The Crazy Horse Electric Game

  That makes some sense to Willie. “Okay.”

  Cyril leans forward in the chair and the front legs come to the floor. He takes off his glasses and rests his elbows on his knees. “Willie, I have a feeling we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other. What you’re going through is a lot of loss. It’s like death. You’re feeling like something really important has died and you need to be able to mourn it; to grieve. Not many of us do that well. I think I can help with that.”

  Cyril’s closeness, his offer of what seems like real compassion, embarrasses Willie a little, but it’s also a powerful draw. He doesn’t know how to respond.

  Cyril winks at him. “So. I’ll see you next week, right?”

  Willie nods. “Right.”

  Cyril stands and gathers his folders off the desk, stuffing them into a pack sack behind his chair, then swings the sack around one shoulder. “One more thing,” he says. “I know you’ve thought of suicide. You’d be crazy if you hadn’t; then I’d really have my work cut out for me. I need to ask a favor.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. If the idea gets serious, you call me, okay? If I were the best therapist in the world, they wouldn’t have me out here in the backwater living out of a duffel bag. I don’t think my professional reputation could handle losin’ you right now; besides, I kind of like you, so don’t you go makin’ me look bad, okay? You get in trouble, you call me. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” Willie says. He has thought of suicide. Seriously. And it’s scary.

  Out in the parking lot, as Willie limps toward his mother’s car, he hears Cyril holler, “Willie, my boy!” and looks back.

  “Them there school folks will put you in Special Ed over my dead body.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The whistle blows to call time and Willie is off the bench with his six-pack of Gatorade and a dry towel. The girls huddle around Coach Williams and Willie hands them the plastic bottles and offers the towel unobtrusively while the coach outlines the play she wants run—designed to get Jenny free on the wing for a last-second shot that will tie the game. Willie stands back from the huddle, across from where Jenny is concentrating on Coach Williams’ every word. She’s to cut off a screen on the left baseline, move diagonally across the key for the pass, and take the quick turnaround jumper from ten to twelve feet, a shot she must be eighty percent on tonight. The girls form a knot with their hands in the middle of the huddle, pump once with a loud “Let’s do it!” and break. Willie’s stomach dances with anticipation as the girls bring the ball in, and he’s aware that something nagging down deep in him wants Jenny to blow it. He shakes the feeling away, murmuring, “Come on, Jen. Come on, Jen,” under his breath. Jenny starts high and knifes in for the baseline as the ball comes in bounds, plants her foot and cuts back as Denise Caulder sets a perfect pick, scraping off Jenny’s defender, who is on her like glue. Jenny takes the pass from the point guard on top with two seconds left, fakes right, spins left and lets loose a rainbow at the buzzer. She knows it’s good as it leaves her fingertips and doesn’t even watch it go in; simply turns and walks toward the bench as the crowd erupts. In overtime the girls walk away with it by eight points.

  Willie lingers in the darkened locker room, picking up towels and gathering uniforms for washing, with only the light from the thirty-watt bulb above the manager’s cage to illumine the room. The girls have showered and gone; Jenny waits just outside the door in the gym, making small talk with the school janitor, who patiently waits to lock up. Willie wishes he didn’t know why he’s stalling; why he can’t go out there and congratulate Jen on a great game and just be with her. But he does know why.

  “You gonna polish the lockers or what?” Jenny is standing at the door, silhouetted against the dim light in the gym, duffel bag hanging easily to her side.

  “Be…right there,” Willie says, and mumbles something about fixing a nozzle on the shower.

  “So what did you think?” Jenny asks over a Coke at the Dragon. “Did we put ’em away or what?”

  “You…put ’em…away,” Willie says, nodding, hiding behind another long drink through his straw.

  “So how about my shot at the end of regulation?” she ventures.

  “…Good…shot,” Willie agrees. He takes another drink.

  Jenny is quiet a fraction of a moment, considering. Then, “Good shot? It was a great shot! Two girls on me; I’da faked ’em out of their jocks if they had any. The ball left my fingers at the buzzer!” She leans forward. “Willie! Why can’t I get anything from you? That was magic to me. There were a million things that could have gone wrong and none of them did. You’re the only person I know who knows what that feels like.”

  Guilt flares in Willie’s gut. Jenny wants something from him and he’s just too selfish and hurt to give it to her. “You’re…right…Jen. It…was a…great…shot. Guess I’m…jealous.”

  Jenny sighs and sits back in the booth. “Yeah,” she says. “Sorry.”

  Cyril Wheat sits forward in his chair and flips off his shoe, spreading his fourth and fifth toes to expose monumental cracking and peeling. Willie winces at the sight of it. “Amazing to me they can call this athlete’s foot when it attacks the likes of me,” Cyril says. “Nerd’s foot, maybe. Or something Latin, like pedus fungus dorcus.” He reaches into his pack, extracting a metal spray can, and fires a powdery white stream at the afflicted area, breathing an audible sigh of relief. “Kills the offending digits,” he says, as much to himself as to Willie. “Three or four days they fall off. You lose two shoe sizes, but a cure’s a cure.

  “So,” he says, replacing the spray can in his pack, “you want to do some work on your girlfriend.”

  Willie nods. “She’s…my…best friend,” he starts. “She’s…my…girlfriend…and she’s…my…best friend.”

  Cyril nods. “Okay.”

  “I’m…mad…at her…all…the time. Sometimes…I feel…like I…hate her.”

  “Sounds like my marriage,” Cyril says. “What do you hate her about?”

  Willie shrugs, then the look of recognition crosses his face and he says, “Sports. School. All…the things…she…can do. Sometimes…I just…hate her…for it.”

  Cyril’s nodding again. “She’s getting all the stuff you used to get, right? And she wants to share it with you like you used to with her, right? And that would be okay with you if you were still getting it, but now it just taps into what you’ve lost and you get angry at yourself and angry at her and angry at the world, right?”

  Willie feels as if Cyril’s been reading his mail. “So…what do…I…do?”

  “Welcome to ABC’s Wide World of Changes, Willie. The only thing you can do is let that go. That golden boy isn’t you anymore, and as long as you keep measuring yourself up against him, you’re gonna be mad as hell at everybody. And I’ll guarantee another thing. Keep it up and you’ll lose your girl.” Cyril’s eyes are watery; he’s feeling Willie’s pain; but he’s dead-on straight with him. “We’ve been seeing each other for a couple of months now, Willie, and you’ve worked through some pretty tough stuff, but if you don’t find a way to get your head straight about this, it’ll all be for nothing.” He sits back. “And you’ll lose your girl.” They’ve been over this before. Cyril has spent the last sixty days letting Willie find his own answers; now he’s supplying some of his own.

  Willie nods and tells him the scary part is that when he’s feeling that way, he wants to lose his girl.

  “Well, keep it up and you’ll get your wish. If I were you, I’d talk about this with Jenny. Bring her in here if you have to, but talk about it with her. No way she’ll understand it if you don’t. By the way, I like your shirt.”

  Willie’s wearing a gray short-sleeved sweatshirt with LURCH stenciled across the front—his attempt at attacking his problem head-on with humor; that came out of session number three. He has another at home just like it, except it says QUASIMODO.

  He decides to ask Jenny if she’ll come in with him next week.


  Willie lies in bed sometime after midnight thinking how his world is coming apart. Every time he gains a victory, there’s nothing to it. He won the battle to keep himself out of Special Ed, but so what? He still feels like a creep every time he stumbles into class or has to fight through the obstacle course between his brain and his mouth to answer even a simple question. He got back into sports, as much as he could, by taking the manager’s spot on the girls’ basketball team. Big deal. All it does is remind him that he couldn’t take the worst girl on the team one-on-one. Every time he stands up in front of the crowd to give the girls water or pass around the towel, he feels like a circus freak, as if every eye in the place were trained on him, pitying him; or laughing, depending on how he sees it that day.

  And then there’s his parents. There are no victories with his parents; only distance. Distance between him and them and distance between them. His mom has grown tired of Willie’s frustration and rage when his physical world won’t cooperate, so she lectures; his dad ignores it. Cavernous silences hold them hostage at the dinner table. After dinner the television set is never off, a safe focus for everyone’s attention. But there is no way to address any of this because everyone is so polite, as if presenting graciousness will stamp out the reality. Willie has thought about trying to get his parents to go with him to see Cyril, but he fears that bringing it up will serve only to light the fuse to the bundle of dynamite destined to blow his family into the cosmos.

  Jenny’s horn blasts through the cold, clear early-morning air as Willie takes his last bite of toast and gulps down his orange juice. He’s dog tired from lying awake all night wondering if things would balance out for his folks if he disappeared from this equation. Could they pull it back together if they didn’t have him around to remind them of every damn thing that’s wrong in their lives?

  He slumps into the shotgun seat beside Jenny and stares out the window, saying only, “…Tired,” when she asks what’s wrong. He’d like to tell her what he’s been thinking, and there was a time not too long ago when he would have; when he would have shared any secret. But the guilt—almost panic—he feels about their relationship tells him it couldn’t stand the stress. Jen would tell him he’s thinking crazy; she would get Johnny to say it, too, and probably a bunch of the others; but no one who really knows the situation can deny it: If Willie Weaver were gone, his parents’ lives would be better.

  “Check this out,” Big Will says after work, hanging his coat on the wooden coat rack in the hall and holding out a red-and-white plastic sack from Brinson’s Sporting Goods. “Your new sport.” He hands the sack to Willie and waits expectantly as Willie reaches in and feels the cool leather grip of the racquet; wraps the fingers of his good hand around it and extracts it from the bag.

  “Racquetball?” he says. It isn’t really a question.

  “Racquetball,” Big Will replies. “It’s made for you. You only use one hand in racquetball, it’s a relatively small court and it takes as much smarts as physical skill. I have a court reserved over at the club for seven-thirty tonight. Got a rule book right here. This is the beginning of a new career for you. We’ll take our time; learn it slow. Don’t even have to tell anyone until you have the hang of it.”

  Willie has mixed feelings. He knows how to play racquetball; he played a couple of times before he was hurt. And he wasn’t bad. The idea of a sport that will focus on his good side instead of his bad makes sense, but it’s hard to imagine he’ll ever be good at any sport and he feels like he might be setting himself up for another failure. He’s agreed with Cyril that he needs to make smart choices, but the reality here is there’s no going against Big Will when his mind is made up; never has been. You just don’t say no to Willie’s dad before you’ve tried. Besides, Big Will sounds kind of excited, and it’s the first attempt he’s made since the accident, and particularly since the drug incident at Johnny’s, to get close to Willie again.

  Willie stuffs his clothes into a basket and removes his gym shorts and sweatshirt from his workout bag. Without comment, Big Will reaches over and turns the LURCH sweatshirt inside out before Willie puts it on. “No more Lurch,” he says. “No more Quasimodo. You’re on your way back.”

  Willie thinks, Sure, Dad, but only nods. “No…more…Lurch,” he says with a partial smile.

  On the court Big Will says, “We won’t play a game tonight, just work on skills. I’ll give you stuff right down the middle off the front wall at first, and you just get it back to the front wall. Nothing fancy. Gotta take it at a pace that works.” He bounces the ball once and takes an easy shot. Willie goes for it and overextends, hitting the ball with the racquet handle, but it does sail weakly to the front wall and his dad puts it right down the middle again. This time Willie lunges forward and the ball strikes the edge of the racquet, shooting straight up to the ceiling and straight back down.

  “Don’t get overanxious,” Big Will says, seeing Willie’s frustration as he grips the racquet handle tighter. “This is just like any other ball game. You have to watch the ball at all times.”

  Willie settles down a little, but he can’t get used to his body; hauling his left side around is like dragging small sacks of concrete, and it distracts him from his concentration on the ball. The frustration is tremendous already, but his dad’s calmness allows him more patience. He works at just getting to the ball; looking ahead to where it’s going to be so he can get a jump on it; but eighty percent of his shots go awry because he has to tell the different parts of his body what to do instead of letting them act on their own, like they used to. After twenty minutes he can feel his dad starting to get tense.

  “Want to…stop?” Willie asks. “We could…come…back.”

  Big Will shakes his head. “Can’t quit,” he says. “Let’s just stay with it awhile; let you get the hang of it.” There’s an edge on his voice, and Willie works harder getting to the ball, hoping to show his dad immediate improvement. But the harder he tries, the more mistakes he makes. He lunges for a shot that’s almost out of reach, catches it hard in the middle of the webbing, but with no control, and drives it high off the front wall into a long arc that carries it over the open back wall, over the spectators’ walkway and into the court behind them.

  Big Will throws his racquet down in disgust. “God damn it, Willie, pay attention! Concentrate! Watch the ball! Damn it, you look like a girl out here!” He catches himself, immediately reining in his anger; pinches the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes. “Forget it,” he says through partially clenched teeth. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” He walks out the back door to retrieve the ball.

  “You don’t look like a girl,” Big Will says on his return, placing his big hand easily on Willie’s shoulder. “That’s just my frustration. I’m sorry.” He breathes deep.

  “We…can…stop,” Willie says. “Come back…tomorrow.”

  Big Will shakes his head again. “No. Can’t leave the court on a bad shot. Now just take your time and concentrate. Keep your eye on the ball. We’ll get ten good hits and go.”

  Willie relaxes and the next two shots are good ones. Encouraged, Big Will keeps them coming right down the middle. Willie gets a good third shot, then a fourth. But the next one shoots straight up off the handle and the sixth he drives into the floor. Big Will slows them up a little to let him get his bearings back, but Willie’s lost it. He stumbles, or gets to the ball too late, or too soon. Pretty soon he can’t see the ball through the tears of frustration.

  Big Will says not a word, just keeps hitting the ball off the front wall, at first easy, then harder and harder as he sees it doesn’t matter, that Willie can’t hit anything anyway. Big Will is silently furious. Finally, as Willie reaches for a backhand that careens off the side wall and dies in the middle of the floor, Big Will slips his hand out of the safety string and fires his racquet sidearm at the front wall. It pops like a gunshot, then lies twisted on the floor. “Just get out of here,” he says. “Let’s just get out of here. If yo
u’re not going to try, there’s no point to it.”

  “I’m…trying,” Willie says.

  “You’re not trying. You were hitting the ball fine; then you gave up. You want to be a cripple all your life, just keep it up. When it gets a little tough, slack off.”

  Tears stream down Willie’s face as he slips his hand out of the safety string and limps toward the door.

  “You just going to leave the ball there?” his dad asks, and Willie slowly retraces his steps to retrieve the ball lying by the front wall. As he leans over to pick it up, he catches movement out of the corner of his eye and glances up to see someone watching from the walkway between courts. He’s overwhelmed by the sight of all this through someone else’s eyes and he falls back against the side wall and sinks to the floor, dropping his head between his knees, sobbing.

  Big Will is in control of himself again and guilt washes over him in a wave. “Come on, son,” he says. “Get up. That’s me, not you. I’m really sorry. I should have let you quit when you were doing well. We’ll do it differently next time.”

  But Willie knows it is him. His dad isn’t the cripple. His dad isn’t some stupid jerk lurching and lunging around the racquetball court in a body that doesn’t even belong to him. His dad isn’t the one who’s going to lose his girl, who has to see a shrink every week because he’s too big a baby to handle what life passes out. It is Willie. It’s his life. And he’s stuck in it.

  Big Will slides his hand gently under Willie’s armpit and helps him to his feet and, with his other hand in the middle of Willie’s back, guides him toward the locker room.

  CHAPTER 9

  Cyril encouraged the Weavers’ family doctor to prescribe some pills for nights like this, but Willie resists taking them as long as he possibly can because of the way he feels when he wakes up in the morning. “Yeah, they can zone ya,” was Cyril’s response to Willie’s complaint. “Most drugs have a down side, whether you get them on the street or from a doctor.”