Carl Haskell had been the head football coach at Cagle County for four seasons. He'd come up from somewhere in south Georgia, from a school down near Waycross that ran the triple option and won a lot of games nobody up here had ever heard of, and the board had hired him to fix a program that had gone three and seven twice in a row. He was forty-five or forty-six, about my age, and he did not look like a football coach. He was lean all the way through, ropy, with forearms like cable and a face burned dark from twenty-some years of standing in the sun, and close-cut gray hair, and a way of standing very still with his weight on both feet that made the boys go quiet when he walked up. He didn't yell much. He talked low and he expected you to lean in to hear it, and they did, all of them. Jesse would have walked into the Chattahoochee for him.
So would I, if I'm honest. I'd stood at that fence every practice for four years, first for Jesse's middle school seasons when Haskell would come down and watch, and then for the varsity, and after practice I'd catch him walking to his truck and ask him about Jesse's drop or his release or his reads. He was always polite about it. He always answered. He never once told me to go home, which I know some coaches would have. I thought, I really did think, that he and I understood each other. We were the same kind of men. We were football men.
That afternoon was hot for April, eighty-one degrees on the bank sign on Main Street, and the practice field smelled like cut fescue and the rubber pellets they put in the turf on the game field next door. The linemen were working on the sled at the far end. The skill guys were doing seven-on-seven on the near half, which was why I always stood at the forty, so I could see Jesse's feet.
Jesse was not good that day.
I saw it in the first ten minutes. He was late on everything. He was looking at the clock on the scoreboard over the game field, where somebody had left it running. He'd drop back and set his feet and then glance up and to the left, toward the scoreboard, half a second, and then throw, and that half a second was the difference between the ball getting to the receiver and the ball getting to the corner. He threw a hitch route into the dirt. He threw a slant behind a kid named Tavion so far that Tavion had to stop and turn all the way around. At six o'clock, on a deep crossing route, he stared down his first read the whole way, the way I'd told him a thousand times in the backyard not to do, and a junior safety named Kyler Ledford read his eyes like a billboard and jumped the route and took it the other way, and the defensive guys went crazy and pounded on Kyler's helmet, and Jesse stood there with his hands on his hips looking at the scoreboard clock.
I said, "Eyes, Jesse," through the fence. Not loud. He didn't hear me, or he acted like he didn't.
Behind the offense, Coach Haskell was standing with his arms crossed and his whistle in his mouth, and I watched him and waited for him to say something to my son about it. He didn't. He was looking at something in his hand. He had his phone out, held low against his hip, and he was looking down at it, and then he put it back in the pocket of his shorts, and then a minute later he took it out again.
I was a little offended, if you want the truth. In four years I'd never seen him look at his phone during practice. He made the boys leave theirs in the locker room, in a plastic tub by the door. And here he was checking it like a teenager, while my son threw the ball to the other team.
At six-fifteen they took a water break. The boys pulled their helmets off and went to the orange coolers on the folding table by the bench, and Jesse didn't. Jesse went straight to Haskell. I watched him go, in his red practice jersey with the number twelve on it. He walked up to Coach Haskell and he said something, and Haskell looked at him, and Jesse said something else and pointed. He pointed north. Toward the mountains. Then he pointed at Haskell's pocket.
I felt my whole face get hot. I knew what he was doing. He was asking. He was doing the exact thing I'd told him at six o'clock that morning he could not do, in the first week, with a sophomore behind him, with every job open. I gripped the fence. I thought about walking over there. My first instinct, watching my son ask his coach about his brother, was to go stop him. I had my hand on the gate latch.
Coach Haskell took his phone out of his pocket and looked at it again. He looked at it for a long time. Then he did something I'd never seen him do. He put the phone away and he looked up, not at Jesse, but across the field, at me. Right at me, at the fence on the forty. Like he'd known exactly where I was standing the whole time.
Then he put the whistle in his mouth and blew it three times, long.