Three long was bring it in. The boys all stopped what they were doing, water cups halfway to their mouths, and turned around. Haskell walked out to the middle of the field, to the fifty, and they came jogging in around him with their helmets in their hands and took a knee, about sixty of them, and the linemen came lumbering up from the sled.
"That's practice," Haskell said.
He didn't say it loud. He never did. But the field was quiet enough I heard it from the fence.
The boys didn't move. It was six-sixteen. Practice went till six forty-five. Nobody in four years had ever heard Carl Haskell end a practice early. You could see them trying to figure out if it was a test.
"I said that's practice. Go on in. Showers, and get out of here. Same time tomorrow. Kyler, nice pick. Jesse, stay." He waited. "Go on."
They went. They went slow at first, looking back over their shoulders, and then faster, the way boys do when they figure out a thing is real. In about two minutes the field was empty except for the sprinkler heads and the coolers on the table and my son standing in his red jersey with his helmet hanging from his hand, and Carl Haskell walking toward me across the grass.
He came up to the fence. He didn't come through the gate. He stood on the field side of the chain-link with his fingers hooked in it, the way mine were, so we were facing each other with the wire between us like two men talking at a property line.
"Roy," he said.
"Coach." My voice came out wrong. "What's going on? Is something wrong? Is Jesse—"
"Jesse's fine."
"Then what—"
"Your son," he said, "is about to run for the state record."