Sam Dorah didn’t think to tryout for the Slough City High JV football squad, but that didn’t stop his reputation from showing up in his place. Word had it that the kid was tough, quick, mean, and good. The head coach asked around, and finally got in contact with Sam’s parents. He invited Sam to a private tryout and later told him to come in for practice. Though Sam had not been formally trained in the game, his quickness, timing, cunning, and aggressiveness made him hard to overlook.
Peregrine Falcon (Dive) — Gonzalo Castellano
Sam quickly emerged as the squad’s standout defensive back. He was highly motivated to succeed, but not for the respect of boys or the adoration of girls, and not for any dream of future glory. He wasn’t even after self-esteem. All Sam wanted was a little peace and quiet.
He tended to avoid the company of his peers. At lunchtime he proceeded to the school cafeteria, grabbed a tray, and made his way to the tables where the solitary kids collected; where he ran into Armen Adroushan now and then. Armen remembered Sam from the previous winter, and he would no sooner disturb Sam’s lunch than he’d disturb the dinner of a junkyard dog, but Sam had a peculiar habit of shaking his milk carton before opening it, and one day Armen’s curiosity got the best of him.
“You like it foamy?” Armen asked.
“Nah. It’s just a habit.”
“A habit. … How’d you get a habit like that?”
“I live on a dairy. We make our own milk—I mean—“
“I think I know what you mean.”
“Our milk isn’t mixed—homogenized.”
Armen inspected his own milk carton. “Is that what homogenized means? Mixed?”
“Yeah. More or less.”
That was said between them for several meals.
Sam yearned for peace because peace didn’t come easily to him. His mind was not a quiet place. His father. His mother. Buck. The dragon. The brutal onslaught of guilt upon the young arsonist sometimes rumbled and rang within him into a head-splitting cacophony that could not be dissipated, save for a quick injection of violence. With a purifying burst into his bloodstream, a crush of bodies delivered peace to Sam’s world.
He wasn’t a big kid, so he had to win his peace with cunning. He had to give his prey a sense of security. He would give a receiver plenty of room. He would do his best to look small, inconspicuous, and inept, to encourage the quarterback to pick his man.
He thought of the falcon. She hides herself in the vastness of the sky. In a shocking flash, the contentment of her prey is shattered. She appears in a blur of pumping wings, propelling herself earthward like a missile breaking through its sound envelope, a blue streak as unexpected as a shooting star.
Sam had given Tulare’s right flanker enough rope to hang himself. Sam looked for the quarterback to unwittingly give him the signal to kick out the gallows chair. The quarterback saw that Sam’s man was open, and he cocked his arm. Sam broke from his starting position as the quarterback fired, and the race to the target began.
Sam closed the gap and met his quarry with gratuitous physicality and passion. With his closing speed, Sam might have made a fine free safety, but the coach thought that Sam might better confound opposing offenses as a “loose man” cornerback. Sam could play his receiver loose, and let the free safety clean up if Sam’s fevered gamble didn’t pay off. An opposing quarterback might not be so easily lured into making the fateful pass unless the corner himself set the trap, so the coach chose to put Sam’s speed and cunning into the corner.
This violent introvert, whom some might equate with a schoolyard bully, would sometimes be found shedding tears after a play, just as he would sometimes shed tears after a fight. No one dared to laugh at those tears, nor even the blood that colored his eyes at such times, but I don’t know why. Perhaps they were afraid of him. Some pitied him. Some, perhaps, were not so much afraid of Sam as the tears themselves, to say nothing of the blood.