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thieves to ease out of the gutter.”
    “I’m laying off for a few days,” Silo said. “In honor of Coach Rake.”
    “How touchin’. I’ll just send the night shift boys home then, since you’re closin’ shop.”
    “You do that, Mal.”
    Silo, Hubcap, and Amos Kelso lumbered down the bleachers, the metal steps rattling as they descended.
    “He’ll be in prison within twelve months,” Mal said as they watched them walk along thetrack behind the end zone. “Make sure your bank is clean, Curry.”
    “Don’t worry.”
    Neely had heard enough. He stood and said, “I’ll be running along too.”
    “I thought you were coming to dinner,” Paul said.
    “I’m not hungry now. How about tomorrow night?”
    “Mona will be disappointed.”
    “Tell her to save the leftovers. Good night, Mal, Randy. I’m sure I’ll see you soon.”
    The knee was stiff, and as Neely crept down the steps he tried mightily to do so without a limp, without a hint that he was anything less than what they remembered. On the track, behind the Spartan bench, he turned too quickly and the knee almost collapsed. It buckled, then wavered as tiny sharp pains hit in a dozen different spots. Because it happened so often, he knew how to lift it just so and quickly shift all weight to his right leg, and to keep walking as if everything was normal.

Wednesday
    In the window of every shop and store around the Messina square there was a large green football schedule, as if the customers and the townsfolk needed help in remembering that the Spartans played every Friday night. And on every lamppost in front of the shops and stores there were green-and-white banners that went up in late August and came down when the season was over. Neely remembered the banners from the days when he rode his bike along the walkways.Nothing had changed. The large green schedules were the same every year—the games in bold print, outlined by the smiling faces of the seniors; along the bottom, small ads of all the local sponsors, which included every single business in Messina. No one was left off the schedule.
    As he entered Renfrow’s Café, one step behind Paul, Neely took a deep breath and told himself to smile, to be polite—these folks, after all, once adored him. The thick smell of things frying hit him at the door, then the sound of pots rattling in the distance. The smells and sounds had not changed from the time his father brought him to Renfrow’s for hot chocolate on Saturday mornings, where the locals relived and replayed the latest Spartan victory.
    During the season, each football player could eat once a week at Renfrow’s at no charge, a simple and generous gesture that had been sorely tested shortly after the school was integrated. Would Renfrow’s allow black players the same privilege? Damned right came the word from Eddie Rake, and the café became one of the first in the state to voluntarily integrate itself.
    Paul spoke to most of the men huddled overtheir coffee, but he kept moving toward a booth by the window. Neely nodded and tried to avoid eye contact. By the time they slid into their seats, the secret was out. Neely Crenshaw was indeed back in town.
    The walls were covered with old football schedules, framed newspaper stories, pennants, autographed jerseys, and hundreds of photos—team photos lined in neat chronological order above the counter, action shots lifted from the local paper, and large black-and-whites of the greatest of Spartans. Neely’s was above the cash register, a photo of him as a senior, posing with the football cocked and ready to fire, no helmet, no smile, all business and attitude and ego, long untamed hair, three days’ worth of stubble and peach fuzz, eyes looking somewhere in the distance, no doubt dreaming of future glory.
    “You were so cute back then,” Paul said.
    “Seems like yesterday, then it seems like a dream.”
    In the center of the longest wall there was a shrine to Eddie Rake—a large color photo of