Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (35 page)

"Ouch," he complained. "That hurt." Then he went back to the Lynx. "Are you done with your temper tantrum?"

"I don't say things like that about you," the Lynx protested.

"How wise you are. No one would believe you."

The Lynx started cursing again. "Why do I put up with you?"

"Because you want my parents to adopt you. You probably ought to call their bluff. There really is a good chance that if they had to choose between us, that they—"

The Lynx, who had roomed with Doug long enough to know that the only way to stop him sometimes was to interrupt him, interrupted. "Tell me, has this lady gotten you off that movie thing?"

"No, she's a part of it." The Lynx had not understood Doug's interest in
Weary Hearts,
but as he readily admitted, he didn't know what it was like to resemble an uncle. The men he called "uncle" were usually paying his mother money for an afternoon of her time. "She's got a stake in it too... not that we've found what we're looking for."

"So you're giving up?"

"No."

"There're lots of jobs, Ringo." The Lynx's soft voice was suddenly urgent, sincere. "Just say the word. I don't know of a team in the N.B.A. who wouldn't want you."

"Oh, man..." Doug sat up and ran a hand over his face. This was not the sort of conversation to have sprawled out across sticky, green-flecked linoleum. "We've been through this. I'm a teacher, an educator. I don't belong in the pros."

"You wouldn't be there forever."

Doug shut his eyes and rounded his spine back against the wall, remembering just in time not to bang his head, and listened while the Lynx, for about the forty millionth time, outlined his future. He was to do a couple years penance in the pros while everyone in the N.C.A.A. forgot that he was supposedly something between Simon Legree and Benedict Arnold.

But he didn't want to coach in the pros. It was so different. The players all had lives and families and investments. They were businessmen who came to work each day. The schedule was so intense, there wasn't time to do any teaching. You coached a game and then got on a plane.

But in college you knew the kids. It started with recruiting. You went to their homes, met their parents. You knew who they were, where they were coming from. Then you saw so much of them, working with them on the court, hanging out in the basketball office. Maybe it was an ego thing on his part, but a coach was so important to a college kid. So many of them wanted to be like you.

Doug suddenly felt weary. He didn't want to think about this. He interrupted the Lynx, speaking lightly. "Isn't this my part? To badger people into doing what's good for them?"

"I don't seem to be doing much of a job of it. When can I call you again?"

When can I call you again?
Where had the Lynx learned that particular telephone trick? "Come on, man. You're my friend. You can call me whenever you want."

The phone sat on a little shelf midway up the wall. Doug said good-bye to the Lynx and stretched his arm back over his head to hang the receiver up. He crossed his arms over his knees, rested his forehead on them for a moment, then peered up at Jill, his chin on his arms. She was still sitting at the table.

"You're a silly woman. You passed up a chance to have the Lynx attend to your every sexual need."

She raised her eyebrows. "You want to talk about silly? It sounds like you passed up a chance to coach in the pros."

He groaned. "I'd be lousy at it."

"Would you, really?"

Her gaze was clear and steady. This wasn't a pair of eyes you could lie to. "No. I'd be all right. Depending on who I was working for. Nobody's offering me my own team."

"Is that what you want?"

"Not in the pros."
Fill in the blanks, sweetheart. I had what I wanted. I was head coach at a Division I school, an A.C.C. school. Every kid's dream. And I blew it. Blew it bad.

"Doug." Her voice was soft. "What happened at Maryland Tech?"

He grimaced. "Do we have to have this conversation?"

"No."

He looked at her suspiciously, but her eyes remained clear. She was telling the truth. They did not need to have this conversation. They could go on, boinking each other like cheery little bunnies; they could blaze as brightly and briefly as crumpled newsprint, leaving behind no sustaining embers, only the faintest grey ash. No, they did not need to have this conversation. It was his choice.

"All right... what do you already know?"

"That if you had had anything to do with it, those people wouldn't have been in Chryslers."

He groaned and banged his head against the wall. "The Lynx never says anything quotable. You couldn't get a sound bite out of him if his life depended on it. So why, tell me, why the one time he has to say something worth repeating, it would have to be about me?"

"I also heard that you weren't up to the challenge." Of all the lies that were told, that was the one that had bothered him the most. She knew that.

"If I'd failed," he said, "I'd have been the first to admit it."

"I know that."

"But I was guilty," he pointed out. He didn't want this to be a Whitewash-Doug-Ringling session. "Everything happened on my watch. That makes it my responsibility."

"Did you know that it was happening?"

"No, but only because I didn't want to know. It would have taken me about ninety seconds to find out if I'd chosen to."

"Why didn't you?"

"I made the classic stupid mistake. I thought that the end would justify the means. I wanted to turn Maryland Tech into Duke. That was impossible." Doug thought back to all he had done. The coaches before him had enforced study halls and had required weekly notes from professors. Doug had gotten rid of all that Mickey-Mouse stuff. That wasn't the way to make kids learn; these kids were experts at maneuvering their way through a system. How else could you get into college without being able to read? So there hadn't been a system. Doug had motivated the team leaders, then expected them to motivate the others. He was proud of what he had accomplished there academically. "Combining that with coaching was enough. I figured I'd deal with the stench of our recruiting program in a year or two. Me and Scarlett O'Hara, think about it another day."

"Is that the whole story?" Jill asked.

"Well, no," he admitted. "I made some enemies."

Even though the uninterested commuters who attended Maryland Tech would never be like the witty pranksters who went to Duke, Doug had wanted the student body more involved in the basketball team. He wanted cheering students, not the rich, silent alumni, in the courtside seats. He had wanted to phase out the athletic dorms so that the rest of the students knew the players. None of this had met with the approval of the athletic director.

Then he had failed to recruit a local star. K. C. Preston, a high school Ail-American out of Baltimore County, got scared off by Doug's talk about academics and signed a letter of intent with Clemson. "He was white," Doug explained. "Our alumns would have killed for a white player, but he was so blindingly stupid—we're not talking bad education here—this guy was truly dim. His elevator just didn't make it to the top floors. Frankly, I didn't want him on the team. I already had enough players who couldn't remember the plays."

"So what did your enemies and young Mr. Preston have to do with your starting summer vacation in March?"

Doug ran his hand up and down the leg of his jeans.

"There is a story you're not telling," she said.

"It's not my own ass I'm covering," he said.

"I never thought that."

"And it's not even the guys who gave out the cars."

"So it's one of the students?"

How right she was. But wasn't it obvious? Who else would he go through this for? He didn't say anything for a long time. He had never told anyone this story, no one, not even his parents. "When the N.C.A.A. started to investigate the cars and all, I took this real open stance—you know, come in, look at anything. There's dirt, you find it, we'll clean it up. Not only did I want to clean it up, but my best hope for avoiding major sanctions was to be cooperative."

Halfway through the investigation two of the players came to him and told him that they hadn't taken their SAT tests. As marginal students at a drug-infested high school, they hadn't fully understood what the tests were. Someone had talked to them, and then they got their scores. It wasn't until coming to college that they realized they had skipped a step.

Doug remembered the horror he had felt when they had told him. He knew what would happen to them. The N.C.A.A. always came down hard on the kids. These guys would be out of college ball. They'd lose their scholarships; they would have to leave school.

Then they had told him something worse. Professors were being paid to change grades.

"It has to be the single worst thing I've heard. There were always rumors that some coaches pressure professors, but we're talking flat-out cash. Frederick used to be this sleepy little place, but now it's development city around there, and some of the alumni have made a mint of money. The faculty are paid garbage, and these guys are offering cash. Take some kid off the bench from a 'D' to a 'C and suddenly your family has two weeks at the beach you weren't going to be able to afford before. Raise a starter from an "F" to a "B" and you're looking at a down payment on a split-level."

Doug had been in a bind. His two players were juniors with hopes of graduating, but to do so, they had to hold on to their athletic scholarships. But this black market in grades could not continue.

"I felt we had to fess up to the grade-selling ourselves and pray to God that the N.C.A.A. wouldn't blast us off the face of the earth. If they discovered it on their own, Maryland Tech basketball would be history."

Doug had taken the boys' story to the school's athletic director. The A.D., although unhappy with Doug over the K. C. Preston matter, said he would investigate the professors publicly, taking his chance with N.C.A.A. sanctions, but would keep quiet about the false tests. "The price was my resignation, which wasn't out of line. I should have realized that something was wrong with their SAT scores. They were too good—I mean, they were godawful scores, but they were too good for those kids. I guess I was so relieved that I didn't want to question it."

So he had resigned, giving up his job, his reputation, his fat endorsement contract with Nike, and—pouf, nothing happened. The N.C.A.A. seemed happy to confine its investigation only to the Chryslers; no one ever said anything about the false tests or bribed professors; and the team's academic advisor, who must have known about the grade scheme, was promoted to assistant dean. The A.D. had done nothing. "So, my dear woman," he concluded, "you are looking at the chump of the century."

"Aren't you angry?"

"At who? Myself? Actually, I probably got off easy. I figure I made two pacts with the devil—first, in trying to coach at a place like that, ignoring the sleazeball recruiting, and second, in trying to protect those kids. After selling my soul twice, I ought to be frying in hell, instead of sitting here looking at the best pair of legs off the Kentucky Derby track."

Jill ignored his pleasantry. "Do you know which professors took the money?"

"No, but, again, it would take me about ninety seconds to find out."

"Why haven't you?"

He shrugged. "What would be the point, just to drag  everyone down with me? I'm going to live up to my side of the deal."

"And then what?"

He shrugged again. He had no answer for that, no answer at all.

Tuesday night Doug missed Jill a whole lot more than he was entitled to. When he got back from the henhouse Wednesday afternoon, she was out riding with her niece Allison. So he prowled restlessly around the dim, cluttered house until she appeared in her jodphurs, hot, gorgeous, and happy. His impulse was to call for an immediate retreat to the front bedroom they were now sharing, but Randy was knocking about, and such open hijinks would be unseemly. So the three of them ate dinner and then, as Doug was sufficiently obsessed with sex that he couldn't plan any other activity, they mopped the kitchen floor.

But pleasure deferred was not pleasure denied, and he was sleeping like the dead when the phone's faint jangle pierced his brain.

He woke like a shot, fumbling for the phone. What was it this time? Drunk driving? Those were the middle-of-the-night calls. Who this time? Doug couldn't find the phone.

Of course not. He wasn't in Frederick. He was home in the Valley, and Aunt Carrie had only one phone, down in the kitchen.

Jill was already across the room, calling back over her shoulder. "Don't get up. It's for me."

He was fully awake now. She was right. The phone wouldn't be for him. He wasn't a coach anymore. If one of the kids were in trouble, the call would go to someone else. He listened to Jill's footsteps run down the stairs, then across the living room. She swore as she tripped over one of the dogs.

He wasn't going to be able to go back to sleep. That was the trouble with calls in the middle of the night. They shot you so full of adrenaline that you were up for good. That was fine when you were a coach, when the call left you with things to do, problems to solve. It wasn't so great when you were just some guy collecting eggs for a living.

He waited for another moment, then got out of bed, pulling on his jeans, going downstairs. The kitchen light slanted into the dark living room, and as soon as he rounded the turn of the stairs he could see Jill in the kitchen.

"Yes, Tim," she was saying. "I can hear how upset you are."

She was stuck. The floor-mopping expedition had left the table and chairs on the other side of the room. The phone had such a short cord that Jill couldn't reach them to sit down. She had snared the coffee percolator, but it was dangling uselessly from her hand. She couldn't get over the sink to fill it.

Doug came into the kitchen and took the pot from her. He pulled a chair close to the phone, then filled the coffeepot, plugging it into the wall outlet nearest the phone, leaving it chirping away on the now-gleaming floor. He brought her a mug, then got an afghan from the living room. He shook out the dog hair and draped it around her narrow shoulders.