Tough Day for the Army (8 page)

Oh, how she filled out that sweater!

We mean it's not our fault; you know that TiVo has always been a little screwy. Gets things wrong all the time it does.

There's no shame in calling time, jogging down the foul line, and discussing options. There's no hurry. It's baseball. So why didn't we do it? Arrrrggggghhhhh!

As it turns out, Larry Billings's mother is deceased, so where we indicated that “only his mother
calls
him Lawrence” we should have said
called.
We deeply regret the error. In fact, we owe you one, Lar.

We don't regret keeping our mouth shut over the postgame getting- stuffed-into-the-locker incident. We are no stoolie.

We're thankful to the Hauer gun company for the tendency of their HP-9 model to jam when fired from a nonlevel position. We imagine that in retrospect, despite the yelling and the banging of the gun first on the standing lamp, then on the dresser, then lamp, and finally the fleshy spot where our neck meets our shoulder, Sheriff Seager is thankful as well, since the actual firing of a gun at another person, especially an unarmed one without any clothes on, almost always leads to serious, nearly permanent regrets. You'd have to ask him about that, though.

There is a certain precise ballet to the double play. Because of this, they are rare in high school ball. Nevertheless, we regret not running our feeble grounder out harder. We said this over and over at the time. Sorry sorry sorry, please don't. Ouch ouch. Sorry sorry sorry, so sorry. Ouch.

Sometimes we have regrets over finding and realizing love late in life, but these regrets are eased by love's presence.

Apparently it's always “Larry,” never “Lar.” This won't happen again, we swear. Let us buy you a beer.

Truthfully, we were a little surprised that we made contact at all, so it wasn't a failure to run hard, but the split-second (or slightly longer than split-second) hesitation that killed us. Once we started running, it was really as fast as we could manage.

That the realization of this love has come at the expense of another man causes barely noticeable regrets.

We're conflicted about our father's tears on that night after we failed to move the runner over and were stuffed in the locker.

Did the Hauer gun company have to make the butt of the HP-9 model so hard and kind of pointy? We regret they decided to do that for sure. Our shoulder feels like it's going to hurt for some time. Do you hear that, the clicking noise when it's raised? There it is again. Do you think it's a tendon?

We still do regret that we couldn't run faster.

We double-checked it, time, date, everything. We looked the date up on the calendar and the channel in the on-screen guide. We were very thorough and careful because we knew it was important.

If we'd really been thinking, rather than screaming and pounding at the inside of the locker door, knowing full well that the teammates who stripped us naked, black-markered “Loser” on our forehead, and shut us in the locker in the first place were not going to let us out, we would have tried some deep, centering breaths, in order to get as comfortable as possible while waiting for morning's custodial crew.

We lied about having “barely noticeable” regrets over our love coming at the expense of another man. Truth is, we have no regrets at all. None.

We regret offering to buy Larry Billings, who is, we've come to find out, a recovering alcoholic, a beer.

None.

You see, the thing about this prefabricated furniture is that the predrilled holes for the premeasured screws never quite line up, which means you really have to torque those things in there in order to get it all assembled, only to realize that the faux-woodgrain contact-paper side is facing the wrong way is really frustrating, and after a couple of hours of sweat getting the thing so it at least stands up mostly level and unwobbly, thinking about starting over again makes us want to cry, which is something we haven't done in quite a few years.

Words of praise go out to the makers of the Megaflex progressive resistance muscle training system. No regrets about that purchase, no sirs!

Julie Norman releasing us from the locker imprisonment was a mixed blessing to be sure. On the plus side, we did not have to wait for the custodial crew, and just after we tumbled from the locker, there was the brief clutching to her sweater-covered chest, the smell of fall and pencil erasers. But there was also her sad eyes on our cold, fish-belly skin. That was hard to take.

While we're glad that Sheriff Seager “must've slipped on the rug” (as he claims) after landing the initial shoulder blow with the Hauer HP-9, we think it's more likely that our work with the Megaflex had something to do with it. Nonetheless, we're also grateful that the state has some really low fitness-recheck requirements for its law enforcement officers.

On the other hand, we suspect, and have suspected for some time, that “recyclables” get dumped into the same trash pile as everything else, which would make the concept of recycling pretty much moot.

We admit that we weren't thinking of this originally, but perhaps Larry Billings would be interested in a nonalcoholic beer. We had an uncle once who had his trouble with the ale and spirits, but he would drink the nonalcoholic beer. We'd like to do something to soothe our regrets.

We regret that the school administration stocked the locker-room shower with the liquid, nonfoaming, antibacterial soap. It does not work for scrubbing off marker, nor does it leave one smelling or feeling fresh after a couple hours inside a gym locker. It leaves one smelling like the bottom of a chemistry-lab sink.

We have slight qualms about digging our knee so hard into Sheriff Seager's back as Mrs. Julie Seager née Norman lashed his hands and feet with lamp cord, allowing us to retrieve our clothes and run to the Sundowner Motor Lodge, Route 14, just past the public access and before the spot where the old oak fell during that microburst last summer.

At the time, we were certain that our father's tears were over our failure at the plate, or our pathetic appearance: wrapped in towels, feet black from the barefoot walk home, forehead scrubbed raw to near bleeding. We thought (foolishly) that he was ashamed.

We shouldn't have lied about that TiVo thing earlier. The truth is we forgot, or actually we remembered ten minutes into the show, which we thought would look bad considering our rock-solid promise to do this one thing, so we made up that other story, which actually worked, we think, which leads us to believe we might come to regret this little confession.

We think now that our father meant to comfort us, that he was waiting for us, and as he was waiting, the tears just got the better of him. We should have known this all along, but regret the self- absorption of youth that leads one to think the whole world is aligned against them. In our defense, it had been a very bad evening. We had reason to believe the worst about people.

We are grateful for the chalky mints in the dented tin dish at the front desk of the Sundowner Motor Lodge because we left without toothbrushes and all the stores were closed, and fresh breath was important at the time.

What is clear is that the sort of people who buy prefabricated furniture (which we are) are the kind of people unlikely to be bothered by imperfect assembly.

Regarding the Larry situation, we've known guys who'll fall off the wagon just smelling a beer, and if Larry's one of those guys, then even a nonalcoholic beer is probably a bad idea.

That small-dick crack regarding Sheriff Seager was unfair. We take it back, despite its obvious truth. Of course, it's easy to be charitable when one has secured the ultimate victory and said victory involves long sessions of lovemaking with a girl you've loved since you first saw her sweater.

How do we know this about our father, then? Have we discussed that evening? No. Let us say this, though: He lives alone now. He makes model ships inside bottles. He uses strands saved from our mother's hair to lash the tiny sailcloth to the miniature mast. We think this means something.

We're thankful for video on demand and their ameliorative effects on people who miss pivotal episodes of their favorite family dramas due to TiVo failures.

If we were to outlive her, which we doubt will happen, but if so, we think we may be like our father and use something of her to make something else. But her hair falls in long curls, not straight like our mother's. We'd have to think of something different.

In truth, the recyclables winding up with the piles of nonrecyclable trash doesn't really bother us all that much. At this moment, to us, it appears that everything is abundant.

Here we are in the house weight room, though it is not really the weight room because it is the boiler room, the place where the boiler is, the boiler that heats the house we live in together as brothers.

It is an old house. And at night, in the cold months, the boiler clangs and clanks, which tells us that it is working at least.

It is a fraternity house, not a frat house. Do you call your mother a “mutt?” Your country a… you get the idea.

Everyone who has ever lived in the house, living or dead, is a brother. This is how it has worked, always.

The boiler room is where we also decided to lift weights because there was room for benches and barbells and it's important to exercise so we look good. We don't say virile because if we said that word it would sound gay, but that's essentially what's going on. We have an image to maintain, after all, a good one. Masculine virtue, emphasis on the masculine. When you say our letters there are associations, positive ones, and there's a certain duty to nurture what our other brothers before us have built.

Schmitty is the obvious choice for what we have planned, the reason we are in the weight room/boiler room. And what we have planned is to waterboard Schmitty.

We can't remember whose idea it was. Inside the house we are either alone or in packs of three or more, never two, because if two of us are seen coming out of a room together, we will say something like,
What were you two faggots up to in there?

We always laugh at that. To react otherwise means we were definitely up to some faggoty shit, because why would we be so pissed if we weren't 69-ing each other like a couple of complete homos? Which is to say we were in a group of at least three and more likely five or more when we said,
You know what we should do? We should do that waterboarding shit. To the pledges.

And then, after a couple seconds' thought, we replied,
That really would be badass, waterboarding our pledges.

We shared a chorus of
yeah
and
totally
, and we took out our phones and googled waterboarding videos, and as we watched them we realized that this idea was even better than first thought because that shit is really badass. We wouldn't even need to have rush anymore because waterboarding sells itself. Everyone will know that we are the fraternity so badass that people are willing to be waterboarded to belong.

That is so fucked up
, we said.
And also fuckingtabulously badass.

We knew that someone had to try it first, to make sure we knew how to do it, because experience tells us the quickest way to shut down a chapter is to kill a pledge.

We decided on Schmitty, who is just now complaining a little about the ropes lashing him to the decline weight bench being too tight. We decided on Schmitty because Schmitty is tough, and also loves the house. Schmitty already has our letters branded on his ass, which is cool, not faggoty, even though all of us were staring at Schmitty's naked, rather muscular butt when it happened.

The branding was way badass. It was the kind of thing we talked about doing all the time, but Schmitty was the only one who agreed to it, and not only did Schmitty go through with it, but even as a couple of us blew chunks at the smell of Schmitty's ass flesh burning, Schmitty just growled like a motherfucking animal until it was done, and sometimes during chapter meetings—which are secret, so we're not supposed to tell this—when we say something that Schmitty agrees with, he drops his pants and flashes the brand and the debate is ended.

Schmitty was the obvious choice for those reasons, and also because he was already in the weight room on the very decline bench to which he is now strapped. The bench is in the decline position in order for Schmitty to work the lower portion of his pectoral muscles, and also because when you waterboard someone you place a cloth over their nose and mouth and then pour water over them to simulate drowning, and if you don't place them in a decline position, the water does not run over the nostrils in sufficient volume to simulate drowning.

This is what we emphasize to Schmitty, that the drowning is simulated, not actual, because he's starting to alternate between looking anxious and angry, pulling harder and harder on the ropes as we drape an old gym towel over his face.
We're not really going to kill you, dumbass
, we say. We're pretty sure Schmitty agreed to this, but in the end it doesn't matter, because we've decided that this is what needs doing.

There is very little light in the weight/boiler room, just a sixty-watt bulb dangling from a single fixture. The sweat on Schmitty's pectorals shines in this light. Schmitty can bench 305 for 12 reps, which is impressive. The floor is concrete slab with long cracks running through it, some of them patched. Schmitty is trying to blow the towel off his face, thrashing his head around, but we remedy this by grabbing the towel ends and pinning Schmitty's head to the bench. The tendons in his neck flex memorably.

It is hot in the boiler room because it is the boiler room. Generations of water stains that look like Rorschach blots mar the brick walls.

We only have enough rope to tie Schmitty's arms, so we decide to sit on his legs, which had been thrashing around like he is treading water, which we recognize is not an example of irony.