Like You'd Understand, Anyway

They moved me to defense pretty much when I arrived. I didn't have the foot speed. Apparently heart didn't matter. So I went after any running back on the field. If they wouldn't let me be a running back, I'd punish the guys who were. And that was before I found out about this kid Corey. The coaching staff loved it, until they didn't. “He's on our side, son,” Big Coach called out to me after a headhunter hit in practice. It got a laugh from the other coaches.

First day was picture day. They gave me number 47. I sat there thinking how great this was. Then I looked around and saw two more number 47s.

I came in at 140 pounds and ate and pumped my way up to 155. I got myself out of JV my sophomore year, halfway through our scrimmage with Quanah. On the second half kickoff I did a surface-to-air thing with their lead guy on the wedge and blew him back into their ballcarrier, who went ass over shoulder pads and fumbled. I opened my eyes and there was the ball and I rolled over and pulled it in. I was on the Web site under both Hit of the Week and HumDuck of the Week. The HumDuck face was superimposed over my helmet. It looked like some Donald Duckish freak was trying to kill someone.

The next practice I was working out with the varsity. Thank God the offense was working on its option, because I had no idea what our coverages were at that point.

Some varsities are all seniors. That's how rare it is.

Wainwright had already moved up. Half the crowds at our scrimmages were there to see him. I was pretty much in a state of panic about being left behind.

Around here, Big Coach likes to remind us, we live under the shade of trees we didn't plant and drink from wells we didn't dig. There's a shitload of tradition, is what he means.

Wainwright's the main upholder of that tradition as far as everybody else is concerned. Players for other teams: they're wearing another color and they're on his field. He takes it personally.

I try to ride that wave but there are mean dogs and mad dogs, and it's not that easy to make the leap.

Our sophomore year we were trailing Childress early and their halfback had already ripped off four or five ten-yard runs against us. “You boys don't tackle all that well,” their center said when we were all unpiling. Later he tried to pull on a trap and I held him up and Wainwright caught him at full speed with his head turned. We stayed over him while the trainers worked on him. “You boys don't stay conscious all that well,” Wainwright told him when he came to.

Now that Wainwright and me're juniors, we're on a mission. He wants to kill everybody in sight starting with whoever's in front of him and I want to kill everybody in sight starting with that kid Corey. Nobody wants to practice with us. We both have a thing for our fullback. The kid's father comes to every single one of his practices to watch his son get that big ass up in the air and put his head down and go. So Wainwright and me meet him in the hole and blow him up, time after time. We just decleat him. Guys'll be getting back up and he'll be putting a shoe back on.

His dad tried to talk to us after one practice, but the coaches broke it up.

We have other ways of passing time too, like throwing golf balls out of the stadium when standing on the fifty-yard line.

It's got to be five hundred miles to Beaumont. It's all the way over by Louisiana.

Midseason sophomore year I tore my MCL. It sounded like someone cracking walnuts in my knee. Wainwright was flying by when it happened and imitated the sound I made for weeks afterwards. I'd done this whimpering thing before I could stop myself. “Oooo, it hurts,” he said in this falsetto whenever he saw me gimping around. They scoped it out, supposedly, but something fucked up and it kept catching and locking, and swelled up. I stumped around for a week or two looking for sympathy and then late one afternoon during this ice storm — it was like black outside — Coach saw me doing nothing in the locker room and asked if I wanted to play the next week. Shit yeah, I told him. I stumped back and forth to show him I was All Heart. “Let me see you run, then,” he said. I looked around the locker room. “Outside,” he said. I went out in shorts and quarter-inch cleats for the ice. Once I got out into the sleet I poked my head back in. “It's fucking slippery, Coach,” I said. I demonstrated by skating my foot around even with the cleats. The cement steps were like a hockey rink.

“You don't haveta play,” he said. “And watch your language.”

Bite me, I thought. I ran like a fucking gazelle. I was never colder in my life. Ice built up on one side of my face from the wind.

I swear more than most people on the team. A lotta Christians around here. We moved from Rahway, New Jersey, when I was in seventh grade.

Anyway, my knee was fine after that.

“I gotta be ready for Port Neches-Groves,” I told Wainwright during my rehab.