I turned and looked across the field at the huge and menacing Green Wave of Summerville. They had dressed out sixty-six players, while us poor Renegades could manage to dress only thirty-one. Their line outweighed us by twenty pounds per man. Their entire offensive backfield had returned after being second-best in the state. The quarterback, John McGrath, was being recruited by all the great college programs in the country; he was leaning toward Alabama or Southern Cal, which at that time was as big-time as big-time got.
Ike and I walked out to the center of the field. We shook hands with their captain, John McGrath, who handled himself with the princely carriage all great athletes have as their birthright. The referee flipped the coin, and Summerville won the toss. We told the ref we wanted to defend the south goal. Then Ike and I strapped on our helmets and ran back to join our teammates.
Coach Jefferson gathered us in a huddle. “Summerville doesn’t think we have a chance. Play clean, boys, but play mean. When Chad kicks off, let the Green Wave know they’re in a game.”
It had been Chad Rutledge who had surprised me most in the brutal football practices of August. I had taken a poisonous dislike to him when I first met him at the yacht club. Over the years, I had met a thousand boys just like him—a candy-assed, cookie-cutter type with a last name for a first name thrown in for the grand pretension of it all. But Chad had proven resilient, versatile, and fast on his feet. He could punt and kick field goals and showed good hands as our starting wideout receiver. On the first day of practice, Coach Jefferson put him in the safety position on defense, where Chad displayed a nose for the ball and was, I thought, our best open-field tackler. Though it would take some time, Chad would prove to me that it was a serious mistake to underestimate those boys of privilege who emerge from the pampered world South of Broad.
As we lined up, waiting for Chad to deliver the signal that he was about to kick off, I yelled to Ike, lined up beside me, “Bet you I beat you downfield and make this tackle, Ike.”
“Dream on, Toad. You’ll be fifty yards behind me when they’re calling for an ambulance to scrape that poor boy off the field.”
“I can feel this one,” I screamed. Chad approached the football and kicked off. A Summerville back received the ball on his own 15-yard line. In a blur of light and color, I sprinted downfield. A Summerville lineman tried to take my feet from underneath me, but he dove too low, and I leaped over him. I experienced the illusion of swiftness as I set my sights on the running boy, who wore number 20. He was sprinting up the left sideline when he saw his blocking breaking down. He reversed his field and started coming in the direction that brought him face-to-face with me, with nowhere to go. I hit him at full speed, driving my right shoulder into his chest and knocking him back five yards before I brought him crashing to the turf. I didn’t know the boy had fumbled and Ike had picked it up until I heard the note of wild joy erupt from our side of the field, and I saw Ike holding the ball aloft in the end zone before handing it off to a referee. I had hurt the boy that I had tackled. He lay on the field, and I kept asking him if he was all right. Soon, a trainer and some coaches were around him, and they helped number 20 to his feet.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” I said.
“It was a good, clean tackle, son,” a man said to me, the first and only time in my life that the great coach John McKissick would speak to me.
Chad kicked the extra point between the goalposts with Niles holding. As we lined up for the second kickoff, I looked up at the time clock: it had taken us only twenty seconds to score.
When Chad kicked off again, Ike and I both tackled the kickoff returner on the twenty-five. Then Summerville lined up and began to show us why they had one of the most feared programs in the state. John McGrath led them downfield in a timely fashion, throwing beautiful and accurate passes to his ends and backs coming out of the backfield. Whenever he handed it off to his big fullback up the middle, Ike and I would close the holes fast; twice we dropped the kid for a loss. But still, Summerville drove us down to our own thirty. Coach Jefferson kept screaming, “They know they’re in a game now. They goddamn sure as hell know that.”
Ike called his own number for a linebacker blitz on a third down and long. The ball was snapped. The quarterback dropped back, looking toward that hole in the pass coverage that was left after Ike charged through the center of the line. No one blocked Ike, and he was going at full speed when he made a spectacular sack on McGrath, who never saw him coming. McGrath fumbled the football, and Niles leaped on top of it.
Though we were not half the team that Summerville was, things broke our way that night, and our coach had delivered a clever and strategic game plan to offset the superior talent of the Green Wave. When Niles called the first play of the year on offense, I thought it was a mistake to start off a season with a trick play. I hiked it to Niles, who kept the ball himself and sprinted out toward the Summerville sidelines. The left guard and I pulled from our positions to lead the blocking in front of Wormy. I stopped a Summerville linebacker from getting to Niles in our backfield, but our blocking was breaking down badly. Niles was about to get in trouble when he stopped suddenly. He looked far down to the other side of the field, where he saw Ike standing alone, calling for the football. Ike had pretended to block his man but let him through, allowing Ike to slip unnoticed down our own sideline. He was still alone when Niles hurled him the ball.
After Chad kicked the extra point, we were leading a stunned Summerville by a score of 14-0.
It was a joyful and rapturous night, one that happens all too infrequently in the brief transit of human life. I can remember everything about that night, every play that either team ran, every block I missed or made, every tackle I was in on. I remember the feeling of complete, transported bliss that one can get only from athletics or lovemaking. I fell in love with the heart of my team as we fought against the strength of an infinitely superior team. Because we had worked out so hard during the summer, Ike and I stuffed their running game the whole night. We would jump up, slapping each other’s helmets, pounding each other’s shoulder pads, trusting each other, and, by the end of that game, loving each other. A bond formed between us and our teammates that I thought would last for the rest of my life. We screamed at one another and fought with lion-hearted courage against Summerville all night long.
The score was tied, 14-14, with a minute left to play. I blitzed and hit McGrath the moment he set up to pass; Ike recovered the fumble on Summerville’s 28-yard line. Our home crowd turned lunatic. I looked up to where my mother and father sat with Monsignor Max and saw that they were leaping up and down and hugging one another. My James Joyce-loving mother was actually gyrating like a cheerleader over a football game.
Niles was cool and no-nonsense in the huddle. Before he called the play, he yelled to us over the noise of the crowd, “Boys, I want to win this goddamn football game. I won’t fuck up; I promise you that. But none of you can fuck up, either. You promise me that.”
“We promise!” the team screamed at him.
“They stopped Wormy tonight,” Niles said. “Now I want my goddamn line to open some holes for him.”
I knocked their noseguard on his back and took out their left linebacker as Wormy ran for fifteen hard-earned yards and a first down on the 13-yard line. On the next play, Wormy went ten yards up the middle to the three. With twenty seconds left, Niles called for Wormy to run it off-tackle.
I snapped the ball. I blocked the man on my left and was looking for a linebacker to bring down when I was hit from behind and found myself lying on my back in the end zone. The world slowed down, and time was stillborn and the movement of all stars and moons sat frozen as I watched something float out of the night air toward me. I reached up to grab it, to touch it. I caught it before I realized it was the football Wormy had just fumbled, which had popped straight up into the air and straight back down into my waiting arms. I secured the ball in the end zone and then felt the entire weight of the whole Green Wave leap on
top of me, trying to steal the ball from me in the pileup.
When the referee signaled that Peninsula had scored a touchdown, the stadium approached meltdown. There were five seconds left on the clock. We lined up for the extra point, and I snapped it back to Niles. He did not put the ball down for Chad to kick, but instead danced around in the backfield for the five seconds it took to end the game.
Then the fans moved in a great flood toward us, surrounding us, pummeling us, just about hurting us in their ecstasy and surprise. Then they went for the goalposts. I retained a sight from that perfect night that could bring me to tears for the rest of my life: I watched in amazement as my mother and father and Monsignor Max helped an out-of-control mob of football fans pull the goalposts to the earth. I howled with laughter when I watched Betty Roberts kiss Wormy Ledbetter on the cheek in her sheer exuberance. I laughed harder when I saw Wormy wipe that kiss off with the sweaty sleeve of his jersey.
I turned and watched the moment when Coach Anthony Jefferson shook hands with Coach John McKissick. Both were models of sportsmanship and made me proud to be part of such a game. History was changing all around me.
I watched the swaying goalposts, watched my father get lifted up to the crossbars to direct the surging, unstoppable fans, watched my mother whip off her shoes and hurl them backward, deep into the crowd, into that lost night. She was trying to get better traction as she rejoined the crowd that finally brought those stubborn goalposts crashing to the earth.
In Charleston that September, a heat wave put a stranglehold on the city. The sun seemed parboiled as it made its slow transit across the peninsula. Because of our nearness to the Atlantic, the humidity seemed man-killing and inescapable as I made my torpid way from class to class. It had pleased me immensely when I found myself in the same classes as the twins, the orphans, Ike Jefferson, Chad Rutledge, and Molly Huger. And, yes, I recognized my mother’s handiwork in the arrangement and understood that she had drafted me as her watchdog over a group that still seemed flammable to her. Of course, Sheba Poe, with her incandescent, voluptuous beauty, was a natural enemy to my mother’s intellectual sensibilities, and Trevor seemed like a creature imported from an undiscovered planet. Starla carried her woundedness like a weather report issued by her damaged, wandering eye. Niles played his role of guardian angel to his sister, but to my mother he seemed unanchored, a young man turned inward because of too many responsibilities given him at too young an age.
“That boy never had a childhood,” my mother announced at dinner one night.
“Niles is a fine young man,” Father said, simply.
“Too bad his sister’s a head case,” my mother said.
“She’s a nice girl, Mother,” I protested. “Why don’t you cut her some slack?”
“I don’t like the way she looks at me,” my mother explained.
“That’s because one of her eyes is looking due west, while the other is looking straight ahead. That’s not her fault.”
“I’m talking attitude, not strabismus or whatever malady she has.”
“Dr. Colwell has agreed to operate on that eye,” I said. “I bet that changes everything about Starla. The eye makes her self-conscious.”
“How on earth will she pay for it?” Mother asked.
“He’s doing it for free.”
“Did you tell Dr. Colwell about Starla?” my father asked.
“Yes, sir. I told him this summer, one night when I was collecting from him for the newspaper. He’s already examined her, and he’ll operate when he has an opening.”
“So your nice boy set this up, Lindsay,” my father said with pride.
“That girl’s personality is set in stone,” Mother said. “She’s a head case. Moving her eyeball isn’t going to change a thing. Mark my words.”
By the end of October, my football team was still undefeated. But Coach Jefferson made us well aware that we had been luckier than we had been good. He swore we could be in better shape, and he made us outhustle every team we played that season. I would feel half-dead after one of his practices.
Fate has its own quirks and defiances and accords, as I was to learn one night after I got home from such a grueling practice. When I walked into the house, my father said, “Your dinner’s in the refrigerator, son. And that pretty Molly Huger called.”
“Molly?” I asked. “Why’d she call?”
“Don’t know,” Father said. “It wasn’t me she wanted to talk to.”
I picked up the phone in my bedroom, then I found myself almost faint with fear. I realized I had never called a girl. My distress came not from being unnerved but from feeling unmanned. My hands trembled and felt clammy. It became clear to me why I was suffering from this unexpected panic attack: the reason I had never called a girl was that I had never dated one. Even to me that seemed like an odd and illogical fact in the life of an eighteen-year-old boy.
Molly and I had developed an easygoing friendship in the first month of school, and we sat next to each other in three of our classes. So I summoned up a small reserve of courage and dialed Molly’s number. Her mother answered on the first ring. When I gave my name, her voice turned frostbitten and brittle.
“Molly isn’t here, Leo. Good night,” Mrs. Huger said, then hung up the phone.
I was rising out of my chair when the phone rang immediately. I answered it as my parents had taught me to do: “King residence. This is Leo speaking.”
I heard Molly laughing at the other end of the phone. “Do you always answer the phone like that?”
“No,” I said, “sometimes I say, ‘This is Leo King and you can kiss my ass, whoever you are.’ Of course, I always answer like that. You know my mother now. This house has ten thousand rules.”
Then fiery words broke out between Molly and her mother. Because Molly’s hand covered the receiver, I could not make out the words, but there was genuine fury in the muffled exchange. Finally, Molly said, “Mama, I think I deserve a little privacy. Thank you very much. Leo, are you still there?”
“Still here,” I said. “Anything wrong?”
“Yeah, there’s a lot wrong,” Molly said. “Chad and I had a fight, and he broke up with me today. In fact, just a few minutes ago.”
“What an idiot,” I said. “Is he nuts?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because you’re you,” I said, flustered. “You’re everything in the world.”
“I was hoping you’d say something like that,” Molly said. “That was one of the reasons I called.”
“What was the other?”
“To ask if you could take me to the dance after the game Friday night.”
I blushed so deeply and suddenly that I thought my face might have a crimson hue for the rest of my life. I hunted for words but muteness had turned my tongue to stone. I prayed for an electrical storm to bring down the phone lines of the city. In wordless shame, I awaited Molly’s intercession.
“Leo? Are you still there?”
“I’m here,” I said, grateful that my voice had returned to the stage.
“Well, what’s the answer?” she asked. “Will you take me to the dance or not?”
“Molly, you’re Chad’s girlfriend. I know how much he thinks about you. I know how proud you make him.”
“Is that why he asked Bettina Trask to the dance?” she said. “Is that why he asked that big-titted tramp to the sock hop?”
“Bettina Trask,” I gasped, stunned at the news. “Does Chad have a death wish? She’s Wormy Ledbetter’s girlfriend. That’s like committing suicide.”
“I hope Wormy beats the snot out of him.”
“We can plan Chad’s funeral if you like. I know how this story is going to end.”
“I don’t want to talk about Chad. Will you take me to the dance or not?”
“Molly, I’ve never been on a date. I wouldn’t know what to do or say or how to act,” I said, each word coming out as slowly as an extracted tooth.
“I can teach you all th
at stuff,” she said.
“Then I should ask you to the dance, shouldn’t I?”
“That’s the normal procedure,” she said.
“Molly Huger, would you go to the dance with me Friday night after the game?”
“I would be most honored, Leo,” Molly said. “I can’t thank you enough for the invitation.”
“Can I ask you a personal question?”
“Ask away.”
“Have you ever dated another boy besides Chad?”
“Never.” She burst into tears and hung up the phone.
In a reverie composed of both terror and ecstasy, I moved out toward the kitchen, where I began to warm up the meal my father had cooked for me. When I sat down to eat dinner, Father joined me as he did every night, to discuss the events of the day.
“Did the chef do a good job, son?”
“He can work in my kitchen anytime,” I replied. “The flank steak’s delicious. The squash and asparagus couldn’t be better. The mashed potatoes, perfect.”
“Balance is the key to everything. What did Miss Molly want from our boy?”
“The strangest thing in the world,” I said. “She wants me to go to the dance with her after the game.”
“Strange is not the appropriate word,” Father said. “How about fabulous or splendiferous or prodigious? It’s not a bad thing when one of the prettiest, nicest girls in the world wants to go dancing with you.”
“Molly’s way too pretty for a boy like me,” I said. “Chad broke up with her today, so she’s feeling hurt. Chad asked Bettina Trask to the dance.”
“Uh-oh,” my father said. “We know what that boy’s after. Bettina has quite a reputation.”
“I’ve gotten to know her a little bit this year. Her family’s poor, and her father’s a no-account. In fact, I heard he was in prison. But Bettina’s really smart and, I think, ambitious.”