Bridge of Sighs

echo of his cathedral dream, but it was all he’d needed. He’d awakened feeling like he was twenty again and could work forty-eight hours straight if he needed to.
    It also occurred to Noonan that last night’s just might be his final dream. That possibility he put out of his mind.
             
     
    T HAT FALL Thomaston had suffered through a mediocre season marred by almost pathological inconsistency. The town’s gamblers, Dec Lynch foremost among them, found that particularly frustrating. Against his better judgment he’d bet on Thomaston the first game of the season, only to have Mohawk’s speedy Puerto Ricans, the very ones Dec had feared, get loose in the home team’s porous secondary. Still, the Tanners had made a game of it in the second half, and with time running out had been driving toward a tying touchdown when Noonan, who’d been sure-handed to that point, coughed up the ball and that was that.
    “What was I thinking?” Dec Lynch said the next morning when Noonan stopped by Ikey’s.
    “Sorry, Dec,” Noonan said as if he wasn’t particularly. “Next week bet on Utica.”
    But Dec wasn’t finished with this week yet. “You know you’re allowed to run
around
guys, right? If there’s just you and a single defender, there’s no law says you gotta go over the top of him. And if you go
around
him you won’t drop the ball on impact, because—and here’s the real beauty of the thing—there
is
no impact. And the
other
beauty would be that I’d still have money in my wallet, whereas…” He took out his billfold then to demonstrate the consequence of trying to go through defenders.
    “Bet Utica next week,” Noonan repeated. Because Utica was, by all reports, bigger, faster and tougher than Mohawk, and it was an away game to boot.
    “Don’t worry,” Dec told him. “I intend to.”
    Except that the following Saturday the whole team played well. On the first play from scrimmage, Perry Kozlowski planted Utica’s star running back in the turf, and the boy went off the field wobbly, never to return. Noonan ran the ball effectively, though he lacked the speed to be spectacular, and late in the fourth quarter he found himself in the same situation as the previous week, a single safety between him and the goal line, and this time he took Dec’s advice. Lowering his head as if he meant to steamroll the Utica defender, he spun at the last second and left the kid with an armful of air and Dec with an empty wallet for the second Saturday in a row.
    It had gone that way pretty much all season, the team zigging when Dec zagged. When he tried to change things up, figuring the Tanners were incapable of having either two good or two bad games in a row, they disproved him then, too.
    “Normally I like to go on vacation right after football season,” he told Noonan the night before their last game.
    He and Lucy and Sarah had congregated at Ikey’s, to wait for Nan Beverly to pick them up. Nan, who’d failed her driver’s exam twice, had passed on the third try, and they were celebrating by going out for pizza in her father’s Caddy.
    “But not this year,” Dec continued. “This year it’ll be Easter before I make back all the money I lost on you nitwits this season. The only bright spot is you’re all going to graduate and stop tormenting me.”
    “I may get held back, actually,” Noonan said, mock-serious. “Honors English may do me in.” In truth it was his best class, and he was still, for some reason, Mr. Berg’s favorite.
    “Sweet thing,” Dec said to Sarah, who was killing time by playing a game of crazy eights with Lucy. “Tell your father that if he flunks this kid, I may have to shoot myself.”
    “That might make him even more determined,” she answered, always happy to take the opposite side of any argument that involved Dec.
    “There she goes being mean to me again,” he said, now trying to make an ally of Noonan. “She does look especially sexy tonight, though, doesn’t she? What I’ll never understand is why she hangs around with mere boys when there are eligible, single men around, men with good looks and experience both.”
    “Lou-Lou isn’t single,” Sarah said, causing Big Lou, at his usual post by the register, to beam.
    “I’m talking about me,” Dec said. “You must’ve missed the good-looking part.”
    “I just heard the part about you being broke, I guess. Last card,” she told Lucy, who commenced drawing, hearts suddenly a rarity.