“Tryin' to get outta practice?” Wainwright asks me later in the hall. He has eyes in the back of his head. He dips a shoulder towards me and I flinch.
I come free on a blitz in practice that afternoon and I'm about to decapitate our starting QB when our fullback puts his helmet into my sternum. “Who blacks out on a chest hit?” Wainwright asks when I come to. I'm somewhere where everything's white. He says I'm black and blue from my throat to my stomach. He pulls back the sheet and hospital gown and shows me with a hand mirror.
“Thank God,” my mom says to herself when she sees me. She had to come from work. My brother's not with her. It's killing her, I can tell.
Can I play with a bruised sternum? The doctor's on the fence about it. He says we can wait and see. Big Coach says it's my call. I rest all weekend and I'm held out of practice Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday I can go and watch, anyway. Already it's like I'm not even on the team. For an hour nobody's on the same page and Coach stands there doing a slow burn until finally he tells the defense that since they're not thinking maybe it's because they're not getting enough blood to their heads. He makes them all do handstands until he tells them to stop. Wainwright's is like a statue. He points his toes.
This goes on for five minutes, kids' feet and legs teetering. People pull over on River Road to watch. Various kids, trying to hold their handstands, laugh. When they do, Coach crosses to where they are and pushes them over with his foot.
When practice breaks up I'm still over by the fence. Wain-wright heads in with two of the other linebackers. I hang there on the chain link like the crowd on Media Day.
On Thursday somebody tapes photos in the urinals of Chil-dress's stars on offense and defense.
Friday morning I wake up crying. This is it, I tell myself, but that's not why I'm crying. My mother makes coffee and nobody says anything before I go to school. My brother looks like if the whole house blew up, that'd be okay too. My hand is jerking so much that I try only once to drink my coffee and then dump the mug in the sink.
The school hallways are all hung with blue and white banners. The tape's come off the cinderblock on one and the first letter's drooped over on itself, so instead of BEAT CHILDRESS the thing reads EAT CHILDRESS. A custodian passes me with a ladder.
There's a pep rally we're all supposed to go to but I skip it and hide out in the library. I can hear the marching band's percussion section whaling away.
“Good luck tonight,” one of the librarians says. She doesn't seem surprised I'm not at the rally.
I stick myself off in the stacks, looking back and forth through the same book. Who cries on the morning of a big game? I hold my hands in my lap as best I can.
When I was six or seven, my brother took me into the woods behind our house. I think those woods are gone now but I haven't been back to check. He broke sticks on trees. Every stick he picked up he laced into tree trunks until it broke. Sometimes it took a while. Sometimes the splinters went whizzing by my face. We walked for half the afternoon and then we stopped. I took my sneakers off because there was a rock in one. I could hear traffic, a highway, somewhere. He whacked more sticks into trees while I sat there. “It's just me and you now,” he finally said, though I knew that. He meant about our dad. He was only eleven or twelve himself. “You're not gonna leave me here, are you?” I said. I asked because of the way he was talking.
Even then I knew he couldn't help me and I couldn't help him. And he looked like he knew what I was thinking. “You're not going to leave me?” I asked again, but he just got up and headed home.
I had to hustle to keep up. “You mean like we gotta stick together?” I remember asking. “No. We don't have to do nothin',” he said back. And in nightmares I had after that he took me out on a dock and the dock became a rug and there'd be this bell going off in the distance.
The library's computers have our team Web site on their monitors to show spirit. This year's slogan at the top is Declaring War in 04. I check out the Port Neches-Groves site on the net. Their news headline is Indians Shorthanded for Biggest Game of the Year.
For our on-field introductions there's some kind of mylar tent or tunnel leading past the north bleachers into the end zone. The nonstarters form two lines leading into it for us to run through. It's like going through a human funnel that empties onto the field. We end up at the 50 yard line in a big pile, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing. Guys're throwing themselves on the top and flipping and ending up in the middle on the bottom. From the seedings it's clear we'll have to win four straight, including this one, for me to meet that kid Corey in the 5A semifinals. Childress wins the toss and the defense huddles up around Coach and he gets on his hands and knees in the grass and scrabbles around whacking our shoes with his hands. He goes all the way around the huddle doing it to everybody. “Check your feet see if you're ready,” we hear him shouting over the crowd. Wainwright's just outside the huddle. He already thinks his feet are ready.
First series Childress goes 73 yards in 11 plays and has a first and goal at the 3. We stuff them twice and they overthrow their tight end and so that fast it's Thrilling Goal-Line Stand time: fourth and inches, and they're going for it.
Wainwright's standing there, weight on one leg, hands on his hips like he's waiting for a fat guy to catch a bus. Somewhere east of us down near the Gulf of Mexico, Corey's getting down in his three-point stance, nowhere near one hundred percent. Guys are waiting on the other side of the line like horses at a starting gate with a baby in the middle of the track. All over Texas, kids are getting ready to cripple and be crippled, and parents are doing their bit or downing a drink or missing out entirely because they've got things to do, too.
Childress runs a flanker reverse, of all things, and I get caught going the wrong way and chopped at the ankles by somebody. I hit the ground and something spears me and launches off my back, taking my wind with it: Wainwright's cleats. He catches the flanker high and clotheslines him.
What's it mean to say you want to do something if you don't do it? It took our family two days to drive down here from New Jersey. The first night, all our stuff in the back, they thought I was asleep, and started talking about my dad again. My mom got defensive. She said he always meant well.
“What good does that do us?” I asked.
“Look who's up,” my brother said.
“Everybody's worried about what he didn't do for us,” my mother said. “What about what we didn't do for ourselves?”
It shut us up for a while. “Sounds like we got the right dad after all, then,” my brother finally said. And we left it at that.
The stands go nuts. Our defense mobs itself in celebration. I still can't breathe. Some of my ribs must be cracked. My sternum feels like it did in the hospital. My arms and legs and head are okay, but everything else wants to die. Wainwright squats next to me and shrugs off some glad-handers, his eyes unreadable under his helmet shadow. The Sisters of Mercy hustle towards me with their stretcher. If I can walk or be carried I'm going to be there for Corey in four weeks. I'm going to be there so his father can see. I'm going to be there so his father can see and say, Who is that kid? That kid's amazing. That kid's a terror.
Ancestral Legacies
This is the roof of the world. An immense, sequestered place, the highest of the high plateaus, many times the size of the Reich. I'm still sick. The porters still gesticulate and exchange private jokes when they assume my attention is elsewhere. Beger's bad ankle is still swollen. Somewhere I've misplaced my certainty.