quarter-boy, all-American

flash fiction

The gridiron presents a parsed and calculated view of the universe – how its inherent nuance can be reduced to a series of unfortunate exacting lines and hashes, a tactical chessboard for the objective of human achievement. The coaches, bald and shiny as the war medals of generals or fat and mustachioed as robber barons, lay their thick fingers over laminate sheets with the schematics of this facsimile for purposes of algorithmic and soulless decision-making, relaying these to the pawns and hoping for perfect execution of both plan and mind, perhaps even of the players themselves as they overheat and burn beneath the Texas sun in the same helmets that serve to encourage them to impale each other with the crowns of their own skulls.

No, not all the players are pawns – one figure stands above the rest, combining the omnidirectional qualities of a queen with the end-game importance of a king: the quarterback. He alone is the source of insurgent individualism in contrast to the dictated movements of the others, the decision maker and improviser, the sergeant in the field.

Mike is one such individual. He looks up from the throes of the huddle and sees his father in the stands, wearing his signature cowboy hat, the same symbolic donning of Texan manliness adopted by Reagan, Bush, McCain. He’s glad his father’s name is not on the back of his high school jersey above his number 10.

DEWITT, it would read, too proudly, unlikely to accommodate the name’s appropriate camel-casing form of DeWitt, the Dutch origins de and Witt ham-fisted together into an unapologetic Americanization meaning the white one or the blonde one.

It is the perfect name for a quarterback, not for this reason of American-Aryan-ish nomenclature, but because it is the kind of name you could see in the mind’s eye affixed to some representation of the cowboy or other American West adjacent-tropes:

The sheriff who follows orders and makes snap decisions within the laws: Manning. Brady. Starr.

The deputy who doesn’t play by the rules: Jackson.

The bandit on a WANTED poster: Vick.

The Kansas rancher who rides side-saddle and shoots from the hip: Mahomes.

The French trapper in the bayou who could wrestle an alligator: Favre.

Christ, there was even a quarterback named for a state, a state famous for cowboys: Montana!

In many ways, the name is one reason why his school – not his coaches, in reality it was his school, by popular and subconscious derivation – made him quarterback, amongst the other reasons, similar to the ones he supposes his county always voted for Reagan, Bush, McCain: his drawl, his Brady-esque chin dimple you could bake an apple pie in, being a white one and a blonde one.

The expectations based on these superficialities weigh on young Mike DeWitt in a way they didn’t upon the likes of Reagan, Bush, McCain, or even his father, because he knows America is so much more than what is American, and that once you don the helmets, high school football players are all alike in that they are reduced to measurables of height, weight, and sprint-speed, mechanical bits to be smashed together over and over in a meat-grinder of plastic on plastic.

Yet it’s still up to him to provide the unquantifiable, the qualitative traits which serve to counteract the elder generation’s strictures relayed from the sidelines. He must answer the questions asked of his society without asking questions himself, for the gunslinger – of course, the quarterback is always a gunslinger – shoots first and asks questions later, even to answer questions of gunslinging.

He must find the archetype of cowboy hat-wearer America has yet to see, one which is American without the Americanisms, one which reconciles masculinity with the regality of the chessboard’s queen, one which is based not on name and look, but on character and humility.

Now, on fourth and long, with five seconds left on the clock, on a wilting Texas night in early November, he must decide: will he be carried in the arms of cheerleaders?

And as Mike DeWitt stands with homoerotic hands upon the glutes of his peer, he looks up at the faceless, nameless others across from him, all itching to spring into motion. Only he holds the key to what happens next, ready to twist it like he would into an F-150, to ignite the world into motion, as he does when he shouts the magic word, which is not, but might as well be:

“DRAW!”

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thanks for reading this story about a high school quarterback. even if you didn’t like it, maybe click the little heart button so that people who might will find it.

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BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS:

What do you think the new archetype of ‘cowboy’ is and should be?

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thanks for reading PNP, where quarterbacks become Mr. November.