“So we get helmets for the second half?”
He shook his head, pulled a beer from the cooler. “No helmets. We just get meaner.”
“Anyone ever died at one of these games?”
He smiled. “Not yet. Could happen, though. Beer?”
I shook my head, waiting for the ringing to stop in there. “Take a water.”
He passed me a bottle of Poland Spring, put a hand on my shoulder, and led me up the sideline a few yards, away from the rest. In the stands, a small group of people had gathered-runners, mostly, who’d stumbled on the game as they prepared to jog the steps, one tall guy sitting off to himself, long legs propped up on the rail, baseball hat pulled low over his eyes.
“Last night,” Broussard said, and let the two words hang in the rain.
I sipped some water.
“I said a thing or two I shouldn’t have. Too much rum, my head gets a little fucked up.”
I looked out at the collection of wide Greek columns that rose beyond the stands. “Such as?”
He stepped in front of me, his eyes dancing and bright. “Don’t try and play with me here, Kenzie.”
“Patrick,” I said, and took a step to my right.
He followed, his nose an inch from mine, that weird, dancing brightness filling his eyes. “We both know I let slip something I shouldn’t have. Let’s leave it at that and forget about it.”
I gave him a friendly, confused smile. “I don’t know where this is coming from, Remy.”
He shook his head slowly. “You don’t want to play it this way, Kenzie. You understand?”
“No, I-”
I never saw his hand move, but I felt a sharp sting on my knuckles and suddenly my water bottle was lying at my feet, chugging its contents into the mud.
“Forget last night, and we’ll be friends.” The lights in his eyes had stopped dancing but burned hard, as if embers were locked in the pupils.
I looked down at the water bottle, the mud encasing the sides of the clear plastic. “And if I don’t?”
“That’s not an ‘if’ you want to bring into your life.” He tilted his head, peered into my eyes as if he saw something there that might require extraction, might not; he wasn’t sure yet. “Are we clear on this?”
“Yeah, Remy,” I said. “We’re clear. Sure.”
He held my eyes for a long minute, breathing steadily through his nostrils. Eventually, he raised his beer to his lips, took a long pull on the can, lowered it.
“That’s Officer Broussard,” he said, and walked back upfield.
The second half of the game was war.
The rain and the mud and the smell of blood brought out something horrible in both teams, and in the carnage that ensued, three HurtYous and two DoRights left the game permanently. One of them-Mike Lawn-had to be carried off the field, after Oscar and a Robbery dick named Zeke Monfriez collided on either side of his body and damn near snapped him in half.
I sustained two heavily bruised ribs and one shot to the lower back that would probably have me pissing blood the next morning, but in view of all the bloody faces, noses flattened to pulps, and one guy spitting two teeth into the first-down hash mark, I felt comparatively fortunate.
Broussard switched to tailback and stayed away from me the rest of the game. He got a torn lower lip on one play, but two plays later clotheslined the guy who’d given it to him so viciously the guy lay on the field coughing and puking for a full minute before he could stand on legs so wobbly it looked like he was on the keel of a schooner in high seas. After he’d clotheslined the poor bastard, Broussard had kicked him while he was down for good measure, and the HurtYous went apeshit. Broussard stood behind a wall of his own men as Oscar and Zeke tried to get at him, called him a cheap-shot motherfucker, and he caught my eyes and smiled like a gleeful three- year-old.
He raised a finger caked with dark blood, and wagged it at me.
We won by a field goal.
As a guy who grew up as desperate to be a jock as any other guy in America, and one who still cancels most engagements on autumn Sunday afternoons, I suppose I should have been ecstatic at what would probably be my last taste of team sports, the thrill of conquest and the sexual intensity of battle. I should have felt like whooping, should have had tears in my eyes as I stood at midfield in the first football stadium ever built in this country, looked at the Greek columns and the rain boiling off the long planks of seating in the stands, smelled the last hint of winter dying in the April rain, the metallic odor of the rain itself, the lonely advance of evening in the cold purple sky.
But I didn’t feel any of that.
I felt like we were a bunch of foolish, pathetic men unwilling to accept our own aging and willing to break bones and tear the flesh of other men just so we could move a brown ball a couple of yards or feet or inches down a field.
And, also, looking along the sidelines at Remy Broussard as he poured a beer over his bloody finger, doused his torn lip with it, and accepted high-fives from his pals, I felt afraid.
“Tell me about him,” I said to Devin and Oscar, as we leaned against the bar.
“Broussard?”
“Yeah.”
Both teams had chosen to convene the postgame party at a bar on Western Avenue in Allston, about a half mile from the stadium. The bar was called the Boyne, after a river in Ireland that had snaked through the village where my mother grew up, lost her fisherman father and two brothers to the lethal liquid combination of whiskey and the sea.
It was excessively well-lit for an Irish bar, and the brightness was heightened by blond wood tables and light beige booths, a shiny blond bar. Most Irish bars are dark, steeped in mahogany and oak and black floors; in the darkness, I’ve always thought, lies the sense of intimacy my race feels is necessary to drink as heavily as we often do.
In the brightness of the Boyne, it was clear to see how the battle we’d just fought on the field had spilled over into the bar. The Homicide and Robbery guys stuck to the bar and the small high tables across from it. The Narco-Vice-CAC cops took over the rear of the place, draped themselves over the backs of booths, and stood in packs near the tiny stage by the fire exit, talking so loudly that the three-piece Irish band quit playing after four songs.
I have no idea how the management felt about the fifty bloody men who’d piled into the sparsely populated bar, if they had a team of extra bouncers waiting in the kitchen and a Def-Con alert called into the Brighton P.D., but they were definitely pulling down a profit, pouring beers and shots nonstop, trying to keep abreast of the calls for more coming from the rear of the bar, sending barbacks to wade through the men and sweep up the broken bottles and overturned ashtrays.
Broussard and John Corkery held court in the back, their voices rising loudly in toasts to the prowess of the DoRights, Broussard alternating a napkin and a cold beer bottle against his damaged lip.
“Thought you guys were buddies,” Oscar said. “What, your moms won’t let you play together anymore, or’d you have a spat?”
“The moms thing,” I said.
“Great cop,” Devin said. “Bit of a showboat, but all those Narco-Vice guys are.”
“But Broussard’s CAC. Hell, he’s not even that anymore. He’s Motor Pool.”
“CAC was recent,” Devin said. “Last two years or so. Before that he did like a nickel in Vice, a nickel in Narco.”
“More than that.” Oscar belched. “We came out of Housing together, did a year in uniform each, and he went into Vice, I went into Violent Crimes. That was ’eighty-three.”
Remy’s head turned away from two of his men as they each chatted in his ear, and he looked across the bar at Oscar and Devin and me. He raised his beer bottle, tilted his head.
We raised ours.
He smiled, kept his eyes on us for a minute, then turned back to his men.
