Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 08 - Winning Can Be Murder (3 page)

Even the pile-up near the Garton bench broke apart, with players rolling wildly right and left to escape the on-coming ambulance.  The driver threw on the brakes, but the tires skidded in the grass and the vehicle narrowly missed Rhodes, who hadn’t moved, before it careened into the Greyhound benches and sent one of them flying onto the track.

The ambulance came to a stop then and Lawton, the Blacklin County jailer, got out.  He looked a little bit like Lou Costello to Rhodes, though he was at least seventy years old.

“Damn driver was at the concession stand, I guess,” Lawton said.  “I had to drive this thing myself.  Like not to’ve got it stopped.”

“So I noticed,” Rhodes said.  “Thank goodness you didn’t kill anybody.”

Lawton was outraged.  “Kill anybody?  What’re you talkin’ about?  Of course I didn’t kill anybody.  What I did was save a bunch of lives, and you oughta consider yourself lucky that I was here at the game.  What’d you have done if I hadn’t turned on that si-reen?  Got your head knocked off, is what.  But don’t thank me.  After all, I’m just a worthless old man who’s tryin’ to do the best for ever’body.  I’m just — “

Rhodes held up a hand to stop him.  “Thanks, Lawton.  I didn’t mean to criticize.  You did just fine.”

“You don’t really mean that.  You’re just tryin’ to calm me down so I don’t have a heart attack.  Wouldn’t want that on your conscience, would you?  The worthless old man who saves your life has a heart attack and dies right on the spot.  That wouldn’t look good in the papers, now would it?”

Lawton usually got into that kind of dispute with Hack Jensen, the dispatcher, but since Hack wasn’t around, Rhodes was an acceptable substitute.  The sheriff didn’t mind.  Lawton had a point, in a way.

“I said you did fine, and I meant it.  Now let’s see if we can get this mob straightened out and start the game again.”

Lawton shook his head.  “ ’Bout time you thought of that.  Wonder how many of these boys the refs’ll kick out?”

Rhodes didn’t have an answer for that one.  The referees did, but only after a consultation that must have lasted at least fifteen minutes.

They walked practically to the goalpost and huddled together with Rhodes and Ruth Grady standing guard to keep players and coaches at bay.  Lawton tagged along, too.  Rhodes didn’t try to stop him.

What the referees eventually decided was to eject two of the Garton Greyhounds who in their judgment were the first two to leave the bench and attack the Clearview tackler.  The Catamounts were not penalized, the officials having concluded that the runner was in bounds when he was hit.

As soon as he heard the decision, the Garton head coach turned purple and hopped up and down like a kid on a pogo stick as an official tried to calm him down.

“What do you think his blood pressure is right now?” Ruth Grady asked.

“I’d guess about two hunnerd over a hunnerd and fifty,” Lawton said.  “I expect there’s a stethoscope in that ambulance if you want to check it.”  He put the accent on the last syllable of
ambulance
.

The ambulance driver had come out onto the field and retrieved his vehicle, returning it to its usual spot behind the goalposts.  He hadn’t said a word to Lawton about commandeering it.

“I’m not much of a nurse,” Ruth said.  “What about you, Sheriff?”

Rhodes wasn’t much of a nurse, either, but he thought that the Garton coach might be an interesting study for some medical student.  He hadn’t cooled off a bit, and he continued to scream at the referee and bounce around the field. 

Rhodes walked over, and between the two of them, he and the ref got the coach back to the bench, where his players and assistants had confined themselves to muttering vague threats, spiced up by the occasional vulgar gesture.

“Just lettin’ the crowd know they think they’re Number One,” Lawton explained to Ruth, who managed to keep a straight face.

Somehow order was finally restored, and the game picked up more or less where it had left off.  Garton had the ball on their own forty-eight yard line, and the Greyhounds, possibly inspired by the fighting, the ejection of their return man, and the lack of a penalty against the Catamounts, promptly ripped off three first downs in a row.  Then, on the next play, they scored. And they kicked the point.

Score:  Garton 28, Clearview 21.

It stayed that way until the last minute of the game.  The Clearview fans grew gloomier and gloomier as the Greyhound supporters became more and more cheerful and more and more vocal about their team’s prowess.  The woman with the red and white hair even went down and joined the Garton cheerleaders for a yell, which made the fans even more gleeful.

None of the Clearview followers left the stands, but it was obvious that many of them had given up hope.  Things looked especially bleak after the Greyhounds punted the ball all the way to the Catamount five yard line.  A draw play gained ten yards and a first down, but then two passes were incomplete and it was fourth down.

Ivy touched Rhodes’ arm.  “It’s all over, isn’t it?”

Rhodes shook his head.  “There are thirty seconds left.  Remember what Yogi Berra said.  “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

 Rhodes didn’t really believe that, however, nor did anyone else in the crowd, but then the Catamount quarterback took the snap, scrambled around for several seconds, and heaved a desperation pass from his own ten yard line.  A skinny receiver flew past the defender, ran under the ball at the fifty yard line, and kept right on going, reaching the end zone untouched.

The Clearview bench erupted in a fit of ecstasy unmatched in Catamount history and the fans screamed themselves hoarse, while the Greyhounds sat as stunned as if someone had hit them in the head with a wooden mallet.  The Clearview fans were just as elated.  There was so much screaming and yelling that Rhodes couldn’t even hear the band playing the fight song, though he could see the director’s arms waving.

 Rhodes wasn’t as happy as everyone else seemed to be.  He could foresee a big problem for the Clearview team.  If the game ended in a tie, Clearview would lose.

Tie games were decided on the basis of two statistics:  penetrations — the number of times one team had been inside the other’s twenty yard line — and first downs.  Penetrations came first, and by Rhodes’ count Garton led on penetrations by a six to five margin.

The Catamounts had to go for two points.

The joy on the bench died down quickly and the Clearview head coach, Jasper Knowles, was in a heated discussion with his offensive coach, Brady Meredith.

Knowles was about fifty-five, a short, bald man with a head like a bowling ball and a body to match.  If he fell down, you could roll him across the field.  Meredith, a former college quarterback about twenty years younger than Knowles towered over the older man, but Knowles wasn’t backing away.

“What’s happening?” Ivy asked.

“Looks like Jasper doesn’t like the play Brady called,” Rhodes said.

The crowd roared as the coaches yelled at each other.  Rhodes tried to make out the coaches’ words, but it was impossible.

Then Meredith threw a punch at Knowles, who pulled his head to the side.  The punch grazed his ear, and he stepped back, staring at Meredith in surprise.  The younger coach took the opportunity to spit at Knowles’ feet and walk away.

The stadium fell suddenly quiet, as if everyone there had taken a deep breath, all at the same time.

Knowles took a deep breath too, and stood up as straight as was possible for him.  Without looking at Meredith, he put his arms around the quarterback’s shoulders and whispered something to him.  The quarterback ran onto the field, but not without a look backward as if he were seeking some kind of confirmation from Meredith.

If that was what he was looking for, he didn’t see it.  Meredith was already leaving the field, followed closely by Jerry Tabor, who’d had an excellent view of the whole proceedings from his place by the fence.

All this activity had been closely observed by the Garton coach, but he didn’t have to call anything to the attention of the referees.  They penalized Clearview five yards for delay of game.

“That makes it harder, doesn’t it,” Ivy said.

Rhodes nodded.  He hoped that Knowles had called a good play.  If he hadn’t, the fans, already stirred to a state of hysteria by the earlier fight and the excitement of the last- minute touchdown, were likely to storm the field and lynch him.

The Catamount quarterback called out the signals, took the ball from center, faked a handoff, and dropped back to pass.  Somehow a Garton linebacker slipped a blocker and leaped toward the quarterback, his hands upraised.

The quarterback threw the ball straight up, or so it seemed from where Rhodes was sitting.  It must have had a slight angle on it because it got by the linebacker’s hands and came down in the end zone, right among a cluster of six or seven players, Catamounts and Greyhounds, all of whom jumped into the air with outstretched arms.

The ball landed somewhere among them, and they all fell in a heap as the officials converged on them.

Before they got there, a player in blue and gold squirmed out of the stack, the ball clutched in his arms.  He ran about five yards before he raised the ball over his head and did a little dance that he must have invented himself.

Ivy stood on tiptoe and put her mouth to Rhodes’ ear to tell him something, but the crowd had gone berserk.  He couldn’t hear a word that she was saying.

Chapter Three

I
t’s an unfortunate part of the rules of football that a game must be played to its conclusion.

After scoring a touchdown, even if only a few seemingly meaningless seconds are left in the game, the team that scored has to kick off to the other team because of the possibility that those final seconds could take on a meaning that was completely unexpected.

For one thing, as small as the chances might be, the receiving team might actually be able to score by running the ball back for a touchdown as Dan (Will-o’-the-wisp) Rhodes had done so long ago.

So the game clearly had to be played out to its conclusion.  No one would argue with that.  The problem with continuing this particular game, however, was the fact that after Clearview managed the two-point conversion, delirious Catamount fans poured out of the stands and onto the field without paying much attention to the clock.

Some of the fans swarmed the players, while others tried to pull down the goalpost.  Still others picked a dazed Jasper Knowles up on their shoulders and paraded him back and forth in front of the Catamount bench.  The officials blew their whistles and tried to control the crowd, but they were having no more luck than they’d had before.

“Is that Lawton headed for the ambulance?” Ivy asked.  “You’d better get down there before he runs over somebody.”

Rhodes had hoped at first that this time the crowd might settle down on its own, but it was clear within seconds that it just wasn’t going to happen.  He walked out of the stands and jogged toward the end zone, getting there just as Lawton reached the ambulance.  The driver was nowhere around.

“Prob’ly gone for another hot dog,” Lawton said.  “Never did know a fella to eat so much at a football game.”

“The band boosters need the money,” Rhodes said.  “You don’t need to drive on the field this time.  Just turn on the siren.  Maybe that’ll do the trick.”

“It better do it quick, or those folks’ll have the goalpost down on the ground,” Lawton said.

Rhodes looked at the goalpost.  There were several men standing on the crossbar, holding to the uprights and rocking the post back and forth, while others were at the support pole, pushing against it and giving all the help they could to the men up on the crossbar.

“I’ll take care of that,” Rhodes told Lawton.  “You just run the siren.”

Two of the men jumped off the crossbar when they saw Rhodes coming.  Then the siren wailed, and the crowd at the base began to scatter.  Practically everyone had run off in one direction or another by the time Rhodes got there, and the others quickly followed.  They didn’t want to get arrested.  The goalpost was still standing, though it might have been listing a bit to the left.  That was good enough for Rhodes.

Rhodes turned toward the middle of the field, and he was gratified to see that Ruth Grady was already there.  She had managed to get the fans to put Coach Knowles down and had even made some headway with the mob surrounding the players in the middle of the field.  Rhodes went to help her out, and before too long they had everyone at least backed up to the fence if not back in the grandstand.

The players eventually calmed down enough to get the kick-off teams on the field, and the rest of the game was anti-climactic.  After the obligatory delay-of-the-game penalty, the Clearview kicker squibbed the ball on the ground, and a Greyhound picked it up on the twenty yard line.  He ran to the left, avoided a couple of tacklers, circled back to the right, and then was overrun by half the Clearview team as time expired.

Yet another giddy celebration began, but Rhodes didn’t feel like stopping this one.  If the goalpost was pulled down, the school district would just have to buy a new one.  What Rhodes was worried about now was the victory celebrations that were sure to ensue.  He was afraid that it was going to be a long night.

R
hodes could remember a time when the Clearview business district would have been humming on the Saturday morning after a game, but that had been a long time ago, before Wal-Mart had built on the outskirts of town. 

Now most of the downtown businesses were quiet, most of them practically deserted.  The only real signs of life were outside the stores, where the Clearview cheerleaders were busy washing the windows, replacing the spirit slogans that had been painted the week before with new ones.

One they hadn’t gotten to yet showed some kind of dog, which Rhodes supposed represented the Garton mascot, impaled on a spit above a roaring fire.  Under the fire the words “Grill the Greyhounds” were painted in blue and gold.  It wasn’t going to be easy to top that one.