Fourth Down and Out. Andrew Welsh-Huggins

      Columbus is a town in which almost anything is likely to happen and in which almost everything has.

      —James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times

      1

      “Hey! Woody Hayes!”

      I was almost home when I heard the man’s voice. I shouldn’t have turned around. Partly because I haven’t been called that name by anyone I consider a friend in close to two decades. And partly because events earlier in the evening should have alerted me to trouble.

      But turn around I did, and that’s when he hit me full in the face. With the flash of a cell phone camera.

      “Woody Hayes,” the man repeated. “I don’t believe it.”

      I stepped back, eyes adjusting in the dark to the flash, and made out a man in a ski mask a few feet in front of me holding a phone in one hand and something I couldn’t quite make out in the other.

      “What the hell?” I said, and instinctively raised the baseball bat I keep in my van and had carried with me on the short walk to my house just in case. Because of what happened earlier. Which shows what a doofus I was to turn around in the first place.

      That’s when I saw the shotgun.

      “Laptop,” he said. “Nice and easy and no one gets hurt.”

      “What if I say no?”

      “What if I blow you away and just take it?”

      “Why do you want it?”

      “Why don’t you shut the fuck up?”

      I debated my options. I didn’t want to give up the laptop. But I knew better than to try something dumb like pitting my bat against his gun.

      “All right,” I said. “It’s all yours.”

      “Set it down,” he said, gesturing with the gun. “And the bat too.”

      I followed his instructions. I lowered the cardboard box holding the computer onto the narrow, brick-paved street, then set the bat beside it.

      “Now turn around and get lost.”

      “Still curious why you want it,” I said.

      “Move it.”

      So I turned around, slowly, and started walking. I hadn’t made it more than ten feet when I heard the sound of boots on brick, turned back, and was just in time to raise my arms and deflect a blow from my own baseball bat that appeared to be destined for my head. I staggered back, forearms aching from the impact, which gave him just enough time to whack my left knee and send me staggering backward.

      “What the hell,” I said again. “I gave you the computer.”

      “That’s for the Illinois game, your senior year, shithead. I lost a hundred bucks on you.”

      “What are you talking about?” I said.

      “Should have been an easy bet. Didn’t know you were playing both sides.”

      The bat swung again, this time hitting my right forearm as I tried to shield my head.

      “Fuck-up,” he said. “That’s all you are.”

      “Get a life,” I managed. “That was twenty years ago.”

      “And that’s how long I’ve been wanting to beat the shit out of you.”

      “It was a football game. Get over it.”

      “Woody Hayes, fuck-up,” he said, swinging the bat once more.

      Maybe it was the pain in my arms and knee. Maybe I was pissed at hearing the old nickname. Maybe it was the laptop. For whatever reason, I found myself summoning the best approximation of a quarterback feint I had left, grabbed the end of the bat as it bounced off the brick instead of one of my body parts, then gripped hard and pulled my unknown assailant toward me. Surprised, he stumbled forward and fell in front of me. I reached over and ripped off the ski mask. A stranger stared back. A tough-looking guy with a menacing goatee and shaved head and what looked like a missing front tooth. There was nothing remarkable about his face except for what was tattooed from his left ear all the way down his neck, a design you don’t see every day, even in a football-crazy town like Columbus, Ohio.

      He had put the shotgun and computer down to play out his revenge fantasy, so I had one shot to get this right. I raised the bat and took a step forward as I prepared to inflict a return blow, and that’s all it took for my left knee, which has always been a bit tricky, especially when clobbered with my own Louisville slugger, to buckle. As I teetered backward he yanked the bat out of my hands and hit the knee again, sending me down hard. After that, the last things I remember were a string of his swear words interspersed with the word “fuck-up,” then another voice that wasn’t his or mine and might have been shouting something like “Hey—what are you doing?!”—and then something hard and sharp hitting my head, which just might have been one of his boots. I know it’s a cliché, but it’s also true: everything went black.

      What’s not a cliché is what happened next. I didn’t wake up in a hospital or on somebody’s couch or in the back of somebody’s car trunk, bound and trussed. I woke up exactly where I’d fallen, probably not more than ten minutes later, to the taste of blood in my mouth, the sound someplace close of sirens, and my bat lying on the curb in front of me. I tried to get up, lay back down, then remembered the laptop, pushed myself onto my knees, opened my eyes and looked around in the alley. Nothing doing. It was gone. Shit.

      2

      “One more time,” I said to the man sitting across from me. “What in God’s name possessed you to go into that girl’s room?”

      A day earlier. I was sitting at a window table at Cup o’ Joe in German Village, the all-brick neighborhood south of downtown I call home. The Sunday Columbus Dispatch was spread before me, my large black coffee was cooling beside it, and next to that sat an uneaten pumpkin muffin.

      “I don’t know,” he said for the third or fourth time. “I wasn’t thinking.”

      “Tell me something I don’t know.”

      I have a certain Sunday morning ritual, and like most people I don’t like it interrupted. Sleep in a little, wake up and slurp some coffee, get dressed without rushing, put a leash on Hopalong and walk him around the block, then stroll over to the coffee shop for round two, including some pastries, while I sit and read the paper. If I have time, I’ll browse in one of the thirty-two rooms in the Book Loft next door, then make my way home in time to leave for an 11:30 a.m. appointment I’m not in the habit of missing.

      But not today. I’d scarcely begun the paper’s extensive account of the Ohio State football team’s convincing victory over Penn State the day before when my cell phone went off. I didn’t recognize the number.

      “Hello? Is this Woody Hayes?” A man’s voice.

      “This is Andy Hayes,” I said. “May I help you?”

      “Andy Hayes?”

      “Andy