The Penalty for Holding

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

In life, there is only narrative, Quinn realized.

Control the narrative, and you control public opinion. That was real power.

Brenna had that kind of power. As a columnist for The Wreck, she had alluded to Smalley’s prejudice against Quinn in the past. Now she actively lobbied for him to replace Lance. In a column titled Free Quinn Novak, she delivered the coup de grâce:

Pharaoh was forced to free the Israelites from b*****e in Egypt.

Lincoln liberated the slaves.

It’s time for the New York Templars to get off their assets. Play Quinn Novak or trade him to a place where his many admirers can thrill to this transcendent talent.

Soon, Free Quinn Novak T-shirts, mugs, banners, and parties began cropping up around New York. Others tweeted, **-ed, f******k-ed, blogged, and—oh, yes—wrote about him, or Brenna writing about him. He became a cause célèbre even among those who knew nothing of football.

It wasn’t the kind of fame he wanted—to be known for who he was rather than what he did. But he could hardly complain when the perks and endorsements that came his way helped others, including the orphans back in Indonesia. Then came the backlash.

“I want that b***h muzzled,” he overheard Smalley say to two men in one of the “catacombs”—the yellow-green and blue cinder-block tunnels that snaked through the bowels of the stadium. “I don’t care how you do it, just do it.”

Alarmed, Quinn texted her.

Don’t worry (lol), she texted back. I can take care of myself.

Still, she was subjected to death threats, received packages containing used condoms, and was even hit in the back with a football “unintentionally” by tight end Taylor Higgs, one of Lance’s henchmen—which led Quinn to call him out.

“Stay away from her,” Quinn told him, “or you—and anyone else who tries to harm her—will answer to me.”

“Ooh, I’m scared,” Taylor said, laughing.

Quinn smiled. Then he decked him. Hey, he figured, some people never learn.

I don’t want you to stick your neck out for me anymore, he wrote Brenna in a note that accompanied a dozen red roses interspersed with stargazer lilies. Still, I appreciate it more than I can say. If you ever need anything, you come to me.

“She’s nothing but Novak’s w***e,” a teammate, Taylor? Lance?, was quoted anonymously as saying, which raised a momentary firestorm in the press once again about the NFL’s continuing female trouble—this despite new regulations implemented after its domestic abuse crisis—and the way men fought one another on the battlefield of female sexuality.

Though everyone denounced the remark, it suggested that the columnist and the quarterback were secret lovers, which both were quick to deny, thereby only stoking the rumors.

Those rumors had their advantage. The “So, got a girl?” questions ceased. It was, Quinn knew, a sad world when a lie and a possible breach of journalistic ethics were preferable to him than revealing the truth that he was a gay virgin. He continued to say nothing, though. And that was sad, too. But then, he was no Michael Sam. At least not yet. Why declare his preference for a certain “team” when he had yet to play for it, right?

The Free Quinn Novak campaign came to a head in a stunning way when Lance broke his left leg in the wee hours of a Sunday morning before the big game against the loathed Philadelphia Quakers and quarterback Mal Ryan.

“There is indeed a God,” one fan tweeted, “because Lance-o-little couldn’t stink up the joint more.”

That was before the Twitteratti got wind of how Lance broke his leg. It seemed that he and “muy caliente Argentine soul-mate”—as she was invariably described in the press to such an extent that it became an epithet, like “rosy-fingered dawn” in The Iliad—had been engaging in some lubricious foreplay involving the new Black Orchid body lotion when Lance slid off her and the bed, suffering a freak stress fracture.

What a fall was there, one surprisingly literary poster wrote on the Temps’ blog, echoing that great coach known as the Bard.

“In a fall worthy of Adam and Eve,” The New York Gazette intoned, “Lancelot Reinhart slid off muy caliente Argentine soul-mate Ileana Cardenas and into a maelstrom of controversy and uncertainty, throwing the Temps’ season into doubt.”

“Season? What season?” Derrick said after reading the story. “Do we have a season? And what doubt? The way I look at it there’s no doubt where we’re headed—the bottom of our division.”

Smalley was so inconsolable that he started hyperventilating.

“We have to win this one for Lance,” he gasped between sobs.

“Not quite Brian’s Song, is it?” Greg whispered to Derrick.

“Hey, hey,” Smalley yelled at them, his face growing so red that his players feared blood would start gushing from his nostrils. “The leader of this team is hurting. Have some respect. Donaldson, it’s on your shoulders tonight. Make Lance proud.”

Stunned, embarrassed silence. Quinn knew Smalley hated him. Now he knew just how much. To pass him over for Dave, it was more than humiliating. Even Dave himself didn’t think he should start.

When the Freers or Quinnies—as Quinn’s fans were known—found out, they exploded.

Since when is the second-string quarterback passed over for the third? Brenna texted. Oh, right, when they play for Smalley.

“Just want to wish you the best, man,” Quinn told Dave, giving him a bro shoulder bump.

“I can’t do it,” Dave said.

“Of course, you can,” Quinn said. “As my aunt always said, ‘Have courage and life will meet you halfway.’“

“No, you don’t understand,” and with that Dave let loose a stream of projectile vomit worthy of Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Whereupon the trainer and team physician were summoned—to say nothing of the clubhouse man with a mop and bucket—and Dave was pronounced ill enough from the flu to be sent off to the hospital.

Smalley didn’t say anything to Quinn before the game. He didn’t have to. Quinn was feeling enough pressure. This was the nationally televised Sunday night game, and the stakes were made clear by the mediocre-former-players-turned-commentators who bloviated on the pregame show.

“Boy oh boy, Coach, with Lance Reinhart out for the season and Dave Donaldson a scratch, facing perhaps the greatest team the NFL has ever produced, the entire Temps’ season rests on the lean shoulders of one rookie quarterback Quinton Day Novak,” Rufus Washington salivated with his usual ungrammatical earnestness to former coach and broadcast partner Joe Nowicki. “And you know, Coach, the Temps’ fans have to be wondering about now if he’s up to the challenge.”

“Well, Ruf, we’ll know in a few hours, won’t we?”

Yes, Ruf, we sure will, Quinn thought as he passed the TV. Jesus Christ, no wonder people thought football players were no-neck neo-Neanderthals.

“Look,” Quinn told his teammates before play began, “I’m not going to make a big speech, because we’ve had enough drama for a whole season, let alone one day. All I want to say is, we can make the drama worthwhile by winning this.”

Early on, it looked as if that would be impossible as the Quakers’ defense boxed Quinn in. But then he remembered himself. Finding he couldn’t get rid of the ball, he simply ran with it. And suddenly he was no longer at Templars Stadium but back there—back in Jakarta with Nemin, Adhi, Sumarti, Gde, his baseball teammates and Aunt Lena—all the people he loved and who loved him. He would not break faith with them.

In the end zone, he raised his arms triumphantly. He could’ve kept on running, so great was the rush. Instead, he dropped to one knee quickly and, just as quickly, crossed himself. “Thank you, God,” he prayed. “And thanks, Aunt Lee.”

He jogged back to his position, acknowledging neither the cheers, which were now all-enveloping, nor the steam pouring from the nostrils of the opposition.

The Quakers sacked him, and his brain pushed against his aching skull and helmet. His mind longed to slip the confines of bone and plastic as his body—ravaged by the opposition’s pile-on—was buried alive.

“Get the f**k off him.” His teammates were yelling now, the sounds indistinct at first as if he were underwater—or beyond the grave. Only slowly did the words come into focus as his teammates clawed their way to free him, bringing with them a lightness of feeling. He knew then that they had his back, knew he would rise again. For this was what he did; this was who he was; this was all he had to give.

He was under center again—clear-headed once more, cool, collected, commanding.

“Twenty-two, fifty-five, hut,” he directed, his trained baritone channeled and strong. On the field of battle that day, Quinn found his voice and knew it would pierce the cold, the crowd, anything.

The Quakers struck back—the empire always does—but they would never recover from the shock of Quinn drawing first blood as they lost 21-14.

After the game and all the following week, the story was about Quinn—“Rookie QB Stuns Super Bowl Champs.”

This is what the Quinnies wanted, Brenna wrote in her postgame column, which was equal parts glee and schadenfreude, to see their man have his moment in the sun. And he didn’t disappoint. All his promise and all the tragedy and heartache he’s endured—the long road from Jakarta, the waiting on the sidelines as other men got the call—all of it was fulfilled today.

He was, as Rumours magazine noted, “the toast of the town.” Even talk-show hosts who had made fun of him were deluging the Temps’ easily exasperated PR guy, Harvey Soffel, to book him.

“Thank you for this,” Quinn said when he caught up with Brenna after a practice session.

“You’re welcome for this, but I did nothing. It was you. You’re on your way.”

“That remains to be seen,” Quinn said. “People recover from the flu. Broken legs heal.”

Brenna shook her head. “They’ll have a hard time putting this genie back in the bottle.”

What he remembered most from that strange, wonderful day, though, was not what she said or the fans or the crush of media but Mal coming up to congratulate him in the postgame ritual in which winners and losers exchanged words of bland grace that rode on plumes of breath in the night air.

“I guess we’ll be seeing more of each other,” Mal whispered in his ear.

His splayed fingers—with their massive ten-inch span from thumb to pinky—spread like tentacles around Quinn’s coiled waist, and he in turn experienced an electric thrill he still felt forbidden to know.