Another car rolled to a stop by the gate and its headlights went off. No door opened.
"Prison's underrated," Hubcap said, and everyone laughed.
"Rake had his favorites," Neely said. "I wasn't one of them."
"Then why are you here?" asked Orley Short.
"I'm not sure. Same reason you're here, I guess."
DuringNeely's freshman year at Tech, he had returned for Messina's homecoming game. In a halftime ceremony, they retired number 19. The standing ovation went on and on and eventually delayed the second half kickoff, which cost the Spartans five yards and prompted Coach Rake, leading 28-0, to start yelling.
That was the only gameNeely had watched since he left. One year later he was in the hospital.
"When did they put up Rake's bronze statue?" he asked.
"Couple of years after they fired him," Jaeger said. "The boosters raised ten thousand bucks and had it done. They wanted to present it to him before a game, but he refused."
"So he never came back?"
"Well, sort of." Jaeger pointed to a hill in the distance behind the clubhouse. "He'd drive up on Karr's Hill before every game and park on one of thosegravel roads. He and Miss Lila would sit there, looking down, listening to Buck Coffey on the radio, too far away to see much, but making sure the town knew he was still watching. At the end of every halftime the band would face the hill and play the fight song, and all ten thousand would wave at Rake."
"It was pretty cool," said Amos Kelso.
"Rake knew everything that was going on," Paul said. "Rabbit called him twice a day with the gossip."
"Was he a recluse?"Neely asked.
"He kept to himself," Amos said."For the first three or four years anyway. There were rumors he was moving, but then rumors don't mean much here. He went to Mass every morning, but that's a small crowd in Messina."
"He got out more in the last few years," Paul said."Started playing golf."