Gutless

by Carl Deuker

  “Are you kidding? He’d never have a gun in the house.”

  “My father has one. It’s right there.” He pointed to a mahogany box on a shelf next to some pruners. “When we first came here from Nanjing, my dad believed that every American was a millionaire and that every American kept a gun in his house. So he bought a Browning Hi Power pistol, the best pistol ever made. That’s how he is. If you’re going to get something, get the best.” He took a step toward the shelf. “Do you want to hold it? It’s a work of art. It feels perfect in your hand. The design is incredible.”

  I put my hands up. “I don’t want to touch it. Guns freak me out.”

  “At least look at it.” He reached up, took down the box, and opened it. “Isn’t it beautiful? The muzzle, the handle, the trigger, the way the magazine fits in—everything about it is perfect.”

  “Except for what it does. That’s not so perfect.”

  He took it out of the box.

  “Put it back, Richie. I don’t like it.”

  He looked at me, shrugged, and then put it back in the box. “It’s not loaded. The magazine clip is in the house. My dad hides it in a bottom drawer in the bathroom.” He grinned. “It’s in a box with a label that reads POISON, DO NOT OPEN. If he hadn’t put that sign on the box, I’d never have looked inside.”

  My father hadn’t gone to my soccer games. After each match, I’d play radio announcer, telling him everything. That’s what I figured I’d do for the final game, but he insisted on attending in person. “I’m not missing the game that could send you to the state championship,” he said, his voice firm.

  I felt sick. I knew nothing about the layout of Lakeside High. If it was a long walk from the parking lot to the bleachers, it would take him forever, with everybody watching. He’d hate that, and I hated the idea of my teammates seeing him struggle.

  His voice dropped. “Don’t worry, Brock. The field is down in a hollow; First Avenue runs right above it. I can park by the fence and see the game better than if I were sitting in the bleachers.”

  The team took a school bus to Lakeside. Every other bus ride had been loosey-goosey, because Richie had set the tone. Before the bus had even pulled out of the parking lot, he’d be telling some crazy story. Guys would laugh and then tell their own stories. This time, Richie sat by himself in the back of the bus and stared out the window.

  Pulling onto the Lakeside campus was like entering a different world. Bill Gates—the billionaire Bill Gates, not Hunter’s father—had gone there. I’ve never seen Harvard or Yale, but Lakeside looked the way I imagine them to look. Brick buildings with ivy crawling up the sides, a big quad bordered with flower beds and crisscrossed with cobblestone paths, wrought-iron benches underneath shade trees. I half expected a security guard to stop our bus, ask us what we were doing there, and then tell us to go away.

  Rich kids have a huge advantage in sports like soccer. In the off-season, guys on my team played in rec leagues or maybe on select teams. Lakeside kids play year-round in premier leagues, getting the best coaching while traveling the world to take on the best competition.

  At game time, we had a couple dozen parents in the bleachers on our side. I looked to the street above the field to see if I could find my dad’s van. I spotted it, and him, and gave a wave.

  From the start, Richie was a ticking bomb. I saw it, and so did Coach Jacklin. Twice I heard him holler, “Easy, easy” to Richie, urging him to get the play under control. If it had been anybody else, Jacklin would have yanked him, but we had no chance to win with Richie on the bench.

  For a while, Richie’s over-the-top intensity worked in our favor. The Lakeside guys backed off when they saw him rushing upfield. It was as if they were jumping out of the path of a speeding car. We were the aggressive team, moving the ball from side to side, looking for chances.

  Their goalie made a good save on a shot from the left side, and a couple of minutes later Richie made a corner kick that almost found the net. A minute after that, Rickie boomed a shot, but it flew just wide.

  But another chance came right away. Rory stole the ball and led Richie with a perfect pass. Richie took it and dribbled upfield. He had Peter open on the side and could have passed it to him. Instead, he tried to deke a Lakeside fullback. It was a smart play; if he got past him, it would be clear sailing to the goal.

  But the Lakeside guys were players. The fullback ran shoulder to shoulder with Richie before making a beautiful steal, poking the ball away without touching Richie. It was an amazing play, and the Lakeside fans roared their approval.

  A Lakeside kid chased down the ball, turned it, and was moving upfield. The kid was running easy, surveying the field, looking for someone to pass to. There wasn’t a play set up. Nothing.

  Suddenly, Richie raced at the kid from behind. I don’t know what he was thinking, but he had no angle. That was bad. Worse, Richie had his cleats up when he tried his slide tackle, or whatever it was. He never touched the ball, but he did hit the back of the Lakeside guy’s leg. The kid’s knee buckled and he went down hard. You could hear everybody in the stands—on both sides—gasp. A second later, the Lakeside player started rolling over and over, howling in pain as he clutched his knee.

  The ref blew long and hard on his whistle, and a trainer or doctor rushed onto the field. Players for both teams kneeled as the doctor guy bent over the Lakeside kid. He moved his leg a little, then a little more, and then he was up, grimacing as he hobbled to the sidelines, blood dripping down his leg and onto his shoe and sock. The parents and kids in the stands clapped for him.

  After that, a bunch of things happened, one after the other like a string of firecrackers exploding. Lakeside dads started pointing their fingers and screaming at Richie. “Get that kid off the field,” one of them shouted in a booming voice.

  The ref motioned Richie to him. He talked to Richie for about thirty seconds, and then the red card came out and he pointed to the sidelines. The Lakeside parents cheered.

  Coach Jacklin came out and walked Richie off the field. Angry shouts from the Lakeside section followed him every step.

  There was an old gray blanket on the bench. When Richie sat down, Jacklin grabbed that blanket and placed it over Richie’s shoulders. Richie immediately pulled it over his head, put his knees on his elbows, and fixed his eyes on the grass by his feet.

  There’s not much to say about the rest of the game. Our best player had been ejected; we were short-handed; we were playing on Lakeside’s field; we were completely off our game. Because of Richie’s foul, we wanted to prove we were good sports, so we played politely, which is another way of saying we played soft. On top of that, they were the better team, even when we’d had Richie. The final score was 6–0.

  Season over.

  Riding back to school on the bus, Richie sat by himself in the first row. Behind him on both sides for two rows were empty seats. I could have sat next to him, stuck by him and all that, but what could I have said that would have been of any use?

  When the bus doors hissed open in the school parking lot, Richie was off the bus first. By the time I made my way to the front, he was half a block away. That was okay. I didn’t want to walk home with him. Not that day.

  My dad was waiting for me when I opened the front door. “Some things just aren’t meant to be,” he said, giving me a shake of the head and a half smile. “Still, you had a great year.” There was a long pause. “What’s going on with your friend Richie? That was a terrible foul. Where’d that come from?”

  I still think about that moment. My dad was right in front of me, asking. I could have told him everything—about Richie’s mom being sick, about Suzanne Friend, about Fear the Fag, about Hunter and all the crap he and his friends had pulled.

  “He just made a stupid play,” I said. “That’s all.”

  Richie wasn’t at school Monday or Tuesday. I thought about stopping by his house to see how he was doing, but I figured he wanted time to himself.

  Coach Jacklin called a
team meeting Tuesday at lunch. As we were waiting, guys around me talked about Richie, how he’d cost us a chance at the playoffs, how dirty his play had been, how they weren’t surprised he wasn’t at school. “I’d stay home too, if I’d pissed away our chances,” one guy said.

  “He should be here,” somebody else put in. “He screwed up bigtime, and he should man up.”

  When other guys nodded in agreement, I’d had enough. “Give the guy a break, will you?” I said to no one and to everyone. “Without Richie, we’d have done nothing. And what would you have done if those posters had been about you?”

  After my outburst, guys looked at the ground or out the window. Everybody was glad when Jacklin arrived so we could listen to his “It was a great year” speech and be done with the soccer season.

  When I stepped inside Ms. Ringleman’s room on Wednesday, I spotted Richie in the last row between two kids who always slept through class. There were no empty desks near him. Our eyes met, and I motioned to some vacant seats up front, hoping he’d move, but he shook his head. At lunch I looked around for him, but he’d found a table way in the back that was full of Asian kids, and he ignored me when I pointed to where we normally ate. I don’t know where he went after lunch, but it wasn’t to chess club.

  Over the next weeks, I tried to break through, and sometimes I thought I had. There’d be an open seat next to him in Ms. Ringleman’s class, and I’d take it. We’d talk a little before class, and sometimes even eat lunch together. But he was shut up tight. He didn’t want me, or anyone, around.

  As a kid, I’d owned some of those transformer toys where you had a tank and then you flipped a few arms and it turned into a fighter jet. He was like that. The joking, outgoing Richie had morphed into a head-down, never-smile kid.

  Maybe that’s why Hunter and his friends started getting on him again. Colton started calling Richie “Red”—short for Red Card—and lots of kids thought tagging a black-haired Asian kid with the nickname Red was funny. “Hey, there’s Red,” guys would say as he walked down the hallway, and they could use that name even if teachers were around. Same thing with MVP. At least twice, at the end of the day a group of guys followed him off campus, chanting, “MVP! MVP! MVP!”—mocking him for getting himself kicked out of the Lakeside game.

  Whenever anybody I knew ridiculed Richie, I told them to knock it off, and most of the time they did. But not always.

  “I don’t know why you keep defending him,” Rory shot back me at one day in the lunchroom. “He screwed up. And he was always bragging about how great he was. You puff yourself up like that and you’re asking for somebody to smack you down.”

  I picked up my tray and moved to another table. “The truth hurts,” Rory called after me, but I didn’t look back.

  On the last Friday in May, school let out early so that teachers could get training on new tests we’d have to take next year. At eleven, I started for home, not sure what I’d do to kill the afternoon. About ten blocks from my house, I decided to stop by Richie’s. If he didn’t want me around, he’d let me know.

  When I neared his house, I could tell things had gone bad. The grass hadn’t been mowed; the flower beds were full of weeds. As I came closer, things looked even worse. The hanging plants on the porch were dead; cobwebs traced paths from the porch light; bits of trash had blown up against the fence.

  From the sidewalk, I could see a light on in the kitchen, and I thought I heard music. I climbed the porch stairs and knocked on the front door. I waited. Nothing. I was about to knock again when Richie’s mother opened the door.

  She looked older and weaker. She smiled when she saw me, but even smiling seemed like it was work for her. “Oh, it’s you, Richie’s friend. I’m so glad you come. Richie is around back, working on ecology school. You go there; you find him.”

  I thanked her and then walked through the gate to the shed. It still seemed deserted—was his mother wrong? “Richie, are you in there?”

  The door opened. Richie was holding a tube of Super Glue in one hand, a tiny park bench in the other, and he had earphones around his neck. For a minute, he just stared at me, not even saying hello. Then he stepped aside. “Come in.”

  My eyes immediately went to the model of the school. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. All the sports fields were finished, and they were perfect. The football field had yardage lines every five yards. The baseball and softball diamonds had tiny bases in perfect position around the tiny infield. The creek running through the school was lined with miniature benches and picnic tables. Thumb-size people ate pea-size meals under a line of shade trees.

  “It’s awesome,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, this is all I’ve been working on for a while, so it should be good.” He pointed to a bare spot. “That’ll be a new wing for the school heated entirely by solar panels. I worked out the economics of it. Even in Seattle there’s enough sunlight to heat a building that size if you have enough glass and you position the building just right. For the contest, you have to prove that your concept works; you can’t just make up stuff.”

  “You’re going to win,” I said. “Not just in Portland, but for the whole country. Nothing else could be this good.”

  He screwed up his face and sort of smiled. “Maybe. But some kid in Eugene might have done twice as much. You never know.”

  We stared silently at the model for a long moment.

  “Did you go to the front door? Did see my mother?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I saw her.”

  “Her cancer is back. She cries all the time. My father yells at her not to give up, but that makes her cry more, and that makes him yell more. That’s why I come out here and lock the door.”

  My mouth went dry. “But the doctors are still treating her, right?”

  “Yeah, they’re treating her, but it won’t work.”

  “Don’t say that, Richie. You don’t know that.”

  “It’s true. I looked it up online. Chemo never works the second time. Or almost never. And I heard my father on the phone. He’s already arranging our move back to Nanjing so my aunts can raise me. I told him I want to stay here, but he won’t listen.”

  “Something could still happen, Richie. You just don’t know.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, sure. Something could happen. Twenty-three cockatiels could fly around my room and poop on my head. Big-breasted girls could beg to sit next to me.”

  A few seconds ticked by. Then I smiled. “Hey, those big-breasted girls have got to sit next to somebody. Why not you?”

  His face stayed stony. “This isn’t a joke, Brock.”

  “Come on, Richie. I was just trying to—“ I stopped. The words wouldn’t come.

  “Trying to what?”

  “I don’t know. Forget it.” I paused. “Do you want me to go?”

  He sighed, and his face relaxed. “No. I’m sick of working on this alone. If you want to stick around and help, that’d be great.”

  Spring football started June 1. Not that many guys turned out. All the seniors—including J’Varre—were done with high school football. The incoming freshmen were still back in middle school, and some guys had quit. That left about fifty players on the field.

  Coach Payne called us together. The assistant coaches were standing on one side, the parent volunteers on the other. He talked for a while, and then turned toward his assistants.

  “I want you men to meet Coach Lever. You may have seen him around school; he teaches P.E. and biology. I’ll be here to help with the transition this week, but in the fall Coach Lever will be your head coach. I’ve had a good long run, but this is it for me. Any questions?”

  We all stood silent, too stunned to speak. There couldn’t have been a more different coach. Coach Payne was an old white guy with bags under his eyes. He had as much hair growing out of his ears as he had on his head. I’d seen him smile a couple of times but never laugh. Coach Lever was a young black guy, built like an NBA player and tatted up like one too. He wore tiny di
amond earrings, and in the hallways he was always smiling, always upbeat. He’d come to Crown Hill in January when one of the lady P.E. teachers had had a baby.

  Somebody shouted out, “We’ll miss you, Coach!” Coach Payne smiled and nodded his head and said he’d miss us, too. Then we all clapped for him, and the guys who knew how to whistle did, and the changeover started.

  Coach Lever brought a new style to the team. As we warmed up, rap music blared from speakers placed all around the field. 2Pac and Eminem and the Beastie Boys. When we switched to hitting the sleds, he played old heavy metal: Led Zeppelin and Guns N’ Roses and AC/DC.

  Coach Payne looked disgusted as the music blared. Some of the other coaches and the parent volunteers were rolling with it; some of them looked like they might walk off.

  But for us, the players? It was great. The music got the blood going, and we needed that, because Coach Lever worked us really hard. We ran more, hit the sleds more, and did more drills than at Coach Payne’s practices. The music somehow made you want to run. That and Coach Lever’s nonstop cheerleading. “Gimme more, white boy,” he screamed at me once, a smile on his face. And I gave him more. We all did.

  When we broke into small groups, I was with the other receivers and the quarterbacks. Kaiden had quit, but Aiden was there with Hunter. As he threw easy passes to us—it was the first day—I saw something different in Hunter. He was never a screw-off on the football field, but that day he was even more intense. The upcoming season was his last chance. More mediocre play and he’d be lucky to get a scholarship offer from a Division III school like Pacific Lutheran.

  For two hours, we worked hard. Coach Payne had directed practice from his high platform; Coach Lever ran from offensive group to defensive group, clapping his hands and asking for more effort.