Like You'd Understand, Anyway

We are drawn up on the legion's left. At the crucial time, we know, the cavalry will appear from behind the settlement, sealing the matter. On this day, with my father somewhere lost in the melee off to my right, we will all of us together become the avenging right arm of the empire. We will execute what will be reported back to the provincial capital as a successful punitive raid. I will myself record the chronicle with my one good eye. I will write, When we broke through the walls and into the settlement we killed every living thing The women, the children, the dogs, the goats were cut in half and dismembered. While the killing was at its height pillaging was forbidden. When the killing was ended the trumpets sounded the recall. Individuals were selected from each maniple to carry out the pillaging. The rest of the force remained alert to a counterattack from beyond the settlement. The settlement was put to the torch. The settlement was razed to the ground. The building stones were scattered. The fields were sown with salt. My comrades-in-arms will think no more of me than before. My father and I will continue to probe and distress our threadbare connections. And what my mother will say about her marriage, weeping with bitterness in a sun-suffused haze a full summer later, will bring back to me my last view of the site after the Twentieth Tungrians and the Ninth Legion had finished with it, pecked over by crows and studded with the occasional shattered pilum: “We honor nothing by being the way we are. We make a desolation and we call it peace.”

Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak

Guy's hurt? Fuck 'im. Guy can't get up, play's still going? Run his ass over. Whistle's blown? Stretcher bearer time. Grab a blow and let the Sisters of Mercy do their thing.

“Faggots,” Wainwright says whenever the trainers come out for someone. He means the trainers.

We're not talking games, here. We're talking summer practice, two-a-days, guys keeling over in the heat. When more than one guy has the dry heaves we call it Hee Haw because of the sound.

“That shit's not funny,” somebody'll say when they see us laughing. Some fat shit, holding his knees, blowing chow. “Dude for the Vikings died.”

We have it written in chalk and boxed on a corner of the blackboard that doesn't get erased: trample the dead, hurdle the weak. When the coaches first wrote it, they spelled it e-l, both times. “Dumb fucks,” Wainwright said when he saw it. He rubbed it out with his arm and wrote it right.

“Who's been screwing with my inspirational slogans?” our defensive coordinator wanted to know.

“I been,” Wainwright told him. It was after the afternoon half of a two-a-day and those of us not on fluids or hurling were on the rug, our legs spread out, because it felt cooler than the benches or we couldn't get up to the benches. “Just streamlining the spelling, Coach.”

“You better be careful you don't get on my list, Wainwright,” Coach told him.

“I'm on everybody's list, Coach,” Wainwright told him back.

Wainwright's a blue chipper's blue chipper. The top prospects in all of the regular and online rating services are always quarterbacks or running backs or wide receivers. He's been the cover of Street & Smith's High School Edition two years running at linebacker. “L.T. never made the cover,” I tell him.

“I don't think they had one for high school back then,” he tells me.

We argue on the way home from practice as to whether L.T. really wanted to kill people out there.

It's a hundred degrees with eighty percent humidity. Wainwright sweats right down the center of his chest, like he's wearing big stripes. Girls line the road we take home, just so they can say they saw him.

We want to cause panic on the field one hundred percent of the time. As far as we can tell, when it came to that, L.T. came the closest. We put him up there in the ninetieth percentile.

“You know how when you get licorice and you double it to get more in your mouth at once?” he said. “That's what he did to Theisman's thigh.”

L.T. was also the snot bubble guy. He said his favorite hits were the ones that popped a snot bubble out of the ball carrier's nose.