The Legend of Jesse Smoke Read Free

fishing as first mate on a charter boat, trying to gaff a fish, and the line got tangled around his wrist. The fish—a huge blue marlin—still pretty strong after a long struggle to get it near to the boat, sounded and took him with it. The last time anyone saw him, he was struggling to get his glove off and unwind the line, even as the fish disappeared with him into the darkness.)
    The whole year we had that kind of luck. No deaths besides that one, but freak accidents that robbed the roster of some very fine players. A blown knee, a blood clot in somebody’s lung. Before the season was over, we had three players from our practice squad starting. It was a bad year.
    That year I met Jesse Smoke, we ended up with three quarterbacks on the team, not one a rookie. We had a promising draft of other position players two months after I went on vacation, and Coach Engram said he was “cautiously optimistic” about the coming year. “It will be tough, though,” he said. “I’m going to have to be tough on everybody. These men will be ready to play.”
    One of the top draft picks you may remember was a defensive end named Orlando Brown. That’s right, the great Orlando. He was a rookie that year, a little heavy for a defensive end—315 pounds—but at six feet eleven inches tall, he looked lean as a racehorse. And he could run almost as fast. He’d played wide receiver in high school, so he could catch a ball if you wanted him to, though all anyone wanted to see was him on the defensive line, charging a quarterback or rooting through offensive linemen to find a runner. He was definitely a kind of freak, and that became a theme for us because, hell, we had a few on the team.
    We had a guy named Daniel Wilber, a center, who was only five feet eleven inches tall and weighed 342 pounds. He looked like one of those old minivans in his uniform, but there was not an ounce of fat on his body and he was probably the best center in all of football. You couldn’t budge him, and if he wanted you out of a play, you were gone. He made All-Pro in his second season and would continue to make it every year he played after that. What the guy did in his spare time was—are you ready for this?—he taught yoga classes. I’m not kidding. It was really funny watching him doing some of those stretches, pointing his toes like a goddamn ballet dancer.
    Drew Bruckner played middle linebacker. He was an artist, you know, a painter, with a canvas and a palette and brushes. He could produce the most beautiful pictures of birds and foxes; mountains and lakes. Didn’t do many people. He said he thought folks were mostly either ugly or too pretty to be interesting. As for football, he played like a man who wanted to end it all. At six feet and 250 pounds, he wasn’t as big as your average middle linebacker, but he was twice as mean on the field. Didn’t care who he ran over, or what kind of collision he caused, he just went after it. That’s what he called it too, “going after it.”
    You remember Darius Exley, our tall, lithe, unbelievably fast wide receiver. Guy could leap as high as a pole-vaulter and snatch the ball out of the air almost from any angle around his body. If you got theball near him, he would get it. He collected action figure dolls. Like hundreds of them, with all their various weapons. He was proud of that collection. Guys on other teams would tease him about his “toys,” but he said nothing, quiet as a stopped clock, like he couldn’t care less what anyone called him. He could move so swiftly, he’d catch eleven balls and score four touchdowns and have nothing whatever to say about it. Nothing excited him, it seemed, but that doll collection.
    Lined up on the other side of the line was our so-called possession receiver, Rob Anders. Rob was gay, one of the first players to admit it while still playing the game. He was only five feet eleven inches tall, and weighed barely more than 170 pounds—pretty slight for a wide