Wherever I Wind Up (9 page)

You can not, Wright says.

You don’t think so? You want to bet? You give me five tries and I’ll put three of them through.

One hundred bucks says you can’t, David says. This is going to be the easiest money I ever make.

I am Pelf’s self-appointed big brother, always looking out for him, and I don’t want him to go into this wager cold. So I suggest we get a ball and tee and do some practicing. We get back from Dick’s but find the nearby field padlocked, so of course we climb over the fence. At six feet two inches and 220 pounds, I get over without incident, but seeing Pelf hoist his big self over—all six feet seven inches and 250 pounds of him—is much more impressive.

Pelf’s job is to kick and my job is to chase. He sets up at the twenty-yard line, tees up the ball, and knocks it through—kicking toe-style, like a latter-day Lou Groza. He backs up to the twenty-five and then the thirty, and boots several more from each distance. Adding the ten yards for the end zone, he’s now hit from forty yards and is finding his range. Pretty darn good. He insists he’s got another ten yards in his leg. He hits from forty-five, and by now he’s probably taken fifteen or seventeen hard kicks and reports that his right shin is getting sore.

We don’t consider stopping.

Pelf places the ball on the tee at the forty-yard line: a fifty-yard field goal. He takes a half dozen steps back, straight behind the tee, sprints up, and powers his toe into the ball … high … and far … and just barely over the crossbar. That’s all that is required. I thrust both my arms overhead like an NFL referee.

He takes three more and converts on a second fifty-yarder.

You are the man, Pelf, I say. Adam Vinatieri should worry for his job.

That’s it, Pelf says. I can’t even lift my foot anymore. My shin is killing me.

We hop back over the fence, Pelf trying to land as lightly as a man his size can land. His shin hurts so much he can barely put pressure on the gas pedal. He’s proven he can hit a fifty-yard field goal, but I go into big-brother mode and tell him I don’t want him kicking any more field goals or stressing his right leg any further. I convince him to drop the bet with David.

The last thing you need is to start the season on the DL because you were kicking field goals, I say. Can you imagine if the papers got ahold of that one?

The wager just fades away. David doesn’t mind; he gets a laugh at the story of Pelf hopping the fence and practicing, and drilling long ones.

CHAPTER FIVE

VOLUNTEERING FOR DUTY

T
en years is a long time, but it’s not so long that I forget the babysitter. The summer after I graduate from MBA, I’m gearing up to enroll at the University of Tennessee when I make an impromptu visit to see my mother’s family. Next thing I know the babysitter and her mother are walking through the front door.

It takes a millisecond for my insides to seize up, like an engine without motor oil.

Oh, my Lord, it’s her.

How long has it been exactly? I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I haven’t seen her since the last time she abused me. I forget whether that was in the bed or the tub. I try to remember which and then scold myself.
Who cares? Why waste one second thinking about that?

She’s all grown up, done with college, with the same long brown hair, as tall and athletic-looking as ever. The seized-up feeling gets worse the closer I stand to her, my heart racing. My insides feel as if they’ve been freeze-dried. I wonder how many other boys she was supposed to babysit who she wound up violating.

R. A. DICKEY

I think I might vomit.

As much as I want to stop it from happening, I can’t: the sight of her instantly transports me back to the summer of 1983 and all the sensations that came with it—the sweat and the smell, the trembling and the terror that went through me when she took off her white outfit with the flowers and climbed on me.

If we happen to have a private moment, I debate whether I should take her down Nightmare Lane. Wouldn’t it be nice to let her know that I remember everything—and let her know what I think of her for doing what she did? I know I am supposed to forgive as a Christian, just as God forgives me.

I am not much of a Christian at the moment, I am afraid.

People move into the next room. We are alone. Nightmare Lane, here we come.

Remember those times when you babysat me? I ask.

She looks at me, puzzled.

I don’t really remember much about them, no, she says.

Oh, really? You don’t remember what happened? I can remind you, because my memory is crystal clear about what happened. Remember the four-poster bed in the room at the end of the hallway?

I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you are talking about. Could you be thinking about another babysitter?

Oh, no. That’s not possible. There was only one babysitter in my whole life who did what you did.

She stares at me blankly, almost dismissively.

I’m sorry. I don’t know what you are talking about, she says. She looks excruciatingly uncomfortable.

Good,
I think.

I can see this is going nowhere, that she is not going to cop to anything, and finally drop the subject. I say good-bye to my family and head to Billy and Lynn’s. The next few days, predictably, are awful, the worst kind of emotional relapse. It’s almost as if I’m reliving the abuse again and again, with an extra measure of humiliation brought on by her refusal to acknowledge anything, triggering an appearance by toxic old friends in the back of my head saying:
Did it really happen the way I remember? Did she really do all these things, or did I dream it?

The helplessness, the shame—it all comes back in a torrent. It’s almost a week before it begins to recede, and I don’t feel seized up anymore. In a few weeks I head off to college in Knoxville.

I never see the babysitter again.

GIBBS HALL
is the athletic dormitory at the University of Tennessee, conveniently located near the Volunteer sports facilities. I arrive in Room 329 of Gibbs in the fall of 1993 with two duffel bags stuffed mostly with sweatshirts and sweatpants and with the mind-set of a walk-on. I am a top recruit, I guess, but I never want to think of myself in those terms. It’s the main reason why I couldn’t stand the recruiting process, which is basically Smoke Blowing 101. They tell you how great you are and have pretty girls escort you around campus on your official visit, and then they have you meet with some of the players, who want to take you out for a night on the town, as if this were all part of a typical day at the University of Tennessee.

I don’t want to be fussed over or gushed over, and I sure don’t want a night on the town. I just want to take some interesting English classes and play baseball and compete at the highest level possible. I am not there long before I get a glimpse of one of the best ballplayers I’ve ever seen. His name is Todd Helton.

Helton is recruited to play football and baseball at Tennessee. He’s the backup quarterback to Heath Shuler in his first two years, and then the backup to Jerry Colquitt, who waited years to get a chance to play, as a junior. In the season opener, Colquitt rips up the ligaments in his knee, and Helton takes over. Three weeks later, Helton bangs up his own knee and gets replaced by a kid named Peyton Manning.

Helton knows his future is in baseball, and after people see Manning play, he isn’t getting the job back anyway. Helton eventually quits football, but in the fall of my freshman year, he is still playing. We’re having a baseball workout just down the hill from the football practice field and one day I see Helton walking toward the ball field during a break in football practice. He is wearing his orange football jersey and football cleats and has his helmet in his hand.

Can I jump in and get a couple of swings? Helton asks the coaches. They say sure. He puts down his helmet and grabs a wooden bat and gets in the cage. He hasn’t had a single warm-up swing. He eschews aluminum in favor of good, old-fashioned lumber. On his second swing, he crushes a ball far over the right-field fence.

That’s good, thanks, Helton says, picking up his helmet and going back to football practice. I tried not to stare.

Helton is one of the greatest clutch hitters I’ve ever seen. During the NCAA regionals my freshman year, we are down four in the eighth inning against Arizona State when he comes up with the bases loaded. One swing later, the game is tied. Helton comes through again and again with his bat, but he is also a phenomenal left-handed relief pitcher, once putting together a string of forty-seven scoreless innings. He still holds the school save record (twenty-three).

Helton is something to watch, but the truth is that Peyton Manning puts on the best show in Knoxville, Saturday after Saturday. Peyton and I become friends, and I’m a sideline spectator at Neyland Stadium—one of the perks of being an athlete—for almost every Tennessee home game. The more I study him, the more I appreciate what he brings to the field. Peyton is a good, accurate passer, but he doesn’t have an arm that totally wows you; it’s not as if I watch him throw and think,
That is the most beautiful ball I’ve ever seen.
He’s got nowhere near the arm that Heath Shuler had, or even the arm that Brandon Stewart, a quarterback who transferred to Texas A&M, had. Peyton even throws his share of ducks, but it doesn’t matter, because everything else is so out of this world that it overrides any little flaw he might have. His decision making, his presence, his gift for leading and making others around him believe—they are all without peer. He is the guy you want in charge, a guy who has been around the game his whole life and it shows. I learn so much from observing him, because it’s a reminder that the best pitchers are not necessarily the ones who throw the hardest or have the scouts salivating over their natural arm strength. The best pitchers are the guys who have a plan and know how to execute it—who know how to compete and never stop doing it.

AS MUCH AS
I am in awe of Todd Helton’s two-way talents and Peyton Manning’s quarterbacking stature, they are not my inspiration during my freshman year at Tennessee. My inspiration is a softball pitcher from Nashville named Jane Dickey.

My little sister. The sister I left behind when I moved in with my father—something I’ve felt guilty about for a long time.

Before I go to college, Jane gets involved in a relationship with an older guy. She gets pregnant at fifteen years old. She’s a superb student and first-rate athlete at a private school in town, and you can imagine what she’s dealing with at such an age, when she’s not much more than a child herself. Everybody has an opinion about what to do. More than a few people privately advise her that if she goes ahead and has a baby now, she might as well say good-bye to every goal and dream she has ever had. Officials at her school tell her that if she decides to get married, she will not be welcome back. So now her education is on the line too.

Amid all this noise and pressure and a society that sometimes wants to treat childbirth as an inconvenience, Jane says, I am going to have this baby.

She says, I didn’t plan on getting pregnant and the timing is terrible, but I have a human life to nurture now and that is what I am going to do, and nobody is going to change my mind.

My parents completely support her decision and do what they can to help her.

So Jane has the baby and gets married and gets tossed out of school and winds up living on an army base with her husband. She graduates high school through a GED program. She loses her last two years of high school, and college, and a good piece of her childhood. Eventually she has to get out of a marriage that probably never had a chance. It is some load of freight, but my sister carries it with grace and dignity.