The Legend of Jesse Smoke Read Free Page A

receiver—but he was a great roll blocker. He could put a bigger man on his belly so quick you’d think somebody blew off the guy’s legs. He never put anybody on his back, but if a defender was running forward, coming up to tackle a runner on Anders’s side, it was really something to see how fast Anders would make him disappear. From the opposite side it looked like the guy fell into a ditch or something. Anders could also catch anything near him, sometimes with one hand. He scored so many touchdowns leaping parallel to the ground and grabbing a ball just before it hit the ground with the palm of one hand, and flipping over on his side before he landed—he could roll in the air like a fish in water—that after a while, folks stopped calling him anything other than “Porpoise.”
    At running back, of course, was Walter Mickens, from Georgia. He was six feet, weighed around 220, and could run as fast as anybody in the league except maybe Darius Exley. He could also move diagonally, or sideways, and even jump backward and come down still moving; he hit the ground full speed from any angle. He was hard to bring down, too. He had a little twist he’d make with his hips and if you had your hands there trying to drag him down, he’d throw you off like water from a bucket. The fans called him “Mighty Mickens.” He was a religious fanatic. Had one cross tattooed on his neck andone on each arm. He believed god was a football fan and kept a little shrine to Christ in his locker.
    Don’t worry, I’m not going to go over the whole roster—that would take too long, and to tell the truth, not all of them are that interesting. (There’s a roster in the back of this book that you can consult if you need to, along with a schedule and some other things.) Just the superfreaks, most of whom, by this point, were fully established players you knew would make the team. And the rookie, Orlando Brown, was a shoe-in. Unless he turned out to be weak in the knees, literally—because at his height just about everybody who tried to block him would be at his knees—he would definitely be what Coach Engram and everybody else called an “impact player.” If we could only get these guys to play together—to work together and become one beast—it seemed like nobody would be able to whip them.

    The truth was, I looked forward to the year. I knew Engram was probably a little worried about his job because it had started to look like we were slipping, and the owner—well, I don’t want to get into talking about him yet. He’s not really as cold-blooded as everybody thinks—I mean he’s got his loyalties and attachments just like anybody else, but he’s not the kind of man who can tolerate a downward trend in anything. Coach Engram never spoke to me about it, except to mention that things were going to be tough this year, but I had the feeling he’d been given the impression that our owner was getting impatient.
    See, for the past two years or so our one real problem was, as you might have guessed, at quarterback.
    Now, we had a great player there. Corey Ambrose had proven himself over and over to be a winner. He could throw the ball reasonably well—accurate from forty or fifty if you gave him time to throw—and the other players liked playing for him. He had what thereceivers call a “soft ball.” It came in spinning just right, and without too much steam on it, usually out in front of them, easy enough to snatch out of the air. In tight situations, he could stand up to the pressure as well as anyone, and he almost never threw the ball so that his receivers had to stretch out and reach for it in traffic—what players call being “hung out to dry.” You could get a few smashed ribs that way, and both Exley and Anders, and the other men who were responsible for catching what Ambrose put up for them, appreciated his accuracy.
    But he was always getting hurt. The kind of small nagging injuries that weren’t so bad for somebody