Slot Machine (3 page)

Frank just tilted a glance my way, and I did my thing. I raised my hand, put on my Boy Scout face, and said, “I swear. It’s the truth. It’s all true.”

“Thank you,” Frank said, bowing graciously.

“No, thank
you
,” I replied. I never wanted him to stop.

“Listen, guys,” Frank went on, “I don’t blame you. Half the time I look at my life and I can hardly believe it myself. But there it is.”

“So what happened?” an impatient desperate small voice shot through.

“Well, I just told her, I said, Sis, I’m tight with the Lord, and we got an agreement: I don’t steal
his
chicks, and he doesn’t throw me into no whales or turn me into salt.”

“What did she do? Come on?”

Out of his version of modesty, Frankie gestured to me to finish.

“She killed herself,” I said flatly.

They all moaned; somebody booed.

“Well, they transferred her anyway, after she took the pills. And we
heard
that the next time she really did it, with the hair dryer in the bathtub.”

“Lights out,” the voice called, and the lights snapped immediately off.

“Nnnnnnnaked. And dead. In the bathtub,” Frankie hummed like the devil in the darkness.

Frankie always told stories to get a reaction. Laughs, applause, and gasps for Frank were like blood for a vampire. So he was probably satisfied, after lights-out, to hear the symphony of rusty bedsprings
eek-eek
ing all over the barracks.

“Pace yourselves, boys,” I thought, “or you’ll never survive three weeks with the guy.”

Mrs. Bishop,

There are no girls here, Ma. None. Not even a nun. Even the big ugly nurse and his assistant are male. Did you know about this? If it were not for Frankie’s imagination, we would all be dangerously lonely here. Have we thought this out all the way? Do we think this is a good thing for me at this stage? All right let it be on your head, Ma.

Fine. Whatever. I’m sorry, I’m being bratty. I shouldn’t be raining on
your
summer. How are those World Cup games going anyway? Pretty ripping, huh? Was that you the paper showed sitting in the party tent with Placido Domingo after Italy-Spain in Foxboro? He was looking down your dress, you know. Did I
not
tell you to avoid the European men while I’m away?

No Longer Your Concern,

Mr. Bishop

W
HAT TO DO WITH
the fat guys? They don’t know what to do with the fat guys. The fat guys don’t fit the Plan, the Philosophy, the shorts. Red shorts. Everybody’s got to wear them. The Plan is that all the fine young men here can succeed if they are properly guided to the right sports activity for them. The raw material is in there, in each and every one of us, and it can be molded with the proper instruction at the earliest levels—before we get too screwed up.

I tried to tell them. I tried earnestly to tell them that my insides were every bit as flabby as my outsides. They wouldn’t hear of it. None of the people in charge here—and they were
all
in charge, except for the kids—could conceive of this. They’d call up their directory of everything they knew about young men’s insides, and that profile would not show up. The soft kid, the kid who could not play anything and who did not even care about it. They were sorry, but that kid did not exist.

“We’ll find what you’re hidin’ inside there,” said Thor, my Cluster Leader. He grabbed two fistfuls of fat at my beltline and yanked me around as he said it, like a hundred people had done before him.

Why do people think that’s funny?

Football, of course. Their response to a fat kid is always football. They don’t know what else to do. They figure they’re going to melt away my outside and find a football-player-shaped monster lurking on the inside.

They just wouldn’t listen.

“Don’t cry, goddammit,” the coach screamed. It was my third play from scrimmage, eight minutes and three head slaps into my football career. “It’s a head slap. It’s illegal, but it happens all the time. You can’t
cry
about it. Jesus.” He turned his back on me and stalked away, personally offended by my behavior. Then he paced, as violent people will do when they’re trying to get it under control.

I wasn’t crying, anyhow. Yes, I was upset, and yes, there were tears splashing down my face, but I was not crying. They were just those pain tears, the kind that come out when your mind says “no way, not now, cannot cry here” but your body knows better and goes ahead unauthorized.

I could feel around me that I was getting looks from the four score and seven other gridiron monkeys who stood in temporary grunt-free silence all over the field. Hell, half of them had cried already, but they channeled their pain in a much more acceptable way: They went on and maimed somebody else.

Composed, Coach came back as I lined up again. He screamed right into the little one-inch earhole on the right side of my helmet, so it sounded like he had a bullhorn pressed to the side of my head. “Do not let him get by you again! Your quarterback was a dead man on that last play! Protect the passer! Don’t cry! Don’t cry!”

“I was not crying,” I yelled, because it seemed pretty important to establish that. It didn’t matter; the coach was already back to pacing, walking me off his mind.

The snap, my man rushed me. Pushed me, two hands flat on my chest.
Bam
. Pushed me again, blasting me back a couple more steps. I tried to dig in. Useless. Crowded me.
Clack
, his helmet banged into mine. One punch in the stomach. My wind gone. I was practically running backward. “Jesus Christ,” I heard the desperate-sounding quarterback behind me say. I was just trying to fend my man off now with stiff arms, waving hands.
Bang
! Left-side head slap nearly knocked me over until
Bang
! right-side head slap rocked me the other way. My head hit the turf before my hands could brace me. I heard the thud of the quarterback being driven into the ground behind me.

I couldn’t get right up. Which was not a problem. Coach came to me.

“Stop crying,” he screamed. “Jesus, I hate that.” He lunged at me as he spoke, like he was going to hit me himself.

It didn’t bother me much. I had enough on my plate just trying to get up. As I pushed to try and get some space between my throbbing head and the earth, it felt as if I was lifting the planet off of me, rather than vice versa. I paused for a few seconds on all fours, touched my face lightly with my fingertips, and felt the blood drip from my nose. A couple of guys got me by the armpits and brought me to the nurse’s station.

Sick bay. Full of slackers like me. Skinny kids and fat kids. Sick bay—or “Injured list” or “IL,” as they prefer to call it—is a very hot ticket, especially in the first few days of retreat.

In fact it’s so popular that they issue us vouchers for IL time. You get four vouchers, each good for an hour with the nurse, or a half day if he declares you a wreck. Seems that in years past out-of-shape guys were always taking dives and hiding out in sick bay for most of camp. Hence the voucher system. If you ran out of vouchers, you were not allowed to go to the nurse if you could get there under your own power. And if you couldn’t, it was a judgment call made by the coach.

I was lying on my cot, a cool ice bag across my sinuses, musing on a way to retroactively flunk my way back into junior high, when the guy in the next cot broke the dream.

“What you in for?”

I opened my eyes, turned slightly to look. “Wow,” I said as I took him all in. He was lying on his stomach, stretching out way over both ends of his little cot, even farther than I overlapped the sides of mine. Can’t have the tubs and beanpoles getting too comfortable down at the clinic, now, can we?

To the untrained eye, this could have been a player. But one glance and I knew better. I recognized the look.

“Basketball slot, huh?” I said wisely.

He nodded, then winced with the pain of nodding. “Football slot?” he asked in return.

“Ya,” I said. “What happened?”

“Undercut. Went up for a rebound and somebody took my legs out from under me, landed right on my back. You?”

“Head slaps. Nosebleeds. Public humiliation.” I kept nodding as I talked, he kept nodding as he listened. Like we’d all been here before, more or less.

The nurse’s assistant, Butch, came over and stood between our cots. Regaining speech control was the official first sign of readiness to return to the general population. Butch himself barely qualified. “You can get up?” he said to my new geeky friend.

“I not can get up,” he grunted slowly.

When I laughed, Butch set himself on me. “You. Bleeding stop?”

I removed the ice pack, brought two fingers to my nostrils.

“Hey. Do that again,” Butch insisted.

“What? This?” I asked, and touched my nose again.

Butch pulled me up by the wrist. “Hell, if you can do that, you’re ready to go back. Stop wastin’ my time.”

Before I was forced out, I leaned down toward my comrade. “Elvin Bishop,” I said, and shook his hand.

“Paul Burman,” he said in return. He smiled through real pain. “Cool. I haven’t actually made any friends here yet.”

I didn’t want to lead him on. “Oh, well, see I already have two friends, so I’m all set for now. But... well, we’ll see.” Then I dropped into a whisper for what I was really after: “This for real?” I asked, pointing at his back.

He nodded.

“Good for you, Paul. Listen, you know where a guy can get his hands on a couple of extra vouchers?”

“Nah. But you dig any up, let me know.”

I said I would, then felt myself being tugged by the back of my T-shirt. Back
there
. My heart sank.

“I’ll see you, Elvin,” Paul said, yelling straight down into the floor. “Probably right here, I’ll see you.” Probably he was right. I returned to the fields.

“No, there’s nothing I can do about it. You’ve
gotta
be a lineman,” the coach growled, too disgusted to even scream at me now. “What am I gonna do, make you a flippin’ cornerback?” He got a lot of laughs with that one. Laughs from assistant coaches. Laughs from jock student football team counselors. Laughs from kids who were built to be real cornerbacks.

Laughs from lumpy scared fat kids. Who should have been better than that.

That was when I shut up.

I took my slot and I didn’t make a sound about it. I played both sides of the ball. It didn’t matter a whole lot except that when I was a defensive lineman I didn’t get beat so bad. One time I even made a tackle when the running back ran right into me, drilled me with his helmet in my belly.

I fell down. I gasped for breath, every play. I ate wedge-shaped orange pieces and threw the peels on the ground with two thousand other peels. I sweated. My armpits, my chest, my back, the crotch of my too-tight red shorts were all soaked through before anybody else’s. But then it all blended together, and my stuff just looked darker. My nose bled two more times, once from a head slap, once when a guy stuck his fingers up through my face mask.

Three o’clock the whistle screeched. I made it. Without a sound, without a tear. Walked off the field just like everybody else. Only last. By a long way.

Mother of all Mothers,

Wish you were here.

I know that all kids write that from camp, but
I
really mean it. I wish you were here with me today, shoulder to shoulder, holding that line. Together we could have done it. As it was, my success was a little spotty.

I did have a spiritual moment, though. Once when I had a little unscheduled “Reflective Period” at the bottom of a pig pile, I saw a tunnel and a glow and somebody foggy saying, “Come to the light. Come to the light.” She looked like you. But that wouldn’t be you, Ma, now would it Ma?

If this is looking a little squiggly it’s because I’m writing with my left hand. Why am I writing with my left hand? Because that’s the hand that still has two fingers that can curl. Doesn’t look half bad, though, does it? There you go, another hidden skill the camp experience has drawn out of me. I was really dogging it back home, wasn’t I? Tomorrow they’re going to have me snag a salmon out of the river with my teeth.

Ug,

Elvin, Son of a Bishop

P.S. I’m getting a lot of special attention here from the football coach. I think I’m his favorite. You better watch out or you could lose me. When this is all over, I just might be going home with Knute.

P
AIN IS ONE THING
. Pain is trying to hang a picture of Curly Howard on your bedroom wall and bashing yourself in the head with the rounded end of a ball peen hammer, just like Curly would have done. I’ve had that. Pain is food poisoning from meat knishes. I’ve had that. Pain is trying to help out around the house, washing the dishes, and just as your mother says, “Careful of the blades on that food processor...” I’ve had that.

But this. The morning after the first day of football. I had slogged through thirteen pretty rugged years up to this point, yet I had no idea a feeling like this was possible. A picture of my mind would have looked like a rat frantically scurrying around a maze, trying to locate one tiny spot that was not searing hot and shot through with spikes of pain. My joints, my muscles, my skin, my organs, there was not a safe, pain-free spot anywhere, inside or out.

I woke at four thirty. I lay stiff until five. It was peaceful at first, in a near-death sort of way. An owl hooted mellowlike. Then dawn broke, the owl fell asleep, and some mental wild birds started screeching—at me. In my head, the screeches came together and sounded like words, the way the loon’s call sounds like “Looooon.”

Outta bed. Outta bed,
one bird called.

Ouch,
the other replied.

Outta bed. Ouch. Outta bed. Ouch. Outta bed. Ouch.

I got out of bed. Ouch. I was aware, way too aware, of being, of being here, of being alive, whatever that amounted to. I couldn’t just float through this the way I usually could when I wanted to be where I wasn’t. I couldn’t pretend, imagine it away, the way I needed to. With every step, every flex, the muscle or joint or bone would scream, reminding me, “
Zing
! You’re still here.
Zing
! It’s pretty bad.
Zing
! There’s plenty more where this came from. Today.” I closed my eyes and sniffed up the wood of the old floor and the pine just outside. There was an actual outdoorsy camp feel to the place, retreat or not, that was reachable and pleasant when everybody was asleep. I was almost there. I almost reached it, that better place.