Fifty
THERE IS A gigantic red bow around my new loader when the two men from Bobcat deliver it, one having driven it practically to our front door and the other having followed in a Ford Ranger Raptor that makes me second-guess myself for putting the Bobcat at the top of my wish list with Laurance Most.
There is a note taped to the side of the loader:
Love you the most,
L. Most
Ten minutes after they’re gone, there is a knock at the front door and Gus Blasingame is standing there, wearing a black-and-gold sweater, holding a football in his left hand.
Coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
“Looking for a quarterback,” he says as we shake hands.
“He doesn’t live here anymore,” I say.
“Prove it.” He tosses me the ball and says, “Let’s take a walk.”
Gus Blasingame had been the hot assistant coach in the National Football League when the previous coach of the Steelers had retired, after what felt like the worst season in about a thousand years to Steelers fans.
I remember watching Gus’s introductory press conference on the NFL Network and hearing him say, “As bad as things were last season, I can promise Steeler Nation that we’re just a quarterback away.”
Then he’d smiled into the cameras and said, “And I do believe we all know who that quarterback is.”
Then he’d paused, just briefly, smiling even more broadly, and said, “And when we get him here, I just might petition the league office to let him wear three numbers on his back, instead of just one or two: One. Oh. Nine.”
He’s only ten years older than me, if that, and had been a quarterback in college himself. Now he’s one of those boy wonder head coaches that seem to be taking over the NFL. Except he’s the boy wonder without the quarterback the Steelers had taken with the first pick in the draft back in April.
We walk toward the fields and talk, small talk mostly, moving past rows of crop all the way out to the open field at the very end of the property.
“Shouldn’t you be at training camp?” I ask.
“One of those new rules,” he says. “Got to give the guys one day off every week.”
“So you decide to fly down here on your own day off?”
“Thought about calling,” he said. “But wanted to surprise you. And to see for myself.”
“See what? How I did helping plant this year’s soybean crop?”
“If you’re in the same shape I was told you are,” he says.
I can’t help smiling. “You’re telling me you believe my agent?” I ask. “Coach, you know they lie on occasion, right?”
“Well, not in this case,” he says. “You look like you’re in better shape than when we worked you out on your pro day over in Chapel Hill.”
Pro days are individual workouts for teams thinking about drafting you, even though by the time Gus Blasingame and his general manager and owner showed up on campus, people in outer space knew the Steelers were drafting Silas Tucker number one.
I lightly pat my shoulder now.
The right one.
Or the wrong one, in my case.
“Tip-top shape everywhere except here,” I say.
He turns and points fifty yards distant, at a tree with a tire hanging from a branch and swaying softly in what breeze there is out here.
Without telling Charlie Hall or anybody, I’ve snuck out here every few days just to see if there might be a day when my arm tells me something different from what my head, and heart, already know:
That I can’t throw a football worth a damn.
“Then please explain what that old thing is doing over there,” he says. “A relic from high school?”
“Just an occasional reminder,” I say, “that the guy you thought of as 109, along with everybody else, has a new nickname now: the Big Nothing.”
He hands me the ball anyway, walks about thirty yards away, and once again says, “Prove it.”
It doesn’t take long for him to see what I really do already know. I can still make a football go where I’m aiming it. I can still even put a nice, tight little spiral on it.
Just with nothing on it.
The pain of that hurts me almost as much as my shoulder does even after a few minutes of soft tossing.
He walks back to me.
“Satisfied?”
“Not sure if that’s the word I’d use,” Gus Blasingame says.
He takes a step back now, a couple of yards, as if trying to take one more good look at me.
“So why are you in what is clearly midseason shape, even in midsummer?”
“Keeps me out of trouble?” I say, turning it into a question.
“I repeat,” he says. “Why?”
“Been a gym rat my whole life,” I say. “Too late for me to change now. How’s that?”
Suddenly Gus Blasingame laughs.
“Silas,” he says, “you’re good at a lot of things. But just off the little time we’ve spent together, I know that one of them isn’t lying. So I’m asking you straight up if you’re up to something.”
“Coach,” I say. I smile and shrug. “Can’t help it, I still think of you that way, as my coach.” I pause then and say, “If I ever am up to something, you’ll be the first to know. But for now, I’m not keeping any secrets.”
“Just so you know,” he says. “I don’t give up too easily.”
I’m about to tell him neither do I but don’t, because what’s the point?
We walk back toward the barn, and he talks to me about a season I won’t be playing, on a team that was never really mine.
I go back to the gym when he’s gone, alone in there all over again with my music and my regrets and all my might-have-beens.
And my secrets.
I had a lot taken away from me.
Not those.