The Big Game Read online

  Danny retreated down the back hallway to his room, knowing that they would both be fine. They always were. He was grateful for the loss of power, though, because the way they had been going he felt certain more than just a plate was going to be broken. It had happened before.

  He checked his phone. The battery was low, so he plugged it in for when the electricity came on and then made a quick call to Janey. She knew everything that happened in their small Texas town. She said that everyone in Crooked Creek had lost power.

  He found the flashlight next to his bed without too much trouble because the orange lightning flashes outside his window lit up things pretty good. He looked sadly at his Xbox and then propped the flashlight up on a stack of underwear atop his dresser so that its beam shone down on the desk beside his bed. From the drawer he removed a World War II bomber plane model and started working on it. He could figure out how to put models together without reading the plans. Other military aircraft hung from the ceiling by fishing line, which—especially in the flickering light—gave the impression that a flying armada was circling his bedroom.

  Danny hadn’t added to his flying collection since his mom had given him the Xbox for his birthday at the beginning of summer along with a twenty-inch flat-screen TV. His dad had been away at a convention looking at new farm equipment. He sure wasn’t thrilled when he got home and found out about it, but he had to leave again almost immediately on a sales trip, so he didn’t have much time to fuss. Now, if Danny wasn’t watching something with his parents, he was playing Rainbow Six Siege with Cupcake.

  Occasionally, Janey would get on to play Left 4 Dead 2. Janey loved the zombies.

  The power hadn’t returned by the time he grew tired of his bomber. He wandered into the living room, where his parents sat arguing about where to vacation by the light of a battery-powered camping lantern. He said good night and used the flashlight to navigate the bathroom, brush his teeth, and get into bed. He lay for a long while listening for the sound of a train to rise up from the thrum of rain against the roof.

  He didn’t remember falling asleep, so he had no idea what time of night it was when his father woke him with an edge in his voice.

  “Danny! Danny!” His father shook him awake, whispering desperately. “Danny! Now! We’ve got to go!”

  Danny could only think something terrible had happened in the storm. He gulped back the panic bubbling up in the back of his throat.

  “Dad? What? What’s wrong? Where’s Mom?”

  “Danny, your mom doesn’t need to run three miles. She’s still a looker and she knows it. I could lose a few, though. Come on—get up and get dressed. I know I haven’t been around much this summer, and I’ve been letting you down. But your training starts now. Three miles. Let’s go.”

  “Three miles?” Danny sat up and turned his phone on. “Dad, it’s five in the morning.”

  “I know that. Road work. You and me. I told your mom we were starting early, and I meant it. She’ll see.”

  The power must have come back on recently because there was light seeping in from the hallway, and Danny now saw that his father had a new Steelers sweat suit on. Even though it was predawn, his hair was carefully styled and he’d shaved in case folks saw him running.

  “Let’s go! Let’s go!” Danny’s father clapped his hands, ready for action.

  Danny left his phone plugged in so it could finish charging, then dressed and tied his sneakers. They stepped out onto the front porch, his father quietly pulling the door shut behind them before standing tall and breathing deep.

  “How about this air? How fresh is this?”

  Everything was wet, but a crisp breeze had cleared away the clouds. The stars winked down at them from a sky that was deep dark blue but no longer black. In the east Danny saw a glow that promised morning.

  “Let’s walk a bit to loosen things up.” Danny’s father swung his arms back and forth and then in small circles as they made their way down the long, straight driveway to County Route 222. His father turned right, heading up the hill and away from town.

  “See, your mom doesn’t understand.” His father angled his head back toward the house. “We met in high school, and she doesn’t know about this part of it. This part came before her. She doesn’t understand that, until now, I’ve let you just be a kid. You were great on the Pop Warner teams, no doubt about it. A star. But you’re twelve years old and going into seventh grade, and this is when things start to get serious. Now, I’m going to ask you a question. What do people say about you in football?”

  Danny thought for a moment. “They say . . . I’m tough and I’m fast.”

  “Yeah, but what else?”

  A light went off in Danny’s head. “Oh, they say I’m just like you. Another Daniel Owens.”

  Even in the faint dawn Danny could see his father’s smile as he nodded his head. “That’s right, another Daniel Owens. You’re a chip off the block. You’ve got everything I have and you can do everything I’ve done, only you get to do it better.”

  “Better than you? I don’t know about that, Dad.”

  His father stopped and put a powerful hand on Danny’s arm to give him a little shake. “Never doubt yourself. Like I say, you can be better, because you’re my son and you’ve got all my experience to back you up. You never have to doubt yourself, because I’m telling you that you can do this.”

  Danny nodded, his stomach tightening with the pressure. All his life he’d be Daniel Owens’s son.

  “And you could be,” his father continued, “you could be a first-round pick—not third like me. That’s why I’m going to train you myself. I’m going to give it everything I’ve got.”

  His father gave the big bulge of his stomach a pat. “Not that I couldn’t stand to lose a few pounds in the bargain. I know that. You’re helping me, I’m helping you. That’s why you are going to have a monster season and tear up that championship game, so that Coach Oglethorpe can’t wait to get you on that varsity team. That’s the key. You’ve got to get up there early, so you get some experience. Then, by the time you’re a sophomore in high school, you’ll dominate. That’s when the colleges will start to drool.”

  His father extended his hand and Danny grasped it and shook it hard. “Are you with me?”

  “Yes,” Danny said, and took off after him.

  At the top of the hill, his father stopped and pulled him into a rare hug. Danny looked over his dad’s shoulder at the lights and the water tower in the little four-corner town of Crooked Creek. He could see Janey’s house down the road about a quarter mile from theirs. The front porch light was on, but he imagined Janey and her parents were still asleep like most people in the town. He drew in a breath, feeling special, up here on top of the world in the fresh breeze with his dad, the man he was named after, an NFL player, a world champion.

  “That’s my boy,” his father said, clapping Danny’s back before turning him loose.

  When his father took off down the other side of the hill on a fast jog, Danny took off too. It felt like flying until the road leveled off on a winding way that more or less followed the creek. They slogged along, heading gradually up again toward the wooded hills in the distance. As the light grew the birds began to wake and sing. It felt so good to be there, just him and his dad and the brand-new day.

  Danny didn’t know how far they’d gone, but his lungs began to burn and his legs felt like lead. Danny glanced at his father. It looked like he’d been under the garden hose. He was drenched in sweat.

  When he began to make sharp wheezing noises, Danny slowed his pace.

  “Dad?” Danny huffed and puffed. “Maybe we should turn back?”

  His father hung his head like a sleepy bear, but shook it to say no, even though he was struggling to breathe. “Top of . . . this . . . next hill . . . You always . . . end . . . on top . . . You . . . gotta . . . push . . .”

  His father suddenly gasped and straightened. He clutched his chest and staggered sideways just off the road.<
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  “Danny?” His father winced like he’d hammered his thumb, and then he pitched forward and collapsed in the dust.

  “Dad!” Danny cried out as he lifted his father’s head off the ground.

  Reality hit him, and he jumped up and ran home for help.

  Somehow, between ragged breaths, he told his mother what had happened. They got back to his dad before the ambulance, and Danny stood, useless, while his mom sat on the roadside with his father’s head in her lap. The paramedics arrived and tried to revive him.

  Everything else was a blur in Danny’s mind. He remembered the sad look on the doctor’s face when he told his mom that her husband was gone, and the ghostly sound of her wailing as the doctor assured Danny there was nothing he could have done.

  Everyone in Crooked Creek came to the funeral, and it seemed like half of Jericho County as well. Danny stood there next to his mother, dry eyed. Always lively in a crowd, today she stood stiff, her eyes brimming with tears. The dark suit he wore made him sweat, and the tie made him itch.

  The coffin loomed to the side of them, but Danny couldn’t bear to look at the big waxy figure that had been his dad.

  The endless line of people all seemed to say the same things.

  “He was just such a great man.”

  “Just too young for a heart attack.”

  “I know you made him so proud, Danny.”

  “He always told everyone you’d be even better than he was.”

  “Sorry for your loss, son.”

  “You look just like him.”

  “He’s gonna live on through you, son.”

  And Danny replied just the same, no matter what they said. “Yes, sir.” “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Some of the men wore football jerseys—Crooked Creek purple or Jericho gold—beneath their black coats and told brief stories about how his dad had bested them or others on the gridiron. Their memories were just words to Danny, like pebbles rattling in an empty can.

  Janey and Cupcake stayed through to the bitter end, until those who had been invited to the house after the burial left.

  “Man,” Cupcake said, “everyone sure loved your dad. There must have been three thousand people.”

  “Too bad two thousand nine hundred fifty of them were morons.” Danny stretched out his feet and loosened his tie.

  “Why?” Cupcake wrinkled his brow.

  Danny clenched his sweaty hands. “Football this and football that and ‘Oh, you’re just like your dad. No, you are your dad.’ What the heck is that? Why would anyone say that? I mean, he’s gone. I’m here.”

  “I’m sure they were only trying to be nice,” Janey said quietly.

  Danny blinked. “Do you think that’s nice?”

  She put a hand on his shoulder. “I know you, but these people knew your dad. They admired him. I think a lot of them wanted to be him.”

  Danny felt like someone had him in a bear hug. It was hard to breathe. “But I’m me, right?”

  Janey grabbed his arm with both hands. “Of course you are, Danny. And you’re our best friend in the world.”

  After they buried his father, after all the people left and a new day was dawning, Danny didn’t talk about what had happened. Janey and Cupcake knew him well and never said another word, but they stayed close for the rest of the summer. When he wasn’t alone aimlessly riding the mower, he spent his time hanging out with Janey at the creek or playing Xbox with Cupcake. None of it required him to talk.

  His mom didn’t talk either. She sighed a lot and smoked her thin cigarettes and made dinner for the two of them, which they ate with the TV on. Sometimes she started to cry, but whenever that happened she’d hurry off to her room like she was ashamed.

  Danny didn’t cry because he didn’t let himself think about what happened. He was just numb. He must have lost track of the days and weeks, too, because he was surprised when, after he and Cupcake defeated a drug lord in the Ghost Recon video game, his friend asked, “You ready for tomorrow?”

  “What do you mean?” Danny said.

  “Football.”

  “Football?”

  “Stop messing with me, Danny. Practice starts tomorrow. You know that.” Cupcake huffed.

  Danny said, “No. I wasn’t thinking.”

  Their headsets remained quiet for some time before Danny said, “Okay, I gotta go.”

  He disconnected his headset before Cupcake could reply and got ready for bed.

  In the morning, he made himself cinnamon toast before climbing aboard the old John Deere rider mower. They had five acres of lawn. It took him all morning to cut it, because when he got far from the house, he switched off the engine and just sat there with the sun beating down. His dad used to call it the “devil’s glare” when it got this hot, the kind of heat that reached your bones.

  When he headed back for lunch, he spotted a silver Ford F-150 in the driveway. It was a big truck with giant tires and a chrome grille, and his heart skipped a beat at the thought of another man calling on his mom so soon after his dad had died.

  But he could think of no other explanation for the big truck, and a roaring wind started up in his head. Pulling into the garage, he hopped off the mower and wiped the sweat from his forehead. Blind to thought, he grabbed a large wrench from the tool chest and charged into the house through the kitchen door.

  When Danny saw the back of a man sitting at the kitchen table cradling a cup of coffee, he raised the wrench.

  Coach Kinen spun around in the kitchen chair and spilled his coffee when he saw Danny advancing toward him. He was up on his feet and his voice was low. “Danny, what are you doing?”

  Danny stopped short, breathing heavy. The wrench suddenly felt like a fifty-pound weight in his hand and he lowered it to his leg. “I was, uh . . . fixing the mower.”

  “We missed you at practice this morning.” The coach removed his cap and scratched at the balding top of his head. Where it wasn’t covered by bristly black hair, Coach Kinen’s skin was deeply tanned.

  Danny’s mom walked into the kitchen. “Danny? I was just telling Coach that you didn’t even mention football practice.” She stopped when she saw the coffee stains across the front of Coach’s purple Crooked Creek football shirt.

  “What happened here?” she demanded, looking at Danny.

  “Nothing to worry about, Sharon,” the coach said smoothly. “And I’m not mad at all, Danny. If you need some extra time after everything . . .” Coach Kinen put the hat back on his head. “Well, we all get that. It’s just that you have to get your ten practices in before the first game. We open against Froston, and I know you won’t want to miss that. . . .”

  Danny looked at his feet, embarrassed.

  “Okay, kiddo. We got our second session at five today, and tomorrow morning we go at seven thirty.” Coach Kinen patted Danny’s shoulder and reached for the door. Danny saw him motion to Danny’s mom before slipping outside.

  “I’ll walk Coach to his truck,” she said.

  Danny washed up and made himself lunch. He was sitting at the table, halfway through the sandwich and a glass of milk, when his mom returned and sat down beside him. She reached over and took his free hand in hers. “Danny, Coach Kinen says he has someone he thinks you might like to talk to. Someone at the junior high.”

  “About what?”

  “Just . . .” She waved a hand in the air before she asked, “Do you want to go to practice this afternoon?”

  Danny shrugged, shook his head, and looked away. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.

  “Coach said take this first day off.” She nodded and picked up the coach’s coffee cup, wiping where it had spilled. “Then start fresh tomorrow, right?”

  Danny took another bite and chewed, licking a spot of ketchup from his lip. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? You don’t know what?”

  Danny shrugged and stuffed the rest of the sandwich into his mouth. He got up and finished chewing on his way to the sink, where he drank dow
n the last of his milk before rinsing the glass and his plate and heading for the door.

  “Danny?”

  He stopped. “Yes?” He held the door halfway open, but he was already out.

  “Your father wanted you to play.”

  Danny winced and shut his eyes, squeezing back the tears. He turned and slammed the door and ran to the garage. He was breathing hard and he forced himself to count backward from one hundred by fives. He started up the mower, still counting, and set off down the driveway. Before he hit the road, he pulled on his headphones and turned up the playlist so that the sound was deafening. The vibration of the machine beneath his hands on the wheel was somehow soothing.

  He was breathing normal again.

  Without planning it, he stopped at Janey’s house and rang the bell. Janey kept her long blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was nearly as tall as Danny, with big brown eyes, flecked with gold. Seeing her approach, Danny started to relax.

  He told her what happened, and she nodded like she understood but got right to the point. “People probably would make less of a fuss if you didn’t quit football.”

  “I didn’t quit. I just . . . didn’t start.”

  She looked at him and shrugged. “You know I don’t care if you play. I’m just trying to help. Your mom’s in a state. Cupcake called me and told me everyone’s talking about Daniel Owens’s son quitting football.”

  “Maybe everyone should mind their business.”

  “That’ll be the day,” she said. “Won’t ever happen in this small town.”

  “Come on,” Danny said. He climbed onto the John Deere and motioned his head for her to climb aboard. She nodded and sat facing the other way with her feet braced on the fenders. As he started the engine, he could feel the back of her head against his own and her shoulder blades cutting into his back. He liked the way that felt, rumbling down the shoulder of Route 222.

  All too soon they came to the break in the guardrail before the bridge. Danny pulled over further onto the grass and cut the motor. He followed Janey down the bank and across the creek, finding footholds on rocks as familiar as his front steps. They climbed the far bank, grabbing a root halfway up that was worn smooth from acting as a handrail. They followed their own winding dirt path back to where the creek bowed and there were several small drops. They weren’t waterfalls, but over thousands of years, the drop had created small slides of water, sluices that swirled into hollowed-out bathtubs of rock.