Shall I say that I was a child drawn to the dramatic? That I had a brooding, battle-worn nature? A misplaced man of action?
I turned. I turned in that hallway. Our classmates, a lusty lynch mob, ringed us and cried out with the inspiring compassion of youth: “Get the new kid!”
Mattheny was not tall, but he was muscled beyond his years and knew it. His wide face seemed rugged as a commando’s, his brown eyes eerily aloof, superior. His curly black hair came down low over his forehead, forming a triangle just over the bridge of his stubby nose.
“Get the new kid!” the lynch mob exhorted.
As he came forward, reaching for my shoulders, Mattheny resembled Frankenstein’s monster. It was as he touched me that I found grace. I slipped my hand around his wrist, turned my back, bent over and hauled his baffled, surprisingly buoyant body over my shoulder and dropped him to the floor. Flat on his back, he looked up at me, stunned but not hurt.
For a moment no one spoke or moved. Then a boy cried, “The new kid flipped John!” Other boys and girls chirped in, “The new kid flipped John!” I believe it was Jerry Rodriguez, the only one who’d been friendly that week, who proclaimed, awestruck, “Sean knows judo!”
The magic word was spoken. A dozen voices echoed: “Judo!” A new truth sprung into being. Judo! No longer jeering, my classmates widened the circle, giving me space. I looked coolly at them, eyes rimmed and glassy with sad knowledge of secret mysterious killer arts. I bowed slightly and walked into the classroom and took my rightful throne.
The classroom buzzed; before the ringing of the second bell, in a score of ways, the tale was told, the legend created, the myth made. Across the room, Mattheny glowered darkly, brow furrowed. Penny Riley, pale-faced Penny Riley, fragile profile to me, twisted her flaxen hair behind her ear, and the corner of her mouth turned upward, slanted ever so slightly, favorably, in my direction.
Penny too had reappeared from that time of smoke and dust. In the Alamo she had been a nurse, bravely tending the wounded. Once she had touched my forehead, laid her cool hand to my bullet wound, and had I not whispered to her my secret? The terrible secret that I was not like the others? That I carried within my heart a dark mission and an outside hope of survival? Perhaps I carried a magic pill that would render me, to all appearances, dead, and when the Mexican troops finished bayoneting everybody, packed up and left the fort, I would awaken? Had I perhaps whispered this secret to her? And what memory of me did she retain from that time of smoke and dust? Did she recall the sweater she had given me one Christmas years ago, the sweater her mother, my mother’s friend, had made her give me, the magnificent black sweater with the white reindeers woven across the chest? I had outgrown the sweater, and we would not speak of that time of smoke and dust. (Though twenty years later, running into Penny again and having a drink in her apartment, I wanted to but could not ask: Do you remember giving me a reindeer sweater? We drank and spoke of Mexico, where she had been and where I was going, and as she twisted her flaxen hair around her ear, I wanted to kiss her delicate lips, touch her pale, China-doll face. And when I finished my bourbon and slumped down her stairs, unkissed, setting forth for Mexico, I felt like a spy operating undercover, my mission obscure, my contacts mysterious, fleeting, and beguiling.)
Through kindergarten and the first two grades, I’d been a miserable, whiny little kid who didn’t get much respect. I was a skinny runt and nobody wanted me on his football or baseball team. My big brother, older by four years, considered me a loser. My sister avoided me, and my baby brother wept copiously whenever I peered into his crib. My parents resigned themselves.
I had a grandma and I called her every night and sang a song, and I would sing that song to her across these thirty years of time if only I could recall the words, if only she were here to hear my craggly voice break into tune. Whenever she visited, Grandma was amazed with our new house—so much bigger than the last—two stories, pink brick, white shutters. My, daddy must be doing so well—oh yes, we were a big happy family in suburban San Antonio on the edge of the frontier. (Daily Indian raids; bandits riding through; and once we had a rattlesnake on the porch and my father, neatly, with his hoe, cleaved it in two. Though in my travels, I have come upon so many Texans of a certain age who share this image of fathers boldly cleaving rattlesnakes in two, that I grow suspect. What is memory and what is myth?) We had a Chihuahua named Rawhide and a backyard ringed with saplings. The sprouts of freshly planted grass struggled through the lumpy dirt and the whitish clumps of caliche, and each evening my father came home and patrolled the yard in his suit, squatting and encouraging the new grass, tossing chunks of the ubiquitous caliche over the fence into the alley, muttering, “We’ll beat this damn caliche, boys.” My brother and I nodded grimly. And we were firm in our resolve. We’d win our war, marshal our forces against the dreaded caliche. (Though visiting my mother these many years later, I patrol the yard and yearn to see even one single clump of caliche, so that my father’s hand, reaching down, might spring to view, and then his sleeve, the dark suit coat, and now my father whole and rising, winding up, setting sail toward the alley, over the chain link fence, his last unconquered clump of caliche.)
We were young and brave and starting out in our new home and to my good fortune I was suddenly, miraculously, a different lad entirely—no longer a sniveling whiner, but a judo master.
Quickly, I made friends. My strange powers extended to football where I was suddenly the shiftiest-hipped kid in the third grade. Even my intellect, rather discredited up to this time, soared. I could, Sister Matthew reported, read at a fifth grade level! Returning from a parent-teacher conference, my mother disclosed this news to me in somber tones, her eyes misting over as if this God-given ability carried along with it awesome, perhaps tragic, responsibilities.
John Mattheny kept his eye on me. He was, in a sense, not a typical bully. He was given without warning to suddenly laying his head down on his desk and weeping, his broad shoulders and back heaving. His father was a wealthy businessman and an ex-marine, and it was rumored that he made John do fifty knuckle pushups every morning and run barefoot on the hot asphalt during the summer. Certainly John was strong for his age, a tremendous athlete. Every day we played football during recess and lunch and after school. John could throw long passes that actually spiraled, and running with the ball, he’d simply lower his head and barrel people over. To be tackled by John was a bone-jarring experience.
We were the best football players in our class, so we always played on opposite teams. While he relied on brute power, I spun and dodged my way down the field like a pinball, and to this day I have seldom known such joy as in those early happy days of football when Jerry Rodriguez would command, “Sean, pack the meat.” Down the field I’d go, packing the meat, as elusive as any judo master could ever hope to be. After school, we played late into the afternoon, and then I’d giddily ride my bike home, weaving from side to side as I pedaled up the long hill my brother and I called Heartbreak Pass, dimly aware of the falling light, the chilly air—the neat front yards and the pink brick houses I turned to battlefields and fortresses; cannons fired, men pitched off scaffoldings, while a judo master serenely disarmed whole waves of enemies.
As well as John’s sudden tearful fits, he was not a typical bully in other ways. I’d seen him take a few good beatings trying to protect other, weaker third graders who were being picked on by older boys, and if he had some money or food he was quick to share it with those who didn’t.
It must have been painful for him, though, to have me challenge his natural right to dominate. A few weeks after the first incident, he attacked me again. As before, I reacted spontaneously, hooking a leg behind him and pushing him to the ground. He was too impressed to even glare.
“Judo!” the kids cried again, any lingering doubts dispelled.
John and I established an uncertain bond. Sister Matthew thought that I would be a good influence on hi
m and switched our seats so that we sat side by side. But she underestimated the power of his will. By stages, I lost my moral grip; I became a bad boy.
When Sister Matthew’s back was turned, John and I sword-fought across the aisle with our pens; we put our hands to our throats as if we were choking; with our fingers we pushed up the tips of our noses, making pigs’ snouts. John giggled and encouraged me on to greater depravities. Once he unzipped his trousers, pulled his spindly penis out and waggled it about. I followed suit. For several seconds, as Sister Matthew drew sentence diagrams on the board, our members probed the stifling classroom air; we tugged, we twisted, we spun them in circles while our classmates stared in horror and awe.
Sometimes when John urged me to be bad, I’d shake my head and whisper, “No, John, no.” But he’d clench his jaw and glower so fiercely that my resistance caved in. Despairing, yet gleeful, I sword-fought another day, mimed choking, made my nose into a pig’s snout.
My misbehavior was both manic and calculated. I must keep John on my side. He was too dangerous an adversary. And what of Penny Riley? Was she smirking this day as I cut up? Or were her lips pursed in stern disapproval? Didn’t she see that I was only doing a parody of a bad boy so that my cover would not be blown? (A parody which I would relentlessly pursue, refining and heightening my act through a score of years; could no one glimpse my essential purity, see through the drunken death mask, look beyond the lunatic defenses?)
When John and I cut up, the class would give us away with its titters. How well I remember kindly Sister Matthew turning slowly from the blackboard as we sealed our lips and assumed blank, stoical expressions. Her soft eyes found mine and she sighed, so hurt to discover me in the early warning signs of coming dissipation and ruin. After school, her voice more sad than angry: “I expected this from John. But from you, Sean, from you . . .” I begged forgiveness, offered fervent promises, cried into her black habit.
Yet all that autumn I soared, a master of judo, a football wizard, a fearless frontiersman, a spy with an eye on Penny Riley.
In the evenings before supper, I played Alamo with my big brother in the backyard. To my chagrin, he insisted on being Davy Crockett and made me be the Mexicans. He shot hundreds of me down with his imaginary rifle, but in the end he allowed me to bayonet him with a plastic baseball bat. He sank to his knees with a great moaning and crying out, but even as Crockett’s life slipped away, he killed a dozen more troops with a rubber knife. My brother provided commentary as he died: “Crockett’s bleeding everywhere . . . he’s lost five gallons of blood . . . now they stick another bayonet all the way through him . . . it sticks out his back . . . but he’s not dead yet . . . he keeps fighting . . . he gets shot in the head . . . Davy Crockett refuses to die! . . . the Mexicans are shooting the shit out of him now but he refuses to die! . . . they can’t kill him! He’s only got one arm left . . . he kicks Santa Anna in the balls . . . now they’re aiming a cannon at him . . .” At last he howled in final death agony, shrieking so loudly my mother might lean her head out the sliding glass door.
All the while an inner voice whispered madly that really I was Davy Crockett, as well as being a spy who knew judo. But somehow, whenever I tried my judo on my brother, he got me in a headlock and threw me to the ground. I did not know why my judo mastery did not apply to him, but I supposed it was due to a character defect on his part.
We had a CYO flag football team, and John and I played on the same side against opposing schools. In flag football John could not rely on power. He was our quarterback and he liked to rear back and sail the ball high through the autumn air, and I’m not sure he cared if anyone caught it or not. When we won he shrugged his shoulders. When we lost he refused to shake the other team’s hands.
One afternoon our flag football team went to play a game against Holy Rosary on the poor side of town, in the barrio. At practice the day before the game, Coach Garza, who had grown up in the barrio, told us that the neighborhood could be rough, and he cautioned us to stick together and not to go running off to the concession stand after the game.
My mother drove me and John Mattheny and Jerry Rodriguez and a couple of other boys to the game. After she crossed Bandera Road, she became skittish as the boys talked about rumors they’d heard, how the men on this side of town carried switchblades and how they’d carve you up if you looked at them too long, or spat on the sidewalk near them, or talked to their sisters. You especially did not want to talk to their sisters, though why I would want to do so I could not fathom.
My mother told us we were imagining things. Then she told us to lock the doors.
She consulted a map and made a series of turns that led us down ever narrower and rutted streets. We fell silent. These houses did not look like our houses. They were small and rundown with sagging roofs and peeling paint. The houses crouched, close to the street, on tiny yards that were full of broken machinery. Clothes hung on lines. A group of men with thin dark faces sat on the front steps of a house and watched the passage of our white station wagon, and our own fathers seemed suddenly soft and round and harmless. These hard men, we thought, must carry switchblades.
The Holy Rosary athletic complex was a large one, with several fields and several football games going on simultaneously. We parked in a gravel lot. My mother kept her hand on my shoulder as we walked stiffly by some teenagers who were sitting in a car drinking beer. As our group shuffled past them, we heard them laughing and calling to us. My mother squeezed my shoulder, though I wanted her to take her hand away.
We found the field where our teammates had already gathered on the sidelines. My mother spotted some of the other parents in the stands and looked relieved. Before she hurried to join them, to my horror she kissed me on the cheek. As she walked away, my friends danced around me, hooting, “Cooties, cooties. Sean’s got cooties!”
“Fuck you,” I said.
“Fuck you, Sean,” John said gleefully, enjoying the word. He punched my arm and skipped away.
My friends were distracted by the sight of the Holy Rosary team warming up. In their maroon jerseys, their team looked crisp and sharp and seasoned. To our dismay, their quarterback (by division rules no older than nine) was as big as Coach Garza and had suspicious stubble above his upper lip. He was lobbing passes forty yards downfield. We panicked: “Coach, that guy’s got a moustache!”
Coach Garza trotted across the field. It was about forty degrees that day but, as always, Coach Garza wore long gray shorts and carried a huge set of keys on his belt. He left the sometimes uneasy impression that he could open any door.
He conferred with the referee, who signaled the opposing coach to join them. Coach Garza waved his hands in the air and pointed at the boy with the moustache. The Holy Rosary coach kicked some dirt on Coach Garza’s shoes, and Coach Garza took off his visored cap to let some cool air on his closecropped skull. He shook his head and trotted back to us.
“Boys, they say he’s only nine. But we’re not going to take this lying down. We’re going to file a league protest.”
“A league protest!” we echoed admiringly. It called to mind weighty men in white wigs who would see that justice was served.
“In the meantime, we’ll play our game the way we know how. We’re not going to let a moustache scare us. They put their pants on one leg at a time just like the rest of us.”
We huddled on the sidelines, stacking our hands atop one another’s, and Coach Garza led us in a prayer that we would play a hard fair game, the kind of game, he implied, that God would be proud of. On the other sideline, the Holy Rosary team was praying too, but we trusted that God would deem our solicitations more heartfelt and that He would lend no succor to nine-year-old quarterbacks who sprouted moustaches.
“Let’s go get them, boys!”
“Let’s get them!” we cried, breaking huddle.
As we took the field, John Mattheny gripped my arm and looked into my eyes
. “Those Mexicans are going to kick our butts,” he said.
And they did. Their offense ran and passed for touchdowns at will. Their defense broke through our line and stripped John of his flags before he could even throw the ball. Once, rattled, he handed off to a charging lineman who trotted in untouched for another score.
I was playing defensive end, and their halfback, a scrawny little bastard, took a pitchout around my corner. I slapped futilely at his squirming hips, the flags brushing through my fingers. As he cruised past, I put both hands on his back and shoved him as hard as I could. He crashed head over heels; his chin scooted along the grass. He sprang to his feet and shook his finger in my face, hissing, “You pushed, man. You can’t push! No pushing!”
He shoved me in the chest, and the referee ran over and separated us. The boy glared as he backed to his huddle. “I’ll get you, man,” he called.
On the next play he took a pitchout and headed my way. So did the rest of his team. They stampeded over me, and I went down in a tangle of bodies. As the ref’s whistle blew, the halfback ran over my head, his sneaker implanting itself on my cheek.
After the game, John and I and Jerry Rodriguez broke the rule about the team sticking together and ran down a hill to the concession stand. There was a long line of jostling boys, and by the time we had our sodas in hand, the sun was starting to set and the field lights had come on. I knew my mother would be alarmed and that we would have to hurry to find her, but John had seen something that intrigued him. Behind the concession stand there was a deserted, weedy, overgrown field with a few swing sets and a merry-go-round. “Come on,” he said, and we trotted after him, our sodas splashing in the paper cups as we crossed a concrete bridge that spanned a ditch.
A Night at the Y Page 7
