They're 8–0 thanks mostly to that kid. So maybe they got it in themselves to step up to where we're going to be. It'd be a bigger deal for them than for us. Every year we're something: State Finalists, Regional Finalists, Regional Semi-Finalists, Bi-District Finalists. Our 1996 team won the Texas State Championship. Our JVs are divided into Team White and Team Blue, thirty-man rosters that each play different schedules, so what we call our baby boys can get some work. White plays at five, Blue at seven, Varsity at nine. Our stadium holds 18,400 but is being upgraded. JVs are mostly sophomores, though every so often there's a Wainwright or a me that moves up early. Everybody keeps an eye on everybody else.
Media Day is the second Friday in August. The coaches stand around in their white T-shirts and blue shorts giving us grief like they're sweet guys because all the beat reporters are there.
Our home unies are dark blue — jerseys, pants, helmets. The coaches think it psyches out opponents that we practice in those in the heat. “How do they know we don't just practice in white?” Wainwright asked them once. They let it go. That same day he just stood looking at them at the end of a 104-degree ballbreaker of a scrimmage and said, “They don't have any idea how serious this is.” When he saw me looking at him he said, “And neither do you.”
At Homecoming all the Kings and Queens are photographed with the team. They're in team-color tuxes and gowns. “You think this kid Corey is Homecoming King?” I asked Wainwright after that same scrimmage.
“You have no idea who I am, do you?” he asked me back.
“So who are you?” I asked him. But he was heading for the showers. A lot of our conversations ended like that.
I was scared shitless when I first came out, and not of the coaches. Like all freshmen I was shipped over to JV, Team White, and I was so nervous the first day I had the shits for thirty minutes and was late for my first real practice. I was in the stall bent over and miserable and thinking, No way you can compete at this level. I had my chin on my knees. In tiny letters at the bottom of the door, someone had scratched Shit shit shit.
I called my brother from the pay phone near the furnace room. He'd started three of his four years for LHS. I remember I said something like, I might be in a little over my head here. I was having trouble not blubbering. He told me not to worry that much yet, that everything would come to me. “Hey, leave if you wanta leave,” he finally said when I wouldn't let it go. “What you gonna do back here?” Meaning my mom's house, where we lived. I didn't have an answer for him. I still had all my dad's tools in my bedroom. I didn't know how to use most of them and they didn't need to be in my bedroom. “What's up with the socket wrench?” Wain-wright asked me the one time he hung out there.
First practice Big Coach saw me, he said he thought my neck was too small for this level. Then a year or so later he said, “Son, you got some big feet there.” He seemed to like me more because of it. You heard a lot of stupid shit over the course of a summer practice schedule.
They moved me to defense pretty much when I arrived. I didn't have the foot speed. Apparently heart didn't matter. So I went after any running back on the field. If they wouldn't let me be a running back, I'd punish the guys who were. And that was before I found out about this kid Corey. The coaching staff loved it, until they didn't. “He's on our side, son,” Big Coach called out to me after a headhunter hit in practice. It got a laugh from the other coaches.
First day was picture day. They gave me number 47. I sat there thinking how great this was. Then I looked around and saw two more number 47s.
I came in at 140 pounds and ate and pumped my way up to 155. I got myself out of JV my sophomore year, halfway through our scrimmage with Quanah. On the second half kickoff I did a surface-to-air thing with their lead guy on the wedge and blew him back into their ballcarrier, who went ass over shoulder pads and fumbled. I opened my eyes and there was the ball and I rolled over and pulled it in. I was on the Web site under both Hit of the Week and HumDuck of the Week. The HumDuck face was superimposed over my helmet. It looked like some Donald Duckish freak was trying to kill someone.
The next practice I was working out with the varsity. Thank God the offense was working on its option, because I had no idea what our coverages were at that point.
Some varsities are all seniors. That's how rare it is.
Wainwright had already moved up. Half the crowds at our scrimmages were there to see him. I was pretty much in a state of panic about being left behind.
Around here, Big Coach likes to remind us, we live under the shade of trees we didn't plant and drink from wells we didn't dig. There's a shitload of tradition, is what he means.
Wainwright's the main upholder of that tradition as far as everybody else is concerned. Players for other teams: they're wearing another color and they're on his field. He takes it personally.
I try to ride that wave but there are mean dogs and mad dogs, and it's not that easy to make the leap.
Our sophomore year we were trailing Childress early and their halfback had already ripped off four or five ten-yard runs against us. “You boys don't tackle all that well,” their center said when we were all unpiling. Later he tried to pull on a trap and I held him up and Wainwright caught him at full speed with his head turned. We stayed over him while the trainers worked on him. “You boys don't stay conscious all that well,” Wainwright told him when he came to.
Now that Wainwright and me're juniors, we're on a mission. He wants to kill everybody in sight starting with whoever's in front of him and I want to kill everybody in sight starting with that kid Corey. Nobody wants to practice with us. We both have a thing for our fullback. The kid's father comes to every single one of his practices to watch his son get that big ass up in the air and put his head down and go. So Wainwright and me meet him in the hole and blow him up, time after time. We just decleat him. Guys'll be getting back up and he'll be putting a shoe back on.
His dad tried to talk to us after one practice, but the coaches broke it up.
We have other ways of passing time too, like throwing golf balls out of the stadium when standing on the fifty-yard line.
It's got to be five hundred miles to Beaumont. It's all the way over by Louisiana.
Midseason sophomore year I tore my MCL. It sounded like someone cracking walnuts in my knee. Wainwright was flying by when it happened and imitated the sound I made for weeks afterwards. I'd done this whimpering thing before I could stop myself. “Oooo, it hurts,” he said in this falsetto whenever he saw me gimping around. They scoped it out, supposedly, but something fucked up and it kept catching and locking, and swelled up. I stumped around for a week or two looking for sympathy and then late one afternoon during this ice storm — it was like black outside — Coach saw me doing nothing in the locker room and asked if I wanted to play the next week. Shit yeah, I told him. I stumped back and forth to show him I was All Heart. “Let me see you run, then,” he said. I looked around the locker room. “Outside,” he said. I went out in shorts and quarter-inch cleats for the ice. Once I got out into the sleet I poked my head back in. “It's fucking slippery, Coach,” I said. I demonstrated by skating my foot around even with the cleats. The cement steps were like a hockey rink.