by Tom Perrotta
“Please don't hurt him,” I said.
Danny's smile disappeared. The lifeguard shut his eyes, bracing himself for pain. I saw myself at the supper table with my parents, trying to explain my innocence.
“Let him go,” said Zirko.
The lifeguard opened his eyes. Danny squinted through the fake glasses.
“Really?”
Zirko nodded. There was an odd look on his face, like he was disgusted by his own decision.
Danny withdrew the knife. Without removing the tape from his mouth, the lifeguard got out of the car and stood politely by the curb in his blood-stained coat.
I watched him out the back window as we drove away. He didn't move a muscle, and I couldn't help thinking how sorry he must have been for what he called me.
* * *
Neil was still at the playground when Cockroach dropped me off He didn't bother to acknowledge me as I trudged across the snowy field to join him.
He didn't seem to be having much fun. He'd shoveled off half a court, but it was really too cold to be shooting hoops. His hands were pink and stiff, nearly frozen.
I grabbed a rebound and threw him a bounce pass. His baseline jumper was short; the whole backboard shivered when the ball struck the rim. I shot a layup with my mitten, then fed him another pass. He caught the ball and held it.
“That was Zirko, wasn't it?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought he was in reform school.”
“I guess they let him out.”
“Did you find the kid?”
“No,” I lied.
Neil's next shot was an air ball, way too long. It arced past the basket, right into my hands.
“I wanted to hit him,” he said, “but I couldn't do it.”
“It's okay. I bled all over his coat.”
Neil smiled. “That was pretty cool.”
He tried to spin the ball Globetrotter-style on his fingertip, but it slid right off.
“Your ball sucks,” he told me.
“It's not mine. I stole it from a black kid.”
“Why'd you do that?”
I shrugged. “Mike Caravello sort of made me.”
Neil made a face and put up another air ball. He missed his next shot and the one after that. I know I'm wrong, but in my memory it seems like he lost his touch forever on that freezing afternoon. For all his talent, he never made it to national television; he never even made the varsity team at Harding. He's a landscaper now. When I'm home in Darwin I see him driving through town sometimes, towing a trailer full of lawn mowers.
I never became the football hero I expected to be either. I lasted just one more season, got tired of it, and drifted on to other things. I never saw the lifeguard again, or Danny, or Chucky, or his mother. I did run into Cockroach at a bar once. He was with a girl and asked me to please call him Frank. As for Zirko, there's not a lot to tell. He dropped out of high school and joined the navy, floating far away from Darwin.
But all that was the future, and the future didn't exist for Neil and me as we tried to salvage the remainder of that freezing Saturday with a game of one on one. The score was 5-3, his favor, when we stopped for a breather at the top of the key.
“Hey Neil,” I said, “do you have a dog?”
“Yeah. German shepherd.”
“Boy or girl?”
“Girl. Sheba.”
I bounced the ball a couple of times, searching for a way to phrase my next question. There was a big knot inside of me I was hoping to untangle.
“Do you like her? Would you be really sad if she died?”
His gaze traveled up from the ball to my face. He looked hurt.
“She's only seven.”
His answer must have satisfied me. I tossed him the ball.
“Check,” he said, bouncing it right back.
I gave a pump fake and took it to the hoop.
Forgiveness
Fifteen minutes before the opening kickoff of our ‘76 state championship game, Rocky DeLucca quit the football team. Harding High never forgave him. Rocky was not only starting halfback and varsity co-captain, he was also president of the Student Council, which voted to impeach him the following week. A lot of people stopped talking to him. Nasty messages were scrawled on his locker. But Rocky barely noticed. All he wanted to talk about was love.
“You know what it's like?” he told me. “It's like the whole world's in black and white, but Wendy and I are in color. I don't know how else to explain it.”
In the weeks before Rocky's downfall, I had gotten to know him pretty well. We were the only two football players on the Student Council, and he had gone out of his way to be my friend even though I was nobody special, just a sophomore benchwarmer. He gave me a ride home a couple of nights in September when practice ran late; gradually it turned into a regular thing.
Rocky was a short muscular guy with a big Italian Afro, olive skin, and a dazzling smile. On Fridays during the season, when football players were required to wear their game jerseys to school, he wore his under a corduroy blazer with patches on the sleeves. He was so cool that it took me a while to admit to myself that he was also a little strange. As popular as he was, he didn't have a girlfriend or a group of guys he hung out with; as far as I could tell he spent his nights at home. He had a cassette player in his car, but only one tape— “I Got a Name” by Jim Croce—which he played over and over, despite my protests. I gathered from remarks he made that he had experienced Croce's death as a personal tragedy.
One rainy night in October he turned to me and said, “You ever get the feeling that everything's a dream?”
“Only when I'm sleeping,” I said.
He ignored me. “Sometimes, right in the middle of the most ordinary situations, I get this weird humming noise in my head and everything starts glowing a little around the edges. It happens a lot during football games. I feel like I'm the only person alive, and everyone else is just a figment of my imagination.”
“Jeez,” I said. “Maybe it's time for a new helmet.”
Another night, after a grueling practice, he asked me if I liked football. Actually, I was having a miserable season. I hated sitting on the bench. But Rocky was team captain so I said, “Are you kidding? I love it.”
He shook his head. “I don't know what's wrong with me. I just can't get excited about it this year.”
I was stunned. Our team was undefeated, ranked fifth in the county, ahead of many larger schools. Rocky was playing well.
“What don't you like about it?”
“The mind control. I listen to the coaches for five minutes, and the word ‘bullshit’ starts running through my head like a mantra.”
“A what?”
“A mantra,” he said. “A word you meditate on.”
Before the impeachment, Rocky's main presidential duty was to say the Pledge of Allegiance over the school PA every morning. You could tell from his voice that he wasn't too thrilled about it. At Harding, it was considered uncool to get too worked up about saluting the flag. The unwritten rule was that you had to stand up, but were not required to put your hand over your heart or actually say the words.
While the rest of my homeroom slouched and mumbled along with Rocky, Wendy Edwards remained seated and went on with her reading. Wendy was a fanatical reader; it was hard to tell if she was making a statement or was simply oblivious to the ritual. But she wasn't a troublemaker, so Mrs. Glowacki left her alone.
On the Wednesday before the state championship game, Coach Whalen was walking in the hall when Rocky asked everyone to please rise. Whalen didn't want to miss the Pledge of Allegiance, so he stepped into the nearest room, which happened to be ours, and slapped his hand smartly against his chest.
Coach Whalen was a school legend. In only three years, he had taken a losing team at a second-rate school and turned it into a football powerhouse. He was handsome and charismatic, a Vietnam vet with chiseled features and shaggy, wheat-colored hair (a lot of girls thought he looked like
Robert Redford). The class responded to his presence. We stood up straighter and pledged allegiance with more fervor than usual.
Only Wendy seemed unaware of our visitor. She was sitting Indian-style in her chair, holding a paperback close to her nose and twirling a strand of hair around her finger. I saw Coach Whalen's head snap in her direction, watched the blood travel up his thick neck into his face, like mercury rising in a thermometer. When the class sat down, he strode past Mrs. Glowacki's desk and tapped Wendy on the shoulder.
“What's the matter?” he asked, a little too politely. “Are you tired?”
Wendy gave him a blank look, then shook her head. Whalen's hands curled into fists, then slowly relaxed. He looked like he wanted to spit.
“Get up,” he said, “and march your butt down to Mr. Wyznewski before I lose my temper.”
Later that day, word spread that Mr. Wyznewski had given her two weeks’ detention for sitting through the Pledge of Allegiance. Rocky was fascinated by the news.
“Do you know her?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We grew up together.”
“What's she like?”
“Not bad. Pretty nice tits.”
He gave me a look, so I started over.
“I mean she's smart,” I said. “But kind of spooky.”
Wendy and I were in first grade when her brother died of leukemia. He was only nine years old. A minister took her out of school, and the next day we made condolence cards with crayons and construction paper. Mine had a picture of a little boy floating above a house.
“I'm sorry about Mike,” it said.
Wendy lived around the corner from me. Her dog, Angel, was a goofy-looking mutt, all black except for three white paws. He trotted around our neighborhood at a brisk clip, as though he were late for an appointment, but would always stop and permit his ears to be scratched by anyone who knew his name. I didn't have a dog, so I stopped him every chance I got; we were friends. But one day when I was in sixth grade, after years of mutual affection, Angel bit me for no reason. He sank his fangs into the meat of my hand, then hustled off with his tail wrapped tightly between his legs.
The pain wasn't terrible; it must have been the betrayal that made me so furious. I ran home and showed my mother the torn flesh, expecting her to share my outrage. But she didn't say anything as she cleaned the wound.
“Aren't you going to call?” I demanded.
“I don't know, Buddy. I hate to bother Jeanette.”
“Angel's dangerous, Ma. What if he bites some little kid?”
My mother called, but she was a bit too friendly for my taste. After about five minutes of small talk she finally got around to mentioning that I'd had a run-in with Angel.
“Run-in?” I said, loud enough for Mrs. Edwards to hear. “He almost took my hand off.”
My mother glared at me, but kept talking in her sugary voice. I could tell she was mad at me when she hung up.
“Hey,” I said. “Angel bit me. I didn't bite him.”
“Buddy, Mrs. Edwards has more important things to worry about than Angel.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Like her husband's dying,” my mother said softly. “That's what.”
A couple of weeks later, when my hand was healed, Wendy burst into tears in the middle of social studies. Mr. Wallace asked her what was wrong.
“My dog got put to sleep,” she said. “I miss him.”
“I'm sorry,” said Mr. Wallace. “Was he old and tired?”
Wendy sniffled and shook her head. I felt sick to my stomach.
“No,” she said. “He bit people.”
Not long after Angel, her father died. Wendy was only out of school for a week, but she looked different when she came back. She kept her eyes wide open all the time, like she'd forgotten how to blink.
Despite the detention, Wendy refused to stand on Thursday. She sat with her hands folded and stared straight ahead at the empty blackboard. Mrs. Glowacki spoke to her at the end of homeroom, but whatever she said, it didn't work. Wendy remained seated again on Friday, even though Coach Whalen and Mr. Wyznewski were watching her from the doorway. She didn't even wait for them to speak. As soon as the pledge ended, she stood up and followed them out the door. She was suspended for three days.
Whalen would have busted her on Thursday, but he'd had a more pressing problem to deal with. Randy Dudley, our all-county middle linebacker, had gotten arrested. With just two days to go before the big game, his timing couldn't have been worse.
Randy was a great player but a frightening person. On Wednesday morning his girlfriend, Janet Lorenzo, had come to school with a black eye. No one had to ask her where she got it. That night, Randy got drunk and went to her house to apologize, but Janet's father wouldn't let him in. Heartbroken, Randy took a crowbar to the windshield of Mr. Lorenzo's Oldsmobile, then led the cops on a high-speed chase through three towns that ended when he missed a turn and flattened a mailbox.
As far as Whalen was concerned, drunk driving was the most serious charge. Team training rules prohibited smoking, drinking, and drugs during the season. The policy was simple: get caught and you were gone. Two scrubs had already been kicked off the team when they made the mistake of buying a six-pack in a bar where a couple of coaches happened to be drinking.
At Thursday's practice, Whalen gave us the verdict: Randy wouldn't be allowed to play on Saturday.
Rocky was glad to see Randy go. He said that if we couldn't win without a guy like that, we didn't deserve to be state champs. I disagreed. If we beat Pine Ridge, the Booster Club was going to buy us expensive championship jackets with leather sleeves and our names written over the heart. I believed that the jacket would redeem the whole wasted season, and I didn't want to lose it at the last minute, just because Randy Dudley rammed his Skylark into a mailbox.
The cheerleaders kicked off Friday's pep rally with a foot-stomping routine. Their saddle shoes raised a thunderous din in the big drafty gymnasium. They clapped their hands and sang to the crowd; the crowd clapped and sang back:
We are Harding
Mighty, mighty Harding!
They ended with their most famous cheer. They turned their backs to the bleachers, bent over, and flipped up their pleated skirts. Sitting with my teammates on the gym floor, all I could see was a row of red smiling faces, but I knew that they had each ironed a yellow letter on their blue panties, so their butts together spelled “GO HARDING!” The crowd loved it.
The cheerleaders scampered off the court. Coach Whalen took the microphone. He said that he had planned on talking about the game, but something else was on his mind. Something more important than football. He pointed to the American flag hanging on the wall next to the banners commemorating our conference championships in 1974 and 75.
“When I was in Vietnam,” he said, “there were people at home, not much older than you, who got their kicks out of spitting on that flag. I guess they thought it was fun. But let me tell you something: for those of us who were serving our country, it wasn't a helluva lotta fun.”
He didn't sound angry. His voice was so calm, he could have been lecturing us about the rules of paddleball.
“I don't know,” he said. “I thought I'd put it all behind me. I thought it was ancient history. But something happened this week in this school that brought it all back to me. I've been thinking about my friends again. The ones who came home in bags. The ones who were buried in coffins with that flag draped on top.”
A hush came over the gym. Whalen looked up, as though his speech were written on the ceiling.
“A lot of brave men died in that war. And they didn't just die of bullets and shrapnel. They died of broken hearts. It broke their hearts to know that people at home were rooting for the other team. Just remember one thing: we didn't lose that war because the other guys were better. We lost because the people at home weren't behind us one hundred percent.”
Whalen took a handkerchief out of his back pocket and wiped his forehead. He glanced
over his shoulder at the team sitting behind him.
“The players on this football team are about to take part in the most important game of their lives. They're ready. They've made the sacrifices. They've paid the price. But you know what? It doesn't matter how good we are. If the students of this school aren't behind us a hundred percent, we don't stand a chance. So let me ask you one very important question: Are you with us?”
A roar rose from the bleachers. Whalen cupped his hand around his ear. “That doesn't sound like a hundred percent to me.”
This time the gym just exploded. People clapped, screamed, and stamped their feet. The cheerleaders shook their pompoms; someone blew an airhorn. The noise wouldn't stop. It sounded like a Zeppelin show at the Garden.
“What did you think of that speech today?” Rocky asked.
We were sitting in Bella Roma Pizza after the Friday night team meeting, where we had watched a depressing film of Pine Ridge's last game. They had this great 200-pound fullback, and I didn't see how we were going to stop him without Randy Dudley.
“I thought it was pretty good,” I said.
He brushed imaginary crumbs off the tabletop.
“It was bullshit.”
“Why?”
“Come on,” he said. “What does Vietnam have to do with anything?”
“He was there. If you fought in a war, I bet you'd talk about it.”
The owner's daughter came out with our slices. Her family had only been in America for about a year, but she was already wearing green eye shadow and a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt.
“My brother was there,” Rocky said. “He doesn't talk about it.”
“I didn't know you had a brother.”
“He's older.”
“What's he do?”
Rocky tipped his slice to let the grease drip onto his paper plate. “I keep telling him he should go on Jeopardy, but he says it's rigged.”
It was almost curfew time when we got back to the car. Team members were supposed to be home by nine on game nights, in bed by ten. Rocky slipped the key in the ignition.