Losers Take All (7 page)

“If you need us so badly, why don't you share your secret with us?” Dylan had demanded. “Why do we have to pretend to cheer for Muhldinger's meatheads?”

“Yeah, if we're gonna miss one of the last afternoons at the lake, don't we deserve to know what the hell's going on?” Frank agreed.

“You'll understand soon enough,” I promised them.

Becca had also been reluctant to come. She hated Muhldinger and everything he stood for, but I pointed out I'd risked everything to pat her dangerously jealous horse, so she had to come to support me. We had gone out on a few more dates, and Frank and Dylan were starting to accept her as part of our little group. Becca probably found them strange, but she seemed to enjoy occasionally hanging out with my two nutty friends.

The four of us were sitting in a row, clapping noticeably less enthusiastically than our neighbors, as Muhldinger stood and walked purposefully toward the mic.

“Hey,” Frank said to me, “your whole family has the school spirit bug. Even your bros showed up.” He pointed to where my dad, mom, and two brothers sat at the very front. “Why are they all dressed up?”

I saw Becca following the direction of his finger with interest. She had never met my parents, or my two brothers. Carl was sitting next to Anne, and my oldest brother, Billy, was there with his wife, Charlotte, and their two young kids.

It felt very strange to see them sitting together in a group and for me to be so far away. It had been my choice, but now that it was happening I didn't like the feeling at all.

Before they could ask me any more questions, Muhldinger grabbed the mic, ripping it from its stand like a hungry bear harvesting a cob of corn from its stalk. He looked around at the big crowd for a moment and then brought the mic to his lips.
“Let's hear it for Fremont!”

The answering applause swelled to a deafening roar. At least a solid minute must have gone by with people clapping, hooting, and whistling while the cheerleaders shook pom-poms and turned cartwheels and the gym's sound system blared the music to the school fight song. The last line of the song is: “Fremont High will rise to the sky, to be number one!”

“LIONS NUMBER ONE,” Muhldinger shouted above the din, picking up the final refrain. A chant began: “NUMBER ONE, NUMBER ONE.” He pumped his ham hock of a fist in time to the chant, and people started stomping on the bleachers.

“Can we leave now?” Dylan asked. “Before I go deaf or this building collapses?”

But the roar was ebbing, because Muhldinger was holding up his hand for silence. “My friends,” he said. “Thanks to all of you for giving up a summer afternoon to show your support for our Lions. The reason we're number one now is because of all of you, but we also owe a huge debt to those who've gone before us. And of course I'm talking about Arthur Gentry, who is watching over us today and always. As I'm sure he would say: when this new football season starts up, let's ‘Just go for it'!”

There was another explosion of cheering. I had to admit that Muhldinger looked completely at ease in his role of school leader, at least when it came to football. “But we also have other Fremont heroes to remember,” he reminded us. “And I've decided that my first official act as your principal should be to do something that's only been done once before in the history of Fremont High.”

I tensed up. My arms were locked straight, my palms on my knees, while the balls of my feet pressed into the wooden bleacher floor.

Muhldinger walked toward the front of the platform, which brought him closer to the crowd. “Today,” he said, “we're going to honor one of the best players to ever walk through the halls of our school, not to mention tear up the football field. I'm talking about the all-time rushing leader at Fremont High—the Logan Express—Tom Logan!”

A spotlight picked out my father, and everyone in the gym seemed to look at him except for Becca, who glanced at me.

“They wanted me to be part of the ceremony,” I whispered to her. “I said I'd come and watch with my friends.”

Muhldinger walked over to where my parents and brothers were sitting. He was still talking to everyone in the gym through the microphone, but he was now looking at my father: “Six thousand two hundred and twenty-three yards. A hundred years of Fremont football and nobody else has even come close to that. And I gotta tell you, I saw him play, and I carry that memory around with me. It reminds me of what we can be if we try hard enough, and
refuse to lose
. So let's not talk about it anymore—let's see it!”

A big screen lowered behind him, and a football game from years past conjured to life on it. I sat forward—I had seen lots of film of my dad playing college football, and even a few grainy clips from his high school days, including a ten-second dark and poorly filmed version of this famous play that had put a last exclamation point on his brilliant high school career. But these images on the big screen were so bright and lifelike that I almost felt like I was on that snowy field when Fremont broke their huddle and lined up for their final play of the season.

Fremont had the ball at the East River twenty-two-yard line. The clock showed seven seconds left, and we were losing by five points. There was time for one more play, with the state championship on the line. The Fremont quarterback hiked the ball, rolled to his right, and handed it off to number 32. My dad tucked the ball away and charged forward, but he was hit behind the line of scrimmage. The tackler bounced off him like he had tried to bring down a tank, and Dad roared toward the East River goal line, twenty-two yards away.

An East River lineman dove at him and got a straight-arm for his trouble. It was like a punch to the face mask, and the lineman's head snapped back as he fell to the snow. The footage we were watching was soundless, but I could almost hear the impact of my father's straight-arm reverberating across the years, and the one thousand people in the Fremont gym seemed to all hear it also. They let out a collective gasp.

Fifteen yards to the goal line. Dad was motoring in heavy traffic. He was following a lone blocker, but when that blocker stumbled, Dad darted away toward the left sideline, completely exposed. A big East River tackler grabbed him from behind, wrapping both arms around my father's waist. He should have been able to pull Dad down, but somehow number 32 dragged the guy with him.

At the ten-yard line, a missile struck. A high-flying East River player flashed in at shoulder height and exploded into my father's right side. The impact spun Dad around but somehow he stayed on his feet. The airborne tackler latched on to my father's right arm. So there were two of them clinging to him now, but the Logan Express chugged forward to the eight, and then the seven.

This was where it got a little hard to believe. Two more East River players hit him high and low from opposite sides. It was hard to see exactly where they grabbed on, because Dad was wearing the opposing team like an outer layer. His red-and-gold shirt was almost completely hidden beneath East River blue. Our gym had gone quiet, and watching, I felt a cold tingle down my back, as if a bit of the snow from that long-ago afternoon were sifting across two decades onto my spine.

Five yards to go. Four. The East River players were getting desperate. You could see them not just holding on but trying to trip him up and drag him down. But the engine that carried them forward refused to quit.

Dad neared the goal line, and a wall of East River brawn was waiting for him there. Three gargantuan players reared up in his path, and their body language said clearly: “Thou shalt not pass.”

Dad hit that blue wall at the one-yard line, and for the first time he lost his momentum and was pushed back. We were watching the play in regular time, but the action seemed to slow to second by second. My father was knocked backward and looked like he would sink down beneath all that weight and fall a few inches short. Then he found some secret reserve of strength, and he surged forward again with a tremendous second effort. And this time, incredibly, the wall in front of him sagged and buckled.

Ever since my teeth had been mashed I hadn't been able to think about football without feeling furious. I'd turned down the team and rejected my father's shirt and his legacy, but when the silent gym came alive with cheering I found myself cheering, too. I couldn't deny the pride I felt at what was happening on the screen.

The four players clinging to my father and the three more in the wall all had hands and arms and legs wrapped around him, but somehow number 32 reached the plane of the goal line. He seemed to freeze there for a heartbeat, neither in nor out, teetering on the brink, as if the football gods wanted this moment time-stamped and immortalized.

Then he burst forward into the end zone and fell to the ground with what looked like half the East River team on top of him. The referee raised both arms signaling the winning touchdown, and the crowd behind the end zone went berserk. The camera panned to a few shots of celebrating spectators and then returned to my father, who had climbed back up to his feet.

His helmet had been ripped off, and his long black hair glistened with snow as his mouth opened wide and he gave a shout of triumph and raised both fists high over his head. He stood like that for a long second, alone in his moment of glory, and then his teammates mobbed him and the tape cut off.

Twenty-seven years later the Fremont gym was rocking with applause. Muhldinger walked into the audience and grabbed my father's arm and made a little joke out of hauling him to his feet. Dad is a shy man who usually shuns the spotlight, but this was his moment and he seemed willing to just go for it.

A drumroll sounded, and then a spotlight led him out onto the gym floor to where Barlow—the varsity co-captain who had slammed me to the ground in Founders' Park—stood holding a red-and-gold shirt with the number 32. I was pretty sure it was the very shirt that Muhldinger had ordered for me—the one I had refused to wear.

Barlow handed the shirt to my dad and shook his hand. Dad held the jersey over his head as the crowd cheered, and then I heard Muhldinger say something to him that sounded like “Go ahead, Tom, hook it up.” My dad slid something through the shirt, and while he was working on it I saw that two cheerleaders were escorting Carl and Billy out onto the gym floor. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Muhldinger boomed, “we thought Tom might need a little help, so here are two other brave Lions from years past—Carl Logan, twice All-League, and Billy Logan, former team captain and All-State!”

Becca's hand tightened on my arm.

“I knew this was coming,” I whispered to her. “It's fine.”

But it wasn't fine. Now that it was actually happening, I was sorry I had come to this stupid pep rally. I should have gone to the lake with my buddies, or allowed Becca to take me horseback riding. I could have been on a horse lost in the trees, far away from this gym where my father and two brothers now stood in a golden pool of light. They were each holding on to something. “Go ahead and raise it up,” Muhldinger told them.

They started to pull, and the football jersey spread out magically on whatever wire was supporting it and began to fly through the air like a red-and-gold bird. But before it rose more than ten feet above the floor I heard my father say, “Wait a minute.”

The shirt stopped rising.

Muhldinger and my dad were standing close together and the mic picked up their voices. “What is it?” our new principal asked.

I heard my father say my name. My stomach knotted up and I felt a little dizzy.

The overhead lights came on. Dad was holding the mic and scanning the crowd. “Jack? Will you come down?”

I told myself that I didn't have to do this—we had discussed it and come to an agreement—but a second later I felt myself standing up and the people near me were clapping and patting me on the back as I walked past them.

I guess there are some things in life that you do without thinking about them too much. I walked to the end of that row, and then hurried down from aisle to aisle and bleacher to bleacher, and I don't think I had a single clear, conscious thought till I hit the gym floor and walked out to join my father and brothers. Dad stepped forward with a happy smile and grabbed my right arm, and then Carl and Billy were passing me a rope and Carl ruffled my hair and said, “'Bout time you got your butt down here, bro.”

The lights went out and a spotlight came on the shirt, and we hoisted it up together. My brothers were on one side of me, and my father was on the other, and our arms and hands pulled and churned together. The jersey rose above the gym floor, above the rows of wooden bleachers, until it reached the iron girders that interlaced just below the gym's ceiling and the banners from our nine State Championship seasons that hung there. One shirt already had a place of honor near those banners and the giant American flag. This was the jersey from Gene Hamilton, who had been the first Fremont football coach back at the turn of the twentieth century and had led the team for four decades. Dad's shirt found its spot right next to his, and the clapping built to a crescendo.

The lights were still off, and two strong hands fell over my shoulders in the darkness. I heard my father's voice tell me softly: “Sorry, Jack, but I needed you with us.”

Instead of being angry at him, I heard myself answer, “I wouldn't have missed it for the world.”

Then the gym lights came back on, and Dad's ceremony was over. The cheerleaders launched into another routine, and I didn't want to walk through it so I moved off to the side and stood in semidarkness at the edge of the gym floor, watching.

“Nice moment,” a familiar voice said, sharp with sarcasm. Muhldinger had walked up next to me.

“Sure was,” I agreed, watching a baton circle skyward and then spin back down until it was snatched out of the air by a blond girl in a short skirt.

“That shirt's better off up there than on your back,” he said.