Part V: Marlin Fever
Chapter 25

Down on the beach not far from the Frostee Freeze there was a pretty good crowd, and more people kept coming.

It had been a heady time for Howie, Autumn, Jared, and Bree. In only a little over a day they had put the whole thing together, including getting to just about all the football players and cheerleaders.

The thing that surprised all four of them was how easily the whole thing had gone together. The idea all but sold itself. “We think we ought to show that the football team is a responsible group of kids, not just a bunch of punks,” Howie told Coach Kulwicki. “We want to show that we don’t have to break the rules to have fun.”

Coach Kulwicki saw the wisdom of the idea immediately, and thought the idea of the team members themselves putting it together had special merit. Before they even got finished with the sales job they’d been working on ever since leaving the pond he bought off on it. What’s more, he made some suggestions on how to improve on the idea. “A lot of people are still burned about what happened last year,” he said. “They’re going to be real happy about the idea of football players being responsible and above board.”

All in all, it was like getting a snowball started rolling downhill, and watching it turn into an avalanche. Howie had been concerned about how he was going to grill all those steaks, but on Kulwicki’s suggestion he called the president of the Knights of Columbus, who promised to provide not only the grills and the charcoal, but volunteers to do the work – and to provide an adult presence. It took two phone calls to provide the steaks – one to the president of the Athletic Boosters, and the phone call the Athletic Booster president made to Kulwicki to make sure he approved. In the end, Jared didn’t have to go to his uncle for funds at all. They were able to promote everything they needed and more, just on the strength of showing they wanted to put the past behind them, and this wasn’t the unlamented football teams of previous years who had disgraced themselves and the town.

Once the ball got rolling most of the rest of the details fell into place quickly. The main work in contacting the football players fell to Howie and Jared, and the cheerleaders to Autumn. Bree wasn’t either a football player or a cheerleader, but she did a lot of running around putting things together, much of the time using Jared’s truck to haul things. Howie, Jared, and Autumn told everyone they talked to that it was originally Bree’s idea.

Howie had the impression that a lot of the football players and cheerleaders had already been planning on giving the illegal party a pass – everybody remembered what had happened the previous year very well, and didn’t want it to be repeated, especially involving them. A beer party wasn’t worth losing the chance of participating in what looked like it was going to be an exciting season.

The result was that there were a lot of kids hanging around on the waterfront, football players, cheerleaders and friends, many in swimsuits – the lake was about as warm as it was going to get all year. The band wasn’t very good, but they fit the mood. It was a garage band of students from the high school, but they fit into the theme of the students doing this party for themselves. They were playing hard, and just added to what seemed like a pretty good party.

When Walt pulled up in his pickup, there were only four vehicles sitting around the isolated spot in the woods he had picked out for the party, well east of town and just inside the county line. It didn’t have much to recommend it other than being isolated and having a lot of mosquitoes, since it was pretty close to a swamp.

He looked at the handful of cars and the tiny number of people who had been waiting for him to get there. “Where the hell is everybody?” he said to John as he got out of the truck.

“Hell if I know,” John told him. “I even waited at the pickup point a little late. I guess everybody is down at the steak fry.”

“Bunch of pussies,” Walt snorted. “At least we’ve got the real deal people here. I’m gonna have to kick that goddamn Erikson’s ass for fucking up our party. Where the hell does he think he’s got the right to fuck with us? Shit, we don’t even have everybody who paid for their beer here.”

“Just means there’s more for the rest of us,” John smiled. “At least we can get well and truly fucked up.”

“Goddamn right,” Walt agreed. “Ain’t nobody getting their money back. The good people are here. Let’s party.”

Mark knew he was going to have to head back very soon. “One more vehicle just pulled in,” he reported to Sheriff Stoneslinger. “Looks like they’re unloading it. I don’t think they’ve noticed me.”

“Roger that,” the sheriff reported. “We’ll give things a while to develop before we deal with them.”

“I really need to head in myself,” Mark told him. “The light is getting really marginal.”

“You better go do it,” the sheriff told him. “Thanks much for your assistance.”

“Not a problem,” Mark told him. “Good luck and good hunting.”

Mark swung Rocinante around and headed for the airstrip at home. It was getting pretty dark, although there was still light enough to see. It wasn’t the first time he’d helped the sheriff out and probably wouldn’t be the last, but there was a special degree of satisfaction in this one, considering what Bree and her friends were trying to pull together.

Howie waited for the band to take a break and borrowed their microphone for a moment. “Hey, Marlins!” he yelled – his voice really roared out the speakers. “Is everybody having a good time?”

There was a round of cheers. “Monday afternoon we get started on practice for the football season. This is our last chance to relax and unwind, because Monday we get serious! Is everybody ready to go out and do the job right?”

There was another round of cheers.

“Most of us on the team have been doing a lot of working out, a lot of weight room, a lot of skills sessions ever since the Forestville game last fall. I’ve talked to a lot of people here tonight, and I’ll tell you what. We are bigger than we were this time last year. We are stronger than we were this time last year. And we are better than we were this time last year. We had a good season last year because we worked hard and got lucky. This year we’ve worked harder just to get ready for Monday, and we don’t want to have to depend on luck. Don’t get me wrong, I hope we have some good luck, but we need to depend on being ready, not just on luck. Marlins, are you ready to go out, go hard, and do some more winning this year?”

Again there was a round of cheers, some yells of “You tell ’em, Howie!”

After it died down, Howie continued. “I’ve talked to Coach Kulwicki and Coach Reardon, and I can tell you they’ve got some stuff for us to practice that’s going to make us a lot tougher team than we were last year. Some of it isn’t going to be easy to learn. It’s going to take a lot of practice to get it right, but it’s going to be dynamite. We got a lot of good luck last year from the fact that nobody we played took us seriously. They learned their lesson last year and are going to be ready for us, so we’ve got to be more ready for them. We’re going to have to go out and bust our butts to do it. We can do it! We did it last year, and we’re just going to have to work harder to do it again even better this year.

“There have been a lot of people tonight who have said they’re glad I thought this party up. I have to be honest. It wasn’t my idea. It was Bree Gravengood’s, and she’s done a lot of work to pull it together, along with Autumn Trevetheck and Jared Wooten. I was involved in setting this up, but I was mostly along for the ride, trying to keep up with them. Can I have a round of applause for them?”

There was quite a bit of applause to that before Howie went on. “There are a lot of people who have provided stuff for this party just so we can prove that we are honorable, that we’re the good guys, and we mean business. A lot of you were in the gym the day practice started a year ago, when Mrs. Wine asked us to restore the honor to Spearfish Lake football. We did a lot of that in the eleven football games we played last fall. I hope the fact that the crowd I see is here and not at the bootleg beer party shows that we’ve taken another step in restoring the honor. We’ve still got a ways to go to wipe away the shame of last year’s bootleg party, but we’re on the way.”

Howie pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket. “I want to read off the list of people who have donated to this party. People, I’d like you to applaud every one of them, since they have shown they have faith in us to do the right thing and try to restore honor to Spearfish Lake football. They’ve shown faith in us, and we need to return it, not by just applause, but by doing our best to show we plan on continuing to restore the honor.”

Monday afternoon was cool with overcast skies, a harbinger of the fall that was fast approaching. As Howie parked the Jeep and walked toward the gym he couldn’t help but remember the previous year. It had been hot and oppressive, and he’d been dreading all the wind sprints and running that seemed likely for the first day of practice, especially with the word going around town that all the coaches had been fired or had resigned. He hadn’t been expecting the multiple bombs that were going to be dropped on the football players, or that by the end of the day the Marlin junior varsity team was going to become the Marlin varsity, and that quite unexpectedly he was going to be the varsity quarterback.

To be honest, for the whole of football practice, and even for the first part of the season he’d expected the team to be obliterated by the opponents. The win over Coldwater had been incredible, and good luck had an awful lot to do with it. It wasn’t until they were partway through the season, maybe about the third or fourth game that they began to realize that more than luck was involved.

Unlike last year, this year Coaches Kulwicki and Reardon met them at the gym door, along with Coach Evachevski, who was going to be the junior varsity coach this year. “Howie, good to see you today,” Coach Kulwicki said with a handshake. “Are you ready to play?”

“Never been more ready,” Howie grinned.

“I heard what you said at the party Saturday night,” Coach Kulwicki told him. “In fact, someone videoed it, and I saw the recording. I didn’t think I should be at that party, but you said about what I would like to have said, and you did it better.”

“Thanks, Coach,” Howie said. “I thought . . . well, to be honest, Bree thought that we ought to show that we’re ready to do this and play by the rules, and still have a good time. We wanted to prove that the days of bad-asses and half-assed football are things of the past.”

“Like I said, you said it better than I could,” Kulwicki told him. “And we’re going to have even fewer of the bad-asses than I expected.”

“I heard about that,” Howie grinned.

“We’re going to be about five seniors short of what I expected,” Kulwicki laughed. “But I suspect they were going to be five problems anyway, and if any of them show up they’re going to find out they’re not on the team this year. Anyway, glad to see you here, and now we’re going to get down to business.”

Like the rest of the community, Howie had heard of what had happened out in the middle of nowhere early Sunday morning. The fully-loaded handful of kids finally decided they couldn’t drink up all the beer Lethbridge had brought down from the Three Pines Reservation, and started for the road, to be met by a roadblock. Everybody at the illegal beer party had been busted for illegal possession, five had been arrested for operating under the influence, and Lethbridge had been busted for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, thirteen counts, to be precise. He was still in jail; his father had decided he didn’t deserve to be bailed out after he’d taken a pretty good hit at the party the year before. The arraignments had been earlier in the day, and Howie wasn’t interested enough to go to the proceedings. He had better things to do.

Jared was already sitting on the bleachers inside the gym when Howie got there. Howie looked around, noticed a lot of guys he expected to see were already there, and more were still coming. He grabbed a seat next to Jared and said, “So are you ready?”

“I’m so ready I could just about shit,” Jared said. “Now things get serious.”

“Sure a lot different than last year,” Howie said. “In fact, there’s not much the same. Jeez, a year ago I was going with Misty and looked to be the JV quarterback.”

“A year ago I wasn’t going with anybody, and was looking forward to wrestling,” Jared smiled. “Yeah, there’s been a thing or two changed.”

It took a while for everyone to arrive; a lot of people came by and congratulated Howie and Jared on the party and how well it had come off, and some passed along comments about how ignominiously the other party had ended. “With any kind of luck, that’s the end of the last of the old days of Spearfish Lake football,” Howie told anyone who commented.

“You know, Howie,” Jared smiled, “you’ve been wondering about what you wanted to do with your life. The last few days it’s gotten pretty clear to me. You need to think about going into politics.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You’ve put in a lot of time talking people into doing the right thing,” Jared said. “You’d almost think you were running for office.”

“Just doing what needed to be done,” Howie said. “Somebody had to stand up and take the lead on things.”

Finally, the coaches came out onto the gym floor. Coach Kulwicki blew his whistle, and when the hubbub died down, he yelled out, “Marlins! Are you ready for some football?”

There was a big roar from the stands. “Is everybody ready to go out and work their butts off?” he continued when the noise tapered off “We’ve got a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it, so we’re going to get started in a few minutes. We’ve got some new approaches for both offense and defense. They’re some things we weren’t ready to do last year, but I think we’re ready for them this year. We’re not done surprising opponents, not by a long shot!”

“Let’s go get ’em,” somebody yelled from the stands.

“Darn right we will,” Kulwicki said. “A couple announcements before we get started issuing gear. First off, nobody owns a position. You will have to compete for what position you play, both varsity and junior varsity. Obviously, people who played a position last year have a leg up, but it’s not going to be a sure thing. We’re going to have to be at our best in every game we play, because it’s not going to be like last year when just about everybody we played thought we were going to be an easy opponent. Anybody who thinks that this year is going to have another think coming. Am I right, Marlins?”

There were cheers and whistles from the stands. Everybody seemed to be wound up tight and ready to get down to business.

“The other thing I needed to say is to the sophomores who played on varsity last year. You were told then that most of you will have to go back to junior varsity this year to give the freshmen coming up some idea of how football is supposed to be played in Spearfish Lake. That’s how it’s going to be. We don’t have many seniors, but we have a lot of juniors, and we’ll probably have to dip into the sophomores a lot to make things come out. In any case, whatever else happens, any sophomore who was on varsity last year and not on the regular varsity this year will be brought up to the varsity sometime this season long enough to earn a varsity letter. If we make it to the playoffs, you will be there. The teams will be working together a lot and practicing together a lot.

“I’m going to be asking a lot of you people. We’re going to be doing some things that aren’t common in high school football, and you’re just going to have to learn them and learn them well if they’re going to work. But if they do, we’re really going to surprise some people. Now head into the locker room, get some gear, and let’s get started!”

At the same time, on the bleachers at the track, Coach John Emerson looked at the girls who had come out for cross-country practice. There were only a handful; the team had lost several seniors the year before, and only had one senior this year, and she was hardly the best runner on the team. There were, however, three juniors, and the best prospect of them was Bree Gravengood. Between sophomores and freshmen there were only six others who had shown up, and John expected that he would lose one or two of them.

Well, that was to be expected, he thought; cross-country was really a rather marginal sport at Spearfish Lake, having to compete with such attention-getters as football and cheerleading. There was also a boys’ team of about the same size but they practiced separately.

“We’re going to have some fun this season,” he told the handful of girls in a normal tone of voice. “We don’t have a large number of you, but we have enough to have a good time, and you’re going to learn things like determination, pacing, and self-control. Those of you who are new to the team, you might as well know that if you listen to me and push yourself a little harder than you think you can you’ll find out that you can accomplish a lot more than you expected. Last year Bree came to us late in the season, and she showed that she could push herself to do better than she dreamed. She’s been training hard for months, and I expect her to be one of our lead runners this year. I’m going to go out running with you, and if any of you seem to need any help, Bree or I will run with you to give your some encouragement and support. Let’s get started with some stretching exercises, then go out and run the course.”

When Howie came home from the first football practice of the year the year before, his butt had been just about dragging in the dirt; he hadn’t had enough energy to even pedal his BMX up the short slope of the driveway to the house.

That was last year. This year he was driving the Jeep, of course, but even so he was just comfortably tired, not beat to shit. He was in a lot better shape than he’d been last year, and so were most of the rest of the players. There had been no need to get involved with conditioning drills; they got started right away with new formations, some of which were going to take some learning. Things were going to be very different this year.

He saw Jack’s Cherokee sitting beside the garage, which must mean he was home. It was going to seem strange to have Jack gone away to Southern, and probably not home very much in the future, maybe not even in the summers. He and Jack hadn’t been very close for several years, but things had improved a lot in the last year or so, and now Howie wouldn’t have him around for moral support.

Sure enough, Jack and Vixen were sitting on the back porch with binoculars, keeping an eye on the bird feeders. There hadn’t been as much of that in the last few weeks as there had been earlier in the year, since the two of them, along with Alan and Summer, were slowly getting their things ready to head down to college. That was going to be a big deal for the four of them, Howie thought; he’d probably be doing the same thing in a couple years, although the details of it were pretty fuzzy in his mind.

Jack had seen him coming. As soon as Howie turned the corner of the house he asked, “So how was practice?”

“Not bad. We ought to be able to have a little fun this year and win a few. Too bad you’re not going to be around for the games.”

“We’ll probably catch the season opener, even though we’ll have to drive down to Coldwater to do it,” Jack smiled. “But the plan is now that we’re going to pound the pavement down to Hawthorne pretty soon after that.”

“Isn’t that going to be a little early to get down there?”

“A few days, but we’ve got an apartment to set up and stuff like school to get ready for, so we can hit the ground running.”

Howie still would have liked to know if they were going to set it up with a boys’ room and a girls’ room, like the four had told their parents, or if they were going to do it by couples. He was not willing to bet either way; Jack and the rest of them were pretty straight, after all, but it was a temptation. On the other hand, if it had been Jared, Bree, Autumn, and him – which wasn’t going to happen – it’d almost certainly be a boys’ and a girls’ room. As good a friend as he was with Autumn, they hadn’t gotten into the romance stuff very much, and neither had Jared and Bree, as far as he knew. It was another huge change from the year before, when he’d been very hot and heavy with Misty even though he hadn’t gotten much for his efforts.

The summer had gone very well in that respect – Misty hadn’t been around to worry about, which was good, although it couldn’t be expected to last much longer. From the word going around, which wasn’t final, of course, Walt was likely to be down at the county jail for the next few months, which would mean that Misty was likely to be back in town pretty soon. He couldn’t call it a worry, or even a concern – just a possible pain in the butt. Well, I’ll just have to cross that bridge when I get to it, he thought.

“Anything I can do to help?” he asked perfunctorily.

“Not right now,” Jack said. “It’s beginning to look like we have to rent a trailer to get all the stuff down there, so we’ll need some help loading it. That’s a few weeks away, though.”

“And you’re planning on cramming all that stuff in one apartment?”

“With the four of us it might not be that bad,” Vixen put in. “Summer tells us that Spring and her roomie manage to cram two full carloads of stuff into a twelve by twelve room and still find a way to walk through it. We saw the apartment back in the winter. It’s not real large but it’s not that small.”

“Well, it ought to be fun,” Howie grinned, thinking that even if they did do it boys’ room and girls’ room there was still likely to be some mix and match going on. “I hope it works out for all of you. I’m going to head in, get something cold to drink, then call Autumn and see how her cheerleading practice went.”

“Probably working on the proper pronunciation of ‘rah, rah, rah,’ or something equally technical,” Vixen shook her head.

“I used to think that,” Howie said, defending his girlfriend, “but I found out there’s a little more to it.”

Howie went inside, grabbed a large Pepsi from the refrigerator, and talked with his folks for a minute. They were busy watching the news on TV, but asked politely how practice had gone; Howie told them “pretty well,” of course. Right at the moment they were more interested in the story on TV, so he went up to his room, tossed his gear bag on his bed, and decided a shower would feel good.

Showered and at least a little hydrated, he picked up the phone to call Autumn. Amazingly enough, she was the one who answered the phone, which was often busy at her house. “So how did your practice go?” he asked.

“Rah, rah, rah,” she told him. “A couple of new formations, a couple new cheers, and the senior girls lording it all over everybody, of course. The good thing is that there aren’t many of them, and they’re not going to be running things like they thought they were since everybody else has them outnumbered by quite a bit. There’s a couple of them who don’t like that very much.”

“Yeah, the senior count is a little low on the football team, too,” Howie agreed. “No Lethbridge, of course, not that I was expecting him, but some of his buddies got shown the door as soon as they showed up. With only one exception, we’re going to have the same guys out of that class we had last year. It wouldn’t surprise me if he doesn’t last very long. Coach just about ran him ragged, and all we were doing was light warm-ups and formations. You hear anything about how it went with Bree?”

“I just got off the phone with her. It sounded like it went pretty well. It wouldn’t surprise me if she’s the fastest kid on the squad this year.”

“If so, that’ll be good for her.”

“I think so, too, if for no more reason than getting the ‘athletics’ box checked off on her Air Force Academy application.”

“From what I understand it’ll do more good for her than that. Hey, it’s not as late as I expected it was going to be. What would you think about heading down to the Frostee Freeze for a cone or something? Either the two of us, or the four of us?”

“I could do that,” she replied. “But isn’t it going to get pretty late for you for football practice tomorrow?”

“Naw, two-a-days don’t start for another week,” Howie told her. “When that rolls around we’re going to be a little short on time to get together, especially in the evenings. I’m thinking we might as well get it in while we can.”

“Talked me into it, but let’s make it just you and me this time. I mean, it’s not that I don’t like Jared and Bree anymore, but it always seems to be the four of us. Maybe just the two of us would be fun for once.”

“All right, I’ll be over and pick you up in a few minutes.”

After he hung up the phone Howie took another big swig of his Pepsi, let out a burp to enjoy it, and went to get dressed, just shorts and a T-shirt since it was still a pretty warm evening. The sun was close to setting when he got in the Jeep and headed for Autumn’s house, although the days were getting noticeably shorter. It’s going to be solid dark at this hour pretty soon, he thought, and it was going to be downright cold before the football season was over with.

Autumn was waiting for him on her folks’ front porch when he pulled up in the Jeep; he wasn’t even able to get out before she was in the right seat. “You know,” she said as she fastened her seat belt, “it seems strange for just the two of us to be going someplace together.”

“We’ve done it before,” he shrugged. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Well, I hadn’t either, but we almost always have Jared and Bree with us. When it’s just the two of us together, it’s mostly been for some special reason, but to just go hang out? We don’t do that very often.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Howie nodded, wondering where Autumn was taking this. Something seemed strange, something he couldn’t put his finger on.

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