Necessary Roughness (11 page)

We held them.

“Nice job, Kim.” Coach patted my back. “Beautiful tackle.”

“You’re a tough little bastard,” added Kearny. I glowed, my face steaming in the frosty air.

At the end of the third quarter we were ahead, 14-6. On fourth down at the Pirates’ twenty, the coaches decided to go for a field goal.

Mikko caught the snap.

I was just following through the kick when I saw the green of a Pirate’s uniform rushing at me. How’d he get through?

I heard a crunching noise, and then I hit the ground.

I was going to tell that Pirate knob to get off me, but then I realized I had no voice. And that I couldn’t breathe.

I’m not sure how Coach knew I was in distress, but he ran onto the field.

“Can you get your helmet off, Jann?” He touched my arm gently, like you might a baby. He took out my mouth guard.

I wanted to breathe. But something hurt really badly, really sharply, like someone was zapping me in the side with an electric cattle prod.

“Medical!” He yelled for Larson. “Can you breathe?”

The magic question. I shook my head. Sledgehammers
were starting to pound my temples.

“Okay, Chan.” Larson’s voice. “Try to sit up a little if you can.”

I straightened. There was a burning, sticking feeling in my side. I doubled back over.

“It might be a rib,” Doc Larson said to Coach. “Chan, try to sit up as much as you can. Breathe in slowly.”

My breath started coming back in short little spasms. It was like being in the ocean when waves keep knocking at you. I needed more air. I gulped. Jerked. Wheezed. I sounded like a cow with emphysema.

Whatever was wrong with my ribs, I was glad to be able to breathe again. I’d just gotten the wind knocked out of me, that’s all it was. When Coach asked me to stand up, I did. Cheers flowed down from the stands, and I saw from the scoreboard I’d still made the field goal. I wondered if the guy who hit me was going to get a skull.

Doc Larson took me to the hospital, where an X ray revealed I had bruised my ribs but not cracked any of them. He said I was still good to go. Lucky. He wound some gauzy junk around my torso and told me not to let my girlfriend hug me too hard. I was psyched I’d still be able to go to the dance.

I had the doc drop me off at the high school so I
could take half a shower. The guys all cheered when I showed up in the locker room. They were all lying around in a sea of pads and stinks and smiles, so I knew we’d won.

“Glad you’re okay, Jann,” said Coach. “As I was saying, while we’re that much closer to State, it gets harder from here, not easier. Everyone’s going to challenge us for the title, so we’ve got to do what we’ve been doing, and double it.”

“We’re going to have a conditioning workout tomorrow at eight,” said Kearny. “So go home early and get some sleep.”

“Uh-huh,” said Leland. He gave us a look, like yeah, right.

“The coaches totally kicked Beargrease’s butt,” Mikko informed me later. “The Pirate guy got a roughing penalty, but the coaches aren’t letting Jimmi play blocker anymore because he can’t contain.”

“Whatever,” I said. At this point I was believing more that Jimmi didn’t cut the mustard than that he was letting people in to gish me.

“Gotta pull your weight around here,”
ALL-PRO
declared as he opened a new three-pack of Fruit of the Looms.

“New undies, huh?” sniped Leland. “Some cocky weegie thinks he’s gonna see some action tonight.”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” said Mikko with a sly grin. “Maybe I just ran out of clean ones.”

“Who’re you going with?”

“Cindy Gray.”

“Oh, that girl, she’ll do it with anyone,” said Rom from the other side of the room. “I mean, even more than the rest of the cheerleaders. Believe me, I know.”

“Kreeger, you are so full of it,” Mikko said. “No girl would want to touch your hairy butt.”

Mikko patted some Brut onto his face. I wished I had enough whiskers to shave.

“You and your ribs ready to go, buddy?” He put his hand up for a high-five.

Slap!

I was ready.

The school dance reminded me of one of those After School Specials on television. There were streamers all around the gym, punch in a bowl, and chaperones. Corny to the max. Maybe dances at my old school were like this, but no one I knew had ever gone to one.

Corny or not, it was worth it to see Rainey in a slinky black dress with blue trim that exactly matched her eyes. Man, it was worth it.

Mikko dragged me into the bathroom first. He’d brought some booze in trial-size shampoo bottles. We
stood in the large handicapped stall and downed them. The bottles still tasted of soap.

“I think it was a mistake to bring Cindy,” he said miserably. “Now she thinks I like her, when all I wanted to do was come to the dance.”

“You don’t like her?” I said. Now I could distinguish between all the blond cheerleaders: she was the one with the interesting ice-cream-cone eating technique.

“She’s just too, too—um, enthusiastic.”

“So what are you going to do? Stay in the bathroom all night?”

Mikko wrapped an arm around my neck. It felt as heavy as an anaconda. “You’re a cool cruiser, Chan. My whole life has changed because of you.”

He was getting drunk. I took the bottle away, pretending to drink it myself. If I sneezed, I expected bubbles of Pert to come blipping out.

“Come on. Let’s go dance this stuff off.”

Rainey was an awesome dancer. I was merely okay. For all my soccer and tae kwon do prowess, I couldn’t quite get my feet to do what I wanted them to do when out on the dance floor. I liked it when they played slow songs, because I got to hold her, and I didn’t have to move around as much.

“Look who’s with the sausage queen!” said Rom, just loud enough for us to hear. He was with one of the cheerleaders with the big boobs.

“Get a life,” I said, pulling Rainey closer. Sometimes, if you get happy enough, even total butt-wipes don’t bug you.

“He is the worst kind of person,” Rainey whispered to me. “Dumb and with muscles.”

“Don’t forget evil,” I said. She laughed, felt looser in my arms. I loved everything about this girl—her teeth, her heavy lashes that gave her a sleepy, dreamy look, her hair …

“How come we didn’t go to your house for pictures?” she asked. Apparently for Riverfest, the whole tradition was to go to everyone’s houses and manufacture Kodak Moments in four different living rooms. We only did three.

My excuse was going to be that O-Ma and Abogee were both working at the store, which they probably were. But somehow the words wouldn’t come out.

“Do you not want your parents to meet me?”

I sighed. It’s not always convenient to date intelligent, perceptive girls.

“Uh.” I rifled through a list of other possible coverups. Then I gave up. Lying can be a lot of trouble.

“Only two things might bother them. You’re not Korean, and you’re a girl.”

“Oh,” she said.

“My parents don’t want me to date until I get to college, and then it’s got to be a Korean girl.”

“Oh.” She looked disappointed.

“You’ll meet them someday,” I told her, pulling her a little closer, even though a fast song had begun. “We just don’t always see eye to eye on stuff, especially me and my dad. All I can do is ask you to be patient, I guess.”

“I understand,” she said.

We ended up dancing more and more into the shadows away from the center of the dance floor. I pushed my head toward hers in the dark. She was exactly the right height. I heard the sea in my ears.

It’s strange how life moves in fits and starts. During the first day at school, minutes passed agonizingly slowly. Now, as we kissed, time was a bullet train hurtling through the black of a tunnel.

The coaches had decided to start watching our weekly game tapes at ALL-PRO’S house. Before, we’d watched them in the cold and damp of the gym, crammed in front of the grainy screen provided by the AV department. The Ripanens’ basement was a big improvement, fully carpeted with a complete home-entertainment center and a billion comfy seats.

There is something excruciating about watching yourself on video. The first time I saw myself on film, it was like, who’s
that?
What I saw onscreen was some doofus galoomping gracelessly up to the ball and hacking at it. It couldn’t have been me—except he was wearing my number, 22. Later, I saw the same guy fumble a ball, in a manner worthy of
America’s Funniest Home Videos.

To put it mildly, it was torture being forced to sit through endless slo-mos. About the only good thing was that the guys didn’t rag on you, because soon enough the coaches would point to something they
did wrong. The video eye sees everything.

We settled comfortably in front of a wide-screen TV. Next to it someone had made a bookshelf. I admired the woodwork, definitely A+ shopwork. In the other corner was a home gym, situated so that you could watch TV or listen to music while you worked out. No wonder
ALL-PRO
was all-pro.

Kearny popped in the tape of our last game with Moose Creek and yelled at us for a while. Then the homemade tape footage fuzzed out, giving way to real TV sports. Channel Five, state tournament. Moose Creek versus Elko Center. Coach Kearny fast-forwarded through the commercials and pregame show.

The players collided on the screen. They bashed into each other like angry rams. They tackled, blocked, punched, gouged, and scored. We began to push and shove each other off the couches.

This showing was more than a strategy session, I was realizing. If we managed to beat Moose Creek, that would be us down there at the Humphrey Dome, on TV. Talk about motivation.

Then the coaches left. Rom dug out the videos he’d picked up at one of the video stores. Iron River, which had no bookstore, had three video stores.

“So did you get a football movie or something?” asked Mikko.

“Naw,” said Rom, looking sidewise at me. “I got us some kung-phooey movies.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Jean-Pierre Vandervanter. He’s good.”

Leave it to Rom to know exactly how to work my nerves. At my tae kwon do
dojang,
a bunch of us had practically formed a club of guys who hated those white-guy martial-arts movies. We were sure we could beat any of their butts in a
real
fight. Jean-Pierre especially annoyed me because he went around claiming to be some kickboxing champion, but no one had ever seen him fight outside of a movie set.

I knew I was going to hate this one when it opened with weird
boing-boing
Asian music.

The plot of the movie was this: Jean-Pierre’s brother had been brutally tortured and murdered by some incredibly ugly Chinese martial artists. So J.P. goes to China to avenge him. He meets this beautiful Chinese woman (a girl, really) whose father is about a thousand years old and happens to be the martial-arts monk at the Shaolin Temple. She, for her part, does things like walk on J.P.’s back to help him with his “training.”

J.P. beats all the Chinese guys, no problem, using all the tae kwon do moves—tornado kicks, somersault kicks—showy stuff you’d never use in a real fight. He earns the undying gratitude of the lotus blossom and her family because those evil guys were also the bandits who had terrorized their village for years.

*  *  *

Wouldn’t you know it, but Rom had not one but two of those movies. The next one was
Kickboxer in Korea,
for God’s sake. Of course the Korean guy is an ugly stupid mo-fo who wears a Korean flag on top of his head—upside down, I might add—and he tries to throw J.P.’s concentration off by doing things like kidnapping and raping J.P.’s new (Korean) girlfriend. I’d never seen a Korean guy who had a Chuckie-the-killer-doll smile or a brow thick enough to park a car on, unless it was in the Museum of Natural History.

“Kill! Kill the chink!” Rom yelled, as the Chuckie-smiling “Korean” guy threw some powder in J.P.’s face to make him blind. “Can’t trust those lousy chinks—they cheat! You’re way better than him. Kill him!”

Chinks. Uh-huh.

My guts tightened. The room seemed to grow very, very still.

Rom snuck a look at me as if to say, “What are you going to do about it, huh?”

A few of the guys shifted in their seats. Even Mikko looked like he didn’t know what to do.

The movie kept on going. Jean-Pierre kept pummeling the Asian baddies, who were coming out of the woodwork, all buckteeth and slit eyes, straight from central casting.

“Buncha chinks,” Rom growled at the screen.

“Shut
up!”
I yelled, jumping to my feet. Everyone looked at me.

“Geez, I’m just joking,” Rom said innocently. “What are you getting so uptight for? It isn’t like I’m calling
you
a name. I’m doing it to the guys on-screen.”

“Yeah, like hell.”

“You calling me a liar?”

“You calling Rom a liar?” Jimmi echoed.

“You don’t know crap about martial arts,” I said.

“Oh, yah, and you do?”

“Koreans invented tae kwon do, which is the stuff Jean-Pierre is doing.”

Rom laughed.

“Okay, so how come there are no Korean martial-arts heroes? Who’s the Korean Jean-Pierre? Or Dolphin Lundegaard? Or Stephen Segull?”

“They’re all fakes!” I yelled.

There was some kind of pressure building inside me. I wanted to quit arguing with Rom and just kill him.

“Yah,” Rom said lazily. There was a knowing gleam in his eye. “Like fer sure, if a bunch of guys jumped you, you could kill ’em, huh?”

My mind leaped back to the raunchy taste of the towel shoved in my mouth. The guys jumping out of nowhere.

“A little necessary roughness, huh?”

I ran over to the pile of scrap lumber by the
bookshelf and grabbed a few of the leftover boards. They were pine, sanded. Perfect.

“Scrap?” I said to Mikko. He just stared at me.

“You don’t need these, right?” I turned my voice up. He nodded uncertainly.

“Okay, here, Rom, Jimmi, come up here and prove your manhood,” I said, thrusting the boards toward them. “Hold these and I’ll show you what I can do.”