“There are advantages to attending a small school,” he said a few months ago on the first day of class. “Small classes, lots of individual attention, all that. But subject material is necessarily limited and if you get a bad teacher for, say English, you’ve got him four years and there’s no escape. By the way, if you happen to think you got a bad teacher for English, I encourage you to keep it to yourself. The most important commodity you can take on to college with you is the ability to think logically, to organize your ideas and present them orally or on paper. Learn to do that and you’ll fool a lot of profs. I’m tempted to say you’ll thank me for putting you through what I’m going to put you through in this class, but you are teenagers, subhuman forms that don’t thank anyone for anything until it’s way too late. Just kidding.”
So today I have my hand in the air because I haven’t had a lot of luck getting my point of view across in Lambeer’s class. “I want to change my book to The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” There is a collective groan, not for any bias against Malcolm, I think, but for the repetition.
Coach smiles. “Like I told you earlier, I’ve heard about your obsession with Malcolm.”
“What? Where did you hear that? What obsession? It’s not an obsession. Malcolm is my life. I live and breathe Malcolm. But it’s not an obsession.”
“In the teachers’ lounge,” he says. “Mr. Lambeer tells me you’re trying to hijack the curriculum.”
“Well, it ain’t working,” I say, “so I’ll try here.”
“There is no curriculum here,” Coach says.
“Which makes it all the easier to hijack.”
“Might I remind you,” he says, “that The Autobiography of Malcolm X is close to five hundred pages? We’re over halfway through the semester. You’re going to have to read like the wind. What were you reading? David Sedaris, right? You sure you want to give that up?”
I don’t tell Coach I’m rereading Malcolm X so it won’t take that long. He’s right: I was reading Sedaris, because I consider him a true American. First of all he’s, like, as funny as they get, and he’s a gay guy who just stands up and says he’s gay and writes right on past you if you have that bias, and he teaches you that humans are humans and funny is funny, and I picked him because I needed as much laughter as I could get. But I’ll read him anyway. Rudy is translating Malcolm into real time, so I might as well milk it for all its worth.
“I don’t think anyone in this school should be allowed to read that book,” Sylvia Longley says.
Coach says, “I’ll be sure you’re not required to read it.”
It’s hard to take Sylvia seriously. She’s pretty smart, but she’s waiting patiently for her first original thought, and while she’s waiting, she gives her dad’s. He’s the state senator from our county and to him, intellectual freedom is the freedom to believe what he believes. If he didn’t already have a job he could be Lambeer’s teaching partner. The scariest part about him, according to my dad, is that he gets elected. “You couldn’t require me to read it,” she says. Sylvia has down that nose-turned-up, lips-slightly-parted, tongue-smacking thing like she invented it.
“Nor would I try,” Coach says. “And because we live in a democracy, you couldn’t require that anyone else not read it.” That’s what I like about Coach as a teacher, and as a coach for that matter: he doesn’t feel the need to accommodate a dumb idea on the off chance that not doing so would bruise some kid’s psyche.
“Burning books is not such a bad idea,” Sylvia says. “I can’t believe this country. It’s okay to burn an American flag, but it’s not okay to burn some book that’s full of trash.”
I can hear my brother shaking his head from across the room. “What’s trashy about Malcolm X?” he says. “Jeez, Sylvia. Tap your helmet.”
“Have you seen the language in that book?” she says.
“I sure as shit have,” Cody says, and pauses for the laugh.
Coach says, “Careful there, Golden Boy.”
Cody raises his hands in surrender.
“He just makes my point,” Sylvia says. “You won’t let him use that language in class, but you’ll allow a book with ten times worse language in it. That’s hypocritical.”
“Not really,” Coach says. “The language in a book represents the time and conditions. It’s history. And the only reason I don’t let him use it in class is I don’t want someone complaining to Mr. Phelps. Personally I don’t care about that language one way or the other. Mr. Wolf said that word loud and clear and I don’t see one student bleeding. I’m just following the rules so I can keep my job and win football games.”
“I’ll say it again,” Sylvia says. “We can burn the flag; we should be able to burn books.”
Coach stands up. “You know what? You’re right. Let’s do it.” He starts for the door.
We sit, watching.
“Come on,” he says. “Sylvia’s right. We can burn the flag; we can burn a book.”
My brother says, “Can we burn a witch?”
Sylvia glares at him like a viper.
“If we can find one who doesn’t mind,” Coach says. “Let’s go.”
In the library, Coach marches directly to the shelf where Malcolm resides, snags a copy, and walks to the desk while our entire class watches from the hall. Suzy March, the student librarian this period, says, “You don’t have to check it out, Mr. Banks. I know you’ll bring it back.”
Coach pulls out his wallet and hands her a ten. “Actually I won’t be bringing this one back,” he says, and we disappear down the hall while Suzy stares at Alexander Hamilton.
Out on the front lawn Coach breaks a few small dead branches off a tree, makes a tepee with them, gathers us close to block the chilly late-fall wind. When he gets a little fire he adds the first three or four pages of Malcolm. Malcolm is quite flammable. He rips out some more pages and lays them on one by one. When it’s going good, he puts the rest of the book on. Malcolm goes up in smoke in no time flat.
“There,” Coach says as the flames burn down. “We said what we had to say about The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I feel good. How about you guys?”
“Pretty funny,” Sylvia says. “A lot of good that did. There are three more copies in the library and you paid for that one. They can just buy another one.”
“You want to burn them all?” Coach says in mock surprise. “Oh, that’s different. I don’t think I can get behind that. I mean, when somebody burns a flag, they just burn one or maybe a couple. They don’t try to burn them all.”
“You can say what you want, Mr. Banks, but what’s in some books is poison. There have to be books that you think are trash, too. I mean you might not say that to us, but you know it’s true.”
“You’re wrong,” Coach says. “I would say it to you. There are a lot of books I think are trash. There are a lot of books I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. I mean, there’s a book in the Old Testament—which if memory serves from the last state senate campaign, is a big book in your house—that says we’re supposed to kill active homosexuals. My younger sister is a homosexual. Active, I think.” He waves his hand over our little band of book burners. “And if statistics bear out, so are one and a half of you guys. It just doesn’t seem right to kill you.”
“This is so stupid,” Sylvia says, but Coach ignores her.
“But I don’t want the Old Testament banned,” he says, “for two reasons. I don’t want a bunch of parents coming after me in the middle of the night with torches, and more important, I’m pretty sure you can read that book and not go out and kill homosexuals, because you have other information that tells you that’s not okay and because you have a brain.”
Sylvia is stomping away by this time and Coach just lets her go. He probably feels bad for embarrassing her, but it was a good lesson. “I suppose now one or two of you will want to burn a flag, but I’m going to have to let you do that on your own and I’d appreciate it if you’d do it off school grounds because I’m going to have a hard enough time explaining this
to Mr. Phelps at the next teachers’ meeting.”
“Hey-Soos. Good to see you.”
“You too, my friend.”
“You check out the book burning today?”
“Your coach knows how to make a point.”
“Sylvia Longley,” I say. “She looks good, but man, she could give you a permanent headache.”
“Sylvia’s playing the game the best way she knows how,” he says.
“Just seems like she’d be smarter.”
“She’s plenty smart. She’s just scared. The boogeyman in her game is loss of control. It’s easy to get on her case, but if Sylvia Longley gives up her belief, she risks losing her dad. Most of us would burn a few books to keep that from happening.”
“So I should have agreed with her?”
“I didn’t say that. What makes this game interesting is that it’s interactive. You have to deal with the Sylvia Longleys of the universe and she has to deal with the Ben Wolfs. Everyone gets a set of controls when they walk on.”
I change the subject. “I kind of miss Marla.”
“She was a nice young woman. What do you miss?”
“You know, someone to talk to; that I could tell everything.”
“You have the Great Confessor in your bedroom and you need someone to talk to?”
“I’m talking about someone real.”
“If you prick me, do I not bleed?”
“I can’t prick you to find out.”
He turns his palms toward me. Bright red blood trickles from scars on each palm.
“Jesus, Hey-Soos. Don’t do that. It’s creepy.”
He laughs. “I love that trick.”
“It’s not a trick when you’re in somebody’s dream. Anybody can do anything in a dream. And what’s with the scars on your palms? Are you trying to tell me you’re really—”
“Naw,” he says, “I’m just messin’ with you. So what would you talk with Marla about that you can’t tell me?”
I get that if I say it, I throw us into a paradox. “Nothing that I can’t tell you, really. I’ve been messing with Lambeer about Malcolm X, but I’m really interested.”
“Very misunderstood guy in your culture.”
“Rudy says the same thing. He’s turning into a whole different guy off the sauce, by the way.”
“You had a lot to do with that, you know,” Hey-Soos says.
“Yeah,” I say. “Me and the nutrients.”
“You and your company,” he says. “When there’s no connection, people die. Malcolm X is probably a pretty good meeting point for the two of you.”
“Well, as you can probably tell from a universe away, I’m nuts about Dallas. She’s…it’s like I couldn’t have imagined her. I couldn’t have dreamed her up to want her. She’s tough and she’s sad…and you should see her with her little brother.”
He smiles.
“Right. You have.”
“I’m worried. I think she might really like me, like want to spend time with me even after graduation. And…well, I’m not gonna be around and…”
“You’re worried about her expectations.”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe you should tell her,” he says.
“I’ve thought about it. But man, once people know…nothing will be the same. What really worries me is that she feels big-time betrayed by her uncle and all the people who were supposed to take care of her. If she finds out I lied now…”
“Ben.”
“You’re right. She finds out at some point anyway. And whether I’m alive or not, she feels betrayed.”
“And if you’re not alive…”
“She never hears why. God, even in my dreams I’m getting dilemmas I can’t solve. She’s worried she’s ruined.”
“By her uncle. But we both know that can’t happen, right? People don’t get ruined like that, awful as that is. The only truly ruined people are those who believe they are.”
“That can’t be right.”
“Ah, but it can.”
“I can’t believe that.” I look at him harshly.
“What if you lived in a culture where every father had sexual relations with every daughter before the age of ten? What if it was just what was done? What if you were considered a horrible parent if you didn’t do that, and would lose your child? What if every girl in the world was chastised if she missed that coming-of-age event?”
My mind spins.
“Or what if it was to be done by the oldest uncle, as it happened to your friend? What if only girls who had not had that experience were put on the outside?”
Even in my dream, I am silent.
“Don’t get this wrong, Ben; you don’t have time. That is a hugely challenging event for Dallas Suzuki. Because it is a secret and it carries seeming awfulness, it keeps her from telling the truth. People who feel ruined, or scared all the time, simply can’t tell the truth. When she can tell it, own it instead of letting it own her, she’ll be fine.”
“So I’m supposed to go to Dallas and say, like, ‘Let’s have sex. There’s nothing wrong with you; it’s only in your head’?”
Hey-Soos laughs big. “If you want her to hand you yours. You’re not supposed to tell her anything. You’re supposed to make sure you never treat her as if she’s ruined.”
And if I don’t tell her the truth about myself, I’m treating her as if she’s ruined; as if she can’t take it.
Hey-Soos says, “So what else?” It’s like he’s doing this inventory, reminding me I have limited time.
“Football’s going good,” I say finally. “Coach keeps telling us our only job is to make sure we leave nothing on the field in these last two games. I’ve got my brother up to speed on our next opponent, Timberline, who could take us without Sooner. Should be a good one. I’m not feeling tired or anything yet. I’m eating good and taking all the supplements Doc gave me. Still scared, I guess; maybe I’ll be a little less scared since talking to you about this truth I’m supposed to be telling. But mostly I want to finish the season healthy and see if I can end this right. Really scared for my mom. Maybe even more for my dad. Cody. Man, I love him. It’s always felt bad not telling but I just don’t want all the complication. I want normal.”
Hey-Soos puts a hand on my knee and again I feel it physically. “Slow down. You might want to consider that, relative to other people’s lives, it’s not normal. I’m not sure it helps to pretend otherwise.”
And I pop awake.
I stand, walk to the window, gaze at a moonless, star-filled night, hoping for a cosmic answer I know isn’t coming (as if I didn’t just get one from Hey-Soos). So I go downstairs to the kitchen for a sandwich, which will come. Whew. I’ve been counting on the fact that I made a good decision to keep what was happening to myself, and not burden other people so I didn’t have to burden myself with their responses. That was the one no-brainer back in the summer and it was wrong. Shit. I don’t know what to do for sure, but no matter what, I’m not telling until football season is over because they’d snatch me out of my pads so fast the pads would still be standing, so I have either one or two weeks to think about it, depending on what happens with Timberline.
Late November
Thirteen
Timberline High School, which includes the towns Pierce and Weippe from up north, has had the same season we’ve had. They’re overloaded in the talent department, just like we are—were before we lost Sooner Cowans—and came through the season undefeated with only a couple of close games. Their one-two punch comes in the form of the Brown brothers, Timothy and Shoat, identical-twin full-blooded Nez Percé Indians, who, as anyone who has played them will tell you, are virtually interchangeable. They’re not that big, a little under six feet and maybe a hundred sixty pounds, but they’re fast and wily and they switch positions on demand. It’s crazy watching the films. They’re numbers 6 and 7, and until they line up you never know which will line up at QB and which will line up at receiver. And you don’t have to watch for long to th
ink they have the telepathy thing going.
The game is billed by the Boise newspaper as the actual state championship. The teams from the southern part of the state don’t have the talent pool, so the real state championship game will likely be a blowout, though Coach will tell you on any given Friday afternoon, anything can happen.
We’re playing at Boise State. There is all kinds of hype because Cody will likely go there and because identical-twin Native American brothers make great press. Timothy and Shoat won’t be matriculating to a college; they’re both already promised to the United States government for at least four years. They’re headed for a way different kind of war.
We get out of school on Wednesday and go down to stay in a hotel near the college so we can get used to the field. Timberline does the same. None of us has ever played on artificial turf and to make it even more surreal, Boise State has the only deep blue artificial turf in the nation. You walk onto the field and think you’re playing the Smurfs. Eight jillion screaming Catholics at Notre Dame aside, it may be the biggest home court advantage in the country.
We have different practice times, so we’re not on the field with Timberline, but we get a chance to watch them from the bleachers and they see us, also.
It’s hard to tell if the blue turf creates an illusion or if we’re in for a real horse race, because these guys look fast. They aren’t particularly big, but hey, no eight-man team is, and they’re coached like we are. Cody and I stand in the bleachers watching them work special teams. These guys are serious.
“We’ll stay up late tonight,” Cody says on the short bus ride back to the hotel. “Go over the tapes until I see ’em in my sleep. Get a good night’s sleep tomorrow and give these guys a shock. Man, we could sure use Cowans.”
Cody couldn’t be more right. One guy makes a much greater difference in eight-man football than in eleven. It’s like Arena Ball on a full-size field. One guy getting consistently beat on defense will kill you; same with not being able to spring a guy loose on offense. Cowans may not have the brightest future after high school, but he doesn’t feel pain and he can run and catch with the best of them and we’re going to miss the extra dimension he gives us. So this will be Cody’s show. If he pulls it off, Boise State will have to give him a shot. If he has a game anywhere close to as good as his Horseshoe Bend game, the BSU scouts will go nuts. And Boise, Idaho, is fucking crazy about football. I mean, they have a blue football field.