The whole room turned to look at me.
—My mechanic’s black, I said. He’s probably taking it out for a test drive.
—You told me the shop’s in Cary, Jimbo said.
—It is.
—That’s two fuckin’ towns away! He banged his fist against the table.
—McCoy is back, and not from Oregon. I will keep the Football House stocked in beers the whole fucking season if Furling’s station wagon isn’t in the Hay parking lot.
—That’s a bet!
People gobbled what was left of their dinners and left in droves to speed to the Hay. I rode with Devonté, listening to Jimbo crow from the front seat.
—Y’all just never learn, he was saying. Seen with your own eyes that we have the most spoiled player in D1, somebody we call Cousin Shawn, and you still insist everything about him isn’t one long lie.
—Like you don’t want him back, Devonté said.
—Oh, I do, I do. I’ve been dreaming about that motherfucker every night. I’m just not under the illusion the rest of y’all are.
—Which is?
We never found out what Jimbo meant. We pulled into the players’ lot, and the only cars in sight were those of the teammates who’d outraced us from Training Table. We stepped out into the night and watched Jimbo walk from one end of the lot to the other, looking for the car, muttering.
—Let’s switch to Coors this season, Jimbo!
—Nah, let’s do fancy shit! Make it Heineken!
Arnold Duffy was already in the Team Room as we filed in for the day’s final meeting, and the journalist’s presence made people mock Jimbo even more mercilessly, everybody hoping their jibe might be the one Duffy chose to publish in the part of his story about the failed resurrection of our star. I laughed along, but underneath I was still disturbed by what Wheeler had seen. I knew that just because my car wasn’t in the lot didn’t mean Reshawn hadn’t returned.
And I was right. After the last players sat and the assistant coaches trailed in behind them, we watched Coach Zeller enter the Team Room with Reshawn. Reshawn’s hair was longer than I’d ever seen it, a starter Afro scraggly at the hairline. His body looked slightly reduced in the way you would expect of an elite athlete who’d gone without intensive exercise for two straight weeks. He looked miserable, and blew out a heavy breath as Zeller hung his arm around his shoulders and said in a low, emotional voice:
—Let’s welcome our boy home.
We clapped. Coach Zeller pulled Reshawn toward him, squeezing him. Reshawn’s body gave in—he even draped his arm around Zeller’s shoulders—but his face was in full recoil. The applause died down and Reshawn took a seat in the front row.
—Prayers work, Zeller said, nodding. Don’t let anybody ever tell you different. Mrs. McCoy’s got a long road ahead, but the recovery—how’d they put it, Reshawn?
—Unprecedented, he said.
—Unprecedented. And we are just so damn grateful.
Zeller smiled, sinking his hands into his pockets.
—You know, the night after Reshawn went back to Oregon, I had a dream. Strange dream. I was standin’ in my kitchen and starin’ at this wooden table. But it wadn’t the table my family eats on. It was a new table. A strange table. And what made this table strange was it had legs and legs, more legs’n I coulda ever hoped to count. Like an insect, or trees in a forest … That was it, a table, then I woke up. Don’t know about y’all, but I don’t usually put much stock in dreams. Thought women were the only people who did that kinda thing. But this dream, it kept naggin’ at me. Kept demandin’ I figure out its purpose. I thought and thought, but just could not get an answer. And then tonight, soon as I walked in here and saw y’all, the table appeared to me again. I understood. God had given me a vision.
Zeller’s eyes widened, hands levitating out of his pockets.
—With most tables, you knock out a leg and they’re easy to tip over. But that table in my dream? You take out one of those legs?
He held out his flattened right hand.
—Steady, men. Unshakable. You see what I’m gettin’ at?
—Yes sir.
—We ain’t a player, men. We’re a team. We ain’t a leg of that table. We’re the fuckin’ table itself. Reshawn goes back to help his mama? We stay standin’. Errol breaks his arm tomorrow? Same goddamn thing. Nobody, ain’t nobody, can knock us down—not if we don’t let ‘em.
—Fuck Savannah, Reshawn said. Fuck every fucking inch of it.
He said he despised the city’s poor outlying districts, which like all such places in the South seemed simultaneously cramped and empty, overgrown and barren. He hated the city’s wealthy, touristed center, too, with its iron-grilled mansions, its avenues of live oaks draped with Spanish moss, the old brick buildings and sparkling new shops and everything else that sat so contentedly on foundations where concrete and stone mixed with slaves’ bones. At first I thought he was being hyperbolic—it seemed impossible he could have felt such hatred for a place he was visiting for only the second time—but as he kept talking, I came to understand he wasn’t really referring to Savannah but to the hellish mental space he’d thrashed around in for the entirety of his stay.
—Everyone pretended to act all understanding. Zeller. My parents. “You’re overwhelmed, Reshawn, we get it.” “It’s okay to take a break, sweetie, we understand.” They told me take a week, call when you’re ready.
He told Professor Grayson he had come simply because he had burned out of football, and Grayson had been good enough to take him at his word and put him to work sifting through the latest tranche of materials they’d gotten from Lala Bigmore’s collection. One of the pieces was a newly uncovered poem by CSK, printed in a Greensboro paper in the late 1850s. The poem was written in off-kilter meter that was unusual for CSK, closer to the kind of verse Emily
