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  Laurence and the others finish their practice and go back to stretching.

  “The truth is, you got lapped because you ran it like a quarter mile. That’s why you died at the 600. Your first split was 57.” Laurence doesn’t even look up from his stretch. He’s in eighth grade, and for some reason, he’s always all coolness. Like he’s got everything covered forever and ever, amen.

  “I ran a 57 quarter? That’s my best time! That’s like world-record material right there—” The air and strength is all back in me now, and I do some happy-dancing, not caring who’s watching.

  “Your second split was a sweet 1:37. Which means you ran your second quarter at 97, which might break this meet’s record for the slowest quarter mile ever run.”

  I stop dancing real fast. 1:37 isn’t good. It’s old person with a cane, one leg, and a swollen foot time.

  “That’s what killed us Second Leg—Joseph—says. That’s what buried us.”

  “It’s not two quarter miles.” Laurence unfolds himself and finally looks at me. He’s not as tall as me, but he’s got muscles already. He’s wearing a headband, cuz otherwise his hair would be in his eyes. The band is school colors, and anybody else might get all kinds of words thrown at them for wearing it.

  “When you run it again, remember that.”

  The first call for their race comes, and the four of them jog over. Me and Laurence have the two-mom thing in common, but that’s about where it ends. Laurence has two dads too. And all his parents live in the same building together. To top it all off, he’s the only child. He can keep his silver spoon, because having all those people in my ear all the time would make me crazy.

  The first legs of the relay are down in the starts, fixing their fingers, getting their butts in the air. Ready. Laurence is on the inside, his favorite spot. The caller yells, “Set!” and the runners lift their butts higher. Then the gun goes off, and they all start running, Laurence taking a fast start and getting about twenty yards ahead of everybody else. He’s smiling. I jog slow around the outside of the track, watching them. Laurence slows down a little. I can hear the coach yelling for him to get his arms up. A tall kid from St. Ann’s gets close to him, and Laurence sprints out farther. The crowd is cheering. By the 200 mark, Laurence is ahead of everyone. I’ve never seen him run with this kind of distance.

  Both my moms are in the stands. Behind them, all four of Laurence’s parents are standing up and cheering. Mama is sneak-emailing. I can tell, because her head is down and she has her reading glasses on. Moms is smiling and waving at me. Who knows how long she’s been trying to get my attention. I give a quick wave and start pulling my sweats on.

  Laurence is still way out ahead of everyone—his face dark, his arms flashing. He’s kicked into something new, something fast and strong. Something crazily determined. I looked up at the stands again. His parents are losing it. They only see their son killing the others. They only see him winning. But I see something else. Standing there, my pants half on, my mouth maybe hanging open, I see that Laurence is already running fast toward the second leg and fast away from them. Fast and far away from them. I see him going and going and know right then that he’ll keep running until he can’t run anymore, until he can look behind himself and not see all that love, all that screaming and attention. Not see all those silver spoons getting shoved down his throat. He passes the stick to Joseph with so much distance between him and the second-place team that even Coach is stunned and smiling.

  Ma looks up from her email, blows me a kiss. Moms shrugs—a “next time you’ll do better” shrug. A “no worries, there’ll be another chance” shrug. I smile, nodding. Knowing I will. The desire to run it different is already building. The chance to work crazy-hard at not being regular, at not disappearing. Behind my parents, Laurence’s people are cheering.

  I see Coach give Laurence the thumbs-up. I see Laurence throw his fist in the air. I feel the hard “Yeah!” he’s screaming blowing toward me. I want to say, “Keep on running, Laurence. You got this.”

  But instead I just watch him—thinking about next week’s 800. I’m gonna run it harder next week. Different. Better.

  And maybe after next week, I’ll run it for years and years. Hard and fast and way beyond regular. Like I’m running to something … like the running’s all I have.

  Coach looks over at me, looks hard like he’s trying to figure me out, like he can already see the amazing runner I’m gonna be, the records I’m gonna break, the trophies and medals and money … Olympic trials and beyond …

  “Why are you standing there with your mouth hanging open, Cashew?! Move the body! Move. The. Body!! Jeez!”

  Or maybe not.

  THE MEAT GRINDER

  BY CHRIS CRUTCHER

  I count from the front of the line back to me. Four. Then I count four down from the front of the line across from me. Rich Saxon. Thirty-five pounds heavier, a full second faster in the forty. The forty. Probably an hour faster in the hundred. I run a hundred yards in about the time it takes to get a haircut. If you’re third in line.

  Saxon is All-Conference.

  I’m All-Mack, my family name. But I’m second-string All-Mack and I’m an only child.

  I live in Sherman, Idaho. Population 867. Elevation 5,281. One foot over a mile high. In its heyday, Sherman was a booming logging town, but someone forgot to tell the logging companies that when they cut down a tree, they should probably plant one, trees being finite and all. The trees around Sherman eventually went the way of the buffalo on America’s Great Plains. Where it once appeared the supply was inexhaustible, the supply is now exhausted, has been for twenty years.

  The town fathers, and mothers, have reinvented Sherman in the past three decades. It is not an invention you would grant a patent. Government money in the late 1980s allowed most merchants to renew their storefronts with an Austrian alpine look, investors from Boise and in some cases from as far north as Lewiston put money into a small ski resort and nine-hole golf course, and the nearby South Fork of the Salmon River provided great rapids when the spring runoff turned it downright adventurous. But Sherman is three and a half hours from the nearest accessible airport and our public relations machine runs on maybe two cylinders. The superhighway running in and out of this bustling burg is a winding two lane that requires four-wheel to navigate for most of the winter, so our dreams of turning into a winter sports mecca turned out to be exactly that. To put it bluntly, Sherman, Idaho, is not Sun Valley. What was for one shining season a three-lift ski resort with attending warm mud baths is now a single–rope tow hill open only on the weekends Ross Conner decides to drag himself out of his toasty cabin to crank up the converted lawnmower engine that powers it. The golf course now serves as a four-wheeler course in summer and a cross-country/snowmobile/dog-racing course in the winter. It’s great fun for the locals and no waiting.

  The nearest movie theater is almost three hours away; the nearest bowling alley, forty-five minutes. Mayor Probst likes to say, “You can throw down your bedroll in the middle of Main Street at six o’clock at night and not worry about anybody runnin’ you over till the snowplows crank up at six the next morning.”

  Apparently Mayor Probst thinks that’s a plus.

  That’s probably why Mayor Probst is mayor.

  The point is, there is nothing to do in Sherman, Idaho, after Labor Day.

  Except football.

  A guy doesn’t have to be a stellar athlete to play football for the Sherman Huskies. Coach Bull Shuster administers the preseason physical with a mirror. He places it under your nose and if you fog it up, you can play. In fact, you kind of have to. If you fail to show on the first day of football practice your freshman year, they come get you. And your parents let them in. It’s better to get beat up with pads than without.

  Which brings me to the peril I now face.

  We call this drill the “meat grinder.” Two lines face each other, maybe five feet apart. Coach slaps the football into the gut of the player on t
he end of one line and the guy up on the far end of the other line is supposed to take him down. Full speed; escape route blocked by your teammates. It’s a tackling drill, so I’ve got to hit Rich Saxon as hard as I can.

  If you’re a betting man, bet against me.

  If you’re a life-insurance man, see me before Coach hands Rich the ball.

  There are two kinds of guys on this team as I see it: those who want to be here and those who would like to be anywhere else. When I say anywhere else, I include Hell. Anywhere else is not an option. Sherman, Idaho, as I said, has 867 people. You can run, but you can’t hide.

  You think they’d be grateful you showed up. I’m five-six, a hundred twenty-seven pounds. I have the muscle definition of a chalk outline. My push-up record has yet to reach double digits; my next chin-up will be my first. This is a sacrifice. My thing is my brain. I’m smart. I get good grades. I love to write. Someday I want to live in a place, far away from my family, where if you threw down your bedroll in the middle of Main Street at six o’clock at night, you’d be squashed by 6:01. My brain is supposed to take me to that place.

  And I’m about to serve it up to Rich Saxon.

  The good news is I get hit in the head a lot already so this won’t be a new experience. My father is a fan of child abuse. He doesn’t even call it something else, like “discipline” or whatever. “I believe in child abuse.” He says that. He says it because his editing function got knocked out of him by his dad, who I guess held tight to that very same belief system. Child Protective Services got called on me for the second time in grade school after I showed up with unexplained bruises on my face and neck. Not totally unexplained. I gave my teacher the story Hector and Carline told me to give them. Hector and Carline are my mom and dad but they haven’t exactly earned the title, so: Hector and Carline. Anyway, the principal called them to school, where he introduced them to our one county social worker who didn’t buy that our family dog jumped against me from behind, knocking me into the kitchen sink. She didn’t buy it because when she asked the dog’s name my dad said Rover, my mother said Fido, and I said Blake. All at the same time. That’s how smart my parents are.

  My parents are Rover and Fido smart.

  So we went to this therapy group filled with other people who thought whacking their kids into being good citizens was one of the original eleven amendments to the constitution. The counselor and group leader, Seymour Kraft, pressed upon us that the truth would set us free, that we should all, kids and adults alike, lay it out in its rawest form to the rest of the group. We were sworn to confidentiality, as was Seymour Kraft, so there was no danger of anyone outside the group becoming privy to our secrets.

  That’s according to Seymour Kraft.

  Seymour traveled to Sherman once a week from Boise and didn’t get that our county is the largest in the state, area-wise, and the smallest population-wise. We’ve got about nine thousand people, and maybe twenty last names. You could walk around this county for three days and not run into one person you don’t know. To paraphrase a well-known paradox, if you fart in the forest and there’s nobody there to hear it, it’s on the front page of the county newspaper on Friday.

  And like I said, my dad has no editing function. We lasted three sessions before every other person in the group, kids included, returned telling Seymour that Hector Mack had squealed every word spoken in confidentiality to the entire county.

  My family was expelled from a child abuse group.

  The social worker informed Mom that either Dad had to move out of the home until he could complete anger-management classes, or I’d be placed in foster care. I voted for foster care, but it was two to one and Dad took up residence above the Chief Café, where he immediately started an extramarital affair with Rosie Swatch, who also doesn’t have an editing function. Carline Mack, who is way tougher and meaner than Hector, battered my head because it was my fault he had to leave (“Blake? You little moron. No dog is named Blake.”), but she did it from the back so you couldn’t see the bruises. She learned that in the child abuse group. Social services was footing the bill for the room above the Chief, so Hector held on to that, then snuck down the back alley around midnight every night to live with us. Rosie Swatch stayed in the room, unbeknownst to my mother, “to make sure no hotel robbers ripped off his stuff.” Hector didn’t have a pair of underwear at the Chief. His “stuff” was Rosie. So I got whacked on the head by both Hector and Carline. Carline hit me because if Hector had never moved out (my fault) he wouldn’t have fallen under the spell of the temptress Rosie Swatch, and Hector hit me because he was afraid to hit Carline.

  Might I just say here that if you’re tempted by the likes of Rosie Swatch, you have a bigger problem than simply a missing editing function. Rosie Swatch weighs a pound more than a Buick. And she bathes about as often as my cousin Reggie runs his own Buick through the car wash. Before she started Weight Watchers her steady boyfriend was Smoky Yardley, Sherman’s most eligible, least desirable bachelor. When she brought her dress size down to XXXXL, she dropped Smoky like a hot rock and picked up the next-least desirable guy, Hector Mack.

  You may be thinking, if you’ve stayed with my story this far, this Devin Mack kid is a bit politically incorrect, that you shouldn’t pay attention to his offensive drivel because he’s got no sense of appropriateness. Well, tell you what. I’m nobody around here—around my house, around school, around town. Want to point out someone’s Walmart shoes for ridicule? Devin Mack. Want to stuff somebody into a wastebasket and hoist him on top of the lockers? DM’s your guy. Wanna trick someone into looking like a giant butt head in front of the coolest girl in school? Mack, Mack, he’s our man….

  But fear not, Devin Mack, we have an antibullying policy here at Sherman High. We have signs that read bully inside a red circle with a slash. Who would dare defy such a thing? We have antibullying T-shirts, baseball caps, bumper stickers, backpacks, coffee mugs, drink containers. We have a new character word of the month, every month. (We used to have one a week, but I guess the English language is short on character words.)

  We had an antibullying bake sale.

  Sherman High School is against bullying.

  Right.

  You can bully me with a look. If you’re a girl you can bully me by smiling when you walk by, then letting me hear you giggle to your girlfriends the minute you pass out of my peripheral vision. You can bully me rolling your eyes when I answer a question correctly in class. Hell, you can bully me when you don’t even know I exist. You can’t hurt me physically; you’d have to break the law to hurt me more than I’ve been hurt. First time I was in foster care, before I even remember, it was because Hector punched me in the stomach. It’s in my CPS file. I was three, and he threw me onto the floor to prove to Carline he didn’t love me more than her (no proof should have been necessary). He told her he slugged me so hard he thought he felt the floor against his knuckles. Through me. I guess that proved he loved her. She told on him. It’s right there in the file.

  Naw, the hurt for me is humiliation. Threaten to humiliate me, you own me. Problem is, and this doesn’t speak highly of my character, if I get the chance to bully, I jump on it. Wanna find the biggest pool of bullies? Go where the victims are. Know why? Because bullying feels good. And it feels twice as good if you’re the target most of the time. Hence the political incorrectness. I call Rosie fat, Smoky Yardley (and my parents and Herbie Waldron and legions of deserving others) dumb, and Coach Shuster ugly because I don’t care. I can say anything I want. I. Don’t. Matter. If Devin Mack bullies you, you won’t even know you’re being bullied.

  So the threat I face at the far end of this meat-grinder drill isn’t the crushing blow about to register inside my helmet. It’s the humiliation, the complete sense of incompetence.

  Coach slaps the ball into Rich’s gut. I get into my three-point stance and wait for the whistle. Rich and I stare past the face masks into each other’s eyes.

  “Time,” Rich yells. He holds up his
hand.

  “What …?” The whistle drops from Coach’s mouth.

  You have to be a player of Rich Saxon’s status to interrupt one of Coach Bull Shuster’s football practices.

  Rich drops the ball and walks toward me, motions me to stand. He drapes an arm over my shoulder pads and walks me away from the team. “You can do this,” he says.

  I can barely breathe. Adrenaline is overflowing, almost buckling my knees. I was ready.

  He puts his mouth close to my earhole. “Remember what I told you the other night. If you hit me high I bowl you over. If you hit me low you’ll get my knee in your helmet.” He taps his stomach. “Right below the numbers,” he says. “Have faith.”

  Faith.

  “Couldn’t you just, like, go down?”

  “No can do, buddy.”

  “Why not?”

  “This is football,” Rich says. “It’s what I do. It’s who I am. Rich Saxon does not go down.”

  We’re headed back toward the drill. Rich slaps my butt. “Faith.”

  So here’s the deal with Rich Saxon. He’s about to hurt me. When I hit him I will feel an electric current from my neck down through my feet. My arms, which I’m supposed to wrap around him and hold on for dear life, will be rendered useless at the moment of impact. I will feel my fingertips slide powerlessly down his torso, waist, thigh pads, calves, cleats, air. I will hear the whistle. I will hear, “Again!” But I can’t hate him. How do you hate a guy like Rich Saxon? He tried to help me. He told me how to tackle him, gave me my best chance to succeed. But he is thirty-five pounds heavier and at least one evolutionary life-form more adept at this game I have grown to hate.

  I don’t care about the electricity, don’t care about the rush of paralysis, don’t care about my body hitting the grass empty-handed. I care about “Again!” and the derisive scowls of my teammates as they watch me drop once more, once more, once more into my three-point stance, many of them grateful it’s me and not them, but unwilling to salute my sacrifice.