We nod and grunt.
Sooner’s glare sweeps the bleachers, practically daring anyone to lay zero-tolerance anything on him.
“You can give me ‘Yes!’” Coach says. “It’s the ‘sir’ I don’t like.”
So we yell “Yes!”
“Well, I’m not a detective and I don’t demand you rat out your buddies. It sets you up to be liars and me to be lied to and I have no time for that. I pay attention to performance. If you’re drinking it will affect your performance. If you’re using drugs it will affect your performance. If you’re causing violence in school you’ll get suspended or expelled and you’ll be gone and there won’t be any performance. I will not throw you off this team for your actions off the football field. I will, however, adjust your playing time in accordance with your actions on the football field.
“On the field, I expect you to give it your all, all the time. You owe that to your teammates and to yourselves; and to Coach Langford and me. Learn your plays; hit hard and hit clean. If I have an inkling that you’re hitting to injure, in practice or in a game, I will jerk you off the field so fast your pads will remain at the point of infraction and, though I said football is not a religious experience, we will have a ‘Come to Jesus’ meeting in which I will play Jesus. We do not go after heads and we do not go after knees. This is a tough, high-risk sport and we will not add to that risk. Is that clear?”
“YES!”
“Beyond that, we hit to rattle skeletons.”
Coach tosses his hat toward the nearly empty boxes of pads and removes his whistle. He sighs. “Fourteen years ago a boy named Ron Ingalls tried to hang himself in the athletic equipment room. Ron wasn’t much of an executioner and I don’t think he was all that serious because he knew I was coming and he left the light on and turned the radio up. When I got him down he said he did it because of the way the jocks treated him, and he named them. Every athlete he named played ball for me. It wasn’t all jocks, guys, it was football players. Ron Ingalls was alone; not a part of anything.
“I teach English here, but in fact, I’m a scientist. What I know about science is that everything from the smallest atom to the universe itself works because of its parts. This team is a single entity. It works when everyone does his part, from the manager to the quarterback. I know, because I know, there are guys on this team who have nothing but contempt for other guys on this team. Off the field, hate away. On the field we need each other. Every one of us operates better when every player does his job. And understand this: if not for fans, you guys would be out on a dusty vacant lot with pieces of your mothers’ old torn-up pillowcases tucked into your belts, playing flag football when there’s nothing good on TV. The fans are part of this entity, too.” He leans forward. “This is where Ron Ingalls comes in; every kid who walks the halls of Trout High is a member of this team. Do not be giving any members of the team a hard time, because I consider that to be detrimental to our mission and I will bench you so hard you’ll be picking wood slivers out of your colon. Are there any questions?”
There are none.
“Okay,” he says, “let’s head for the cafeteria and get this first day of practice under our belts.”
“Oh, and gentlemen,” Coach says as we begin to clear the bleachers. “Some of you may have taken history or civics classes that outlined the freedoms one enjoys in a democracy. At the heart of those freedoms is choice. At this moment you have the freedom to choose whether or not to play football. With an affirmative choice, all democracy vanishes.”
It’s another two weeks before school starts, so we walk through darkened, deserted halls toward the cafeteria, where we come upon card tables covered with tablecloths, a candle burning in the center of each. Caterers from Lindemann’s, Trout’s best imitation of an upscale restaurant, wait to serve us our choice of soup, salad, a meat or veggie entrée, and a generous selection of desserts. This is one of Coach Banks’s more eccentric traditions, marking our last day of relative comfort.
I’m the only guy who orders the veggies.
Coach squats next to Cody, who’s sitting across from me. Randy Dolven and Rich Glover sit to my right and left, popping bite-size sirloin tips like popcorn. “Ben Wolf,” Coach says. “This is your last year of high school. You were headed for State in cross-country. What in hell are you doing here?”
“I want a new experience.”
He can’t help but take in my size. People I’ve never met do that the moment they hear my deep voice and realize I’m not a sixth grader, but I’ve known Coach since junior high school when he came to our house to lay out future plans for my brother, took a look around, and turned into our backup dad. In Coach’s defense, he is seeing me for the first time, in this light. “The new experience could be brain damage,” he says.
Dolven says, “That wouldn’t be a new experience.”
“Have you talked with Coach Gildehaus?” Coach asks. Gildehaus coaches cross-country.
“I left a message on his answering machine yesterday afternoon,” I say. “I’ll talk with him today.”
“He called Coach Gildy when he knew he wouldn’t be there,” Cody says, “like I do with you when my shit is in the street.”
“What do you think of this?” Coach asks my brother.
“Sole surviving son,” Cody says. “Doubles the inheritance pool for me.”
“Glad you’re not my brother,” Coach says, and turns back to me. “I can’t promise you much playing time, buddy. Most of these seniors have three years’ experience.” He looks me over again. “And you have to admit, you’re not exactly…What do you weigh now?”
“One thirty.”
He stares. Cody looks away and smiles.
“Okay, one twenty-three. Listen Coach, I’m not the delinquent ant crawling up the elephant’s leg with sexual pleasures in mind. I’ve always had a fantasy of playing ball. I could turn out to be a weapon on special teams or something.”
Coach palms the back of his neck. “Well, I’ve never turned a kid away and I’m not going to start now. As long as you know what you’re getting into.” He stands. “You get this squared away with Coach Gildehaus today.”
If Coach knew what I was already into, he wouldn’t give this a second thought. Football’s tough but it doesn’t usually kill you. He’s right about my being a cross-country stud, which is a bit of a miracle itself, given my revolutions per minute are double those skinny long-legged dudes I run against. But I’m a guy who does what it takes and if I can do what it takes in cross-country at this height, I can do what it takes in football at this weight. Sure there are guys out there twice my size, just like there are guys in cross-country with twice my inseam, but the only reason I never turned out before was fear of permanent damage, and permanent won’t last as long now. And shoot, even Jim Brown couldn’t have taken a straight shot from a hundred-twenty-three pound bowling ball, if it was rolling fast enough. Sports is about concentration and confidence. There were about five million high school roundballers who could run faster, jump higher, dribble behind their backs and between their legs better than Larry Bird, but not one of them could hang on the court with him for the time it takes a bull rider to get points, even now, and he’s been retired forever. It’s in the mind. Plus, I’m blessed with one thing no one on our team or any other team has. I’m blessed with nothing to lose.
Late August
Three
“You’re going through with it,” Marla Dawson says, eyeing the cleats protruding through the open zipper of my workout bag.
I drop the bag next to the chair across from her desk and sit. “I’m like a genuine gridiron hero.”
She smiles. “Only smaller.”
“Only smaller.”
“You’re going to have to help me with this,” she says, studying my face. “It’s incomprehensible to me that you want to spend your last…this time, being pummeled.”
“I just need something that grips my attention tighter than reality,” I say. “Man, you see those bi
g guys coming, it takes everything you have not to burrow into the grass like a gopher.”
Marla Dawson is Doc’s and my compromise. He was this close—forefinger and thumb maybe a quarter inch apart—to breaking confidentiality and calling my parents. “There will be a day,” he said, “when I look back wondering what I should have done. I’ve got to live with myself.” There was an implied And you don’t, so we agreed I’d talk with a shrink at least twice a week and he’d find a way to fund it. Of Trout’s 943 citizens, not one of them is a shrink, or even plays one on TV. I figured I’d bring that to his attention after he got a little more comfortable with reality. Only Doc Wagner is not so dumb as I’d like to think, because he happened to know our county is included in an outreach program out of Ada County, which means Boise, and that we have us a traveling shrink. Guess how often.
Marla’s laugh at my gopher remark is tentative. “I’m out of my depth here,” she says for about the eighth time in the four weeks we’ve been meeting. “I’ve worked with suicidal kids and kids who have lost parents and siblings, and even one kid who was terminal, but I’ve never worked with someone who doesn’t care he’s dying.”
“So you’ll want me on your resume. I’ll sign anything.”
“I want you on someone else’s resume,” she says. “You make me crazy.”
“I want that on my resume.” Driving a therapist crazy is like scaring a NASCAR driver with a Kia.
Marla can’t be more than ten years older than I am. She’s been a psychiatric social worker maybe three years, total. You don’t draw Trout, Idaho, duty if you’re Sigmund Freud. “You can write your doctoral thesis on me when I’m gone.”
She’s wrong, of course. Just because it feels congruent in some unexplainable way doesn’t mean I don’t care or that I’m not scared. I’ve begun jerking awake in the middle of the night, sweating in the wake of unremembered dreams, getting up to touch my stuff—running shoes and CDs, my leather jacket, my beaded Indian belt—sitting on the end of my bed in the dark trying to wrap my imagination around the fact that in a relatively short time I will simply be gone. But with my fear comes intense curiosity. It’s hard to imagine what isn’t. I rethink and rethink and rethink and rethink my decision not to tell my brother and my parents, not because I’ve begun to believe I could tolerate how they would treat me after hearing the news, but because I worry about how betrayed they might feel that I didn’t let them prepare. The thing that bothers me more than my dad’s bewilderment, and whatever effect this shit will have on Mom, is my brother’s rage. When I go down for the count and Cody finds out how long I knew, he will be one pissed quarterback.
“So how are you otherwise?” Marla says, bringing me back into her office with a swoosh. “And don’t say ‘I’m dying’ again. That was barely funny once.”
The more I tell Marla Dawson how I am the more she doesn’t get it, but I have to admit it feels good to say it somewhere I know it won’t get out. This isn’t a story about some pathetic kid who goes terminal and freaks out before learning to live with the certainty of death and squares up all accounts on his deathbed only to have his brother make a million dollars later selling the story to Lifetime. I may be only eighteen, but I’ve been around long enough to know that some accounts don’t get squared. This is a story about a kid who always knew at some core level he was moving on early and, even through the initial terror and disbelief, is going to figure out, come hell or high water ( I vote high water), a way to consolidate a life into a year. Before Doc told me, I thought I had time to play, but now this year is my life. I have maybe twelve months to fall in love, marry, make smart investments, grow old, and die. But it’s relative, right? There are insects that pack it all into a day. I was going to do maintenance work on my GPA while reading every book I could get my hands on that would teach me about real life, run my heart out in cross-country, make a few extra bucks from the Hall brothers washing and waxing cars in their showroom at Trout Auto when they needed it, and see if I could muster the guts to spend some of that money on Dallas Suzuki, who’s tall enough to slow dance with her chin on my head (and my head in a sweet, softer place), to do just that. I’ve traded in the running for football, increased my reading time exponentially, and…well, Dallas Suzuki, brace yourself.
According to the laws of probability as outlined in Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (which, if you want to know what the universe is really about, you will read), I won the lottery to the power of about three hundred just being here. You too. Even if you start counting possibilities after the earth got formed, which the odds were way against, one botched life of a direct ancestor, going all the way back past salamanders, and your number doesn’t pop up. Also, according to Bryson, if you packed the entire history of the earth into one day, life in its most basic form would start around four in the morning, you’d get maybe twenty minutes of dinosaurs around ten thirty at night, and humans would take up about the last minute and seventeen seconds.
So if you look at the difference between your life expectancy and mine, which relative to those numbers is so infinitesimal it could be represented by Sooner Cowans’s chemistry grade; and you figure how much of your life you’re going to waste because you don’t know when it ends and how much of mine I’m gonna fill up because I do, we got dealt about the same hand which, if you think about it, isn’t exactly an ace-high straight flush.
“I’m good,” I tell Marla, in answer to her question. “I figure if Doc is right about the time I have left, I should wrap up my adolescence in the next few days, get into my early productive stages about the third week of school, go through my midlife crisis during Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday, redouble my efforts at productivity and think about my legacy, say, Easter, and start cashing in my 401(k)s a couple weeks before Memorial Day. I don’t have to worry about making enough money to put kids through college so I can focus on the more philosophical elements of my life.” I unzip my backpack and haul out my notebook. “I have it charted here if you want to see.”
“I think I’ve got it,” she says. “So where do I fit in?”
“Problem solving,” I tell her. “And convincing Doc I’m not crazy for refusing treatment.”
“And how do you propose I do that? He calls me twice a week asking if you’ve changed your mind.”
“Favorable psychological assessments,” I tell her. “He needs to know he’s done everything he can, which he has. I mean, he could have stopped me from playing football.”
She nods. “He’s sticking his neck out for you. And the problem solving?”
“Well, if I’m going to put the lid on adolescence in the next few days, I pretty much need to get laid.”
Marla blanches.
“Not with you,” I say. “Dallas Suzuki.”
“What’s a Dallas Suzuki?”
“Only the focus of my lust and my undying love.”
“In that order?”
“You should see her.”
“I have to say it offends my feminine sensibilities to help fuel the rocket of your sexual intentions, young man.”
“But you need to remember that as your rapidly expiring client, I set the agenda. And besides, if you knew Dallas Suzuki you’d worry about protecting me.”
“How do we go about this?”
“Methinks we need to make me more virile,” I say.
Marla looks me over with the identical expression Coach Banks flashed when I told him why I was turning out for football.
“Use your imagination,” I tell her.
“I’ll try.”
“We might not have the horses in any given year to take it all the way,” Coach says between earsplitting whistles in the middle of infinite wind sprints, “but ours will never tire down the stretch.” That’s horse-racing talk for the fourth quarter. Coach bases our capacity for pain on what he calls the principle of cardio bulimia. Simply put, that means we stop running when the third guy chucks up. It’s a good skill to perfect if you happen to be a f
rosh or sophomore struggling to get into the good graces of the starters. In fact we select a “Player of the Day” in the locker room after the second practice each day and that award always goes to puker number three, who also gets divine dispensation from the wetted end of Sooner Cowans’s towel. This football team is in killer shape, and if we run into teams with more talent, that’s what will pull us through.
“You were hittin’ out there today.” Cody throws his gear into the back of my 1941 Chevy pickup.
I began coveting this vehicle when I saw it in Coach’s backyard three years ago. I couldn’t believe it still ran. “Kissed my first girl in this sweet ride,” he told me then. “If you promise to do the same I’ll give you a good price.” I said how about if I promised to kiss my next girl in it and he said that was good enough. It’s Trout lore that the girl Coach kissed died in an awful car accident when they were seniors and he kind of spun out. He went to college to become an English teacher, taught in a few small towns in eastern Washington, then came home to bring closure to his interrupted life. I wonder if that closure ever came; he’s been here twenty years, lives alone. I treat his pickup like a place of worship.
“Never underestimate the power of a midget on a mission,” I tell Cody.
He hops into the passenger seat, snaps the seat belt low and tight across his lap, and smiles once again at the makeshift sign posted on the dash in front of him. SHOULD THE CABIN LOSE PRESSURE, AN OXYGEN MASK WILL APPEAR FROM ABOVE. BE SURE TO HELP THE DRIVER WITH HIS MASK BEFORE SECURING YOUR OWN.
“Just don’t get your brain crushed,” he says. “I need you.”
The Creator of the Universe must have a sense of humor, giving the three-quarter-size Wolf kid perfect vision for diagnosing defenses and the Greek-godlike Wolf kid a brain that scrambles them on sight. Last year when he took over at QB, Cody and I stayed up late with the scouting tapes on the eve of every game. I’d teach him to read each situation and point out how one or two of the opposing players telegraphed their defense. Every team has someone to key on and I’m a genius at detecting them. This way Cody doesn’t have to see the big picture. He says the college of his choice will have to cough up two scholarships, one for his body and one for my brain.