“It wasn’t all Skip’s fault,” Jenna cried. “This was building up for years, poisoning him from the inside. He felt a duty, Brian, a duty to be the sentinel of outrage. Who else would speak for the land? For the wild creatures?”
“Save your Sierra Club lecture for the first-graders, okay?”
“Skip is not a bad man, he has a vision of right and wrong. He’s a principled person who took things too far, and maybe he paid for his mistakes. But he deserves credit for his courage, and for all his misery he deserves compassion, too.”
“What he deserved,” Keyes said, “was twenty-five-to-life at Raiford.” Ten innocent people were dead and here was Jenna doing Portia from the Merchant of Venice. He let go of her hand and stood up, not wishing to test his fortitude by sitting too close for too long. He said, “You’d better go.”
“I took the bus,” Jenna sniffled. “Can you give me a lift?”
“No, I can’t.”
“But I really don’t want to be alone, Brian. I just want to lie in a hot bath and think sunny thoughts, a hot bath with kelp crystals. Maybe you could come by tonight and keep me company?”
In the tub Jenna would be unstoppable. “Thanks anyway,” Keyes said, “but I’m going to the football game.”
He gave her ten bucks for a cab.
She looked at the money, then at Brian. Her little-girl-lost look, a pale version at that.
“If he’s dead,” she said softly, “what’ll we do?”
“I’ll varnish the coffin,” Keyes said, “you spray for chinch bugs.”
32
The annual Orange Bowl Football Classic began at exactly eight P.M. on January 1, when the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame kicked off to the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers before a stadium crowd of 73,411 and an estimated worldwide television audience of forty-one million people. The A. C. Nielsen Company, which rates TV shows based on sample American homes, later calculated that the Notre Dame-Nebraska football game attained a blockbuster rating of 23.5, giving it a 38% share of all households watching television that Tuesday night. These ratings were all the more remarkable considering that, for obvious reasons, the second half of the Orange Bowl game was never played.
Midway through the first quarter the rains came; stinging needles that sent a groan through the crowd and brought out a sea of umbrellas.
Brian Keyes huddled sullenly in the rain and wished he’d stayed home. He had decided to attend the game only because he couldn’t reach Kara Lynn, and because he’d gotten a free ticket (the Chamber of Commerce, showing its gratitude). Unfortunately, his seat was in the midst of the University of Nebraska card section, where raucous fans held up squares of bright posterboard to spell out witty messages like “Mash the Irish!” in giant letters. No sooner had Keyes settled in when some of the rooters had handed him two red cards and asked if he wouldn’t mind being their semicolon. Keyes was worse than miserable.
On the field Nebraska was humiliating Notre Dame; no real surprise, since the no-neck Cornhuskers outweighed their opponents by an average of thirty-two pounds apiece. Many of the fans, already sopped and now bored, wondered whose brilliant idea the four-point spread was. By half-time the score was 21-3.
The second-string running back for Notre Dame was a young man named David Lee, who stood six-feet-four and weighed a shade under two hundred pounds and was about as Irish as Sonny Liston. Though nominally listed on the team roster as a senior, David Lee was actually several dozen credits short of sophomore status—this, despite majoring in physical education and minoring in physical therapy. David Lee’s grade-point average had recently skied to 1.9, slightly enhancing his chances of graduating from college before the age of fifty—provided, of course, he was not first drafted by a professional football team.
Which now seemed unlikely. During the first half of the Orange Bowl game, David Lee attempted to run with the football three times. The first effort resulted in a five-yard loss, the second a fumble. The third time he actually gained twelve yards and a first down. Unfortunately the only two pro football scouts in the stadium missed David Lee’s big run because they spent the entire second quarter stuck in line at the men’s room, fighting over the urinals with some Klansmen from Perrine.