Bridge of Sighs

have my permission to toss his black ass onto the pavement. Just be careful of that blade he carries.”
    Noonan spotted his mother sitting, for some reason, over on the visitors’ side with his raucous feral brothers, all of them a bane to their teachers but loving to her. They surrounded her now, as if they feared that contact with the world outside their Borough home might overstimulate her. Not much danger of that, Noonan felt sure. Her usual smile was even more serene today, which suggested she’d fortified herself with an additional little pill before leaving the house. He doubted that by tomorrow she’d be any too sure exactly what sort of sporting event she’d attended. She might even wake up and think she’d dreamed her day out. Still, every time he glanced up where she sat, her gaze was fixed on him, his teammates apparently beside the point, and each time he got tackled, she clamped her hand to her mouth. After every play, his brothers had to reassure her. “It’s okay, Mom. See? He’s up. He’s not hurt.”
    And so it had gone all afternoon. Things normally shrouded in the fog of combat were brightly lit, things happening singly instead of all at once, a slow-motion miracle. When the game was over, Coach Halliday addressed his rowdy, ecstatic team in the locker room for the last time. With the possible exception of Dec Lynch, nobody had been more exasperated by the Tanners’ inconsistency than their coach, and today he seemed even more dispirited by their lopsided victory than he’d been by many of their losses. “You see what I been telling you?” he said. He had bad knees from his own days in the semipro leagues, and he needed to be helped up onto the bench so he could address his troops. “You see?”
    Noonan, for one, did not, and it didn’t look like anyone else did either.
    “Marconi,” Coach said, barely containing his exasperation. “What have I been telling you guys all season?”
    Noonan tried to guess what he might be getting at. He’d told them a lot of things, more than they could absorb at any given moment. Now he seemed to want Noonan to distill all of those things, including the ones they’d forgotten, into a single lesson,
after
an exhausting game. He took a stab. “Fundamentals?”
    Coach Halliday rubbed his forehead vigorously, then turned to Perry Kozlowski. “Koz,” he said. “What have I been saying since August?”
    Perry was visited by a sudden inspiration. “How good we could be if we all worked together?”
    “Thank you,” Coach said, as if he really was grateful and might well have borrowed the track coach’s starter pistol and shot himself in the head if Perry, too, had disappointed him. “Four months I’ve been telling you that. It’s good to know I wasn’t wasting my breath. Today, you were a
team.
You understand? Life is teamwork, men. That’s all it is. When you think about this game, that’s what I want you to remember—how good you were today and how good you could’ve been all season long if you’d paid attention back in September.”
    It was a good speech, Noonan thought, and he was moved by it, despite not believing a single word of it. He didn’t doubt that Halliday truly thought that life was teamwork, and he supposed he was grateful for his high opinion of their abilities. And of course he was sorry they’d disappointed him by underachieving. But he doubted they’d been any more of a team today than previously. Rather, they’d just played better than usual, probably because this was their last game. Kids who normally missed blocks made them, receivers who usually dropped balls managed to hang on. They’d scored first and benefited from a couple of lucky bounces. Their victory, the way Noonan saw it, was a combination of luck and fate and momentum and who knew what else, but he doubted it could be chalked up to teamwork. More to the point, though Noonan wouldn’t have said so to Coach Halliday, he was delighted to see the end of the season, which, far from teaching him that life was nothing but teamwork, had convinced him to eschew all team sports in the future. He’d enjoyed the competition and the physicality, and he understood the necessity of discipline, but the camaraderie that seemed so important to Coach and Perry was left out of him.
    When Halliday was done talking, it took two linemen and an assistant coach to help him down and lead him out of the locker room. Then Perry, the team captain, clad only in a jockstrap,