Sophomores

by Sean Desmond

  “Definitely swirlies,” Sticky decided.

  Oglesby thwacked Thumper on the teacher’s desk. “Gentlemen, the short, exciting life of that freshman is now over. Return to your seats.”

  They settled in, and Oglesby began prowling back and forth across the front of the classroom, Thumper poking and pinging off the floor, the chalkboard, the radiator, and the first row of sophomores. He turned and put a death grip on Rob’s shoulder and smiled.

  “So what is the main problem the boys face on the island?”

  Rob’s shyness kicked in, and he chinned into his button-down collar for an answer. “Mmm, food? Shelter?”

  “Perhaps at first, but what do they fear?”

  “The Beast,” Philip Humphrey spat out. “They fear the pig as a monster.”

  Dan half raised his hand but then put it back down, afraid to be called on. Oglesby saw the hesitation and pounced.

  “Mr. Ma-lone”—Oglesby said his name slowly, like the spider to the fly—“care to contribute?”

  Dan seized with regret. “No, sir, I’m good.”

  “Are you good with a failing grade for participation in my class?”

  Jesus . . . Dan brought it back to what Oglesby had written on the board. “Their main problem is each other.”

  Oglesby took two steps closer to Dan, a menacing Socratic scrutiny. “Go on, Malone.”

  “It’s fear of the unknown, but it’s really a fear that they manufacture in order to manipulate each other. And that leads to their other problem, which, frankly, is stupidity. It takes Ralph way too long to realize that Jack has turned the other kids against him.”

  “Okay, so Ralph is naïve. But why do they plot against him?”

  “It’s the savage part of our nature, an animal quality—it’s amoral, capable of evil.”

  Dan was wading into the deep end now, unsure what Oglesby wanted and partially bullshitting.

  “What’s the difference between amorality and immorality, Mr. Malone?”

  “Awareness. Intent . . .” Dan’s thoughts scrambled for the answer that decoded the book—and his teacher. “And society. You take away society, and this amoral animal instinct takes over.”

  Oglesby was shaking his head in disagreement. “Do you need to take away society? There are murders every day in the city of Dallas. Too many. Mr. Malone is missing the point . . .”

  Ouch. Dan thought he had cracked it.

  “A point which you need to understand about this book, gentlemen, because the dynamic that governs Lord of the Flies is one of the keys to understanding this class, and”—Oglesby dropped his teaser—“winning the Game.”

  “Uh-oh,” Sticky muttered. He had heard about the Game from his older brother.

  “What did Dennis tell you about the Game, Mr. O’Donnell?”

  “He said it was . . .” Sticky wasn’t sure how to translate his brother’s pants-crapping warnings. “He said it was a lot of our grade.”

  “Indeed. Twenty-five percent for the second semester will be determined by the outcome of the Game.”

  The Game was a central mystery to Oglesby’s honors English and a wellspring of rumors and riddles for the panicked sophomores. Mere mention of the Game to Oglesby alums from previous classes produced a good-luck-with-that head shake and some cryptic comment along the lines of “The harder you try, the more likely you’re to fail” or “Pay attention, you have to figure out how it’s rigged.”

  “So is the Beast good or bad?” Oglesby asked, setting them back on track.

  “Both,” blurted Dan—he was figuring out how to unpack these trick questions. Maybe. “The Beast is us, part of our nature, it’s good and bad.”

  “Are you certain about that, Mr. Malone?”

  “Eh . . . yes.”

  A few of the sophomores laughed, and the teacher grinned—they were either onto a major philosophical truth or had missed the point of the book entirely. Oglesby didn’t let on which way he thought the discussion was going but capped the discussion there and returned journals.

  When Oglesby came to Dan’s desk he plunked his journal down on his desk with no hitch for regard or comment. Dan leafed through to the final piece he had done on “Shadows and Tall Trees.” He had tried to find a connection between the chapter in Flies and the U2 song of the same title, but he was straining. Dan had ended by quoting the best part of the song:

  Do you feel in me anything redeeming?

  Any worthwhile feeling?

  He thought it through, or had tried at least. Did that mean anything—or was it just another jumble of human nature? He turned the page to Oglesby’s comment:

  You’re taking your point for granted. Show, don’t tell.

  “Gentlemen, with the exception of Mr. Humphrey, who did a song-by-song exegesis of The Wall, these journals are quite unremarkable.”

  Humphrey raised his arms in a moronic concert salute. “Floyd rules!”

  “Mr. Roger Waters thanks you. Remember, gentlemen, rule number fourteen: writing is revising. Don’t just fill the blankness of the paper with pen marks—think. Then write. Then think again. Then revise. Remember, revise is re-vision, re-seeing the argument through the writing process.

  “Gentlemen, writing means using your brain. Writing is a muscle—you must train it, and each time you do it gets bigger and better.”

  The sophomores looked on blankly. Oglesby dropped Thumper on the floor in a bit of rehearsed pique and exasperation. He grabbed his own lapels and scowled.

  “And so let me put the challenges of this class before you now. There is the Game, which we will discuss in due time. But there’s another trial some of you will undertake this year.”

  Oglesby went to the blackboard and wrote the same word twice.

  Rattus rattus.

  “What is this? Mr. Indovina?”

  “Does it mean ‘write and write’ in Latin?”

  “No. Rattus rattus is the common rat. The average black and gray rat is no more than six inches long. Nothing special about Rattus ratti. They live, they breed, they die. Now . . .” Oglesby returned to the board.

  Rattus norvegicus.

  “There’s another kind of rat. It’s a brown rat. It’s bigger, a foot long at times—some in the subways of New York and London grow to the size of cats. The brown rat, the Norwegian rat, is smarter—all lab rats are descendants of the Norwegian rat. It adapts to everywhere. It’s fiercer, it’s more resilient. It will gnaw through a metal trash can if it has to. It is smart enough to figure out any maze, and it communicates with other rats by ultrasound, chirping like a bat or a dolphin. The Norwegian rat is special. Exceptional.”

  Oglesby reached into his bag and pulled out a foot-long brown rat with red beady eyes. He held it up, pendulum-like, by the tail. And then he threw it down the middle aisle between Flanagan and Deangelis, who took no chances and scurried out of their chairs. Okay, it was fake, but it looked pretty lifelike.

  “And that’s what this class is about—this is honors English. I want to know who is exceptional and who is content creeping by. In the coming weeks I want to find out: Are any of you Norwegian rats? Can any of you understand literature and write about it at a high level? Who will work hard and be ready for the Game? Can you do more than survive and crawl along like a common Rattus rattus? Can you adapt and thrive like a Norwegian rat? Who among you is smart enough to do that?”

  The bell for class change rang, and Oglesby picked up the plastic rat and dropped it onto the teacher’s desk. Dan looked down at his journal. A pulse beat in his brain, then his chest. He was lost in a maze of thought when suddenly a path cleared. The challenge was before him: Show, don’t tell, how smart you are. Show Oglesby. Write something inspired. Write who you want to be.

  And Dan Malone wanted to be a Rattus norvegicus very badly.

  * * *

  Yea
rs later, in a different century, they would call the Jesuit/W. T. White rivalry the Battle for the Saddle, but in the late eighties, it was just the kind of classic private-versus-public-school matchup that exaggerated the narcissism of small differences. While it was really two middle-class versions of Dallas squaring off, the cultural divide felt like Notre Dame versus Alabama. On the football field, Jesuit was well coached and ran a disciplined (read: boring, predictable) offense, while White made the wishbone seem downright improvisational and had a knack for producing stars you couldn’t possibly stop. That year’s phenom was Calvin Murray, the younger brother of Kevin Murray, an all-American quarterback at A&M who had beaten Bo Jackson and Auburn in the Cotton Bowl two years before.

  The Jesuit Rangers had a solid backfield of Judd Deuterman and Randy Holliday. Thunder and lightning, sort of. The Rangers were led by Gary Pasqua, who was a phlegmatic, God-fearing, hard-to-read Italian Landry and had coached the team for as long as anyone could remember. For practices he sported those legendary polyester Bike nut-hugger shorts that rode up on every coach’s beer gut. But on Friday night, he wore gray slacks, cleats, and a Jesuit blue and gold windbreaker. He walked the sideline as if it were the deck of the HMS Victory—imperious, commanding, unfazed by good or bad fortune on the field, and barely noticing his team or assistant coaches, who gave him a five-yard halo of solitude that he only occasionally broke to grab a flanker by the collar of his pads to relay a call and shove him off to the huddle.

  * * *

  “You ready, number one son?” Pat Malone called from the driveway as he turned over the engine for his pea-green ’70 Mercury Cougar.

  “Yup.” Dan slammed the front door of the house, silencing his mother’s Talmudic instructions for check-in and curfew. He carried a can of 7-Up that he was slowly sipping and had pilfered three airplane bottles of vodka from his father’s endless collection traveling non-rev for American. In the hutch in the den, the Malones had a whole air force of every type of booze and liqueur—even a mini Galliano that spired above the rest.

  “Where is this game? Up by that field house on Spring Valley?”

  “Yup.”

  Home field for W. T. White was Loos Stadium—whether to pronounce it “loose” or “lows” no one was quite sure.

  “Am I picking you up after, or are you taking the IRT back?”

  “What?” For the most part, Dan liked his father’s corny teasing. “I’ll get a ride home.”

  “Okay, try to avoid vans of Libyan terrorists.”

  “Check.”

  Pat backed them out of the driveway and flipped open the hidden headlights on the Cougar’s black grille. “Danny boy, question. How’s swim team? How are your frogmen shaping up?”

  “Fall workouts don’t start until two weeks from now.”

  “Ah. Right.” Pat felt bad about how oblivious he was to his son’s school calendar. “How’s the Society of Jesus treating you? Any good classes?”

  “Not really.” It was a tired reply, Dan staring out the side window.

  “Well . . . keep working hard.”

  “I am.”

  “Good.” He turned onto Marsh, north over the LBJ overpass. Pat sensed Dan had more to say, but there was a long-running, unspoken father-son understanding to keep the long-running, unspoken father-son understanding.

  “What are they going to do about your Cowboys, son?”

  “I don’t know. Danny White’s gonna play. Are these games even going to count?”

  “Yeah, these owners are a bunch of hard-asses. Scab football is no good. We shouldn’t even be tuning in on Sundays. Never cross a picket line to steal a man’s livelihood. Always be on the side of the workingman.” Pat thought of his role at American and swallowed dry. “Can you do that for me, Danny boy?”

  “Uh . . . sure.”

  “Your father and Mr. Hoffa thank you.” Pat smiled, then Dan chuckled.

  “Whatever, Dad.”

  They held quiet the rest of the trip, content and left alone together.

  As Pat pulled into the drop-off for the stadium parking lot, his left leg twitched, and he stopped short, the front tires screeching for a hot second. Nobody noticed, but it broke the high school rule of not drawing unnecessary attention to oneself. Mortified, Dan smacked the dashboard and gave his father a what-the-hell glare.

  “Sorry. Leg fell asleep there for a second.”

  Dan took a deep breath, caught himself and his 7-Up, which had thankfully not spilled. “It’s okay. Just run over the kids from White, not Jesuit.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Thanks for the ride.”

  “Be good, bub, or at least not too bad,” Pat said, but Dan was already out of the car and not looking back.

  Pat watched Dan disappear into the crowd of teenagers. There was a certain civility in his son that put Pat at ease. He was fully a young man, who could do great things, and as Pat shook out the tingling in his leg, he said a quick prayer that his son would be healthy and do all the things he’d never had the chance to.

  * * *

  Dan flashed his student ID at the gate and waltzed unmolested past two Addison police officers. He then scooted around the student section and ducked into the toilets. In the stall he poured the airplane bottles of vodka into the can. He took a sip and almost gagged but managed to swallow, which was followed by a burn in his throat and a shudder down his back. Dan studied the graffiti on the stall door as he took another sip.

  A guilty remembrance of his father twitched in his mind, but he let that go.

  It was Dan’s small, dark rebellion.

  It was also his coping method for watching the Jesuit Rangers get their ass kicked. Dan climbed the stairs into the bleachers. The cheerleaders went into a routine on the track between the crowd and the sideline, where Father Payne, the team chaplain, had the varsity all on one knee in prayer. Dan walked past as the defensive captain, Brad Stonecipher, capped off a Hail Mary.

  “Our Lady, Queen of Victory.”

  And the whole team replied: “Pray for us.”

  The prayer was more than called for. Dan spotted Cady Bloom in the rear of the cheerleader formation. Entirely too cute with her blue and gold pom-poms, short pleated skirt, and, well . . . Chesty but not giving it away like White’s Caballeras and Baby Bulls—two competing dance teams of tasseled and sequined cowgirls.

  Dan stared at Cady for the long moment he walked past, baffled and crushed as a senior male cheerleader—some redheaded doofus named Embry Martindale—grabbed Cady’s ass and hoisted her into the late-evening Texas sky. Dan took a sip of 7-Up and sucked his teeth in panic. Damn it. I need a plan to get this girl’s attention before some mouth-breathing jock moves in.

  The sun in the west was a drop of burning gold that slid nearer and nearer the sill of the world as the national anthem was played. Loos Stadium was underlit; the distant stanchions of floodlights cast shadows on both sides of the field. Dan found his buddies in the nosebleeds where the bleachers met the flightpath for Addison Airport. This was the crew’s go-to hangout spot, where they could judge the action from a sarcastic distance.

  “Let’s go Rangers!” Rick yelled in Dan’s face as he came up the steps. “Get jacked up, Malone!”

  “I’m totally pumped.” Dan drew an invisible six-shooter, just like the Jesuit mascot, Sam the Ranger, then pressed it against his temple and pulled the trigger.

  Rob nodded to Dan’s can in hand. “Whatcha got there?”

  “Carbonated lemon-lime soda, Mr. McGhee.”

  “I can smell the booze from here. Where’d you get that?” Rob asked while mimicking the cheerleaders’ semaphore routine.

  “I grabbed this out of your mama’s fridge.”

  “Hilarious, Malone, what’s in there?”

  “Nothing.”

  Sticky shook his head. “You are a fuckin’ idiot—how did th
ey not catch you with that?”

  “I have a system—and I’m not a suspicious criminal like you.”

  Stick made a move at Dan to lift him and throw him over the bleachers, but Dan danced away in time.

  The Rangers received the kickoff. The sophomores did have one player—one of their own—to root for. For the first time in the forward-pass era Coach Pasqua was starting a sophomore at quarterback. A cheer went up as number 16, Mike Goldenbaum, jogged into the huddle.

  Here we go, Rangers, here we go.

  First snap. Guard pulled and Holliday burst through the trap before the White linebackers could fill it. Twelve yards and a shoestring tackle by the weak safety.

  “Let’s go—run it down their goddamn throats.”

  “Same option right. They’re cheating on it.”

  And despite that, the sophomore QB took it right, faked the pitch to Holliday in the flat, juked the outside linebacker, and was into the secondary. He crossed midfield in a blink.

  “Go, G-bomb! Fuckin’ go!”

  The forty, the thirty, and the safety had an angle. The twenty. The safety drew in, and Goldenbaum stiff-armed him to the ground. The cornerback trailing the play tried to drag him out of bounds, but Goldenbaum high-stepped out of the tackle, stumbled at the ten, but kept his feet moving. Touchdown Rangers. The Ranger band fired up the fight song.

  We sing hurrah for the blue and gold . . .

  “Goddamn Goldenbaum. That was ridiculous.” Rob pumped his fist as the extra point tumbled over the bar. “If we can run like this, we will blow them off the field.”

  * * *

  Way to jinx it, McGhee. The Longhorns got the ball on a touchback, and the Calvin Murray show began. First play: a rollout with a twenty-yard bullet to his tight end. Second play: shotgun, keeper running at half speed, and fifteen yards, before stepping out of bounds. Third play: drop back, pump fake, freezing the secondary as the slot receiver ran a deep fade. From the far point in the horn of the midfield logo Calvin aired it out and hit the receiver five yards deep in the end zone. In stride. Touchdown. Forty-five yards on the stat sheet, the throw more like sixty yards in the air.