Ghosts of Tom Joad (8 page)

“Do they have night in Heaven? I thought it was always daytime, because it was above the clouds and all.”

“You guys are idiots. We better climb down before we get caught up here and for sure we'd end up in Hell.”

We moved on to Muley's back shed, where his old man kept a steel bass boat. The shed was a pretty special place for us, smelling like old, wet sweaters and full of cobwebs and stuff like car parts and ratty sports gear that was as attractive then as free beer is now. There was an old Coke sign with a girl in a thick 1950s bikini that provided most of us our first unrequited but warming mental image. We all remembered how cool it stayed in there on hot days, and how we could warm it up with the electric heater in the winter and make it smell like burnt toast. The bass boat held a place of pride among the junk, but had seen better days. We tried to fix it with Bondo, the putty stuff you use on car dents, but that didn't stick too well to all the rust, and the thing floated more out of stubbornness than anything else. Flat bottom, seats two safely. Rides low in the water, and you got to paddle. We'd take it out on the river from time to time, drinking beer when we could, horsing around when we couldn't.

This night we did have some beer and the four of us decided it made a lot of sense to take the boat out on the river after dark, kind of a thrill. It was a warm, heavy, humid night, still then soft around us. The moon was hanging. I don't know what you call it, but it looked like God's toenail up there. A riot of stars you could only see after your eyes got used to it. Lightning bugs. Car sounds far off on the highway. The current was light and the
river half dry in summer, so we figured loading the four of us into a boat made for two wouldn't be a problem. Then we met Pam, this girl Tim sort of liked and Tim made us take her along too. Pam had been the third girl in our grade to start wearing a bra, and Tim had it on good authority she had lost her virginity already and was willing to lose it some more. She had a Farrah 'do. We all had that poster on our walls, if not on our minds, that summer, so that was important.

Things started out okay, as okay as four drunk teenage boys with a boat and beer sniffing after one nervous teenage girl can be. Our enthusiasm was fuel. We got the boat into the water and climbed in well enough. Muley had the idea of tying a rope through the plastic rings on the six packs of Genesee so we could tow them along behind us and they'd stay cold. Tim devoted himself to bossing us around to make himself look like a big guy, and Pam devoted herself to worrying about five people in a boat that might safely hold two.

Pam was right like girls then usually were about those kind of things. The boat drifted along with the current, ending up in the center of the river two beers later. We could see a few lights reflecting off the water, and it was kinda pretty. I guess that is what inspired Tim to try and put his arm around Pam, who was less inspired by the romantic scene and shrugged him off a bit too hard. The boat rocked and water came over the shallow sides. I was laughing, and so was Muley, who started rocking the boat even more, when the whole thing flipped over. The five of us were dumped into the river. It wasn't too deep; I couldn't touch the bottom, but it was easy enough to doggy paddle over to the far bank. I wasn't even breathing too hard, and looked
over, laughing, at Tim, Rich and a really unhappy Pam. Her Farrah 'do was ruined. The boat was gone.

“Where's Muley?”

“I don't know, maybe over there?”

No Muley.

Tim and Pam went off looking for him down the river bank, thinking maybe he swam off that way. Rich heard him first—Muley, in the water, shouting for us. I figured he was kidding around like always, pretending to drown in eight feet of warm water, when I saw Rich dive back in. I went in right after him, and we reached Muley in a few wet splashes. Rich grabbed him first, and we pulled him over to the bank. He was crying, snot all down his face, white as Wonder Bread. He had been wearing his heavy work boots, lace-ups, and they had filled with water, pulling him under. Muley was a strong kid back then, and was able to claw his way up to the surface and shout, but if Rich had not gone in after him, he'd a' drowned that night in the river while we watched.

It was either Muley's earlier laughing or Muley's recent shouting that brought out the cops. Someone must have heard it all and called them. The one fat cop came up to me and said, “Son, how many kids were in that boat?” And I said, truthfully, “Sir, there were five of us.” Me, Muley and Rich were right there. Tim and Pam hadn't come back, likely seeing the cop car lights and running. Five of us, just like I said.

“Don't worry son, we'll find your friends.” The cop put me in the back of his car with a blanket and waded into the river. Three other cops pulled up and went right in, too, and right after that the fire truck came with the siren going and all those men
waded into the river. Flashlights were swinging criss-cross over the water and the cops would yell for a bit, then tell each other to “Be quiet and just listen for a minute goddammit, there's two kids out there somewhere. There was five of 'em in that boat when it flipped, and we only got three on the bank! We ain't gonna let them other two missing die for no reason—”

I figured out the reason. The next time the fat cop came over panting and tomato-faced to see how I was doing, I told him that Tim and Pam probably weren't coming back. He put his hand on my shoulder and said something about, “Not if I can help it, son.” This time, before he turned back, I told him Tim and Pam weren't in the river. Nobody drowned. Nobody was missing. Tim and Pam had just run away. When he asked me how many in the boat, I didn't want to lie and so I said, “Five officer, honest. Maybe you misunderstood me?”

For some reason then the fat cop got angry with me, using cuss words and all. Me, Muley and Rich ended up having to call our parents from the police station, and later they had to pay a fine for us endangering a law enforcement official and wasting emergency resources such as the fire truck and flashlights. That cost me most of my summer allowance money and my dad was pissed. Muley's dad screamed at him for twenty minutes after Johnny Carson was over that night, and swatted his ass for the first time since fifth grade. Rich got off easy, but his old man was upset, saying that if Rich had drowned, or had been arrested for real, there'd go his senior year on the football team and there'd go any chance of playing ball at some college, why'd he think he could throw away his life like that? Tim never got to make out with Pam that night, but they didn't go to jail either
and he walked her home and she said maybe she'd think about it. It was the first time I realized you could die without getting old first, and that stuck with me.

W
E LOVED FOOTBALL
because we had grown up loving football. Muley, me, and most of my friends, including Tim and Rich, played football. Our town had two teams, our team and some other kids who sort of made a team from the parochial school, but they only played against other kids in the God league. We played for Reeve, and in Reeve that was close to being with God. We played in the Southwestern Conference against other towns and then when we were winners we'd play in Regionals and up to, maybe in the year of 1977, State Championships. Everyone knew the year before Rob had gone on to actual tryouts at Ohio State, and in the past the Bernard boys had both made the team at OSU, even if they did not play much in the one game we saw on television each Thanksgiving weekend.

Muley was thinking back to football training camp, and said to me:

I remember Coach's whistle, how it sounded bigger and louder in the locker room than outside, sort of telling you in there Coach Polanski was what mattered. He'd wait for us to start peeling off the sweaty gear and then gather us around him. He'd say things like, “Alright. I know it's late and you all want to get outta here, but lemme say something about today's practice. I think you all let your dicks hang out too much this summer. You better shape up, boys, or we're all in for some long practices. Hell, I find chunks of better men in my shit every morning.”

Old man Polanski didn't want us to let down Reeve, and Reeve loved him back for it. He was officially a teacher at the high school, History of Our United States, which was only about from Columbus to the Civil War, even though the textbook went up to the Korean War. Everyone on the football team got an A from him except Ron Curry, who he thought wasn't pulling his weight. Coach was stuck, 'cause the school board made it a rule that anyone who showed up every day for practice could be on the team, so we wasn't violating laws made by sissies who probably never even played the game themselves. Back in our dads' day, not just anyone got on the team. It was called Judgment Day, when everyone was gathered on the field at the end of summer and Coach called out names. Winners forward, losers to the locker rooms, and fuck you and your life in Reeve if you were on the wrong side of the line. Different now, sort of.

“Who're you, boy?” said Coach.

“I'm Andrew, sir. Freshman.”

“You call my dad ‘Sir.' You better learn quick to call me Coach.”

“Yes sir.”

“Andrew, you big enough to play football? How the hell tall are you anyway?”

“I'm five foot three, Coach.”

“Five foot three. Who knew they could stack shit that high in Reeve?”

We all laughed as Coach looked around the room for our reaction. Coach was always kidding like that, making the new guys feel noticed and welcoming them and all.

“And for you knuckleheads with concussions, get your underwear on right. Yellow stains in the front and brown stains in the back.”

Coach was kind of a role model for us.

“Now, I heard some of you like to do some drinking.”

Coach, high on the smell of his own piss, often gave us advice to develop us as adult men.

“And I can't say that's all bad, but what I'm talking about is the fighting you boys seem to do after that. I don't want none of you to get hurt in some silly-ass bar fight. We are here to play football, to win for Reeve, not get into fights.”

We had heard this one before. Here came the best part every year:

“However, if you are gonna fight, you might as well kick the shit outta the other guy, or you're gonna have to answer to me. We beat 'em on the field and we beat 'em off the field. We are winners, don't leave here forgetting that. Now get.”

Him leaving the locker room meant we were going to initiate the new guys. Just anyone could join the team because of that dumb rule, but it was us that made it so you had to prove you were good enough. That was initiation. Coaches had their office attached to the locker room and could hear everything. You cussed one of them, even quietly, and he'd be in your face in a flash second, moving out of that office like you never seen a fat man move, sometimes still with a pint bottle of rotgut in one hand and a cigarette dropping ash in the other. But somehow they never heard anything when it was initiation. Once they signaled they didn't care, it put the bullies in charge.

We started out making the freshmen sing, sometimes funny songs, sometimes something from the radio, and sometimes we'd make 'em pair off and sing love songs out loud to each other. Nothing funnier than some scared kid singing some romantic Elton John song to another guy, especially since we made them do it. If they didn't, they'd get a load of muscle ache cream in their jock, burn the hell outta their balls because it was greasy and didn't wash off. I got it my freshman year and it didn't dry all through practice, but I sat in a cold bath tub for two hours when I got home. I told Mom I was relaxing, and she assumed I was beatin' off, but Dad knew, and stuck his head in to laugh at me like he got laughed at a hundred years ago when seniors did it to him. It was tradition, and that mattered for us. Nobody got hurt really, just singing and stuff really. I doubt half of them even remember what happened.

Ron Curry was not a freshman but a senior like us, and so officially he was not supposed to be initiated. I don't know why we hated him, but Coach did and so we did. Maybe we just had to hate someone 'cause I guess it made us feel stronger to hack at someone like him. Ron was fat and pasty, that kinda kid who'd never tan no matter what, so Coach called him Snowball, and so did we. Even though he was a senior we made him sing too, and one time we made him bend over the tackling dummy and hump it in front of everybody. He sang “I'm in the Mood for Love” so many times in that locker room that we stopped telling him to do it and he just did it whenever we pulled him into the center. In the beginning, he cried like a pussy, and once he cried in the cafeteria when we threw mashed potatoes at him because he wore a new shirt we didn't like 'cause it was sort of
girly, but mostly he just did it. He never had a girlfriend, of course, right? His dad we heard made him go out for the football team each year to make a man outta him, even though he did not want to, so maybe givin' in to us wasn't so different than givin' in to his dad. Did you know he was the only guy from that year moved out of Reeve right after graduation? All along we knew he wasn't part of the team.

Ron was always on the second string defense, them kids who stood in for the other team to let our offense practice. Coach called them cannon fodder, a word we did not understand, but must have had something to do with the Civil War 'cause Coach was that teacher.

This one time, he told Ron to rush in at the quarterback, blitz the hell out of him, and then he quietly told the offense to expect it and cream Ron's ass as a kind of joke. Well, the ball was snapped, and Ron ran ahead just like he was told, saw them big guys laying for him, and backed up, as he was a fool but he wasn't stupid. Coach was pissed, blowing his whistle and kicking up dirt. He grabbed Ron by the face mask so that he could jerk his head around like punctuation while he chewed him out. “Goddammit, you do what I tell you,” Coach screamed, them veins in his neck even sticking out. “This is not a democracy, you ain't got a choice, you do what you are told to do.” Spit was flying, and Ron couldn't back up because Coach had him by the mask. Coach ended by telling him that on the next play he goddamn better rush and blitz like he was told. So the ball was snapped and Ron started in, seeing the guys laying for him, and kept rushing forward 'cause there was nothing he could do but take the hit.