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.
Justwithnothing 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 himneither do Ibut 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.
FIFTY-ONE
I’VE JUST COME back from a short walk with Bumper when Taylor McCarter Webb calls and invites me to dinner. Their house. The next night.
“We doing takeout?” I ask.
“You’re not funny.”
