Like You'd Understand, Anyway

by Jim Shepard

  On the sidebar there's News, Team Info, Spirit Groups, History, Merchandise, and Tickets. Click on Spirit Groups and you pull up categories for Cheerleaders, the Pepettes, the LHS Band, and the Majorettes. Under History you find HumDuck Origins, Team Records, Past Coaches, Traditions, and Ex-Players.

  “Why don't you just drive over to Beaumont if you want to meet this kid?” Wainwright asked me on the way home from practice. Yellow jackets did figure eights over his head. They liked his shampoo.

  “I wanna meet him on the field,” I told him. Though I thought about actually driving there. That I would if I had to. But Wainwright wants a piece of him too. Partly because he thinks it's cold, what my dad did, if he did it. And partly because he's tired of hearing that the kid's unstoppable. “Unstop pable,” he said, the first time he heard it, like he'd just smelled barbecue.

  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.

  “You don't haveta play,” he said. “And watch your language.”

  Bite me, I thought. I ran like a fucking gazelle. I was never colder in my life. Ice built up on one side of my face from the wind.

  I swear more than most people on the team. A lotta Christians around here. We moved from Rahway, New Jersey, when I was in seventh grade.

  Anyway, my knee was fine after that.

  “I gotta be ready for Port Neches-Groves,” I told Wainwright during my rehab.

  “Long as you're ready,” he said. “I don't care who you're ready for.”

  I spent a lot of time at home doing leg lifts with gallon jugs filled with sand on either side of my ankle.

  “Gotta work,” my brother would chuckle from the other room.

  “Why?” I'd go. “You don't.”

  Which he'd also think was funny. He said he wanted to test the welfare state. That's what he tells relatives when they ask if he's found anything yet.

  My mom's brothers and sisters are the ones who ask. My dad only had one brother, and we don't know where he is, either.

  “What about Wal-Mart?” my mom'll say. “They're hiring.”

  “I could be a greeter,” my brother'll say. “Welcome to fucking Wal-Mart.”

  My mom doesn't think he should work for Wal-Mart. She thinks he should go to college out of state, maybe back up north. She says he has a God-given brain. He would've had scholarships to Kent State and Utah State, but he tanked on his grades his senior year. He comes to the games partway through the first half and sits on the opponent's side. He takes credit for my being All-State. He's probably right. By the time I got to Pop Warner, when kids my own age would hit me, I'd be like: please.

  Wainwright's brother, meanwhile, recovered a big fumble against the Ravens on opening day. His family gets the NFL package so they can watch his games. Every time Wainwright gets another award, his dad tells him, “Well, if you turn out to be a tenth of the player your brother is, I'll be happy.”

  “I think you're a tenth now,” I told him once we were alone, the first time I heard his dad say that. He didn't say anything back. Later that night he took a couple of his parents' tropical fish out into the driveway and fungoed them into the neighbor's yard with his old wiffle bat.

  We lost our conference championship to Childress last year when I got beat deep halfway through the second half and neither team scored again. I was only helping out on a two-deep coverage, but still. They went on to the 5A Finals. This year their stadium cups feature a photo of their wide receiver running down the sidelines with a number 47 chasing him. Number 47 is me.

  Port Neches-Groves lost in the Bi-District round anyway, which made me feel a little better.

  Big Coach and Childress's coach have a bet going every year and the winner gets this butt-ugly hassock that has our colors, blue and white, on one side, and their colors, orange and brown, on the other. The two booster groups made it together. All fall Big Coach has been yelling at us that he wants to be able to put his feet up again after a hard day of motivating sad sacks in the heat.

  And Wainwright and me have decided that we're not losing as juniors. Anybody who's not on board for that—anybody who dogs it in practice, or shies away from going for a ball over the middle, or is a pussy about being hurt—hears from us. One guy we cornered in the showers. He kept crying and calling us faggots but he got the message.

  Our offense blows but our defense gets more and more awesome.

  Our first nine games we've given up 55 points—a little over 6 a game—and that's because Big Spring, who we opened with, scored 18 on us off turnovers. Besides Wainwright and me we got Nunez and Swearington and Stribling and that's just in our front seven. And we're all maniacs. Our nickel back tackled his great aunt when he was five years old. She walked through the front hall to give him a hug and he took her out. He says she bounced back strong.

  But here's the thing: I'm sleeping less and less. I can't sit still. Something's fucking me up from the inside.

  “What do you mean?” my mom says when I tell her something weird's going on.

  “I don't know,” I tell her.

  “Is it something physical?” she says. “You wanna go to a doctor?”

  “It's mental,” my brother calls from the TV room.

  “You're not helping,” my mom calls back.

  “I have no idea where your father is,” she tells me. “I'd tell you if I did.”

  I'm just keyed up early, is Wainwright's opinion. Even so, he gives me that look, the one the kid we cornered in the showers probably saw.

  In the Floydada game, he did something in a pileup that made me ask if he was nuts when we were coming off the field and he ignored me the rest of the game. I kept to myself after that. I didn't hear from him and he didn't hear from me. I don't need you, I thought. But then it was like whatever control I had went away.

  I e-mail the guy who sells boats in Michigan: This is my name. Are you my dad?

  I have to e-mail him again before he e-mails back Heck No.

  “Don't you wonder if he's living in Beaumont?” I ask my brother.

  “You know what I heard?” my brother says back. “I heard that that kid is such a great running back because his father loves him so much.”

  Before every practice we're supposed to come up with what Big Coach calls a Fact from History or Science. His father was a superintendent of schools and he's big on people knowing something. Mine on Thursday practice the week before Childress week is that according to surveys, ten percent more young people in America this year have felt like they were going to go nuts than ten years ago.

  “Where'd you get this?” Big Coach wants to know, fingering my scrap of paper.

  I show him: Dr. Joseph Mercola, author of Total Health Program.

  Port Neches-Groves's Web site's mailbag link is going all spastic all week because the entire starting backfield—Corey and Cody Clark, the quarterback, and Michael Thibodeaux, the fullback— are all hurt and Clark and Thibodeaux out at least a week and smart money says that that's the end of the line with powerhouse Port Arthur coming up.

  “What's the matter with you?” my brother asks when he finds me in his room, squatting on the floor. I'm naked. It's three in the morning.

  I couldn't sleep, I tell him.

  “What, you think you're gonna be more fucked-up than me, too?” he goes. He says it like if he could kill me, he would.

  I just squat there, shocked by his voice.

  “You wanta feel sorry for somebody? Feel sorry for me,” he says. When I look at him his eyes are all teared up.

  “What's wrong?” my mom wants to know when she comes downstairs to make coffee. We're both in the kitchen. I put on some sweatpants and a shirt when I got too cold. The sun's up and the dog's out.

  She sees me shivering and turns up the heat. “Nobody answers anymore?” she wants to know. “Maybe I should shout all the time?” she asks, when nobody says anything.

  She leaves the room and comes back with a desk drawer she upends over my plate. Pencil stubs, old photographs, rubber bands, tacks. “Your father's stuff,” she tells me, exasperated. “Knock yourself out.”

  Nobody in the photos is him. There's a bill from 1987 for some dry cleaning.

  I even go to the school nurse. “I feel like—” I tell her when it's my turn. That's as far as I get. It's not like if I found him anything would be any better.

  “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.