar was rolling especially well, he liked to gingerly taunt his opponents with clichés that were not remotely applicable to what they were actually doing. His personal favorite was “That’s just like catching a can of corn,” which was a baseball term he only halfway understood. Sometimes he would say things like “You mess with the bull, you get the horns,” or “The fox is back in the henhouse.” Edgar just liked the way these phrases sounded, regardless of their context (of which there was usually none). Most of the time, no one was even listening. However, Edgar consistently misused one platitude that a) made no sense and b) forced Horace to reexperience his deepest shame: When things were really going well, Edgar would slam the dice cup onto the Formica tabletop, examine its contents, and stupidly decree, “You can’t con an honest man.”

  Edgar Camaro did not understand what that phrase meant. But Horace did, and he knew that it was true, and it reminded him of what he was not.

  NOVEMBER 24, 1983

  (Mitch)

  “Post pattern,” he said. “Sprint upfield thirteen steps, plant your outside foot hard, and break toward the center of the field at a forty-five degree angle. The ball will be coming over your left shoulder. It should be a pretty deep route. Watch out for the flagpole.”

  Mitch was speaking to his twelve-year-old sister.

  Kate Hrlicka trotted toward the imaginary sideline and took her position as an imaginary wide receiver. She rested her hands on her hips and placed her left foot slightly in front of her right, mimicking the two-point stance of James Lofton (a Green Bay Packer whose football card she kept inside a music box). Kate was still built like a boy. “Red eighty-four! Red eighty-four!” yelled Mitch. “Down…hut hut!” Kate sprinted off the nonexistent line and counted the thirteen steps in her head. She planted her outside foot and broke upfield, which means she broke toward the barn. The hood of her sweatshirt flew off her head. Mitch dropped back five steps and heaved the football toward his sister. The throw was high. Kate had to jump and twist, but she caught it.

  If women played football, Kate Hrlicka would not have to worry about how she was going to pay for college. If women played football, Kate Hrlicka would be going to Notre Dame for free.

  “Nice route,” said Mitch. “You’re awesome.” As he spoke, clouds of white rolled out of his nose and mouth and slowly grew invisible. The air was twenty-eight degrees.

  Kate flipped the ball back to her brother. “All I do is run under the ball,” she said. “You’re the quarterback. I could never throw anything that far. Not even a golf ball!”

  “I’m a terrible quarterback,” said Mitch. “And that was probably as far as I have ever thrown a football in my entire life. But you are awesome. This time, I want you to run a hook-and-go: Go down ten steps, fake a buttonhook, and then break it back into a fly pattern.”

  Kate jogged back to her point of origin and returned to her familiar two-point stance. Mitch rebarked the cadence. Kate counted the ten steps and pivoted inward; Mitch pump-faked the ball, freezing the imaginary defenders who were trying to stop his sixth-grade sister from going to the Pro Bowl. Kate made a rapid 360-degree revolution and sprinted down the sideline, which means she sprinted alongside a shelterbelt of evergreens. Mitch threw the ball as far as he could, actively trying to overthrow her. He failed; the ball nestl
ed in her paws and did not move. Jesus, she was so good at this.

  “You are awesome,” he said again. “I cannot believe how awesome you are. You are a witch.”

  “It’s just fun to run after things,” Kate said. “Do you think it’s almost dinnertime?”

  “Doubtful,” said Mitch. “Grandma isn’t even here yet. We probably won’t eat dinner until two o’clock. Let’s try a flag pattern. Do you remember how to run a flag pattern? It’s exactly like a post, except you cut to the corner instead of the middle.”

  “I remember,” she said. This time Kate caught the ball one-handed.

  “Do you have any idea how good you are at football?” asked Mitch. “I really think you have no idea how good you are at playing football.”

  “I’m good,” Kate said. “I just wish we lived in town. Then we could play against other people.”

  The Hrlickas’ nearest neighbor was two and a half miles away; if you looked to the west, you could distantly see the house. They lived nine miles outside of Owl; at night, you could see the town’s feeble lights flickering to the south. It was flat in every direction. The only trees on any horizon were the ones people planted to stop the wind.

  “No, it’s better to live out here,” said Mitch. “Besides, town kids are stupid. All they do is ride their bikes and play Atari. They don’t even know how to change a tire.”

  “Yeah, I know town kids are stupid,” said Kate. “But still. It would be fun to run pass plays against other people.”

  “No, this is better,” said Mitch. “Besides, there is no possible way any other girl could possibly cover you one-on-one. It wouldn’t even be fun. You would kill them.”