by Don DeLillo
“Pussy,” he said.
I opened my eyes and searched the silent lawns.
12
WE WERE DOING simple calisthenics, row upon row of us, bending, breathing and stretching, instructing our collective soul in the disciplines necessary to make us one body, a thing of ninety legs. Two of the coaches, George Owen and Brian Tweego, walked through the ranks, bestowing their shrill blessing on prince and dog alike. At Tweego’s command we switched to squat-jumps. Automatically my teammates groaned and just as automatically I became elated. My body surged and dropped; my mind repeated the process. The indifferent drift of time and all things filled me with affection for the universe. I squatted and jumped and jumped and squatted. Life was simplified by these afternoons of opposites and affinities. Eventually we headed toward the far goal posts for the first of two laps. I ran in a group that included Buddy Shock, Tim Flanders and Howard Lowry. When we were finished we watched the offensive linemen charge the blocking sled. These were Tweego’s people and he screamed at them as he rode the sled, reviling Bloomberg and Onan Moley in particular. Creed himself stood about twenty yards off to the side, arms folded, eyes very busy beneath the peak of his black baseball cap.
“Coach is a man of destiny,” Tim Flanders said. “They’re a vanishing breed. My grandfather was a man of destiny. On my father’s side. His whole identity was dominated by some tremendous vision.”
“Identity,” Buddy Shock said. “An equality satisfied by all possible values of the variables for which the standardized expressions involved in the equality are quantitatively determined.”
“What happened to your grandfather?” I said.
“He was killed in an industrial accident,” Flanders said. “He was burned beyond recognition. Selective ordnance. You know what that is, don’t you?”
“You’re not saying that was his destiny. To get burned beyond recognition.”
“Of course not.”
“Then what was his destiny?”
“He never attained it, Gary. It was the accident that prevented him from attaining it.”
“Then how do you know he was a man of destiny?”
“Same way I know Coach is a man of destiny. He sits up nights. He has piercing eyes. You never see him in a phone booth.”
Garland Hobbs strolled over to join us. He was tall and solidly constructed, about six-four and 215, good-looking in a blank way, faintly impressive, like a tall motel. He had a quarterback’s gait, slack and expensive.
“What’s your comment on the big move?” I said.
“What move is that?”
“Switching Taft Robinson to quarterback. We’d like your comment.”
“Switching shit,” he said.
“It’s the truth, Hobbsie,” I said. “Coach is going over to a whole new offense just for the Centrex game. He wants a quarterback who can run. Sprint-outs, roll-outs, options, bootlegs. You see, he wants a quarterback who can run.”
“I’m the quarterback.”
“It’s just for one game.”
“I’m the quarterback.”
“But you can’t run, Hobbsie. He wants a quarterback who can run.”
“We’re undefeated in three games,” Hobbs said. “I’ve got sixty-two percent completions. I’ve been intercepted just once and that’s because Jessup broke the pattern and he’ll tell you that himself. I’ve been concentrating. I’ve been taking command in the huddle. I’ve been reading the blitz just like Coach taught me.”
“But you can’t run.”
“I can throw, damn it. Can he throw?”
“Sure he can throw. He can do anything. You know that as well as I do. Coach thinks with Taft at quarterback we’ll be able to do a lot more with our offense. It’s a total offense concept. It’s a reordering of priorities.”
“I don’t understand it. We’ve been doing real well up to now.”
“We’ve been playing leprosariums and barbers’ colleges. Coach wants something special to spring on Centrex.”
“He’s putting you on,” Buddy Shock said.
“Is that right, Gary?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“You son of a bitch,” Hobbs said.
Vern Feck ran around blowing a whistle and each player reported to his respective coach. The six running backs formed a circle around Oscar Veech. He was trying to think of something to say. Finally he focused on me.
“Button up when you get hit, Harkness. You haven’t been buttoning up. You lost the ball once against those people and you almost lost it two other times.”
“I was running with reckless abandon.”
“Run with reckless abandon until you’re hit. When you’re hit, button up.”
“Right.”
“Button up. Become fetal. Hug that ball. Hug it. Hug it.”
“Yes sir.”
“Lee Roy, what am I talking about, Lee Roy?”
“I wasn’t listening, sir,” Lee Roy Tyler said.
“Typical,” Veech said. “That’s typical of the whole attitude around here. You people are a bunch of feeble-minded shit farmers. You’re lazy, you’re self-satisfied, you’re stupid. In my considered opinion, you’re a bunch of feebs. If you can’t concentrate, you can’t play football for this team. Awright now. What was I talking about, Hopper?”
“Buttoning up.”
“Lee Roy, what are you supposed to do when your quarterback calls trips right and you’re parked out there in the slot ready to fly and suddenly it dawns on you that they’re in a zone? What do you do, Lee Roy?”
“Sir?”
“Lee Roy, you’re a dung beetle. Shit is your proper environment. You do nothing, that’s what you do. You run your damn pattern.”
“Yes sir.”
“Let’s get real basic here. Deering, who do you take out on a weak-side sweep against a four-three?”
“Sir, I take out the linebacker.”
“You take out the end, feeb. Your wide receiver cracks back on the linebacker.”
“It’s coming back to me now,” Jim Deering said.
“If you had half a brain you’d be dangerous,” Veech said. “Come on, let’s get out of here before I hemorrhage.”
We went over for a joint conference with Tom Cook Clark and his three quarterbacks, Garland Hobbs, Terry Madden and Byrd Whiteside. Then Vern Feck brought his linebackers over and we got Randy King to center for us so we could practice defending against the blitz, two setbacks and the center against blitz variations by the three linebackers. It was a timing drill really; we were wearing pads and headgear but there wasn’t supposed to be any real contact. Madden was at quarterback. Bobby Hopper and I were behind him. On the first snapback, Champ Conway slipped and fell before he even reached me. Vern Feck was all over him in a second.
“Shitbird!” he screamed. “Shit, shit, shitbird. You got dumb feet, Conway. Messages from your brain must get clogged up somewhere around your kneecap. We got people ready to take your place, shitbird. Now you remember that.”
“Audibilize,” Tom Cook Clark was saying to Madden. “When you see them leaning like that, get ready to audibilize.”
“Awright, awright, awright,” Oscar Veech shouted, clapping his hands for no apparent reason.
“What are you, Conway?”
“Shitbird, sir.”
Later a fight broke out between Randy King and a reserve linebacker, John Butler. King got Butler in a head-lock and tried to spin him quickly to the ground. He ended his spin holding Butler’s helmet. He caught a forearm from behind, then got spun around himself and kicked in the leg. He went down, grunting, and Butler jumped on him and they wrestled for a while, making dust. King, on the bottom, tried to pull Butler’s jersey over his head. Finally the coaches stopped it and we got going again. Several plays later the blocking got sloppy, and Hobbs, at quarterback now, ran out of the pocket a bit prematurely. A whistle blew, rather softly, as if reluctant to call attention to itself, and we watched Creed come walking across the field. Hobbs put
his hands on his hips and looked at the grass. Creed, taking his time, began speaking while he was still ten yards away, very quietly though, with forbearance.
“You’ve got to stay in the pocket, son.”
“Yes sir, I know.”
“You bailed out too early. You’ve got to stand firm even with all that meat coming in at you. If you can’t do that, you can’t play for me. Now that’s a fact.”
“Yes sir.”
“Gary, that blocking was dreadful.”
“Yes sir,” I said.
King and Butler were fighting again. Creed heard the noise and turned slowly to watch. Since both of them wore linemen’s facemasks, it was extremely difficult to draw blood, the unannounced purpose and only real satisfaction of such a fight. So they started kicking and wrestling again, pulling at each other’s equipment, not tactically but in frustration, the pads, the faceguard, the helmet itself. King down now, John Butler kicked him in the stomach. Somebody pushed Butler away. King was through for the afternoon. They had to help him off. Butler stood alone near the sideline. Creed walked slowly across the field toward the offensive linemen, who were running wind sprints. I watched Bloomberg for a moment. Then we went back to our blitz drill. Everybody ignored Butler. He stood off to one side, watching. Five minutes later (you could feel it), we forgave him.
Sam Trammel, who coached the receivers, called the starting offensive and defensive units together for a dummy scrimmage. Vern Feck jumped in and out of the defensive huddle, checking on his boys, little pink face half-shady under the baseball cap, whistle bouncing off his wet T-shirt. I went through the motions; the motions seemed to reciprocate. I blocked, I carried the ball, I ran pass patterns. Out on a deep pattern I watched the ball spiral toward me, nose dropping now, laces spinning, my hands up and fingers spread, eyes following the ball right into my hands, here, now, and then lengthening my stride, breaking toward the middle, seeing myself on large-screen color TV as I veered into the end zone. The afternoon went by in theoretically measured stages, gliding, and I moved about not as myself but as some sequence from the idea of motion, a brief arrangement of schemes and physical laws abstracted from the whole. Everything was wonderfully automatic, in harmony, dreamed by genius. Cruising over the middle on a circle pattern, just loafing because the play was directed elsewhere, I got blasted for no reason by the free safety, Lenny Wells. I rolled over twice, enjoying the grass, and then got to my feet and patted Lenny on the rump.
“How to hit, baby,” I told him.
It ended as it had begun, two laps around the goal posts. On the first turn a tackle named Ted Joost, who was Randy King’s roommate, bumped John Butler right into the goal post and kept on going. Butler ran after him and jumped on his back. Joost shook him off and they started swinging. I jogged past them and by the time I made the far turn and headed back it was all over. I walked toward Staley Hall with Bing Jackmin.
“I can’t take much more of this,” he said.
“Of what?”
“The antiquated procedures.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“All the procedures around here are antiquated. Blocking sleds are antiquated whether you know it or not. Agility drills are antiquated. We even have to bend down and touch our toes. Gary, this is the second half of the twentieth century. That stuff went out with the gladiators. We’re using antiquated procedures and we don’t even know it.”
“You said yourself that we hark back. We hark back, you said. You’re the one who coined that dumb phrase referring to the connection between then and now.”
“Hyperatavistic,” he said.
“I don’t think that was it.”
“Whatever it was, I still think football is antiquated. And you want to know what else it is? I’ve already given you a hint.”
“What else, Bing?”
“It’s gladiatorial,” he said. “They fatten us up and then put us in the arena together. They train us to kill, more or less.”
“Lead a revolt,” I said.
“Coach would break me in half.”
Howard Lowry was walking ahead of us. Howard was known as Boxcar. He was a starting tackle on defense and one of the few men on the squad who had normal human flab around his middle. He went about 265, packed low and very wide, and he was considered immovable. Howard roomed with Billy Mast, a reserve back on defense. Billy was in the process of memorizing Rilke’s ninth Duino Elegy in German, a language he did not understand. It was for a course he was taking in the untenable.
13
MYNA CORBETT AND THE responsibilities of beauty were to occupy me on and off for the rest of the year. I don’t know exactly what it was I felt for her, or thought about her, or expected to give or receive. There are a thousand kinds of love. The simplest thing to say is that she made me feel comfortable. She created a private balance of nature, a sense of things being right, or almost right, both in themselves and against a larger requirement. So this love in a way was ecological; she made me feel at peace with my environment and maybe on my better days I did the same for her. Since my examinations of life sometimes ended in oblique forms of self-mockery, and since my investigative projects often manifested themselves as parodies of hunger or grief or exile, it was refreshing to seek in this woman a perfect circle whose reality overpowered the examiner’s talent for reducing in size and meaning whatever variety of experience he was currently engaged in sampling.
Myna owned half a million dollars and membership in a science-fiction book club. There, by most standards, her attraction ended. She weighed about 165 pounds. Her face had several blotches of varying size and her hair hung in limp tangled clusters. She bit her nails, she waddled, she never shut up. We had two classes together, Mexican geography and a sort of introduction to exobiology. Myna was the only female in the geography class (traditionally a course for football players) and seemed quite serious about the layout of Mexico. We got along well from the very beginning. I enjoyed listening to her talk and I liked the total liberty of her clothing. There was a sense of cavalcade to the way she dressed. Any number of fashion eras were likely to be represented at a given time. The feeling was warm, color-abundant, distinctly antihistorical.
We had mock picnics behind the Quonset hut — chopped almonds and Gatorade. Myna would usually bring along a science-fiction novel. She’d eat and read simultaneously, bouncing slightly on the brown grass when she reached a particularly invigorating passage. It was during our third or fourth picnic, on an unseasonably cool day, that we got involved for the first time in the responsibilities of beauty. Myna wore a carved plastic bracelet, meshed gold chains around her neck, and a hand-embroidered Victorian shawl over a silk gypsy blouse and floor-length patchwork skirt. Her boots were studded with blue stars.
“I’ve just realized what’s really curious about you,” I said. “Somehow you don’t transmit any sense of a personal future.”
“I’m a now person, Gary.”
“That’s good because I’m a then person.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I like you. I need some perspective in my life.”
“You’ll hate me for saying this, Myna, but I think you’re one of the prettiest girls I’ve ever known. Man or boy. Pound for pound.”
“People are always telling me that. What a pretty face I have. It’s just a thing you say to fat girls. It’s supposed to make us guilty so we’ll lose weight.”
“But it’s true,” I said.
“I know it’s true. All I have to do is lose fifty pounds and go to a skin doctor. But I like myself the way I am. I don’t want to be beautiful or desirable. I don’t have the strength for that. There are too many responsibilities. Things to live up to. I feel like I’m consistently myself. So many people have someone else stuck inside them. Like inside that big large body of yours there’s a scrawny kid with thick glasses. Inside my father there’s a vicious police dog, a fascist killer animal. Almost everybody has something stuck inside them. Inside me there’s a sloppy emot
ional overweight girl. I’m the same, Gary, inside and out. It’s hard to be beautiful. You have an obligation to people. You almost become public property. You can lose yourself and get almost mentally disturbed on just the public nature of being beautiful. Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. You can get completely lost in that whole dumb mess. And anyway who’s to say what’s beautiful and what’s ugly?”
“There are standards.”
“Whose?”
“I don’t know. The Greeks. The Etruscans. You can’t escape some things. History forces you to listen and to see.”
“You have to balance history with science fiction,” she said. “It’s the only way to keep sane.”
“We’ll have another picnic tomorrow.”
“Jesus, can we?”
“We can do anything we want, Myna.”
“Can we bring something besides chopped almonds? Can we bring vegetable pancakes and maybe brownies?”
