The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [120]
"He could, all right." Bruno. Coach Almighty making his point that last practice day. "I have to deal with a rube three-letter man." The bastard meant the ones on the hill. He was going to drill it into Purcell about no fumbles, once and for all. Something else surfaced in Ben. "Agnes, you started off saying 'They.'"
"The two of them, sure. Football boss and, I don't know, little boss?"
"What were they wearing?"
"Raft hats."
Stumped, he labored to come up with the kind of hats people on rafts wore.
"George Raft," Agnes broke in, impatient again with his capacity for not understanding. "Vic took me to a movie when he had a jingle in his pocket, you know."
Snap-brim hats. The cinematic emblem of tough guys. Bruno and his copycat pet sportswriter. Loudon was in on it, bastard number two. Ben's mind was working furiously. "So you saw them make him run the hill three times. Then what?"
"After that?" Both hands around the glass again, Agnes sipped with shaky delicacy. "It was getting good and dark. I came in the house. The bosses maybe were getting tired of watching, they kind of were wandering off, but the football boss gave another one of those waves. The boy still was on the hill. I just about couldn't believe it. Think to myself, how many times they gonna run that boy?"
She jerked her head toward the Letter Hill. "I don't savvy white men's games."
Ben sat there unmoving, everything she had described passing in order behind his eyes like camera shot after camera shot, the full scene playing out into dusk. Merle Purcell struggling to the dimming rocks, legs and the organ in his chest pumping in determination that could not be told from desperation. Running one lap too many on the steep zigzag path, either from the command of a coach who then turned blindly away or from his own excess will to measure up. In either case, pushed to the brink of what a body could stand, before the lifeless collapse at the stem of the T.
"You told Vic?" It was as much an assertion as a question.
"Told him enough, you bet," Agnes vouched, draining her glass as if in a toast to the Hill 57 way of doing things. "Watch your fanny where those football people are involved, I said to him. End up like that white boy if he don't be careful."
Vic's silences. The scales of friendship are roomy, but nothing human is infinite. Ben sorted through the realization that the one person he thought he knew as well as himself had held back a thing this size. He could see the reason, seated as it was across the table from him. In wino veritas? Not in any court of law a half-bright defense attorney could find his way into. The word of Agnes Rides Proud did not stand a drunkard's prayer against whatever sworn version Bruno and Loudon would come up with.
Rolling the empty glass between her palms, Agnes looked over at the wine bottle and its neighbor, the Kool-Aid packet, in hostessly fashion. "There's more."
"Not for me," Ben murmured.
The rain was moving in by the time he started back up the shack-strewn hill. As he climbed, his mind kept spinning with the facts of Purcell's pointless dying. "They run him and run him. Made him do it." It wasn't even war, although it was mortal contest. Then it became cult of the fallen hero. "Merrrle! Merrrle!" The stadium's roars, the whole Twelfth Man shenanigan. From that, the eleven teammates who were borne by it to two kinds of uniformed fame. Pelted by the chilly autumn rain and challenged by the slick trail under him, Ben fought his way up the slope, mindful in every nerve and muscle of Purcell's struggle on that other sidehill. The Ghost Runner. Truer than the bastards knew. He had his ending for the script about all that, now. If he lasted long enough to see it onto the movie screen, the fundamental bastard Bruno would know he had been found guilty in a venue beyond all the courtrooms there are, his accomplice bastard Loudon would know, a