Michael Koryta - The Prophet

Colin Mears did not address the fans, and Kent was glad of that, but Lorell had said his piece for him, and now Lorell led the school in a moment of silence in Rachel’s memory, reminding them all that while the Cardinals intended to go out and win a state championship, none of that really mattered. What mattered was Rachel.

All the right things to say. He sounded good, poised and mature and well reasoned. Kent should have been proud of him, probably. Instead he just felt uneasy.

They had their moment of silence, and then the pep band started to play. Just like that. One murdered child recognized, one game to play. On to the next one. There was nothing wrong with it. How else were they supposed to do it? You put one foot in front of the other, you honored the past while you went to meet the future, that was the only way. Otherwise you turned into… into Adam.

That was the end of the day, there were only fifteen minutes left before the final bell rang, and Kent let them walk out of the gym with its smells of trapped sweat and polished hardwood and go on to do whatever it was they each did before kickoff. He made no claims on them before five thirty, when they were required to arrive in the locker room. He didn’t even make claims on his coaching staff before five thirty. As he told them every year, if we aren’t ready to go by Friday morning, we’re already beaten.

His own game day rituals were simple. A run, a shower, and then a retreat into his office until game time. He went to the locker room and changed clothes, put on shorts and running shoes and a hooded sweatshirt and a soft, flexible brace for his left knee, and then he went out into the fall day.

Perfect football weather. Perfect. The sky was cobalt blue, a fringe of dark gray encroaching from the northwest, but not here yet, and the clouds were high and clean and white. There was a breeze that carried the scents of autumn out of the wooded neighborhoods past the school and down to the field, and the temperature was mid-fifties, brisk enough to energize. Kent stretched in the end zone, then paced off to the sideline, where he would not cross the playing surface, and began to run.

There was a track that ran between the bleachers and the field, but he never ran the track. He loved the feel of the turf beneath his shoes, loved the memories each step brought. The track featured gentle curves, too, and by running around the field in rectangles, he was forced to make hard, ninety-degree cuts, each one putting a stab of pain through his left knee. He needed that.

The knee had ended his playing career. He’d played D-1 ball but for a small school. The knee began to give him problems his freshman year, when he was a backup. Over the summer he visited a joint specialist in Cleveland and was told that it wasn’t so serious, he had a partially torn MCL and some damaged cartilage that needed to be scraped, but once that happened, he’d have only a couple of months of rehab and be back on the field, good as new.

A couple of months took him out of the starting competition, though. A couple of months set him back maybe a full season.

He didn’t let them scrape the knee. Thanked them and said he’d make an appointment but never did. Showed up in the fall and won the starting job, and the team won four of their first five games before he began to hobble. Trainers recommended an MRI. This time the test showed that the cartilage damage was getting worse, should already have been removed, and that the ACL had begun to fray because it was absorbing extra stress from the already weakened ligament on the inside of his knee. They braced him up and shot him full of cortisone and he tore both ligaments all the way through in the third quarter of the final game of the season. Missed a year rehabbing it, and there was a big, strong-armed kid behind him who claimed the job and never relinquished it. Kent finished his career pacing the sidelines with a clipboard in hand, validating what he’d always known, the reason he wouldn’t take the time off for proper treatment—there was always somebody better than you waiting just behind you.

After college he’d come right home. Walter Ward had a position waiting for him, and it was supposed to be a temporary gig, a filler, because Kent was done with football, and willing to let the game own him for only a few more months, while he determined the best course of action for the future.

Then he met Beth. Well, got reacquainted with Beth. He’d known her during his high school years, but Walter Ward’s daughter was three years younger than him, and nobody was dumb enough to look too long at the coach’s freshman daughter. By the time he was part of the staff, Beth was in college, and Walter Ward approved, on one condition—Kent needed to get his ass into church. Case closed.

Between the church and Beth, Kent found things to fill holes that the game could not. As his family disintegrated around him, first with his father’s death, then his mother’s slow, sad, booze-soaked decline, and Adam’s inability—no, refusal— to move beyond Marie’s death, these were critical new pillars raised to support Kent. The flares of emotional pain faded to a dull, manageable ache, the surges of anger became soft waves of sorrow, and he was able to turn, for the first time, back toward the loss of his sister instead of away from it. And then, finally, to move on, marked by loss but not defined by it.

It was Walter Ward’s idea to bring Kent into a prison. It was him walking out with Kent when he couldn’t take the place, on that first trip. But they went back. And back again, and then, several years later, Kent sat down with Gideon Pearce and prayed for him while the man laughed.

But still he had his games. The mission he’d given himself at twenty—find a way to live that didn’t require football as oxygen—had never truly been accomplished. He insisted, and believed that he succeeded much of the time, on diminishing the importance of the game, that he had turned it from a pathological need to win into something truly healthy, and the boys who came back each year with degrees or good jobs or fine families or simply good attitudes, they were the result that mattered, the only reward he needed.

He lengthened his stride, a good sweat coming now, and tried to tell himself that he didn’t want to win as badly as he felt he did, tried to tell himself that it wouldn’t prove anything about him. A win or a loss made no difference. Chambers had enjoyed a good year and he was sending good boys out into the world better prepared to be good men.

More wins did not matter.

But, oh, how he wanted them.

I will not be defined by a trophy, he often said, but it was easy to say you would not be defined by something you didn’t have.

It was a packed house, and by arriving late, Adam and Chelsea lost any chance at finding a comfortable seat in the bleachers with a decent view. He didn’t like crowds, anyhow, so they just stood at the fence, positioned behind the end zone. If Chelsea minded having to stand, she didn’t say anything about it. Casual fans loved to be centered up on the field—ticket prices for pro games rise every ten yards between the goal line and the fifty, the fifty being considered the best seats in the house. But in Adam’s opinion, the difference between someone who just enjoyed football and someone who truly knew the game was that someone who knew the game wanted to watch from a position that put him in synch with the action. The game moved vertically, so why sit in a position where you were always at right angles to the action? There was such disconnect. Adam had played middle linebacker, and the way he wanted to see the game was the way he’d always watched it unfold from the field—facing down the quarterback and the offensive line, reading his keys, trying to determine the play calls.