The Education of Giacomo Jones Ch. 06

"Guys, this is the kind of field I like - 88 yards to the other team's end zone and we get to abuse them every inch along the way. And it starts right now. Let's kick these asses," Mason Gerow said before calling three plays — a short pass, a counter option play to the left, and then a deep pass — to be run in quick succession without a huddle as soon as the network returned from its commercials and play resumed.

At the conclusion of those three plays, Fulbright was on Florida's 29 yard line. From here on out, the plays would be signaled in from the sideline or Gerow would audible from the line. A simple dive play gouged Florida for 11 yards. The 38 read option again gained eight yards, giving the Generals second and 2 from the Florida 10. The coup de gràce would be a pass play to Mojo Hale run as a 38 read option fake. Hale caught the ball at the two yard line and knocked two Florida defensive backs who tried to stop him backward into their own end zone. Midway through the first quarter, the scoreboard read Fulbright 21, Florida 0.

When the Gator offense came back onto the field for its third possession of the game, the chirping had ceased. It's something a player recognizes in the eye of an opponent when his confidence has been crushed. Florida punted again after gaining just five yards on three plays, and Fulbright got the ball on its own 44. The Generals kept the ball on the ground to impose its will, further fatiguing Florida mentally and physically. Nine plays later with five seconds left in the first quarter, Gerow pushed the ball over the goal line from the two, and the rout was on.

In the second quarter, Florida showed signs of life. A speedy tailback who had lined up wide to the left of the formation slipped unnoticed behind the Fulbright secondary on an option pass and caught the ball as he streaked toward the end zone running a skinny post pattern. And just before halftime, the Gators got as close as the Fulbright 20 before a holding penalty and an intentional grounding call against the quarterback moved the ball back to the 37 where Florida kicked a field goal to make the score at intermission a more respectable 28-10.

The third quarter, however, began with a suffocating Generals defense that held the Gators to just three yards on three plays after taking the opening second half kickoff. After a booming 50-yard punt — a game highlight for Florida — Fulbright began another methodical drive from its own 31 and, eight plays later, had pushed the score to 35-10 on a shovel pass screen that Dorie Masters ran 12 yards, untouched, into the end zone.

By the end of the third quarter, Matt Gerow had taken his final regular season snap at quarterback. Masters, Riemers and Hale had left the game as well. And still Fulbright scored. Once the second- and third-team backfield had gotten its game legs under it, Perry Hemphill began pulling his starting offensive linemen from the field. By the time there was 10 minutes left in the game, none of the players on the field for Fulbright were starters. The reserves, however, attacked with the same intensity as the starters had, and Hemphill had given them free rein to run the entire playbook as circumstances dictated, not playing it safe.

"Run this motherfucker up," Hemphill told his reserve offensive players before they trotted onto the field. When Fulbright scored again on Florida's starting defense, the indignity became too much. A Gator defensive tackle was ejected from the game for taking a swing at a Fulbright lineman. A defensive end, the Gators top prospect in the NFL Draft, was flagged for targeting and ejected, meaning he would have to sit out the first half in the now highly unlikely event that Florida would go to any bowl.

When the game finally ended in a nearly empty Ben Hill Griffin Stadium at Gainesville, the Generals had a satisfying 42-10 victory and an end to a decades-long losing streak. The victory was made even sweeter by Florida's sullen response: running directly to their locker room at the end of the game without the usual postgame greetings and congratulations.

"How in the world do y'all explain to your fans and your mamas and daddies getting your asses kicked by — what did you call us? — 'sissy boys'?" Hal Donovan yelled at the wide receiver who had taunted him early in the game at the start of the play that Donovan forced a fumble from him. "How ya like me now, you little bitch?"

The Florida player had no response other than a raised middle finger extended from an arm in Donovan's general direction. Really, what could he say? He had earned his humiliation. But he couldn't muster even the baseline manhood it might have taken to look turn his head in his tormentor's direction, much less look him in the eye. And that told Donovan everything he needed to know about this sad husk of a man — an entire team of them, in fact.

●●●

The Battery in Charleston, South Carolina, takes on an almost dreamy aura some late afternoons in the fall and that was true on this balmy Saturday. Two days earlier, Calvita Jones had spent her most buoyant Thanksgiving in years among people she had just met who had welcomed her warmly. Well, Emily Gartlan, owner of the three-story, 9,750 square-foot, French colonial antebellum mansion across the narrow residential street from The Battery, welcomed her with open genuinely arms. Her foppish, Ivy League-educated kids had no choice but to follow suit.

Things got even better for Callie on Friday with the arrival in Charleston of Ed and Lorrie Martin, with whom she had forged a close bond over a long weekend escape to the Martins' secluded lake house in October. It was a covertly executed getaway from a predatory global media mob on the weekend immediately following the dire emotional and mental trauma the Geno Millions incident inflicted on Gia in her dormitory at Fulbright. Callie is convinced that if not for those days of quiet sanctuary on the shores of Watts Bar Lake, her daughter would not have recovered to the remarkable extent that she had.

Now, Callie and Gia held hands and strolled slowly, aimlessly along the paths of The Battery. It is a peaceful park that commemorates the Revolutionary and Civil wars. It stretches along the south shoreline of Charleston's oldest, most prestigious and history-rich precinct. Eternally mute ornamental cannons point across the water of Charleston Harbor toward the distant Fort Sumter, the fuse that in 1861 ignited the War Between the States.

"You know, the last time I can remember you holding my hand as we walked was when you were in second grade and your papa or I would walk you to elementary school at St. Elizabeth's," Callie told her daughter and saw her flash a warm smile in return.

So much had happened in their respective lives, especially in the past two months. Through it, Gia had been touched by her mother's unfailing care and Callie had been impressed by her daughter's resilience and resolve. It had brought them much closer than they had been in years.

"So have you made any decisions or developed any thoughts on where you'd like to plant your flag after you sell the Ridgefield Park house and leave New Jersey," Gia asked her mom.

Spartanburg had some nice areas, but most probably would not make her list of finalists, she said. Columbia was an energetic state capital town with a major state university infusing some youthful energy to it, but she felt it was barren and bereft of charm and character. If she was forced to liken cities according to retail establishments, Callie said, Columbia would be one big Costco..

"I really liked Asheville," she offered, referring to a city nestled in the Appalachians in southwestern North Carolina near the Tennessee border. She liked its walkable communities, its sizeable community of retirees, the fact that it's an unusually open-minded, somewhat progressive redoubt in a conservative region. For a town of just under 100,000 people, it had a distinct metropolitan feel.

"Never been there," Gia said, "but I haven't heard anything bad about it, either. A friend in the dorm who grew up there says it gets cold in the winters because it's so high up and that it's pretty common to see bears rummaging in your trash cans outdoors."

"Emmett's daughter told me the same thing," Callie said.

"The real estate agent? He has a daughter who lives there?" Gia said.

"Oh yes. Three grandchildren — two girls and a boy — in a renovated early 20th century Craftsman house just outside of downtown. They had us over to dinner there Tuesday night. They're a delightful family, big into the town's pretty impressive local arts scene," Callie said.

"Dinner with his family? That's another level of personal service, Ma," Gia said. "Either Aunt Semmie's really determined to sell you a house of Emmett sees something in you he likes."

"Oh ... pffft," Callie said, unconvincingly dismissing both notions with a wave of her hand. It was the enigmatic tug at the corner of her mother's mouth — the telltale sign of the start of a smile — that caught Gia's eye.

"Ma?" Gia said, turning as she walked to look at her mother. "Rovescia i fagioli, mamma." She knew that the exhortation to "spill the beans," made in Italian, would be much more irresistible than the same request in English.

"Oh ... he's ... he's just a very nice man," Callie said as her face blushed, the smile spread to involuntarily crease her face and her eyue twinkled. The smile was contagious, and it infected Gia immediately.

"My God, Ma, you like this guy!" she said. "This is huge. Tell me all about him. Tell me why he's making you smile and blush like un adolescente."

Callie was flustered and fidgeting, but the smile never left her face. This was a charade she knew she couldn't play with her genius daughter who always could see through her better than a doctor reads an X-ray. She shrugged.

"I do like him, Gia," she finally conceded, a sense of relief washing over her. "He's 63 and widowed. He was married 22 years before his wife was killed in a car accident by a drunk driver. They lived in Conway, South Carolina, which he says is a college town not far from Myrtle Beach. He was Gartlan's top-selling agent at the time but found Conway too depressing without his wife so Semmie made him the agent in charge of the Charlotte office and all the offices in that metro region of North and South Carolina, the most profitable in the company and the largest outside the headquarters here in Charleston."

Calvita Jones looked 20 years younger than she had when Gia last saw her just before she caught her flight home after the horrors of October. Her face seemed to glow.

"Emmett drove me here Wednesday night after we spent the day looking over Columbia. Then he drove up to Myrtle Beach to spend the holiday with his son and daughter-in-law, who are expecting their first child in April. He's stopping by tomorrow night and we'll head down to Savannah to check that out on Monday and then see if anything interests us in the Atlanta region Tuesday and Wednesday. I'll probably fly home next Thursday or Friday," she said.

He is Episcopalian, Callie said, which is something a devout Catholic would note. "But if you gotta be Protestant, it's a hell of a lot better than those crazy snake handlers they have down here," she said with a laugh. "And they call their services 'Mass' instead of just 'church.'"

"Oh my God, Ma, you're already talking religion? How serious is this?"

"It just came up casually. We passed this beautiful Catholic church here in Charleston as he was taking me to Semmie's and I noted now much it looked like the one I attended when I was a kid in Brooklyn," she said. "He mentioned that he's Episcopalian, but not an every-Sunday Episcopalian."

Gia hugged stopped walking and hugged her mother.

"You like him," Gia said. It wasn't a question but an assessment. "Maybe more than like him."

Callie chuckled and nodded slightly. "I do. I do like him. Nothing's happened romantically, but ... yeah, we've enjoyed each other's company these past few days. He's been widowed a long time. It's been nearly nine years for me. So we have a, um ... what's the word I'm looking for ... rapport. Whether it ever goes beyond that, who knows."

"Gia, the love of my life was and is always going to be your father. He's the man who was put on earth for me, God let us find each other, and you are the blessing it produced. No one else will ever reach that level," she said in a wistful, somewhat distant tone. "And I'm not looking for that."

"But at least Emmett has opened my eyes to the possibility of meeting someone I can enjoy life with, who can ease my loneliness and vice-versa, somebody I can laugh with, cry with if I need to. Someone to grow old with," Callie said. "A week ago, I couldn't make that statement. So ... we'll see."

Now back in the moment, Callie brought her eyes back from the distant horizon beyond Charleston Harbor to her daughter's face to see her silently, contentedly studying her mother's expression. Gia said nothing. She just hugged her mom again, and that Callie knew it conferred her only child's blessing on her pursuit of happiness.

By the time they returned to the Gartlan mansion, Rance, his two cousins and his dad were arrayed on chairs and sofas watching the annual intrastate battle between Auburn and Alabama, better known as the "Iron Bowl." Gia and her mom, a new convert to football, joined them for the few minutes before dinner - a Carolina Low Country feast of boiled shrimp, soft-shell crab and corn and locally harvested oysters.

Rance was on the sofa and, with all the seats there taken and no one offering her room to sit beside him, she perched on the edge the left arm of the sofa with her legs stretched across Rance's. She noticed one of his Yale-educated cousins cutting his eye toward her, a fleeting look of wordless disapproval. Rance missed it, attuned as he was to the game.

The game lacked its normal intensity. LSU had already locked up the SEC's Western Division title and a berth to play Georgia in the SEC championship game. With two losses on its record, Alabama was out of the conversation for a spot in the four-team college football playoff — if you consider four teams a playoff. And Auburn, having fired its coach shortly after midseason, was under the interim leadership of a former War Eagle player as the quarrelsome, filthy-rich boosters who run things there, scoured the coaching landscape for a coach who might challenge the dominance of Nick Saban and Bama.

By the second half, the contest was more like a track meet than a football game with the Tide scoring at will over its cross-state nemesis. So even Rance, who had just been selected second team All-SEC at right tackle, lost interest.

"It's almost time for supper," Rance said, patting Gia on her arm. "I need to go back to the cottage and freshen up. You?"

"That wouldn't hurt," she said as she pulled her legs off Rance and stood, allowing Rance to do the same.

Aunt Semmie had assigned Rance and Gia the only two-bedroom accommodation. It was named Cooper Cottage for the Cooper River which empties into the harbor just a few hundred feet to the east of the Gartlan compound. To get there required a stroll over a pea gravel path through a garden of flowers and blooming shrubs and ornamental trees, some of which would likely be in bloom at any given month of the calendar. Gia and Rance drew the two-bedroom cabin to at least sustain the plausibility that they were sleeping separately — a tacit don't-ask-don't-tell arrangement.

Rance and Gia did the hosts the favor of sleeping in both beds — one on Saturday night, another on Sunday night — to either confirm their naivete or leave them guessing.

"So those are your cousins? Interesting," Gia said. "I had a cousin, my dad's sister's son in Jamaica. He was a sweet boy but he got mixed up with the wrong gang and wound up in the wrong street corner at the wrong time and was shot to death in Kingston. He was only 17."

Rance shook his head as they walked slowly through Semmie's elaborate garden.

"I'm sorry, baby. I don't think I knew that about you. Did you know him well?"

"I'd see him maybe once a year, every other year. He'd visit the city with his mom and we'd gather on the Jersey Shore for a couple of days. Dad took us down to Jamaica three or four times when he'd visit his sister. But after Dad died, the visits just stopped. Jamie was killed a couple of years later. He was four years older than I am. I still miss him and I miss Aunt Sis, too. I send her a Christmas gift every year but I don't hear anything back."

"As you can see firsthand," Rance said, "Tucker and Forrest are not the most endearing people in the world. Been that way pretty much since I've known them, but it's worse since Tucker went to Yale and Forrest went to Penn. They look down their nose at everybody, think they're the smartest folks in any room, but they're actually pretty slow."

"Don't let the snobbishness get to you, but if they decide to give you the treatment, feel free to peel the hide off them. They'll have earned it. I did it once and they quit fooling with me, but they have no idea how out-of-their-league smart you are."

"What's the treatment?" she asked.

Rance chuckled. "You'll know it when you see it, and you'll know what to do. They like to pile on together and see if they can embarrass somebody or make them look stupid. They usually do it at the dinner table just to unsettle guests. Rude as hell. Just expose them for the lightweights they are with a smile on your face."

"Will Aunt Semmie kick us out of here for that?" she said.

"Aunt Semmie will love it and be silently rooting for you," Rance said. "She hated the way Frank raised those two to think they were too good for ordinary people and look down on them. He nurtured their toxic conceits."

"If it helps, remember this: Tucker was rejected when he tried to get into Yale Law. Same at Harvard, Penn and Dartmouth. And at Duke and Virginia. He wound up barely making the cut at Washington & Lee, and then only after Semmie agreed to make a generous donation. And Forrest ... he's a senior at Princeton and was told last year by his academic adviser to transition out of pre-law because ... well, he doesn't have what it takes to get into Princeton Law or any other Ivy League law school," Rance said. "Just wanted to arm you with those fun facts in case you get the treatment."

"Mmm hmm," Gia purred. "And how long before you get to give me the treatment and vice-versa," she said as she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him in for a sensual kiss.

"Let's go shower, see how dirty we can get soaping each other up and see what happens," Rance said.

●●●

The home was massive — 9,750 square feet in all and, as Aunt Semmie would say, "costs a fortune to cool in the summer — with a dozen bedrooms, nine full bathrooms and three half-baths and, to the rear, a collection of cozy, modern guest cottages interspersed within an elaborate garden that remained in bloom nearly all year.

Gia and Rance were assigned Cooper Cottage near the secure rear gate as an accommodation to what Aunt Semmie knew would be a late arrival necessitated by their late return with the Fulbright football team to Fallstrom from Gainesville, then the three-hour drive from the Piedmont through the Low Country into Charleston after that.

They were so exhausted that they were barely able to take their shoes off before they collapsed into the plush, four-poster bed with its gauze canopy and a profusion of soft, frilly pillows for 10 unbroken hours of sleep.

Not only had the final game of the season on a short week of practice drained them, the weight of a staggeringly consequential regular season and all that had transpired since two-a-days began in August was now, at least for the moment, off of them. During that span, Fulbright had won 10 regular season games with the opportunity for an eleventh ahead in whatever New Year's bowl game they drew. That eclipsed Fulbright's previous best total of nine wins in a season, and that was counting a bowl victory over Northwestern during the Eisenhower Administration.