Eight Two Months Later
EIGHT
TWO MONTHS LATER
THE UNC CHANCELLOR himself had called in May with the invitation.
As proud as I was of my grade-point average and graduating with honors, I had politely declined to take the walk with the rest of the graduating seniors, including the ones who’d been my teammates.
Even six weeks after the accident, I still wasn’t up to it. It wasn’t the walk I wanted to avoid—I didn’t want to be out in public yet.
It’s one of the reasons why I hadn’t granted a single interview, no matter how many people had reached out, in an almost endless manner of backdoor ways, some of them slap-dick ways, including trying to go through EJ, who slam-dunked every single one of them.
What I’ve mostly been doing while I’ve tried to get better is read. Just because my mind is still working fine.
I’ve always been a reader, mostly because my father—a learned man—was bound and determined, like it was one of his missions in life, to make me more than a jock. So I’d already fallen in love with reading and books before he’d left this earth.
Even when I’d been ten and eleven years old, he’d created a book club for just the two of us, so’s we’d read the same book at the same time and discuss it as we went along, him asking me questions and me doing the same with him.
“You know what’s just about the best kind of big game in this world?” he told me one time. “Page one and chapter one of a book you really want to read.”
There was always a book in my locker or hanging out of my backpack or when we were on the team plane, going to a game or coming back from one.
“You lose another bet, 109?” my teammates would ride me. “No way that book is for school.”
“Trying to improve my brain,” I’d say.
And one of them, usually Gideon, would say something like “Don’t that hurt?”
What I couldn’t properly explain was that, more than anything, books were a way for me to still connect to my father.
I didn’t make a big thing of it with most of my friends, other than Taylor, or with my teammates.
Not to sound cocky, because it’s never been my nature, even if OST—the Original Silas Tucker, as I thought of my dad—had allowed something like that.
But I was better than them at football and didn’t want to act as if I thought I was better at everything and better than everybody, even when I was pulling the kind of grades I did at UNC, just barely missing out on being an Academic All-American.
One time Vince Tarplay picked up my latest book and said, “I’ll go ahead and wait for the movie, if it’s all the same to you.”
Vince is the one who packs up my dorm room—mine and Gideon’s—because I can’t bring myself to go back there. Too many memories.
I’ve been thinking on a line I’d read once from Gone with the Wind, of all places. Book and not the movie. Poor old doomed Ashley Wilkes saying, “I want the old days back again, and they’ll never come back.”
I’ve stopped trying to kid myself. Mine are gone, along with those good old days, the ones I used to think were going on right now.
There’s another line I can’t get out of my head lately, from one of my favorite books when I was in high school, The Outsiders:
“I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.”
That was a good one right there.
I’m not going to allow myself to lie about football. About any kind of ball. Just not going to do it because I wouldn’t believe myself now even if I tried. I’m never being a quarterback, like ever again.
Of course, I’m not supposed to even be thinking about throwing a ball yet, so close to having had the shoulder surgery, so close to the stitches coming out, so close to being cleared for release.
Why would I, anyway? But finally, there comes the day when I can’t wait any longer, I have to try, just for my own peace of mind. To find out for myself.
So Vince, who’s working construction in Cross Rivers now that his own football career is over, picks me up at the rehabilitation center and we drive over to Cedar Falls Park and find an open and isolated patch of green in the back, away from anybody who might notice us, which means notice me.
He’s brought one of his old footballs.
And damn if it doesn’t feel sweet in my hand, as soon as my fingers are on those laces again. Vince sees me smiling to myself when they are.
“Yeah,” he says, nodding.
“Yeah,” I say quietly.
We begin soft-tossing then for a few minutes, and even that causes stabs of pain in my shoulder every time my arm comes forward. If Vince sees that on my face, he doesn’t let on.
Eventually I tell him to move back twenty yards.
After he does, he jokes that he can’t rightly decide which one of us looks creakier moving around, tells me he’s glad I’m not asking him to get back into his catcher’s crouch because he’s not rightly sure he could get back out of it.
But he at least looks the same to me as he always has, Chris Rock’s face on a fullback’s body.
“You still sure you want to do this?” Vince asks.
“Heck no,” I say to my old friend.
It takes only a few minutes for me to shut it down.
There’s just no point in continuing, the ball consistently landing a few yards short of where Vince is standing, like a duck that’s been shot out of the air.
And even though this is the kind of pass I used to be able to make left-handed.
Or with my eyes closed.
“109?” I say to him. “I can’t even hit the speed limit.”
“We can try again when your shoulder gets a little stronger.”
“No,” I say. “We can’t, because it’s never gonna be strong enough.” I shrug. “I’m done, dawg.”
“You can’t know that for sure.”
“What I know for sure is that I can’t.”
As we walk back to his car, he says, “You got any plans now that you’re being released?”
“Go home.”
I turn to him and force a smile.
Somehow, even that hurts.
“Hey, it’s like Taylor says,” I tell him. “I was always going places.”
It happens then.
As we’re walking toward Vince’s car, I can see my father standing alone in the distance at the end of the trees, the way he used to stand by himself at my football games, like he was standing guard over the whole day, taking it all in.
I don’t say anything to Vince about it, just keep my mind on the past.
My father would never show me anything when I’d look over at him during my games. Never tell me at the dinner table that night what he thought about how I played. He’d wait for me to tell him.
After I did, and because I didn’t play many bad games even then, it would be a private joke between us, him talking country to me. Just a little North Cackalacky between the two of us.
“Son,” he’d say. “Can’t lie. You were good as gravy today.”
And we’d both laugh.
I don’t feel like laughing now.
No lie.