Carry On

by Lisa Fenn

  Lincoln’s coaches kept the team on a steady diet of JV matches, looking to score a little confidence. The victories came in incremental doses rather than wins per se. If Sifers threw a half nelson from his feet rather than his knees, McKinney counted the bout a success. If Diaz got his opponents on their backs, it was a good day. They almost always ended up losing the match, but those flashes of proper technique, of marginal improvements, were enough to keep them all going.

  “They weren’t quitters. You have to respect anyone who volunteers to spend their weekends getting beat up,” McKinney said. “They weren’t much of a team, but they were a family.” Dartanyon, especially, lapped up McKinney’s direction like a shelter pup. He grew faster on his feet and harder to take down, looking comfortable on the mat in the way natural athletes do when they discover what their bodies are made to do.

  Which is why the news caught them all by surprise. Not even Dartanyon is sure how his secret slipped out. Being new to the school, he was hoping to hold on to it for a little longer.

  “You’re blind?” Robinson exclaimed one day at practice.

  Dartanyon took a deep breath and nodded. “Yah, pretty much.” Dartanyon suffers from nystagmus and optic neuropathy—congenital conditions that cause involuntary, roving eye movements and severe nearsightedness that limits his focus to approximately four feet.

  “We’re cousins,” Psycho chimed in. “We have the same eye issues.”

  “You’re related to Psycho?” Robinson asked with a nervous chuckle. “Geezus, now I’ve heard it all.”

  “I mean, I can see some things,” Dartanyon said. “I just can’t see very far, and things are a little blurry.”

  Robinson huddled up with McKinney and Conklin. How could Dartanyon be blind? He hadn’t run into any walls since he showed up. He executed drills better than kids with vision. Sure, the coaches had noticed things here and there, like how Dartanyon held his cell phone a little too close to his face, or how when they talked to him from a foot or two away, his pupils seemed to jog off in different directions. But they’d dismissed it as a wandering eye, behavior no stranger than anyone else’s on the team.

  “Uno’s got some type of lung issue. Sifers is limping around like he’s been smoking Camels since the age of two. Christmas is in the corner sewing shoes and can’t take a bath. A little jiggle of the eyes hardly stands out as alarming in this group,” McKinney said.

  “I may be blind, but I can hear everything you’re saying,” Dartanyon called out as they whispered off to the side.

  “Had I known he was blind, I would have dragged some other kid out of the weight room that day,” Robinson said later. “Probably better I didn’t know.”

  Dartanyon finished 11–16 that season. Respectable, yet hardly anything to raise an eyebrow at. Still, Robinson’s faith told him that God had the right kid, that a champion waited within.

  COACH MCKINNEY AND Coach Conklin both moved out of Ohio prior to the 2007–8 season, leaving Coach Robinson at the helm. Also missing at the start of the season was Dartanyon. He didn’t show up for the first practice. Nor the second. Robinson hunted him down in the halls. “Yah, sorry, coach, but I can’t wrestle this year,” Dartanyon told him.

  “Oh, yes, you can,” Robinson said. “You got too much talent to waste.” He grabbed Dartanyon by the neck and put him in a cradle, but Robinson couldn’t hold him. Nor could he blame him when Dartanyon finally offered up his reason. “My dad and me have to move in with my aunt, and she can’t afford to feed us both, so I have to work to help out.”

  Robinson understood, but still he hounded Dartanyon each afternoon that he found him lingering in the halls. “Son, you can go a lot further in life through sports than you can sweeping floors somewhere,” he said. “Come wrestle till you find work.” Maybe Robinson’s needling wore him down. Maybe Dartanyon realized the job prospects for visually impaired teens were dire in a city with the second-highest unemployment rate in the country. Whatever the reason, Dartanyon eventually turned up in the gym.

  The team’s technical development plateaued with McKinny’s departure, but their sense of family strengthened. Early in Robinson’s tenure, Lincoln traveled to a city meet where they got their heads handed to them. Robinson went Coach Bobby Knight on them, berating them wildly. “You guys couldn’t pin a fish on dry land!” he screamed.

  Robinson stormed out of the gym, telling his kids they could all walk home because he wasn’t riding with a bus full of losers. Once he was out the door, shame stopped his stride. “I was compelled to go back and tell those kids that I loved them,” he remembered. “They were an emotionally broken bunch who needed love more than they needed points and wins.” So he hustled back into the gym to find them all sitting like stones right where he’d left them. He told them he was sorry. He asked for their forgiveness. He told them he loved them.

  “That was my epiphany,” Robinson remembered. “I could have lost every kid right there if I didn’t go back.” From then on, he looked each of his wrestlers in the eye before they walked on the mat and shouted, “Who loves you?”

  “Coach does!” they would answer with proud assurance. With his world mired in perpetual uncertainty, Dartanyon especially grew to trust in this ritual and began to blossom under Robinson’s care. He grew a little stronger that year—moving up a weight class from 171 to 189 pounds—and a little fiercer. He was no longer content to toss someone around in a personal display of strength. He was out for the kill, finishing most of his twenty-five wins that season with a punishing headlock. Robinson just looked on and smiled in the impish way you do when you’re holding in a secret.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE NEW KID

  The following fall, at the start of the 2008–9 season, Matt Sifers told Robinson that there was a new kid who wanted to wrestle. “I’m not sure what you’re going to think of him,” Sifers said. “He’s . . . well . . . a little different.”

  Robinson chuckled. “We already got every kind of different on this team. What, is he purple?”

  “No, he’s not purple,” Sifers said. “He’s black.”

  “We already got one of those,” Robinson said, pointing to Dartanyon. “What’s so different about this one?”

  “He doesn’t have any legs.”

  Robinson prided himself as being the king of comebacks, but nothing came out of his gaping mouth this time. He crossed his arms over his chest and thought for a moment. He had long bought into the Wolverines’ misfit identity, and he figured if he learned how to coach kids without shoes, he could learn how to coach a kid without legs too. “Tell him to come to practice,” he said finally. “We’d love to have him.”

  Leroy Sutton was a lower-extremity double amputee who’d transferred into Lincoln-West from Akron the previous winter, halfway through his junior year. This being his twelfth school in ten years, Leroy was done trying to make friends. He repelled most people’s curiosity with black nail polish, facial piercings, and the heavy metal that blared out of his headphones as he played air drums against the sides of his wheelchair. He successfully creeped out Sifers in the computer class they shared their senior year. Leroy eventually spoke first, noticing Matt’s football jersey one Friday and asking what position he played. “You should come out for the team,” Sifers said awkwardly, immediately regretting his insensitivity and reddening.

  “Nah, I’m a wrestler,” Leroy said.

  Sifers wasn’t sure how Leroy wrestling could be any more probable than Leroy playing football; he was just glad Leroy had said something that made him feel better instead of worse.

  “I wrestle too,” Sifers said. “You should come out for the wrestling team this fall.” Every day for the next month, Sifers told Leroy that he expected to see him at practice, and the day the mats rolled out, Leroy rolled in.

  THE LINCOLN WRESTLING program had expanded to include twelve kids and nine pairs of shoes as that season began, and Justin Hons, a history teacher at Lincoln, came on as Robinson’s assistant. Hons, a sinewy
young white man, had a background in mixed martial arts but was a little uncertain as to how to convert that into wrestling mechanics. He and Robinson were even less sure what to do with Leroy.

  Leroy had wrestled for part of his sophomore and junior year at his previous high school, Akron Firestone, under Coach Mark Avcollie. A grizzled lifer in Ohio wrestling, Avcollie had coached fourteen years at Cleveland’s St. Ignatius High School, a chief rival of St. Ed’s. In 1988 he led St. Ignatius to their first state wrestling title, keeping the St. Ed’s Eagles from a state record eleventh consecutive championship. Avcollie retired from coaching shortly thereafter, but couldn’t stay away. Firestone, a public school with a meager wrestling program, eagerly snapped him up, and it wasn’t long before his Falcons commanded their own slice of respect throughout the state.

  In the fall of 2006 Leroy, then a sophomore at Firestone, tottered into Avcollie’s wrestling room on buckling prosthetic legs and crutches. He asked how he might try out for the team. Avcollie, all business, told Leroy the same thing, in the same gravelly voice, that he told every other kid who entered his lair: “Anyone can try out. I don’t have to cut anybody. Wrestling is the hardest thing you’ll ever do. You’ll cut yourself.” He usually had sixty kids show up on the first day of practice, and four weeks later he’d be staring down twenty.

  Leroy wore a tattered white ribbed tank top that day, revealing his thick shoulders and biceps. “It was obvious he didn’t have any legs, but it didn’t look like the rest of him had gone to a fat waste,” Avcollie remembered. “He had a build on him. If you had only seen him from the waist up, you would have thought he was an athlete.”

  After only a week of practices, Firestone traveled to St. Ed’s for a scrimmage. The coaches told the boys to partner up. Leroy was quickly passed over, as no one knew how to approach a wrestler without legs. He slunk back to the edge of the mats, the odd man out. Just then Andrew Gasber, a two-time Ohio state place winner who would finish his high school career 121–16, walked into the gym like a gladiator into a ring. He was running late. He pointed to Leroy as though he had been searching dark alleys to find him. “I got you,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  A wrestling infant versus one of the sport’s giants, Leroy hardly made it within arm’s reach before Andrew flattened him into the mat, brutalizing him for the next two minutes. Andrew showed no mercy, tossing Leroy around like a German shepherd with a chew toy as coaches winced, mercifully closing their notebooks. When the whistle finally blew, Leroy untangled himself from Andrew’s web of limbs and emerged with a wide, satisfied smile. Avcollie knew right then that Leroy Sutton would never quit.

  Leroy participated in a handful of junior varsity matches that season. He rarely left with a win, but always with a smile. Leroy’s wrestling days at Firestone were limited, though. Academic ineligibility sidelined him during his sophomore year, and his right femur extruded through the skin to end his junior season early. Following bone revision surgery in 2007, Leroy moved in with his grandmother on the east side of Cleveland and transferred to Lincoln-West.

  Most of the kids on the Lincoln team knew Leroy from classes. He’d met Dartanyon the previous spring, when Uno introduced them in the halls. By then, Dartanyon had either acquired a nickname or given it to himself, depending on whom you ask. “Leroy, meet Muscles,” Uno said. “Muscles, this is Leroy Sutton.” Leroy cocked his head in a “wassup” sort of way as he looked Dartanyon over. You ain’t the only one with muscles anymore, he thought, though he said nothing.

  In Akron, the story behind Leroy’s disability was no secret. Residents young and old could tell you where they were when Leroy Sutton lost his legs. But Cleveland represented new territory, and Leroy wanted to be known for something other than his history. No one dared to ask what happened to him until Dartanyon broke code and spoke unprompted, catching Leroy off guard: “What happened to your legs, man?”

  HE DIDN’T KNOW they were gone.

  Staring down at the sheets of his bed, the morphine starting to fade, Leroy was still numb, but he knew something was wrong.

  “It was when I tried to sit up,” Leroy remembered. “I pulled the covers up, and that’s when I figured everything out.”

  December 7, 2001, was a day that started like all others for then eleven-year-old Leroy.

  “Redd, getcha butt outta bed!” Leroy’s fifteen-year-old brother, Tony, pounded on the wall separating their bedrooms to wake him up. Their mother left at the crack of dawn for a painting job three hours away in Pittsburgh, but even when she was out of a job, the boys still got themselves up for school. Nuzzling children out of slumber and packing lunches with napkin notes was not the kind of mothering Katrina Sutton was about.

  The Suttons had moved onto Laird Street a few months prior. Lined with deteriorating Victorian homes, Laird had been built in the early 1900s as a stately dwelling community for the executives of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, whose headquarters were less than a mile away. Once the rubber capital of the world, Akron’s population boomed through the 1970s as Goodyear, Goodrich, and Firestone created jobs at insatiable rates. The rubber industry responded to the housing crunch by building homes for their employees.

  But like so many other Rust Belt industries, tire companies moved their operations overseas due to multiple labor union strikes in the 1970s and ’80s. By 1984, only Goodyear’s Formula One racing tire plant remained, and the once-opulent homes of Goodyear Heights were divided into subsidized Section 8 tenant housing. By the time Leroy moved in, the neighborhood was one of the worst areas of Akron, home to drug dealers and the mentally ill, living in destitution. The stench of body odor and uncollected garbage wafted off the hill down onto Market Street, the main thoroughfare, on hot days.

  Leroy, a fifth-grader at Hotchkiss Elementary, was too young to understand the bedlam around him. Instead, he awoke excited for his safety patrol shift that morning. Whereas Tony could talk you out of your boots on a snowy day, Leroy was a quiet, sensitive boy. Volunteering on crosswalk duty afforded Leroy a low-pressure outlet in which to make friends, where he could trade hellos with his schoolmates and smiles with the mothers dropping them off. Safety patrol also allowed him to be a few minutes late to his first class, and he felt important sauntering in with an office pass.

  That morning, Leroy proudly dressed in the black leather jacket and white New Balance low-tops that Tony had given him the day before. Some of the kids in the neighborhood were saying Leroy was soft, so Tony bought him name-brand clothes to raise his street cred a little. Leroy didn’t know where his brother got the money, nor did he know about the slits strategically cut into Tony’s own clothes to hide the bags of weed he sold at his high school. Tony was the man of the house, and his mother groomed him to do his part. As a result, he loved Leroy and their four-year-old sister, Keyiera, and resented them in equal parts. He wished he could be a kid himself rather than braiding his sister’s hair and minding his brother every day. Tony was Leroy’s greatest tormenter and fiercest protector.

  That morning Tony and Leroy packed up Keyiera and dropped her with a neighbor, making them a few minutes late. Walking their usual twenty-minute route down and around Market Street would have landed them both tardy, so they headed for a short cut through a neighboring yard and onto the Wheeling and Lake Erie railroad tracks.

  Leroy’s elementary school was five minutes down the right side of the track; Tony’s high school a few minutes farther on the left. The train told time for them each morning. When the boys ran on schedule, the cars shunted by while Leroy was safely in his crossing gear and Tony was climbing the back steps of East High. That morning, the engine rumbled toward them just as the boys emerged from the bushes. They were later than they thought.

  “I’m just gonna cross over now, in case it’s a real long train,” Leroy said.

  “All right,” Tony replied. “By the time it passes, I be seeing you on the stairs up to your school.”

  DISPATCH CALLED OUT to Akron Fire Station 2 right at the
7:30 a.m. shift change. The six-person crew—three on the fire engine, two on the med unit, and one swingman—had just finished checking the rigs and replenishing supplies from the previous shift. They had more than forty years of collective emergency response experience among them, enough to expect anything at one of Akron’s busiest stations.

  Station 2 received an average of twenty med-run calls in a twenty-four-hour period. Its service area included Laird Street—which responders referred to as “Laird Land”—and the adjoining “Willard World,” an equally impoverished neighboring street. As is true with most inner-city populations, 911 served as the block’s default health care provider. Many runs at Station 2 were for non-emergency calls from residents who used the emergency room as their primary care doctors and the ambulance service as their chauffeur. Responders transported ankle sprains, sore throats, and addicts wanting a free trip to a nearby psychiatric crisis center, hoping to talk their way into a fix when their street drugs ran out. Few of these folks really needed an ambulance, but transporters knew that if they didn’t oblige, the resident might scream, throw rocks, and call again an hour later.

  The bad days were really bad, though. Babies dead in their cribs and a strung-out mom claiming she’d put her son to bed at 5:00 p.m. “She put him to bed at five p.m. all right. She put him to bed at five p.m. a week ago,” paramedic Richard Wendelken remembered. Elderly men and women living surrounded by decades of hoarded newspapers, rotting food, and urine-soaked clothes. Families of ten or more packed together on a bare floor with the television blaring at two o’clock in the morning, the walls teeming with so many cockroaches that they looked like patterned wallpaper.

  “When there were children involved, I never left a run without checking the fridge for food, and a lot of times there wasn’t much,” paramedic Keith Forfia said. Responders were trained to forget their runs, but they could never seem to shake the inescapable hopelessness of Laird.