***
When Garner got home he went to his bedroom and shut his door and lay there in the dark, dozens of things wrestling in his head. He wondered, not for the first time, why he couldn’t bring himself to come clean — why he couldn’t sit his mother down and explain to her that he’d gone outside regulations to secure a big account and had gotten caught, that the rule he’d broken was one he’d broken a dozen times before, that everybody broke, but that this time the account had been lost and that this had caused problems. It wasn’t a complicated story. There was the possibility that he wasn’t really duping his mother at all, that his mother knew something was wrong and was giving him space to figure it out himself. He knew at least part of what was stopping him from telling the truth had nothing to do with her, anyway. It was the town — what this sincere, right-and-wrong hamlet thought of him. He couldn’t tell whether he despised this place and couldn’t stand the idea of being pitied by it, or whether he still needed the town to be proud of him. He thought of Ainsley, of course — her lips, her fingers in his hair. After all this time, she still wanted him. She’d wanted him back before his success. She’d wanted him, he knew, for his toughness. That he’d ever thought he was in her league to begin with, back when he was the scrawniest kid on the high school football team, said it all. He wasn’t the type to give up, to be run off by long odds.
He was up from the bed and pacing now, arms crossed, pulling in whole breaths. There his suits were in the closet, dormant, dutiful. A fly was buzzing around over near the window, probably trapped behind the screen. What Ainsley had told Garner about the fullback was picking at him. It was number 41. He remembered the mohawk. He’d noticed the kid last Saturday, easily the best blocker on the team, one of those kids who had that innate knack for colliding squarely with another human. He was stout enough to lead inside and quick enough to pull wide on outside runs, and when the offense got stuck they’d sneak him out of the backfield and throw to him. Usually that type of offense didn’t even use a fullback, but this kid was always out there. Several times Garner had even seen him directing traffic before the snap.
Garner sat down on the bed and plucked his phone from the nightstand. He looked up the lines and found that Coastal was favored by nineteen points that Saturday. Almost three touchdowns. They were on the road, at North Florida. Three touchdowns on the road. Their star fullback wouldn’t be playing and nobody knew it yet.
Garner reclined stiffly onto his back, the fly in the window quiet now, gone or else resigned to its fate. He stared into the dark and must’ve slept an hour here and there, and in time, as it had to, the sour bluish light rose up into the world. He showered and dressed and drove his mother’s Honda directly west on Route 8 until he came to a town two counties in where no one knew him. He had to wait fifteen minutes for the bank to open, and then he went in and withdrew everything he could from his checking without having to close the account — a little over two grand. He didn’t love the idea of using cash, of using a live bookie, but that last credit card didn’t have nearly enough room on it, so here he was, doing this the old-fashioned way. This was the way desperate people bet and he was desperate.
The teller asked if he needed anything else and he said he did. Garner had an old money market he’d opened with the commission from his first big deal. He’d never touched it, had planned to leave it be until he was older, when he’d be able to tell people it was the first score he’d ever made. Then he’d do something magnanimous with it, maybe gift it to some ambitious young man he would have begun to mentor.
It hadn’t had time to accrue much interest; it was still around five thousand. Garner drew a steadying breath and told the teller he wanted to close the money market.
On the drive back to the coast, he felt a pang of contrition over the fact that he’d gotten the information for the bet he was about to make from Ainsley, information she wasn’t supposed to have shared with him, but he told himself he was being ridiculous. No one would find out why he’d made the bet, and no one was getting cheated except the bookie. He’d make this one bet, and after he won he could figure out a better way to get some money coming in.
He pulled up behind Cuss Seafood, an ancient, tidy diner where everyone knew the owner took wagers. Garner had never been in the place. He poked his head into the storeroom and asked for Cuss and after a minute a wiry black man with one of his eyes askew walked out and accepted Garner’s money like it was twenty bucks. Cuss reeked of harsh, outdated soap. It was hard to tell if he was looking at Garner or off into the live oaks. He peered at Garner’s driver’s license, scribbled in a little booklet, then slipped Garner’s cash into a blue envelope stamped LOWER COUNTRY ENTERTAINMENT. “You sure this just for entertainment?” he said. “We a entertainment outfit.”
Saturday morning Garner’s mother’s hot water heater crapped out. He insisted to her that he’d take care of it, having no clue how much a hot water heater cost. He wasn’t going to look into it until after the game. A hot water heater would be the least of his worries if he lost the bet. He’d get to find out what rock bottom felt like.
He skipped a cold shower. Down at the end of the block he puffed away at one of his Russian cigarettes and when he got back to the house his mother’s friends were appearing. They were putting hors d’oeuvres together for the game. They liked to watch it here, on the big TV.
Garner said his hellos and returned each woman’s hug. The big woman who tottered around in high heels, the skinny one who always wore a ball cap. Lucas’s mother was there again. Lucas’s band was rehearsing, she said, or he would’ve come over. They were getting ready to record a demo, so they had to practice every chance they got. They always received terrific reviews in the local papers, Lucas’s mother told Garner. He should go listen to them sometime.
“Sure,” he said. “I just might do that.”
He spent another couple minutes turning down the food the women offered him, then claimed he wasn’t feeling well and retired to his room to watch the game on a tiny old TV set that normally stayed in the back of the closet. Garner didn’t want to be around people for the game. He snuck out and fetched a beer from the fridge during the highlight show that aired during warm-ups, thinking the alcohol would dampen his nerves, but it tasted stale and he only got about half the bottle down.
He saw the opening kickoff, saw the spheroid spinning end over end against the sky, and then he watched in a trance as the first minutes proceeded exactly as he needed them to. One drive ended with a dropped pass, another on downs. Both teams were using the full play clock, like they wanted to get the game over with. The only scoring opportunity in the quarter was a North Florida field goal that sailed well wide. Everyone on the field was testy. A player on each side got whistled for a hit out of bounds, and then the Coastal tight end got ejected for throwing a punch at a North Florida safety. Both coaches stripped down to undershirts and kept yanking their headsets off to scream at the officials. The Coastal running back had no pop and wasn’t falling forward like he usually did, mostly because, to everyone but Garner’s surprise, Coastal’s fullback had been a late scratch.
Everything was moving quickly, even the commercial breaks. The stands were half empty, Garner noticed. Bad shotgun snaps and booming punts. When Coastal finally hit a long post route to that receiver Forde, the play was called back for illegal procedure because the backup fullback had lined up wrong. And at that point, watching the Coastal players begin to celebrate and then stop celebrating and drop their heads at the sight of the yellow hanky on the ground, optimism filled Garner’s guts.