Pop

  “That’s you, right? Charlie Popovich of the Chargers and the Bengals?”

  “Yeah, sure,” he’d replied vaguely, and retreated up the Paper Airplane.

  Marcus hadn’t broached the subject since. Obviously, Charlie didn’t like to discuss his playing days. Maybe there had been an overenthusiastic fan—perhaps more than one. That might explain why Troy and Chelsea were so protective of their dad, and so angry at anyone who approached him.

  Playing cornerback was a thankless job. If you made a play, that was just the defense working as it was designed to. If you missed one, you were the goat lying on the turf while some guy galloped for the end zone with traces of your genetic code on his cleats. So Marcus kept his focus on not screwing up, and it went pretty well. There was one lapse in the second quarter that gave up a big gain, but when the receiver was finally brought down, it was Marcus who did the bringing. So that was worth something.

  “Nice tackle, Jordan,” Coach Barker approved. “Thirty yards too late, but I like the technique.”

  “Technique?” Troy complained. “That cost us a field goal!”

  Barker glared the QB back to the bench, and Marcus kept his mouth shut. No sense upsetting Golden Boy in the middle of a game.

  Luckily, the result of this contest was never in much doubt. The Steelers of Central Regional High were no match for the defending champs. Troy’s high-powered offense took up just where it had left off with last year’s perfect season. Marcus didn’t like the guy, but he couldn’t claim that Troy wasn’t any good. He was efficient, effective, and accurate in his throws. Even more impressive, he projected total control while on the field. It was more than the way he took snaps and made handoffs and threw passes. Something in his body language drew attention like an industrial magnet. It definitely drew Alyssa’s attention. Throughout her cheers and chants and routines, her eyes never left him.

  It happened in the fourth quarter. The Raiders were driving yet again, up 28–3. Luke had beaten his man and was all alone in the middle of the field, waving his arms, no one between him and the distant end zone. Instead, Troy opted for a short dump to Ron for a three-yard gain.

  Marcus turned to Barker, but the coach seemed to have missed it, probably assuming that Troy simply hadn’t noticed Luke so wide open. Marcus knew better. Number Seven had seen Luke all right, but he’d also seen the big defensive end closing in on him at top speed. Troy could have made that play, but he would have been flattened. He’d gotten rid of the ball to avoid the pop.

  It was as clear to Marcus as if he’d been inside Troy’s helmet. It was the way Marcus had played until recently—running scared. And it meant that even Golden Boy was human. Marcus took some comfort in that. Sure, he’d been banished to the defensive secondary, but he had a slight advantage over Troy Popovich. And he’d picked it up from the guy’s own father.

  The feeling—a distinctly Charlie-esque desire for contact—was almost tangible as Marcus took the field for the next defensive series. He was going to get out there and pop somebody.

  He didn’t have long to wait. Down by several scores late in the game, the Steelers’ quarterback was throwing deep, looking for a miracle comeback. On third and ten, one of those passes came in Marcus’s direction.

  He pounded along the sideline, matching the receiver stride for side. When he saw his man glance over his shoulder, he knew the ball was on its way. He risked a quick look of his own. There it was, descending like a cruise missile, a little wobbly but well thrown.

  He waited for his opponent to leap first—striking too soon would draw a penalty. Then, the instant the receiver left his feet, Marcus did too. Impact was sudden, jarring, primal—Marcus’s shoulder rammed into the Steeler’s gut, and more than four hundred pounds of muscle, bone, and equipment slammed together at high speed. The pass hit its target right in the numbers, but the sprawling receiver couldn’t make the play. Shaken by the force of his own tackle, Marcus saw the deflected ball out of the corner of his eye. A split second before he crashed to the ground, he was able to get his left hand around it and pull it to his chest.

  Interception, Raiders.

  “Waste of a good play” was Troy’s pronouncement, with a gesture in the direction of the scoreboard.

  “Great hit, Jordan!” cheered the coach. “We’ll make a corner of you yet!”

  The clock ticked down to a Raiders victory. Perfect season number two was under way. There was so much praise blowing around the sidelines that some of it even fell on the lowly cornerback. His high-five meter may not have registered among the titans of the offense, but he was definitely a member of the club.

  The bleachers thinned as spectators headed for the exits. Families and friends stopped by the bench to congratulate the players.

  Barbara Jordan waved her camera as she made her way to the parking lot. “Got some great shots,” she called. “You’re going to be in the Sunday paper!”

  She meant the team, of course, not him specifically. Probably the winning QB. Breakfast tomorrow wasn’t going to go down very well if he had to look at a picture of Troy on page one.

  He spied Charlie’s tall form behind the bench, above the heads of the crowd, his wife at his side. Mrs. Popovich wrapped her arms around Number Seven’s expansive shoulder pads. “You were wonderful, honey.”

  Troy accepted the hug without embarrassment, but his eyes never left Charlie, who walked purposefully straight past his son. Marcus was struck by a wave of amazement. The King of Pop was coming to him.

  “Good game, Mac. You never could have done it without me.”

  Marcus grinned. “Damn right I couldn’t.”

  Troy untangled himself from his mother and took his father’s arm. “Come on, Dad. Let’s go home.”

  Mrs. Popovich stepped in. “Charlie, didn’t Troy play a fantastic game?”

  Charlie nodded vigorously. “Oh, yeah—sure, like always!”

  The look Troy gave Marcus could have melted his faceguard.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The new drill was called Shark Bait.

  It was Charlie’s most sadistic creation to date. A sickly crabapple tree was used as a catapult to send the punt skyward. The receiver, positioned halfway up the Paper Airplane, had to jump for it, bring in the awkward, spinning ball, and land on the grass below. There, he truly was “shark bait”—exposed, unprotected, unable even to brace himself for impact as the tackler plowed him over.

  They had been at it for close to two hours, without a break. As always, Marcus was getting the worst of the exchange, but he fought on, determined to get his licks in. If he could induce a grunt or a gasp from the NFL’s King of Pop, that was a major achievement. As for the pain signals screaming from every cell of his own body, he almost welcomed them. It used to be the result of the collision that he wanted—a good tackle or block, an approving smile behind Barker’s usual backhanded compliment. Now the hitting was an end in itself. The impact felt good, and the hurt that went with it was something he craved. It had even seeped into his life outside football. He’d be sitting in class, knowing he should be thinking about the lesson or the Vespa’s next oil change or the feeling of Alyssa’s lips on his, with the promise of more to come if the two of them ever had the chance to be alone together. Instead, he had another kind of body contact in mind. All he wanted to do was tackle a brick wall. Charlie had turned him into a pop addict.

  Nothing was harder than catching a football that was twirling end over end. As he dropped from the Paper Airplane, he struggled to pull the ball in while at the same time concentrating on achieving a solid landing with no twisted ankles. As always, Charlie’s tackle was textbook. As he wrapped Marcus up, his shoulder slammed the ball free. The momentum of his lunge drove his head right into Marcus’s upper arm.

  Marcus was aware of an uncoupling deep inside him, as if his skeleton was made of Lego blocks and some basic connection had popped loose. A split second later, he was in unbearable pain.

  Not even an NFL tough guy could ignore
the cries of agony as his companion writhed on the grass, hugging himself against a level of discomfort that would have been unimaginable just a moment before.

  “What is it, Mac? Where’d you get dinged?”

  “My shoulder!” Marcus gasped, barely able to summon the breath required for speech. “I think it’s broken!”

  Charlie looked dubious. “I would have felt that. Probably just a dislocation. Happens all the time.”

  “Not to me!” Marcus yowled. His shoulder was on fire, the searing waves radiating from his fingertips to the center of his chest.

  Charlie grabbed him by the good arm and hauled him to his feet. The head rush nearly caused him to black out.

  “Here’s what you do,” said the NFL veteran, indicating the Remembrance sculpture. “You’ve got to ram your shoulder into that statue as hard as you can.”

  “Are you crazy?” Marcus howled.

  “You’ve got to be moving fast enough to knock the bone back into the joint. It’s going to hurt like hell.”

  “It hurts like hell already!”

  Charlie looked mildly annoyed. “And it’ll keep on hurting until you fix it.”

  It was too much to ask. Never before had Marcus suffered such torment. The prospect of touching a cobweb was unthinkable, much less a block of granite.

  “I’ve got to get to a doctor!”

  “He’s just going to tell you the same thing,” the King of Pop warned.

  “He’s not going to tell me to run into a statue!”

  “No, he’ll push it back in for you,” Charlie reasoned. “Here, you want me to try?”

  Marcus shrank away. “Don’t touch me—please! I’ve got to go to the emergency room. There’s no way I can get there on my bike! Have you got a car, Charlie?”

  “I’ll get it!” Charlie promised. “Just sit tight. I’ll be back in ten minutes!” And he sprinted off with long athletic strides.

  Marcus was too miserable to notice the fifty-four-year-old’s impressive speed. He sat with his back against the Paper Airplane, willing himself to remain absolutely still, because movement was out of the question. The simple act of breathing in and out was all he could manage.

  Come on, Charlie. Hurry up.

  The pain was so intense that he actually zoned out for a while, although he couldn’t be certain if he’d slept or fainted.

  “Charlie?” he said groggily.

  But he was alone. Not only that—the sun had changed position, and was considerably lower in the sky. He looked down at his watch. Forty minutes had passed! Where was Charlie?

  No—no time to think about that. He needed relief from this torment, and he needed it now.

  He couldn’t walk to the hospital, and he couldn’t ride the Vespa in this condition. He probably couldn’t even crawl out of the park to fall at the feet of some random pedestrian. There was only one option left.

  He staggered to his feet, biting the side of his mouth to keep from losing consciousness again. He took a few steps back. He’d become much tougher since training with Charlie, but this required reserves of courage even he wasn’t sure he possessed.

  Holding his breath, he ran forward at full tilt and slammed his shoulder into the solid granite.

  He heard himself scream, and that was all he was aware of for several minutes. When he awoke, his lunch was all down the front of his shirt, and the pain was gone. In wonder, he flexed his shoulder, moving his arm up and down. He was fine. A little sore, but only a little. Fine.

  Unbelievable! Charlie was right.

  Charlie…

  How could a grown man leave a teenager in such a condition? How could he just walk away like that, promising help and never coming back? Could anybody be so selfish? Did he consider himself so big a sports star that other people simply didn’t matter?

  I don’t care how much he’s helped me with football! I’m done with that guy.

  He started for the parking lot and his Vespa, still amazed that the terrible agony was so suddenly gone. To be utterly incapacitated and, an instant later, totally back to normal seemed almost like magic. Clearly, it had been no big deal to Charlie. He pictured an NFL locker room, with howling players bodychecking the cinder-block walls to autocorrect their various dislocations.

  The bike’s motor roared to life, and he tooled out of the main entrance of the park, more shaken by Charlie’s behavior than the memory of the blinding pain. This man was supposed to be his friend. He had taken Marcus under his wing and generously shared his football experience. He had even greeted Marcus before going up to his own son at the Raiders-Steelers game.

  What a jerk!

  No sooner had Marcus reached Poplar Street than a shiny black Cadillac SUV crested the rise. A familiar set of broad shoulders was hunched over the wheel. It was Charlie, peering through the windshield with the intense concentration of a chess master pondering a critical move.

  Marcus waved his arms. “Hey!”

  The big Cadillac roared straight on past.

  He didn’t see me!

  Marcus’s brow knit. No, that wasn’t quite it. More like Charlie had seen him—and had looked right through him.

  He twisted the throttle, and the scooter took off in hot pursuit. Putt-putting around town, there weren’t a lot of opportunities for the Vespa to show what it could do. Props to Comrade Stalin—it was a great gift, even with the many strings attached. He flashed past the SUV and then ditched the bike in the grass just in time to flag Charlie down from the side of the road.

  The passenger window receded into the door frame.

  “What happened?” Marcus demanded. “You were supposed to come pick me up!”

  Charlie’s face was blank. “What?”

  “That’s not funny, man!” Marcus exploded. “You left me screaming my head off with a dislocated shoulder!”

  “What you have to do is find a good, solid tree—”

  “It isn’t dislocated now! I had to fix it myself when you didn’t show up to take me to the emergency room!”

  Charlie frowned. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “You can’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about! It just happened!”

  “Mac—”

  “You know my real name!” stormed Marcus. “I’ve told it to you twenty times! I may not have played pro football, but I’m a person too. Where do you get off trying to stiff me for your half of that broken window? You owe me a hundred and fifty-five bucks!”

  The former linebacker’s eyes narrowed. “Are you trying to rip me off?”

  “Forget it.” If Charlie wanted to screw a high school kid out of what amounted to pocket change for a guy behind the wheel of a seventy-thousand-dollar SUV, Marcus wasn’t going to fight with him. It just reinforced the image of the egotistical pro athlete, so self-centered that he couldn’t even devote a few minutes of his day to giving a teenager obviously in agony a lift to the hospital.

  He got back on his bike, giving the SUV a wide berth as he made a left turn into traffic. He was burning again, but this time it was with shame. How duped he’d been by this old weirdo! How quick to mistake a few tackling pointers and a glitzy stat sheet for friendship! He felt like an idiot.

  The sound of car horns behind him drew his eyes to the mirror. The Cadillac was making a U-turn. Was Charlie chasing him now? Well, if he was, he’d picked the wrong kind of scooter to go up against. A twist of the throttle and soon the Vespa was up to seventy, whizzing by Three Alarm Park, the SUV just a dot in the rearview.

  He had already wasted more than enough time on Charlie Popovich.

  The collage had once held a place of honor on Troy’s bedroom wall. Now it lay at the bottom of his junk drawer, buried under old CD cases and a long-defunct Scooby-Doo puzzle with two pieces missing.

  “Troy!” came his mother’s voice from downstairs.

  He ignored her, scrutinizing his third-grade handwriting on the construction paper: Number 55 in Action.

  His father’s eyes stared back at him from ev
ery conceivable angle. The artwork was a patchwork of dozens of football cards from the King of Pop’s playing days. Troy made no move to touch it; he never did. But rarely did a day go by when he didn’t open the drawer to look at it.

  “Troy, get down here!”

  “I’m busy,” he mumbled, using his pinky finger to slide an arcade token off Charlie’s San Diego rookie card.

  “Now!”

  Mrs. Popovich was at the base of the stairs, practically shaking with anger. He caught an expression of mock sympathy from his sister. Chelsea the spectator—she was enjoying this.

  His mother grabbed his wrist and towed him into the kitchen, where French doors led out to the driveway. There sat the black SUV, parked at an odd angle. A large dent marred the front bumper.

  “Don’t look at me,” he defended himself. “I can’t afford the gas to take that monster around the corner. You probably got dinged in a parking lot.”

  “I haven’t been in a parking lot,” Mrs. Popovich said icily. “The car’s been here all day.”

  “Well, I didn’t hit it,” said Troy. “Check my Mustang—it’s clean.”

  “He couldn’t have hit it,” Chelsea put in. “The dent’s on the wrong side of the car.”

  Their mother was exasperated. “Then who—”

  A loud, juicy crunch stopped her in her tracks. The three peered through the doorway to the den, where Charlie reclined on the couch in front of the TV, dismantling a pear.

  Troy’s brow furrowed. “Dad doesn’t drive anymore, does he?”

  “He took me to the cell phone place,” Chelsea supplied.

  “Well, okay, if there’s someone in the car with him,” said Mrs. Popovich. “But alone?”

  “Where does he ever go that he can’t walk to?” asked Troy.

  His mother looked stricken, her lips hardening into a thin line. Wordlessly, she removed the Cadillac key chain from a wall hook and hid it deep inside a kitchen drawer.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  For Marcus, cutting Charlie out of his life was both easy and hard. It was a simple matter to stop heading for Three Alarm Park after football practice every day. But he missed the former linebacker.