"Yeah?" Scoop's eyes brightened. He reached for his pencil.

"Now wait a minute. We're still just talking, Scoop. If you put this in the paper and it doesn't happen, you'll look dumb. You might even screw up our chances of convincing those guys."

"Right." He nodded. "I'll make you a deal. You look at the former issues, but if the plans for the game look definite, let me know so I can break the story."

"Anything you say."

So I went to the corner and started sorting through the papers. They smelled like a mouldy cellar. I almost sneezed.

Fifteen years of them. How many weeks in a school year? Forty? A lot of issues. But looking through them wasn't as hard as you'd think. See, the only issues I wanted were the ones in the football season. And I only wanted the issues since Coach Hayes had come to the school eleven years ago. It took me less than half an hour. And this is what I learned.

The first two seasons when Hayes had coached were awful. Worse than that. Disastrous. The team never won a game. A total zip.

But after that? Winning season after winning season.

With these facts in common. The games we won had lopsided scores in our favor, but the opposing team always managed to get on the board. And every season, we lost one game, the first or the seventh or the third, no consistent pattern there. And the teams that beat us varied. But the score was always zero for us.

Because he didn't bring out Mumbo Jumbo?

I know that's crazy. Next thing you'll figure I believe in horoscopes and fortune telling and all that crap. But I swear it made me wonder, and remember, you weren't on the field to see those creepy double images. In my place, you'd have started to wonder too.

By then, Scoop was leaning over my shoulder, squinting at the paper in front of me.

"Something the matter, Scoop?"

"Just nosey."

"Yeah."

"I see you're reading about the game the team lost three years ago."

"I wasn't playing then."

"I know. But I was a cub reporter for the paper then. I was there that night. I remember thinking how weird that game was."

"Oh?"

"All those perfect games, and then a real dog."

"Well, nobody plays good every game. Hey, thanks, Scoop. Anything I can do for you, just – "

"Let me know about the reunion game."

"Believe me, you'll be the first."

And that's what started things. With some bad moves from a new kid on the team whose name was Price. See, he wouldn't keep his grades up. Maybe he was just stupid. He soon started acting that way.

Coach Hayes followed through on his threat. No grades, no play. So Price got kicked off the team.

But Price had a father with a beer gut who'd been a jock when he was in high school, and when Price started whining, the father went whacko over what he said was an insult to his kid. "I don't care about his grades. You think I want him to grow up with ulcers, trying to be a brain. Football's been good for me. It gave me character, and I know it's good for my boy's."

No major problem. Just your basic asshole father sticking up for his kid. But Coach Hayes wouldn't budge, and that's when Price broke the rule.

You might remember reading about it back then, and I'm not talking about the high school paper. The local Courier. Then the major paper in the state. Then… FATHER OF HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL PLAYER ACCUSES TEAM OF DEVIL WORSHIP.

Well, you can imagine, there wasn't any stopping it after that. The city council wanted to know what the hell was going on. The school board demanded an explanation. The principal got angry phone calls.

My father put down the Courier and frowned at me. "Is this story about the statue true? Mumbo Jumbo?"

"It's not like Price says. It's just a mascot."

"But you touch it before you go out to play?"

"Hey, it's nothing. It's only sort of for good luck."

My father frowned harder.

The other guys on the team got the same bit from their parents. Joey told me his father was so upset he wanted Joey to quit.

"Are you going to?" I asked.

"Are you kidding? Christ, no. The team means too much to me."

Or winning does, I thought.

By then, the week was over. Friday night had come around. Another game. One of the first-aid guys came down to the locker room, excited. "The bleachers are packed! A record crowd!" Sure, all the publicity. Everybody wanted to see the team with the voodoo statue.

At first, I thought Coach Hayes would leave it in the cabinet. Because of the controversy. But as soon as he started insulting us, I knew he didn't intend to break the routine. Looking back to that night, I wonder if he guessed that he wouldn't have many more chances to bring it out. He meant to take advantage of every one of them.

So he went to the cabinet. I held my breath as he unlocked it. The publicity made me self-conscious. Certainly all the talk about devil worship made me nervous about the double images I'd seen.

I watched as he opened the door.

His throat made a funny sound, and when he stepped to the side, I understood why.

"Where is it?" Joey blurted.

Several players gasped.

"Where's Mumbo Jumbo?" Joey's cleats scraped on the concrete floor as he stalked to the empty cabinet. "What happened to -?"

Coach Hayes looked stunned. All at once his neck bulged. "Harcourt." His lips curled. He made the principal's name sound like a curse. "The school board must have told him – "

"But the cabinet was locked," someone said.

"The janitor could have opened it for him." Coach Hayes stomped across the room toward the door.

And suddenly stopped as if he'd realized something. "We've got a game to play. I can't chase after him while – " Turning, he stared at us. "Get out there and show them. I'll find the statue. You can bet on that."

So we went out, and maybe because we'd been spooked, the other team killed us. We couldn't do anything right. Fumbles, interceptions, major penalties. It must have been the worst game any team from City High ever played. The fans started hissing, booing. A man shouted, "Devil worship, my ass! These guys don't need a voodoo statue! They need a miracle!" The more we screwed up, the more we lost confidence and screwed up worse. I saw Rebecca wiping tears from her eyes and felt so humiliated I couldn't wait for the game to end so I could hide in the locker room.

Coach Hayes kept scurrying around, talking to the principal and anybody else he suspected, gesturing angrily. They shook their heads no. By the end of the game, he still hadn't found the statue.

We sat in the locker room, bitter, silent, when somebody knocked on the door.

I was closest.

"Open it," Coach Hayes said.

So I did.

And stared at Mumbo Jumbo on the floor. There wasn't anyone in the hall.

Sure, we heard rumors, but we could never prove that the other team had taken it. We even heard that stealing the statue had been the rival coach's idea, a practical joke on his good old friend Coach Hayes.

Scoop put all this in the school newspaper Monday morning. Don't ask me how he found out. He must have been a better reporter than any of us gave him credit for. He even had a drawing of the statue, so accurate that whoever had stolen it must have shown it to him. Or maybe Scoop was the one who stole it.

Whoever. I feel partly responsible for the story he wrote. I must have made him curious when I went to see him and asked to look at the former issues of the paper. Maybe he checked and found out I'd handed him a line about a reunion game.

For whatever reason, he seems to have gone through the same issues I did – because he came up with the same pattern I'd noticed. Two losing seasons, then all of a sudden an unbroken string of winners. Because of Mumbo Jumbo? He didn't come right out and link the statue with the team's success, but you could tell he was trying to raise the issue. In every winning season, we'd lost only one game, and our score was always zero. In our winning games, however, we'd always had a lopsided spread in our favor, but the other team had always somehow managed to gain a few points. Coincidence, Scoop asked, or was there a better explanation? For evidence, he quoted from an interview he'd had with Price. He didn't bother mentioning that he had no witness for what had happened in the locker room in the years when Price wasn't on the team. His whole story was like that, making guesses seem like facts. Then he talked about Friday's game and how in the years since Coach Hayes had been showing the statue this was the first time we'd lost two games in one season. Perhaps because somebody stole the statue Friday night? Scoop repeated the rumor that the rival team had been responsible for the theft. We'd probably never know the truth, he said. He'd already described the few tiny holes in the statue, "the size of a pin, one of them over the statue's heart." Now several paragraphs later, he ended the story by mourning the rival coach who'd died from a heart attack on his way home from the game.