Nobody Can't Catch Me

Friday night. Stadium lights. Scoreboard: TROJANS 21 — GREEKS 17, and the clock bleeding out in the 4th. The GREEKS are driving. In the huddle: AGGIE, the quarterback, helmet in hand, jaw set — and not at the Trojans. At PARIS, #10 in white across the field, who took Helen right off Aggie's brother's arm.

AGGIE (low, then louder — the fit coming on) — I don't care about the game. I care about that guy. Ten. In the white. He took her like she was a coin toss.

ACHILLES (the running back, bouncing, all engine) — So put me up the middle. I'll run the whole roster over flat. Twenty-one to seventeen — give me the rock, we go home winners.

AGGIE — They're keying on you, big man. Eleven hats in the hole on your first step.

A beat. Then — from the edge of the huddle, easy, already grinning — OZZY. #0. The receiver nobody's covered clean all season.

OZZY — Muscle loses to a wall. Yelling loses to a wall. (taps his own temple) You beat a wall with what's up here. Run The Horse.

AGGIE — The trick.

OZZY — Fake it to Achilles. Hand 'em the whole gift, let the wall of Troy swallow it. Then the reverse comes back behind 'em — ball's with me before they know it left. (shrugging, delighted) They chase me where I was. I'm already where they're gonna be.

ACHILLES — And when they hit me and I've got nothing?

OZZY — Then they hit nobody. Same as all night. You can't cover smoke, big man.

AGGIE looks at PARIS one more time. Looks at OZZY. Nods once — the general handing the war to the trickster.

AGGIE — The Horse. On one. (claps) Break.

They break. OZZY jogs out wide, alone on the numbers, bouncing. The crowd is a wall of sound. He looks dead into the Trojan secondary and mouths it — catch me — as the number kicks.

Button. The snap. Fake to Achilles — the whole white defense collapses on the gift — the reverse — and OZZY is gone up the sideline into the lights, untouched, as the gun sounds. GREEKS WIN. The team mobs Achilles at midfield, mobs Aggie — and Ozzy stands alone in the open field, the one man nobody could reach, the crowd chanting a name that means no one. He proved it: they can't catch him. Nobody can hold him either. He looks toward the dark past the lights — toward home — and the celebration roars on without him. Blackout. Now comes the long way back.