Free The Missing Person by Doris Grumbach

Dempsey, was small for a football player, with much of his mother’s gentleness about him. He was “wonderfully put together,” as she said. He could run very fast and for long distances without getting winded. His muscles lay smooth and flat on his bones; nothing bulged as he moved. Everything in his body operated with the greatest economy. Even his corn-silk hair lay flat against his narrow head. His brother, Tunney, younger by a year, was taller, darker, and much heavier, like their father, with unusually wide shoulders, long arms, and broad, capable hands. “A born pass receiver,” his father said when Tun had attained his full growth and had already decided he wanted to be a farmer.
    The young twins, Sully and Shark, loved football too, but their eyes were poor, the result of an overlong stay in incubation after their premature births. Good-naturedly, but without much hope, they ignored their handicap and practiced incessantly, throwing the football between them as they walked to high school or helped their mother in the truck garden, priding themselves at not hitting any tender shoots. “Old Four Eyes” they called each other: their names were Sharkey and Sullivan. In his youthful passion for the sport of boxing, Wendell Butts had bestowed the names of famous fighters on his sons, “as incentive,” he told them later, “to work hard and be good, really good, at something.”
    As was only fitting for the eldest, Dempsey was the first to obey. During his last year in high school he led his team to the state championship; the University in Iowa City sent a scout to see him play. He was offered a scholarship to the University of Iowa which had a coach known throughout the middle west for building winning teams.
    Demp was not much of a student and ignored attending a number of his more difficult college classes. Yet he squeaked through. In the spring he made the track team. His height and weight (by dint of forcing himself to eat starches he finally made one hundred and sixty-five pounds), the swiftness with which he moved, his accurate eye and arm, made him a natural quarterback. He played fast and hard, with perfect concentration on every play he called, every pass he threw.
    On Sundays he went to an Open Bible Church near the University. Usually he was invited back “to the house” to have dinner with the minister and his family. The minister had a daughter, Edna-Mae, who was Dempsey’s age. She was a healthy-looking, suntanned girl with hair exactly the color of Demp’s. She tried to interest him in herself. But he was too involved in football and in watching his weight and getting enough sleep. So he would leave the minister’s house almost as soon as dinner was over, and never seemed to notice Edna-Mae’s attentions.
    His classmates found him likable but very strange. He had none of their extracurricular interest in beer, women, jazz, and cars, an odd guy for a football player. Behind his back they called him “the Lady,” but he was too sensitive, too tough-spirited, and too damned nice for them to allow him to hear the epithet. In his senior year he was able to throw accurate lateral passes and had compiled a record, for his league, as a ground gainer. The coach boasted to the professional scouts who began to attend the Iowa games on Saturday afternoons that Demp was calling the plays without help from the sidelines.
    As president of his graduating class Demp gave a short speech after the valedictory had been delivered at commencement. He charmed the audience with his gentle, boyish smile, his deep-blue, sincere-looking eyes, and his genuine team-effort sentiments. A week later, so eager was he to play professional football, that he signed on with a new team on the West Coast, the Mavericks. Then he took a job on a road-building project near Des Moines to earn some of his expenses and to toughen up for the team.
    In mid-July he was due at