Everything on the Line (18 page)

To the contrary, their passion was extraordinary, even oxymoronic. A gentle passion. An unselfish passion. A sweet passion. A giving passion. Thanks, in large part, to both Giglio and Gioconda, who have taught Ugo to understand the carnal shortcomings of the male of the species and in so doing to respect the beauty of the female body. They have both spoken openly and honestly to him for many years about this, using as prime illustrations the innocent ardor of statues of nude couples, especially Rodin’s
The Eternal Idol
and
The Kiss
.

And now, for the first time, Ugo has appreciated it in the flesh.

Making love to Antonella has made him feel as if a statue from his formal education were coming alive, transforming itself from white to pink and from hard to soft and from cold to warm.

But most amazing to him was the perfect smoothness of Antonella’s skin, just like those Rodin sculptures. Well, maybe not perfect, but even that tiny mole on her inner right thigh, when he caressed and first became aware of it, felt beautiful, much like some palpable, pardonable, even lovely imperfection in the marble surface of a statue.

The two lovers are lying in bed, gazing into each other’s eyes with profound contentment. Antonella smiles sweetly as her fingers caress first Ugo’s beating chest, then his perfect lips, and her hand, for no ostensible reason, follows a path that leads halfway up his aquiline nose, then across his cheek that has relocated itself upward due to all this smiling, then to his right ear. She caresses this ear, this beautiful ear, this ear that is perfectly formed, this ear that is so soft to her touch, this ear…
that cannot hear
.

And for the second time today, Antonella Cazzaro weeps.

13

Win or Tie

A WITCH’S BREAST MIGHT SEEM LUKEWARM if compared to the air in Columbus, Ohio, on this Saturday morning of November 25, 2051.

Ira Spade has shlepped twenty-one-year-old Jack out here in polar temperatures to train for the sizzling hot Australian Open, employing this unusual tactic of reverse logic in order to expose his prize possession to the most extreme possible conditions and toughen him up mentally even more than usual.

Following a brisk twenty-degree morning jog along the frigid banks of the Scioto River, the wind whipping in their faces and turning their cheeks and noses the color of Jonathan apples, Jack and Ira return to the home of the family hosting them, Ira’s drinking buddy from the good old Ohio State days, Spike Devlin, and his gum-chewing wife, Sadie.

As the shivering father and son walk in the front door that is flanked by an American flag on the left and an Ohio State flag—red with a big gray
O
in the middle, on which a green buckeye leaf is resting—on the right, Spike greets them in his scruffy yellow Bevis and Butthead pajamas and his shabby black leather slippers.

“So, how was the run, boys?” Spike inquires, stroking his bushy, prematurely gray mustache.

“Grrr-r-r-reat!” a shivering Ira answers, doing his best impression of the famous breakfast cereal feline.

The boys remove layers of windbreakers, sweatshirts, turtlenecks, and long johns and sit in their
THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
T-shirts in front of the roaring fire that will remain in use nonstop from now until the end of March.

The Devlin living room, spacious and cluttered, features a long wall flanking, and running over, the fireplace. Hanging on the wall, from left to right and all askew, are a golden plaque honoring Spike’s twenty-five years of service to the Olentangy Construction Company; black-and-white glossies of Ohio State Heisman Trophy winners ranging from old-timers like Les Horvath, Vic Janowicz, and “Hopalong” Cassady to the most recent recipients, Jamaal Jenks and Ndwiga Mbaki; Ohio State collector’s item programs from the 1950, 1955, 1958, 1969, 1974, and 1997 Rose Bowls, as well as the Ohio State-Michigan football games of 2038 and 2049, which OSU won by identical scores of 63-0; a framed
THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
dinner plate; and a color photo of sixty-five-year-old legendary OSU coach Woody Hayes throwing a punch on the sidelines at Clemson nosetackle Charlie Bauman at the end of the 1978 Gator Bowl.

In the place of honor over the fireplace, handsomely framed quotes attributed to the revered Coach Hayes hang in all their glory:

“I never saw a football player make a tackle

with a smile on his face.”

“Football represents and embodies everything

that’s great about this country, because

the United States of America is built on winners,

not losers or people who didn’t bother to play.”

“There’s nothing that cleanses your soul

like getting the hell kicked out of you.”

“Show me a gracious loser,

and I’ll show you a bus boy.”

“That will take care of you, you son of a bitch.”

And, finally, Ira’s personal favorite:

“Without winners, there wouldn’t even be

any goddamned civilization.”

On one of the side walls hang multicolored signs drawn and taped by Big Buckeyes Booster Sadie Devlin, anticipating this afternoon’s classic, brutally savage annual gridiron tilt:
“GO BUCKS!”
and
“GO SCARLET AND GREY!”
and
“BEAT THE LIVING CRAP OUTTA MICHIGAN
” and
“BLUE REALLY SUCKS!”

On the coffee table sit a football autographed by all the 2051 OSU football players and staff; a gray-and-scarlet
THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
ashtray, in which repose three slightly poisonous, bitter-tasting, but highly cherished buckeye nuts; and a framed photo of the beefy and neckless Devlin twins, Skip and Shep, posing proudly in their Ohio State football uniforms.

In the background, a Kuriyoshi SurroundSound Polyereo System plays a continuously looped, goose bump-producing recording of the pulsating Ohio State Fight Song “Across the Field.”

“So, you boys wanna little pick-me-up?” the buxom Sadie asks, jaws aching from masticating five sticks of Juicy Fruit, as she plops four
THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
mugs of steaming hot chocolate on the coffee table.

“I see you’re looking at that old photo of Woody punching that Clemson player,” Spike says to Jack, whose face is returning to its original pre-walk hue and whose cockles are being slowly warmed by Sadie’s toasty brew.

“Well,” Spike continues, “here’s the poop on that. Good ol’ Woody was a winner, a flat-out winner. And he understood better’n anyone that in order to be a
real
winner in this world, you couldn’t be a nice guy or a namby-pamby. Nosirree, you had to be a through-and-through bastard. And
that
bastard was a real sonuvabitch!”

“A real sonuvabitch!”
Greek-chorus-of-one Ira Spade echoes.

“Well, sir,” Spike intones after slurping his hot chocolate and wiping his lips with his pajama sleeve, “from what I been told, winning was a total obsession for this old fanatical coach, who saw football not just as a sport, but as
war
, the two activities using many of the same survival tactics. Yep, his knowledge of military history was legendary, so they say. And so he taught his boys to go out there in the trenches and to be tough and mean and to fight till the end for good ol’ OSU and the good ol’ U.S. of A. and good ol’ apple pie, hot dogs, and the flag…

Spike mops his sweaty brow with his pajama sleeve and takes a deep breath as his audience of three listens breathlessly.

“…and, y’know, this good ol’ Ohio boy bastard sonuvabitch was plainspoken and hardly ever cursed—his favorite word was ‘goldarn’—and he had this high-pitched, lispy, avuncular, I’d-never-hurt-a-fly, sing-songy voice but deep inside he had this goddam fire in his belly and a temper you wouldn’t believe how hot and scary it was and every once in a while it’d just come out of him on the sidelines and this particular time you see in the photo he got so caught up in winning the game and he was sort of getting on, if you get my drift, and something must’ve gone haywire upstairs and he just unloaded on this Clemson kid after the kid intercepted a pass late in the fourth quarter and let ’im have it…

“And that was the last game good ol’ Woody ever coached in his life, ’cause they fired him the next day. Man, that mean sonuvabitch sure went out in a blaze of glory! And y’know, even though they fired his sorry keister, he still remains the most beloved figure in Buckeyes history, and they named the street the stadium’s on ‘Woody Hayes Drive,’ and also a Chair in National Security Studies after him, and they even built a huge statue of him on campus right in the middle of the goddamned Oval!”

Spike raises his
THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
mug and toasts, “To Wayne Woodrow Hayes, the greatest sonuvabitch winner who ever lived!”

“Amen!”
Sadie shouts gleefully.

“Amen!”
echoes Jack, who is really into it now.

“And one more thing,” Spike adds, looking right at Jack. “Ol’ Woody gave us a great legacy, ’specially if you been around the block like I have, ’cause he taught us that football, just like life, is a matter of pure survival, of…dog eat dog, of…win or…”

“Die!”
Jack and Ira fill in the blank together and execute a double fist-bump.

* * *

If a die-hard Ohio State Buckeyes football fan were on his deathbed and could be granted one wish before the end, he would without question request to be in the stands at Ohio Stadium in Columbus to witness the end-of-regular-season finale, the bitterly contested Ohio State-Michigan game. This is precisely where Ira and Jack and Spike and Sadie are, out here in the middle of the chaos, fully exposed to the freezing air and the maniacal atmosphere of the rabid home field during one of the greatest rivalries in all of sport.

Oh, say can you see see see by the dawn’s early light light light…

The Ohio for America Patriotic State Choir is harmonizing on the fifty-yard line, and, like Pavlov’s dogs salivating at the sound of the pre-dinner bell, the great majority of the 105,749 conditioned spectators place their red-blooded American hands on their red-blooded American hearts at the sound of the pregame anthem.

…O’er the land of the free free free and the home of the brave brave brave?

Before the final verse is enunciated, a wave of hysterical cheering drowns out the patriotism and puts it on hold. Love of country is one thing.

But this is Ohio State football.

“This should be one helluva game,” Spike Devlin roars, taking a swig of Southern Comfort from his
THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
flask. “Both teams are 9-0, both are scoring machines—”

“Go Bucks!”
Sadie screams uncontrollably into the frigid air. A sizable wad of Juicy Fruit shoots out of her mouth, and she pops into it another five sticks without missing a beat.

“Yeah,” Ira agrees, ripping the flask from Spike’s gloved hand and taking a swig of his own to defrost himself, “it should be a real
pisser
!”

Ira, a good ol’ OSU alum, is thinking about how this whole experience is going to toughen Jack up for the Aussie Open in January.

Jack, born and raised in New York City and new to all of this, is thinking about the fact that he cannot feel his own face.

Aside from a relatively small segregated section of maize-and-blue-clad Michigan faithful, the horseshoe that is Ohio Stadium is a sea of scarlet and gray: Ohio State flags and Ohio State scarves and Ohio State windbreakers and Ohio State wine pouches and Ohio State booze flasks and Ohio State coolers and Ohio State baseball caps.

The first half is a roller-coaster blur of action, each side scoring at will: 7-0 Michigan, 7-7, 14-7 Michigan, 14-14, 21-14 Michigan, 21-21, 28-21 Michigan, 28-28, 31-28 Michigan. And, with five seconds left in the half, Chris Zacheroff kicks a 49-yard field goal to tie it, 31-31, for the Bucks, then is carted off the field when a hard-charging Michigan defensive end lands flush on his kicking foot.

And the crowd goes wild.

Spike Devlin refills his
THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
flask with Southern Comfort and it is passed around to Ira and then to Sadie and Ira says no, he’s in training when it reaches Jack and everyone’s having a good old time.

And now there’s a growing murmur in the crowd because here comes the Ohio State Marching Band and OSU fans know exactly what’s coming but it doesn’t matter, they’re screaming anyhow in anticipation and now the band has formed a huge capital
O
with their bodies and now they’re looping the
h
as they march in single file from one letter to the next, spelling out in perfect precision the celebrated and beloved “script Ohio,” and from above they look like an army of highly disciplined ants and now they’re up to the
i
and then the
o
and the fans are going bananas and when the sousaphone player suddenly jumps out of the top of the
o
and runs out to the tip of the
i
and raises his plumed marching band hat aloft and bends over dramatically at the waist, like he’s bowing to Her Frigging Majesty the Queen of England, so that his hefty silver instrument nearly touches the ground, thus dotting the
i
with aplomb and fanfare and bravado, every single Buckeyes fan in the place goes ballistic and hearts are really racing now, even that of New Yorker and non-OSU alum Jack Spade.

And the second half is underway, and maybe because the temperature has fallen to zero both defenses stiffen, so to speak, and neither offense can get anything going and the entire half is a series of dropped frozen footballs and fumbled frozen footballs and wobbly passes and sacks and vicious hits and prostrate bodies and Ira leans over to Jack to tell him this is what football is all about and that the team that is toughest and wants to win the most will in fact win and he’ll be goddamned if Ohio State isn’t that team and Jack can barely nod his frozen head and Sadie’s gum has settled between her upper and lower rows of teeth, sealing her mouth shut, and Spike fills up his
THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
flask once again with Southern Comfort and he and Ira and Sadie, who has managed to pry open her mouth, take swigs.