Читать книгу The Education of Arnold Hitler - Marc Estrin - Страница 19

Six foot one, bright, handsome as a god, he was still only fifteen and a despised sophomore to boot. Others would have their turns before him. Not, however, in the hospital—he was at the head of the line. Perhaps it was an accident; perhaps Brian Hedder had really wanted to hurt the young punk, teach the handsome sailor something about the reality principle, Texas style. In an early-October after-school practice, the two-hundred-pound seventeen-year-old decided to show his young teammate what he would be up against if he held on to the ball a second too long before passing. With Beelzebubian momentum and Satanic accuracy, he charged through the sophomore scrimmage line and hurled his huge shoulder at Arnold’s leading left knee. With his foot cleated into the ground, Arnold’s joint buckled inward with a twist and an agonizing pop, and he crumpled to the ground as the junior team pounced on the loosed ball. Coach Crews ran onto the field as Arnold lay there writhing.

“All right, kiddo,” the coach said, “you OK?”

“Do I look like I’m OK?” the victim responded.

“Try to get up. Brian, gimme a hand with him.” Both teams gathered around the rescue scene.

“Can you bear weight?”

Arnold stepped away from the coach’s shoulder onto his left leg. His assailant, Brian, caught him before he went down.

“All right. Let’s get him into the shop.”

The “shop” was the training room, a dingy, windowless, sweat-smelling cubicle under the bleachers in Old Rock Gym, a room crammed with two padded tables, a sink, an ice machine, and metal lockers full of gauze, peroxide and tape. Three padded men on five legs squeezed through the door, following Coach Crews. One was in severe pain.

“Get him up there on the table. Can you bend your knee?”

“Not any more than this.”

“Lemme poke around. Scream when it hurts.”

“Aaaaaarggh!”

“Good scream. Hedder, Reynolds, get back on the field, tell em everything’s OK.”

“Everything’s not OK!”

“Don’t be a crybaby, Hitler. You guys get going!”

Brian and Lonnie clicked their way out of the shop. Tommy Crews pulled on Arnold’s knee.

“Pretty stable there.” He began to sing: “The shin bone’s still connected to the thigh bone. . . .” He palpated the inner and outer sides of the joint.

“Yaiiiii!”

“OK, OK. That’s called army anesthesia.”

“What?”

“You hurt the patient, and when they scream, you say, ‘OK, OK.’”

“And you keep on hurting them.”

“Sure. No pain, no gain.”

“Yeeeeow!”

“OK, OK,” offered the coach as he continued his exam, “but I wanna tell you about Steve Godkin in the ’56 Olympics. Melbourne. You were just a little twerp then. Steve was a swimmer—two-hundred-meter freestyle. He was just about to go down to Australia when his right lung collapsed. Spontaneous. Spitting up blood. So he goes to the doctor, and they throw him in the hospital, shove him full of tubes, cut him open . . .”

“Yowww!”

“OK, OK . . . repair his lung, and sew him back up. ‘I gotta swim next week,’ he says. ‘That’s what you think,’ the docs say. ‘For one thing, you’ll stress the wound, for another, it’ll be too painful.’ ‘I’m going anyway,’ Steve says. He’d wanted to be in the Olympics since he was nine. So the doc shakes his head, makes him sign a release, and hands him an Rx for big-time pain pills. But when Steve gets down to Melbourne, he finds out pain pills aren’t allowed in competition, so he decides to swim without them. So he’s standing at poolside, already white-faced from pain, and the gun goes off and he dives in, makes the first lap, does a spin-turn and pushes off, and he’s gotta come up for air in the middle of a blood-curdling scream. He plows into the water again, this time makes a split turn, pushes off—and his stitches break, his chest splits open right here, and he starts bleeding like a pig. Over the last two laps he loses two pints of blood. Good thing there weren’t sharks in the pool.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Cause that’s the kind of kid we need on the team. That’s the kind of strong character you want in your corner, you know? He was a fighter, Steve Godkin. Didn’t win, but he was a fighter.”

“Just don’t press over here.”

“All right. I got it diagnosed. You’re in deep shit. I think you got a mangled meniscus in there. But we’ll have to get Doc Printz to confirm.”

“What does that mean, a mangled meniscus?”

“It’s like cartilage pads inside your knee. Keeps the bones from grinding. I think you nipped a nice fat hunk off of this one here. Let’s get some ice on it.”

Tommy Crews was no doc, but in his seven years of coaching, he’d seen and heard many knees go down. And he was absolutely right about the meniscus. When Doc Printz opened the knee, the joint interior was mangled, bloody, and swollen—a mess. Almost as big a mess as the Hitler family finances after paying for surgery. Almost as big a mess as Arnold’s Tiger football career, untimely ripp’d. He wouldn’t run again till the beginning of March, and then only tentatively. Still, he could practice throwing, and his arm and accuracy improved. In spite of being essentially out of play for his sophomore year, he was the clear choice for starting JV quarterback the next.

As an invalid, he found another way to be of Tiger service: tutoring. Tutoring three of the nine black students who had newly joined the team. Tutoring math or English or social studies, sometimes all—whatever they needed to keep their grade-point averages above 65 so they could qualify to play. Talking with his new charges, Arnold’s eyes were opened to the unfamiliar world of “separate but equal”: I. M. Terrell High, up in Fort Worth, had been “their” school, a good school, one they preferred. Teddy Marshall, now a Mansfield senior running back, was having trouble switching over.

“So what were you doing at Terrell?” Arnold asked over a first-order equation. “What were you learning?”

“Nothin. We din’t have no homework, we din’t have no tutors, like you. Teacher come into class and she give you somethin to read and she goes out. She leaves some other student in charge. At the end of the period, she comes back and tell you somethin to read for the next day.”

“I thought you said you didn’t have homework.”

“Well, hell, they never ast about it the next day, so what the hell. What you think people doin with their nights? Homework? Forty-five girls last year in the maternity ward. Eighteen Terrell guys sentenced to the chain gang.”

“So are things better here?”

“Things are OK, but you know, man, it’s hard to keep quiet when you git called nigger twenty times a day. But, hey, man, I don’t have to get up at 5:30 every mornin to take the bus. An git home at 6:30 after my folks is through eatin.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“But this math shit is hard. I mean, what it have to do with me, man? I know this algebra and then I get a job as a dishwasher—if I can get one. What a dishwasher got to know algebra for?”

“Some college is going to snap you up on a football scholarship. Then you’ll have to know this stuff.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll believe it when I see it. Ain’t no one’s called this nigger yet.”

“They will, Teddy, they will.”

Arnold also had difficult studying to do. All the quarterback responsibilities—it was overwhelming: learning all the calls, all the two- and three-play packages, not getting fooled by an overshifted defense, understanding the T-formation, I-formation, Warner Single Wing formation, Shotgun, Wishbone, Veer formation, Eagle Defense, 3-4 Pass defense, 4-3 Pro defense, Oklahoma defense—he had to know and call them all. He had to be familiar with the strategies and tactics of the dozen teams the Tigers played, and of the others they might meet should they make it to State: the Paolo Duro Dons, the Nacogdoches Dragons, the Lubbock Westerners, the Big Spring Steers, the Abilene Eagles, the Amarillo Golden Sandies, the San Angelo Bobcats, the Sweetwater Mustangs, the Lamesa Tornadoes, the Midland Bulldogs, the Ysleta Indians, the Wichita Falls Coyotes, the Highland Park Scotties, the Tascosa Rebels, the Lamar Vikings, the Carter Cowboys, and of course those impostors who dared to take the same name, the Texarkana Tigers.

He was sitting on his bed one night, three weeks postsurgery, manipulating his chess pieces on the board in a single-wing shift to the left, when an agonizing pain shot through his left knee.

“Fuck! Goddamn!” He had thought he was healing.

“Arnold, watch your mouth!” Was that his father? It didn’t sound like his father. His knee began to tingle and buzz.

“A man’s belly shall be filled with the fruit of his mouth,” his knee said to him.

“Grandpa? Nonno Jacobo?”

“So who else talks to you in your knee?”

“You haven’t been there for a long time.”

“I haven’t had to.”

“How are you, Grandpa?”

“Terrible. It’s a mess in here. Swollen like I’m squeezing to death. It’s the archetype of Jew, Arnold—up to his eyeballs in a cistern, thinking about the infinite.”

“What infinite?”

“I’m thinking about the fish, Arnold, what about the fish? Did God name the fish? He brought before Adam all the beasts of the field and all the fowl of the air. To name them. But what about the fish? Who named the fish? Names are important. Words are important. Keep your mouth clean. A vessel for the holy. Death and life are in the power of the tongue. Next time I wash your mouth out with soap.”

Arnold laughed. “How are you going to do that?”

“Don’t give me any of your lip, you Texas ignorante. You want your knee to get better? You want an inside contact or not?”

“Can you get me better by Christmas?”

“Sha! Kina hora! You mean Chanukuh?”

“What’s Chanukah?”

“For this, I raised your mama? Not Christmas. January. Second week in January.”

“You promise?”

“Would I lie?”

“No.”

“You promise you’ll keep your mouth clean?”

“Yes.”

“OK. End of the second week of January, you get up off your little goyish tush . . .”

“Grandpa, I’m six foot one. Two meters.”

“Big, little, it’s still a tush. You start to work out. Slow. Understand? Slow. You’ll be full speed ahead by April. I’ll put my boys on it.”

“What boys?”

“Leave it to me, you little pisher. Say hello to the folks.”

And the buzzing clicked off. Just like that. The tingling and buzzing stopped.

“Grandpa? Are you there?”

No answer.