Running Loose (2 page)

I guess I got a pretty good draw when they handed out parents. I mean, just since last summer Rob Dropzec’s uncle became his stepdad while his real dad became his stepuncle in a trade that still has the fans baffled. And Amy Miller’s little brother got taken away—
taken away
—because he kept showing up at school with funny bruises and marks on his back and legs. Carter hasn’t spent three days with his old man since he was five and his dad took a hotshot job with Morrison-Knudsen down in Boise. He was supposed to move the family down as soon as he got settled in his job and found a house. What he found was a new family, and now it’s like Carter doesn’t exist. Carter and I ran into him down there one night in a pizza place, and it got pretty heavy; but other than that one time, Carter
pretends his dad doesn’t exist either. Just says it’s no big deal.

And then there’s Becky’s parents. Her dad is a real class guy, one of those people who seem to know how things work. But his noodle must’ve been on sabbatical when he married her mom, to hear Becky tell it. Boy, now she’s a case for the books. If you could bottle half the garbage she pulls, you could sell it for 150 proof Brain Disease. Luckily they aren’t together anymore either. Becky chose to live with her dad when they split a little over three years ago. Her mom stayed back East, where Becky used to live, and her dad came out here to be a frontier lawyer.

And I wouldn’t have Boomer’s dad if he were the only one left in the world. It’s not hard to see where Boomer comes by his sweet attitude. Stuff like what happened that time at his birthday party is just a way of life at his house. And his mom is the only person in the world tough enough to hang in there, though I don’t know why she’d want to.

Anyway, except for the times I wish I had crappy parents so I’d have someone to blame things on, I gotta say I got a pretty good deal. Norm’s always real calm and takes time to work things out. Doesn’t like to leave a lot of loose ends. He’s a good guy to go to when you
have a problem. He’ll never tell you the answer, but he’ll stick with you till you come up with one. Brenda’s a little more emotional—like to the seventh power—but you need a little of that. She’s good for helping you realize that how you feel is how you feel, and a lot of times there’s no use trying to control it. If you lived your whole life like that, you’d probably turn out like Donald Duck, but there’s a need for some of it. At least for me there is. And she’s full of love. I mean she loves this family like love’s the mail. She delivers through rain and sleet and dark of night and conditions that are a whole lot worse than any of those.

Don’t get me wrong. We don’t live here like the Beaver Cleaver family or the Waltons all the time. Brenda and I go at it pretty regularly. I mean, she’s forever doing things like buying me new undershorts to wear when I travel someplace, even if it’s just an away game, and throwing away my old ones.

“Louie, I’ve seen your underpants. I know what you do.”

I bet she doesn’t know how often.

Just when I get them washed a few times and nice and soft and broken in, they disappear. She says how would I feel if I got in an accident and was wearing some old pair of brown and yellows. Like they’re going
to identify my body by the stains on my skivvies and leave her to live out her life in total and utter humiliation. I can see the obituary in the
Trout News:

Really, that’s the kind of arguments we get into sometimes. I don’t know how I get sucked into them, but I do. Brenda’s got heart, though, and you can go through a lot of petty little crap for that.

I don’t think I could have gotten through this year alive without my folks. I mean, they didn’t actually do anything; but they were always there, and they did surprisingly little judging considering some of the stuff I pulled.

Anyway, I was telling you about football. We started our two-a-day workouts the Monday after we picked up our equipment. It started like every season starts: with us sitting on the bleachers in the gym at seven-thirty in the morning in our jocks and T-shirts waiting for Lednecky to come out of his office up behind the stage to give us the opening pep talk that’s supposed to charge us up for the season. Everyone is
pretty nervous because those first few practices are hell. We get a “Summer Newsletter” along about the first of July that tells us what kind of condition (“excellent, gentlemen”) he expects us to report in, but everybody puts it off till it’s too late. We know we’re going to have to run the mile right off, and if we don’t hit our time—six minutes for backs and ends, eight minutes for linemen—we’ll run it at the beginning of practice every day till we do. And if one guy misses, we all run it. (“This is a
team
, gentlemen.”) We also know that calisthenics will be triple what they’ll be once the season gets going since there’s no contact for the first few days until he thinks we’re ready and we’ve all had our physicals. But the killer is the wind sprints. At the end of every practice we run wind sprints until at least four guys throw up. No one believes me. They all think we run a certain number, though only Mark Robeson can say what that number is. (“Infinity, Banks. The predetermined number of wind sprints we run at the end of each practice is infinity. I’ve counted them.”) But I’ve watched for four years, and when the fourth guy chucks up his breakfast, we head for the showers. In fact, I used to wind them up early by turning away and sticking my finger down my throat right after the third guy went. We’d run one more sprint and go in.

But no more. This year I know I’m ready. Carter and I have been working out all summer—hard. Carter’s got me ready to try out for end, Dakota’s got me pumped up to make a showing, and I’m ready to run the rest of those would-be athletes into the ground. My target is Boomer. I can’t take Carter; he’s too fast and in too good a shape. But Boomer’s been logging all summer, and though he may be strong and mean enough to eat me if he catches me, I know he can’t take me for a mile. No way. So that’s my first goal.

Lednecky came down from his office with Coach Madison. This was Madison’s first year out of college. He played defensive back at some state college in South Dakota and was pretty hot stuff, I guess. I owe him a lot.

Anyway, Madison sat on the end of one of the bleachers, and Lednecky walked out on the gym floor in front of us. He had his U of I T-shirt and his New York Yankee baseball cap that he swears was given to him by Thurman Munson, who’s dead now and can’t deny it. As usual, he looked like he could kick any three of our butts with one hand tied to the opposite leg. He’s one big strong mother bear.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “welcome to Cougar Football. I’ll get right down to it. This is the team I’ve
been waiting for. We’ve had state champions for the past two seasons, and those were just
building
years. We have six starters back and probably five more who’ll be better than the men we lost. We have two boys who will almost certainly receive college scholarships and a couple more who have an outside chance. Man for man, this could be the best team in the state, Triple A teams included.” His voice was low and under control, almost like he was talking to somebody on the street, but you could feel the intensity.

“None of us will probably have this opportunity again for a long, long time, if ever.” He paused and took off his cap, running his fingers through his H. R. Haldeman haircut. Not even H. R. Haldeman has that haircut anymore.

A lot of guys nodded, but nobody said anything. It wasn’t time yet.

It started to build. “We can’t allow
anything
to stand in our way this year, gentlemen. We have townspeople who are expecting miracles, we have a school board that put out thirty-five hundred dollars it didn’t have for new equipment, and we have pride. For most teams a winning season is considered a success. But for us a nine-and-one season would be a disaster! We’re at the very top of the heap! The pinnacle!” he
boomed. “Ten-and-O!”

It was time. “Damn right!” Boomer screamed, and everyone joined in chanting, “Ten-and-O! Ten-and-O!…”

I suppose if that were on film and we saw it later, we’d all feel like a real bunch of jerks, but luckily the Great Cameraman in the Sky, if there is one, doesn’t put you through that. At least I hope not.

Lednecky let it go for a few minutes, then raised his hand. “All right. Training rules. Same as always. Home by ten, in bed by ten-thirty. Weekends you have until midnight. Night before a game you’re home by nine and in bed by nine-thirty. You get one night during the season till two. That’s Homecoming. No drinking, no smoking. Tell your girlfriends to find something to do for the next two and a half months. You’ve heard me say it before, and you’ll hear it as long as you play for me: You can’t do your best in two places. Girlfriends will have to wait. Everybody got it?”

“Yes, sir!” we yelled.

“Okay. Break the rules, you’re off the team. I don’t make exceptions.”

I happened to know that was a crock. Carter or Boomer could have shown up at Lednecky’s place drunk on their butts at 3:00
A.M
. before a game and
crawled into bed with his wife and still suited up that afternoon. But those things are understood. For most of us the point was well taken.

Some of the training rules are pretty crazy. Most of them you’d do anyway, whether you were playing football or not, but going to bed at nine-thirty the night before a game is the surest way I know to stay awake all night. And that whole thing about not doing your best in two places never made much sense to me either. Does he think we stop jerking off for two and a half months? I don’t. And I do my best, too.

Anyway, Lednecky went on to introduce Madison to us and go over the basic offenses and defenses we would be using. He said he had most of us pegged for the positions he thought we should play, but we were welcome to try out for any we wanted. I said it looked like the only place we were weak was at quarterback, so I thought I’d try out for that. I heard Carter yell, “Top!” but before I could react, a ball hit me in the back of the head. That sort of eased everyone’s jitters for a minute.

“Okay,” Lednecky said, “if there are no other questions, Coach Madison has your shoes in the equipment room. You can pay as you pick them up. You have twenty minutes to be on the field.”

I felt pretty good going onto the field. I was in the best condition of my life, to that point, and I knew no one but Carter was even close. I didn’t have to worry about falling in a pile of my own vomit and drowning at the end of the mile. Carter had told me all summer that the reason two-a-days were so rough was that everyone was in such crappy shape, and I believed him. All summer we’d run distances and done wind sprints and push-ups and sit-ups, and I must have run a million pass patterns. I was even starting to develop a little muscle in my chest and arms. No way Lednecky was going to do me in. The only reason I was nervous was I wanted to look good from the first drill to the last; no exceptions. And I wanted to take Boomer in the mile.

I got to the field ahead of everyone and took a couple of easy laps around the track. By the time I’d started my second one Carter fell in beside me.

“Are you ready for this?” he asked.

I nodded. “You bet. What do you figure for this mile?”

“About five-thirty,” he said. “No sense killing ourselves for the rest of practice. Don’t worry about time, though. Just go out and kick everyone else’s butt, and the time will take care of itself. You want
to stay up on everyone.”

“What about Boomer?”

“Hasn’t worked out all summer, but he’s mean enough to be right there with us.” He looked over at me and smiled. “It’d kill him if you beat him, though. And it would sure look good to Lednecky.”

Mean enough to be with
us
. Carter wasn’t going to be with
us
, but he’d decided in early summer he was going to drag me up as far as I’d go. He’s a pretty good friend.

The whistle blew, and we headed to the other end of the field to circle the coaches. Sammy Green dropped for fifteen because he took off his helmet and sat on it. (“That damn thing is part of your head for the next three months, Green. Never take it off unless Coach Madison or I tell you to!”)

You got the feeling that this was the biggest season of Lednecky’s life, including the ones he played. What he’d said in the gym was true. This was the team he’d been waiting for. Probably from the day he crawled out of the La Brea Tar Pits.

We worked through our warm-up calisthenics, and Madison blew his whistle over by the starting line for the mile. Everybody groaned, so we dropped for fifteen. Lednecky said we should look at every challenge as an opportunity for the next three months. He
didn’t want any crybabies.

“Backs and receivers first,” Madison called out. “Get it under six, guys. It’s a lot easier to do it once and get it out of the way.” He smiled. “I know you’re all in top condition, so it should be a breeze.”

Boomer came up behind me and slapped the back of my helmet. “We’re a little weak at quarterback, so I think I’ll try out for that,” he mimicked. “Cute. Christ, I don’t see how Sampson can stand you.” He slapped my helmet again, interrupting the ringing in my ears from the first time.

“You get this under six, wussy?” he said.

I adjusted my helmet. “I’ll be there. Could give you a little push. I’m in pretty good shape.”

“That right?” he sneered. “Tell you what, Banks. You take me in this mile, I’ll pack your gear for every away game and carry it on and off the bus.” He smiled, if you can call what he does smiling. “If I win, you wear my sweaty jock around your nose to Homecoming.”

“That’s okay, Boomer,” I said. “Thanks for the offer, though.”

“Screw it,” he said. “You beat me, I’ll pack your gear.”

I knew damn good and well he’d never hold to that if I beat him, but the prospect of watching him worm
out of it really jacked me up.

“Whatever you say,” I said, and we trotted to the line.