"No. He's somewhere in the back, with a nurse. Miss Lila said he didn't want anybody to see him in his last days.Said he's just a skeleton."
The image of Eddie Rake lying in a dark bed with a nurse nearby counting the minutes chilled the conversation for a long time. Until the day he was fired he coached in cleats and shorts and never hesitated to demonstrate the proper blocking mechanics or the finer points of a stiff arm. Rake relished physical contact with his players, but not the slap on the back for a job well done. Rake liked to hit, and no practice session was complete until he angrily threw down his clipboard and grabbed someone by the shoulder pads.The bigger the better. In blocking drills, when things were not going to suit him, he would crouch in a perfect three-point stance then fire off the ball and crash into a defensive tackle, one with forty more pounds and the full complement of pads and gear. Every Messina player had seen Rake, on a particularly bad day, throw his body at a running back and take him down with a vicious hit. He loved the violence of football and demanded it from every player.
In thirty-four years as head Coach, Rake had struck only two players off the field. The first had been a famous fistfight in the late sixties between the Coach and a hothead who had quit the team and was looking for trouble, of which he found plenty with Rake. The second had been a cheap shot that landed in the face of Neely Crenshaw.
It was incomprehensible that he was now a shriveled old man gasping for his last breath.
"I was in the Philippines," Silo said at low volume, but his voice was coarse and carried through the clear air. "I was guardin' toilets for the officers, hatin' every minute of it, and I never saw you play in college."
"You didn't miss much," Neely said.
"I heard later that you were great,then you got hurt."
"I had some nice games."
"He was the national player of the week when he was a sophomore," Paul said."Threw for six touchdowns against Purdue."
"It was a knee, right?" Silo asked.
"Yes."
"How'd it happen?"
"I rolled out, into the flat, saw an opening, tucked the ball and ran, didn't see a linebacker."Neely delivered the narrative as if he'd done it a thousand times and preferred not to do it again.
Silo had torn an ACL in spring football and survived it. He knew something about the knee. "Surgery and all that?" he asked.
"Four of them," Neely said. "Completely ruptured the ligament, busted the kneecap."
"So the helmet got you?"