“What do you mean?”
“You guys have game tapes, right? You must’ve seen yourself on the field with those monsters. Even the little guys look big next to you. You look like a special effect.”
“Hey, I was on the school paper last year. What kind of journalism is this?”
“What about Ben Wolf the student?” she says.
“The student?”
“Well, you’re not just some mindless superstud, right?”
“You’re right, not just. I’m attending some classes.”
“Which you have to do in order to play football,” Dallas says. “What’s next for you?”
That’s a question I’m not prepared to answer, so while I don’t tell the truth, I tell a truth. “I’m going against the ‘senioritis’ grain,” I tell her. “This is going to sound sick and wrong, but now that you’ve come to know and love me I know you’ll soften it for publication. I’m going for it all this year. We’re headed out into the world and in case you haven’t noticed, they’re not preparing us.”
Dallas puts her pen down. “You want to go off the record on this?”
I stare at her notebook. “Yeah, probably I do.”
“Okay,” she says, “go on.”
“No teachers better be tryin’ to slip anything past me, because I’m a be lookin’ for truth.” I open my backpack and dig out my copy of Lies My Teacher Told Me. “ Did you know Woodrow Wilson was a white supremacist? They have schools named after this guy. All Lambeer ever told us was that he tried to get us into the League of Nations.” I flip some pages. “Did you know Christopher Columbus was a huge catalyst behind slave trading all over the world? Lambeer talks about him like he’s Jesus’s brother or something. It’s like people don’t think teenagers think about real life, like we’re all about sports and parties and Rock ’n’ Roll High School. No real synapses fire until the magical, and arbitrary, age of twenty-one.”
“Add Japanese concentration camps to that,” Dallas says. I happen to know she’s one of those students who has taken her education seriously from day one. A suspicious kind of person might think that’s the reason I’m dropping this on her, but they would be only partially right.
“Yeah, no shit. Japanese concentration camps. Good old World War Two.”
“Well, I’ll leave all this for another story, maybe one I write after final grades are turned in.”
“I appreciate it.”
She picks up her pen and notebook again. “Do you have a date for homecoming?”
“You’re putting my romantic status into this?”
“God no,” she says, slamming the notebook shut. “I’m asking you to homecoming.”
I’m going to need therapy after this.
Six
“That threw me for a loop.”
“I heard your heart beating all the way here when she asked you to homecoming.”
“I thought I recovered nicely.”
“Perspective is important.”
“Everything’s relative, right?”
Hey-Soos smiles. “Never forget that.”
“Man, I gotta tell you, when I got to spend one second with her, I hated that I’m short-term. I kid around about her, but, I mean, did you see her? Did you listen to her? Feel what happened inside me? Of course you did, you’re me, or you’re Hey-Soos, or…Man, if I weren’t dying, you’d be freaking me out. I mean…never mind. Sheesh. I wish I’d known a long time ago she’d talk to me. Look at the time I wasted. What am I going to do about this?”
“I vote you go to homecoming with her.”
“Go to homecoming with her? Go to homecoming with her? Of course I’ll go to homecoming with her. This is like getting your dying wish. It is my dying wish.”
Hey-Soos says, “You’re speaking in tongues.”
“You seem rattled today,” Marla Dawson says after my third or fourth attempt to describe Dallas Suzuki’s allure.
“Chart that,” I tell her. “This could be, like, a breakthrough.” That’s what Marla calls it when I say something worth writing down. She charts it. So far she hasn’t charted much.
“You think you’re pretty funny,” she says, “but you are truly rattled. I may not be Sigmund Freud, but you would be well advised to talk about things like this in some detail.”
Marla is right. It’s hard for me to talk about anything here without joking. She’s said before that when I get so close to telling real truth I use comedy as a shield. Hey, when you’re walking around a high school so small everyone not only knows everyone else but might be related, and your younger brother, who looks exactly like you only life-size, is the school’s superstud, and when you’re dying, comedy is what you have. Don’t get me wrong; I love it that Cody’s a superstud. I just don’t always like the comparisons.
But Marla wants serious, and I should give her serious. She’s not Freud, but she’s plenty smart. New, and scared, but smart. I know I have to get to the serious side soon, because shortly I’ll be living on borrowed time. I try to return to the feelings I had sitting in The Chief with Dallas, because they were serious. I close my eyes and picture her. “Did you ever have a feeling that you were connected to somebody? I mean the minute you see them, or have some stupid little conversation where neither one of you said anything important, but…” I open my eyes and see tears welling in hers. “You have,” I say.
She clears her throat. “I have.”
“Who…”
She reaches for a Kleenex. It’s like I kicked her in the gut. “Keep talking. I’ll save this for my therapist.”
“Therapists have therapists? Whoa. And I’ll bet those therapists have therapists, too. I’m looking at infinity.” She looks wounded and I back way up. “Sorry.”
She says, “You felt a connection.”
“Yeah. I mean, I’ve had my eye on Dallas Suzuki since she moved here, but she’s…you know, she could have maybe not any guy but a whole bunch of them who are…I don’t know.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” Marla says.
“I can’t sell myself tall.”
Her eyes roll. “What does it take to keep you focused?”
“An answer to this dilemma?”
“You have to stay focused so I know what the dilemma is,” she says. “Stay on task.”
I rise a few inches and sit back down hard. “On task. I looked across that table, and Dallas was finishing up with some meaningless statistics about my life for her ‘profile,’ but she had already asked me to homecoming and I couldn’t even hear. I just kept thinking of the night. You know, of the dance. Coach always picks the toughest league game of the year for homecoming, and it will be over and we’ll have won it and I’ll be all dressed up and she’ll be…oh, man…”
“How do you know you’ll win?”
“Because I’m going to homecoming with Dallas Suzuki and I will not allow it to be on a loss. Anyway, have you ever been with someone and even though you haven’t been there before it just seemed…”
“Like something inside you was touching something inside her?”
Whoa again. “That’s exactly what it felt like. Dallas is, like, one of the toughest, smartest kids in our school, girl or boy, and she was being her same tough self. But there was this feeling, like I knew her. That part had nothing to do with my loins, which were also stirring. At any rate I started feeling this…this grief.”
Marla nods. “Which makes sense.”
“How does it make sense? I just got to talk to her for the first time right then, and she asked me to homecoming. I should be happier than a pig in shit.”
“But like you said before…”
I sit back. “Yeah. I swear, sometimes I forget. I’m gonna feel bad any time I get anything good, ’cause I have to give it up.”
“You have to feel that way unless you do like you said,” she says.
“Right. A day at a time.”
“You told me to hold you to that. I’m holding you to it.”
And that’s the way I’ll do it
. A day at a time. An hour if need be. A minute. Like I do football; one hit at a time. You think a guy my size could hit Sooner Cowans like I do if I thought about having to do it again?
“I heard three guys talking about the Horseshoe Bend game today,” Coach says. We’re huddled around him in the end zone near the end of practice. “That’s an extra six wind sprints.” His whistle pierces the crisp air and we line up. As usual we run until the third guy chucks up something special, and then know there are six more. Coach runs those last three beside us, hollering. “We don’t play Horseshoe Bend this week! We don’t play Horseshoe Bend this week! Who do we play this week?”
A couple of guys grunt out, “Council!”
“Can’t hear you,” Coach hollers. “You owe me suicides at the end of these! Who do we play this week?”
“COUNCIL!”
We’re back at the starting line, the six extra wind sprints history. Suicides are normally a basketball drill. At the sound of the whistle, you sprint from the baseline to the first free throw line and back, then to the half-court line and back, then to the far free throw line and back, then to the far baseline and back. That’s one suicide. On a football field, it’s to the twenty-five and back, then the fifty, then the seventy-five, then a hundred. And back.
In the end zone, Coach is the only one standing. “Guys, if we look ahead, somebody’s gonna come along and ambush us, sure as hell. Talent-wise we should be able to spot Council a couple of touchdowns, but they run back one kickoff or a punt or hop on a fumble at the wrong time, then stuff us on defense and that’s wiped out. There’s a reason the preseason pick to win the college national championship usually doesn’t even make it to the game. They forget to see somebody coming who wants it worse than they do. Now, one more time. Who do we play this week?”
“COUNCIL!”
We beat Council 28–7.
Sooner stalks the frosh and sophomores with a snapping towel in the locker room afterward, and even though they all got playing time, this is the most dangerous part of their day. Sooner’s towel is a poisonous snake’s tongue. Coach will halt it in a minute if he sees it, but Sooner is sneaky and like I said, Coach’s “We Are The World” attitude isn’t exactly his life philosophy. Sooner feels negligent any time he walks out of a room and someone smaller than him isn’t crying.
My brother catches the tip of the towel on the back-swing and jerks it out of Sooner’s hand. Sooner whirls, ready to swing. “Nice game, Cowans,” my brother says. “Took two or three a’ them there Lumberjacks to pull you down ever time. Whaddaya think you were gettin’ a carry?” Sooner doesn’t recognize my brother’s spot-on imitation of him.
Sooner forgets he was about to raise a three-inch welt on some third-stringer’s baby butt. “Had one eighty-three,” he says. “You gimme the ball fourteen times. What is that?”
“A hair over thirteen,” my brother says. “Damn, man! MVP numbers.” He looks at the side of Sooner’s face, at the same bruise I saw in The Chief. “Looks like somebody popped you, man.”
Sooner touches his face. “Fuck you, Wolf.”
Cody smiles. “Man, you got bad taste.”
Sooner smiles. So does the kid who just avoided losing a piece of his ass. That’s Cody. Smooth.
“Let’s get something to eat and you can start me on the Horseshoe Bend videos,” Cody says as he throws his gear in back of the pickup after we shower.
“It’s Friday night,” I say. “You get something to eat and Dallas and I will get something to eat. There’s a dance at the Legion Hall. You can have your choice of cheerleaders or girl jocks except for one, and we’ll do the videos tomorrow.”
“What happened to ‘Keep it in your pants until the end of the season’?”
“C’mon, Coach said that’s just an expression his coach used. He meant stay focused. And I am focused. And you will be too as soon as I get you going on those videos. Horseshoe Bend is meat.”
When we get to the house, the front and back doors are open and we hear the vacuum and old-time rock ’n’ roll spilling out of the open windows. Mom is on a tear. Dad’s truck is gone, which means he’s been here and is probably warning the folks at Emergency to be ready. Cody grabs my shoulder as I start inside. “Let me take care of it,” he says. “If you go in there, you’ll be there all night and Dallas will miss her shot at the greatest pint-sized lover of all time.”
I start toward the door anyway and Cody wraps me up from behind, playfully, but he isn’t letting go. “You can’t fix this, little bro. Every time you try and every time you fail. She’ll either wear herself out and come down or she’ll go to the hospital and come down. But your lifeguard act has no effect. We’ll do the tapes tomorrow like you said. I’ll catch up with you at the dance.” I hate to admit it, but as much as I have the eagle eye on the field, Cody has it off. Mom’s big swings don’t affect him like they do me. I feel her swings in my bones. Every high, every crash.
A crash is what Dad calls what happens when Mom comes to the end of a run. He calls her manic stage a run. When the crash starts she tries to keep the run going with alcohol, which is a way bad idea because alcohol is a depressant even though it feels initially like it’s giving you a boost. When I was little I’d want to go outside and play with my friends or see a movie and Mom would be in the kitchen, drinking whiskey and Diet Coke from a glass hidden in the cupboard, washing dishes or cleaning up, ready to tank. It started with a sigh, just as I got to the door.
“What’s wrong?” I’d say.
“Nothing.” But the tone of “nothing” meant “everything,” and I’d feel an ache. I’d think if I’d let her talk for a minute she’d feel better. She’d say she was a bad mom and I’d spend fifteen minutes arguing, numbering all the good things she did for us, but that just gave her ammunition to deny it. The more she denied, the more desperate I’d get and we’d be there for hours; Cody would leave and come back when his game of hide-and-seek or kick the can was done and all our friends were in their houses. Mom would wear out and I’d go to my room, believing I had saved her. Within days the bedroom door would close and Cody and Dad and I would eat our dinners at The Chief and Doc Wagner would come over and get Mom on meds and she’d start to float back up.
I always believed if I’d said the right thing, made a little more convincing argument for her motherhood, I could keep her afloat. Dad went unaware for years about those conversations because they happened while he slept on the couch in front of the TV. He probably saved my emotional life the night he overheard, waited until Mom went to bed, and explained her condition to me. “You can’t convince her because she needs to crash. What she talked about means nothing; she talks so she can crash.”
It’s funny. The front door to our house is huge double French doors that open onto our lawn from a sunroom just off the living room. The back door is a tiny door in the kitchen leading to a cluttered porch you can barely get through for all the shit Cody and I leave there. I could have walked out that front door and totally avoided Mom, but until my dad explained things to me, I never once used it. And I never once made it through the kitchen.
At the dance I get a little taste of the football hero thing and if I’d known it felt this good, I’d have turned out a long time ago. It would be worth it to go through life crippled to feel this good, even if you were going to have a long one. The cheerleaders meet me at the door and hoist me onto their shoulders. I’m the only guy on the team who gets that kind of treatment because, hey, cheerleaders have a load limit. Dallas stands back, watching and laughing, relaxed because their first volleyball game is a week away. My guess is she’ll be more focused when that happens. She’s a monster on the court, and word is it takes her a while to come down.
About ten thirty Sooner promises Jack Badley, the band guy spinning the CDs, weeks of crippling pain if Jack doesn’t let him take over the mike for a while, and when Sooner plays a slow one so “you studs can git you some,” Coach Gildy threatens to feed Sooner the mike. Fortunately the Legion
naires only let us have dances down here if we can provide a chaperone, and Gildy is usually up for that. Gildy’s built slight, like a runner, but he is made of titanium. The guy can do, I shit you not, two hundred fifty push-ups without stopping. Sooner gives up the mike.
“Can’t you guys keep him under control?” Gildy says as he approaches Dallas and me standing by the door.
“Hey, Coach Gildy. Yeah, you’d think he’d listen to etiquette tips from the likes of me.”
“Not really,” Coach says back. “You’d have to tell him what etiquette means. Hey, you were spectacular out there today. You’ve been out for the wrong sport all these years.”
“Maybe,” I say. “Still feelin’ a little bad for jumping ship on cross-country.”
“Don’t do that. Life’s short. Do what you love.”
“You want to come in? No one’s home.”
I’m guessing my surprise is showing. “Inside your house? I thought…” I catch myself.
“It’s a rumor that no one ever comes inside my house.”
It may be a rumor, but it’s one nobody disputes. It’s understood that Dallas doesn’t bring people home; not even girlfriends or volleyball team members. It’s so well known it doesn’t even seem weird anymore. “How many other kids from school have been inside your house?”
She smiles. “Well, if I get you and snag one more, that’ll be two.”
“That’s what I thought.”
She holds the door open, eyebrows raised.
“You sure it’s okay?”
“I said, nobody’s home.”
“Would it be okay if they were?”
“I’m the one who doesn’t bring people here,” she says. “Mom doesn’t care. And Joe Henry has friends over all the time.”
“So where are they?”
“Boise,” she says. “Mom had to take him to the dentist, and Joe Henry doesn’t go to the dentist without getting to stay overnight in a ‘fancy hotel.’ They won’t be back till tomorrow. He stays in a place with a swimming pool or we pay dearly.”