—BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
This was nowhere near the satisfied booing Scan and I had received. This booing had an irritated edge to it, and as soon as Reshawn climbed down from his chair the boos ended with a grumpy peremptoriness, as if the vets were eager to begin forgetting the whole unpleasant episode.
Reshawn and I got in line for the buffet behind J1 and J2, who’d ridden with us in my Saturn.
—McCoy, J1 turned to say. That was a poem?
—Yeah.
—You write it? —It’s by Dickinson.
—Man, I thought that shit sounded familiar, J2 said. We read Tale of Two Cities.
—Not Dickens, Reshawn said. Dickinson.
We returned to the Hay for the afternoon break. I decided to look up the rest of the poem, see whether the remaining stanzas clarified what he’d been trying to say. I went to the training room and used one of the desktop computers to search online using “brain” and “sky” and “Dickinson” as search terms. What I found was shorter than I’d expected, only three stanzas, but I still could not for the life of me understand why he’d chosen this particular poem. Or was I overthinking things and he had just randomly chosen it, knowing one Dickinson poem would be as jarring and strange as another? That was probably the answer. Probably the poem’s content wasn’t the point, probably the point was him showing us he was perfectly capable of memorizing the fight song and chose not to—the point was to remove himself another degree from the team, to keep extending the distance between us and him.
What made this so galling was that, while he was trying to get as far from us as possible off the field, he was becoming more integral to our offense with every practice. He continued to play superlatively, and by the next morning he was promoted to starting tailback.
We gradually wore more pads to practice as we acclimated to playing in the punishing heat, which meant we were edging toward tackling and the advantage was tipping toward Chase. He was a nasty, physical player and took every chance to face me in drills so he could use his extra twenty pounds to crack, slap, yank, jerk, and generally manhandle me. Also, the defensive packages we were installing were growing more sophisticated than anything I’d ever seen. Chase already had everything memorized and moved through his assignments confidently, but I was carrying my playbook everywhere to try and learn its hundred-plus pages, and whenever I got onto the field for reps during Team period, there was a crucial delay between thought and action.
Yet there was one way in which I maintained an undeniable edge—Coach Hightower. On Thursday morning, we practiced our fits during Individual period. The “fit” is when you punch your hands into the breastplate of your blocker’s shoulder pads and grab his jersey, the move necessary to gain control of that blocker and move him wherever you need. To practice it, the linebackers paired up, with partners kneeling across from one another on the grass. The hitter then lowered himself into a four-point stance (hands also on the ground) and on the whistle cocked his arms and shot them upward, exploding his hands into the breastplate of the hittee, grabbing his jersey and jerking him backward. The hittee, meanwhile, stayed on two knees and was totally pliant, absorbing the shock and falling back onto his haunches.
To get a good fit you had to thrust your hips in a single fluid motion, and to help us visualize how we should be doing this, Coach Hightower said we should move our hips like we were fucking a girl from behind. For a couple of reasons this particular pedagogical tool fell flat for me, and when Coach Hightower saw me struggling to get it right, he took a fatherly knee to the side of me while I was on all fours. Without warning he grabbed the back of my running shorts with his left hand, grabbed the jersey cloth covering my breastplate with his right, and proceeded to guide my body upward in the quarter-circle motion he was looking for. The knuckles on his left hand pressed into the small sweaty patch of hair just above my tailbone, which made me so tense that I went even more awkwardly rigid.
—Relaaaaaax, he whispered into my helmet’s earhole. Just keep thinking about that sweet thing you took to homecoming.
—Yes sir.
—All right. Go again.
Thrust, thrust, thrust—Hightower lifting me, guiding me, making it feel like I was being helped to practice flying as much as fucking. Eventually I relaxed in his hands and started to get the motion down.
—That’s what I’m talking about! he said, patting me on the helmet and rising to his feet.
He moved down the line of players and stopped at Chase.
—McGerrin, stop moving like some dude’s fucking you in the ass. Go again!
Chase did, and though I couldn’t find any fault with his form, Hightower grew exasperated. He butted Chase’s partner out of the way, positioned himself on all fours across from Chase, and proceeded to use his old linebacking skills to show Chase his errors, striking Chase’s breastplate full force, jamming him hard over and over again.
—Like this!
—Like this!
—LIKE THIS!
When it came time for the afternoon break, I took the elevator up to the fifth floor, thinking I would visit Coach Hightower and keep pressing my advantage. Though I wouldn’t have admitted it back then, I was also hungry to establish Hightower as the mentor who’d fill the hole Coach Johannsen had left.
He was in the middle of typing an email when I knocked on his open door. He left his hands resting on his computer’s keyboard as he turned to me.
—Furling! Take a seat.
I sat in the chair across from him while he finished the email. Hand-annotated scouting reports were scattered across his desk, many of them patterned with brown coffee mug rings or yellow grease stains. On a bookshelf to my left, videotapes of last season’s games stood in unflush stacks,
