I start the pickup. “To crush my brain they’d have to find it,” I tell him. “It’s my spine that Sooner’s shooting for.”
“You do dreams?” I’m in Marla’s office after practice the next day. School starts tomorrow.
“I took a class or two,” she says. “I wouldn’t exactly call myself Carl Jung. Why, are you having dreams?”
I take a deep breath. “You gotta promise not to tell. Who’s Carl Jung?”
“The dream guru,” she says. “And I’m a therapist. I can’t tell. If I could you’d be the first one I’d tell on. Every member of your family would know what’s going on and you’d be balder than a newborn on chemo and radiation and whatever else they do to slow this thing. Ben, you’re eighteen years old. I can’t believe you’re refusing treatment. Where is the disbelief? Where is the anger? Where is the magical thinking; the release?”
“I read that same book,” I say. “I went directly to release. Those other phases end up in the same place, and I’m short on time. And I’ll tell you something else. You’d keep yourself in work right up to retirement if you told my mother.”
“But Ben, listen to me—”
“No, you listen to me. Do whatever you have to do to make it so I don’t have to take care of you while I die. All my life I’ve been the kid who cuts his finger off and won’t come in the house because he doesn’t want to bleed on the rug, and if I’m going to do this year right, I gotta have somebody who thinks blood on the rug is decor.”
She sighs big and looks off to the side.
“You’ll have to do better than that,” I tell her. “Let me see if I can make it easier. I am scared, but not exactly like I’m supposed to be. When Doc said I was dying, it was like…I don’t know…right. I can’t explain that, but it’s just true. So yeah, I’m scared, big-time, but in the same way I knew it was right, I know something’s next. I don’t know what, but something. Did you know energy never dies? You can’t kill it. And besides, I’m a hundred-twenty-three pound kamikaze on special teams. I’ll get killed doing that way before some disease gets me.”
She laughs. Tears rim her eyes, but she laughs.
I say, “Good. Now, do you do dreams?”
Marla rolls her eyes. “Why not.”
“You’ll want these in your thesis.”
“And they are about…”
“They are conversations with Hey-Soos, which I recall word for word when I wake up.”
“Spelled…”
“H-e-y-s-o-o-s.”
“You’re aware that H-e-y-s-o-o-s in Spanish is spelled J-e-s-u-s.”
“I am aware of that, but I’m pretty sure he spells it this way. I mean, he didn’t say that, but in the dream I know it.”
Marla flips open an imaginary notebook and touches the tip of an imaginary pencil to her tongue. “And how long have you been hearing these voices?” She really is going to be good at this some day.
“Paranoid schizophrenia,” I say, “a diagnosis you can live with.”
She folds her hands on the desk. “So, real conversations with Jesus-spelled-H-e-y-s-o-o-s?”
“Yeah, well, you know, real in the dream.”
“Does Hey-Soos tell you you’re out of your mind playing football?”
“As a matter of fact, he does.”
“What does Hey-Soos look like?”
“Like he should be pronouncing his name the other way. You know, sandals, bathrobe; got that hippie thing going. Dark, could be Mid-Eastern or Latino. Definitely a guy who gets harassed by Homeland Security.”
“Are you messing with me?”
“I do,” I say, “but I’m not.”
“So what do you and…Hey-Soos…talk about?”
“This is the part you’re going to think is crazy.”
“You’re way late for that.”
“We talk about what to do with my life.”
She nods. “And does Hey-Soos say what that might be?”
“This isn’t your run-of-the-mill savior,” I say. “He plays his cards close to the robe; makes me come to my own conclusions.”
Marla shakes her head and sighs. “Well, I guess I should welcome the help.”
Early September
Four
“Little Wolf, how are you doing this?” Coach has called me into his office after practice. This place is a trip through Trout athletic history. There’s a framed picture on the wall of Coach and Boomer, Sooner’s dad. Man, one look at that guy and you know why Sooner doesn’t have siblings. This guy eats his young. That year’s quarterback stands between them, for which Coach looks plenty happy. The Idaho state championship trophy for the two-mile run sits on a table just below that picture, then there are a few years missing, followed by paraphernalia highlighting some event in football or track for each year Coach has been back. To the untrained eye it might look like the storeroom in the back of a sporting goods store, but my eyes trace these walls with reverence. Nobody I know loves what he does more than Coach Lou Banks.
“How am I doing what?”
He sweeps his hand, palm down, in front of the window looking out into the locker room. “This,” he says. “Football. You’re flattening guys half again your size.”
“Focus,” I tell him. I give him my theory on Jim Brown in the path of the rapidly accelerating one-hundred-twenty-three-pound bowling ball. “Why?”
“I want to learn to coach it,” he says. “No offense, but you’re not exactly in possession of an NCAA Division One body, for any sport. Coach Gildy and I used to sit around after your cross-country meets and laugh our asses off at your turnover rate. Man, you must have worn out some shoes.”
That’s pretty funny. “It’s all math,” I tell him. “The shorter the stride, the faster the drumbeat.”
“And how the hell are you getting to all these tackles? I’ve clocked your wind sprints and you might be the sixth or seventh fastest guy on the team. Yet you’re in on almost every damn tackle.”
“I’m tellin’ you, Coach: math. You gauge the speed of the guy you’re after and chart the angle quick enough to know where he’s going before he does, then give him the big surprise. A football field is finite on all sides; the mathematician conquers the speedster almost every time.”
Coach palms his neck. “How do I put that in the language of the average football player?” he says.
“The average football player doesn’t speak a language,” I say back. “And you might notice something else. I may be the sixth or seventh fastest wind sprinter at the beginning, but clock me toward the end.”
Coach looks wistful. “I played like you once, maybe not as smart, but as hard. It’s good to have you, Ben. Plus, you keep your brother levelheaded.” He’s quiet a moment. “Listen, buddy, these first weeks you’re looking tough enough to start….”
“But like you said, you got guys who’ve been busting their butts for three years, waiting for that starting spot. Give it to ’em. Most times I won’t be the difference between a win and a loss. When I am, put me in. Otherwise, I’m fine with special teams.” I don’t want to sound like some kind of saint or something, but if this disease takes me out in midseason and they’re counting on me, it could be hard to fix. And no way do I want anyone hating me for taking his spot. I probably won’t be around long enough to fix that. It’s good to drum up a little contempt for the guy running ahead of you on the cross-country team because you both get to run anyway, but you don’t want disharmony with your buds on the gridiron.
Coach pops me on top of the head. “You’re a good man. How’s the ol’ pickup running?”
“Runnin’ good,” I tell him. “And I’m getting ready to christen her.”
“Feel free to keep it to yourself when you do,” he says.
I said before, Coach has long felt like a second dad to me. Coming on to Christmas of Cody’s and my eighth-grade year, the world was right. Mom was on her meds, we had three feet of snow, it was clear and cloudless and “colder ’n a well digger’s butt in the Klondi
ke,” as Dad put it, casting the valley and mountains in heart-stopping postcard beauty. A great hunting season augmented Dad’s mail and freight business, and Cody and I brought in extra money of our own shoveling sidewalks and pushing cars out of ditches; you couldn’t have crammed one more present under our tree.
Then around December twentieth Mom flushed her medication down the toilet and on the twenty-fourth downed close to a fifth of Jim Beam whiskey and turned Christmas Eve into Halloween. The crazy chemical unbalance she achieved would have sent Freddy Krueger running for cover. My mother’s shrill, rageful voice echoed through the neighborhood as Coach pulled up to let Cody and me out after caroling up at the county hospital, and through the window we saw the living room filled with smoke. Coach ran inside to find Dad pinning Mom to the couch and a smoking, water-soaked pile of ashes beneath the tree. Dad had got to her as the fire started up the tree and kept us off the next night’s evening news. Coach took Cody and me to his place. We didn’t get any presents that year, but we skied and snow-mobiled all Christmas Day with Coach before settling down in his tiny dining room for one of the worst turkey dinners I have had the pleasure of choking down. Since then he’s been our go-to guy when the shit-storm starts.
Coach probably could have gone anywhere and done anything he wanted, but he came back home. Trout High School stands on the same ground it stood on when he went here more than twenty-five years ago, though it’s been remodeled. Hidden on the south side of the building, there’s a tree with a plaque set in concrete near the trunk. It says, IN MEMORY OF BECKY SANDERS. Everyone knows Becky was Coach’s girlfriend. She died in that awful accident at the river bridge south of town. Coach had been the scourge of the school that year after he stomped off the football field when his racist coach had ordered an illegal hit on a black player from another school—the only black player in the league—and Sooner’s dad did the dirty deed. That ended Coach’s football career. By his own account he wasn’t a particularly talented football player so he turned himself, on guts alone, into a better small-college distance runner than his talent should have allowed. Football was his first love, after Becky, and I think he came back here to get the bad taste out of his mouth from that last year. And he stayed. Now that I know I’m on my way out, I’m worried that he likes me so much, with a dead girlfriend in his history.
If we win it this year it will be because of my brother. Physically, he’s got it all. We run a single wing, which is, like, pre-Pleistocene and never seen in eleven-man, but it’s perfect for a quarterback who’s as good a runner as he is a passer and that’s my brother. Even with his dyslexic defensive reading skills he’s almost impossible to corner because of his speed and quick release. He’s upchuck scared before every game, dead sure the other team will figure out he’s fooling the world, but the second the kickoff whistle blows he transforms into a football machine. God, I love to watch him play.
One thing about attending a high school with fewer than a hundred students is you’re offered one teacher for each subject and if you don’t get along with him or her, suck it up. It’s worse with a required course because, well, it’s required. I’m pretty sure teachers sit in the teachers’ lounge with the same lament about us, but at least they’re getting paid.
First period of the first day of school I realize if I’m going to maximize my education this year, I’d better take control. Mr. Lambeer, our U.S. government/current events teacher, underlines that idea for me in spades. As a junior I took U.S. history from him, and dutifully wrote down everything he said, regurgitated it on tests, and walked away with an A. Since then, however, I’ve begun reading Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James W. Loewen, which tells how the twelve most popular high school history texts are way more interested in making us love our country and revere all the famous historical dudes than they are in getting the facts right. As near as I can tell, Lambeer told every lie in the book, and added some whoppers of his own. So I’m figuring what’s true for history, may also be true for government.
“You may as well all know I’m conservative and proud of it,” he says. “Damn proud of it, in fact.” I don’t doubt him; he looks plenty proud. “Best you know where your information is coming from,” he goes on, “and though I’m conservative, I’m also open-minded to others’ ideas. So feel free to disagree with any political thing I say. But be ready to defend your position, and I’ll warn you I was considered a pretty darned good debater in college.”
Lambeer’s hard to take; wears a suede jacket with those leather patches on the elbows, khakis, a sweater vest, and brown loafers. The man is dapper; and though he says he welcomes political debate, he’s known to get pretty surly when he doesn’t bring you around to his position, which should make him fun to mess with.
We sit in traditional rows in his room and he loves to walk up and down the aisles with a rubber-tipped pointer as he lectures or asks questions. Lambeer is the guy who, by his very existence, taught me the meaning of pontificate.
“We’ll cover the structure and meaning of the Constitution in a matter of weeks,” he says, “so we can put it in today’s context. I’m interested in relevance.” He goes on to make clear what a miraculous document our Constitution is, how it has stood the test of time with relatively few changes—amendments—over its more than two hundred years in existence.
“Did you know the Framers recommended we revisit the Constitution about every twenty years?” I ask.
“Excuse me?”
“Yeah, they knew things change, that the Constitution could get stale in the face of progress.”
Lambeer takes a deep breath. “We’ll get to questions and discussions later, Mr. Wolf.” He turns back to his notes. “The Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to our Constitution—is the perfect example of laws that stand up in any age.” He raises his eyebrows at me.
I raise my hand at him.
“Mr. Wolf, I said—”
“I know, but what about the right to bear arms?”
“What about it?”
“Do you think the Framers of the Constitution knew that amendment would put semiautomatic weapons in the hands of teenagers like my brother, intent on blowing away their classmates?”
Cody points a cocked finger at me.
Sooner Cowans says, “Jesus, Wolf. Right to bear arms just means everyone can have a gun.”
Lambeer ignores him. Sooner’s not exactly the guy you want on your side when trying to make an intellectual point. “Do you believe the second amendment to be a bad one, Mr. Wolf?”
“It was meant to arm a well-regulated militia,” I say. “I think it needs to be more exclusive.”
“If we take away one person’s right to own a certain gun,” he says, “where does it end?”
“Have you read Outgunned, by Brown and Abel?” I ask. This reading binge is turning me into a force to be dealt with.
“That’s a liberally biased piece of…That book has an agenda,” he says. “It’s an outright attack on the National Rifle Association.”
I start to answer but he says, “Hold that thought; we’ll come back to this.”
“Let’s back up one amendment,” I say. “Do you subscribe to the concept of separation of church and state?” I say subscribe to. Whew. I might have to get leather patches on the elbows of my jacket. First I’d have to get a jacket.
“Yes, I do, but I also know that our nation was founded by Christians as a Christian nation, so that concept bears qualification.”
“Actually the fact that we were founded by mostly Christians is probably a reason to make sure we enforce that separation,” I say. “That keeps laws fair if we, like, try to hedge to the Christian side of things.”
“Mr. Wolf, what have you been reading?”
“Just a bunch of subversive stuff,” I say.
Dallas Suzuki says, “Remind me to get his reading list.”
I am speechless. I’d walk proud and erect through gunfire for Dallas Suzuki’s grocery list.
“We’ll post
pone this discussion until we can get through this early material,” Lambeer says. Back to his notes. “In addition to the Bill of Rights—”
I say, “Did you know that ‘under God’ wasn’t part of the Pledge of Allegiance until the early nineteen fifties?”
“MR. WOLF!”
It is clear I have begun my quest for truth in Constitutional education with a little too much zeal, so I zip it for the rest of the period, in order to finish it in class instead of in the office.
First game of the year, against Meadows Valley, Cody is en fuego. Sooner Cowans, the aforementioned Son of Kong, runs the opening kickoff back to their ten, broken loose by a bullet block from Trout’s own hundred-twenty-three-pound helmet with legs, and Cody fires a perfect rollout pass to Andy Evans on a down-and-out to the corner of the end zone. We’re ahead by one touchdown with twenty seconds gone in the first quarter and that’s as close as Meadows gets. Cody throws for three more, Sooner runs for two, and our sophomores play nearly the entire fourth quarter. I play on all special teams, which in this case is mostly our kickoffs and their punts, so I’m in on about one play in four. By mid-second quarter I have a little cult following of Impossible Dreamers in the stands and I’m thinking this change of career direction was a great idea. Even their coach comes over after the game to ask what spaceship I rode down on. Coach Banks says again he doesn’t know how he’s going to keep me out of the starting lineup on defense, but I tell him again to keep me a surprise. Truth is, the less other teams see me, the tougher it will be to figure me out.