“Rex!” someone called from the other side of the door. “Are you in there? Are you decent? Please tell me you don’t have a dead hooker in there! Open this up or I’m gonna break it in! Rex! Rex!”

Okay, Rex tried to say, and no sound came out of his mouth. His lips had dried and gummed shut. Nevertheless, he felt an overwhelming sense of relief. It was Bisciotti.

“Rex? Oh, fuck.” This last was in a lower I’m-trying-to-have-a-rational-discussion-with-Joe-Theismann voice of futility, and was followed by a thump as Bisciotti threw his shoulder against the door.

Rex got to his feet and the whole world wavered in and out of focus for a moment. He got his mouth open at last, his lips parting with a soft rip that he felt rather than heard.

“That’s okay,” he managed. “That’s okay, Steve. I’m here. I’m awake now.”

He went across the room and opened the door.

“Christ, Rex, I thought this was San Felipé all over again…”

Bisciotti broke off and stared at him, his brown eyes widening and widening until Rex thought: He’s going to run. You can’t look that way at anyone or anything and not take to your heels as soon as you get over the first shock of whatever it was.

Then Bisciotti kissed his right thumb, crossed himself, and said, “Are you gonna let me in, Rex?”

—

Bisciotti had brought better medicine than Dr. Chao’s – Chivas. He took the bottle out of his calfskin briefcase and poured them each two fingers worth. He touched the rim of his plastic motel tumbler to the rim of Rex’s.

“To the big dance,” he said. “How’s that?”

“That’s just fine. Sure hope to get back someday,” Rex said, and knocked the shot off in one big swallow. After the explosion of fire in his stomach had subsided to a glow, he excused himself and went into the bathroom. He didn’t need to use the toilet – he’d dropped a burrito-size growler an hour ago – but he thought out of respect for his visitor it was time to finally flush it down.

“What did he do to you?” Bisciotti asked. “Did he poison your locker room?”

Rex began to laugh. It was the first good laugh in a long time. He sat down in his chair again and laughed until more tears rolled down his cheeks.

“I love you, Steve,” he said when the laughter had tapered off to chuckles and a few shrill giggles. “Everyone else, including Michelle, thinks I’m crazy. Even Rob!  Do you know how far gone you must be when Rob is telling you that you’ve gone off the deep end?  The last time you saw me I was eighty pounds overweight and now I look like I’m trying out for the part of the scarecrow in the gritty reboot of The Wizard of Oz and the first thing out of your mouth is ‘Did he poison your locker room?’ ”

Bisciotti waved away both Rex’s half-hysterical laughter and the compliment with the same impatience. Rex thought, Ike and Mike, they think alike, Izdik and Bisciotti, too. When it comes to vengeance and counter-vengeance, they have no sense of humor.

“Well? Did he?”

“I suppose that he did. In a way, he did.”

“Like what happened in Tampa?”

“No, not exactly.”

“How much weight have you lost?”

You runna my team inna the groun’, fat man, he heard Izdik say, I never take it off you.

“How much weight, Rex?” Bisciotti repeated. His voice was calm, gentle even, but his eyes sparkled in an odd, clear way. Rex hadn’t seen a man’s eyes sparkle in quite that way since his own dad’s did, that winter afternoon after Gilbride’s chuck and duck antics against the Jets had cost the Oilers defense a pair of players, and it made Rex a little nervous.

“When this began – when I came out of the team facility in Florham Park and that bastard touched me – I weighed three hundred and fifty pounds. This morning I weighed in at two hundred and sixteen just before lunch. That’s what … a hundred and thirty-four pounds?”

“Jesus and Mary and Joseph the carpenter from Brooklyn Heights,” Bisciotti whispered, and crossed himself again. “He touched you?”

This is where he walks out – this is where they all walk out, Rex thought, and for one wild second he thought of simply lying, of making up some mad story of a MRSA outbreak. But if there had ever been a time for disguising your blitz package, it was gone now. And if Bisciotti walked, Rex would walk with him, at least as far as Bisciotti’s car. He would open the door for him, slap him on the ass, hard, and thank him very much for coming. He would do it because Bisciotti had listened when Rex called in the middle of the night, and sent his rather peculiar version of a doctor, and then come himself. But mostly he would perform those courtesies because Bisciotti’s eyes had widened like that when Rex opened the door, and he still hadn’t run away.

So you tell him the truth. He says the only things he believes is that defense wins championships, and that’s probably the truth, but you tell him the truth because that’s the only way you can ever pay back a guy like him.

He touched you? Bisciotti had asked, and although that was only a second ago it seemed much longer in Rex’s scared, confused mind. Now he said what was the hardest thing for him to say. “Not like, a Trestman or Childress touch. It was just a caress on the cheek. But he didn’t just touch me, Steve. He cursed me.  And he didn’t just curse me.  He cursed all of us.  The whole team.”

He waited for that rather mad sparkle to die out of Bisciotti’s eyes. He waited for Bisciotti to glance at his watch, hop to his feet, and grab his briefcase. Time sure has a way of flying, doesn’t it? I’d love to stay and talk over this curse business with you, Rex, but we’ve got training camp opening up in a couple weeks, and…”

The sparkle didn’t die and Bisciotti didn’t get up. He crossed his legs, neatened the crease, brought out a package of Camel cigarettes, and lit one.

“Tell me everything,” he said.