“Bisexuals?! Now we gotta worry ’bout champs AND bisexuals?!” yelled Grandaddy right back across the field. “Shit, I ain’t even got enough time in my day to be heterosexual with m’woman, how the hell them poofters got time in they day t’be bisexual? They must get nothin’ done.”
“Done! I’ll tell you what they get done. They get…”
“Lew! Your balls are hangin’ out!” Dad interrupted deliberately to shut down their conversation in front of me.
“Look to the sky, fellers! I’m tellin you, he’s gonna pee on us!” Lew yelled back.
I straddled the Gran Torino’s center console. Dad had let me drive ever since I could see over the dash. He got in beside me, ordering eyes on the road as I jabbed the radio button.
“Fly the airplane, don’t let it fly you,” said Dad sternly.
We got out on the road to home, but my dad always slowed down a bit when I steered, so faster drivers were held up impatiently behind me.
“Hey, Dad, what’s chasin’ tail?”
“Oh, it’s just Lew’s way of sayin’ chasing girls.”
“Free Bird” came on the radio just as Dad yelled out the window at a red Firebird blazing past us in the parking lane, right up close to the Gran Torino’s passenger door. “Goddamn drug uh-dikt, Kevin!” When Dad swore, it was like my Grandaddy. They called it taking a PE, Profanity Exemption—a well-placed and excusable piece of profanity used to achieve what no other nonprofane word could. Lightning struck nearby, accompanied by an instantaneous thunderclap. The flash was so severe that Kevin’s bright red Firebird paled to a soft pink, and a slash of deep blue paint became visible across the left rear bumper.
“Dad, how come Mr. Hoagie wears his army medals to practice, and Grandaddy and you don’t wear your medals?”
“I guess it reminds Lew he done something with his life. He’s a war hero for sure, son, and he’s a fine football coach. But your Grandaddy and I, we like to focus on making more new great things, not live in the past like Lew, restin’ on his mighty impressive laurels.” Dad got quiet. Steam came off the hood when bloated Texas raindrops hit the car, and water spewed down the windshield as Dad told me to keep my eyes on the goddamn road or he’d take the wheel.
* * *
“Dad, how do Mr. Hoagie’s balls know when it’s gonna rain?”
“Not at the table, son,” said Dad, noticing Mom’s look of mock horror as she sat down with us at our little white kitchen table.
I devoured my mom’s charred macaroni and cheese, especially after practice. I didn’t know any better and she’s from Louisiana, so Cajun was her excuse. I shoveled mouthfuls, and Dad pretended to take bites of his as he ambled through the kitchen door into the garage with the excuse that he had to shut the garage door, only to leave his bowl hidden under the back bumper of his ’58 British racing green MGA.
“Genie, that was delicious, darlin’. Mic, get out here!” called Dad. My eyes adjusted to the dark garage, and I stretched deep into the foot well to reach the pedals. “Now, rev it, Mic!”
Looking so pretty, Mom watched Dad under the hood tinkering with his race car engine, so she didn’t notice Steve McQueen’s Velveeta mustache or Dad’s empty bowl. As Dad was leaning under the hood, Steve’s ears perked up and he came over to whine at me. Dogs hear shit. Moments later, Mom, Dad, and I heard it, too. Tires screeched as the garage door imploded at us, splintering its center, crumpling in about a foot and a half with a sound like a shotgun blast.
“What the goddamn…?” Dad’s head popped out from under the hood.
With the garage door now inoperable, Mom, Steve McQueen, and I followed Dad as he raged back through the kitchen and out the front door to the driveway to find a mop of blond hair intertwined with a sheaf of feathered brown inside a red Firebird now coupled intimately with our garage door. Oblivious, Kevin and Lilyth were making out in the front seat of Kevin’s ’73 Firebird SD-455. Lilyth’s puckered tube top was somewhere down around her patched bell- bottoms. Speechless, Mom started to cry. Dad shook his head in disgust as he slowly surveyed the impaled Firebird. The crossbeam of the garage door was wedged into the grille, and a fan belt let out a shrieking whine. Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” blared so loud on Kevin’s eight-track that he and Lilyth didn’t hear Dad coming. Even after Dad yanked open the door, they didn’t notice him, so he popped out the eight-track, chucked it on the ground, and stood back away from the pall of marijuana smoke that poured from the car along with whatever perfume Lilyth had marinated herself in that day. Still no reaction.
Then my dad got furious.
Dad dragged Kevin out by the head, cussing over Lilyth’s sudden screaming, and threw him facedown on our driveway. Though years later Lilyth claimed she tried to get Kevin to leave before Mom and Dad saw them, I don’t believe she ever cared. Then everything got more intense really fast and I was sent into the house, but I sneaked into the garage through the kitchen and peered out through the fresh gap in the garage door.
Lilyth and Mom were still crying, for different reasons. Dad was circling the Firebird, where Kevin had fled back to the safety of his roof and sat with his left leg dangling through the open window, his foot on the steering wheel.
“What the hell is wrong with you, boy? Look what you did to my goddamn garage door,” my dad yelled.
Kevin just looked right through my dad and then back to the garage door before replying, “But look at what your door did to my car, man. I think it was a fair fight. I never wanted them to fight, but they just kept getting closer and closer, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop them.” Kevin rambled on, “But I think it’s over now, don’t you? I think they’ll get along great now.” Over Dad’s shoulder, Kevin saw me peeking out through the gash in the garage door and winked at me. Dad’s temper lost its leash. “Hey, be cool, man,” Kevin said calmly to my dad, as Dad yanked Kevin off the roof of the car and viciously open-palmed him right across the face.
Then Dad looked Kevin right in the eye, just the way he learned it from Grandaddy. “Now you listen to me, son. You do whatever you want, whenever you want, with whatever drug you want. But the minute I find you doing any of that shit with my daughter, I will walk you quietly down the hall to my bathroom and drown you right there in the goddamn bathtub. Is that clear?”
“Damn.”
“Don’t you ‘DAMN’ me, boy! Now you can go wait on the curb, and I’ll call you a cab.” Dad turned to Lilyth to say, “Your mother and I have trusted you with a considerable amount of freedom with the Pied Piper here behind the wheel.” Meanwhile, Kevin leapt back into his sanctuary, smoked the tires backing up, and fishtailed that Firebird the hell down Bentliff Street. Swerving as the splintered two-by-four led the Firebird like a jouster’s lance, Kevin accelerated and Lilyth continued to sob long after he disappeared around the corner.
As my dad’s car pulled up to the field the next day for my football game, I saw Kevin’s car parked just past the end zone, The Plank still stuck in his grille. Although I couldn’t explain Kevin to myself, I always wanted to. He was perched on the Firebird roof again, just staring, transfixed at the bench on the opposing sideline. My dad took a PE and let out a goddamn drug uh-dikt as I got out of the car and headed over to my team on the sideline.
For each game, we were always to line up on the bench in numerical order according to our jersey number, and mine was the only spot that remained vacant. I was 24. I crossed the field, still looking over at Kevin, wondering what went on in his mind, and wondering what he was staring at so intently. As I arrived at my place on that bench, I finally saw what Kevin was staring at. I took my place and sat directly in his sight line. As if he was expecting me, he pulled a grin so small that I could hardly make it out, and he threw up the peace sign. I looked behind me to see if he was looking at someone or something else, and when I turned back he was pointing right at me and mouthed the word you. He held my gaze and after a moment threw both his arms into the air as a referee would to indicate a touchdown. Still unsure who
Kevin was gesturing to, I glanced behind me, but there was no one.
“Hey, where the hell you at, boy?” I heard Coach Gasconade yell. “Had a talk with your Grandaddy Charlie, and he tell me he watch you in the neighbor’s yard and that you got a hell of an open field run, and that you a lot faster’n even you think. That true?”
“Um, I think I’m pretty fast, sir,” I said.
“You faster’n my son, Tommy?” he asked.
“Well, no, sir, but I think everybody except him.”
“Well, this is one your Grandaddy wanted me to ask you, so why you think you ain’t faster’n Tommy?” he asked, a touch of smugness in his voice.
“Because he’s the fastest on the team,” I replied.
“How you know he’s the fastest? ’Cause your Grandaddy don’t seem to think so.”
This was the first time that I actually thought about how I’d come to this very limiting conclusion. I told Coach Gasconade that I recalled that on the first day of practice starting back when we were in the peewees at age six, Coach Gasconade had told the whole team that Tommy was the fastest, and for us all to do our best to keep up with him when we do laps or sprints. And I had. I had always kept up with Tommy. Up until that moment, it never occurred to me that Tommy might have been going as fast as he possibly could. And if he was, he was a fucking slug.
“I guess I always just did what you said, Coach, and I kept up with him. Never tried to beat him ’cause I figured he had a lot more speed in reserve than even I did. ’Cause you told me he was the fastest on the team.”
Coach Gasconade just looked at me in complete dismay, like my Grandaddy’s look of disappointment, and I cringed. It seemed like something was sparking in Coach Gasconade’s head, like maybe he’d overlooked something, and he pulled out his stopwatch and called Tommy to the fifty-yard line right in front of the bench. He sent Tommy down and back, and then called me to the very same line. Down and back, and then I took my same place on the bench. All the while, Kevin still kept on staring at me as I heard the coach confer with Lew, nursing his beer on the sidelines.
Coach Gasconade’s tongue circled his teeth behind his clenched lips as he stared down at that stopwatch in his hands, slowly shaking his head before slowly looking up at Tommy and casting that god-awful look of disappointment upon his son.
“Okay, new man on kickoff return, and he gonna be joining Tommy in the backfield. ’Tween the two of you, we might just have a shot against these Yellow Jackets.”
* * *
As the Yellow Jackets assembled on the other side of the field after their warm-up, I saw Kevin still sitting and staring, The Plank from our garage door jutting out of his Firebird. I stared until Jane walked right in front of it, but just as quickly as she appeared, she was gone. She seemed to escape during my blinks. I recalibrated, tracking her every possible move in my peripheral vision. Her next likely resurface at her current speed would be the bleachers. I estimated it would take her fifteen seconds to surface from the crowd and climb the stands into full view. But instead, she appeared in ten seconds on the opposite side of the stands. She tended to warp all my processes that I fell back on to calculate time, speed, arrival, and general physics. All of my best tools and abilities seemed to run and hide in her presence.
I took my first kickoff that day and wound around my pursuers just like I was running into the Milans’ front yard. I found my way to the sideline and started pulling away from all the Yellow Jackets, heading straight for the end zone. As they drifted farther behind, I quit looking over my shoulder—and that’s when I saw her. Her bright yellow sundress almost stopped me in my tracks; it was the exact same shade as my pursuers. That color should’ve slowed me down, but it just pulled me faster and faster. She was sitting in an aluminum lawn chair with green and yellow webbing right next to her dad just outside the end zone. In that moment, I wished I had had a quarterback’s face mask on my helmet, so she could see clearly who I was. I wanted her to know that this was me, and not the kid who nearly hanged himself by his red scarf in class. I wanted her to know this me. I wanted her to know that number 24, who was racing toward the end zone, lived right across the ditch flanked by our fences. As I approached the goal line, she slowly stood up from her chair, toppling it over behind her, with her hands clasped as if in prayer. And as I entered the end zone, she was hugging herself and bouncing up and down off her heels. I wanted to stare at her forever as I slowed down to a stop directly under the goalpost, but I also wanted her to see the name on the back of my jersey. I prayed for my prayer to race past hers and get up there first, for her to know everything that I felt about her. I didn’t know what she was asking for, but I didn’t want it to divert attention away from what I wanted her to know. I gently placed the ball on the ground, just the way my Grandaddy had told me to.
I had never scored a touchdown in a game before, but my Grandaddy had told me exactly what to do when I did. He told me to never spike the ball, or do any goddamn jig in the end zone when you score.
“Nope,” he said. “You just politely hand the ball to the ref or gently set it under the uprights and walk away, like you goddamn expected that shit to happen. Jigs are for people who surprised themselves. You gonna score, boy. I’m telling you right now, so no need to be surprised when it happens. And when they see that even you ain’t surprised, they’ll know that you can do it again and again. I ain’t surprised by the greatness in you, ’cause me and your daddy the ones that put it in there.” He knew more about me than even I did. And I guess it made sense. After all, like my Grandaddy used to say to me, “The only reason you ain’t a rattlesnake is that you momma and daddy ain’t rattlesnakes.”
I took as much time as I could placing the ball on the ground and had a wonderful plan to nonchalantly swing around and jog back to the bench, giving Jane ample time to read my name in bold print across my shoulder blades—but then I got hit by the first wave of my celebrating teammates. The impact took my breath away, far away. I went down hard as they all piled on top of me to celebrate. I was underneath our entire team in a complete panic, trying to collect a lungful of air and not lose sight of Jane in her beautiful yellow dress. I don’t know if it was the claustrophobia or the fact that my lungs were completely compressed by fifteen teammates, but I lost consciousness. I woke up on the sideline with my Grandaddy staring through my face mask.
I wondered both where Jane had gone, and how Kevin had known. I needed Jane to know things about me—everything, in fact. I wanted her to know that I was the one who scored, but to forget that I was also the one who got knocked unconscious. I wanted to explain to Jane how I was flat-footed and knock-kneed from age three to seven, but that I was still really fast. And that I was dyslexic from kindergarten through third grade, but that I was still smarter than they knew. I wanted her to know that I got put in the slow class and had to wear clunky corrective “dress-style” shoes but that I was still pretty damn good at sports. I wanted her to see that I had to wear those shoes and not that I chose to. They weren’t the ones with metal braces, but still, they were hideously embarrassing to me. I always wanted Levi’s and Converse sneakers, but they didn’t sell them at Sears, and you couldn’t put them on layaway. I wanted her to know that when I wrote yekciM, and my mom got scared and started crying, that I wasn’t scared at all. And that I knew the doctor was an idiot when he suggested a special school and to not expect much academically from me. I believed I was fine. I knew it. Shit, I could write everything and anything not only frontwards, but backwards as well. Simultaneous inversion, that was my normal. I wanted so badly to tell Jane that although they placed me with the special needs kids in level four, I was smart. I just needed her to understand, in case she knew about my level four.
In case she’d seen or heard, because the principal insisted on keeping the level four door open all the time—lest there be an incident—so you’d see who was “in the dummies,” as the kids called it. My comprehension was fine. I just transposed letters. I wanted Jane to know
that I scored better than most in everything when it was discussed verbally, and that my eyes were just giving my brain faulty information. My calculator was accurate. I just needed to relabel my keys. I was mortified when I’d have to go to that “special room” with huge windows for thirty minutes every day before lunch to do a mix of body mechanics, visual, and reprogramming exercises. I wanted her to know that I dreaded those thirty minutes, when the entire school would walk by the windows of that fucking room heading for lunch, and see me lying on the floor staring at a ball swinging back and forth from the ceiling to reset my brain while a nurse with a pencil doodled on her paper and I tried to mute out everything around me.
The public display and remarks like, “Oh, Mickey’s got dyslexia,” petered out, and didn’t really bother me because I knew in my gut that I was good and good at stuff. I wanted Jane to know that I may have had a pang of angst about it off and on, but generally I’d ignore most of it. Just like I felt in my gut that I might be faster than Tommy. It hadn’t yet occurred to me to beat him because I was only ever told to keep up with him. I was taught to be respectful when adults said this is how it is. I was obedient, and so very literal. I didn’t actually know for sure if I could beat Tommy, because I hadn’t tried to do it. In fact, I accepted his entitlement as faster, since the coaches had always said that Tommy was the fastest on the team. I just figured he wasn’t really going as fast as he could truly go when we ran at practice. I figured they knew something I didn’t. I figured Tommy was faster than me because Coach Gasconade had said so since I was six years old. And I wanted Jane to know for certain that that was the very last time I would ever let someone else tell me who I was.
Our next game was a rivalry against the Angleton Red Devils. As we did at the start of every game, we were all to stand in a line, helmets off and over our hearts, facing the opposing team about five feet in front of us. I scanned the crowd for Jane, but couldn’t find her anywhere. I took my helmet off and covered my heart as every other player had—except one. The Red Devil directly across from me stood there with his helmet still on and his hands on his hips as our national anthem began to play. My dad and my Grandaddy had both served in the military, so not removing a cover for our anthem was not an option that I had ever been made aware of.
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