There was a heartbeat in those stands that dotted the Friday nights of Texas and Oklahoma and Ohio and Pennsylvania and Florida and all of America like a galaxy of stars, a giant, lurking heartbeat.
Michael Dukakis never heard that sound, and even if he had he probably would have dismissed it as some silly tribal rite practiced in the American boondocks by people who made no difference. But his opponent didn’t make the same mistake. He had been down the lonely road to those games, where the heartbeat had resonated more spectacularly than in the healthiest newborn. He knew it was still as strong as ever. He knew what kind of values these people had.
In his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination for president Bush reminded an entire nation, an entire world, of where he had been and what he believed in, his echo of the past a reaffirmation of the present:Now we moved to West Texas forty years ago, forty years ago this year. And the war was over, and we wanted to get out and make it on our own. Those were exciting days. We lived in a little shotgun house, one room for the three of us, worked in the oil business, and then started my own.
And in time, we had six children; moved from the shotgun to a duplex apartment to a house, and lived the dream—high school football on Friday nights. . . .
(10)
BOOBIE WHO?
I
When Boobie Miles returned to the football field, no one called out his name with those bellowing chants that had rocked the Watermelon Feed in a moment that seemed like a millennium before. There were no bursts of applause, no coach’s speech comparing him to the great Permian runners of the past, no take-your-sweet-time walk down the aisle of the crowded high school cafeteria. In the space of five weeks he had become an afterthought whose past performance earned no special privilege and seemed largely forgotten.
Had there been a waiver wire in the world of high school football, a place to dump former stars, he would have been on it, dangled at a bargain-basement price to Andrews or Kermit or Wink or maybe Seminole or any other town that might be willing to take a chance on a once-hot prospect with a bum knee for the stretch run to make the playoffs. Or maybe he could just be traded for a reserve defensive tackle and a player to be named later.
“In a week or two the fans will think he already graduated,” said Trapper. “They’ll be saying, ‘Boobie who?’”
Boobie who?
The only thing to herald his return was the shame and ignominy of a white shirt. There were dozens of other players wearing them as well, and together they blended into the dry heat of the practice field like lingering cattle waiting to be herded in this or that direction. There were a select few who didn’t look that way and clearly stood out, but Boobie didn’t merit that distinction anymore.
As part of a long-standing tradition, the Permian starters wore black shirts during practice and the subs wore white. In the life of a player few single moments were more stirring than to open up the locker one day and find a black practice jersey hanging there like a gilded, sacred robe in the middle of a foul-smelling pile of pads and pants and shoes and jocks. Conversely, few single moments were more humbling than to have that black shirt taken away and given to someone else.
Boobie had worn a black shirt his junior season. Up until the knee injury, he had worn one his senior year without a remote thought of change. But in his absence Chris Comer had come to own the black shirt at fullback. He had rushed for a hundred yards or more in each of Permian’s five games, and it was becoming the general consensus of the coaches that he was better than Boobie ever had been or ever would be. For one thing, he worked harder in the weight room than Boobie and didn’t coast on his natural strength. For another, he didn’t try all those pretty-boy spin moves all day long like he was some damn ballerina or something but knew that the best way sometimes to get by someone was to lower the shoulder and punish the living shit out of him, use that stupendously strong body of his as the weapon God had clearly intended it to be. Boobie might have been able to run like that, but it was difficult to get him to try it. In the past all that was a necessary part of coaching him. But now it didn’t matter nearly so much. If he wanted to show off his fancy spins and jukes, he could do it at home in his backyard in between the broken-down cars and the little pieces of trash that swirled in the wind. He wasn’t a black shirt anymore, just another white shirt trying to work his way back into the starting lineup.
When he returned to practice and discovered his reduction in status, he was livid. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, not his senior year. “They made me wear a white shirt,” he said afterward. “They jacked me. If I don’t play, I’m not gonna suit up. You know me. If I suit up, I want to play.”
On the field, the coaches were as gentle with him as ever, treating him once again as an explosive time bomb that could be set off by the slightest impulse. When Boobie went up to Coach Belew and asked him if he was going to play that Friday night against Midland High, Belew gently told him that they had to make sure he was ready, make sure his knee could take the stress of a live football game. But off the field in the coaches’ office after practice, Belew couldn’t believe the nerve of Boobie to ask such a ridiculous question.
“Did you hear what Boobie said to me? He asked me if he was going to play Friday,” Belew told the other coaches. “It would be a miracle if he can play this year. It’s a tough road to hoe, coming back from knee surgery and playing in the same year. It would be suicide to let ’im play.”
It raised the question of why he was out there at all, since it had already been determined that Boobie would need knee surgery after the season. For the team, his return appeared to be a no-risk proposition. If he came back, it was a gift, a pleasant surprise. If he didn’t come back that was okay because they had found someone who had not only replaced him but surpassed him.
But for Boobie, the risks were enormous. If he did play well, it might rekindle the interest of recruiters, who had gone on to whore after other tricks. But by playing there was always the risk of further damage to his knee, as well as the psychic damage of having to adjust to being a bit player in an extravaganza that had originally been written for him.
Initially there had been nothing but the blindness of hope, as if a magic wand would appear and make his knee pure again.
“I can’t wait to come back,” he had said shortly after the arthroscopic surgery that was done at the time of the injury. “Put on that knee brace and fly.” He felt certain he would regain his role as starting fullback by the Odessa High game, when the stadium would surely be rockin’ ’n’ rollin’. But it was a belief only he held.
“He thinks he’s gonna be ready for OHS, but he’s sadly mistaken,” said Trapper. Initially, he had been surprised by the dedication with which Boobie worked toward rehabilitation. But like most everyone else associated with the program, he had little real faith in him. When the reality of the injury set in, when it became apparent to Boobie that there was no magic wand, the grueling regimen of rehabilitation became more frustrating and futile.
“That was out of his nature for him to do that too hard, out of character,” said Trapper. “You have to be thinking that he’s seen the handwriting on the wall—the team hasn’t fallen apart without him.”
When the Odessa High game took place, Boobie was still in street clothes. Watching the pre-game warm-ups, he seemed devoid of any emotional connection to the team, his infectious self-confidence dissolving into detached coldness, an observer peering in on something that had no place for him. “Nah, I’m not that excited,” he said as the stadium began to fill up, and during the game he said almost nothing but looked on glumly as the team moved effortlessly ahead without him.
He came back to practice the following week to the shame of a white practice jersey, and he had no role in Permian’s 42-0 trouncing of Midland High.
During the next week, when it became clear he was going to get a chance to play, his mood alternated. There were glimpses of the old Boobie holding court once again in the locker room, turnin
g to Jerrod McDougal and addressing him with “Hey, Baby Ostrich Head Face.” There were also glimpses of his finding the game of football a difficult struggle. During one of the early morning practices in the gymnasium, he was pushed while running with the ball. After the play, he turned around and hurled the football at the offender.
That Friday night against the Abilene High Eagles, he suited up with the familiar paraphernalia: the high-top Nikes, the silver stockings, the white TERMINATOR X towel. He watched from the sidelines as Comer scored the first two touchdowns of the game, one on a three-yard run and the other on an eighty-eight yard run where he broke up the middle on a trap and just outran everyone else to the goal line. Boobie stood behind the other players glassy-eyed, his hands clasped.
He got into the game in the second quarter and gained four yards on his first carry of the season. He got the ball again, spinning for a gain of two yards, and then he blocked from the tailback position as Comer scored his third touchdown of the night to make the score 28-0 at the half. Comer had already gained 125 yards on nine carries. Boobie had gained six yards on two carries.
He carried the ball eight more times in the second half. It was obvious he was tentative, the knee looming as if all the bone and flesh and ligament and cartilage lay there exposed for everyone to take a shot at like some carnival game. “I think he’s scared, real scared,” said Trapper from the sidelines as he watched Boobie drag his leg a little bit and get up slowly from a pile of tacklers. But Trapper had to admire his gutsiness. “I think he’s doing a lot better than I expected.”
With a third and two at the Abilene 23, he took the ball on the hand-off and suddenly all the justifications flooded back of why he had once been touted as one of the ten best running backs in the state of Texas. He cut up the middle and broke past several tacklers for an eight-yard gain and a first down. The old fire was there and the indelible image of Boobie towering over hapless tacklers.
Watching him your heart rose and you began to believe that he could do it, get it all back again, have the type of season that he wanted so badly to have. But it was only a flash, a haunting glimmer of what could have been. Several plays later, he left the game limping with a cramp and did not return. In the meantime, Permian scored an easy 49-0 win to improve its record to five and one and solidify its top-ten ranking in the statewide polls.
A year before against this same team, Boobie had had the night of his life. He had gained 232 yards on eight carries. He would have easily broken the Permian record for the most yards rushing in a single game if Gaines, deciding the game was a rout, had not taken him out (Gaines said he hadn’t known that Boobie was close to the record). But the performance was still spectacular enough to earn him a mention in USA Today. L.V. carefully kept the clipping, just as he carefully kept a pile of other glowing clippings about Boobie from the Dallas Morning News and the Odessa American his junior year. On this night against the Abilene Eagles, he gained forty-six yards on ten carries, and his return to action earned a single paragraph at the tail end of the Odessa American account of the game. There was no reason to give him more mention than that. Compared to Comer, who finished the game with 138 yards, he hadn’t done anything.
For L.V., watching Boobie play against Abilene had been harrowing. On every play he couldn’t help but worry that his nephew would do further damage to his knee, even though the brace did provide good protection. He saw the emotional effect the injury was having on Boobie—the prolonged periods of depression as one Friday night after another just came and went.
“He wants to have that magic wand and have it be like it was before [his knee] got hurt,” L.V. said, but he knew that wasn’t possible.
He wondered if he was doing the right thing by letting Boobie play at all. He had always risen to protect Boobie and somehow make life right for him. He had fought for him and with him, and whenever Boobie had veered off course he successfully put him back on it. Early in the season, before everything had turned so hideous, L.V. had stood in the failing afternoon light and silently watched Boobie perform. The other boosters and parents and hangers-on traveled from one end of the practice field to the other in friendly little packs. But L.V. stayed off by himself, as if he felt he didn’t quite belong. Instead his eyes just followed as Boobie danced and weaved and did all those things on the beautifully manicured, well-watered fields that L.V. had patiently taught him. He didn’t have the look of a proud, gaping parent but the look of someone always there for Boobie, always keeping an eye out for him.
It had seemed so simple then, but now every option was fraught with painful uncertainty. Should he let Boobie play—even if it meant the risk of further injury—because it was the only way he could still contend for a major-college scholarship? Or should he put the dream in jeopardy and elect to have the surgery done on Boobie now, before it was too late, before there was more physical and psychological damage?
“High school is important, but this is a stepping stone,” said L.V. one day, sitting on a bench in the locker room of the field house, surrounded by all the little pictures on the Wall of Fame. “If he gets hurt here . . .” The thought made him shudder. Back home in a worn envelope were the letters from Texas A & M and Nebraska and Oklahoma and all the rest that glowed as powerfully as kryptonite. In his heart, he believed the recruiters wouldn’t run from his nephew just because of a knee injury. With a little time, he’d be as good as new.
But the Permian staff said there was no way a major college would touch Boobie now unless he came back and proved that he had recovered. He was damaged goods, like a crate of Florida oranges that had gone rotten in delivery, and the big boys were not going to deal with him unless they had positive proof some sweet juice could still be squeezed out of him, not some mess of pulp and seeds.
Privately the Permian staff, with the exception of Coach Hearne, didn’t see any dilemma in Boobie’s decision at all. The doctor had cleared him to play, which in the coaches’ minds meant he could play. And all the things that went along with the injury—the mental aspect of having to adjust to being a white shirt substitute, the necessity of major knee surgery after the season whether he gained one yard or a thousand, the fluid that had to be drawn from it, the fear of getting hit on it—were necessary prices to pay. Others had done it. He wasn’t the first. To a large degree, they saw him as selfish and undisciplined and utterly undedicated to the great cause of Mojo.
“Playing to him is not what it’s all about,” said Trapper. “He just doesn’t want to play. Fuckheads can just play. He wants to be number one. He wants to be the one with his name in the paper. He wants to be the leading rusher in District Four Five-A. He wants to be the one they’re talking about.
“I think he can come back. It’s a mental block. He has blinded himself. His attitude is, ‘If I can’t be the center of attention, I don’t want to be anything at all.’ He’s not just letting himself down. He’s letting the team down, he’s letting [Gaines] down, he’s letting his uncle down.”
“It takes a special kind of kid to overcome an injury like that,” said Belew. “I don’t think he’ll ever do what it takes to be one hundred percent.”
Sometimes it sounded as if they were talking about a pro player making a million dollars a year with a contractual obligation to play, not an eighteen-year-old kid playing for his high school team who, to be here at all, had overcome abandonment by his mother and foster homes and learning disabilities.
L.V. understood the team’s interest, but he also understood the needs of his nephew as well as himself. They weren’t in this so that Boobie could be a dutiful substitute, coming off the bench to give Comer or Billingsley a rest. There was no ticket to the promised land in doing that.
“I’d rather hold him out and let him take his chances in college. If it wasn’t the football season, it would be much easier,” he said in the silence of the locker room. But L.V. knew how much emotion and energy had been wrapped into Boobie’s senior year, how so much of Boobie’s life, as well as hi
s own, seemed to hinge on it. How long had they waited?
L.V. gave one of his little laughs and lowered his palm until it was about four feet from the ground. “Ever since he was right there.”
He decided to let him continue.
Boobie played sparingly the following week in a 48-2 win over Dallas Jesuit that upped Permian’s record to six and one. He ran the ball five times for fourteen yards and seemed even more tentative than he had against Abilene High. He broke to the right on one carry but had no acceleration at all and was easily tackled for no gain. He rumbled for five yards on another play but went down before taking a hit.
The next Friday night, Permian met the Cooper Cougars in Abilene. On the second play of the game, Comer went sixty-four yards for a touchdown, his seventh of the season. Boobie got his first carry of the game on the next series as a substitute and scored his first touchdown of the year on a one-yard dive. He was livid after the play and threw the football at a Cooper player. Boobie said the player had pulled his face mask and punched him in the face.
“You’re a senior, you got to be able to handle that,” Gaines told him as he came to the sidelines.
“I ain’t gonna sit there and let somebody hit me in my damn face,” said Boobie as he walked to the players’ bench, his voice strained and agitated. Early in the fourth quarter he scored another touchdown to make it 49-14. It was his last carry of the night, giving him forty-nine yards on twelve carries. As at the Abilene High game there were times one could see tiny flashes of the old brilliance, but there were more moments of watching him try to cut upfield into freedom, only to fall helplessly to the ground.