The Legend of Jesse Smoke (12 page)

He sat back in the chair. “Shit.”

“It might be good for the team,” I said. “For sure it’ll sell some tickets.”

“Selling tickets has never been our problem.”

“It will sell tickets in every stadium we go to, every goddamn city. I guarantee you the commissioner will be happy about it. At least once he sees the cash flow he will.”

“You think so? Cause here’s what I think—I think she’ll get killed on the first play from scrimmage. In practice. Soon as we put the pads on.”

“She won’t. She’s tough. And you’ve seen how strong that arm is.”

“An ant’s real strong, too. But when you step on it, it’s done for.”

“Well,” I said, almost whispering, “we got some work to do there, I agree. We gotta protect her.”

He placed the cigar on the edge of an ashtray on the desk.

“But then, that’s true of every quarterback, isn’t it?” I said.

I didn’t like the way he looked at me, the mixture of sadness and hard-boned assessment—the way one friend might look at another when they’re both starving and realizing one of them will have to eat the other.

“It’s against the rules, Skip. At the end of the day, nobody’s gonna let it happen.”

“All right then. But I signed her,” I said. “Gave her seventy grand. So what do we do about that?”

He shook his head, staring at me, the cigar swirling smoke above his fingers. “Jesus Christ on a crutch,” he said.

“I’ll talk to the boss,” I said. “Let me take it to him.”

He was quiet a long time, still gazing at me. Then he said, “He’ll fire your ass.”

“Maybe. But what if I convince him? Are you at least willing to work with her?”

He just stared at me.

“Come on, it’s innovative, Jon. We’ll break new ground.”

“The only thing that might get broken around here is that young woman, if we put her on the field.”

“Like I said. We gotta protect her.”

The “boss” and owner of the Redskins was an extremely wealthy, strong-minded force of nature named Edgar Flores. He’d gotten rich off of that computer program everybody’s in love with now called Smite. As you know, it makes use of software and hardware governing every conceivable glitch in a computer. Whenever your computer would hang, or drop you offline for no reason, or behave in a way that made you wait longer than you wanted to wait, you clicked on Smite and it would fix the problem (it really would), but while it was doing that it would also present on the monitor a fully animated picture of your computer that could talk to you. If you wanted to, you could have the pleasure of seeming to cause the computer varying levels of abuse by pressing one of the buttons between F1 and F5. As the numbers got higher, the amount of damage you inflicted rose. You could pretend to spill coffee on its keyboard, or drop it from a small table, or throw it out the window of a tall building and watch it smash to bits on the pavement. The computer would start out saying, “Ouch,
that’s not real good for me!” and at the highest level, F5, it would be screaming, “Don’t do
that
!!” Alternately, at F6 the computer would strive to please you in order to make up for being so much trouble. It might tell you a pretty good joke. At F7 you’d get a song from a Broadway show or, depending on your taste and what you preprogrammed it to do, music from just about any genre. At F8 it would talk to you about great recipes, or terrific wines, or the place to go for the best summer vacations. It would have demonstrations and videos for these programs, and you could update it regularly so it was always fresh. At F9 you’d get previews of upcoming films with showtimes and locations. I don’t know how the program operated to fix the glitches, but that little animated computer was always priceless. It would look at you with real sincerity, and the voice was really pleasant. You could request a female or a male voice for the program. (It was always a big company secret where the voices actually came from.)

As you may remember, the program was so successful it spread to refrigerators, toasters, air conditioners, and so on. That’s where all those small TV screens came from. Every appliance has one now. Yesterday my refrigerator suggested I cool it down a little so my ice cream would be more solid. Then it told me a joke about penguins. I adjusted the control to colder and it said, “Good job.”

It turns out the F6 through F9 portion of the program was the most popular. Eventually, the F1 through F5 got reduced to just the F1 button, and other features were added; folks could sign up for more jokes, children’s stories, book reviews, brief bios of celebrities. Nobody seemed to notice the truly positive sign that inflicting pain was never very popular. I always wondered what sort of vengeful fellow would come up with an idea like that, but Flores wasn’t really that bad a guy. And he loved football.

He wasn’t married and didn’t seem to want to spend much time with women. People speculated that he was gay, but he never spoke about it or behaved in any sort of way that might confirm it. He was tall, with a thicket of jet-black hair that he combed straight back on
the top of his head. He had a prominent chin and jaw, with a dark five o’clock shadow, bushy black brows, and deep-set, gloomy black eyes. If he’d had a longer nose, he might almost have looked a bit like Richard Nixon, but his nose was short and kind of wide at the end, like a pair of mud flaps. The strongest thing about Flores was his way of disarming you with absolutely meaningless questions in the middle of important meetings. He’d ask so seriously it would set you back just looking into those serious eyes of his. Once, when we were going over our draft plan, I was talking about maybe picking a fullback from Ohio State who hadn’t been given the ball very often but who could block like a forklift, when suddenly Flores said to me, “Do you know when a person stops using fractions about his or her age?”

“What?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right.

“In other words, when do people stop giving their age in halves?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“A kid says I’m three and a half. Whereas, you never hear anybody saying, I’m sixty-two and a half.”

I said nothing. I was still pointing at the scouting report on the Ohio State fullback.

“So at what age do people stop giving that half part? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody say seventeen and a half, for instance, or even ten and a half, have you?”

I shook my head.

“It has to be somewhere between two and, say, five, that people stop keeping track.”

“You spend much time around children?” I asked.

“Sure, when I was a kid myself.”

“That was a long time ago,” I said.

“What about you? You ever spend a lot of time around children?”

“Never had one. Never wanted one. Even when I was a kid I kept them at arm’s length.”

“Interesting.”

I shook my head again, but thankfully he didn’t notice.

When Edgar Flores wasn’t working, he sat in a director’s chair at Redskins Park and watched the team practice. And he attended every game. It killed him to see the team lose. He’d walk around for days, acting like his country had lost a war and it was his fault. Cheering the Redskins on took all his energy.

Still, he was a busy man and not at all easy to meet with when he was in a business suit, occupied with his business. The Smite Company became Flores Systems, Inc., and he was involved in all kinds of different enterprises by then, though the most profitable of these was still the Washington Redskins. It was the richest franchise in professional sports. Had been that way for a long time. Sellouts since the late sixties at old RFK Stadium. Even when they were bad the Redskins sold out.

Anyway, after a few days of wrangling with Charley Duncan and Flores’s administrative assistant, I got in to see him. His main offices were in Fairfax, Virginia, on the tenth floor of an office building he’d built. He occupied the entire top floor, the front half for his assistant and his staff and the other half for his plush, plant-infested, shag-carpeted office and an indoor putting green.

He was sitting behind a big glass-topped desk when I walked in. Three tall, broad windows behind him looked out on the old Fairfax Courthouse. He had a cigar burning in the ashtray.

“What’s up?” he said, gesturing for me to sit down.

I sat down in the chair but found it impossible to get comfortable under his poker-faced gaze. For one thing, I was a bit on the soft side, a little curvier in the middle than I am now, and this guy was lean as a cornerback. I always felt as though my shirt might be bulging open around a choking button and he’d be sitting there while my naval stared back at him. He stared at me as though I had dried doughnut sugar all over me.

There’s something threatening about a billionaire, no matter how goofy they might be now and then. They don’t have the same manners as the rest of us. The ones I’ve known seem vaguely bored by the whole world, brash and frequently rude; they don’t like to waste time
in any conversation you may choose to initiate. Everything you say has to be earning something in their estimation, or they break it off. Flores could talk to you about nothing, but you? You’d better not try the same thing with him. Maybe you know what I’m talking about.

He asked me how life was treating me and I said, “Nothing special,” then immediately regretted it. “I mean, I’m great. Just great.”

“You wanted to see me,” he said, a flat statement.

“Oh, yes. Of course,” I stammered. “I got a question for you, Mr. Flores, but first I want to ask you something.”

“You got a question for me.”

“Yes.”

“But you want to ask me something first.”

I nodded.

“Wouldn’t that be a question, too?” He picked up the cigar and drew on it. When he saw I wasn’t going to answer him, he said, “Go on. Go on.”

“You know who Branch Rickey was?”

Of course he knew, he said. He knew about all the great owners in history. I asked him what Branch Rickey did for the Brooklyn Dodgers and he told me the story of Jackie Robinson. I let him go on with it.

When he was done, I said, “You want to be the next Branch Rickey?”

He put down his cigar and leaned forward. I could see he was interested.

“And, maybe win the next Super Bowl in the bargain?”

Edgar Flores was not a suspicious man, but he reserved judgment on most things, and you could never tell what was going on in his mind, except that he was considering, plotting. And he would not answer a rhetorical question, which was wasted speech as far as he was concerned. He motioned for me to go on.

“I’ve got a player as strong as Jackie Robinson was. No joke.”

“What is he, purple? What’s Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey got to do with me?”

I told him.

I watched Flores’s face intently, saw his eyes remain exactly as they were before, saw a very slight convulsion near the corner of his mouth, then saw the line of his lips begin to lengthen a bit. I couldn’t quite parse it.

“She’s the best pure passer I’ve ever seen,” I said, quickly. “She can do it all. She’s big and strong and fast. Her footwork’s perfect and she handles the ball like it’s a third its actual size.” I was in a hurry, racing that growing smile, afraid he’d begin to laugh.

He picked up the cigar again and began to chomp on it, never taking his eyes off me. “What have you got going on with her?”

“Nothing sir. Nothing like that.”

“Nothing funny at all.”

“No, sir.” I was a little indignant, actually. “Look, she
is
beautiful. I won’t lie. But she’s a quarterback. That’s how I see her. I have not looked at her that—the other way.” I was telling the truth, mostly. I was drawn to Jesse, of course. But by that time my interests were not sexual, they were purely athletic.

His eyes narrowed a bit, and he glared at me. I could see that he was trying to read me—my soul, my mind.

“I should tell you, I signed her to a one-year deal,” I said. “I gave her the rookie minimum. Coach Engram didn’t know anything about it.”

Flores never did smile. Just puffed a lot of smoke in the air. I don’t know how much time went by before he simply dismissed me with a wave of that cigar. “I’ll get back to you on that.”

I rose from my chair. “You’ve got to see her throw the ball.”

“What’s her name?”

“Jesse Smoke.”

He turned his cigar, thinking. “Well, now.”

“What?”

“When’s the next coaches’ meeting?”

I told him.

“Tell Engram I’m going to be there.”

I turned to leave.

“Granger,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Don’t hand me that Branch Rickey bullshit, all right?”

I said nothing.

“Branch Rickey,” he said with disgust.

“Only, she
will
be the first, Mr. Flores. And I promise you, she’ll do just as well as Jackie Robinson ever did.”

“And how many will follow her?”

I nodded. I had to admit he probably had a point there. Football was too big, too fast, too injury plagued to be much of a female pursuit. The only way I was going to get anybody interested in Jesse was to show them that she played the game a lot better than any man.

“She’s as good as you say she is, and she doesn’t look like she might break?” he said now with a fully escaped smile on his face. “Might be fun. Might be a lot of fun.”

“Fun?”

“I wonder what old Joshua Bennet will say.” He had been feuding with the commissioner over NFL Europe for years. As I’m sure you know, each team in two divisions plays one game a year in England or France. There’s a game a week now, and we rotate each year which two divisions will play. The NFC East, our division, was up for the season after next. (NFL Europe is why the NFL switched to an eighteen-game season.) Flores hated giving up even one home game for the long trip to play in Europe. Plus, he never forgave Bennet for talking the league into reinstalling the traditional extra point. Flores always favored the new system the league installed shortly after they stopped numbering Super Bowls: no kicker on extra points. Every touchdown was worth 7 points instead of 6. If you wanted to go for an extra point, you’d line up on the 10-yard line and try to score again. If you made it you got an “extra point,” making the score worth 8 points. If you failed, you lost a point and went back to 6. You
could decide
not
to go for the extra point, and for years that’s what most teams did. Unless they were behind and absolutely needed to, nobody went for an extra point. Fans clamored for the old system. By the time I began coaching with the Redskins, the commissioner had talked the league into going back to it. Kickers lined up at the 33 yard-line, the same place they had all the way back when Flores was in college and Tom Brady was throwing touchdown passes.