“Gentlemen,” the ref said to the tri-captains. “You’re the visitors. Call it in the air.”
He flipped the silver dollar and Fifty-five said in a feeble, raspy voice, “Tails.”
“Tails it is,” said the ref, scooping up the coin.
“We’ll kii-iick.” Fifty-five barely got the words out.
They didn’t shake our hands — Edenburg and Taunton never shook hands.
“Did Fifty-five seem weird to you?” I asked Jason as we headed to the sideline.
“I don’t know,” Jason said, absorbed in his own thoughts.
Things moved quickly after that, the way they always did in the last minutes before the game whistle blew. I knew Daddy and Mama would be home listening to the game — watching me play made Mama anxious — but I searched the crowd for them anyway. Noise and color blurred together. I smelled an odd sourness on the heavy air. Tuttle ran up and down the sideline, slapping us on the ass; then he gathered the return team, yelling, “Right return! Right return!” They trotted out to their positions.
Taunton was already lined up along the forty-yard line, a string of eleven black monsters. I expected them to operate with their characteristic machinelike efficiency, but the kicker approached the tee with a herky-jerky step and the ball dribbled off his foot; the others just stood there. One of our guys recovered the onside kick at the Taunton forty-six.
“They’re pissing in our faces!” Coach Tuttle said, incensed. “Disrespecting us!”
He told Justin to run a short-passing series, but when Justin got us huddled up, he called for a long pass to me off a flea-flicker.
“That ain’t what Coach called,” said Tick Robbins, our tail-back.
“Fuck him!” Justin said. “This is my last game and I’m calling what I want. That retard’s done telling me what to do.”
Tick complained and Justin said, “We throw short passes over the middle, it’s gonna get Andy dead. Now run the damn play! On two.”
We broke the huddle and I lined up opposite a Taunton cornerback. He was looking up into the sky, like he was receiving instruction from God. On two, I faked toward the center of the field and then took off along the sideline. Nobody covered me, and as the ball descended out of the lights, I thought this might be a satori moment. I made the catch, but the pass was a little overthrown and my momentum carried me stumbling out of bounds inside the twenty, where I fell.
That didn’t stop the Taunton defenders. They had scarcely moved a muscle when the ball was snapped, yet now they came at what seemed an impossibly fast clip. Their outlines blurred, and it looked as if they weren’t running but were skimming over the grass. Three of them piled onto me, but the impact didn’t have much effect. I felt something jabbing at me and fought to get clear. As I did, I thought I saw a lemony eye open in the chest of the guy lying atop me — just a flicker, then it was gone — and heard above the noise of the crowd a single, unmistakable jee-eep. I scrambled up, confused and frightened. My jersey was covered with tiny rips.
The ref had thrown a flag for unnecessary roughness, and he was chewing out the Taunton players, threatening ejections. They appeared unconcerned, picking themselves up and walking stiffly, laboriously away. I showed the ref my jersey, but he was mad at the world and told me to shut up and play football. In the huddle I said that something funny was going on, but Justin was all afire to score and paid no attention. After the penalty, we had possession on the Taunton nine-yard line — he dismissed the play Tuttle had sent in and called a quarterback draw. And then Tony Budgen, our right tackle, said “Holy shit!”
The Taunton Warriors, the players on the field and on the sideline, were disintegrating, dissolving into flights of grackles. Their uniforms, their bodies. their every particular had been composed of birds, compressed into ungainly shapes, and now those shapes were breaking apart. A helmet appeared to open into a bloom of glossy wings; the numbers 3 and 6 lifted from a jersey, assuming plumper forms, becoming two birds that flew at me, creating a gap from which others emerged; a headless Warrior winnowed to nothing, deconstructing from the neck down like one of those speeded-up time-lapse films detailing the building of a skyscraper, only this one ran backward; the defensive front four exploded into a shrapnel of birds.
Alarmed yet fascinated by the display, we backed toward midfield as the grackles flapped up from the last remaining relics of our opponents, some to perch on the Taunton bus, lining its fenders and roof, a row of hunched, silent spectators, while the rest ascended beyond the lights to join a vast, indistinct disturbance in the sky. Screams issued from the bleachers. Portions of the crowd were disintegrating, too, leaving patches of empty seats, and people pushed and clawed at one another, desperately trying to flee. I had in mind to do the same but was rooted to the spot, staring up into the toiling darkness above the field. It began to get close, stuffy, like when you pull a blanket over your head, and the reason for this soon came clear.
The disturbance above the field was a host of grackles, an unthinkable tonnage of feathers and hollow bones and stringy flesh — as they descended to the level of the lights, the air thickened with their sour smell. They descended farther, whirling and whirling, obscuring the lights so that they showed as dim, flickering suns through a water of black wings.
I could no longer see the sign on the Toddle House beyond the east end of the field, and this led me to believe that the flock had sealed us off from the world. Everyone in the bleachers had poured onto the grass. The pep band’s instruments were scattered about. Somebody had stepped on a French horn, crushing the bell. A cheerleader, Beth Pugh, crawled past, black hair striping her face, encaging her demented eyes — when I tried to help her, she slapped my arm away and screamed. People were on their knees, weeping and praying; some shielded their eyes and mouths against the droppings that fell, intermittently peeking at the grackles.
There must have been millions. They must have been stacked to the top of the sky in order to bring such a stench, such an oppressive presence. The great seething of their wings and the rusty chaos of their cries reduced the sounds of human terror to barely audible interruptions in an ocean of white noise. They descended lower yet, roofing the field with their swarming, swirling bodies, darkening the light, and I lay flat, my face buried in the grass, certain that I would be torn apart or crushed or carried off like Amy Carlysle’s daughter and dropped from a height.
But when I looked again — after no more than a minute or two, I think — the flock had retreated beyond the tops of the light poles, and they continued their retreat, going beyond the range of sight and hearing until a mere handful were left swooping and curvetting overhead, and those few still perched atop the Taunton bus. Then the bus itself exploded, vanishing in a flurry of the purplish black wings and lemony eyes and cruel beaks that had composed its shape, and we were alone, less than a thousand of us, splattered with bird shit, terrified, wandering the field and searching for our loved ones. I had no one to look for other than Doyle, but I could find him nowhere.
We won the game by way of forfeit and lost in the regionals the week after by the same means. No one wanted to play, and despite some blah blah blahspouted by Coach Tuttle about how the dead would want us to soldier on in the face of tragedy, how events like this could define our lives, the team voted unanimously to accept a painless defeat.