QB 1 (11 page)

T
HE NEXT THURSDAY NIGHT, TEXAS FACED KANSAS IN LAWRENCEVILLE
for a prime-time televised game. Troy and Libby Cullen flew up to Kansas to watch. Unfortunately, Wyatt Cullen, enjoying his own dream freshman season, finally played a nightmare of a game.

Jake watched it in his dad's den with Bear and Nate and couldn't believe what he was seeing from his brother.

Four picks, just one touchdown pass, not even two hundred passing yards, finally getting benched in the fourth quarter, the Longhorns losing 31–7, the TV announcers wondering if the 'Horns might go from number four in the country all the way out of the top ten.

When it was over, Bear and Nate fixing to leave, Nate said, “Looked like one of those identify-theft deals to me.”

“No, it was my brother,” Jake said.

“Holy crap,” Bear said, “you mean he's . . .
human
?”

On the phone afterward, calling from his hotel, Troy Cullen said to Jake, “You watch?”

“Course I watched,” Jake said.

“The whole darn country watched,” Troy Cullen said. “Tell me again who you got tomorrow night?”

“Kersey.”

“Well, can you at least get the family one win this weekend?” Jake's dad said.

Jake said he was sure going to try.

The Cowboys did get another win the next night against Kersey, Casey throwing for two touchdowns, Jake running for one on a sweet bootleg. It ended up 28–13, Granger. They were starting to roll now. Jake felt he'd come back from playing the way he had against the Chirita 'Cats and the hit to the ribs he'd taken, felt like he was about to get on a roll himself.

But when Jake was riding around with Bear late Saturday morning, the callers to the radio weren't talking about the Cowboys in Granger, how good the Cowboys were going, even whether or not they liked Jake better or Casey.

Most of them were still talking about how bad Wyatt had looked against Kansas.

Amazing,
Jake thought.

It was still all about his big brother, even when the other team did everything except throw him down a flight of stairs. When Jake and Bear finally showed up at Stone's Throw for lunch, first thing Bobby Ray said when they walked through the door was, “Some game.”

“Sure was,” Jake said.

Only Bobby Ray Stone didn't mean Granger vs. Kersey.

Bobby Ray said, “Never saw your brother throw that bad in his life.”

Amazing.

The 'Horns came home and had a hard practice on Friday—Wyatt saying on his Facebook page that “Coach made us practice soon as the plane landed”—but then their coach gave them Saturday off. So Wyatt drove home in the morning, showed up in time for lunch, Jake thinking that his brother hadn't lost a football game since his junior year at Granger, wanting to see how he'd react, getting knocked down on national television.

Right away he saw that this wasn't Wyatt the cocky college boy he'd seen the first time he'd come home from Austin, everybody gathered around him at Amy's.

“Just needed to get away from Longhorns football for a day,” he said when they were all at the table. “Man, I forgot what it was like to get thrown down a flight of stairs like that.”

“That's exactly what it feels like, a spit-storm like that,” Troy Cullen said, “like you're just fallin' all over yourself and can't do a thing to stop it.”

“I knew everything wasn't going to go right all season,” Wyatt said. “I just didn't think it would go
that
wrong.”

“Just one game,” his dad said. “Good wake-up call, that's the way I look at it. Now you got time to regroup before the Red River game. Just one game.”

Texas-Oklahoma, as big a regular-season rivalry game as there was in college football.

Wyatt said, “You listen to the callers on the radio, they already think that Chris Bishop ought to be back in there by then.” So he'd been listening, too, maybe all the way home.

Chris Bishop had briefly started for Texas the season before as a sophomore, but Wyatt had flat beat him out in the preseason, the way he'd ended up beating out all the other quarterbacks on the roster. Chris hadn't done anything except mop up in Texas victories until the Kansas game.

“Oh, don't listen to that bull,” his dad said, everybody at the table knowing he wanted to say more, and worse. “Don't be listening to those people. Most of 'em don't know whether a football is blown up or stuffed with horsefeathers,” Troy Cullen said.

Finally Wyatt grinned.

“Gee, Dad, none of us ever heard that one before,” he said, and they all laughed.

Jake said, “Though I do believe that when Mom's not around it's not feathers.”

“By the way,” Wyatt said, “how's little brother doing? I heard you got flattened by a sixteen-wheeler against Chirita.”

“Wasn't so bad.”

“Man, the only thing scares me more than a blind-side hit like that is snakes.”

“The kind that used to make you squeal like a pig when you saw one?” Jake said.

Wyatt said, “Were you this funny when you were younger?”

“I was,” Jake said, grinning at him. “Leastways when I was allowed to talk at the dinner table.”

Then they were all back to talking about the Kansas game, Troy Cullen mostly, acting like it was his job to make Wyatt feel better about it, somehow convince him it wasn't as bad as he thought it was. But Wyatt, to his credit, wasn't having any of it, finally quoting his dad about how game film never lied and neither did the stat sheet.

“Still only counts as one loss in the standings,” Troy Cullen said.

“Am I allowed to change the subject to a game that our other son
won
last night?” Libby Cullen said.

“Not only allowed,” Wyatt said, “but encouraged.”

“Boy's lookin' more comfortable back there all the time,” Troy Cullen said, then turned to Wyatt and said, “Which is the way you're gonna feel when you get back at it against Oklahoma.”

Jake shot a quick look over at his mom, saw her smile and shake her head, as if in that moment she and Jake weren't even there.

Or as if she was just giving up for now.

Whether she wanted to accept it or not, at this table, in this family, there was no quarterback controversy, because Wyatt came first.

Win or lose.

The best Jake had ever figured, his whole life, from the first time he started thinking about these things, was that his dad loved him
differently
than he did Wyatt. Who
had
come first, no way around that. Who was the
real
QB-1 in the family, least in all the ways that mattered. Who'd been the best player in town from the time he was seven years old. Who'd become the star at Granger High. Who now had the job that their dad had always dreamed about having, quarterback of the Texas Longhorns, all the way up to number four in the country. It was big-time, Jake had to admit.

When lunch was cleared, Wyatt and Jake went into their dad's study to watch the Notre Dame game with him while Libby Cullen went off to play doubles with some of her friends at the tennis club, a rare day off for her from football.

It was at halftime that Wyatt said to Jake, “You want to go out behind the barn and throw the ball around, see if I can remember how to do that proper?”

Jake said, “Been waitin' for you to ask, brother.”

On their way through the door, they each tried to hip check the other into the door frame, same way they had been trying to do that to each other their whole lives, Troy Cullen calling after them not to screw around when they got outside and get themselves hurt.

“If something does happen to me,” Wyatt said to Jake in the hall, “you think Dad could step in against Oklahoma?”

“I heard that,” Troy Cullen said from the study.

“You were supposed to,” Wyatt said back to him.

“You think Archie Manning takes this much lip from his boys?” Troy Cullen yelled as his boys headed through the kitchen.

Wyatt said, “I think we established a long time ago that we aren't Peyton or Eli. And you
sure
aren't Archie.”

Then Wyatt laughed again, like he was starting to feel better. The sound of his brother's laughter made Jake feel better, too. Maybe this was what his mom meant when she called him a pleaser, Jake wanting to help his brother let go of the Kansas game, same as their dad did.

This was a corner of the pasture that had always belonged to Wyatt and Jake, one their dad made sure was mowed nice for them. It wasn't as long as a real football field, maybe seventy-five yards. And as football-crazed as their dad was, he'd never painted yard lines out here or put up goalposts.

Still, you could have a solid touch football game out here, and run solid pass routes. It was here, Jake knew, that he'd first learned about being a quarterback, just watching his dad work with Wyatt.

Troy Cullen would work with Jake when he was bigger and older, teach him the same fundamentals, telling him that this was the way he'd done things when he'd played. Or just flat telling him to do them the way Wyatt did. Like they were supposed to be the same player. It wasn't until Jake had started working with Coach Jessup that he really heard somebody telling him to be himself.

Jake wore Granger blue shorts and an Ole Miss T-shirt he'd bought online, in honor of Eli. Wyatt had changed out of his jeans after lunch and wore an old pair of khaki shorts, an orange Texas T-shirt with the famous horns on the front.

After they'd warmed up for about five minutes, soft tossing, Wyatt said, “You changed your motion.”

“Didn't think you'd notice.”

“You kiddin'? Been watching you since you could barely see over the center in peewee ball.”

Jake explained how it had been Coach J who'd done it, and how once he tried dropping down just a little, it felt more comfortable, and now he was sticking with it because it was working for him.

Jake said, “Dad was none too pleased when he finally saw me throwing like this in a game.”

They moved back a little now, putting more on their throws, Jake smiling to himself, thinking that it wasn't just his brother out here with him, it was the quarterback of the Longhorns.

“Shocker about Dad,” Wyatt said. “What'd he say, that you'd stopped throwing like me?”

“Pretty much.”

“Course you know that's just code for him telling you he wants you to throw like
him.
”

“Yeah.” Jake threw his brother a tight spiral, putting some snap on it.

“Looks good to me,” Wyatt said.

Now Wyatt threw hard, the ball stinging Jake's hands, like Wyatt showing off
his
arm. An unspoken contest that had been going on for as long as Jake could remember, even being four years younger. Never just a game of catch, not with him.

More like a game of catch-
up.

Jake said, “You better move back. I can see you're babying that college arm of yours, but I feel like I got my good heater going today.”

“Babying?” Wyatt said, and threw one now like he was throwing into double coverage, like he wanted to knock his kid brother down if he could.

“Oh,” Jake said, “so it's gonna be like that?”

Wyatt grinned. “Hasn't it always, little brother?”

Jake knowing that Wyatt was always going to call him that, even if Jake ended up being bigger than Big Ben Roethlisberger.

They started running pass patterns for each other after a while, both of them starting to air the ball out big-time, Jake realizing—maybe for the first time in his life—that he had as much arm as his older brother did.

When they finally took a break, both of them hitting the water bottles they'd brought out here with them, Wyatt said, “I forgot how much losing sucks.”

“Dad's right,” Jake said. “One game.”

“You start to think that college is gonna go the way high school did, that you're just gonna crush it,” Wyatt said. “Till you go and
get
crushed.”