All of the young sale associates agreed, riding through the night, that the new commissions program would be excellent if they got a lot of sales, less desirable if they did not. They all privately liked Kevin, the team leader, but they laughed about the sweat stains, the pants, the screensaver of the ugly baby and the dog.
“There’s the parking lot,” Paul said.
“Do we need tickets or anything?” Sarah said.
“I doubt it.”
Only the women had umbrellas. They offered to share them, but the men declined. Sarah found a ring of wet keys on the ground next to a car, and she rested them on the handle of the driver’s-side door. Paul cradled a backpack beneath the front of his jacket as they walked toward the field, where football players stretched and jogged and performed jumping jacks beneath rain and low wisps of fog. The grass was patchy and brown, dotted with dark puddles. It was not lined with chalk. A distant goalpost lay on its side in the mud, mired like a mastodon in a tar pit. Two leaning light towers draped a feeble glow onto the field, accentuating the vast darkness beyond. At the far end of the field a scoreboard with missing lights showed seven points for the home team and seven for the visitor, with an indecipherable number of minutes remaining in what appeared to be the second quarter. Above the scoreboard a wooden sign welcomed fans to the Falcons Nest, and beneath it stood a man in a yellow poncho. In the cold rain, alone beneath a dilapidated scoreboard and a grammatical error, the man had the posture of one who was enduring a severe test of faith from a higher power.
Several long wooden benches ran crookedly along one sideline. On the other sideline there was a narrow block of aluminum bleachers, which wobbled and creaked as the young sales associates climbed to the top row. “Luxury box,” Brandon said. Sarah had thought to bring two hotel towels, and she wiped the bench dry. The four sat close together beneath the two feminine umbrellas, their pockets buzzing intermittently with text messages from their boyfriends and girlfriends back home. They were all conscious of attempting to have a memorable night, and of having one.
“When are you due?” Deirdre asked Paul, pointing at the backpack tucked beneath the front of his jacket.
“Any day now,” Paul said, rubbing his belly.
“Push,” Deirdre said.
Paul extricated the backpack, and unzipped it. He liked having something to do, and he liked the way Deirdre’s upper arm, beneath her jacket and sweater, felt against his upper arm, beneath his jacket and sweater. “I am the proud mother,” he said, “of a party.” He removed from the backpack four plastic cups and a bottle of sparkling wine that could be, if necessary, a joke. A nice bottle of champagne would have made it look like he was trying too hard, but in fact he had tried very hard to make it look as if he was not trying too hard. It had taken him almost half an hour to find a bottle of sparkling wine that seemed versatile enough to pass for either thoughtful or parodic, and perhaps both. He wanted to let the night decide. Now he draped a folded wet towel over his arm. He was suddenly a maître d’, not a new mother. Deirdre laughed, as did Paul and Sarah. He put the towel over the bottle, and expertly removed the cork from the inexpensive sparkling wine. The happy, expensive sound of it. When he poured, he tilted the cups at forty-five-degree angles to minimize the loss of bubbles. He had worked for a catering company in college. As he poured, he glanced at Sarah’s face, trying to determine the meaning of his own gift. Drops of rain slid from the edge of the umbrella into the cups of sparkling wine. Paul wanted to say something in French, but he had forgotten all of it. There was also in the backpack a box of cookies, a festive assortment. The women each selected a cookie, and the men took three. They clicked plastic cups, drank to the core values of Prestige Vista Solutions.
“So which one is David?”
“He’s. . right there. Number twenty-three.”
“Blue or white?”
“Blue.”
“I don’t see him.”
“He’s right over there. Williams.”
“That’s not his last name, is it?”
“No. He’s playing someone else.”
“I see him.”
“He’s basically the only one out there who looks like he ought to be wearing that uniform.”
“Except that guy. Seven.”
“How did he get into this?”
“He said he was approached in the lobby. He basically had to interview for it. They were short a man.”
“Do they play a whole game?”
“Who knows?”
“Are you boys disappointed you didn’t get chosen?”
Paul and Brandon laughed at the absurd question. They were in fact disappointed, but they didn’t know it. Their wistful envy, by the time it made its way to their minds, had been transmuted to mild disdain and nonchalance and embarrassment. Paul said he had been in the elevator with some of the men, and they were ridiculous. Brandon agreed. He had seen them at breakfast. Just shoot him, Brandon said, if he’s doing that when he gets to be their age.
“Oh, they’re not so bad,” Sarah said.
Now there were two other spectators, a hooded man sitting in the first row of the bleachers, and another man in a baseball cap in the third row. They both sat hunched, still and watchful, arms crossed for warmth. The man in the baseball cap unclasped himself to pour a drink from a dented thermos. The men on the field progressed slowly through orchestrated series of movements, like tai chi masters in the park.
“There’s just some people who shouldn’t wear football pants,” Brandon said.
“These guys are going to get hurt,” Paul said, and the man in the baseball cap turned his head briefly.
Someone on the field whistled. The football was placed on the ground in a patch of limp grass, then each team gathered in a huddle. The Giants huddle was rapidly generated and ill-formed. It dissolved almost immediately, and the defenders spread out in rough formation, awaiting the offensive alignment. The Redskins huddle was a perfect and intimate order, elemental and domestic, like a log cabin in the wilderness. Sarah and Deirdre, Brandon and Paul — they could perhaps sense in the huddle the origins of civilization. The men bent at the waist, hands on knees. Their helmets nearly touched inside the private sphere, where ten men listened for the secret, the invocation against evil. Their breath rose together from the center of the circle. They broke their huddle with a synchronized and disciplined clap, not bright but dulled by gloves and tape. They jogged to the line of scrimmage. Even the quarterback jogged. He wore number 7. His face mask was old-fashioned, a single bar. It was nearly ten o’clock, November 18. The rain fell steadily through the fog. Passing cars honked from the street, and a passenger in a truck yelled something mean-spirited and vulgar. It was odd, Paul thought, not to begin with a kickoff. He did not know what he hoped to see, failure or something else. The quarterback was under center. He looked to his right and then to his left. He looked again to his right, then to his left. He called, “Yellow forty-one,” his voice wavering. He called it again. The hooded man and the man with the baseball cap leaned forward, elbows on their knees. The sales associates sat closely together on the top row of the bleachers, their shoulders touching. The man in the yellow poncho stood completely still beneath the scoreboard. The ball was snapped then, and something happened, a single ruinous play, a discrete unit of chaos, violent and unlovely. The players grunted, their damp pads clacked through the fog. The entire play lasted perhaps five seconds. “Shit, flea flicker,” Brandon murmured as the running back pitched the ball back to the quarterback. “Uh-oh,” he said. “Throw it, throw it.” But the quarterback had not thrown the ball. He had stepped up into the pocket to avoid the rush, and then crumpled beneath a linebacker who had leaped onto his back. “That was not good,” Paul said. “Those old guys are not up for this.” Other defenders jumped on top of the quarterback, and a muffled scream came from the pile of bodies. Like a spell the scream lifted the players from the pile. One player, the one who had brought the quarterback down, gestured frantically to an empty sideline. He put his hands on his helmet. It was something the sales associates would remember.