Читать книгу The Education of Arnold Hitler - Marc Estrin - Страница 22

The Tigers faced the Abilene Eagles at Geyer Field in their seventh and last home game of the season. A string of victories makes each successive game more manic, the fans more bloodthirsty, the players readier to kill and die. Coach Crews gathered the Tigers in the locker room for the pregame prayer session.

“Our Lord in Heaven, we thank you for this opportunity to show You our stuff in Your name. We know that by giving us an undefeated season, You’re challenging us to be more than we thought we could be. We know that with your help, we’ll be offering You our thanks—around Your Birthday—at State! Amen.”

“Amen,” the boys muttered.

“I can’t hear you!”

“AMEN!”

“Amen, you said it. Now look, guys, I know this is a tense time for you. The Eagles are 6 and 1, and no pushover. We’ve studied their games; we know who’s who and who can do what. But just having it in your heads will not win a football game. I want you to go out there and knock the snot out of em!”

The answering roar echoed off the metal lockers.

“There’s nothing that comes easy that’s worth a dime. Matter of fact, I never saw a football player make a tackle with a smile on his face. But that’s your special assignment today. I want you to kill em—smiling. A big, toothy, frightening smile, right through your face guards. I want you laughing as you knock em down, laughing as you get up off the pile. I want them to never see a smile, or hear a laugh again—in their entire lives—without a shiver, remembering this day. Show me your canines!”

The effect was grotesque.

“Now, laugh. More! Louder! Keep those fangs out!”

It’s hard to laugh while baring your canines. A sweat-stinking, equipment-strewn room of large boys in their underwear, their faces distorted, their throats tense, ejaculating sharp, fierce, rough sounds made even the rusting lockers want to shut their doors in self-defense. Coach Crews felt his own demonstrative grimace fading as he perceived the horror of what he had unleashed.

“All right, that’s enough,” he yelled. It took twenty seconds for diaphragms to stop convulsing, and another thirty for facial muscles to relax back to prerictal state. “I want you to kneel down, here in front of me. Now repeat after me: We gonna match em physical for physical!”

“We gonna match em physical for physical!”

“We gonna be more physical!”

“We gonna be more physical!”

“We gonna smile doin it!”

“We gonna smile doin it!”

“We gonna hit em longer! We gonna hit em harder!”

“We gonna hit em longer! We gonna hit em harder!”

“Four full quarters!”

“Four full quarters!”

“Now get dressed, and get out there and beat the hell out of em! With a smile!”

“Yes, sir!”

“I can’t hear you!”

“YES, SIR!”

The coach walked out of the locker room muttering, “Sometimes the only way to win an argument is to shoot the guy.” He did earn his high salary.

Arnold lay down on his back, his shirt pulled up, allowing the contrast between the cool cement and the steamy air to become a focus for his pregame meditation. One-pointedness. Billie Jo had shown him this relaxation technique. Billie Jo. It was hard to keep his mind focused. Where was she right at this moment? Friday night in Oberlin. Did they even have a football team? How could he not know this?

“Pssst. Hey, buddy. I wanna show you something.”

It was BJ, all suited up.

“Another price list for dark meat?”

“No, man. Check this out.”

He handed Arnold a note: “Y’ALL WATCH YOUR BALLS, YOU AND YOUR NIGGER-LOVIN FRIENDS. THEY ARE TARGETED.”

“Where’d you find this?” Arnold whispered.

“It was in my locker—stuffed in my goddamn helmet. Someone has my combination.”

“Shall we show it to Crews?”

“What if he’s the one who wrote it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean who else has the locker combinations, man?”

“I don’t know. Anyone in here could have watched you opening the door.”

“You mean you think it’s someone on the team?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, shit, man, how’m I gonna play this game under friendly fire?”

“Hey, cool down. We don’t know it’s somebody from the team. I just said it could be. It’s probably not.”

“Then who?”

“Let’s just have a good game, all right?”

Arnold returned to an intensely difficult relaxation.

Maybe Arnold was shaken. Maybe BJ was spooked. Maybe the Tigers were trying too hard to smile through their fangs. For whatever reason, the opening quarter ended with Mansfield behind for the first time in the season. Arnold had completed two out of seven pass attempts, there had been one interception, and BJ had fumbled his one great catch, blowing a drive that seemed headed for scoring. The score was 7-0. Arnold was clearly tense. For one thing, who else but he was one of “your nigger-lovin friends”? He tried to gather himself, reciting his checklist each time he backpedaled—but he was off, definitely off. He was being rushed. Where was his line?

At quarter break, Coach Terwilliger gathered the team. “OK, men, this is just to get them off their guards. Now’s the time for sweet redemption. We’re gonna drive them and everything they stand for straight into the snot-ass ground. Right?”

The answering “Right!” seemed slightly shaky.

At halftime, the score stood 7-6, Eagles, the Tiger touchdown having come with a brilliant breakthrough and sixty-three-yard run by Jim Featherstone, a new black running back, still a junior. The Hitler-Frame action was stabilizing, but for short hits only. During the dueling of the bands, right tackle Darryll Ramey was shot up with Novocain for what was likely a broken hand. “Hang tough,” he was told.

The Tigers took the kickoff on their own twenty-five, and Feather-stone ran it to the Eagles’ thirty-three-yard line. The crowd was stomping, like to break the stands. Arnold took the snap and dropped back to pass, looking for BJ crossing fast to the right, angling for the end zone. From out of nowhere, there loomed above him “Boomer,” the 240-pound hunk of Texas beef, four inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than he, famous across the state for sacking and hurting opposing quarterbacks. Before he could be smashed, Arnold retracted his arm, faked a turn to the right, spun out to the left, and found a tiny alleyway. With an alert block by Joe Bob Arthur, and some expert interference, Arnold broke free of the defenders and outran them down the left sideline. “Go, Hitler, go! Go, Hitler, go!” shouted the crowd, and before they could repeat it four times, Arnold hit the end zone, and the delirious crowd hit the roof, which was the sky. George Hitler sat in the stands with a lump in his throat and thought how sweet it was to see his boy do that. God dog, can he run!

Late in the fourth quarter, with a first down at the Eagle forty-seven, Arnold dropped back to pass. He saw flanker Gordon Headlee open, but his touch was too soft, and the ball fluttered, a high fly up for grabs. Interception! His second in the game. The imposter was quickly dumped, but the moment, it turned out, was fatal. With 2:27 left in the game, the Eagle quarterback threw the finest pass of his life, a sixty-two-yard bomb to his left end, to tie the score, 13-all, and the extra point was good. In the last two minutes of play, Arnold led a fierce attack from his own thirty-yard line. After three successive first downs, between short, successful passing and brutal inching-over pileups, the Tigers were at the Eagle thirty-five, third and five. Forty-six seconds on the clock. The wide receiver went into motion, Arnold dropped back to pass, hesitated a split second, faked a handoff to the left, and started around the right, angling low for the end zone. This time Boomer was on him, lunging at him high in a full-speed blitz, smashing his enormous bulk down on Arnold’s neck.

Force = mass × acceleration. The force was great.

All right. So what? He got trashed. It was part of the game. Looking up at his assailant as he lay crumpled on the ground, he reached out for a hand—a not uncommon collegial courtesy—and instead met the most hate-filled eyes he had ever seen glowering from the huge face towering over him.

“C’mon, you fuckin pussy, get up. You motherfuckin nigger-lover pretty boy, c’mon, let’s see how tough you are.”

Sticks and stones may . . .

“Get up, you prick, you goddamn pretty boy, nigger-lovin pussy-prick, Mr. Joe Rah-Rah Nigger-Jew.” And he spit. The striped-shirts broke it up. Boomer spit again and lumbered away.

Nigger-lover? Nigger-Jew? The imprecations had spread two hundred miles to Abilene? Was he to have revenge wreaked upon him by every porcine racist in Texas high school football? And what was this “Jew” thing?

As he struggled to get up, helped by his teammates, Arnold vomited a little on the field. Just a little. And he wobbled to the bench to recover, his head between his knees.

“Arnold.”

It was Jacobo.

“Arnold, can you hear me?”

“A lot of static, Nonno, a lot of static.”

“You want to know what the ‘Jew’ thing is?”

“What Jew thing?”

“What he called you—Nigger-Jew.”

“Who?”

“Signore Galumpho out there.”

Ten seconds’ silence.

“Arnold?”

“Sorry, my head is spinning.”

“In that case, I have a riddle for you: So the old lady says, ‘Sam, close the window. It’s cold outside.’”

“Here, too, Grandpa. We had snow. . . .”

“And the old man says, ‘Nu, and if I close the window, will it be warm outside?’”

“Is that the riddle?”

“No. The riddle is, what color are the speakers?”

Arnold paused to listen to his head hurt.

“From the way you say it, it sounds like a Jewish joke.”

“An if ah opens de winda, is it gwine be warm out dere?”

“Grandpa!”

“Well?”

“Colored.”

“Can you imagine this story in a Swedish accent, or a French accent, or Deutsch or Italiano?”

“No.”

“Colored and Jew, eternal pair, the only two who could make such a story. Why’s that?”

“Grandpa, I have a headache. I can’t think.”

“Think later, then. I have one more question—easy: What’s the object of Jewish football?”

“Tell me,” Arnold said wearily.

“To get the quarter back.”

“Grandpa, that’s racist.”

“So is Galumpho. Ciao, bambino.”

And he hung up.

. . .

When the whistle blew on their first defeat, the Tigers gathered at the fifty-yard line to pray an altogether different petition from the prideful locker room thank-you of two hours earlier. Coach Crews washed the boys in the waters of Babylon as they wept over their impotence in the strange land of defeat. The passer and the receiver had much to bemoan that night.

When BJ got home, he was the one to discover the four slashed tires on the family car.