He’s unloaded a real bullet, too. The ball sings like silk tearing along a seam and Billy knows there will be no mercy in it, but he does just like the pros, eyes it all the way in and folds his stomach around the blow, a smothering oooooph—
Touchdown. He throws the ball back to Dime and angles deeper into the end zone, legs stroking, lungs feeding on fresh cold air. It feels so good to run, to just: run. Dime leads him too far with the next pass and he has to stretch, full extension in midstride and—hands! A cheer rises from the end-zone stands as he pulls the ball in, and Billy breaks off a little touchdown dance, uh huh, uh huh, taking it to the house. On the next pass Dime waves him long, then launches a bomb that floats over Billy’s head and into his arms, like rocking a baby the way that ball cuddles up to him, and the end-zone crowd sends up another cheer.
Billy is on. He’s feeling it. There’s a tingling sentience in every inch of his body, his receptors keyed to near-orgasmic pitch with a corresponding sureness of motor control. Is this how professional athletes feel all the time? Such pleasure in the sheer physicality of every moment, the meaty spring of your feet off good firm turf, the razor-strop of cold air in and out your lungs. Even food must have a heightened savoriness for them, and sex, dawg, don’t even talk about it. Naturally he hopes Faison is watching, and there’s the half-conscious thought that she did this, their encounter somehow altered his brain chemistry with one result being this quantum boost to his athletic skills.
He pivots, plants his feet for the throw back to Dime, and finds one, two, three footballs sailing at him, air support for an all-out incursion onto the field. Mango launches a line-drive kick that screams past Billy’s head. Lodis rams into Sykes from behind, knocking him to the ground. Crack and A-bort go long for a pass from Day, elbowing and trash-talking stride for stride, stumbling, nearly falling they are laughing so hard. “Jerry Rice,” Dime says as he jogs past Billy, then he kicks into gear and goes streaking off, looking back for Billy’s pass. The end-zone crowd is really cheering now and why not, what fan hasn’t dreamed of doing this very thing, a hell-all dash around the Valhalla of pro football fields? Bravo falls into a loose game of razzle-dazzle, modified tackle-the-man-with-the-ball with fluid or basically nonexistent teams and no apparent goal, just a bunch of guys tearing around the end zone, slamming into each other and laughing their asses off. And if it was just this, Billy thinks, just the rude mindless headbanging game of it, then football would be an excellent sport and not the bloated, sanctified, self-important beast it became once the culture got its clammy hands on it. Rules. There are hundreds, and every year they make more, an insidious and particularly gross distortion of the concept of “play,” and then there are the meat-brain coaches with their sadistic drills and team prayers and dyslexia-inducing diagrams, the control-freak refs running around like little Hitlers, the time-outs, the deadening pauses for incompletes, the pontifical ceremony of instant-replay reviews, plus huddles, playbooks, pads, audibles, and all other manner of stupefactive device when the truth of the matter is that boys just want to run around and knock the shit out of each other. This was a mystery Billy’s mother was never able to fathom. After having two daughters she couldn’t accept why from the earliest age her son would purposely slam into walls, doors, shrubbery, wrestle the ottoman around the den, or spontaneously tumble to the ground for no apparent reason other than it is there. Football seemed a constructive outlet for this impulse, and at various times during his youth Billy played organized ball, “organized” being the code word for elaborate systems of command and control where every ounce of power resides at the top. It seemed that football must be made to be productive and useful, a net-plus benefit for all mankind, hence the endless motivational yawping about teamwork, sacrifice, discipline, and other modern virtues, the basic thrust of which boiled down to shut up and do as you’re told. So despite the terrific violence inherent in the game a weird passivity seeped into your mind. All those rules, all the maxims, all the three-hour practices where you mostly stood around waiting your turn to be screamed at by an assistant coach, they produced an almost pleasurable numbness, a general dulling of perception and responsiveness. In a way it was nice, constantly being told what to do, except after a while it got boring as hell, and at a certain age you started to realize that most of the coaches were actually dumb as rocks.
So fuck that, he was done with football after his sophomore year, except the Army is pretty much the same thing, though the violence is, well, what it is, obviously. By factors of thousands. But for the moment Bravo has found some measure of peace as they bounce off each other like lottery balls, great gouts of tension release with every hit and they are laughing like absolute maniacs. The end-zone crowd — the cheap seats, the rednecks, the blue-collar rowdies — they’re standing and cheering them on. Bravo is running wild over hallowed ground and—weird! — nobody is stopping them. Then three obese men in Cowboys parkas and caps roll up in a stretch golf cart, and the fattest of the three, a guy with steel-framed glasses and swollen ass cheeks for jowls, yells at Bravo to Get the hell off my field, NOW.
“Get the HELL off his field!” Crack screams, and Mango screams it back and in an instant all the Bravos are bellowing at each other, Get the HELL off his field! His field, dude, get the HELL off his field! He wants his field back NOW! Get the HELL OFF! They gather up the footballs with a geriatric shuffle-trot, pausing every couple of steps to scream HELL! and FIELD! and the three fat guys just sit there and scowl. A couple of cops saunter over but don’t say anything, and the Bravos keep yelling at the tops of their lungs because the bastard couldn’t even be nice about it, couldn’t append a civil please or gracious thank-you for these brave American soldiers, these youngsters, as General Colin Powell (ret.) calls them, these loyal, honorable youths who bared their breasts to the foe for the sake of your freedoms, you fat fuck, you disgrace to the notion of man-in-God’s-image, you whale-ass keeper of other people’s grasses. Dude, maybe they don’t hate our freedoms, maybe they hate our fat!
The end-zone rowdies send up a boo when they see what’s happening, a blowsy, cynical sort of Screwed again! howl. Norm & Co. greet the Bravos as they trot off the field. Norm is laughing. “Sorry, fellas,” he says with that mouthful-of-salad chewiness, “I should’ve warned you. Bruce is pretty touchy about his field.”
But isn’t Norm the boss? So it seems like he could… Whatever.
“It’s a really nice field,” A-bort says.
“Dude, best field you’ll ever see,” says Crack. “I bet Mango’d love to have a run at that turf. Crank up the John Deere and go at it, I mean, you know, just being a Mex and all.”
“It’s Astroturf, moron,” Mango points out.
“I’m just saying—”
“Ethnic clichés demean us all,” Mango says.
“All I’m saying is any beaner would love—”
“—to do your mother like I did?”
Norm is laughing. What cards these Bravos are, what a grab-ass band of brothers. Okay, so maybe they aren’t the greatest generation by anyone’s standard, but they are surely the best of the bottom third percentile of their own somewhat muddled and suspect generation. Over in the flats a network camera crew is setting up while two media-type women discuss “the shoot.” The six cheerleaders are there, waiting. Josh is there, hovering, and Albert, texting. With a certain habituated weariness Billy notes that Major Mac is nowhere to be seen.