James Ellroy - The Best American Noir of the Century

So he played football for some pissant Christian college in the Dakotas where he didn’t bother to take a degree. With his fused toe, he had lost a step in the open field and his cuts lost their precision, so he haunted the weight room, forced thick muscle over his running back’s body, and made himself into a solid if small fullback, but good enough to wrangle an invitation to one of the postseason senior bowl games. Then the first-string fullback, who was sure to be drafted by the pros, strained his knee in practice and refused to play. Oh, God, Benbow thought, another break.

But God foxed this one. The backfield coach was a born-again fundamentalist named Culpepper, and once he caught Benbow neither bowing his head nor even bothering to close his eyes during a lengthy team prayer, the coach became determined to convert the boy. Benbow played along, choking on his anger at the self-righteous bastard until his stomach cramped, swallowing the anger until he was throwing up three times a day, twice during practice and once before lights-out. By game day he’d lost twelve pounds and feared he wouldn’t have the strength to play.

But he did. He had a first half to praise the football gods, if not the Christian one: two rushing touchdowns, one three yards dragging a linebacker and a corner, the other thirty-nine yards of fluid grace and power; and one receiving, twenty-two yards. But the quarterback had missed the handoff at the end of the first half, jammed the ball against Benbow’s hip, and a blitzing linebacker picked it out of the air, then scored.

In the locker room at halftime, Culpepper was all over him like stink on shit. Pride goeth before a fall! he shouted. We’re never as tall as we are on our knees before Jesus! And all the other soft-brain clichés. Benbow’s stomach knotted like a rawhide rope, then rebelled. Benbow caught that bit of vomit and swallowed it. But the second wave was too much. He turned and puked into a nearby sink. Culpepper went mad. Accused him of being out of shape, of drinking, smoking, and fornicating. When Benbow denied the charges, Culpepper added another, screamed Prevaricator! his foamy spittle flying into Benbow’s face. And that was that.

Culpepper lost an eye from the single punch and nearly died during the operation to rebuild his cheekbone. Everybody said Benbow was lucky not to do time, like his father, who had killed a corrupt weighmaster down in Texas with his tire thumper, and was then killed himself by a bad Houston drug dealer down in the Ellis Unit at Huntsville when Benbow was six. Benbow was lucky, he guessed, but marked “Uncoachable” by the pro scouts and denied tryouts all over the league. Benbow played three years in Canada, then destroyed his knee in a bar fight with a Chinese guy in Vancouver. Then he was out of the game. Forever.

Benbow drifted west, fighting fires in the summers and dealing poker in the winter, taking the occasional college classes until he finally finished a PE teaching degree at Northern Montana and garnered an assistant coach’s job at a small town in the Sweetgrass Hills, where he discovered he had an unsuspected gift for coaching, as he did for poker: a quick mind and no fear. A gift, once discovered, that became an addiction to the hard work, long hours, loving the game, and paying the price to win.

Head coach in three years, then two state championships, and a move to a larger school in Washington State. Where his mother came to live with him. Or die with him, as it were. The doctors said it was her heart, but Benbow knew that she died of truck-stop food, cheap whiskey, and long-haul drivers whose souls were as full of stale air as their tires.

But he coached a state championship team the next year and was considering offers from a football power down in northern California when he was struck down by a scandalous lawsuit. His second-string quarterback had become convinced that Benbow was sleeping with his mother, which of course he was. When the kid attacked Benbow at practice with his helmet, Benbow had to hit the kid to keep him off. He knew this part of his life was over when he saw the kid’s eye dangling out of its socket on the grayish pink string of the optic nerve.

Downhill, as they say, from there. Drinking and fighting as often as coaching, low-rent poker games and married women, usually married to school-board members or dumb-shit administrators. Downhill all the way to Alabamphilia.

Benbow came back to this new world propped in a heap on the couch in the cottage’s living room, with a dull ache behind his ear and a thousand sharp pains in his foot, which was propped in a white cast on the coffee table, the fresh cast the size of a watermelon. Benbow didn’t have to ask what purpose it served. The skinny man sat beside him, a syringe in hand. Across the room, R. L.’s bulk stood black against a fiery sunset, Mona Sue sitting curled in a chair in his shadow, slowly filing her nails. Through the window, Benbow could see the Kmart twins walking slow guard tours back and forth across the deck.

“He’s comin’ out of it, Mr. Dark,” the old man said, his voice as sharp as his pale nose.

“Well, give him another dose, Doc,” R. L. said without turning. “We don’t want that boy a-hurtin none. Not yet.”

Benbow didn’t understand what R. L. meant as the doctor stirred beside him, releasing a thin, dry stench like a limestone cavern or an open grave. Benbow had heard that death supposedly hurt no more than having a tooth pulled, and he wondered who had brought back that bit of information as the doctor hit him in the shoulder with a blunt needle, then he slipped uneasily into an enforced sleep like a small death.

When he woke again, Benbow found little changed but the light. Mona Sue still curled in her chair, sleeping now, below her husband’s hulk against the full dark sky. The doctor slept, too, leaning the fragile bones of his skull against Benbow’s sore arm. And Benbow’s leg was also asleep, locked in position by the giant cast resting on the coffee table. He sat very still for as long as he could, waiting for his mind to clear, willing his dead leg to awaken, and wondering why he wasn’t dead, too.

“Don’t be gettin’ no ideas, son,” R. L. said without turning.

Of all the things Benbow had hated during the long Sundays shoveling pig shit or dealing cards for R. L. Dark —that was the trade he and the old man had made for Little R. L.’s football services — he hated the bastard calling him “son.”

“I’m not your son, you fucking old bastard.”

R. L. ignored him, didn’t even bother to turn. “How hot’s that there water?” he asked calmly as the doctor stirred.

Benbow answered without thinking. “Somewhere between 98 and 102. Why?”

“How ‘bout half a dose, Doc?” R. L. said, turning now. “And see ‘bout makin’ that boy’s cast waterproof. I’m thinkin’ that hot water might take the edge off my rheumatism and I for sure want the coach there to keep me company…”

Once again Benbow found the warm, lazy path back to the darkness at the center of his life, half listening to the old man and Mona Sue squabble over the air conditioner.

After word of his bargain with R. L. Dark for the gridiron services of his baby son spread throughout every tuck and hollow of the county, Benbow could no longer stop after practice for even a single quiet beer at any one of the rank honky-tonks that surrounded the dry town without hearing snickers as he left. It seemed that whatever he might have gained in sympathy, he surely lost in respect. And the old man treated him worse than a farting joke.

On the Saturdays that first fall, when Benbow began his days exchanging his manual labor for Little R. L.’s rushing talents, the old man dogged him all around the hog farm on a small John Deere tractor, endlessly pointing out Benbow’s total ignorance of the details of trading baton for bread and his general inability to perform hard work, complaining at great length, then cackling wildly and jacking the throttle on the tractor as if this was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. Even knowing that Little R. L. was lying on the couch in front of the television and soothing his sore muscles with a pint jar of shine couldn’t make Ben-how even begin to resent his bargain, and he never even bothered to look at the old man, knowing that this was his only escape.