Sophomores

by Sean Desmond

  “Look.” Rick pointed across I-35 at the candy-cane-striped A-frame of a Whataburger. “We can just hop over there, it will probably be faster—”

  “Stow that crap, Dowlearn.” Moyle was cranky hungry. They all were. “Just take your meal ticket and hand it to the cashier inside.”

  The boys were starving as the Tillotsons met them at the door, stacks of dinner plates under their arms.

  “Now, this is a family establishment,” Mr. Tillotson admonished, and then adjusted his browline glasses with a greasy thumb, “so I expect you all to comport yourselves like gentlemen. Not like your slapdick wrestling team, who should have been put out in a barn. Am I clear, boys?”

  Without any assent or dissent from the team, Tillotson started handing out plates while Gail gave everyone a lobotomized smile and collected the buffet tickets. In went the boys to the dining room. To their credit, the Circle cafeteria had laid out a staggering spread, and it probably had all been edible around noon that day, when it was first cooked and trayed. At the front of the line were two heaping piles of Texas toast and biscuits, which was the old buffet trick of putting the bread first to hog room on the plate. All the boys fell for this, except Sticky, who nonchalantly pocketed a biscuit like it was a billfold. Fast-forward over the salad, which was barely chopped chunks of iceberg. Get past the taigas of broccoli and asparagus, forget the mucusy okra and something resembling succotash, and skip ahead to the station for the mains and sides. The choice was meatloaf surfing its own au jus, a sweaty pile of spaghetti, or fried chicken with an impossible nook-and-cranny mahogany breading burnished by the golden heat lamp. And then came mac and cheese by the yard, a Close Encounters amount of mashed potatoes, and two long porcelain boats in the shape of chuck wagons for glopping white and brown gravy. And as the boys’ gang tackled the fried chicken, out came two piping trays of beef enchiladas and pork tamales. Amazing.

  For the next hour, the Jesuit boys devoured this carousel of cuisine. Dan and Rob, whose diets had been apportioned their whole lives by their mothers, quickly regressed into a semiferal state of hoarding every morsel and went back multiple times. Under the aurora of the buffet, everything glistened and life was a banquet of possibilities. Rob watched Rick pile salt, Bac-Os, and enchilada sauce on his mashed potatoes and did the same. Dan cursed his stupidity at taking a fried chicken breast—Way too much white meat to chew through—when there were the superior crispy-skin ratios on the drumsticks and thighs. And then there was dessert, which was equally unlimited, and the boys made four or five trips to try everything. First was the giant carameled flan—a sucker’s move, Dan realized; better to save room for the key lime squares and coconut cake and brownies and Blue Bell with hot fudge. On top of this were endless refills of Hawaiian Punch, Orange Crush, Big Red, and Dr Pepper, and maybe the fountain mix was a little off, and the ice machine made a lot of noise but very little ice, but that was okay, you had all you could eat or drink, and the gluttonous freedom of that kept Sticky and Rick scraping their plates into the trash when the Tillotsons weren’t looking and heading back for more. At one point Dan looked over at Mr. Donahue, who was carefully inspecting his meatloaf. Moments later, his fork went down, next to a plate of uneaten food, as Dan stabbed at his beef enchilada, which induced an orange slick of grease to ooze forth.

  The buffet pillaged and insulin levels rising, Coach Moyle stood to address the team.

  “Gentlemen, first off, raise your cokes to the Tillotsons, who kept the kitchen open for us.”

  Sticky, bold and brave, tried to sneak off to the buffet for a third dessert.

  “O’Donnell, get back in your chair. Guys, ‘all you can eat’ doesn’t mean you have to eat it all. Okay . . .” Coach Moyle frowned at his Casio watch. It was almost eleven thirty, and qualifying heats started tomorrow at eight a.m. “Mr. Donahue is going to drive us over to the motel and we are doubled up on rooms, so the curfew is the minute you enter that room. We’re running really late tonight, so everybody brush their teeth and hit the hay—lights-out midnight. No exceptions. Radcliffe, how much flan is that?”

  “Fenatacci bet me—”

  “Stop it. Stop eating flan to impress your boyfriend. You’re a goddamn athlete, not a pet pig. Okay, gentlemen, starting now, let’s cut the shit. I’m knocking on doors at six a.m. and we’re coming back to the Circle for breakfast, but not to load up—nothing that slows us down in the water. Tomorrow is a big day. Tomorrow is when all the hard work pays off. Am I right, Rangers?”

  “Yeah.” Dan sniggered at Rob, who was nodding off into a half-eaten pile of chicken carcass.

  “I said . . . right, Rangers?”

  “Yeah!” It wasn’t much better. It was way too late.

  “Okay, thank you. I know we’re all tired, but we’ve done all the work to get us here. These races are a celebration of the training. O’Donnell, put down the goddamn brownies, you’ve had enough. And no smuggling food out of here. This is not a final meal on death row, this is not the Last Supper.”

  Moyle belched through a breath and rubbed his stomach. “Okay, get some rest, focus on tomorrow. I know that was a long bus ride, but, gentlemen, I have a good feeling.”

  Moyle belched again but tried to disguise it. “Rangers, bring it in. We are going to kick their ass tomorrow! Am I right?”

  “Yes!”

  “You can do better than that. Are we going to swim hard? Let me hear you say it. Swim hard!”

  “Swim hard!”

  “C’mon, let me hear it. Central, Strake, Cathedral—these boys are going to eat our wakes. Are we going to kick their asses?”

  “Yeah!”

  “That’s right, Rangers. Let’s kick some ass. Let’s go!” Moyle pumped his fist and stormed out of the restaurant.

  * * *

  “My asshole may literally fall out of my butt, Coach.”

  “Get on the bus, McGhee. And quit bellyaching, all of you.”

  The last twelve hours had been rough. Rob took two steps to climb onto the bus and then pushed Dan out of his way as he ran back into the motel looking for a free bathroom. Dan barely noticed. That nasty, greasy enchilada on top of fried chicken, what was I thinking? He hadn’t slept and had been switching off between the sink and toilet with Rob all night.

  “Where’s O’Donnell and Dowlearn?”

  Dan lowered himself gingerly onto a seat. “Bathroom.”

  “Molfetta?”

  “Bathroom.”

  “Christ.” Moyle steadied himself with a knee on the driver’s seat. Dan lay down in his row. If he stayed very still he might make it back to Dallas. How could there be anything left in my stomach to upset it? he wondered. The night had been sheer intestinal hell. He missed his five hundred qualifier, but Dan was just one of a score of scratches that morning. Drew Radcliffe turned in the only good performance, winning the prelim for the one hundred breaststroke, then vomiting over the lane line. The gun went off for the two hundred IM with Rick still in the bathroom stalls. By midmorning the whole swim team was severely (and ironically) dehydrated. Rob, Sticky, and the other divers were all suffering from hurling bouts of reverse peristalsis. Moyle himself had to coach through the runs, and he couldn’t cobble together a single bowel-continent relay team. The Rangers had to forfeit.

  Donahue came onto the bus with a giant 7-Eleven coffee and two trash cans he had stolen from the motel. Moyle sipped a ginger ale and looked up at him. “You ever have this in the marines? Any suggestions?”

  “Don’t eat at the Circle cafeteria.” The joke was met with several groans. Donahue was the only one currently not in danger of shitting himself. “We now have two emergency toilets. Bucket number one is for upchuck and bucket number two for letting the dog out. Get everyone on the bus, I don’t care how sick. All of them have to drink a ration of Imodium. No Pepto, it doesn’t do anything once it’s past the stomach.”

  Donahue started passing o
ut eight-ounce bottles of Imodium. Dan reached up and grabbed one. “This stuff is plaster for your gut. It will stop the need for bombing the Oval Office. All right, let’s try to get through this together.”

  An angry wet fart marked the end of Donahue’s evacuation plan. The rest of the Ranger team limped onto the bus. Dan closed his eyes and sucked down the loperamide. Tastes like peppermint lead paint. Eventually he felt Sticky shove his feet away to collapse down next to him. He heard the bus door close and the engine belch to life. The air on the bus was a nauseating cloud of carburetor, motion lotion, Donahue’s cigarettes, and the mint varnish of Imodium. Dan’s stomach was a tight knot that felt every dip and acclivity of the interstate, and he dared not crawl out of the fetal position, praying: Lord Almighty, merciful Christ, please don’t make me have to go again.

  As Donahue drove the bus back north, they all lay still, trying not to resort to bucket one or two, desperate just to hold it, and hold it, and hold it some more.

  [ MARCH 21 ]

  Pat Malone stood at the edge of the tarmac staring at a dark bronze statue of Captain Eddie Rickenbacker. He had landed in Miami twenty minutes ago and had taken a courtesy Jeep—essentially a luggage cart—across the airport to the buildings and hangars that comprised the headquarters for Eastern Airlines. The Florida sun was shockingly bright and bleached out everything. He squinted in the whitewash glare of building 16, the corporate offices. There was Captain Rickenbacker, the flying ace and founder, a hand in the air like he was saluting the Red Baron or perhaps hailing a cab. Behind the statue were the marble columns, pediments, and sea nymphs of the Rickenbacker Fountain. The fountain and its whirlpools, however, were dry and rusted at the spouts, the water drained and the power cut off years earlier in a cost-saving move.

  For a minute, Pat stood on the griddle of the concrete tarmac deciding what to do. He was fifteen minutes early for his interview but worried about sweating through his suit. Like the fountain, he was dry but still a bit clammy from withdrawal. So he moved inside building 16, the glass front doors giving way to a hemispheric lobby with blue pearl granite floors, the walls sheathed in a tacky orange wallpaper that had bubbled with the humidity, and a reception desk in the shape of an airfoil. Pat wandered to the left to study the hanging route map, the blue and green peels of the Mercatored Americas with tiny lightbulbs dimly burning at the point of each Eastern destination. Lima flickered like a dying star as Pat tried to take a minute and rehearse some interview answers. Eastern’s labor costs were notoriously high. And the load factor, i.e., butts in seats, was not great on a lot of these routes to the Caribbean and points sud. Eastern was a big boy, but the littlest of the bigs, and the north–south frost-to-flowers routes made it a vacation airline with price-sensitive markets. Where American’s corporate pride was driven by fleet size, passenger loads, and revenues, Eastern was a little more humble and looser in terms of its management and marketing—the official airline of Mickey Mouse. Their immediate threat was Charlie Bryan of the machinists’ union, who was holding out for concessions when none could be offered. Pat was interviewing to be director of employee benefits—a step up in title even if he was downgrading from Cadillac to Chevy in terms of carrier.

  After milling around near the map, Pat was not too early anymore and stepped toward the reception desk. His legs felt fine for once, and he was going to will his way through walking today. Nail this interview and you could show up day one on crutches. Just get an offer. Keep your hands steady. Be confident. You ran a department three times this size. Do it for Daniel. Do it for Daniel’s college bursar.

  Pat announced himself and was escorted to the ninth floor. Past screaming orange wallpaper again, up a cantilevered stairwell of poured concrete, through a series of doorways with Moorish cut-outs like he was entering Rick’s Café, he was eventually led to the reception area for the office of Colonel Frank Borman, chief executive officer, Eastern Airlines, and former pilot, Gemini and Apollo space programs.

  * * *

  Pat had never met an astronaut before, but he had heard stories about Borman—West Point, hard charging, not one for nuance. “Uncomplicated,” which was offered as code for “asshole.” Pat had considered all of this: If America had to send someone to the moon, they wouldn’t send an asshole, right? Or maybe it takes an asshole to get you there?

  The door swung open, and the former fighter pilot, still at his 168-pound flying weight, bounded out of the office.

  “Pat?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s a pleasure—”

  “Great to have you here. Come in, come in.”

  He had cut off Pat, but that was to be expected. Pat had heard through the rumor mill that Borman was near deaf. His old buddy at American Jack Crowdus claimed all the spacemen were hard of hearing from sitting on those Saturn Fives. But Doug Dorsey at Delta had told him that Borman busted his eardrums while dive-bombing with a head cold. Uncomplicated.

  Pat walked a perfect line across the tangerine carpet into an office that had the aesthetic appeal of a shoe box wrapped in green vinyl. The intercom chirped, and a call came in. Borman frowned and asked Pat for thirty seconds.

  “It’s our friends in New York. Look around while I take this.”

  “New York” for Eastern meant Chase bank, a “Rockefeller and Rickenbacker” airline since they bought it outright from Alfred Sloan at GM. As Borman murmured into the phone, Pat wandered the perimeter of the office. There were three oil paintings of fighter planes streaking across the American West and photos of Borman’s two sons, both square-headed blonds like him, both cadets at West Point in their parade uniforms. Then Pat came upon a large framed invitation:

  You are cordially invited to attend

  the departure of the

  United States Spaceship Apollo 8

  on Its voyage around the moon,

  Departing from Launch Complex 39 Kennedy Space Center

  with the launch window commencing at

  7 a.m. on December 21, 1968

  To the right of the invitation was a portrait of Borman and his crew, Bill Anders and Jim Lovell, in their white nylon space suits, the famous shot of Earthrise from above the charcoal lunar desert, and the mission patch, which was a red figure eight looped around the Earth and the moon.

  “Checking out my greatest hits over there, huh?” Borman hung up the phone.

  “Just glad you made it back in one piece, sir.”

  Borman smiled, and Pat was unsure he had heard him. The colonel pointed at the next frame, which offered a schematic of Apollo 8. “You hear folks now saying how they put us there in a tin can, but let me tell you, the rocket and this command module were made out of five point six million parts. Even if NASA got ninety-nine point nine percent of everything right, that meant fifty-six hundred defects. When you think about the risk involved in that, we were very lucky. But more than lucky, we were good.”

  The nod to actuarial appreciation impressed Pat. “That’s amazing to think about, sir.”

  Borman squared his shoulders and pointed at another photo. “So you’re sitting on this rocket that’s taller than the Statue of Liberty. You’ve got to get her up to twenty-four, twenty-five thousand miles per hour and travel two hundred thirty-nine thousand miles to the moon. The first stage gives you a hundred sixty million horsepower.”

  “Wow.” Pat realized that for the facts and figures to be coming this quickly, they had to be part of some set piece Borman had recited countless times.

  “And the moon is barreling along in its own orbit at twenty-three hundred miles an hour, so you have to aim in front of it to catch it.”

  “Did you have computers—”

  “I was in charge of twenty-four instruments, forty event indicators, seventy-one lights, and five hundred sixty-six switches.” Borman’s recitation could not be interrupted. Autopilot, Pat thought. “And that’s not including the actual controls to fly and doing some of th
at with four to five Gs of force coming down on you.”

  “I remember following your mission over the Christmas holiday. Did you—”

  “It wasn’t Eastern’s first-class to the Bahamas. Oh no . . .”

  Pat was now worried Borman was completely deaf and on some sort of broadcast mode. There was no indicator light for that.

  “It was more like sightseeing in a Sherman tank. We had this one small window to look out and you couldn’t see the moon on approach because of the sun’s glare. But then we orbited the moon ten times and I was the first man to see with his own eyes the dark side of the moon.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “Unbelievable we made it back.” Borman chuckled. So he is hearing me? Unclear. Borman stretched out his arms, his hands falling on the imagined controls of the command module. “Once you escape Earth’s gravity, it’s very quiet. You fire a thruster and there’s just the thump of the solenoids opening and closing. So it’s noiseless and still, and then we got around to the dark side, and it’s just sameness. And remember when you’re behind the moon you lose the radio signal with Houston. So you’re far away and it’s this big battered expanse of nothing. Crater upon crater, hill upon dusty hill. So there I am like Columbus or Magellan, seeing this, and I’m thinking, This is it? There’s nothing there. We go all that way, and then nothing.”

  Borman realized he was starting to drift off and turned back to Pat. “So they tell me you’ve put up with Bob Crandall since deregulation.”