Tackle Without a Team (3 page)

“N-nothing,” Scott breathed, as his stomach flip-flopped.

“Nothing? Then why are your hands shaking?” the coach asked.

He stepped up beside Scott, towering above him like the Jolly Green Giant.

Scott didn’t move. Didn’t speak. He was frozen.

“Mind letting me see what you’re hiding in there?” the coach asked quietly.

Scott hesitated. Then, reluctantly, he unzipped the bag again and took out the towel, revealing the two marijuana cigarettes
underneath.

“They’re — they’re not mine,” he stammered, nervous and worried.

The coach stared at him. “You mean to tell me somebody
else
put those in there?”

Sweating profusely, Scott nodded.

Coach Dresso cleared his throat. “I wish I could believe you, Scott,” he said. “But if that was true, then why did you try
to hide them again? Why didn’t you bring them to me right away?”

“I guess I wasn’t thinking straight. I was surprised. But I swear, I don’t smoke the stuff,” Scott insisted.

“Let me have them,” the coach said, extending his hand.

Scott handed the marijuana to him, praying that the coach believed him.

“After you shower and get into your civvies, I want to talk with you,” the coach said and moved on.

Scott stared after him, his heart still beating like crazy. He felt eyes on him now and glanced quickly around to see every
pair in the room staring at him. I know what they’re thinking, he thought. My brother, Eddie, had smoked dope. He’d even gotten
caught with it in his car and arrested. They probably think I’m just
like him. But I could never let that happen to me!

Kear looked at him, stunned. “You smoke grass?”

“No! You
know
I don’t!” Scott exclaimed, his voice low but strained. “Somebody else put those joints in there!”

“Who?”

“How the heck would I know?”

Choking back tears, he zipped up the duffel bag, got up, and started to head toward the coach’s office.

“Scott.” Kear grabbed his arm. “I believe you.”

Scott’s mouth tightened. Then he said, “Thanks,” and kept walking, feeling as though he were going to his execution.

“Aren’t you going to shower?” Coach Dresso asked when Scott walked in.

“No. I’ll wait until I get home,” Scott replied. “You wanted to tell me something?”

The coach nodded. “Yes, as much as I hate to.” He sighed deeply. “I don’t know what else to do but tell it to you straight,
Scott. You know the rules. I don’t condone ordinary cigarette smoking for any athlete, and certainly not for
kids your age. And marijuana” — the coach’s tone grew sharper — “that’s an illegal substance, in case you’d forgotten.”

“I told you, I don’t smoke, Coach,” Scott said stiffly. “Not even regular cigarettes.”

“But I have evidence to the contrary, Scott.”

“I know. But you’ve got to believe me, Coach,” Scott insisted. “I didn’t put those joints in there. Somebody else did.”

“All right. Who? Only somebody who doesn’t like you. And there isn’t a guy on the team who fits that description.”

Monk Robertson does, Scott wanted to say. But he didn’t have any proof to back up his feeling.

“No,” the coach continued. “I can’t think of a single person on the team who would be nasty enough to plant them in your duffel.
As far as I know right now, those joints are yours. You probably purchased them sometime between now and the last time you
showered, stuck them into your duffel bag, and forgot all about it.”

Scott’s eyes ached as he stared at the coach. “I didn’t —” he started to say.

“And you’ve got to pay the penalty,” the coach
went on, ignoring Scott’s interruption. “I’d really like to believe you, Scott, but if I just let you off the hook like that,
it wouldn’t be a very good example to the other players, would it?”

Scott didn’t answer.

“Anyway, as of now, you’re off the team. Sorry, Scott, but that’s the rule. Given the seriousness of this incident, I should
also inform the principal and your parents, but since —”

Scott whirled around and ran out the door, as the remainder of the coach’s words faded into silence behind him.

The principal! And his parents … Eddie’s arrest had shamed them no end. He couldn’t let them go through that misery again!

“All because someone stashed their pot in my bag!” he whispered, hurt and angry. “Why did they pick on me?”

He stormed out of the locker room to the wide, bush-lined walkway where more than a dozen kids were waiting for their friends
to emerge. They all stared at him, puzzled.

“Why didn’t you take a shower?” several of them asked almost in unison.

He didn’t answer but continued on toward
the parking lot where his parents and sisters —Anna Mae, eleven, and Carolyn, nine — were waiting for him. Only Eddie wasn’t
there. He was attending his first year of college. I wonder what he’d think, or say, if he were here now, Scott thought. He’d
been through it. But with him it was real. He
had
smoked marijuana. He
knew
what it was like to get caught and be guilty.

Suddenly, two girls broke away from the group and rushed toward him, stopping in front of him so that he couldn’t take another
step.

“Scott!” murmured Jerilea Townsend, a brown-eyed brunette he’d come to like since the eighth grade. “You look as if you lost
the game, not won it! What happened?”

“I’ve just been fired,” Scott said solemnly and pushed on between them.

“Fired?” Fran Whitaker echoed, her eyes flashing wide. “What do you mean …
fired
?” Fran was a friend of Kear’s.

“Just what I said,” Scott answered, trying not to sound belligerent but not really caring whether he did or not. Uppermost
in his mind was the thought that the coach was wrong in
kicking him off the team. Just because those cigarettes were in his duffel bag didn’t prove a thing.
Anybody
could have put them in there. The locker door hadn’t been locked, nor had his duffel bag.

He heard the clatter of the girls’ shoes as they ran to keep up with him. “Scott! Aren’t you going to tell us what happened?
Why were you fired?” Jerilea asked, her voice shrill.

“The coach saw a couple of cigarettes in my duffel bag.” Scott chose not to mention what
kind
of cigarettes. He didn’t want word to get around that he had been caught with drugs. “I don’t smoke, and I told him so. I
told him somebody must have stuck ’em in there, but he wouldn’t believe me.”

“That’s not
fair
!” Jerilea cried.

Tell me about it, Scott thought to himself as he kept on walking. The girls didn’t follow him this time.

He was relieved. He was embarrassed enough without having them around to see him wallow in his frustration.

He reached the tan, four-door car where his
parents and the girls were waiting, tossed the bag onto the floor in back, and plunked himself down next to Anna Mae.

“Okay! Let’s go!” he said, forcing a grin and pretending nothing was bothering him. He had decided to keep mum. He knew the
effect it would have on them if they knew what had happened. They’d be crushed.

Carolyn stared at him. “You didn’t shower,” she observed, wrinkling her nose.

She
would
have to notice that, he thought. “I didn’t want to keep all of you waiting,” he explained.

His father started up the car.

“Something wrong?” his mother asked, looking back at him. “I don’t remember your not taking a shower right after a game before.”

His fists tightened. “Oh, Ma. Nothing’s wrong. Can’t I skip a shower just once without everybody giving me the third degree?”

He glanced at the rearview mirror and saw his father looking at him, too. If anybody could tell when something was troubling
him, it was his father.

But all Mr. Kramer said was, “Okay, okay.
Let’s leave the boy alone. He played a good game and must be tired.”

Scott breathed a sigh of relief.

But, as they headed out of the parking lot, the hurt feeling came back stronger than ever. They’d find out the truth sooner
or later, he thought. They had to — the next time the Greyhawks played, and he didn’t suit up.

He couldn’t remember being in a worse mess in his life.

It was shortly after four o’clock when Scott got a phone call from Kear.

“What’re you up to?” Kear asked.

“Watching some dumb movie,” Scott answered, staring at the TV screen that was in front of him and Anna Mae. He hadn’t been
able to concentrate on the story, anyway. The earlier events of the day still plagued him. And being around his sisters and
parents made him uneasy. He was afraid that at any moment one of them would start asking him questions again.
Out with it, Scott. What happened back there in the locker room
? He couldn’t quite face that yet.

“Scott?”

“Yeah?”

“If you want me to, I’ll quit the team,” Kear said.

“What? No way! Are you crazy?”

“I’m your friend,” Kear said softly. “And I think it’s rotten what the coach did to you.”

“You’re not going to quit —” Scott blurted, before he remembered his sister was within earshot, and took the phone to another
room. “You’re not quitting the team,” he continued, a little more softly. “I know how much you love to play football.”

He couldn’t believe it. Kear was really a close friend, to be willing to quit football for him.

“I don’t love it any more than you do,” Kear said. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Scott said, shrugging his shoulders. “Maybe I can find some other team to play on. But if the word gets around
about me, I’m dead. I’m like the guy in that book,
The Man Without a Country
. Only I’m the kid without a football team.”

Kear laughed. Scott laughed, too. But only for a moment. Being without a football team was not very funny.

“Hey,” Kear went on, his mood changed for the better, “want to see a
real
movie?”

“Sure,” said Scott. “No matter what it is, it’s got to be better than this mushy stuff.”

Kear chuckled. “It’s about ghosts, so it
must
be better.”

Scott grinned. “Right. What time do you want to go?”

“The movie starts at six,” Kear said. “A quarter of six okay?”

“Wait a sec,” Scott said. He clamped a hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone and yelled, “Ma! Okay if I go to a movie
with Kear?”

“When? And what’s the movie?” his mother’s high-pitched voice came from the kitchen.

“It’s about a ghost! And it starts at six!”

“Ghost? No way! You have enough nightmares already without going to a horror movie! Tell Kear —”

“Oh, Ma!” Scott interrupted, disappointed. “What’s one more nightmare? I live through them all right, don’t I?”

There was a pause. The next minute he heard a tapping on wood. He turned and saw her standing on the wide threshold separating
the
dining and living rooms, tapping the handle part of a knife against the casing. Her blue-eyed gaze was fastened on him.

“
You
live through them,” she said. “But maybe the next time
I
won’t. You frighten me half to death with your jumping up in bed and gasping for air. And you want to see a horror movie?”

He nodded, smiling. “Yeah.”

She shook her blonde head, gave the casing a sharp tap with the knife handle, and headed back to the kitchen. “Okay. Go ahead,”
she said. “I guess I can live through another nightmare, too.”

Scott laughed. “Thanks, Ma!” He took his hand off the mouthpiece of the telephone and said into it, “See you at a quarter
of six, Kear.”

Scott plunked back down on the easy chair he’d been sitting on and continued to watch the movie. It got more boring by the
minute; it seemed that all the main actor and actress did was talk and kiss. Finally, he couldn’t stand it any longer and
went to his room to read.

Kear arrived a few minutes early, but Scott was ready. His mother suggested that he take his red jacket along because, by
the time the
movie let out, the temperature might drop a few degrees.

They started to walk the five blocks to Cinema 4, where the movie was playing. As they were about to cross to the second block,
Scott saw two girls on the next corner, waiting for a bus. Even from where he stood he could see that they were smoking.

He grabbed Kear’s hand. “Hold it a second,” he said.

They paused on the curb.

“Isn’t that Peg Moore and Flossie the Glossie?” Kear said, staring up the street at the girls.

“Yeah.”

“Isn’t Peg the one you once had a crush on?” Kear went on.

“Don’t remind me,” Scott said. Just the same, his mind reverted back to the not-too-distant past when he and Peg Moore had
been a couple. It didn’t last long, because he’d found out she smoked — sometimes even marijuana. And she’d only been twelve
then, a couple of months younger than he.

He didn’t think that anyone should smoke. Especially not pot. Maybe it was because of his
parents’ strict rule or Eddie’s experience that he felt this way, but when he’d found out Peg smoked, he hardly ever saw or
spoke to her again.

The girl with her, Florence Menkin — who most of the kids called Flossie the Glossie, because she wore so much makeup — smoked,
too.

“Oh, no. They spotted us,” Scott groaned.

Flossie the Glossie was waving to them. “Scott! Kear! Come here!” she called.

“We don’t
have
to go, do we?” said Scott, afraid of what to expect from them. Peg, especially.

“Well, we have to go that way to get to the theater,” Kear said.

Reluctantly, Scott followed Kear to the corner where the girls were standing. He didn’t have to get too close to recognize
the odor of marijuana.

“Hi, guys,” Florence said. “Where’re you headed?”

“The movies,” Kear answered. Scott frowned at him. What was he going to do next, invite them along? he thought.

But Peg hardly seemed to notice Kear. She
was smiling and peering at Scott with her bloodshot eyes. Slowly she lifted her arm and held the joint out to him.