Christine

  "Almost human, Dennis!" Arnie whispered to me, apparently on the verge of grateful tears. "Did you hear that? Almost hyooooman."

  And perhaps it is also only retrospection--or imagination--that makes me think his humor was forced, unreal, only a facade. False memory or true one, the subject of his back passed off, although that limp came and went all through the fall.

  I was pretty busy myself. The cheerleader and I had broken it off, but I could usually find someone to step out with on Saturday nights . . . if I wasn't too tired from the constant football practice.

  Coach Puffer wasn't a wretch like Will Darnell, but he was no rose; like half the smalltown high school coaches in America, he had patterned his coaching techniques on those of the late Vince Lombardi, whose chief scripture was that winning wasn't everything, it was the only thing. You'd be surprised how many people who should know better believe that half-baked horseshit.

  A summer of working for Carson Brothers had left me in rugged shape and I think I could have cruised through the season--if it had been a winning season. But by the time Arnie and I had the ugly confrontation near the smoking area behind the shop with Buddy Repperton--and I think that was during the third week of classes--it was pretty clear we weren't going to have a winning season. That made Coach Puffer extremely hard to live with, because in his ten years at LHS, he had never had a losing season. That was the year Coach Puffer had to learn a bitter humility. It was a hard lesson for him . . . and it wasn't so easy for us, either.

  Our first game, away against the Luneburg Tigers, was September ninth. Now, Luneburg is just that--a burg. It's a little piss-ant rural high school at the extreme west end of our district, and over my years at Libertyville, the usual battle cry after Luneburg's bumbling defense had allowed yet another touchdown was: TELL-US-HOW-IT-FEELS-TO-HAVE-COWSHIT-ON-YOUR-HEELS! Followed by a big, sarcastic cheer: RAAAAYYYYYY, LUUUUNEBURG!

  It had been over twenty years since Luneburg beat a Libertyville team, but that year they rose up and smote us righteously. I was playing left end, and by halftime I was morally sure that I was going to have cleat-mark scars all over my back for the rest of my life. By then the score was 17-3. It ended up 30-10. The Luneburg fans were delirious; they tore down the goalposts as if it had been the Regional Championship game and carried their players off the field on their shoulders.

  Our fans, who had come up in buses specially laid on, sat huddled on the visitors' bleachers in the blaring early September heat, looking blank. In the dressing room, Coach Puffer, looking stunned and pallid, suggested we get down on our knees and pray for guidance in the weeks to come. I knew then that the hurting had not ended but was just beginning.

  We got down on our knees, aching, bruised, and battered, wanting nothing but to get into the shower and start washing that loser smell off ourselves, and listened as Coach Puffer explained the situation to God in a ten-minute peroration that ended with a promise that we would do our part if He would do His.

  The next week, we practiced three hours a day (instead of the customary ninety minutes to two hours) under the broiling sun. I tumbled into bed nights and dreamed of his bellowing voice: "Hit that sucker! Hit! Hit!" I ran windsprints until I began to feel that my legs were going to undergo spontaneous decomposition (at the same instant my lungs burst into flames, probably). Lenny Barongg, one of our tailbacks, had a mild sunstroke and was mercifully--for him, at least--excused for the rest of the week.

  So I saw Arnie, and he came over and took dinner with my folks and Ellie and me on Thursday or Friday nights, he checked out a ballgame or two with us on Sunday afternoons, but beyond that I lost sight of him almost completely. I was too busy hauling my aches and pains to class, to practice, then home to my room to do my assignments.

  Going back to my football woes--I think the worst thing was the way people looked at me, and Lenny, and the rest of the team, in the hallways. Now, that "school spirit" business is mostly a lot of bullshit made up by school administrators who remember having a helluva time at the Saturday-afternoon gridiron contests of their youth but have conveniently forgotten that a lot of it resulted from being drunk, horny, or both. If you had held a rally in favor of legalizing marijuana, you would have seen some school spirit. But about football, basketball, and track, most of the student body didn't give a shit. They were too busy trying to get into college or someone's pants or trouble. Business as usual.

  All the same, you get used to being a winner--you start to take it for granted. Libertyville had been fielding killer football teams for a long time; the last time the school had had a losing record--at least, before my senior year--was twelve years before, in 1966. So in the week after the loss to Luneburg, while there was no weeping and gnashing of teeth, there were hurt, puzzled looks in the hall and some booing at the regular Friday afternoon rally at the end of period seven. The boos made Coach Puffer turn nearly purple, and he invited those "poor sports and fair-weather friends" to turn out Saturday afternoon to watch the comeback of the century.

  I don't know if the poor sports and fair-weather friends turned out or not, but I was there. We were at home, and our opponents were the Ridge Rock Bears. Now Ridge Rock is a mining town, and while the kids going to Ridge Rock High are hicks, they are not soft hicks. They are mean, ugly, tough hicks. The year before, Libertyville's football team had barely edged them out for the regional title, and one of the local sports commentators had said it wasn't because Libertyville had a better team but because it had more warm bodies to draw on. Coach Puffer had hit the ceiling over that too, I can tell you.

  This, however, was the Bears' year. They steamrollered us. Fred Dann went out of the game with a concussion in the first period. In the second period, Norman Aleppo got a ride to the Libertyville Community Hospital with a broken arm. And in the last period, the Bears scored three consecutive touchdowns, two on punt returns. The final score was 40-6. All false modesty aside, I'll tell you that I scored the six. But I won't put realism aside with the modesty: I was lucky.

  So . . . another week of hell on the practice field. Another week of Coach yelling Hit that sucker. One day we practiced for nearly four hours, and when Lenny suggested to Coach that it might be nice to have some time left for doing homework, I thought--just for an instant--that Puffer was going to belt him one. He had taken to jingling his keys constantly from hand to hand, reminding me of Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. I believe that how you lose is a much better index to character than how you win. Puffer, who had never been 0-2 in his coaching career, reacted with baffled, pointless fury, like a caged tiger being teased by cruel children.

  The next Friday afternoon--that would have been September 22--the usual rally during the last fifteen minutes of period seven was cancelled. I didn't know any of the players who minded; standing up there and being introduced by twelve prancing cheerleaders for the umpty-umpth time was sort of a bore. It was an ominous sign, all the same. That night we were invited back to the gym by Coach Puffer, where we went to the movies for two hours, watching our humiliation by the Tigers and the Bears in the game films. Perhaps this was supposed to fire us up, but it only depressed me.

  That night, before our second home game of the year, I had a peculiar dream. It was not exactly a nightmare, not like the one where I woke the house screaming, certainly, but it was . . . uncomfortable. We were playing the Philadelphia City Dragons, and a strong wind was blowing. The sounds of the cheers, the blaring, distorted voice of Chubby McCarthy from the loudspeaker as he announced downs and yards, even the sounds of players hitting other players, all sounded weird and echoey in that constant, flat wind.

  The faces in the stands seemed yellow and oddly shadowed, like the faces of Chinese masks. The cheerleaders danced and capered like jerky automatons. The sky was a queer gray, running with clouds. We were being badly beaten. Coach Puffer was yelling in plays, but no one could hear him. The Dragons were running away from us. The ball was always theirs. Lenny Barongg looked as if he was playing with terrible pain; h
is mouth was drawn down in a trembling bow like a mask of tragedy.

  I was hit, knocked down, run over. I lay on the playing field, far behind the line of scrimmage, writhing, trying to get my breath back. I looked up and there, parked in the middle of the track field, behind the visitors' bleachers, was Christine. Once more she was sparkling and brand-new, as if she had rolled out of the showroom only an hour before.

  Arnie was sitting on the roof, crosslegged like Buddha, looking at me expressionlessly. He hollered something at me, but the steady howl of the wind almost buried it. It sounded as if he said: Don't worry, Dennis. We'll take care of everything. So don't worry. All is cool.

  Take care of what? I wondered as I lay there on the dream playing field (which my dreaming self had, for some reason, converted into Astro-Turf), struggling for breath with my jock digging cruelly into the fork of my thighs just below my testicles. Take care of what?

  Of what?

  No answer. Only the baleful shine of Christine's yellow headlamps and Arnie sitting serenely crosslegged on her roof in that steady, rushing wind.

  The next day we got out there and did battle for good old Libertyville High again. It wasn't as bad as it had been in my dream--that Saturday no one got hurt, and for a brief while in the third quarter it even looked as though we might have a chance--but then the Philadelphia City quarterback got lucky with a couple of long passes--when things start to go wrong, everything goes wrong--and we lost again.

  After the game, Coach Puffer just sat there on the bench. He wouldn't look at any of us. There were eleven games left on our schedule, but he was already a beaten man.

  16/ Enter Leigh, Exit Buddy

  I'm not braggin, babe, so don't put me down,

  But I've got the fastest set of wheels in town,

  When someone comes up to me he don't even try

  Cause if she had a set of wings, man,

  I know she could fly,

  She's my little deuce coupe,

  You don't know what I got . . .

  --The Beach Boys

  It was, I am quite sure, the Tuesday after our loss to the Philadelphia City Dragons that things began moving again. That would have been the twenty-sixth of September.

  Arnie and I had three classes together, and one of them was Topics in American History, a block course, period four. The first nine weeks were being taught by Mr. Thompson, the head of the department. The subject of that first nine weeks was Two Hundred Years of Boom and Bust. Arnie called it a boing-boing-going-going class, because it was right before lunch and everybody's stomach seemed to be doing something interesting.

  When the class was over that day, a girl came over to Arnie and asked him if he had the English assignment. He did. He dug it out of his notebook carefully, and while he did, this girl watched him seriously with her dark blue eyes, never taking them off his face. Her hair was a darkish blond, the color of fresh honey--not the strained stuff, but honey the way it first comes from the comb--and held back with a wide blue band that matched her eyes. Looking at her, my stomach did a happy little flip-flop. As she copied the assignment down, Arnie looked at her.

  That wasn't the first time I had seen Leigh Cabot, of course; she had transferred from a town in Massachusetts to Libertyville three weeks ago, so she had been around. Somebody had told me her father worked for 3M, the people who make Scotch tape.

  It wasn't even the first time I had noticed her, because Leigh Cabot was, to put it with perfect simplicity, a beautiful girl. In a work of fiction, I've noticed that writers always invent a flaw here or a flaw there in the women and girls they make up, maybe because they think real beauty is a stereotype or because they think a flaw or two makes the lady more realistic. So she'll be beautiful except her lower lip is too long, or in spite of the fact that her nose is a little too sharp, or maybe she's flat-chested. It's always something.

  But Leigh Cabot was just beautiful, with no qualifications. Her skin was fair and perfect, usually with a touch of perfectly natural color. She stood about five feet eight, tall for a girl but not too tall, and her figure was lovely--firm, high breasts, a small waist that looked as if you could almost put your hands around it (anyway, you longed to try), nice hips, good legs. Beautiful face, sexy, smooth figure--artistically dull, I suppose, without a too-long lower lip or a sharp nose or a wrong bump or bulge anywhere (not even an endearing crooked tooth--she must have had a great orthodontist, too), but she sure didn't feel dull when you were looking at her.

  A few guys had tried to date her and had been pleasantly turned down. It was assumed she was probably carrying a torch for some guy back in Andover or Braintree or wherever it was she had come from, and that she'd probably come around in time. Two of the classes I had with Arnie I also had with Leigh, and I had only been biding my time before making my own move.

  Now, watching them steal glances at each other as Arnie found the assignment and she wrote it carefully down, I wondered if I was going to have a chance to make my move. Then I had to grin at myself. Arnie Cunningham, Ole Pizza-Face himself, and Leigh Cabot. That was totally ridiculous. That was--

  Then the interior smile sort of dried up. I noticed for the third time-- the definitive time--that Arnie's complexion was taking care of itself with almost stunning rapidity. The blemishes were gone. Some of them had left those small, pitted scars along his cheeks, true, but if a guy's face is a strong one, those pits don't seem to matter as much; in a crazy sort of way, they can even add character.

  Leigh and Arnie studied each other surreptitiously and I studied Arnie surreptitiously, wondering exactly when and how this miracle had taken place. The sunlight slanted strongly through the windows of Mr. Thompson's room, delineating the lines of my friend's face clearly. He looked . . . older. As if he had beaten the blemishes and the acne not only by regular washing or the application of some special cream but by somehow turning the clock ahead about three years. He was wearing his hair differently, too--it was shorter, and the sideburns he had affected ever since he could grow them (that was since about eighteen months ago) were gone.

  I thought back to that overcast afternoon when we had gone to see the Chuck Norris Kung-fu picture. That was the first time I had noticed an improvement, I decided. Right around the time he had bought the car. Maybe that was it. Teenagers of the world, rejoice. Solve painful acne problems forever. Buy an old car and it will--

  The interior grin, which had been surfacing once more, suddenly went sour.

  Buy an old car and it will what? Change your head, your way of thinking, and thus change your metabolism? Liberate the real you? I seemed to hear Stukey James, our old high school math teacher, whispering his oft-repeated refrain in my own head: If we follow this line of reasoning to the bitter end, ladies and gentlemen, where does it take us?

  Where indeed?

  "Thank you, Arnie," Leigh said in her soft, clear voice. She had folded the assignment into her notebook.

  "Sure," he said.

  Their eyes met then--they were looking at each other instead of just sneaking glances at each other--and even I could feel the spark jump.

  "See you period six," she said, and walked away, hips undulating gently under a green knitted skirt, hair swinging against the back of her sweater.

  "What have you got with her period six?" I asked. I had a study hall that period--and one proctored by the formidable Miss Raypach, whom all the kids called Miss Rat-Pack . . . but never to her face, you can believe that.

  "Calculus," he said in this dreamy, syrupy voice that was so unlike his usual one that I got giggling. He looked around at me, brows drawing together. "What are you laughing at, Dennis?"

  "Cal-Q-lussss," I said. I rolled my eyes and flapped my hands and laughed harder.

  He made as if to punch me. "You better watch it, Guilder," he said.

  "Off my case, potato-face."

  "They put you on varsity and look what happens to the fucking football team."

  Mr. Hodder, who teaches freshmen the finer points
of grammar (and also how to jerk off, some wits said) happened to be passing by just then, and he frowned impressively at Arnie. "Watch your language in the halls," he said, and passed onward, a briefcase in one hand and a hamburger from the hot-lunch line in the other.

  Arnie had gone beet-red; he always does when a teacher speaks to him (it was such an automatic reaction that when we were in grammar school he would end up getting punished for things he hadn't done just because he looked guilty). It probably says something about the way Michael and Regina brought him up--I'm okay, you're okay, I'm a person, you're a person, we all respect each other to the hilt, and whenever anybody does anything wrong, you're going to get what amounts to an allergic guilt reaction. All part of growing up liberal in America, I guess.

  "Watch your language, Cunningham," I said. "You in a heap o trouble."

  Then he got laughing too. We walked down the echoing, banging hallway together. People rushed here and there or leaned up against their lockers, eating. You weren't supposed to eat in the hallways, but lots of people did.

  "Did you bring your lunch?" I asked.

  "Yeah, brown-bagging it."

  "Go get it. Let's eat out on the bleachers."

  "Aren't you sick of that football field by now?" Arnie asked. "If you'd spent much more time on your belly last Saturday, I think one of the custodians would have planted you."

  "I don't mind. We're playing away this week. And I want to get out of here."

  "All right, meet you out there."

  He walked away, and I went to my locker to get my lunch. I had four sandwiches, for starters. Since Coach Puffer had started his marathon practice sessions, it seemed as if I was always hungry.

  I walked down the hall, thinking about Leigh Cabot and how it would pretty much stand everyone on their ear if they started going out together. High school society is very conservative, you know. No big lecture, but it is. The girls all wear the latest nutty fashions, the boys sometimes wear their hair most of the way down to their assholes, everyone is smoking a little dope or sniffing a little coke--but all of that is just the outward patina, the defense you put up while you try and figure out exactly what's happening with your life. It's like a mirror--what you use to reflect sunlight back into the eyes of teachers and parents, hoping to confuse them before they can confuse you even more than you already are. At heart, most high school kids are about as funky as a bunch of Republican bankers at a church social. There are girls who might have every album Black Sabbath ever made, but if Ozzy Osbourne went to their school and asked one of them for a date, that girl (and all of her friends) would laugh herself into a hemorrhage at the very idea.