Pregame #3
Everyone (almost) loved the Woodsmen. They lived and breathed pro-football and the bright, hunter orange, the team color, was all around us.
Even this elementary school’s mascot was orange, which didn’t make much sense for a llama.
It didn’t really make much sense that they were the Llamas, either, since that animal wasn’t commonly seen in Michigan and as far as I could tell, they weren’t really renowned for either their athletic skills or their bravery or anything. They mostly seemed to spit.
“Oh, look at this,” Sarah said, and turned her laptop so that I could see the screen. “That’s his wedding. He just got married in August.”
It was definitely the man I’d first seen earlier, except he was perpendicular to the ground in this picture.
He was also wearing a shirt, a nice one, that was part of a tuxedo.
He looked extremely handsome with his dark hair mostly neat, his face freshly shaved, and his brown eyes non-bleary.
The biggest difference that I spotted between the prostrate Everett Ford from this morning and the groom Everett Ford on the screen was how happy he looked.
He was smiling widely at the camera, his arm around his bride.
But to be honest, he was pretty much an afterthought because she was next to him, and her looks were overwhelming. The woman was gorgeous, like a living doll—like perfection in human form. “Who is his wife?” I asked Sarah.
She squinted at the screen. “Eris,” she read, and then explained, “It sounds like iris, the flower, with an ‘eh’ sound at the beginning. It’s a homophone of ‘heiress,’ someone who will inherit a lot of money.
” She was used to describing words. “It looks like she’s an actress and she’s been in a lot of stuff.
” But she squinted again and shook her head.
“I don’t recognize any of these titles, but I’m not much of a movie-goer. Or a TV-watcher,” she added.
I got up to look but I didn’t recognize any of them, either.
“Click there,” I said, pointing, and that opened a window to a short clip from one of her credits, a movie about an elite group of high schoolers who inadvertently opened a time capsule that led to…
there was a long description, but it basically led to a whole lot of supernatural problems and for an unknown reason, they were the only people able to solve them all.
None of the actors in the cast pictures looked anywhere close to high-school age—more like late twenties?
That included Eris, whose face was taut and unwrinkled but was definitely not that of a teenager.
We waited as our slow school Wi-Fi took a moment to kick in, and then the scene started. All the good-looking “kids” had gathered in their school’s library. They were dressed much, much better than I remembered seeing only a few years before, when I had actually been in high school myself.
The screen froze and we waited again, and finally the dialogue started.
“Brannigan, you cannot go alone,” Eris announced.
Her voice seemed odd—kind of robotic. “I will go with you and together we will confront that demon from the depths of hell.” She picked up a sword that she must have carried to school that day and held it next to her head, a little close for comfort if she had any sense of self-preservation.
The camera zoomed onto her beautiful face.
Her features had frozen when she’d finished her line but this time, it wasn’t because of our poor Wi-Fi.
The clip played to the end, but her expression didn’t change as the character named Brannigan thumped his chest and let loose with a kind of war cry, and then a blue demon (either bad CGI or just a puppet) screeched outside the library window.
“That’s the best example of her acting?” I asked doubtfully. It had been like watching someone read a grocery list, but with a medieval weapon.
“Mmm,” Sarah Pauker murmured, nodding. “That’s why she’s not famous. She’s so beautiful but she’s really, really bad.” She studied the other pictures from Eris’s movies. “She and Everett Ford are already getting divorced? They were only married for a few weeks.”
“It seemed like she broke his heart,” I mused.
After I’d come out of the storage room at the stadium, I had whispered to Sarah what had happened, how he had lain on the carpet and lamented that his wife had dumped him for someone else.
Then the Woodsmen staff had whisked us away, but I’d looked back over my shoulder at the door and felt sorry for the guy.
“Nobody’s saying much about their situation,” she reported, typing quickly and squinting more at the screen.
“But she’s D-list and he’s third-string, so they won’t attract as much attention.
” She did find two or three pictures of them going out together.
Eris, one name only, posed in front of her husband as she stared at the various camera lenses.
Her expression was about the same in all of them: she looked beautifully bored, and really, so did he.
None of the events they had attended seemed very significant or impressive, like, one was the Milwaukee premier of her latest movie.
As far as I was aware, that city wasn’t a hotbed of film action.
Sarah switched to another tab and pointed at it.
“I had already looked him up, football-wise. He was good in college,” she commented, scrolling down a page of statistics about completion percentages and passing yards per game.
“A three-year starter at a decent program. They were better ten years ago, of course, a powerhouse.”
I nodded like I already knew that, which I did not.
“I wonder why it didn’t work out for him after he was drafted. But it happens.”
“Why? What do you mean?” I asked.
“He had great numbers,” she explained, pointing again to the screen.
“But sometimes that doesn’t translate. Lots of quarterbacks can’t make the jump to the pros.
Maybe in college, they had the speed to run for yards instead of staying in the pocket and going through their progressions, so they didn’t develop those skills.
That means they don’t have the ability to look at all the options for passes,” she translated.
“Or they may not actually have great arm strength and once they’re playing at a professional level, their legs aren’t enough.
The guys on the defense are so much bigger and faster.
” She tilted her head as she looked again at her stats.
“That doesn’t seem to be true for Everett Ford, but who knows? ”
I nodded again, this time signaling that I understood about pockets and options. I really had heard those terms before and I got the gist of what she was saying: at the highest level, some quarterbacks just couldn’t outrun their weaknesses.
“Maybe they buckle under the pressure of being on such a big stage, with so much more at risk. A pro-style offense might be too complicated for them to learn. There are a lot of reasons why it might not work out,” she concluded briskly, “but they all sighed contracts that guarantee them good money. The bench is a great place to earn a living without worrying about injury.”
It certainly didn’t seem like a bad life to me.
You got to play a game and get paid a ton for it, all while not taking any hits.
I would have signed up for that for sure.
But since football wasn’t a possible career path for me, I left the elementary school and hurried to Emilia Schaub College to advance my education instead.
I had enough time to do some homework before my classes, and then I managed to stay awake during those (which didn’t always happen).
And honestly, I didn’t think much more about the events of that day, besides when I glanced at the sealed bag containing my pukey shirt on the passenger seat. I’d left it there so I would remember to bring it inside and wash it when I finally got home.
I still wasn’t reflecting on Everett Ford and his one-named wife when I hurried to the bar where I worked a few nights a week.
It wasn’t the best place, as in, it wasn’t one of the busy establishments on the main street of town where people ordered fancier liquor that resulted in bigger tips.
But the owner had been a friend of my dad’s, and she was easy about my hours.
She didn’t mind that I was about fifteen—ok, twenty minutes late in arriving for this particular shift, but I’d come as fast as I could.
A car had skidded off the road into a ditch and several people had stopped to help, causing unexpected traffic.
Also, I had left late from the college. I’d had to stay after class to explain to my professor why I hadn’t submitted the paper that had been due three days before, and which I probably wouldn’t finish until a few days from now.
But the bar would be slow tonight, as it was every night at Jannie’s, so I would have time to research and write.
There were only a couple of regulars and one or two other patrons who had come into town for the Woodsmen game this Saturday.
I had time to get in a few sentences, but then I got lost in thought about what might have happened if I’d met a normal football player who could have been impressed by my nice shirt.
I did look up when the door opened and then stayed that way, letting the chilly fall wind sweep in some skittering leaves.
Just like I had earlier in the day, I went to investigate the situation. And just like before, it was…really?
“Everett Ford?” I asked as I peered through the darkness of our parking lot.
This time, he was on his feet, but he still had on the inside-out T-shirt.
I saw it because he wasn’t wearing a coat even though it was late October in northern Michigan, which meant that it wasn’t warm.
But I also saw something else: he wasn’t drunk anymore.
Hours had now passed and he must have sobered up.
All my days seemed to last at least a week and our previous encounter felt like ancient history, but it really had been enough time for him to get it out of his system.
He stared at me and then walked inside, and I closed the door behind him.
One other customer got slightly excited, because maybe Ford was third-string and only semi-famous, but he was still a Woodsmen football player.
I felt sorry for him, again. “Come this way,” I directed, and ushered him across the bar and into a booth in the darkest corner.
He sat and stared at his hands. “I’ll have a whiskey,” he ordered. “Neat.”
I wasn’t going to serve him, no way. He didn’t need to restart the cycle. “I can get you a cup of coffee,” I suggested. It was going to be instant and it was going to taste terrible. This wasn’t a fine dining establishment, just a mediocre drinking place.
“I’m not getting what I want today,” he told me. He sighed.
“Sorry,” I apologized.
That word from me seemed to trigger a memory. “I know you,” he announced. “You’re Miss Harmon.”
“I am,” I said, very surprised. “We met a few hours ago, at Woodsmen Stadium. What happened after I left?”
“Were you there when I got fired?”
“No. You got fired as a football player?” I asked, even more surprised. “I didn’t know they could do that.”
“I got sent down,” he explained. “I had to go meet with the coach and the GM. I don’t remember much but I know that I’m done.”
“I was probably on the stadium tour with the class by that point,” I said, and he nodded.
“There were kids all around. Then I crashed.”
“You were on your face on the floor,” I agreed. “Or do you mean when I fell on you?” I rubbed my elbow as I remembered, because it had been hurting all day.
“I mean that I wrecked my car,” Everett Ford told me, and my jaw dropped.
“You hit kids? Are they all right?”
“The kids were in the doorway,” he said. “Nobody was on the road except for me.”
His voice sounded totally fine, but the words weren’t making much sense. Unless…
“Did you have a rollover accident on M-22?” I asked. “Did you end up inverted? I drove past that on my way here.”
“It was me,” he said. “My life has gone to hell.”
Well, he wasn’t wrong. Today he had been dumped by his wife, lost his job, and destroyed his car. “You still have your health,” I consoled him, but then he sneezed. He really should have been wearing a coat. “Can I call someone for you? How about that agent guy?”
“He dropped me as a client.”
“Oh. Well, I’ll get the coffee to warm you up.
” What else could I do? I went into the back room to see if we actually had any coffee because it wasn’t a beverage that we served frequently here.
And even though it was only a few minutes later that I returned with a brimming mug that I’d found (and washed), the booth at the back was now empty.
I went immediately to the door and opened it to look out into the parking lot but Jannie, the owner, didn’t want to pay for lights outside and I couldn’t see much. I definitely didn’t spot a large, good-looking guy in a backwards T-shirt.
“Close the damn door!” one of the regulars yelled. “He left.”
I didn’t close it. I couldn’t leave the register and my stuff, but I still wanted to look. “Where did he go?” I asked over my shoulder.
“How the hell should I know? I’ll have another drink.” He wiggled his nearly empty 7 and 7 at me. “Close the door.”
Reluctantly, I did close it, and I walked back to the booth where Everett Ford had sat. It was empty with no sign that he’d ever been there, but had I expected a note or something?
“Did you see he got sent down to the Junior Woodsmen?” the same man called to me, and I nodded.
“He had a bad day,” I said, and that was an understatement.