Stotan! (3 page)

Nortie groaned and sat back against the wall. “Oh, God,” he moaned. “What is it?”

Jeff said, “You don't want to know. I will tell you this much. The term was coined somewhere after the middle of this very century in Australia. Further knowledge can be obtained by interested parties through clandestine arrangements for sexual favors with family members—preferably mothers and sisters.” He did an exaggerated about-face and high-stepped out of the room.

Nortie was up in an instant, following him out, yelling, “Wait, Jeff! You can sleep with
my
sister.” It's a good thing my parents weren't home.

Jeff has an abscessed front tooth with a temporary hole drilled in the back for drainage, and the substance that comes out would be more appropriate draining into the alley behind Lion's apartment than into someone's mouth—even Jeff's. It drains very slowly—it's been like that for months, with no end in sight according to his dentist—so he doesn't have the taste all the time, but when he wants to he can suck it out with his tongue, blow it on you and flatten you out. I've always said if any of us could take Max and his black belt, it would be Jeff and his magic tooth. Max would get one whiff and kick his own brains out trying to get out of his misery.

Nortie ran back into the room with a stunned expression and a tear in his eye.

“Any luck?” I asked.

Nortie gasped. “He knows I don't have a sister.” He wiped his eye. “Jeez, why does he do that? He sucked his tooth.”

November 14

You have to hurt a little for Nortie. He's a classic case of what can happen to a guy who's been beat up all his life. Eighteen years old and his old man still punches him around.

I've asked Nort why he doesn't just kiss him off—tell him to go to hell and stay with me for the rest of the year—but he shrugs and says his dad's okay; he just doesn't know any other way to act. I tell him it's time he
learned
some other way to act or to hell with him, but Nortie dodges that.

When we were sophomores, I went to their place for dinner one Sunday afternoon just before Christmas. I think Nortie was uncomfortable having someone come
over because his dad can be so ornery and unpredictable, but he had eaten at my place so many times he figured it was time to take a chance. Anyway, right before dinner, around three in the afternoon, Nortie and I jumped in their family car to run over to the local 7–11 to get whipped cream for the pie, and as we were pulling out of the parking lot, some guy slid around the corner on the ice and slammed into our front fender. There was absolutely no way Nortie could have prevented it—in fact, we were stopped when the guy hit us—but Nortie got real quiet, sort of set his jaw, and after they exchanged insurance information, we drove home.

His dad happened to see us drive up out the living-room window and was barreling down the sidewalk toward us before Nortie could even get out. He jerked Nortie out of the car onto his hands and knees, then lifted him up and slapped the sides of his head, screaming at him. When Nortie put his hands up to protect his head, his dad gave him a hard shot to the solar plexus and dropped him. To this day I'm embarrassed that I didn't jump out of the car and take my best shot at Mr. Wheeler, but I sat frozen, my eyes glued to his face. He isn't a very big guy, but he looked
so
mean, deliberately aiming each of his shots. When Nortie hit the ground, I
came unfrozen; jumped out and ran around the car to help him up. His wind was gone and he was convulsing for air, but he waved me away. His dad was yelling, “Let the little screw be! I'll teach him to mess up my car!”

I tried to explain what had happened, that it wasn't Nortie's fault, but I couldn't make him hear me. Mr. Wheeler has Nortie pegged for a screwup, and the facts be damned.

Nortie's mom watched it all out the living-room window and she didn't move a muscle. For a quick second I remember hating her guts, but later I thought of the times I'd seen her wearing sunglasses on dark days and long sleeves on hot days to cover up her own bruises, and I guessed she was doing what she had to to get along. Still, it's hard to respect her.

I didn't stay for dinner.

Boy, it's no wonder that little turd is so fast. He's just a demon in workouts. He's so nervous before every practice he can't eat lunch and he whines and bitches and moans like a third-grader on Death Row as 2:30 approaches, but when we hit the water, he pays the pool back for every time his old man ever laid a finger on him. I hope he finds an outlet when we're through with swimming, because he's got to have a lot of mean energy boiling around in him.

I think I'd like to get the whole truth about Stotan Week from Max because Max is a human being, but I have a feeling I'm going to get it from Jeff, who isn't. I found a note on my desk in English class today—about an hour after he tried to assassinate Nortie again in the hall with a blast from his chemical breath because Nortie had the audacity to try to get him to cough up Stotan information for free. The note said, “Learn all you can about Herb Elliot.” It wasn't signed, but I'd recognize Jeff's handwriting anywhere. It looks like he dipped the feet of a baby chick in ink, placed it on the page and set the little bugger ablaze. Big as he is on current events, Jeff's a researching fool. You could have bet he'd be the one to crack this Stotan mystery, but you could also count on his not telling anyone what he found out. I do know who Herb Elliot is, so that's a start.

November 15

Being the serious-minded student of current affairs he is, Jeff has appointed himself Frost's official unofficial political analyst and at times he bowls you over with it. If you want the real reasons the Russians boycotted the
Olympics, or the hot poop on the sudden unexplained disappearance of one unnamed assistant football coach and one similarly unnamed cheerleader, Jeff's your man. For local, national and regional news, see Jeffrey Hawkins in flaming red color at six and eleven. Of course, he delivers each newsy tidbit like it's the Russian invasion of Afghanistan or the release of the Iranian hostages, so some analysis on your own part is in order, but he's a smart motor scooter and he does his homework. You're making a mistake if you don't listen to what he has to say, no matter how obnoxious he makes it.

“Up for a little racial tension?” he asked me in the lunch line today. He showed up with Lion and Elaine, armed to the teeth with Doomsday warnings. Yesterday, Herb Elliot. Today, racial tension. The man has range.

“Sure, I haven't got a lot else to think about,” I said, looking at Elaine and Lion, then back to Walter Cronkite. “What week is
that
scheduled for?”

“Coming soon to a theater near you,” he said, reached inside his coat and pulled out a rolled-up newspaper, unrolled it and spread it out on my tray. I put a plate of burgers—one dish the nutritional demolition squad in the cafeteria hasn't yet learned to destroy—on top of it. The girl behind the counter informed me that
there was a two-burger limit. I've been eating here once a day for the last four years and that rule has always been the same on burger day. “Really?” I said. “Sorry, I didn't know that.” I put the rest back and, when she looked the other way, slipped an extra under my coat. I tell you, it's a never ending battle.

We moved out into the dining area, over by a window, and set our trays on a table. Lion opened his bookbag and removed a Mason jar and a Tupperware container that he filled with milk and peanut butter respectively, for later consumption. There is no late-night food service in his palatial digs like there is in homes with regular families, so he stocks up in the cafeteria. Once when one of the guys who cleans the tables in the cafeteria told him he couldn't be taking food off the premises, Lion told him it was okay, that he was one of three athletes in the nation who'd been awarded athletic scholarships to high school, and there was an “all you can eat” clause in his. That's the last that was said. No one messes much with Lion. The kindest thing said about his presentation of himself is it's “different” and that's not the half of it; and he's a real horse. Except for maybe Jeff, he's the biggest guy I've ever seen call himself a swimmer. We are not talking svelte and streamlined here. These are guys who, when we're up to
10,000 to 12,000 yards a day and their percentage of body fat is zero or less, still weigh in around 190. Lion and Jeff do not look like the swimmers you see atop the Olympic podium; Lion and Jeff are chiseled out of marble block with crude tools. These are not sleek sailboats; these are destroyers.

I removed the paper from under my plate and gave it a look. It was called the
Aryan Press
and in the center of the front page was a not very professional drawing of an ape alongside an equal-quality drawing of a black man. Both were side profiles in similar positions, bent forward and staring straight ahead. Around each picture were labels and arrows showing assumed similarities between the two. I've seen it before on a poster—though more professionally drawn—down in the men's can at the Red Rooster. It's the “scientific proof” bigots use to prove blacks are further back on the evolutionary scale than whites. If it weren't so silly, it'd be downright offensive. The rest of the paper was filled with stories about atrocities Jews and blacks have committed on the blue-eyed, blond population through the ages—a couple of hard shots to the stomach about “equal opportunity” and some serious warnings about the dangers of contaminating a pure bloodline. I stared at it a few seconds, then asked Jeff where he got it.

“They're all over school,” he said. “Somebody's been sticking them in unlocked lockers, and there's a stack of them out by the front entrance.”

Before any of us could say what we thought we should do, Lion was up and headed for the door. Jeff and Elaine and I followed him out of sheer habit. At the front entrance he took one look at the stack of papers, moved them to the middle of the sidewalk, broke the bailing wire that held them together, spread them out a little for air and put a match to them. The match blew out and he tried another. Someone threw him a disposable lighter and that did the trick. Without thinking, we were into the spirit, moving the metal garbage cans around the fire to keep it contained, and stood watching the papers burn as kids and teachers poured out of classrooms and the cafeteria. Most of them obviously didn't know what the commotion was about, and Lion passed a couple of unburned copies among them. Then he stood up on one of the garbage cans and raised his hands. He presented enough of a spectacle to get something that vaguely resembled silence, and he roared, “I catch anyone passing this crap out and he'll answer to me for it! I'll kick his butt! I've been going to this school four years and I'm proud of it! This crap stinks and I
won't have it!” He got down as Mrs. Stevens, the vice-principal, stormed through the doors with a fire extinguisher. She extinguished the flames in seconds, then turned to the crowd, furious. “Who's responsible for this?” she demanded, and Lion stepped forward.

“I am,” he said, “and I'm headed for your office.”

Mrs. Stevens said, “You better be, Buster, and you better have a darn good explanation.” They both disappeared as Elaine and Jeff and I started picking up the partially burned papers, cramming them into the garbage drums. I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see Max. “What's going on?” he asked, and I handed him one of the papers. He looked at it and smiled, shaking his head. “Lion find a cause?” he asked.

I smiled and nodded. “Looks like it.”

Max shook his head again and said, “I wouldn't give it my time.” He went back inside.

It had all happened so fast no one had time to think. That's the way Lion is. When he's hot, he comes on like a flash flood. He knows exactly what his values are at any given moment and what he's willing to go to the wall for; let the consequences fall into place later. Consequences would be light for this. Lion would be back in the cafeteria almost before we would. Mrs. Stevens came to Frost seven years ago because she's
been the most successful administrator in the city at taking care of racial issues, and though there aren't all that many blacks in Spokane, Frost has by far the majority of them.

Mrs. Stevens is black.

We weren't back in the cafeteria five minutes before Lion was there, stuffing his face as though nothing had happened. “Can't let that stuff get out of hand,” he said. “Boy, I like that Mrs. Stevens.”

I looked to Jeff. “Well, I guess that takes care of racial tension,” I said.

He shrugged and raised his eyebrows. “We'll see,” he said. “You know, those are printed locally, over in Falls Lake. Those guys have been there quite a while, but it looks like they're trying to get something started. You'd be surprised how many people believe that crap even though they're not in the inner circle.”

Lion took another huge bite and said, “I better not see any more of them.”

Elaine got up to get another burger and I remember feeling a little self-conscious about watching her butt move toward the counter like the flanks of a thoroughbred racehorse. Old Elaine wears some fairly tight britches and she's real muscular. She's always been one of the guys, so it feels a little like incest, but she's been
wedging herself into my dreams lately, and there's not much a guy can do about that. That's not information I'm ready to put out for group discussion, but that's the way it is. It doesn't help that I already have a girlfriend.

“So tell me, O wise red peckerhead,” I said to Jeff, in a futile effort to banish Elaine from my lunchtime fantasies, “what's today's little teaser on Stotan Week?”

“You didn't check out Herb Elliot, did you?”

I had to admit I hadn't.

“I have to know you really
want
this information, Walk,” he said. “I just can't give it out. I have to feel needed.”

Elaine sat down again. “A Stotan is a cross between a Stoic and a Spartan,” she said, and Jeff's chin dropped to his pecs. “The term was coined by Percy Cerruti, coach of the great Australian miler Herb Elliot in the late fifties and early sixties.” She ran it off with encyclopedic brilliance. “Cerruti used that term to describe Elliot in his single-minded determination to be the greatest miler of all time. Elliot would do his regular workouts, which were considerable, then throw off his clothes to run dune after dune on the Australian beaches, driving himself to the brink of exhausted ecstasy. Herb Elliot thought American athletes were wussies. Percy Cerruti thought Herb Elliot was a
Stotan.” She chomped down on her burger.

“Slime-bag,” Jeff said. “Scuzz-ball.”

Elaine went on, seemingly delighted by Jeff's epithet. “I would imagine that Stotan Week will be a week in which Max asks you to put forth Stotanic efforts to make yourselves less like wussies and more like Herb Elliot.”

Lion's eyes lit up; you could see his mind whipping along ahead of Elaine, visions of himself and Herb charging over an infinity of Australian sand dunes, then diving into the surf and swimming to New Zealand.

Jeff was pissed at having been scooped.