The Education of Giacomo Jones Ch. 03

She and three other equipment staffers had departed Fallstrom after practice on Thursday afternoon in a Fulbright van that followed the football program's 18-wheeler, its trailer shrink-wrapped in Fulbright green-and-gold and emblazoned with its logo and images of Gerow and Riemers in action. They stopped and overnighted at the approximate midpoint of the drive - Chattanooga.

Rance had texted his parents to let them know Gia would be bivouacked in town and gave them her cell number. Lorraine called Gia around 8 p.m. and learned that the caravan was still in north Georgia, probably 90 minutes from Chattanooga. Since it would be a late arrival and Gia wasn't sure exactly where they would be staying, they agreed to meet up for breakfast the following morning — very early, before the truck headed out — and that Gia would text Lorraine the hotel location after she arrived.

Early indeed. Lorrie Martin's blue Volvo pulled under the front awning of the Holiday Inn Express just off Interstate 75 at 5:45 a.m. and saw Gia standing there in the dark, already waiting on her with her backpack already loaded. Punctual. Lorraine liked that.

It would have to be quick. The truck and van would head out at 7, and they weren't waiting around. Be there or be left behind. So, rather than risk delays at a sit-down restaurant, Lorraine and Gia decided that the Sonic Drive-In's breakfast menu was just right.

"Rance tells me it's been a sort of crazy week, that they had a bad practice earlier this week and Hemphill ran them til some players collapsed. What's going on?" Lorraine said.

Gia was as unsure as the coaches about the team's mindset heading into the Vandy game. She said that the team seemed to lack focus early in the week after the previous week's upset win over South Carolina. But since Monday afternoon's aborted practice, the wind sprints from hell and the players-only huddle on the practice field afterward, the team had been difficult to read.

"They're sort of ... quiet," Gia said between bites of her breakfast wrap. "I can't tell if it's resentment toward the coaches or if they're just really dialed in. I hope it's the latter."

"When I ask Rance about it, he just says that it's a thing the team is working through, that it's finding itself, and that he doesn't think it's necessarily a bad thing. He says guys aren't as chatty as they were, but he thinks they're paying a lot more attention."

"Well, tomorrow will tell," Lorraine said.

"How are the two of you doing? This is new for Rance. He had girl friends before, but not really a girlfriend. None of them owned his heart. You do. You really do, you know," Lorraine said. "Moms know it when they see it."

Gia smiled. "It's all sort of developing fast, but ... there's a bond with him that is very special. And it's real. I mean, neither of us are 20 yet, but we're pretty mature about things. I think we are pretty careful and sober about our relationship."

Lorraine put down her sausage biscuit and clasped Gia's hand.

"You are both young - very young. You're both very smart. I am getting to know you, but I know my Rance. He's always been sort of an old soul. Seemed like a 40-year-old in kindergarten. He doesn't do anything on a whim, without careful thought. He's always been like that," Lorraine said, looking directly at Gia.

"If Rance tells you he loves you, Gia, it's real. I know that he does and he knows that I know that he does," she said. "I sensed it the night I met you and I was a little concerned about it at first, but you are making a wonderful difference in his life, and I am so happy he has you ... and that you have him."

Gia could feel her heart turn cartwheels. She knew that Rance reciprocated her love for him, but it's always good to hear that reinforced by the woman who gave birth to him, raised him and knows him better than anyone on the planet. Gia's face beamed. She reached her left arm across the car's center console as best she could, still restrained by the passenger-side seatbelt, straining to hug the mother of the man she loved.

"Thank you, Mrs. Martin," Gia whispered.

"Lorrie," she said. "Please call me Lorrie."

The Volvo pulled back into the hotel parking lot at 6:55 a.m. The van was under the awning with its back open. Lorraine popped the rear latch and Gia grabbed her backpack. Lorraine walked with her to the van and hugged her again.

"Gia, you've got my number. Don't hesitate to use it any time you need to talk," she said. "And next time you're back in Chattanooga, I hope it's for longer than an overnight in some hotel by the interstate. Safe travels, dear girl."

A little more than four hours after breakfast with Lorraine, Gia and the other trainers were just outside Vanderbilt Stadium, offloading Fulbright's crates of specialized, secure communications gear from the trailer and pushing it into the visitor's locker room where it would be secure Friday night. The team arrived in midafternoon and was halfway through its walk-through when Rance spotted Gia there.

"How was breakfast?" Rance asked her as he walked off the field afterward.

"Very nice. Too short, but very nice. Your mom is wonderful. But we can talk about that more later," Gia said. "Bigger question - how are you? Nobody knows how to read the mood of this team."

Rance was uncharacteristically tight lipped, just like his teammates. Even with Gia.

"I think we'll be fine. Maybe better than fine. This is something we've never been through before, and maybe it's how things are when a team finds itself," he said. "We'll know by this time tomorrow."

Even though their relationship had not been a secret within the team for some weeks now, there was no parting kiss or hug. Just didn't seem right to either of them now. This was business, the night before the game. Both of them knew what that meant.

●●●

The sports pages, the podcasts, the cable sports talking heads had noticed the change in the demeanor of the Fulbright Generals, ranked No. 21 in the AP Poll and 22nd in the coaches' poll in USA Today.

Perry Hemphill was tight-lipped, not his usual glib, homespun self. And noncommittal.

"I really don't know how we will play when we take the field in Nashville this weekend. We are heavily favored over a quality opponent and I am never comfortable with that. You never know," Hemphill had told the beat writer for the Charlotte Observer.

Of course, when Nick Saban does that, as he does seemingly five or six times a season before Alabama faces a prohibitive underdog, nobody questions him or the likelihood that the Crimson Tide will be ahead by four or five touchdowns by halftime and that no starter will set foot on the field after the first possession of the second half. With Saban, it's dismissed as football a form of football psy-ops and expectations-management known since the days of its most celebrated practitioner, Bear Bryant, simply as "poormouth."

But when it came from Perry Hemphill the week after convincingly whipping South Carolina, the collective sports media cognoscenti diagnosed it as a malignancy that portended only another dark finish for the perennially woebegone Fulbright program.

USA Today's lead college football beat writer, a cliché-addicted shill for elite college football powers who specializes in imagining doom scenarios for upstart programs that enjoyed an encouraging run, had grimly predicted "a turning point scenario for this Cinderella season, and not one in which the glass slipper finds a rightful owner in Fallstrom, South Carolina."

Kirk Herbstreit fretted aloud on ESPN's "College GameDay" that morning that "something is off in this Fulbright program. You can feel it with the coaching staff and with the players I've spoken to." (Never mind that any player on the Fulbright team can recall ever speaking to Herbstreit.) And his prognosis, though not as hopeless as the USA Today writer, was that Fulbright was prime for a "course correction" against Vanderbilt.

So the narrative was out there: Something was suddenly amiss with the high-flying, expectations defying Generals.

The head coach was quietly encouraged by all the breathless and unfounded media lather because all the reporting he had seen had been pure fiction - at best lazy copycatting that pervades sports media and at worst unmitigated fiction. No reporter had found out anything that tipped off Perry Hemphill that the press was really on to something.

A few fly-by-night college football fan blogs had somehow spun up a fable that the school was under FBI investigation because a scout team player had left the team midweek to "focus on personal matters." One blogger, evidently citing his imagination as his source, suggested that there was a connection between the player and a company that runs a major online sports betting app. Another said the departed player had been a FBI informant. The truth, that nobody at Fulbright was about to divulge, was that the kid's mother had been diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer and the family wanted its privacy. And Hemphill assured the grief-stricken player that his scholarship would still be there if or when he wanted to come back.

Not that Hemphill was happy with the bogus reporting - his opinion of sports journalists was low to begin with. He was gratified that no one had figured out that the team had suddenly become introspective and introverted: they had been challenged and they were growing up.

The pregame mood in the cramped visitors' locker room was restive, a shared quiet commitment that was ready to boil over as kickoff approached. You'd imagine, had you not known better, that it was a team about to play for a national title. There was an intensity, born on that moment when Mojo Hale had challenged his teammates after Monday's practice, to realize the priceless opportunity that would be there for only this fleeting moment in their lives and to wholly dedicate themselves to seizing it. The only people who could recognize it for sure were the players themselves.

The game started out sloppy for the Generals, who took the field jacked up on their own natural adrenaline. Vanderbilt got inside the Fulbright 10 before its drive stalled because the team was too keyed up, moving before the snap, overrunning routes, overthrowing open receivers. The Commodores scored first, settling for a field goal, seeming to confirm the week's doomsayers. The Vandy drive was sustained by two defensive personal fouls and two offsides penalties. Twice, the penalties bailed Vandy out of third-and-long situations.

Hemp wasn't happy with the mistakes, but he was pleased that it was not an effort problem but, rather, the Generals had taken the field looking to punish this opponent. So before his team took the ensuing kickoff, he huddled his entire team around him.

"Guys, you may think I am here to ream your asses, but ...," he smiled and paused a second, " ... I see what's going on out there. You are ready, and I am proud of you. I want you to keep that edge, that intensity, but I want you to take a breath, calm down a little, play Fulbright by God football ... and have fun kicking the shit out of those guys."

Hemp had no idea the plague he had just unleashed on Vanderbilt. It was as though someone flipped a switch that brought Fulbright instantly to life.

It took Fulbright just four plays, all of them on the ground and three of them with the ball in Bookie Riemers's hands, to score the game's first touchdown. The offensive line was firing with the fury and precision of a Ferrari engine, tearing huge holes in the front line of a Vandy defensive front that had allowed no more than 170 yards rushing in any game so far during the season. Well, Fulbright gained nearly half of that in its first four plays. And it was just the first of seven Generals touchdown drives on the afternoon.

After its error-prone first series, the Generals defense shut down anything and everything Vanderbilt attempted. Outside the 65 yards the Commodores gained in their first drive - 40 of those yards from Fulbright penalties - Vanderbilt would gain only 180 more combined yards for the entire game for 245 yards of total offense in a 52-9 Fulbright rout. The stadium was largely empty except for Fulbright fans by halftime. It could have been considerably worse had Rance Martin, Mojo Hale, Bookie Riemers, Matt Gerow, Matt Crews and the rest of the starting offense not been benched midway through the third quarter with the game already out of reach to give the second- and third-team players some game experience.

In a fleeting break from their self-imposed no-displays-of-affection protocol in team settings, Rance wrapped his arms around Gia as she approached Rance while the final seconds melted from the scoreboard clock to congratulate him. There, in the Fulbright bench area on the east side of the field, he picked her off her feet and kissed her.

"Rance!" Gia said, self-consciously looking around.

"It's OK baby. This week cleared up a lot of things for everyone. See you soon as we get showered," he said.

Gia was helping push the large, green comms-gear trunk up the loading ramp and into the tractor-trailer for the overnight drive back to Fallstrom. The player buses would soon depart for the Nashville airport and the charter back to Charlotte and bus ride to campus. They only had a moment there beneath the stadium where Gia's parents were waiting.

"Whatever happened to this team during the week ... it worked," Ed Martin told his son. "Vandy's not as bad a team as you just made them look. Y'all had more yards against them by halftime than they allowed LSU in four quarters last week."

"I think we had to figure out our priorities," Rance said.

"Gia, where are y'all staying tonight? I wish you could fly back with the team," Lorraine said, holding her hand.

"I think we're going as far as Chattanooga again, probably the same hotel by the freeway, and make the last leg of the trip Sunday," she said.

"Well you're welcome to stay with us - ride with us - back to Chattanooga if they'll let you. We'll have you at the hotel at whatever time you have to be there in the morning to shove off," Ed Martin said.

Gia thanked them and said she had maybe another hour's work packing up before she could go.

"I'm good with that," Lorraine said, looking at Ed who nodding his agreement. "Do you think they'd let you?"

Gia looked at Rance for guidance. He nodded affirmatively.

"Why not? Can't hurt to ask. I think you'd rest better at our house than whatever motel they're booking y'all into tonight."

Gia disappeared, quickly asked head equipment manager Leroy Forbes for special dispensation for the ride to Chattanooga and returned less than a minute later smiling broadly. "He's good with it long as I'm ready to shove off at the Holiday Inn before 8 tomorrow morning."

A Nashville motorcycle cop's siren yelped from somewhere in front of the two buses that were almost boarded and ready for the police escort to the airport. Rance hugged his mom and dad and, for the first time in front of his parents, kissed Gia and told her to text him during the ride back to let him know she's OK. Lorraine Martin squeezed her husband's hand as their son and his girlfriend parted.

The buses pulled into the late-afternoon Nashville traffic with police sirens wailing and lights flashing. Lorraine told Gia that they were going to get their car, parked nearly a half a mile away, on the other side of Nashville's replica of Greece's Parthenon, and pull it just outside the stadium's visitors' team gate close to where the buses had just exited and wait for her there.

"You could use some pampering, Gia," Ed said after Gia had joined them navigating the family's Audi SUV just a couple of blocks east of Vandy's campus to a five-star restaurant he had favored since his days at Vanderbilt Law School. He ordered a pour of a very expensive Beaujolais for Lorraine and then looked at Gia.

"It's legal to serve children over 18 accompanied by their parents," he said, covering for Gia and conferring upon her a familial designation. She smiled.

"For both the ladies," he told the white-coated server. "Just water for me. I'm driving."

Gia feasted on an exquisite medium-well cut of veal, asparagus in hollandaise, and rice pilaf. A filling meal, a full day capped with an impressive win, the wine and the quiet hum of the car along Interstate 24 cruising southeast toward Chattanooga, made Gia drowsy. Feeling safe and cared for, she dozed off in the back seat and didn't wake until the car came to a stop in the circular drive in front of the Martin home.

It was a roomy, well-appointed, two-story Georgian white brick house in a well-to-to Chattanooga neighborhood, very comfortable but not ostentatious.

"Gia, why don't you take Rance's room. Follow me it's at the top of the stairs," Lorraine said. "You'll have your own bath all to yourself - the whole floor, in fact. Renee's off on a weekend church event over in Cherokee, North Carolina. So consider yourself at home because ... well, you are."

Gia hugged Lorraine goodnight - an extended embrace that conveyed meaning they both grasped. Gia closed the door, sealing herself inside the room that had been Rance's cocoon for most of his life, until he went to Fulbright a little over a year earlier. It was like a Rance Martin museum to Gia. Pictures of him at various points of his life on most every wall: with his father and an older man she presumed to be his grandfather holding a stringer of fish on a pier over a lake; an elementary school-aged Rance in a Little League uniform, his baseball glove on his left hand; Rance in the recent past in the midst of a group of jubilant football players holding a trophy in their midst; Rance in his gown and mortarboard at his high school graduation. Gia allowed herself to linger on each, getting lost in the scene, imagining how the two might have interacted had they known each other in those days. That's when the phone buzzed in her pocket.

She supposed it was Rance checking in on her and letting her know that the team had made it safely back to Fallstrom. It wasn't. Instead, it was from her mom with a one-word message: CALL.

NEXT: Chapter 4 - The Horror