Muckers (30 page)

* * *

The sun’s holding steady above the horizon and playing tricks on the dewy macadam. It’ll be like that for another hour, I’d imagine, till I pass Oak Creek. Cruz will have read
the letter by then and found the money that I’d saved for Bobby’s pew. That Ford Deluxe doesn’t belong to anyone except Cruz. The money will make sure he keeps it.

The H is gone from my rearview mirror. It hung there for a long time. Now there’s nothing but green, a hundred miles of it stretching out in front of me across the horizon to Flagstaff. That’s where I’m headed. I’ll be staying with the Mackenzies while I figure things out—start thinking about the future. I’ve got options. Maybe I’ll finish school up there. Maybe someday I’ll coach.

The ponderosas are so thick in Flagstaff that the sun can barely get through them. I bet it’s the same green in Antrim. And maybe in Hatley someday, a dozen years from now, after those paradise seeds take hold. I guess people can start over. Shed their skin. Even a snake gets a shot at it every year.

I stop the Chevy on a wide spot of dirt beside the road and take out the picture Francisco gave me. It’s of Faye Miller sitting in the Gulch with her boy when he was a baby. He’s wearing a baptism dress and is holding Francisco’s wand like it’s a rattle. But the best part is what’s written on the other side:
July 18, 1943. The Baptism of Samuel Robert O’Sullivan
.

I should have known the first time I saw him. He’s got Bobby’s smile and that forehead with all those freckles.
Our
freckles.

I tuck the photograph in the kimono next to the Yavapai Cup with the pearls. The material’s red like Angie’s lips and not too shiny. Just perfect, actually. It’s a couple of hundred miles from Flagstaff to Ajo and it’s no place for someone who isn’t a miner, but that won’t stop me from seeing Angie.

I get back on the road and head for those peaks. I just might climb them when I get to Flag. I’ll have plenty of time
to go fishing, too. Catch me a trout. I know what I’ll do. I’ll eat it while I’m waiting for the sunset. I’ve never seen one from that side before. Then I’ll look in the opposite direction toward Hatley, and think of all the miracles that have already happened.

WHILE THE FIRST YEAR OF
the Korean War, and the Communist scare it ignited, are the backdrop of my novel, the story itself is inspired by Jerome, Arizona, a mountain town that was once a billion-dollar copper camp in the rugged north of the state a hundred years ago.

You can still see the entire community defying gravity as you drive through it today. Looping past the gulches where the old-timers are buried below the hulking bones of a swimming pool built for “foreigners,” you first come to the old high school—its burnished copper doors now shuttered. Jerome High closed in 1951, the year the mines tapered off production, spurring a mass exodus that left the town practically deserted. But like the houses that seem impossibly placed up the thirty-degree incline of Cleopatra Hill, the people of Jerome seemed to defy logic, too. During that final year of decline, they accomplished an incredible sports victory.

I first found out about the Muckers football team while living in Sedona, Arizona, about a twenty-minute drive from Jerome. I was working as an announcer for ESPN, covering the WNBA and the X Games, but the truth is, all I wanted to do was write.

I’d been researching a different story about Jerome and had reached a dead end. Still, the town had a hold on me
(once you visit you’ll see what I mean), and I think Alene Alder Rangel, archivist of the Jerome Historical Society at the time, felt sorry for me that morning as I sat staring at microfilm. She pointed to a cardboard box that had recently arrived and asked if I wanted to take a look. Inside were the typical memorabilia a historical society would kindly accept—things like yearbooks, school newspapers, and photographs of people picnicking in the Gulch eating watermelon a century ago. But then the letters tumbled out—dozens of them—addressed to Mr. Lewis McDonald, who was the longtime principal of Jerome High (and later, a Northern Arizona University administrator). It was Mr. McDonald’s request that these mementos be given to the historical society after his death. The precious notes—some handwritten, others typed from the bunks of battleships—were all from young men who had gone to Jerome High, and spanned nearly three decades’ worth of correspondence, beginning in the 1930s. (Nearly half of the 1950 Muckers starters served in the Korean War, which escalated and continued until 1953. All survived.)

Flushed with excitement, yet not quite knowing what I would find, I photocopied everything in the box, then went home and read into the night. By morning I’d learned what history books could never reveal: about separate swimming pools and young soldiers eager to share what they’d gone through. I connected the letters with faces in the yearbooks and became a witness to the anguish of forbidden love, final notes from those who would perish at Iwo Jima, and glimpses of Coach Homer Brown, writing from his sickbed about the head wounds that would later kill him.

But what kept me up all these years was an article in
Arizona Football
—and likely the only one ever written about the
Jerome Muckers’ incredible story. It described their valiant history and the football team’s final season, when they managed to win a title in herculean fashion without their longtime coach. This was my story.

They were a ragtag team of diminutive players with a mountain of odds against them: the smallest team in the state, a football field made of slag instead of grass, and a coach who would die of his war wounds before the season even began.

One of the few racially mixed teams in Arizona, the Jerome Muckers often played against high schools that were either all-black or all-white, but not Mexican and white like they were. Not only did the Muckers win the 1950 Northern Arizona Conference title, they went undefeated, trouncing teams from big cities like Phoenix and Flagstaff who were double their size. The remarkable feat earned the Muckers bragging rights for the mythic state championship. (Play-offs were not held back then, so the state title was determined by merit and led to plenty of arguments.)

It was a spectacular story that never made national or even state headlines. Prejudice, under the guise of the Communist red scare, had seeped into every part of American society—including newsrooms.

The story would have remained buried in the hearts of the few Mucker players who are still alive and scattered like tumbleweed across desert towns if I hadn’t opened that box.

Interviewing some of those Muckers about their story (how else would I have known about the school-bus drills, the bitter rivalries, or even where the football field really was?), I became certain I could create a novel that echoed
their spirit. But it was in the letters that my characters took shape, allowing me to write in the voices of young men.

I wrote much of the novel on location, sitting in Coach Brown’s office at the abandoned gymnasium, or on the metal fire escape where that crazy tree really did grow, reading 1950 editions of the
Verde Independent
. Even now, you can go into the high school and visit artists who rent studio space amid the khaki-colored lockers, the staff john, and the empty trophy case. And if you walk down North Drive to the cemetery, you’ll find clusters of paradise trees by a tall house that used to be the Mexican Methodist Church (built with powder boxes by Sabino Gonzales, who inspired my character Francisco). But the shanties in El Barrio Chicano (Mexican Town) are gone, except for a few foundations. And the slag football field has become a parking lot beyond the fire hall, where the long-abandoned open pit continues to dominate the view.

I think the best view of the pit, though, is from the first pew on the left-hand side of the Holy Family Church, which still has its tin ceiling, the organist’s mirror, and that ill-fated lamb across the altar. The parish and its former priests (one left the church after making a fortune in mining stocks and married; the other was known to collect hundreds of women’s left shoes and to hide thousands in offertory money in coffee cans) helped me create the Sacred Heart of Mary and the character of Father Pierre.

I’ve watched that gaping pit (and the forty-foot-high J painted on the hill above it) slowly disappear from my rearview mirror a hundred times while driving home. But I’ll never forget how Jerome looked the night I left it after interviewing former Muckers quarterback Rusty Winslow. Watching the town prepare for the night as I
looped around the old high school, I saw the lights from the old mining hospital (now the Grand Hotel) turn on first, starting up the birthday-candle glow. By the time I’d reached Cottonwood, the illumination had grown wider and brighter, and I imagined the whole town celebrating a spectacular achievement that had gone unnoticed for too many years.

A STORY BECOMES A NOVEL
because so many people work hard to make it so. In my case, that’s especially true, since I’d discovered the spark of this story more than a dozen years ago, right before the trajectory of my life made several dramatic turns that could have derailed it.

By the time the final draft of
Muckers
had been written, I’d lived in two different countries and three states, and gone from being an ESPN announcer—single and travel-bound—to being married and a stepmom, and writing from home in (very fashionable) sweatpants.

Before all that, though, I’d collected my own boxes full of material. They would be the first items on the U-Haul trucks. I’d also written fifty pages of
Muckers
, sitting on the fire escape of Jerome High (which had long been abandoned) or in the auditorium next to a few chatty squatters who often gave me Dunkin’ Donuts napkins to write on when I’d run out of paper.

During that time, I was most thankful for meeting Rusty Winslow, a Jerome Mucker quarterback who became a football coach. Unassuming and courteous, Rusty kept calling me “ma’am,” his wavy hair looking like it must have in 1950, and walking with the gait of a man still proud of his town and what they’d achieved. Standing on the old field as Rusty told me about Coach Brown and pushing that school bus
around or about those Wolves was the highlight of gathering golden nuggets for my novel. I’m thankful for Rusty’s stories about playing Muckers football and grateful to his wife, Barbara (Hollingshead) Winslow—they were Jerome High School classmates—for her recollections about living in Jerome.

Of course, when it came to crafting the novel, I have several people to thank for supporting me through the writing process and keeping me grounded to the finish.

Nancy Hinkel is one of those editors who authors hope to have for their entire careers. I’m told that notion is very old-school and that it rarely happens anymore, but then again, I’m married to an editor, so I do have a reference point. And I suppose with a novel set in 1950 and featuring old-time football, it’s obvious how much I value tradition and maintaining treasured relationships. I’d like to thank Nancy for gently nudging me to let go of what I had to in order to make the story better. Nancy also helped me strive for that elusive balance in historical fiction—between what really happened in the town I’d grown so attached to and what was best for my characters. Thanks also to the watchful eye of Nancy’s editorial assistants, Jeremy Medina and Stephen Brown. Is there anyone left in publishing who returns emails immediately? They do, and that means so much. Special thanks to the extraordinary copy editors Iris Broudy and Artie Bennett and to the jacket designer Sarah Hoy.

To my husband, Rich Wallace. I keep reminding myself that I’ve known this story longer than I’ve known you. But I have
Muckers
to thank for bringing us together. When we met in Prescott at that writers’ conference, I was trying to compose rhymes, but we talked sports and about
Muckers
and it felt like I’d always known you. Thank you for making sure that Red’s voice and the essence of
Muckers
never shifted
when the stress of moving and life sometimes clouded my reference point, and for always being as excited about this story as any of yours. No one writes sports action like you do, so I appreciate how you watched over mine.

Research can be a tricky thing. It was Alene Alder Rangel, then the archivist of the Jerome Historical Society, who allowed full access to reporters like me. Without Alene, I would have never known about Mr. McDonald’s box, had access to photographs and alumni, or been able to listen to dozens of taped interviews of Jerome old-timers to get a sense of language, history, and personality. This is how I was able to put flesh on the bones of my characters, and I’m so grateful to Alene.

Getting the additional information I needed once I’d moved to New Hampshire could have been tricky also. But thanks to an archival swap program, I was able to have every 1950 edition of the
Verde Independent
and the
Arizona Republic
brought to the Keene Public Library from the Arizona State Library, Archives, and Public Records—five microfilm reels at a time. Thanks to the staff at the Keene library for never “shushing” me whenever I gasped at discovering new headlines or want ads that took my breath away. These fascinating tidbits found their way into the novel, creating their own story parallel to the main one.

To Judy Goldman, the wonderful Mexican children’s book author who breathed language into my characters Cruz and Angie, making sure that they spoke “Mexican” Spanish and that their voices and traditions rang true to their ancestry. Mexico City seemed so close, and I thank you for always responding so quickly and enthusiastically. And to Kathy Cannon Wiechman for your watchful eye when it came to continuity.

Some things just fall your way, and finding the late Barry
Sollenberger’s article on the history of Jerome Muckers football was my lucky break, and how I knew I had a sports story. I never got the chance to meet Barry but am so grateful for his commitment to chronicling the history of Arizona high school football. Without Barry, much of that state’s sports history would have been lost.