End Zone (3 page)

In time the draft board began to get interested. I allowed
my father to get in touch with a former classmate of his, an influential alumnus of Michigan State. Negotiations were held and I was granted an interview with two subalterns of the athletic department, types familiar to football and other paramilitary complexes, the square-jawed bedrock of the corporation. They knew what I could do on the football field, having followed my high school career, but they wouldn’t accept me unless I could convince them that I was ready to take orders, to pursue a mature course, to submit my will to the common good. I managed to convince them. I went to East Lansing the following autumn, an aging recruit, and was leading the freshman squad in touchdowns, yards gained rushing, and platitudes. Then, in a game against the Indiana freshmen, I was one of three players converging on a safetyman who had just intercepted a pass. We seemed to hit him simultaneously. He died the next day and I went home that evening.

I stayed in my room for seven weeks this time, shuffling a deck of cards. I got to the point where I could cut to the six of spades about three out of five times, as long as I didn’t try it too often, abuse the gift, as long as I tried only when I truly felt an emanation from the six, when I knew in my fingers that I could cut to that particular card.

Then I got a phone call from Emmett Creed. Two days later he flew up to see me. I liked the idea of losing myself in an obscure part of the world. And I had discovered a very simple truth. My life meant nothing without football.

R
AYMOND
T
OON STOOD
six feet seven. He was a mild young man, totally unintimidating, a former bible student. He was a reserve tackle on defense and he had come here because it was the only school he knew of that offered a course in sportscasting.

“Time-adjusted rate of return,” he said. “Redundant asset method. Capital budgeting. Probable stream of earnings. Independently negotiated credit balances. Consolidation. Tax anticipation notes.”

We were in the cafeteria. John Jessup was also at our table, reading a textbook. Jessup and Toon were roommates. Jessup didn’t like the arrangement because Raymond practiced his sportscasting in the room all weekend. When he wasn’t studying theories of economic valuation, he was camped in front of his portable TV set. He’d switch it on, turn the sound down to nothing, and describe the action. At this time of year it was mainly baseball, golf, bowling and stock car racing. Jessup had
complained to Rolf Hauptfuhrer that he was being driven out of his mind. But so far nothing had been done. Moody Kimbrough brought his tray over to our table.

“This milk is putrid,” Jessup told him.

“What do you want from me?”

“You’re one of the captains. Go tell Coach. They shouldn’t give us milk like this. They should be more careful with the athletes’ milk.”

“Back home it’s the blankety-blank water you have to watch,” Kimbrough said.

“Back where I come from it’s the water and the milk,” Raymond said.

“This is shitpiss,” Jessup said. “This is the worst-ass milk I ever tasted.”

Kimbrough drank from his little carton.

“I’ll tell you something,” he said. “This milk is putrid.”

“Damnright,” Jessup said.

“This milk is contaminated. It’s putrid. It’s the worst I ever tasted. Back up home it’s the water. Here I guess it’s the milk. I’ll be sure and tell Coach.”

“Toony, what was the point you were trying to make?” I said.

“The level of deemed merit,” Raymond said. “Assessed value. Imputed market prices. Munitions. Maximized comparative risk.”

Onan Moley joined us. He was wearing a sweat shirt with a screaming eagle, the team symbol, pictured across the front. The word
SACRIFICE
was inscribed beneath the eagle. Onan hunched his shoulders and lowered his head almost to table level before speaking.

“There’s a lot of talk about a lot of things.”

“What talk?” Kimbrough said.

“Never mind.”

“I’m co-captain, Onan. I’ve got a pipeline. But I don’t know about any talk. Now what talk do you mean?”

“There might be a queer on the squad.”

“Offense or defense,” Kimbrough said.

Terry Madden seated himself at the end of the table. He broke a roll and began to butter it.

“What’s the good word?” he said.

Jessup read aloud from his textbook on monolithic integrated circuitry.

“The pattern match begins with a search for a substring of a given string that has a specified structure in the string-manipulation language.”

Taft Robinson was sitting three tables away. I took my dessert over. He looked up, nodded, then looked down again and sliced a quivering ribbon of fat off the last piece of sirloin on his plate.

“That weak-side sweep looked good today,” I said. “I finally got in a good block for you.”

“I saw it,” he said.

“I wiped out that bastard Smee. He likes to hurt people, that son of a bitch.”

“Which one is he?”

“Middle linebacker. He’s the defensive captain. He captains the defense.”

“I saw the block,” Taft said.

“I really wiped him out, that bastard. Hey, look, what are you doing here anyway?”

“Where — here?”

“Right,” I said. “Here in this particular locale. This dude ranch.”

“I’m here to play football. Same as you.”

“You could be at almost any school in the country. Why
would you want to leave a place like Columbia to come here? Granted, Columbia’s not exactly a football colossus. But to come here. How the hell did you let Creed talk you into this place? It’s not as though you’re integrating the place. Technically you’re integrating the place but that’s only because nobody else ever wanted to come here. Who the hell would want to come to a place like this?”

“You came here.”

“Hey, Robinson,” Kimbrough said.

“I’m here because I’m a chronic ballbreaker. First, it’s not likely any other school would have me. Second, I wanted to disappear.”

“But you’re here,” he said. “We’re all here.”

“I can’t argue with that. How’s your milk? Jessup says the milk is putrid.”

“Which one is he?”

“Hey, Robinson,” Moody Kimbrough said. “We don’t wear sunglasses indoors around here. We don’t do that — hear?”

“Mind your own business,” I said.

I watched him coming toward our table. I thought briefly about the fact that he outweighed me by forty pounds or so. Then I got up and hit him in the stomach. He made a noise, an abrupt burp, and hit me in roughly the same spot. I sat down and tried to breathe. When I raised my head finally, Taft was just finishing his dessert.

W
E STOOD IN A CIRCLE
in the enormous gray morning, all the receivers and offensive backs, helmets in hands. Thunder moved down from the northeast. Creed, in a transparent raincoat, was already up in the tower. At the center of the circle was Tom Cook Clark, an assistant coach, an expert on quarterbacking, known as a scholarly man because he smoked a pipe and did not use profanity.

“What we want to do is establish a planning procedures approach whereby we neutralize the defense. We’ll be employing a lot of play-action and some pass-run options off the sweep. We’ll be using a minimum number of sprint-outs because the passing philosophy here is based on the pocket concept and we don’t want to inflate the injury potential which is what you do if your quarterback strays from the pocket and if he can’t run real well, which most don’t. We use the aerial game here to implement the ground game whereby we force their defense to respect the run which is what they won’t do if they can
anticipate pass and read pass and if our frequency, say on second and long, indicates pass. So that’s what we’ll try to come up with, depending on the situation and the contingency plan and how they react to the running game. I should insert at this point that if they send their linebackers, you’ve been trained and briefed and you know how to counter this. You’ve got your screen, your flare, your quick slant-in. You’ve been drilled and drilled on this in the blitz drills. It all depends on what eventuates. It’s just eleven men doing their job. That’s all it is.”

Oscar Veech moved into the circle.

“I want you to bust ass out there today,” he said. “Guards and tackles, I want you to come off that ball real quick and pop, pop, hit those people, move those people out, pop them, put some hurt on them, drive them back till they look like sick little puppy dogs squatting down to crap.”

“The guards and tackles are over in that other group,” I said.

“Right, right, right. Now go out there and execute. Move that ball. Hit somebody. Hit somebody. Hit somebody.”

Garland Hobbs handed off to me on a quick trap and two people hit me. There was a big pile-up and I felt a fair number of knees and elbows and then somebody’s hand was inside my facemask trying to come away with flesh. I realized Mr. Kimbrough had issued directives. On the next play I was pass-blocking for Hobbs and they sent everybody including the free safety. I went after the middle linebacker, Dennis Smee, helmet to groin, and then fell on top of him with a forearm leading the way.

Whistles were blowing and the coaches edged in a bit
closer. Vern Feck took off his baseball cap and put his pink face right into the pile-up, little sparks of saliva jumping out of his whistle as he blew it right under my nose. Creed came down from the tower.

O
F ALL THE ASPECTS
of exile, silence pleased me least. Other things were not so displeasing. Exile compensates the banished by offering certain opportunities. Each day, for example, I spent some time in meditation. This never failed to be a lovely interlude, for there was nothing to meditate on. Each day I added a new word to my vocabulary, wrote a letter to someone I loved, and memorized the name of one more president of the United States and the years of his term in office. Simplicity, repetition, solitude, starkness, discipline upon discipline. There were profits here, things that could be used to make me stronger; the small fanatical monk who clung to my liver would thrive on such ascetic scraps. And then there was geography. We were in the middle of the middle of nowhere, that terrain so flat and bare, suggestive of the end of recorded time, a splendid sense of remoteness firing my soul. It was easy to feel that back up there, where men spoke the name civilization
in wistful tones, I was wanted for some terrible crime.

Exile in a real place, a place of few bodies and many stones, is just an extension (a packaging) of the other exile, the state of being separated from whatever is left of the center of one’s own history. I found comfort in West Texas. There was even pleasure in the daily punishment on the field. I felt that I was better for it, reduced in complexity, a warrior.

But the silence was difficult. It hung over the land and drifted across the long plains. It was out there with the soft black insects beyond the last line of buildings, beyond the prefabs and the Quonset hut and the ROTC barracks. Day after day my eyes scanned in all directions a stunned earth, unchangingly dull, a land silenced by its own beginnings in the roaring heat, born dead, flat stones burying the memory. I felt threatened by the silence. In my room at home, during my retreats from destructive episodes of one kind or another, I had never even noticed the quiet. Perhaps silence is dispersed by familiar things; their antiquity is heard. All I had feared then was that my mother, bringing my lunch upstairs, would forget to comment on the weather. (These reports were indispensable to my progress.) But now, in the vast burning west, the silences were menacing. I decided not to eat meat for a few weeks.

One day in early September we started playing a game called Bang You’re Dead. It’s an extremely simple-minded game. Almost every child has played it in one form or another. Your hand assumes the shape of a gun and you fire at anyone who passes. You try to reproduce, in your own way, the sound of a gun being fired. Or you simply shout these words:
Bang, you’re dead.
The other person clutches
a vital area of his body and then falls, simulating death. (Never mere injury; always death.) Nobody knew who had started the game or exactly when it had started. You had to fall if you were shot. The game depended on this.

It went on for six or seven days. At first, naturally enough, I thought it was all very silly, even for a bunch of bored and lonely athletes. Then I began to change my mind. Suddenly, beneath its bluntness, the game seemed compellingly intricate. It possessed gradations, dark joys, a resonance echoing from the most perplexing of dreams. I began to kill selectively. When killed, I fell to the floor or earth with great deliberation, with sincerity. I varied my falls, searching for the rhythm of something imperishable, a classic death.

We did not abuse the powers inherent in the game. The only massacre took place during the game’s first or second day when things were still shapeless, the potential unrealized. It started on the second floor of the dormitory just before lights-out and worked along the floor and down one flight, everyone shooting each other, men in their underwear rolling down the stairs, huge nude brutes draped over the banisters. The pleasure throughout was empty. I guess we realized together that the game was better than this. So we cooled things off and devised unwritten limits.

I shot Terry Madden at sunset from a distance of forty yards as he appeared over the crest of a small hill and came toward me. He held his stomach and fell, in slow motion, and then rolled down the grassy slope, tumbling, rolling slowly as possible, closer, slower, ever nearer, tumbling down to die at my feet with the pale setting of the sun.

To kill with impunity. To die in the celebration of ancient ways.

All those days the almost empty campus was marked by the sound of human gunfire. There were several ways in which this sound was uttered — the comical, the truly gruesome, the futuristic, the stylized, the circumspect. Each served to break the silence of the long evenings. From the window of my room I’d hear the faint gunfire and see a lone figure in the distance fall to the ground. Sometimes, hearing nothing, I’d merely see the victim get hit, twisting around a tree as he fell or slowly dropping to his knees, and this isolated motion also served to break the silence, the lingering stillness of that time of day. So there was that reason above all to appreciate the game; it forced cracks in the enveloping silence.