The Throwback Special (19 page)

“That’s not his last name, is it?”

“No. He’s playing someone else.”

“I see him.”

“He’s basically the only one out there who looks like he ought to be wearing that uniform.”

“Except that guy. Seven.”

“How did he get into this?”

“He said he was approached in the lobby. He basically had to interview for it. They were short a man.”

“Do they play a whole game?”

“Who knows?”

“Are you boys disappointed you didn’t get chosen?”

Paul and Brandon laughed at the absurd question. They were in fact disappointed, but they didn’t know it. Their wistful envy, by the time it made its way to their minds, had been transmuted to mild disdain and nonchalance and embarrassment. Paul said he had been in the elevator with some of the men, and they were ridiculous. Brandon agreed. He had seen them at breakfast. Just shoot him, Brandon said, if he’s doing that when he gets to be their age.

“Oh, they’re not so bad,” Sarah said.

Now there were two other spectators, a hooded man sitting in the first row of the bleachers, and another man in a baseball cap in the third row. They both sat hunched, still and watchful, arms crossed for warmth. The man in the baseball cap unclasped himself to pour a drink from
a dented thermos. The men on the field progressed slowly through orchestrated series of movements, like tai chi masters in the park.

“There’s just some people who shouldn’t wear football pants,” Brandon said.

“These guys are going to get
hurt
,” Paul said, and the man in the baseball cap turned his head briefly.

Someone on the field whistled. The football was placed on the ground in a patch of limp grass, then each team gathered in a huddle. The Giants huddle was rapidly generated and ill-formed. It dissolved almost immediately, and the defenders spread out in rough formation, awaiting the offensive alignment. The Redskins huddle was a perfect and intimate order, elemental and domestic, like a log cabin in the wilderness. Sarah and Deirdre, Brandon and Paul—they could perhaps sense in the huddle the origins of civilization. The men bent at the waist, hands on knees. Their helmets nearly touched inside the private sphere, where ten men listened for the secret, the invocation against evil. Their breath rose together from the center of the circle. They broke their huddle with a synchronized and disciplined clap, not bright but dulled by gloves and tape. They jogged to the line of scrimmage. Even the quarterback jogged. He wore number 7. His face mask was old-fashioned, a single bar. It was nearly ten o’clock, November 18. The rain fell steadily through the fog. Passing cars honked from the street, and a passenger in a truck yelled something mean-spirited and vulgar. It was odd, Paul thought, not to begin with a kickoff. He did
not know what he hoped to see, failure or something else. The quarterback was under center. He looked to his right and then to his left. He looked again to his right, then to his left. He called, “Yellow forty-one,” his voice wavering. He called it again. The hooded man and the man with the baseball cap leaned forward, elbows on their knees. The sales associates sat closely together on the top row of the bleachers, their shoulders touching. The man in the yellow poncho stood completely still beneath the scoreboard. The ball was snapped then, and something happened, a single ruinous play, a discrete unit of chaos, violent and unlovely. The players grunted, their damp pads clacked through the fog. The entire play lasted perhaps five seconds. “Shit, flea flicker,” Brandon murmured as the running back pitched the ball back to the quarterback. “Uh-oh,” he said. “Throw it,
throw
it.” But the quarterback had not thrown the ball. He had stepped up into the pocket to avoid the rush, and then crumpled beneath a linebacker who had leaped onto his back. “That was not good,” Paul said. “Those old guys are not up for this.” Other defenders jumped on top of the quarterback, and a muffled scream came from the pile of bodies. Like a spell the scream lifted the players from the pile. One player, the one who had brought the quarterback down, gestured frantically to an empty sideline. He put his hands on his helmet. It was something the sales associates would remember.

Sarah stood up, nearly spilling her wine from the plastic cup. “What is he doing?” she said. “What was that? What happened? Is someone hurt?” The other associates
shrugged and shook their heads. The hooded man in the first row of the bleachers was standing, applauding. The sound of his solitary appreciation was small in the night. Paul checked once more to see if the bottle was empty. Perhaps, he thought, it would be best to just go to bed early. Tomorrow was another long day of meetings. “Was that real?” Sarah said. “Is it over? Are they leaving?”

ROOM 324 WAS WARM
and pungent, suffused with the smell of leaf rot and liniment. The muddy cleats teemed in a pile by the door. The men embraced, they tousled hair, they pounded one another on the shoulder pads. They drank inexpensive sparkling wine from the bottle, chewed unlit cigars, passed ice packs and Carl’s dull scissors. Their cheeks and knuckles were red from the cold, and their fingers were stiff. As was increasingly the case in recent years, several men were injured. They had pulled something, tweaked something, strained something. They grimaced, gripped the tender regions. They cut tape from their ankles and wrists, and it lay on the carpet in withered, valedictory strips. It was clear to everyone that this had been their best Throwback Special. Steven was challenged to deny it, and he would not. He said he just wanted to check his notes, but he could not check them because Bald Michael had hidden his notes in the second-floor vending alcove.

Tommy’s eyes shone wild with frantic relief. Because he had been so nervous, because he had been so concerned about handling the football, because he was not particularly dexterous or graceful, he had been the perfect Riggins, the standard. He had turned his shoulders too quickly, pitched it back too quickly. He had been utterly unconvincing in performing the flea flicker, which is to say he had been utterly convincing in performing Riggins. The best Riggins—Tommy had made this evident to all—was a bad Riggins. And Tommy, like other men, had somehow actualized himself while pretending to be someone else. He snuck up behind Myron with a finger to his lips. He clasped his arms around Myron’s stomach, and lifted him off the floor. Myron kicked Gil’s drink out of his hand, and he spilled his own drink on the comforter. Someone blotted halfheartedly with a sock. Tommy’s mustache, other men began to realize, was gone. He had, at some unknown point, removed it.

Randy held his hand in a bucket of ice. His Donnie Warren had been all truth. He had been elegantly wrecked by Taylor, and he wore the dark mud stain across his chest. He had even gotten his hand stepped on while lying on the ground, a nice touch. The hand, now submerged in a bucket of ice, looked both swollen and bony. Vince took a picture of Randy’s hand in the bucket, pink and blurry beneath the cubes like a creature whose existence has been rumored but not verified. Vince put his hand on Randy’s shoulder, and Randy allowed it, leaned into it. He got glimpses now and then. He sensed that the loss of his
eyewear business might be a blessing. That was what people tended to say about the very worst things. That was the outrageous claim they made. In his garage where he did not kill himself he had constructed a prototype of a self-washing house window. He had used a voltaic cell to power the wiper, but his design called for solar. His hand might have been broken. It throbbed beneath the ice in a nearly pleasurable way.

Gil sat on a queen bed with the other offensive linemen. He had removed his shoulder pads, but he still wore with pride the jersey of Mark May. Despite the rain and the mud, his jersey was immaculate, shimmering. The offensive line had worked perfectly as a unit. Each man had done his job. Others paid passing tribute with oinks and snorts, cans of beer. Gil leaned back on the bed, striking something hard beneath the comforter, a large cylindrical lump. He flung back the blanket and sheets, and there was Fancy Drum. The linemen cheered. Across the room, Steven tried to pretend that it did not matter much to him one way or the other. Men who had detested Fancy Drum now looked upon it with affection, tenderness. The drum seemed to have proven itself, completed a rite of passage. It was now, at last, at the end, accepted into the group. Men posed for photos, not one of them lewd, an arm around Fancy Drum, as around a teenage nephew.

George put in a terrible CD of his brother’s jam band, and Wesley replaced it immediately. Without removing his helmet, Fat Michael poured corn chips from a bag into his mouth. He swigged sparkling wine through the
single crossbar of the face mask, and he danced to the music, without inhibition or rhythm. He seemed reluctant to put any weight on his right leg. His jersey was a mess. Jeff stayed close by, keeping an eye on Fat Michael. It was almost always the case that the man who played Theismann had to be monitored for a few hours after the play.

David, the young Web specialist at Prestige Vista Solutions, parted the curtains to watch the rain. He had the odd sensation that he might see the players, himself included, beneath the foggy dim lights of the distant field. He closed the curtains, and attempted to cross the room, his backpack slung over one shoulder pad. Along the way, he was heartily thanked and congratulated. His hair was tousled, his back was slapped, his hand was shaken. He was given a red plastic cup, and another. Waiting outside the bathroom, David asked Vince what he should do with his uniform, his gear. Vince shrugged. “Souvenir,” he said. “A small token. Or give it to Trent.” He shrugged again, and gestured to David that the bathroom was now unoccupied.

In the bathroom, trying with cold fingers to untie the drawstring of his pants, David decided that he would not, after all, blog about the night, or post any pictures. He didn’t have any pictures. He resisted looking at himself in the mirror, perhaps out of a concern that his bright reflection would almost certainly tell the wrong story. He liked wearing the uniform, though it was faded and frayed. He had liked the snug fit of the helmet, the reassuring pressure of the chinstrap. He had liked the stillness before the
snap, his breath in the air. He had liked the sense that anything at all might happen, even though only one thing could happen. And he had liked watching the old grainy replay on his tablet. The antique font, the primitive production values. It was like watching newsreel footage of some distant war or assassination attempt. With his back to the mirror David took off his uniform and pads, while the men outside the bathroom sang the hit song from a recent animated movie about Pegasus. He folded the jersey and pants, and placed them on the edge of the bathtub. He put the helmet and shoulder pads in the tub, and did not take a picture of them. His regular clothes, drab and wrinkled, were stuffed in his backpack. He began slowly to dress.

Back by the window, next to the heating and cooling unit, Charles told Robert that it did not sound serious. He wore his brown canvas bag over his uniform, the strap running diagonally across his Terry Kinard jersey. He put his hand on Robert’s arm. “It sounds to me,” he said, “like she’s just a picky eater. I wouldn’t worry too much. But get in touch with me if you have any more concerns or questions.” He reached into his bag for a business card. Robert tucked the card into his maroon waistband, next to his ping-pong ball, and walked directly into the throng, forlorn and euphoric. The men did not think of Adam, whose departure had been so mysterious, so generic.

The door opened. Chad entered with more ice, and the cat darted from the room. The phone rang on the bedside table, but nobody answered it. Peter held a deck of cards,
and several men implored him to do the trick he had done the previous year, or was it two years ago? The trick was called “Three Ladies and a Rascal.” Derek finally found Gary, who had taken off his Lawrence Taylor jersey and draped it over the television. Derek wanted to know what it was like. He was curious, not angry. The room was so loud that the men had to lean close to speak and hear.

Gary shrugged. “It was a weight,” he said.

Derek leaned toward Gary’s ear. “A wait?”

Gary nodded. “A big weight.”

Trent stood in the narrow alley between the wall and the bed. He surveyed the room, nodding. He was satisfied with his work as commissioner. He had had to make some difficult decisions. He had had to guide the group through some unprecedented challenges. He had had to clean a nasty bloodstain out of a jersey in the middle of the night. He reached across the bed to shake hands with Vince, Bald Michael, Gil, Wesley.

“Time to write your memoirs,” Gil said to Trent.

Typically, the commissioner’s final duty as commissioner was to select the next commissioner, but Trent could see that the ping-pong balls had at some point been dumped on a bed, and were now dispersed entropically throughout the room—beneath furniture, under the curtain, in the cleat pile. One ball was in the bathroom. Two had been stepped on and dented. One was held tightly in Randy’s noninjured hand. One was stuck to a curled piece of athletic tape like a mouse in a trap. It was not a process, Trent observed, that could be easily reversed.

“Guys,” he said.

“Hey, guys,” he said.

Carl stood on a queen bed. His jersey was untucked, and his thigh pads and knee pads had shifted radically away from his thighs and knees. He turned in a circle. He could see everything from up this high. He tried to kick a ping-pong ball, and missed. Andy shuffled past the bed with a bottle of sparkling wine. “Trick or treat!” Carl yelled at Andy, leaning over, pushing his cup into Andy’s face. “Say when, brother!” Andy shouted, lifting the bottle, pouring. Carl did not hold the cup at a forty-five-degree angle. He never did say when. Someone flicked the lights off and on, off and on. Someone, maybe Vince, had a few words to say. Tommy raised his cup to Robert, who stood across the room. They had never really spoken that much in all these years. The sparkling wine foamed over the edge of Carl’s cup like a fountain, and the men, several of them, howled.

David, the young Web specialist, left the bathroom and stepped past the pile of cleats at the door. None of the men saw him leave the room. He closed the door behind him quietly, then hung the
Do Not Disturb
sign on the handle. He walked down the hallway, past the surveillance camera, toward the elevator. His regular shoes felt strange and soft, and they made no sound on the carpet. He patted his pockets—phone, keys, wallet, mouthguard. His girlfriend, far away, knew nothing about his night. He pressed the button, and waited. Standing by the elevator doors, he could still hear the voices of the men in Room 324, chanting.