by Rich Wallace
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Published by Laurel-Leaf
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New York
Text copyright © 1996 by Rich Wallace
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eISBN: 978-0-307-56128-2
Reprinted by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers
v3.1_r1
FOR MY FATHER
AND MY SONS
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
CHAPTER 1
November
She’s somebody I could write a song about, I think. She’s small, and older, maybe nineteen, and has probably seen some things in those years. Her hair is so full and bouncy, and it’s that color—a couple of colors, really—of dried hay, but with a warmth to it, too.
You can tell she’s strong by the way she lifts the pump off the tank with one lean, flexed arm and flips that handle thing up and shakes her hair off her face. There’s authority in the way she shoves it smoothly into the car and in the way she wears that mechanic’s shirt, gray with the tail hanging out of her jeans and a little Mobil patch on the pocket. It’s a better show than MTV.
Al’s playing with the radio, looking for the Spanish station out of Weston. He’s in an international mood tonight, with practice starting tomorrow and the Olympics next summer. So we’ll be driving English, probably, on the wrong side of the road, like they do over there.
I’m in the backseat so I have a decent view of the gasoline girl. Al’s only getting three bucks’ worth, so she’s stayed with the pump the whole time. Now she’s pulling it out, a couple of drops spurting out of the nozzle, and the denim stretches tight on her thighs as she wrestles the thing back into its holster.
She ambles over and holds her hand out to Al, and he slips her the bills and she mumbles “Thanks.” Hatcher looks back at Digit and smirks, and I don’t know if they know something about this girl or what.
Al pulls out kind of fast and I look back and she’s already got the pump in another car, a van, actually, and she’s reaching over to get one of those squeegee things out of a bucket.
We didn’t bother going to the football game. It’s the last game, but we’re all in our own worlds tonight and didn’t want any distractions. And I’ve avoided public places since I beat up that minister.
We hit the mats for real tomorrow morning, so Digit’s mostly looking out the window at the town’s dark stores and Hatcher’s steadily squeezing a rubber ball to build up his forearms, as if they’re not built up enough already.
Al’s the only one who’s really saying anything, and he’s just been going on about kicking people’s butts and winning the state meet. He found the station, so now he’s beating on the dashboard and singing words he doesn’t understand. My right shoulder still hurts a little.
The town is deserted—even more deserted than most nights—because everybody who’d be hanging out is at the game. In an hour the usual spots will be filled—strategic storefronts and benches.
In this car with me are my three best friends, and the three biggest obstacles to my doing much wrestling this winter. I have weighed 135 pounds for two solid years now. After Thanksgiving dinner and a pint of ice cream I might balloon up to 135 1/2 for a few minutes, and if I run eight miles hard in the middle of the summer I might shed a pound or two of water.
I am a natural 135-pounder. So is Al. The other two—Digit and Hatcher, I mean—could be among the best in the state this season at 130 and 140.
We call him Digit because he’s missing one—he’s got no pinkie on his right hand. But I don’t think it’s ever made any difference to him. We always said if he couldn’t make weight for a match then he could just cut off the other one.
We’re outside of town now, heading for Weston, I guess. There’s no traffic, so Al takes it over to the other lane and puts on a proper British accent.
“Bloody good driving, if I do say so,” he says, holding his arms straight out on the wheel like a chauffeur or something. He swings back over into the American lane and turns up the radio.
It doesn’t take long to get away from town, and then it’s twenty minutes, mostly through the woods, until you get into Weston. Our town is small—about four thousand people, plus all the farms on the outskirts—but it’s the county seat, so we’ve got the courthouse and the jail and an abnormally high concentration of lawyers. Most of the guys who work, work at Sturbridge Building Products, making cinder blocks, precast concrete steps, stuff like that. That’s where my father works. And Al’s father and Digit’s. Hatcher’s old man is a doctor, but he’s president of the Wrestling Boosters Association. They’ve got about four hundred members. I’m not kidding.
Part of me wishes we’d gone to the game so I could look for this junior that I sit near in geometry. She’s cute and doesn’t have a boyfriend or anything, and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t mind that I’m a wrestler. I mentioned her to Hatcher the other day, and he sort of frowned and said, “What are you interested in a spic for?” I had no answer at the time.
There’s about three levels of girls at the school—some who are almost groupies about the wrestlers (not very many of them, and they’re mostly annoying); some who are anti-wrestling because, I have to admit, the whole town is a little warped about the sport; and the ones in the middle who judge us for what we’re worth.
If you wonder why I’m taking geometry as a senior, it’s because it took me three years to get through two years of algebra. And, to use an algebra expression (I don’t use very many), the missing factor in the girl thing I stated above is that there are a whole lot of girls who probably don’t even give half a thought about whether somebody wrestles or not. I have to keep that in mind.
There seems to be an important announcement on the radio. I catch the word for “dictator,” I think, and then the guy clearly says “Honduras.” Hatcher yawns and stretches in the front seat and says he’s getting tired.
Al punches one of the things you punch to change the station in a hurry, and we get Top 40 music out of Scranton.
“Doughnuts,” says Al, looking around and nodding. Digit says the same thing, and I nod, too. Mr. Donut is about our best road trip. There’s a doughnut place in town, but we like the ride to Weston and Mr. Donut gives us a valid reason to go. I’ve puked doughnuts out the window twice on the way back. Doughnuts and Rolling Rock. (My limit ought to be three beers, but I can’t stop at an odd number.)
Us four have our differences, but mostly we see eye to eye. We all want the same thing.
Two guys from Sturbridge have won state titles over the years. Jerry Franken won at 135—my weight—about twenty years and seventy pounds ago, and now he’s a supervisor at the plant and treasurer of the booster club.
Peter Valdez managed to dry out to 103 as a senior six years ago and went undefeated. We were in sixth grade that year and were just getting into wrestling. That’s when the four of us hooked up, became a unit. We’d go wild at the matches—Peter pinned just about everybody he faced. We wanted to be just like him.
Peter got a full ride to Pitt and made All-America as a freshman, then screwed up his knee and quit school.
My dad says Peter should get promoted to supervisor any day now.
Al almost hit a deer right around here last time we went to Weston. It raced out into the road and then froze in the headlights. If we’d been on the right side of the road, we would’ve nailed it, but it got out of the way just in time. It was a buck; looked like a four-point but we didn’t get a good look. Scared the piss out of us. This area is overrun with deer.
Except when I go hunting. Then the deer disappear.
My dad gets a deer just about every season. I’ve been hunting with a bow for four years and haven’t even taken a shot. “You’re not patient enough, Benny,” he says.
We come over the hill and can see Weston lit up in the valley. It’s big enough to be considered “the city” around here—there’s a real downtown with exotic things like movie theaters and three-story buildings. In Sturbridge we’ve got a McDonald’s and an Arthur Treacher’s, a strip mall with an Acme, an anemic Kmart, about seven shoe stores, and several video places. People drive over to Weston to keep from going insane with boredom.
Weston has two high schools: North and South. They’re both in our conference, and they beat up on us pretty good in most sports. Not wrestling. Wearing a Sturbridge wrestling jacket carries some weight over here, although we don’t go looking for fights. Hatcher’s the only one of us who usually wears his letterman’s jacket anyway.
Al parks at Mr. Donut, which is pretty much empty. There’s two girls at the counter who might be from the college (it’s called Weston Area Community College), but they don’t look very receptive. And like I said, we’re not looking for distractions. We get our stuff quietly and head across the parking lot to the Burger King.
One of Al’s best tricks is to get a milkshake and fill his mouth with it, then go out in the parking lot and make believe he’s puking it up. You can ruin a lot of people’s meals that way. Tonight we’re quiet though, pensive I think the word is. Tomorrow we hit the mats.
Al is picking at his hair with one of those big-toothed combs as we start back. He got it cut this afternoon, or shorn, because his hair is kind of like a sheep’s, really curly. He looks evil, with the same kind of tight hair on his chin and above his lip (that’s the only place he can grow it) and a mocking kind of smile. But he’s okay. His father is one of the few people ever to get fired from the plant, because he drinks more than anybody else and controls it even less. They rehired him last winter. Al was 11–0 at the time.
I don’t know what else to say. Practice starts in about ten hours. I’ll be spending the year getting pushed into the mat by Al in workouts and watching the meets from the sidelines. If I cut weight or add it, I run into Hatcher and Digit.
I just look out the window all the way back to Sturbridge and hardly say a word.
The needle’s on empty when we get back to town, but Al drives right past the Mobil station, which stays open until midnight. The girl is standing on the island with her back to the road, looking at her nails, I think. I figure she weighs about a hundred and six.
She’s somebody I could probably write a song about.
The worst things about Sturbridge:
there’s nothing to do
there’s no way out
there’s no end in sight
The best:
the wrestling team
the cinder blocks
you can smell cows from my bedroom when the ground thaws in spring
CHAPTER 2
My father sits awake most nights until one or two, not really waiting up for me. Just waiting, I guess.
“Go to the game?” he asks as I walk into the living room. He leans forward in his armchair, the tan one that almost matches the sofa they bought when they got married. He’s drinking a pint can of Schaefer, but he’s not drunk.
“Nah,” I say. “We just hung out. Too keyed up.”
“Well, tomorrow’s the day,” he says, knowing what I mean. He looks back at the TV—Cheers in syndication. “This is your year, Benny.”
It isn’t, but I nod and kind of suck in my lips. What he doesn’t know is that Hatcher isn’t at 145 anymore, and Al didn’t bulk up to 140, like we planned. So instead of a block of the four of us from 130 to 145, it’s only three, with me as the odd man out.
“Mom asleep?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
My father works hard—you can see it in his face. He’s lean, like me, but his eyes are tired and he ought to wash his hair more often. He just seems to have shrunk into his body sort of, like there was an extra layer of muscle under the skin that melted away and now the skin’s a little too loose. He never wrestled. Played baseball at Sturbridge twenty-five years ago, and still plays softball in a summer league and goes bowling once a week. Does a job once in a while at night, on the sly.
He leans back in his chair and looks at me with something like pride, expecting, I guess, that he’ll soon have a reason to be proud of me. He doesn’t pressure me, ever. But I’ve seen the way he looks when I win, trying to contain his smile and not yelling much, even if it isn’t a varsity match. I know it’d make him the proudest guy in town if I was winning regularly.
Like lots of others in this town, my father envisions us as this solid, unbeatable block; four straight weight classes worth four pins in nearly every match. The kind of nucleus that wins championships. The fact that we’ve been friends for so long makes it that much sweeter. At least in theory.
Suddenly, there’s not as much room in that theory. Suddenly, I’m not really sure who I’ve been friends with. Can you be best friends with a group?
You have to realize that I’ve been wrestling against Al since junior high school, and I haven’t beaten him in three years. If he wasn’t such a borderline student, he could go anywhere he wants next year.
Then there’s Hatcher up at 140. A year ago I could probably take him, even giving away a lot of weight, but a year ago he was just a little better than average (third in the district) at 145. He’s dropped weight since then, went to two camps last summer (Trenton and Penn State), wrestled in all-comers tournaments, and improved two hundred percent. And if I could dry out to 130 (I just get weak as hell), Digit would kick my butt, too.
I sigh out of frustration, but turn it into a yawn. I’m not giving up on myself, and I’ll never quit trying. But if you look at this with any objectivity at all, then you know I’ve got just about nowhere to go this season. “See you tomorrow, Dad,” I say, and head up the stairs.
My father yawns and pulls one foot up on the chair with him, and blinks a couple of times. “Go get ’em,” he says.
Those are the same words I heard him whisper last month when I went after the minister.
Some things I won’t eat:
sushi
lamb
cheese
baloney
Some things that I will:
rice
oranges
chicken
pretzels
CHAPTER 3
I’ve got ten minutes. We’ve been at it for more than an hour, and there’s at least that much to go, and you can bet this is the only break he’s gonna give us.
So far it’s been okay. We’ve been going one-on-one for about twenty minutes, and of course I’m matched with Al. He’s only pinned me twice, but he’s been in control most of the way.
My shoulder’s all right; it only hurts when Al’s got leverage and I’m trying to stay off my back. He knows it hurts, and he’s got every right to exploit that. He hasn’t pinned me because of the pain, just because he’s stronger.
There’s a frantic kind of energy because we know how good we can be this year. We’re solid at every weight class except heavyweight, and there’s competition two or three deep for every spot except Al’s and Digit’s and Hatcher’s. Maybe Al will have some competition.
Hatcher is over by the window, getting some air, and he sees me leaning here by the water fountain. “Getting your ass kicked?” he wants to know, and I shrug and say, “Yeah, but not entirely.” He comes over and I get another drink.
He asks me how I’m doing, how many times I got pinned, and if I managed to score any points. I tell him, but I’m staring at the wall and getting my head together while I’m talking, thinking about maybe cutting weight.
There are about eight freshmen sprawled on the floor about ten feet away from us in the hall. Coach goes extra tough on freshmen, especially in the first couple of weeks, so you can’t stay with this program unless you really, really want to.
“Get up, girls,” Hatcher says to them, and they all get up in a pretty big hurry because you don’t screw around with a wrestling star in this town. You just don’t.
Hatcher gets one of them in a headlock, a little kid with big ears and kind of a bowl haircut. “What’s your name?” he asks.
“Tom Austin,” the kid says, smiling like he’s thinking maybe Hatcher’s just being friendly.