Love, Zac Read online

  Love, Zac

  Small-Town Football

  and the Life and Death

  of an American Boy

  Reid Forgrave

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2020

  To Megan, the one I want to impress

  Contents

  Prologue

  1 : The Seed

  2 : The Ancestors

  3 : The Father

  4 : The Hammer

  5 : The Coach and the Trainer

  6 : The Roller Coaster

  7 : The Doctor

  8 : The Reckoning

  9 : The End

  10 : The Future

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Zac Easter stood on the long wooden dock leading out onto Lake Ahquabi, gripping the .40-caliber pistol he’d given his dad for Father’s Day not even five months before.

  The sun had dipped over the horizon on the other side of the Y-shaped lake. Leaves lay in heaps on the fringe of the woods. The gusty November winds died down as the sun sank on the horizon, but there was still a chill in the air. Winter was coming. Zac took out his phone and snapped a picture. He posted it to Snapchat, ignoring the frantic phone calls that were pouring into his phone. God bless America, he captioned the photo.

  Where is Zac? All around Zac’s hometown, friends and family were terrified. They’d seen his Facebook post a few minutes before: “If your reading this than God bless the times we’ve had together. Please forgive me. I’m taking the selfish road out. Only God understands what I’ve been through . . . I will always watch over you!”* They needed to stop him. But how? They didn’t even know where he was. From the house where Zac grew up, a few miles away and amidst fields of corn, his parents called. Zac did not pick up. From the small town just down the street where Zac had played high school football, and from Des Moines, the big capital city not quite twenty miles to the north, his friends called. Zac did not pick up. At 5:36 p.m., a college roommate texted him: “Hey what’re you up to bud?” No reply. From the law school at Case Western Reserve University, almost seven hundred miles away in Cleveland, Ohio, Ali Epperson—Zac’s girlfriend, and the only person to whom he had fully confided his struggles with his rapidly deteriorating brain—called. Zac did not pick up.

  She called again.

  He did not pick up.

  She called again.

  Finally, Zac picked up. There was terror in his voice.

  “I can’t do this,” he told her. “It’s never going to get better.”

  Ali, a vivacious law student who in many ways was Zac’s opposite—a bleeding-heart liberal who balanced out Zac’s dyed-in-the-wool conservatism—was freaking out. How many hours had she spent on the phone with him, talking about the disease that seemed to be eating his brain from the inside? How many times had the two talked about the sport he loved, the sport that had consumed much of his childhood but now seemed to be consuming the rest of his life as well? How many times had she told him that a real man was not stoic and unfeeling—that a real man must face his demons instead of suffering silently in deference to some antiquated ideal of masculinity? How many times had she told him not to apologize to her, that she loved him despite the crazy stuff that was going on, and that they would work through it all together?

  Earlier on this day—Friday the 13th, of all days, in November 2015—he had apologized again. “I’m sorry you fell in love with a guy with a ducked up brain,” Zac had texted her, his phone’s autocorrect softening the swear word. He’d awoken early, started drinking, and called Ali in a panic late in the morning, shit-faced and swerving his car around the suburbs. She’d coaxed him to drive into a gas station, then into a Jimmy John’s to grab a sandwich and sober up. She’d calmed him like she always did. He’d apologized like he always did. She’d texted him back: “You can’t choose who you fall in love with. You just fall in love.” Then, he’d texted an ominous reply: “If anything happens to [me] just by a chance of luck. Tell my family everything.”

  Now, things were happening. A friend noticed the setting of Zac’s Snapchat photo: the beach on Lake Ahquabi, where Zac and Ali had escaped to in the summer to get away from high school friends and stare at the clouds. The lake was just down the road from his family’s house. The lake’s name is derived from an ancient Algonquian language. It means “resting place.”

  Ali kept Zac on the phone. “Listen to the sound of my voice,” she soothed him. “Listen to the sound of my voice.”

  “I’m losing my mind,” he cried. “This is it for me!” One Warren County Sheriff’s Office cruiser came speeding down the winding hill toward the lake, followed by another. “Ali, did you send these cops here?” The cops got closer to him. He started apologizing to Ali, and he told her he wanted his brain donated for research. Then, Zac’s phone cut out.

  Out on the dock, Zac pointed the pistol at the darkened sky and fired a warning shot.

  That is when a pickup truck sped down the hill and slammed to a stop next to the lake. Zac’s father, a burly former high-school football coach named Myles Easter, jumped out. The parking lot quickly filled with squad cars. One deputy, a former all-conference linebacker who played for Myles on the same high school team Zac had played for, trained his assault rifle on Zac. Lasers from other police rifles danced on Zac’s body. The evening was dark, and it was getting cold. Myles saw the cherry-red 2008 Mazda3 Zac called Old Red. He peered into the window of his son’s car. He saw an empty six-pack of Coors Light, an empty bottle of Captain Morgan rum, and a pill bottle.

  Floodlights illuminated Zac. A black curtain fell on the water behind him. Zac stood up from a picnic table and walked down the pier toward a wooden fishing hut at water’s edge. A few more steps, and he’d be inside, alone on the water, out of sight.

  “Put your gun down!” the deputies shouted.

  “Nope!” Zac yelled with an anguished laugh. “Not gonna do that!”

  In a flash, Zac’s father realized what was happening: Zac wants the police to shoot him. “Fuck it,” Myles said to himself. “I can’t let this happen.”

  Zac’s father sprinted past the sheriff’s deputies and onto the pier. “Zac!” he shouted. If he shoots me, he shoots me, the father thought.

  “Dad, stop!”

  As Myles Easter ran toward his son, Zac’s face came into focus. His blue eyes looked foggy and confused. The expression on his still-boyish face matched the tenor of his voice: sad, sick, exhausted, scared. Worn down by life. Beaten, once and for all.

  “Zac, I’m coming,” Myles said. “Put your gun down.”

  “Dad!” Zac shouted. “Dad, stop!”

  Then, gripping his father’s pistol, Zac disappeared into the fishing hut. The door slammed shut behind him.

  And Zac Easter was alone.

  * Zac’s often-haphazard spelling is retained when quoting from his diary and other writings.

  One

  The Seed

  Iowa’s capitol building sits on a grassy hill just east of downtown Des Moines. It marks the highest point on the east side of this Midwestern city. Atop the rectangular limestone structure, four smaller copper domes encircle one large dome in the center, which ascends 275 feet above the ground. The large dome is gilded with 150 troy ounces of 23-karat gold leaf. Six intimidating Corinthian columns rise up on each side of the building to ornately designed cornices at the roofline. The architectural message from this enormous edifice, for which the cornerstone was laid in 1871, seems to be this: Respect authority. Nearby is a newly hopping entertainment district that a little more than a decade before had a reputation somewhere between sketchy and abandoned.

  Across two parking lots and past an office building is the busy US Highway 69. Get on it and go south: over
the Des Moines River, past the car dealerships and the RV dealerships and the mobile home parks and the cheap motels. Pass the car washes and the immigrant-owned small businesses and the storage lockers. Pass the Home Depot and the Walmart Supercenter and the miles of suburban chain restaurants. Soon, the highway hangs left then swings back to the right, and the hills become rolling, the cornfields and forests vast, the chain stores and restaurants gone, the houses much fewer and farther between. I made this drive dozens of times while I lived in Iowa. It was always a calming feeling, the city melting away as rural America opened up before me.

  The skies are boundless. Christ Died For Our Sins, 1 Corinthians, reads a road sign. There are silos and grain bins, machine sheds and water towers. There’s an ad for a Harley Davidson dealership and a sign for a shooting range. Then, for a dozen miles, there’s not much but farm fields, filled with corn and soybeans in the state’s rich, silty soil that people here call black gold. This soil is what makes Iowa the place people mean when they talk about the nation’s breadbasket, a place disparaged or just plain forgotten about by the coasts but vital to the nation’s survival, and to its fractured and diverse national culture. A local clothing store sells a T-shirt with a map of the United States and an arrow pointing to the middle of the country. IOWA, the shirt reads. WAVE THE NEXT TIME YOU FLY OVER!

  The highway rises and falls, and soon buildings appear again. A Buick GMC car dealership. Calvary Baptist Church. Newly built suburban developments interrupting those endless miles of farm fields. A meat locker, a bait shop. Three huge cement towers that can store more than two million bushels of grain at Heartland Co-op’s facility. The Harley Davidson dealership, right next door to the John Deere dealership. And the National Balloon Museum, a reminder of what Indianola is best known for: a huge annual nine-day hot-air balloon festival each summer, during which nearly a hundred colorful hot-air balloons paint the Iowa skies.

  On the edge of this town of sixteen thousand residents, a half hour’s drive from the Iowa capital, a small sign—Indianola, Est. 1849—welcomes you to the place where Zac Easter was raised.

  Every four years, Iowa becomes a national caricature. Presidential candidates trot through the state to prove themselves worthy during the first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses. Iowans like to joke that for one month every four years, the rest of the nation cares about Iowa’s problems. Then, Iowans cast their votes, and the nation moves on. On national television news, Iowa is presented as a state of seed-corn hats and hay bales, Carhartt bib overalls and pork-chops-on-a-stick. But the character of this state makes it less a rural anomaly than a bellwether of the Midwest. As a transplant from the East Coast, I found Iowa an understated place, where people are less prone to shouting and more prone to understanding, and where natural beauty can be found not in snowcapped mountains or crashing ocean waves but in the quiet serenity of a summer breeze rustling over a soybean field. And it is a place where the values of the sport of football—of hard work and teamwork, of a community that rallies around a cause, of a faith that each of us is but a small, vital piece in a much grander plan—align perfectly with the values of everyday life.

  Now, leave the small town of Indianola and head a few miles into the country. Today is the day of the Iowa Hawkeyes’ spring scrimmage, and the university’s head football coach is talking on the radio. Like a mellower version of football-mad Alabama, the broadcast of the exhibition game reaches throughout the state of Iowa. As Iowa’s coach speaks about the returning players who make up his team’s beefy offensive line, drive past the graveyard, past the huge hay bales splotched on coffee-colored fields, past the farm pond where a rowboat is tied to a dock. Cows lounge near a rusting silo. The pavement stops, and the road turns to gravel. A sign reads: HAY FOR SALE. The hills climb and dive next to rows of newly planted corn, an antique windmill, and whitewashed fences that keep in the horses. A teenage boy zips by on his four-wheeler, heading from his family’s goat farm toward their house. A cloud of dust encircles you as you turn onto 92nd Lane. A few houses in, on five wooded acres of timber, sits the Easter household, the place where Zac Easter, all-American boy, grew into a man.

  Zac as a toddler

  They called him Hoad. On Saturday mornings, the three young Easter boys—Myles II was the eldest, then Zac, then Levi—would crowd around the television to watch Garfield and Friends. In the cartoon, Odie was the mutt who was Garfield’s best friend. With floppy ears and a tongue that constantly hung out, he was honest, kind, and impossibly energetic. Friends with everyone, he was mischievous yet lovable. A bit goofy, sure, but a truly decent being through and through. And all that stuff about Odie? That was Zac, too. “Zac never stopped running. Everything he did was at full charge,” said his mother, Brenda Easter. Over time the name evolved, the way nicknames do—Odie morphing into Hodie, Hodie shrinking to Hoad.

  Zac was a sweet, curious kid, always sporting a smile but seemingly programmed to destroy. At eighteen months, he climbed up the curtains, grabbed his grandmother’s prized china egg, dropped it, and broke it. As a kid, he went through four of those supposedly unbreakable steel Tonka dump trucks. He broke the first three and then, at age seven, disassembled the fourth, his boundless curiosity spurring him to figure out how the toy worked. At age eight, when an ambulance rushed by his house, siren blaring, Zac pretended to crash his bicycle to see if the ambulance would stop. (It didn’t.) The dimpled, boyish face that followed Zac until adulthood seemed to easily get him out of trouble: Who, me? The mischief was mostly harmless but always there. One winter, the family couldn’t figure out why the light bulbs on the Christmas tree kept bursting. Faulty wiring? Time to invest in new Christmas lights? Nope. Turned out the cause was Zac, taking swings at the bulbs with a baseball bat.

  As he got older, the blast radius got bigger. In the woods surrounding his home, he was Tom Sawyer reborn: undiluted, unleashed, Midwestern middle-class American boy. The Easter family’s acreage was just east of a piece of land made somewhat famous for its antique covered bridges—the part of the world where The Bridges of Madison County was filmed. Zac and his friends would head into the woods to play soldier, shooting one another with the plastic pellets of Airsoft toy guns, pretending to be the military heroes of movies they loved like Platoon or The Deer Hunter. He and his brothers would go on hikes to the creek, bringing along an artillery of Black Cat fireworks to blow up minnows and bullfrogs. (An unspoken agreement among Zac’s high school friends was that anytime anybody made a trip through neighboring Missouri, where fireworks could be purchased legally, they’d return with $100 or $200 worth of fresh ordnance.) As a teenager, he graduated to the family’s Honda Recon ATV, his first taste of real adrenaline, and real recklessness, too. He’d fly through the woods, bank on two wheels, and carve the tightest, fastest semicircles he could. He’d build jumps and hurtle over them. Zac knew these trails by heart. He could almost ride them with his eyes closed. “GODDAMMIT!” his dad would yell from the porch as he watched Zac’s close-cropped chestnut hair zip by. And Zac, as always, just kept going. “He really was reckless on that, just wild,” his father later recalled. “He was confident he wouldn’t wreck, always in control. Honestly, that’s what you want on a football team, too.”

  You weren’t a real member of the Easter family if you didn’t love guns. The three boys joined their dad on hunts starting when they were five or six. At age nine, each received his first firearm; by that point the boy was trained in gun safety and itching to shoot. The oldest son, Myles II, bagged a six-point buck his very first hunt with his dad. Levi, the youngest, would eventually become the best shot of the three. There was a rhythm to the family’s hunting trips: sitting in the tree stand, soaking in the silence, then moving around to rustle deer out from the woods. They’d spread out to be alone, keeping in contact with cell phones, and then they’d get back together. Always they kept an eye out for rattlesnakes.

  At the edge of the family’s backyard is where the tree line begins. Every night, the boys’ father
would grab a shotgun and a pistol, rustle up the family’s two rat terriers, Tito and Max, and go for a walk in the woods. Not a walk, really. More of a prowl. Myles Easter was looking for targets. Every January he tacks a new blank sheet of paper to the refrigerator. At the top of the sheet are the words KILL LIST. By the end of the year, the kill list is typically filled with more than a hundred animals: deer, squirrels, snakes, muskrats. He takes the list so seriously that he has placed several motion-activated trail cameras out there, so he’ll know if a prized big buck, or something even more exotic, has crept into the Easters’ territory. The boys would join their dad on his backyard hunts as well as hunts on the family land nearby. The best hunts would enter into family lore—or, with a perfectly placed shot and a bit of luck, onto a sacred spot on the wall in their living room with its vaulted ceiling. There, the family’s top kills lived on for eternity—the animals staring out from the two-story whitewashed drywall, with the help of taxidermy.

  One of the favorite Easter family hunting stories dates back to when Zac was a teenager. He and his father spotted a rabbit in the backyard. Zac raced inside and grabbed a .50-caliber muzzleloader, a huge rifle fit more for the Wild West era than the twenty-first century. Zac being Zac, he ran back outside and jammed way too much gunpowder into the rifle. He fired: BOOM! Their ears rang. Pieces of rabbit flew up to the tree line, with a bunny carcass spinning in the air. The Easter men couldn’t stop laughing for the rest of the night. Brenda Easter just sighed. This was her life as the only woman in a home of four testosterone-juiced men.

  Zac as a young boy.

  A forty-minute drive away is the Easter family timber, some eighty acres of wooded hills that aren’t suitable for farming. What they are suitable for is world-class deer hunting. And from the first day of deer season until the last each year—from right after Thanksgiving until right after New Year’s—Myles Easter and his three boys would spend every free moment roaming the family land. They would wake up well before sunrise, and Myles would cook up a breakfast of bacon and eggs. They’d jump into his Ford pickup and drive to the timber, sipping coffee the entire way. Sometimes they got a deer. Sometimes they didn’t. Either way—from when he was a young boy until he was a college graduate—these were the happiest days of Zac Easter’s life.