Christine (16 page)

“Yes,” I said. “I guess they do.”

“So long, kid,” he said, sticking a fresh cigar in his mouth. “Say hi to your dad for me.”

“I will.”

“And tell Cunningham to keep an eye out for that punk Repperton. I got an idea he might be the sort who'd hold a grudge.”

“Me too,” I said.

I walked out of the garage, pausing once to glance back—but looking in from the glare, Christine was little more than a shadow among shadows.
Bad pennies always turn up,
Darnell said. It was a phrase that followed me home.

15

Football Woes

School started, and nothing much happened for a week or two. Arnie didn't find out I'd been down to the garage, and I was glad. I don't think he would have taken kindly to the news. Darnell kept his mouth shut as he had promised (probably for his own reasons). I called Michael one afternoon after school when I knew Arnie would be down at the garage. I told him Arnie had done some stuff to the car, but it was nowhere near street-legal. I told him my impression was that Arnie was mostly farting around. Michael greeted this news with a mixture of relief and surprise, and that ended it . . . for a while.

Arnie himself flickered in and out of my view, like something you see from the corner of your eye. He was around the halls, and we had three classes together, and he sometimes came over after school or on weekends. There were times when it really seemed as if nothing had changed. But he was at Darnell's a lot more than he was at my house, and on Friday nights he went out to Philly Plains—the stock-car track—with Darnell's half-bright handyman, Jimmy Sykes. They ran out sportsters and charger-class racers, mostly Camaros and Mustangs with their glass knocked out and roll bars installed. They took them out on Darnell's flatbed and came back with fresh junk for the automobile graveyard.

It was around that time that Arnie hurt his back. It wasn't a serious injury—or so he claimed—but my mother noticed that something was wrong with him almost right away. He came over one Sunday to watch the Phillies, who were pounding down the homestretch to moderate glory that year, and happened to get up during the third inning to pour us each a glass of orange juice. My mother was sitting on the couch with my father, reading a book. She glanced up when Arnie came back in and said, “You're limping, Arnie.”

I thought I saw a surprising, unexpected expression on Arnie's face for a second or two—a furtive, almost guilty look. I could have been wrong. If it
was
there, it was gone a second later.

“I guess I strained my back out at the Plains last night,” he said, giving me my orange juice. “Jimmy Sykes stalled out the last of the clunks we were loading just when it was almost up on the bed of the truck. I could see it rolling back down and then the two of us goofing around for another two hours, trying to get it started again. So I gave it a shove. Guess I shouldn't have.”

It seemed like an elaborate explanation for a simple little limp, but I could have been wrong about that too.

“You have to be more careful of your back,” my mother said severely. “The Lord—”

“Mom, could we watch the game now?” I asked.

“—only gives you one,” she finished.

“Yes, Mrs. Guilder,” Arnie said dutifully.

Elaine wandered in. “Is there any more juice, or did you two coneheads drink it all?”

“Come on, give me a break!” I yelled. There had been some sort of disputed play at second and I had missed the whole thing.

“Don't shout at your sister, Dennis,” my father muttered from the depths of
The Hobbyist
magazine he was reading.

“There's a lot left, Ellie,” Arnie told her.

“Sometimes, Arnie,” Elaine told him, “you strike me as almost human.” She flounced out to the kitchen.

“Almost human, Dennis!” Arnie whispered to me, apparently on the verge of grateful tears. “Did you hear that? Almost
hyooooman.”

And perhaps it is also only retrospection—or imagination—that makes me think his humor was forced, unreal, only a facade. False memory or true one, the subject of his back passed off, although that limp came and went all through the fall.

I was pretty busy myself. The cheerleader and I had broken it off, but I could usually find someone to step out with on Saturday nights . . . if I wasn't too tired from the constant football practice.

Coach Puffer wasn't a wretch like Will Darnell, but he was no rose; like half the smalltown high school coaches in America, he had patterned his coaching techniques on those of the late Vince Lombardi, whose chief scripture was that winning wasn't everything, it was the
only
thing. You'd be surprised how many people who should know better believe that half-baked horseshit.

A summer of working for Carson Brothers had left me in rugged shape and I think I could have cruised through the season—if it had been a winning season. But by the time Arnie and I had the ugly confrontation near the smoking area behind the shop with Buddy Repperton—and I think that was during the third week of classes—it was pretty clear we weren't going to have a winning season. That made Coach Puffer extremely hard to live with, because in his ten years at LHS, he had
never
had a losing season. That was the year Coach Puffer had to learn a bitter humility. It was a hard lesson for him . . . and it wasn't so easy for us, either.

Our first game, away against the Luneburg Tigers, was September ninth. Now, Luneburg is just that—a burg. It's a little piss-ant rural high school at the extreme west of our district, and over my years at Libertyville, the usual battle cry after Luneburg's bumbling defense had allowed yet another touchdown was:
TELL-US-HOW-IT-FEELS-TO-HAVE-COWSHIT-ON-YOUR-HEELS!
Followed by a big, sarcastic cheer:
RAAAAYYYYYY, LUUUUNEBURG!

It had been over twenty years since Luneburg beat a Libertyville team, but that year they rose up and smote us righteously. I was playing left end, and by halftime I was morally sure that I was going to have cleat-mark scars all over my back for the rest of my life. By then the score was 17-3. It ended up 30-10. The Luneburg fans were delirious; they tore down the goalposts as if it had been the Regional Championship game and carried their players off the field on their shoulders.

Our fans, who had come up in buses specially laid on, sat huddled on the visitors' bleachers in the blaring early September heat, looking blank. In the dressing room, Coach Puffer, looking stunned and pallid, suggested we get down on our knees and pray for guidance in the weeks to come. I knew then that the hurting had not ended but was just beginning.

We got down on our knees, aching, bruised, and battered, wanting nothing but to get into the shower and start washing that loser smell off ourselves, and listened as Coach Puffer explained the situation to God in a ten-minute peroration that ended with a promise that we would do our part if He would do His.

The next week, we practiced three hours a day (instead of the customary ninety minutes to two hours) under the broiling sun. I tumbled into bed nights and dreamed of his bellowing voice:
“Hit that sucker! Hit! Hit!”
I ran wind-sprints until I began to feel that my legs were going to undergo spontaneous decomposition (at the same instant my lungs burst into flames, probably). Lenny Barongg, one of our tailbacks, had a mild sunstroke and was mercifully—for him, at least—excused for the rest of the week.

So I saw Arnie, and he came over and took dinner with my folks and Ellie and me on Thursday or Friday nights, he checked out a ballgame or two with us on Sunday afternoons, but beyond that I lost sight of him almost completely. I was too busy hauling my aches and pains to class, to practice, then home to my room to do my assignments.

Going back to my football woes—I think the worst thing was the way people looked at me, and Lenny, and the rest of the team, in the hallways. Now, that “school spirit” business is mostly a lot of bullshit made up by school administrators who remember having a helluva time at the Saturday-afternoon gridiron contests of their youth but have conveniently forgotten that a lot of it resulted from being drunk, horny, or both. If you had held a rally in favor of legalizing marijuana, you would have seen some school spirit. But about football, basketball, and track, most of the student body didn't give a shit. They were too busy trying to get into college or someone's pants or trouble. Business as usual.

All the same, you get used to being a winner—you start to take it for granted. Libertyville had been fielding killer football teams for a long time; the last time the school had had a losing record—at least, before my senior year—was twelve years before, in 1966. So in the week after the loss to Luneburg, while there was no weeping and gnashing of teeth, there were hurt, puzzled looks in the hall and some booing at the regular Friday afternoon rally at the end of period seven. The boos made Coach Puffer turn nearly purple, and he invited those “poor sports and fair-weather friends” to turn out Saturday afternoon to watch the comeback of the century.

I don't know if the poor sports and fair-weather friends turned out or not, but I was there. We were at home, and our opponents were the Ridge Rock Bears. Now Ridge Rock is a mining town, and while the kids going to Ridge Rock High are hicks, they are not soft hicks. They are mean, ugly, tough hicks. The year before, Libertyville's football team had barely edged them out for the regional title, and one of the local sports commentators had said it wasn't because Libertyville had a better team but because it had more warm bodies to draw on. Coach Puffer had hit the ceiling over that too, I can tell you.

This, however, was the Bears' year. They steamrollered us. Fred Dann went out of the game with a concussion in the first period. In the second period, Norman Aleppo got a ride to the Libertyville Community Hospital with a broken arm. And in the last period, the Bears scored three consecutive touchdowns, two on punt returns. The final score was 40-6. All false modesty aside, I'll tell you that I scored the six. But I won't put realism aside with the modesty: I was lucky.

So . . . another week of hell on the practice field. Another week of Coach yelling
Hit that sucker.
One day we practiced for nearly four hours, and when Lenny suggested to Coach that it might be nice to have some time left for doing homework, I thought—just for an instant—that Puffer was going to belt him one. He had taken to jingling his keys constantly from hand to hand, reminding me of Captain Queeg in
The Caine Mutiny.
I believe that how you lose is a much better index to character than how you win. Puffer, who had never been 0-2 in his coaching career, reacted with baffled, pointless fury, like a caged tiger being teased by cruel children.

The next Friday afternoon—that would have been September 22—the usual rally during the last fifteen minutes of period seven was cancelled. I didn't know any of the players who minded; standing up there and being introduced by twelve prancing cheerleaders for the umpty-umpth time was sort of a bore. It was an ominous sign, all the same. That night we were invited back to the gym by Coach Puffer, where we went to the movies for two hours, watching our humiliation by the Tigers and the Bears in the game films. Perhaps this was supposed to fire us up, but it only depressed me.

That night, before our second home game of the year, I had a peculiar dream. It was not exactly a nightmare, not like the one where I woke the house screaming, certainly, but it was . . . uncomfortable. We were playing the Philadelphia City Dragons, and a strong wind was blowing. The sounds of the cheers, the blaring, distorted voice of Chubby McCarthy from the loudspeaker as he announced downs and yards, even the sounds of players hitting other players, all sounded weird and echoey in that constant, flat wind.

The faces in the stands seemed yellow and oddly shadowed, like the faces of Chinese masks. The cheerleaders danced and capered like jerky automatons. The sky was a queer gray, running with clouds. We were being badly beaten. Coach Puffer was yelling in plays, but no one could hear him. The Dragons were running away from us. The ball was always theirs. Lenny Barongg looked as if he was playing with terrible pain; his mouth was drawn down in a trembling bow like a mask of tragedy.

I was hit, knocked down, run over. I lay on the playing field, far behind the line of scrimmage, writhing, trying to get my breath back. I looked up and there, parked in the middle of the track field, behind the visitors' bleachers, was Christine. Once more she was sparkling and brand-new, as if she had rolled out of the showroom only an hour before.

Arnie was sitting on the roof, crosslegged like Buddha, looking at me expressionlessly. He hollered something at me, but the steady howl of the wind almost buried it. It sounded as if he said:
Don't worry, Dennis. We'
ll take care of everything. So don't worry. All is cool.

Take care of what? I wondered as I lay there on the dream playing field (which my dreaming self had, for some reason, converted into Astro-Turf), struggling for breath with my jock digging cruelly into the fork of my thighs just below my testicles.
Take care of what?

Of what?

No answer. Only the baleful shine of Christine's yellow headlamps and Arnie sitting serenely crosslegged on her roof in that steady, rushing wind.

• • •

The next day we got out there and did battle for good old Libertyville High again. It wasn't as bad as it had been in my dream—that Saturday no one got hurt, and for a brief while in the third quarter it even looked as though we might have a chance—but then the Philadelphia City quarterback got lucky with a couple of long passes—when things start to go wrong,
everything
goes wrong—and we lost again.

After the game, Coach Puffer just sat there on the bench. He wouldn't look at any of us. There were eleven games left on our schedule, but he was already a beaten man.