He laughed and filled three glasses with ice. I’m still after Lotterman, he said. It looks like I might get my money.
Just then Chenault came up from the beach, wearing the same white bikini and carrying a big beach towel. She smiled at Yeamon: They came again. I heard them talking.
Goddamnit, Yeamon snapped. Why do you keep going down there? What the hell is wrong with you?
She smiled and sat down on the towel. It’s my favorite place. Why should I leave just because of them?
Yeamon turned to me. She goes down to the beach and takes off her clothes — the natives hide back in the palms and watch her.
Not always, Chenault said quickly. Usually it’s just on weekends.
Yeamon leaned forward and shouted at her. Well goddamn you! Don’t go down there anymore! From now on you stay up here if you want to lie around naked! I’ll be goddamned if I’ll spend all my time worrying about you getting raped. He shook his head with disgust. One of these days they’ll get you and if you keep on teasing the poor bastards I’ll damn well let them have you!
She stared down at the concrete. I felt sorry for her and stood up to make her a drink. When I handed it to her she looked up gratefully and took a long swallow.
Drink up, said Yeamon. We’ll invite some of your friends and have a real party! Then he fell back in the chair. Ah, the good life, he muttered.
We sat there drinking for a while, Chenault saying nothing, Yeamon doing most of the talking, and finally he got up and picked a coconut off the sand beside the patio. Come on, he said, let’s have a little football.
I was glad for anything that would clear the air, so I put down my drink and ran awkwardly out for a pass. He spiraled it perfectly, but it smacked my fingers like lead and I dropped it.
Let’s get down on the beach, he called. Plenty of room to run.
I nodded and waved to Sala. He shook his head. Go play, he muttered. Me and Chenault have serious things to discuss.
Chenault smiled halfheartedly and waved us down to the beach. Go on, she said.
I slid down the bluff to the hard-packed sand on the beach. Yeamon threw up his arm and ran at an angle toward the surf. I tossed the nut high and long, watching it fall just beyond him in the water and make a quick splash. He fell on it and went under, bringing it up in his hands.
I turned and sprinted away, watching it float down at me out of the hot blue sky. It hurt my hands again, but this time I hung on. It was a good feeling to snag a long pass, even if it was a coconut. My hands grew red and tender, but it was a good clean feeling and I didn’t mind. We ran short, over-the-middle passes and long floaters down the sidelines, and after a while I couldn’t help but think we were engaged in some kind of holy ritual, the reenactment of all our young Saturdays — expatriated now, lost and cut off from those games and those drunken stadiums, beyond the noise and blind to the false color of those happy spectacles — after years of jeering at football and all that football means, here I was on an empty Caribbean beach, running these silly pass patterns with all the zeal of a regular sandlot fanatic.
As we raced back and forth, falling and plunging in the surf, I recalled my Saturdays at Vanderbilt and the precision beauty of a Georgia Tech backfield, pushing us back and back with that awful belly series, a lean figure in a gold jersey, slashing over a hole that should never have been there, now loose on the crisp grass of our secondary and an unholy shout from the stands across the way; and finally to bring the bastard down, escape those blockers coming at you like cannonballs, then line up again and face that terrible machinery. It was a torturous thing, but beautiful in its way; here were men who would never again function or even understand how they were supposed to function as well as they did today. They were dolts and thugs for the most part, huge pieces of meat, trained to a fine edge — but somehow they mastered those complex plays and patterns, and in rare moments they were artists.