“Not my job,” Hey-Soos says.
“Some guardian angel or whatever you are. You don’t care if I live or die.”
“That’s because I know nothing dies,” he says. “Things change. You’re choosing change.”
“Another thing I’m way not smart enough to say! Or even think. Where is this craziness coming from?”
“Just listen to yourself.”
“I’m scared.”
“I know. You can still choose treatment.”
“I’d just get bald and sick and die anyway.”
“I have nothing against going with instinct.”
“So how did I know?”
“I don’t know for sure that you did, but sometimes we’re privy to information that comes through senses other than our brains.”
In that space in my brain or my heart or maybe the landscape exactly between, Hey-Soos and I just look at each other. Finally I say, “You willing to tell me some stuff?”
“You mean, like secrets of the universe?”
“Yeah, like that.”
“Try me,” he says.
“Why am I here? I mean, what’s the purpose if I’m gonna be gone so quick? It’s not like anybody’s going to listen to me; I’m just going to be this small guy who had a good year on the football field. The good citizens of Trout aren’t really going to name a street after Malcolm X. My mother won’t get healed knowing me. My brother won’t all of a sudden learn to decipher defenses. And Dallas…God, Dallas.”
“You’re asking the purpose of life.”
“I’m asking the purpose of my life.”
“I’ll tell you all you need to know. Look, I’m a scientist. Everything out here in the universe came from a single thing, something scientists call the big bang. That means you have within you everything the universe has within it. When you know something without learning it, it’s because some part of you connects up with something out there and it is familiar. You know it without learning it. That’s just a side effect. The point is that everything that exists inside you also exists outside you. The world is practice for the inner you.
“Think of life on earth as a video game. A serious one, one you are totally drawn to. While you’re playing that game you don’t pay attention to anyone or anything else. You’re sucked in. You learn the rules and follow them to a tee because you know if you don’t, you’re out of the game. You get excited. You get disappointed; you get pissed. Everything is focused on continued play. Play the game once and you might last a long time, but play it again and you might get taken out early because something in the game jumped up and bit you in the ass.”
“Like disease?”
“Like disease. But even when you see it jump up and bite you and you know you’re going down, you stay with it and get as many points as you can; that is, if you have proper reverence for the game.”
“That’s what I’m doing now?”
“And if you’re playing it with someone else, they get better because you do your best and they try to stay with you. You get more and more focused and you discover things you didn’t know about the game before because it allows you to get more points, to go as far as you can.”
“I think I get it.”
“I think you do, too,” Hey-Soos says. “So don’t worry about your brother and his college football career, or Dallas, or whether you can make your mother okay. If you play the game the best you can, you have the best chance of others seeing a piece of what you see.”
That seems like what should be the end of a Conversation with Hey-Soos, but he doesn’t back up and I don’t wake up.
I say, “What about Rudy?
“Case in point. Not exactly what you expected, is he?”
“That’s an understatement.”
“Maybe he needs something from you, too. And if you want a little piece of information that will let you cut to the chase quicker, just remember, no one is.”
“No one is what?”
“What you expect. I mean, what do you imagine people think when they first see you coming at them on an open football field?”
“Yeah, I’m—”
“Not what they expect.”
Early November
Football gets a little tougher as the season wears on. Earlier on, in late summer and early fall days, we practice in seventy, sometimes eighty degrees, nearly always under deep blue mountain skies. I forget sometimes what a stunning part of the country I live in. But the only thing shorter than Indian summer around here is me, and by this time of year we’re Googling our laptops for imminent snow, or worse, miserable cold rain. We got through Halloween with none of the white stuff and I’m hoping Thanksgiving, which means through the football season, but it doesn’t look good. I’ve run a few cross-country meets in whiteouts but no one was trying to knock me down.
And we have turned it up a notch when I didn’t think there were more notches. We haven’t had a tough game since Horseshoe Bend. Win one more, we go to Regionals; one more after that, we go to State. Coach is playing it cool but you can tell he wants it like nothing else because with every mental error we run wind sprints like someone just screamed, “Tsunami.”
“If you’re overmatched physically, blame God,” Coach hollers over and over, “but mental alertness belongs to you!” We’re gonna be sharp and we’re gonna be in killer shape. Should we live.
After Monday’s practice, Coach calls me into his room off the lockers. “Hey, little big man, you caught a couple of sweet ones out there today.”
“My brother was putting them where I couldn’t miss.”
“Is he doing okay? Anything going on I should know?”
“Not that I know of. Why?”
“Just keeping my fingers in all the pies,” he says. “He looks great to me, but you’d be the first person to see any cracks. A lot rides on these next games.”
“No kidding,” I say. “Lose one and you’re a spectator.”
“I mean for your brother. Scouts at every game. He should come out of this with a full ride. Your brother can be a hell of a college quarterback and he can get a good education in the bargain. I know your parents are going to be strapped sending the two of you off next year. Cody shows his best stuff these last games and that covers books and tuition for one.”
Coach is telling me this because he doesn’t want to pressure Cody.
“My brother’s set, Coach. I mean he’s still dyslexic reading defenses, but that’s business as usual.”
Coach smiles. “Swear to God, half that scholarship should be yours, buddy. You may be smaller, but that’s just physical size.”
“Cody’ll be okay.”
“And how about you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Been hearing rumors about you in Lambeer’s class.”
“Aw, I’m just keeping Mr. Lambeer honest. He acts like he wrote history, or at least the Constitution.”
“Well, don’t mess with him too much. He’s been known to use grades as a weapon, and I’ll deny I said that.”
“All I need is a D minus.”
Coach laughs. “Okay, let me know when I need to prepare to bail you out.”
If you’re playing high school football at any level, and you’re a couple of games away from winning the state championship, your head and heart are full. I have a feeling it’s that way when you get toward the top of anything. You’re part of something and if you do everything you can with whatever talent you have, it’s almost spiritual. Football in this country gets a bad rap sometimes, I think, because of its press: big, tough, seriously uncerebral. That might be because the first guys who got hold of the game didn’t know what they had, or how to treat it. You can make the standard case against it, that your body wasn’t meant to be treated that way, that if you do it long and hard enough you’ll wind up with bad knees and/or bad ankles and/or a loose brain. All that’s correct, but once you make the contract to play, then it’s all about you and your teammates.
Doesn’t mat
ter if they’re your friends or not; if you want the unit to work, the “thing” that is all of you, then you play in concert with one another. I mean, I don’t care how smart I am about angles and seeing ahead and surprising guys by concentrating all my energy on one point when I hit them; if my guys don’t knock a whole bunch of people down before I get there, I don’t get there. Many things happened between the moment the ball was hiked and the moment that sweet pigskin settled onto my fingertips in the Horseshoe Bend game. Cecil Cross is probably the least talented starter on the team. I’ll bet I haven’t even mentioned him. He works his ass off every practice, runs sprints till he pukes, and works on his moves like a ballerina, but the only thing he lacks more than coordination is strength. He starts at offensive guard, and when you watch the tapes of that last touchdown, he’s so overmatched, he might as well be Richard Simmons in the ring with Muhammad Ali. He’s taking forearms to the helmet and getting shoved back and to the side by a guy with twice his skills, but ol’ Cecil stays between his assailant and Cody long enough for Cody to get the ball off. If Cecil blows it, Cody is on his back. But Cecil doesn’t blow it and the ball settles into my outstretched hands. Nobody cheered and stomped when Cecil Cross walked into the dance that night, but we’re a team and Cecil did his job and every guy knows it.
My point is there are a lot of rewards for doing it right and the big one could be a state championship. But it’s part of a bigger thing for me. When that ball floated into my hands it felt like the truth. I would be there, Cody would put it there, and all I had to do was hold on. It almost made me understand why some guys point to the sky when they make a good play, like God wanted them to catch it or something, which by the way, really pisses me off when I see it. I like Hey-Soos’s take on things. I’d be real worried about a big bang God who gave a shit about a football game. But when you do everything right, and it works, it feels somehow elevated. Given my condition, I work for that feeling every play of every practice. I want one more catch like the Horseshoe Bend catch.
I’ve been going over to Dallas’s place almost every night after practice, hanging out with her and her little brother. Mrs. Suzuki seems to like me well enough, but disappears into the kitchen or the bedroom shortly after I arrive. She’s hard to read; I can’t tell if she’s “giving us space” or if she’s just uncomfortable. She and Dallas don’t look at all alike, partially because she supplies the Caucasian half of Dallas’s DNA and partially because she’s at least five inches shorter. But like I said, she’s nice to me and she feeds me, so I’m happy.
Dallas wrapped up her volleyball season a week ago when they got knocked out of the district tournament the first day. (Don’t think she wasn’t a little hard to communicate with after that happened.) She gets a couple of weeks before basketball and her after-school time is focused on Joe Henry, who is one of the most compelling little dudes you would care to meet. He’s four plus with shoulder-length shiny black hair and horn-rimmed specs that make him look like a thirty-year-old little person. Today I knock and look through the window. Dallas is sitting on the floor cross-legged with Joe Henry perched on her knees. Dallas waves me in without turning around. She and Joe Henry are staring into each other’s eyes, laughing, paying me no attention. I smell roast beef cooking.
“You can lead a horse to water…” Dallas says.
“But you don’t can make him do push-ups,” Joe Henry finishes, then laughs like a maniac.
“A bird in the hand…”
“Gets squoze.” More laughter.
“Hickory dickory dock…” Dallas says.
“Two mouses ran up the clock.”
“Mice.”
“Right,” Joe Henry says. “Mice.”
“The clock struck one…” Dallas says.
“And the other one escraped with minor injuries.”
“Escaped, not ‘escraped.’”
“Yeah, that. Do another one.”
“Little Miss Muffet, sat on a tuffet…”
“I like this one,” Joe Henry says. “Eating her curds away…”
“It’s curds and whey. Two words. Say it. Curds and whey.”
“Curds and whey. Go!”
“Along came a spider,” Dallas says, “and sat down beside her and said…”
“Is this seat taken?” Joe Henry goes into convulsions.
I step inside the screen door and let it close loudly. “You guys taking that act on the road?”
“Soon as Joe Henry gets his part down,” Dallas says. Without putting her hands on the floor, she stands from the cross-legged position, walks over, and kisses me lightly on the mouth, then on the cheek.
“Your mom around?” I ask, hoping the opposite, though it doesn’t matter because of Joe Henry.
Dallas nods toward the kitchen. “Smell that dinner cooking? You think I’m cooking that?”
“Ask me what’s inside my sleeping bag,” Joe Henry says to me.
“What?”
He frowns at Dallas. She says, “Ask him what’s inside his sleeping bag.”
I squat to his eye level, which isn’t far for me. “What’s inside your sleeping bag, Joe Henry?”
“Duck down!” he screams and ducks down, then falls to the floor, rolling over and over.
Jeez. “If my eyes rolled back any farther in my head and I started to cry the tears would run down my back,” I tell them.
Joe Henry squeals. “Tears down my back,” he says.
I go for the kill. “They’d call it back-tear-ia.”
Joe Henry stares at me.
“Jesus,” Dallas says and wrinkles her nose. “Jesus, Ben. That’s bad. You can be arrested for telling a joke like that.”
“Bacteria,” I say to Joe Henry.
Dallas says, “Jesus, Ben.”
Joe Henry says, “Jesus, Ben.”
Hey, look what I had to work with.
Before the night’s over I’ve got Joe Henry running the exact patterns I’ll run for the next two weeks, and his Nerf football bounces off every part of his body but his hands. But brings the ball back time after time and I get the sense he could catch his first pass any day now. Dallas watches and smiles.
At the door she kisses me longer; sweet.
“What a great kid,” I tell her.
“You like my guy? He has his days.” She looks back over her shoulder at Joe Henry who lies on the floor, holding the Nerf football like a pillow, passed out. “From sixty to zero in five seconds,” she says. “Get out of here. We have school tomorrow.”
“I’m glad football players don’t have to turn in homework,” I say.
“Football players do have to turn in their homework,” she says. “At this school V-ballers rule.”
I look at my watch. Man, I don’t want to leave. But…“If that’s the case,” I say, “I’d better go do some. It will be the first this week.”
She laughs. “You can bring us all up to date on Malcolm X,” she says. “Jeez, Ben.”
“Hey, I wasn’t kidding. Malcolm was a righteous dude.”
“Whatever you say.”
A dim light glows through the living room window as I pull up to the house, which means Dad is kicked back in his recliner plowing through Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s biography of Lincoln. When my dad’s not at work or dozing, he reads. I say hi and cross the room toward the stairs. Dad doesn’t like to be jerked away from a good book and he looks comfortable in his recliner that’s way too big for our living room.
“Hey, Ben?”
I’m halfway up the stairs. “Yeah?”
“Is there something I should know about?”
My heart jumps. “Like what?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “You’ve been…different lately.”
“Different? How have I been different?”
“Calmer, I guess. More focused. That’s relative, of course. Since about the time you turned out for football, if memory serves. Last couple of years, you were the fart on the proverbial skillet. What’s going on?” br />
Dad’s not the first person to notice. Cody rides me all the time about going down to see Rudy, especially since Rudy’s been almost conscious and interesting and I lose track of time listening to him. And lots of people ride me when I can’t keep my mouth shut about Malcolm X in Current Events. But they’ll make a lot of guesses before they suspect the Death Train, so I’m safe. “It’s child development, Dad. Maturation. It happens to the worst of us.”
He places his book in his lap and studies me, so I sit on the step. “I worry sometimes,” he says. “With your mom and all. I’ve not always paid the best attention. I know she focuses on you; that you don’t have the good sense to stay away when she’s ready to crash.”
“Yeah, but you’re the one who takes care of her after she does. I’m okay, Dad. I’m learning about that. I’m getting better.” He watches me a few more seconds, then picks up his book.
I think Doc Wagner lets me get away with this charade because he knows what knowledge of my impending death would do to my mom. He knows I wouldn’t really sue him for breaking confidentiality. The way I figure it, when I die Mom can grieve the incident and survive that one big hit, but if she had to care for me in her roller coaster condition, the guilt might eat her up. I have an idea that’s Doc’s thinking, too. Either way, it’s gonna hit her like a sledgehammer.
Twelve
One class we don’t get a break on during football season is Coach’s. As intense as he is on the field, that’s how intense he is as a teacher. “Football is a game,” he says, “but your education is your life.” So we’re sitting in his Literature That Means Something class. It’s an elective and I think he created it partially to offset Current Events. Lambeer is a teacher who cares what you think. Coach cares how you think. The class focuses on fiction, but if you can make a case for the literary value of any non-fiction book, he’ll give you credit. Then you have to make a class presentation sometime during the quarter and the more discussion you generate, the better your grade. He warns you when you sign up that you’d better be serious.