The Legend of Jesse Smoke (15 page)

“Why the hell didn’t you kick for the Divas?” I asked.

“They
had
a kicker.”

“Yeah, and she missed half the time.”

“So? We only lost one game,” she said, stooping down to put the balls back in a sack. “And it wasn’t for lack of a kicker.”

“But you’re so good at it.”

She stood up and faced me now, her look almost petulant, like that of a child resisting a chore. “I don’t want to, okay?”

I went to Coach Engram and told him what Jesse could do, aware that I had to approach him gently. Already, he was saying things like “Our Lady of the Footballs is getting to be a huge distraction.”
He listened with a little less irritation, though, when I told him about the repetitions and how smoothly she made each of those kicks.

“Let’s see if she can kick like that when somebody’s trying to kill her,” he said.

Until that day, I’d never seen her kick at all, but I knew she’d be able to do it. “Trust me, Coach. Jesse’s not the nervous type.”

But when we approached her with the idea, as I expected, she said no. Oh, she was nice about it, with that fresh-faced kid’s smile. “Aww, Coach,” she said. “I don’t want to be a kicker. But thanks for asking.”

Then Coach Engram said, “It may be the only way you can make this roster.”

“You let me play more in practice,” she responded, “and I think I’ll make the roster.” She was still smiling—it really was absolutely disarming, that rare mingling of innocence, expectation, confidence, and world-weary hope.

“You think so?”

“Yes, sir.”

We were just outside the locker room and I was getting ready to drive Jesse home so she could shower and clean up for the team dinner. Coach was standing there with his hands on his hips, a whistle around his neck and a baseball cap tilted back off his head. He looked down at his black shoes and shook his head slowly. Then he faced her and said, in a low, soft voice, “The league’s going to try and block you, Jesse. You do know that, don’t you?”

She cast her eyes down a bit, the smile flagging some, but said nothing.

“The players’ union’s already filing to keep it from happening. The men don’t want you out there.”

“Really,” I said.

He looked at me. “It’s something going on between the commissioner and Flores. You knew the NFL would stop this if they could, Skip—but if they can get the players’ union to do it, then it’s not so much the commissioner picking on Flores again.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

Jesse was no longer smiling. You wouldn’t say she was disappointed, exactly—at least I couldn’t read it in her face. She looked more or less the way she might have looked if somebody had told her she had to wait in another line to make a deposit. But she was looking at me, as though she expected me to say something. Then she said, “Who are they filing with?”

“Pardon?” Engram said.

“Who are the players filing with? A court? The league?” She really wanted to know.

“The league, I guess,” said Engram.

“Yeah, they wouldn’t go to a court,” I said. “That’s the last place the league or the players want to be.”

“It
could
end up in a court, though,” Engram said, “They just don’t want to risk having you on the field in a game, Jesse. They wouldn’t feel they could play their hardest; they’d be afraid of really hurting you. They believe the integrity of the game would be damaged.”

“Integrity?” I said. “What integrity? Those guys don’t hesitate a second when they find a way around the rules and the refs don’t see it.”

Engram looked hard at me.

“It’s true, Jon,” I said, “and you know it. It’s not integrity they worry about.”

“Call it purity, then. But they think it would affect the way they compete on the field—that it would create an unfair advantage for us, for the Redskins.”

Jesse shook her head slowly, then looked up. “But if I kick? They won’t complain if I’m a kicker?”

“Jesse,” Engram said, “You’re a fan, too, right? Have you ever seen some of the men who have been kickers in this league? You’re bigger than a lot of them, and in a lot better shape.”

She nodded slowly.

“I really think if we can work you out as a kicker, the league and the players will back down on it,” I said. “They don’t want lawsuits
and they’ve all seen what happens when they go up against Mr. Smite.”

She didn’t know what I was talking about.

“Our owner,” I said.

So Jesse accepted the deal about kicking and ended up practicing almost exclusively with the special teams unit. In drills she’d make 20 out of 20. That’s when Flores saw her kicking. I’d never seen him so excited, though he never said anything to Engram or me directly. It was our team to put on the field as it always had been. He was one of the best owners that way.

When Jesse finished working with the special teams she’d do stretches and work out to strengthen her legs. But I could tell that determined as she was, she didn’t like not throwing the ball. She’d be on the ground, pulling her leg up past her ear, stretching her hamstring, and I’d see her watching the passing drills on the other side of the field.

Our resident kicker—not a bad fellow, who the previous year had made 29 out of 34 attempts—injured his popliteus, the tiny sardine-size muscle between the tendons in the back of the knee, and was pretty much useless all through that camp. In two team scrimmages, with folks trying to block her kicks, Jesse went 4 for 4—including a 59-yarder that cleared the uprights by a half a yard. It could not have been more gratifying, watching the ball leave the spot where the holder set it down, sailing high and straight toward the uprights. Something in Jesse’s form did not allow for slicing or hooking, so the ball never curved right or left even a little bit; it shot straight down the middle between the goalposts. It didn’t matter if she was kicking from the left hash mark or the right one, she got it straight and true.

After the second scrimmage, Coach Engram cut our regular kicker, which I thought meant the job was going to be Jesse’s. So did everybody else, and the media storm kicked up all over again.

This time, however, we decided we’d let Jesse speak to the press. The first interview she granted was with Colin Roddy. I wasn’t
allowed to sit in with her during the interview, but when it was done, she called me and we went across the street from Redskins Park to a coffee shop where we could talk.

“How’d it go?” I wanted to know. We were sitting at a small table near the front window with coffees in front of us. She was stirring hers. Outside, the wind from a passing shower kicked up dust and small wet leaves. She stared out the window while she stirred her coffee, and I remember thinking again how really attractive she was from just about any angle. Not that she was glamorous or anything. If she was beautiful, it was because her face was so trusting, so open to the world, so ready to light up with her own certainty. And, of course, I’ve talked enough already about her eyes. Large and sparklingly blue, they were entirely unenhanced by any makeup. Makeup would have ruined it; like painting a huge pair of red lips on the Mona Lisa.

“It went all right,” she said. “He’s really an interesting man.”

“You sure talked a long time. Did he write a lot of it down?”

But she wasn’t finished. “Charming in a craggy sort of way.”

“Charming?”

She gave a sort of half smile. “Yeah. Charming. I liked him.”

“What’d he want to know?”

“He wanted to know if I was really a man, for starters—if I’d had a sex change operation.”

“Are you serious? I can’t believe you didn’t slap him.”

“I don’t know. He seemed just … kinda sad to me,” she said. “I think he might have been slapped enough.”

“He’s an asshole,” I said.

She didn’t like my saying that. “He’s odd. I think he has Asperger’s or something.”

“Then they must have used ‘perger’ at the end of the word to replace ‘hole.’”

She frowned slightly, but then she said, “I told him I really want to play quarterback.”

I winced. “Well, he’ll run with that, I can tell you.”

“He also wanted to know how I could get so good at kicking the ball if I’d never kicked for another team.”

“Good question,” I told her. “I’d like to know that myself.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Never thought about it. I did it with my dad, though, back in the day, as a way of getting mental control.”

I wanted to know what she meant by “mental control.”

“It’s something my dad believed in. He wanted me to visualize everything. Be able to place the ball right where I imagined it would go. So to help me visualize the ball’s path, he’d have me kick it, too. He used to say, ‘It’s harder with your foot, but if you can get it to go where you want that way, it will be easier when you can hold the damn thing in your hands.’”

It was the first time I’d ever heard her use a curse word. I think she noticed that it registered with me, because she smiled a bit and said, “
His
words.”

“But it’s amazing you never kicked for anybody?”

“That’s exactly what Mr. Roddy said.”

“Well it
is
fairly extraordinary.”

“I never kicked a ball trying to score points,” she said. “But, now that I’m going to do it—not that I’m in for it—the whole idea’s kind of exciting.”

“Doesn’t make you a bit nervous?”

The question was completely opaque to her. “Nervous?”

“About missing, you know, when it counts.”

“Oh, I don’t think I’ll do that.”

“Yeah? I hope you’re right.”

“They
all
count, anyway,” she said. “Every one of them counts.”

God, it was easy to love her. “You are really something, Jess,” I said.

She sipped her coffee and stared out the window again. I could have sat across from her and gazed at that face forever. Looking at Jesse, you kind of understood why art was such a great idea.

Roddy wrote a feature on Jesse that went across the country, calling her a “grand experiment.” He’d gotten in touch with other players and coaches and was the first to report the players’ union’s resistance, the commissioner’s having to deal with pressure from just about every corner of the league, and our owner’s recalcitrant and continued rebellion against the powers that be. Many, he said, believed that “the Redskins were a laughingstock,” and some league sources were certain that the reign of Jonathon Engram had reached its lowest point; that the Redskins were destined to sink to the bottom of the standings once the season started. Some sources (who naturally wished to remain nameless) predicted that the team would not win a single game. “It will be extra incentive,” one source said, “for every team to beat the hell out of those guys.”

USA Today
had a long article about the legal battles sure to ensue. Folks talked about what it means to use the word “man” in the rule book. Some wondered why the commissioner didn’t just rule that Flores could not play a woman.

This was all a response to the news that Jesse would be our kicker. I shuddered to think what might happen if we ever planned to play her at quarterback.

Jesse, in any event, took all of it in stride.

She and I went to dinner often during the weeks after her position was announced, and plenty of folks went out of their way to be kind to us. A few of the fans who recognized her wanted her autograph, and after a while she was getting all kinds of offers from local schools to come and talk to their students. She was gradually becoming a symbol—of a number of things, actually. To some, she was the embodiment of the “new equality” between men and women. To others, she represented the end of civilization—an interloper destined to ruin the last bastion of male power. Through all of it, though, she was just Jesse and behaved exactly as she always had, as though some part of her mind did not even grasp the notion of her own celebrity.

“I’m pretty happy,” she said one night over a salmon fillet. “Although I’d be happier if I got to play quarterback.”

“Don’t get your hopes up, Jess,” I said. “You know what has to happen for you to get in? Three people have to get hurt.”

She nodded slightly. “Assuming he keeps three.”

“No, he’ll keep all three of them,” I said. “Still … you never know. Ambrose is always getting hurt, and Spivey’s erratic.”

“He doesn’t know the playbook either.”

I nodded. “And then Kelso doesn’t have the arm.”

“I like him, though,” Jesse said. “He’s smart. Accurate too.” She looked at me then, with this mischievous grin. “He’d be great for the Divas.”

I laughed a little too hard.

“Now that was mean,” she said. “I shouldn’t make fun of Jimmy. He’s one of the good guys.”

“He sure admires the way you throw a football,” I said, which was true. When he first saw her do it, not knowing he was watching a woman, he must have seen the end of his playing days every time she dropped back and sent a ball arching through the air like an electric current.

“I don’t want anybody to get hurt,” Jesse said. “I
do
want to play, though. Maybe if I have a good year kicking the ball I’ll get a chance next year?”

“Maybe,” I said. But I didn’t believe it. I wasn’t even sure she’d get into a game as a kicker.

We had our first exhibition game coming up in a week—against the Oakland Raiders—and I was worried about getting her into that game. Jesse was the only kicker in camp for a while, so everybody assumed it was her job. Then I found out Charley Duncan was scouring the waiver wire looking for another kicker. “Just as insurance,” he told me.

Still, I didn’t like it much.

“You won’t find a kicker better than Jesse,” I said to Charley.

“It’s not my job to decide who competes. I just do what I’m told.”

“Right.”

“Look, Engram wants insurance. I go get it for him.”

I knew this wasn’t true because I’d talked about it with Coach Engram only a few hours before. I wasn’t going to call Charley a liar, though. “So you’re just following orders,” was all I said.

“You got it.”

“No wonder Roddy calls you a ‘general manager in name only.’”

“Fuck you, Granger,” he said.

“She’ll get on the field,” I said. “I hope you know that. No matter
what
you do here.”