“I’m not going to give you any long sermon,” he says. “We all know what we’re here for, we all know what we have to do.” He reaches into his handbag and pulls out a newspaper clipping. “Before you go out there, I want to read you something. This is from yesterday’s Chronicle. I thought you might like to hear what Harv Matision has to say about Killerbowl XXI. ‘This Killerbowl stuff is getting to be old hat to me,’ he says. ‘I mean, it gets kind of repetitious. Every New Year’s Day, regular as clockwork, I kick hell out of the Prospectors. I wouldn’t complain if it was at least good exercise but, hell, I’d get more of a workout by staying home and getting laid. Although I guess playing the Prospectors is almost the same thing. Either way, I wind up giving a bunch of pussies a good fucking over.”

Carrerra wads the sheet up and tosses it on the floor. “After something like that, do I have to get you up? Do I have to give you a reason to go out and win this game? Look up there.” He points to a faded XXI written in chalk on the locker room blackboard. “That’s where we’ve been going all year, and now we’re here. Why? Because we’re the best damn team in the league. We’re winners. And we’re gonna show ‘em we’re winners. Matision, the Minutemen, and the whole god damned world. Now, let’s go out there and play football.”

Orval Frazier hits the locker room door. “Fucking aye,” he screams, and he’s out on the street. The rest of the team follows after.

T.K. hangs back. From here on, Carrerra is little different from millions of other Americans. He’ll watch the game on television just like everybody else. Nothing less, nor more, than an observer to its self-ordained ebb and flow. He’s performed his function, done his duty. He’s given his men everything he thinks they need to win. It’s too late to take part of it back or add more. He’ll see them at the quarter timeouts, but in less than an hour he can’t undo what will have gone on in the five and a half hours before. When his last man takes to the street to start the game, he enters a state of limbo, powerless to aid in victory, a foremost object of blame in defeat.

“Any final instructions?” T.K. asks as if there could really be any that mattered.

Carrerra stares balefully up into T.K.’s eyes. He has genuinely solicitous emotion in his voice when he speaks. “Just go out and win the son of a bitch, T.K. Just you go out on that street and you win.”

T.K. nods, and trots out after his team.

Saturday, February 20, 2010