“Then he’d bite you with his horse teeth,” I said.
“Gaa.”
“Talk about something else,” Esther said.
“Remember his thumbnails? They were brownish yellow. They didn’t have any pink at all. They were scab colored.”
“Oh God please,” Esther said.
“It was real scary being anywhere near those thumbs. They were horrible-looking things. And he liked to use his thumb to pick his nose.”
“Oh please no.”
“We’re here to comfort each other,” Myna said.
After the picnic I went to my room. Bloomberg, wearing shorts with little slits in them, was on his bed, turned to the wall, asleep. After a while I was called to the telephone. I assumed someone in my family had died. On the way to the phone I wondered who it might be, which death would cause me the most grief, whether it was an accident or natural, and whether I would have to go home for the funeral if it was just an uncle or aunt. Then I picked up the phone and heard my mother’s voice.
“How’s your laundry?” she said.
“Fine — how’s yours?”
I wasn’t particularly relieved that no one had died. When we were finished talking I returned to my room. Anatole was on his back. His body rose and fell through a tidal sleep. I spent the afternoon looking out the window. That evening we went down to a team meeting. Tweego and Hauptfuhrer yelled at us for our performance of two days before, our sixth game. We had won 27–10 but it had been our worst game by far. We lost the ball four times on fumbles. Bing Jackmin missed an extra point and three field goals. The defensive unit wasn’t aggressive, giving up just ten points only because the opposition was so pathetic; we knew it wouldn’t be much of a contest when we saw their quarterback wearing number 78. Garland Hobbs didn’t show much either. He threw only long passes in the first quarter, as if a sustained drive was too much trouble, and he missed his first six and then got intercepted before Creed placed a hand on his shoulder and spoke softly into his face. All these thing we were reminded of as we sat in the long low stone room under Staley Hall. Coming up was Centrex, the game that would make or break the season. In six games we had scored 246 points and given up 41. It didn’t mean a thing if we couldn’t win the next one.
“You got five days to get ready,” Hauptfuhrer said. “This isn’t Snow White and the seven dwarfs you’re facing this time. This is a bunch of head-hunters. They like to hit. They have definite sadistic tendencies. This isn’t another humpty dumpty outfit. This is a squad that’s big and mean. You people got a long way to go in meanness. You think you’re mean but you’re not mean. Centrex is mean. They’re practically evil. They’ll stomp all over you. It’ll be men against boys. You better execute out there. And you better play mean. They’re head-hunters. They like to humiliate people. That’s their stock in trade. You better get ready for the worst.”
“Let me tell you about their head coach,” Tweego said. “I know Jade Kiley. I’ve known him for years. I know every wart on his hide. And he’s mean.”
“You better believe it.”
“And his boys are mean.”
“They’re quite a contingent,” Hauptfuhrer said. “They like to hit.”
“A Jade Kiley team likes to hit. That’s been his trademark down the years. I’ve known Jade Kiley I don’t know how long. His teams have always liked to hit. Jade Kiley doesn’t let you put on a uniform unless you like to hit. Jade Kiley teams are hitting teams.”
“They like to humiliate people. They’re quite a contingent.”
“You got your work cut out for you,” Tweego said. “You got five days to get ready. We can help you get ready but we can’t play the damn game for you. We can take you right up to kickoff. Then you’re on your own.”
“They’ll stomp blue shit out of you,” Hauptfuhrer said.
Creed didn’t make an appearance. As the season progressed he had become more remote. We saw him only at practice and at the games. He no longer had his meals with the squad. At practice he stayed up in the tower or sat alone in the last row of benches in the small grandstand section used during the baseball season. During the games he remained in one spot on the sidelines, right at the midfield stripe, letting his assistants make all the decisions and control the flow of players. He seemed to be losing weight and he moved slowly now, with a slight limp.
When the meeting ended Raymond Toon and I went up to his room to watch television. I wanted to look at the replay of a game between the Detroit Lions and the Minnesota Vikings. It was a little early but he turned on the set anyway and we watched a program composed of film clips of hurricanes, tornadoes and avalanches. It was one of the most fascinating things I had ever seen. Raymond, stretched out in his chair, nearly spanned the walls.
“What do you think?” he said. “Can we beat them?”
“I’m watching this.”
“They’ll be tough. We’ve had it too easy all year. It’ll make them seem that much tougher. But I guess all we can do is go out there and do the best we can. The man upstairs decides these things.”
“Who do you mean, Toony?”
“The man upstairs,” he said. “It’s up to him what happens. All we can do is use our talents to the best of our ability. We can run, we can block, we can tackle, we can kick the ball and catch the ball. If the man upstairs decides we don’t deserve to win, then we won’t win. Gary, I’m a substitute tackle. I’ve done all I can to earn first-string status. I play my heart out every time I get in there. Maybe I’m not mean enough. That’s a criticism that’s been leveled at me more than once. I know I try my best. I go all out on every play. I give one hundred and ten percent just like Coach demanded of us back last summer. It’s like the notion of valuation in the hard market, Gary. Practitioners link the measurement of earnings magnitude to the need for assessing the variability that’s expressed in the multiplier rate. This way you avoid double-counting the risk allowance. But I can’t crack the starting lineup. And if the man upstairs wants it that way, that’s good enough for me. He has his reasons.”
“What are they?”
“I wouldn’t even try to guess, Gary. I just know they’re good reasons. But they’re probably beyond our scope.”
“Toony, this shit about the man upstairs. Is the man upstairs supposed to be synonymous with God or what? Because either way it’s an outmoded concept. It’s a concept that’s incredibly outmoded. It makes absolutely no theological sense.”
“Don’t try to get me in a discussion,” he said.
John Jessup walked in then, Raymond’s roommate. The game came on and we all watched it, marveling at the pros, how easily they did the things we stumbled over. In slow motion the game’s violence became almost tender, a series of lovely and sensual assaults. The camera held on fallen men, on men about to be hit, on those who did the hitting. It was a loving relationship with just a trace of mockery; the camera lingered a bit too long, making poetic sport of the wounded. We laughed at the most acrobatic spills and the hardest tackles and at the meanness of some of it, the gang tackles and cheap shots. We laughed especially at the meanness. After about ten minutes Raymond turned down the sound so he could practice his sportscasting. Jessup leaped for the set and turned the sound back up.
“I’ve had enough broadcasting from your big dumb face.”
“I have to practice,” Raymond said.
“This goddamn set is not to be goddamn touched. Now I’m serious about that.”
“It’s my set, John.”
“I don’t care if it was a gift from your grandmother who knitted it herself.”
“John, I’ve never hurt a man on purpose in my whole life.”
“And you ain’t tonight, shitfinger.”
Jessup was standing in front of the set now, guarding it. Raymond began to ease himself from the chair. I moved my head in order to see what the Lions would do on fourth and one inside the Minnesota 5. The field-goal team came on and I reached over and grabbed Raymond’s arm.
??
?Go easy,” I said. “We’ve got a hard week ahead of us. You’re both tense. It’s the tension. I feel it. Coach feels it. We all feel it. We’re all tense and knotted up. Let’s save the combat for Saturday. It’s bound to be a long hard week. Toony, shake the man’s hand.”
I was right about the kind of week it would be. We did everything wrong in practice and the coaches raged at us. I spent a lot of time with Myna. Nothing helped very much. Wednesday’s practice was the worst of the year and when we were only slightly better the next day, Creed issued word that Friday’s light workout would be canceled. He also called the team captains in and suggested we have a beer party that night, Thursday, no coaches, no females, no time limit. The throwing of the beer cans started half an hour after the party began. It went from there to fights, to mass vomiting, to singing and comradeship. A defensive end named Larry Nix kept punching a door until he busted through. A few people fell asleep in their chairs or on the floor. There was a pissing contest with about twenty entries trying not for distance but for altitude — a broom held by two men being the crossbar as it were, the broom raised in stages as contestants dropped out and others progressed. It was the most disgusting, ridiculous and adolescent night I had ever spent. The floor of the lounge was covered with beer, urine and ketchup, and we kept slipping and falling and then getting up and getting casually knocked down again by somebody passing by. Clothes were torn and there was blood to be seen on a few grinning faces. There were tag-team wrestling matches, push-up contests, mock bullfights, and other events harder to classify. A bunch of men jumping repeatedly in the air with their hands at their sides. Seven people in a circle spitting at each other’s shoes. Lloyd Philpot Jr. ate nine hamburgers in twenty-five minutes. Link Brownlee chugged a bottle of ketchup. Jim Deering and his brother Chuck traded ten quick bolo punches to the midsection, apparently reviving a boyhood tradition. It was a horrible night. They took off Billy Mast’s clothes and threw him out the front door. Somebody pushed Gus de Rochambeau and he skidded past me over the beer and piss and put his hand through a window. I took out my handkerchief and bandaged him. Then we sang one of the school songs, Gus and I, and I didn’t know whether I was singing seriously or making fun of the song and in a very short while I didn’t know whether I was singing at all or just listening to Gus sing. I thought I could hear my own voice but I wasn’t sure and so I stood there with Gus, not wanting to leave if I was still singing, and I watched my teammates slip and fall into the beer and get up sick and laughing.
Since there was no workout scheduled for Friday, I thought it would be a good idea to end the week as it had begun, a picnic with Myna and the Chalk sisters. The cyclic redundancy might be beneficial. I needed a feeling of restfulness, of things content enough in themselves to begin again, and I thought the warm drawling chatter of an identical picnic might put me at ease. Myna was available and so was Esther Chalk. Vera had a class but we talked her out of it and assembled behind the Quonset hut. I lay on the blanket with my arms over my face.
“We could all live somewhere,” Myna said. “I have all this money that’s in my name. We could go to Mexico. A friend of mine knows where to get good stuff in Mexico City. We could buy a Rolls-Royce and pick up some stuff in Mexico City and drive into the mountains.”
“You have money?” Esther said. “Gary, she has money?”
“Half a million.”
“Oil depletion,” Myna said.
“Half a million dollars?”
“My father wanted to send me to Bryn Mawr. So I had this decision to make. Either I could lose all my excess weight and kill my blemishes with cobalt or whatever they use and go to Bryn Mawr and be a beautiful and charming young lady and risk being supermiserable because of the responsibilities of that kind of thing. Or I could come a little west to out here and be emotional and do what I want. They’re both better than staying home and out here you don’t get nagged by responsibilities like the responsibilities of beauty.”
“What are you going to do with the money?” Vera said.
“Gary,” Esther said, “what’s she going to do with the money?”
“I don’t know.”
“She should keep it.”
“She should do whatever she wants,” Esther said.
“She should keep it,” Vera said. “She should hold on to it.”
“I don’t know much about things English. But the idea of riding around in a Rolls-Royce sounds pretty neat. And it’s her money.”
“But she shouldn’t just throw it away. She should do something positive with it. Maybe open a shop. I’m into handicrafts, Gary. We could think up something worthwhile.”
“She can throw it away if she wants to. It’s her money, Vera.”
“Don’t call me that. You know how much I hate that name. You know how much I loathe and despise that name, you damn bitch.”
“Our mother named her after herself,” Esther said.
“She should have named you Vera. You’re the damn Vera. I’m not that damn person. I’m just me. You’re the Vera. You’re more her than I am.”
“She gets this way, Gary. It’s a real laugh and a half, isn’t it?”
“You’re the only damn Vera in the vicinity that I know of. It’s the honest-to-goddest truth, Gary. She’s the damn Vera, not me.”
“Quiet,” I said.
“We can all go live somewhere in Mexico,” Myna said. “We can live in a house in the mountains with a garden that’s always full of flowers, the wildest colors in Mexico. We can buy a Rolls-Royce and go. Gary, you drive.”
“We can buy four Rolls-Royces,” Esther said.
“You don’t need all that money to go to Mexico and live in a garden,” Vera said.
“But we’re getting four Rolls-Royces.”
“I think we should get just one,” Myna said. “That way we stay together.”
“That’s right,” Vera said.
“That way we insure staying together. And we can all study the works of Tudev Nemkhu who’s this Mongolian science-fiction writer who’s got a real big underground following. He’s in exile in Libya because his government frowns on sci-fi.”
“All of us in the mountains smoking our little pipes,” Vera said.
We sat around for a while longer. Myna read to us, bouncing on her haunches, pausing after certain passages to bite her nails. We heard the wind then. It came up suddenly, fanning sand into the air. We tried to cover ourselves. Esther wore a large button with the word carrots printed on it.
18
THE FOOTBALL TEAM filled two buses and rode a hundred and twenty miles to a point just outside the campus of the West Centrex Biotechnical Institute. There the buses split up, offense to one motel, defense to another. We had steak for dinner and went to our rooms. All evening we kept visiting each other, trying to talk away the nervousness. Finally Sam Trammel and Oscar Veech came around and told us to get to bed. There were three men to a room. The regulars got beds; the substitutes were assigned to cots. Bloomberg and I had a reserve guard, Len Skink, sharing our room. For some reason Len was known as Dog-Boy. In the darkness I listened to the cars going by. I knew I’d have trouble sleeping. A long time passed, anywhere from an hour to three hours or more.
“Is anybody awake?” Len said.
“I am.”
“Who’s that?” he said.
“Gary.”
“You scared me. I didn’t think anybody would be awake. I’m having trouble sleeping. Where’s Bloomers?”
“He’s in bed.”
“He doesn’t make a sound,” Len said. “I can’t hear a single sound coming from his bed. A big guy like that.”
“That means he’s asleep.”
“It’s real dark in here, isn’t it? It’s as dark with your eyes open as when they’re closed. Put your hand in front of your face. I bet you can’t see a thing. My hand is about three inches from my face and I can’t see it at all. How far is your hand, Gary?”
“I don’t know. I can’t see it.”
“We better get some sleep. This stuff isn’t for me. I remember the night I graduated high school. We stayed up all night. That was some night.”
“What did you do?”
“We stayed up,” he said.
In the morning we went out to the stadium, suited up without pads or headgear and had an extra mild workout, just getting loose, tossing the ball around, awakening our bodies to the feel of pigskin and turf. The place seemed fairly new. It was shaped like a horseshoe and probably seated about 22,000. Our workout progressed in virtual silence. It was a cool morning with no breeze to speak of. We went back in and listened to the coaches for a while. Then we rode back to the motels. At four o’clock we had our pregame meal — beef consommé steak and eggs. At five-thirty we went back out to the stadium and slowly, very slowly, got suited up in fresh uniforms. Nobody said much until we went through the runway and took the field for our warmup. In the runway a few people made their private sounds, fierce alien noises having nothing to do with speech or communication of any kind. It was a kind of frantic breathing with elements of chant, each man’s sound unique and yet mated to the other sounds, a mass rhythmic breathing that became more widespread as we emerged from the runway and trotted onto the field. We did light calisthenics and ran through some basic plays. Then the receivers and backs ran simple pass patterns as the quarterbacks took turns throwing. Off to the side the linemen exploded from their stances, each one making his private noise, the chant or urgent breathing of men in preparation for ritual danger. We returned to the locker room in silence and listened to our respective coaches issue final instructions. Then I put on my helmet and went looking for Buddy Shock. He and the other linebackers were still being lectured by Vern Feck. I waited until the coach was finished and then I grabbed Buddy by the shoulder, spun him around and hit him with a forearm across the chest, hard. He answered with three open-hand blows against the side of my helmet.