by Terry Davis
Dinner is over and all the families in the neighborhood are out on their lawns. The fathers are watering the grass with hoses, the kids are playing, and the mothers are feeling the men’s tranquility at being home from work, I guess, because Agee says the way they hush the children is “unnaturally prolonged.” Just a bunch of middle- or lower-middle-class people enjoying their tiny pieces of the universe. The lots these guys live on might only be fifty feet wide, but they water the lawn with as much pride as they’d take in watering the lawn of a mansion. More, probably, because if they owned mansions they’d have gardeners or sprinkling systems.
Agee describes the men as huge children peeing because that’s probably how he remembers thinking of men with hoses. That’s how I still think of a guy with a hose. He describes them as “loosely military against an invisible wall” maybe because he thinks living is like being sentenced to a firing squad without knowing where or when you’re going to be lined up against the wall. This makes sense to me. I mean, we’re born and the guns cock. Once the guns are cocked they can go off any time.
I’m not sure why the men are “gentle happy and peaceful.” Maybe they feel the beauty of being with their families, watering a patch of grass on a beautiful evening, is as much beauty as life offers condemned men. If this is what Agee’s getting at, then “tasting the mean goodness of their living” means that the men understand or at least feel the meaning of life. “Good” because it feels good. “Mean” because it feels so good you want it to last forever.
XX
In the back of the bus the younger guys giggle and light farts and pretend to beat off. It’s going to be a long two days, so I’m here in front, taking a seminap. The older you get, the more toward the front of the bus you seem to go, until you’re right up here in front with Coach. I also like the fresh air coming under the door. My nose gets dry if I can’t get a little fresh air blowing in my face.
It’s not quite daylight yet, but most everybody seems awake. Kuch is reading Motocross magazine, Schmooz has the New Riders’ “Dirty Business” going softly on his tape player, and Otto is looking out over the Spokane River. The closer it gets to daylight, the more the river reflects the mountains. They seem to be growing right out of the snowbanks into the gray water. Coach snores lightly under his old hunting hat. He’s got the earflaps down and reminds me of pictures I’ve seen of Chinese farmers in the wintertime. Except he’s Japanese.
The Missoula trip is the big road trip of the season because everybody gets to go. The varsity has two matches, the JV has two, and everybody else gets lined up against somebody close to his weight. Our JVs wrestle Custer at two this afternoon. That’s why we had to leave so early. We wrestle until it’s time for the Lewis and Clark–Battleground matches in the evening. Then tomorrow the losing teams wrestle each other in the afternoon and the winners go in the evening. It’s really fun.
“Hey, Louden.” From behind I hear a muffled summons. It’s Norty Wheeler, crawling up the aisle on all fours. He looks spaced. His eyes bristle. He’s just dropped from heavyweight to 185 so he can go first-man JV against Custer. Otto and Howard Fontaine have beaten Norty consistently for the number-one and number-two heavyweight spots, but he dropped to 185 and whipped up on Craig Martin for number two there. Then Balldozer thrashed Norty so bad in their wrestle-off for number one that Norty may be disoriented still.
“Hi, Norty,” I say.
Otto turns from the window. “Mornin’, Dog Breath” is his greeting for Nort.
“Wuff, wuff” is Nort’s reply.
“What’s wrong, Nort?” I ask. “Ya look bad.” He’s wearing a red double-knit tie. The part that should be short is longer than the long part and it flops out of his letter sweater like a thin tongue. He lettered in football, which is not bad for a sophomore at David Thompson.
“I got no norms,” Norty whines. “And also I’m hungry.”
“What don’t you have, Nort?” asks Otto.
“Norms. I got no norms. None of us do. Mr. Borison says we live in a time of anomie.” Borison teaches sociology.
“Swain’s got some norms,” replies Otto. “I saw ’em yesterday in the shower.”
“Think of it this way, Nort,” I console. “You’ve got a lot of abnorms.”
“You guys are a comfort,” he replies. “Got anything to eat?” He droops in Saint Bernard style.
“You didn’t bring anything?” I’m astounded.
“Cake and turkey sandwiches,” Nort replies. “But nothin’ I can eat before the match. I’d never make weight. I think I’m on some kind of Nutrament high. I drank a can on the way to school and I feel a little spacy.”
“You look like shit,” interjects Otto.
Norty’s blood sugar is probably low. I reach for my honey bottle. “Open up,” I say. I squeeze a thick golden line of honey onto his tongue.
“Ummmmm, good.” Nort smiles. He turns around and crawls back toward the rear.
Otto and I look at each other. “Hypoglycemic,” I say.
“Poor fucker’s got no norms,” Otto replies.
The bus driver pumps the brakes. We slide just a little at first, then straighten out and slow down. Out the window on our side red-and-blue lights flash and twirl. A pickup with a big camper is stuck up to the hubs in the entrance to a little roadside park. A state trooper and a couple wrecker guys stand around. Nobody seems to be hurt or anything. An old couple sit in the cab of the pickup. The bus driver pours it on again.
“Guy must have tried to pull in there for a snooze,” I observe. “Must have thought he was driving a snow vehicle.”
“Fuck,” says Otto. He shivers. “Every time we take a road trip we see an accident or something.”
I know what Otto’s thinking about, but I don’t respond. He turns and watches Idaho go by outside the window and I close my eyes.
We were really into violence and meanness our sophomore year. Me and Otto and Kuch. We had to be to make varsity on a state championship team. Few of the older guys liked us because we were so insane. Running guys into the walls in wrestle-offs if we couldn’t do anything else to shake them loose. Screaming and dancing and never stopping brutalizing ourselves and anybody else we got our hands on. We each won our first match, against Marcus Whitman, and we were about psyched to our crania for the next ones, which were against Grand Coulee and Chief Joseph in a triangular meet at Chief Joseph in Wenatchee. We were doubly psyched because it was our first road trip.
We had to leave real early to make Wenatchee by noon. Everybody was asleep by the time we turned up the ramp for 90 West. Everybody except Otto and Kuch and me. Spokane looked really neat from Sunset Hill. Downtown had just been decorated for Christmas and we could see the Christmas lights there and a few others that had been left on all night in the residential neighborhoods. We scanned the Northside of town and spotted the water tower. You can see the tower easily from Sunset Hill at night and you can just make out the high school. It felt good to be part of all the David Thompson green and gold.
Just outside of Cheney a couple state troopers screamed by us, fishtailing like crazy on the black ice. The sirens woke everybody and from the front of the bus guys were yelling about a fire up the road. By the time we crossed the railroad tracks the road in front of us was all lit up in firelight. The three of us looked out the side windows but couldn’t see anything except patrol cars and a couple Cheney fire trucks until a trooper waved us to the shoulder and around the fire trucks. The bus driver swung out and around and got stuck. Then we could see what was going on, because the back windows looked right between the two fire trucks and square at the wreck. A gas truck was jackknifed across the highway, and a VW sedan had rammed into the side of it right where the gas valves were. The fire trucks were spraying foam all over, but still rivers of fire a yard wide ran across the road. A body hung out the driver’s window. It was part black and part covered with foam. The hair burst into flames right before our eyes. Another body twitched and danced in the flames on the passen
ger side. The head was nearly severed and lolled out the window. I guess it was the trachea that waved in the boiling flames.
The bus driver spun the wheels and rocked the bus back and forth. Everybody rushed mad-assed to the back of the bus to see. Guys were smashing me against the window. The head that was almost cut off seemed to be screaming, but of course it wasn’t. The window started to get awful hot against my cheek, but then one of the fire trucks turned the foam on us and it covered the window. Everybody got off me since there wasn’t anything to see anymore. The bus started getting hot, so Coach had some guys open all the windows on the side away from the fire. We could hear the flames bellowing like the wind. When a couple of the truck tires exploded, somebody yelled that the truck was about to explode, too. Oh, fuck, I thought. I stood up in panic and got ready to dive out a window. But the snow was melting all around and the bus tires had dug down to bare ground and spun us back onto the highway.
I don’t think anybody but Kuch and Otto and me got a very good look, with the bus rocking and everybody pushing and all. It didn’t seem like anybody else did, because we were the only ones not talking about how neat it was. It turned Otto straight to stone and Kuch and I just looked back and forth at each other until Kuch finally said, “Jesus fuck, did you see those guys!”
The three of us talked about it while the sun came up. It was good to talk, because then we didn’t have to think too much about it. We figured the passenger was dead from the crash for sure, and we hoped the driver had been killed then, too, or at least knocked out. It sure looked like he’d been trying to get out that window, though.
When we got to Wenatchee we heard on the radio that it had been a couple air force guys on their way back to Fairchild after visiting their girlfriends in Cheney. The radio said the passenger was killed instantly, but that the driver had burned to death.
Kuch and Otto both wrestled fairly well and won. If my guy hadn’t been muscle-bound and overconfident about me being just a sophomore, he probably would have beat me. I didn’t wrestle well at all. I had a real hard time shaking the whole scene from my mind, especially the head lolling back, as if to scream. To this day I can see it. On the way home we felt the bus dip when we drove over the site of the wreck. The fire had melted the asphalt and left a low place the county hasn’t filled to this day.
* * *
Otto prods me out of a light snooze. Mike Konigi stands resplendent before us.
“Huh?” asks Mike. “Huh, huh, huh, you guys? Am I spiff city or not?”
“Eat a pound, Konigi,” Otto responds. Otto, like me, is clothed in customary denim and flannel.
Konigi does look okay. He’s wearing a blue double-knit blazer over a white turtleneck and gray bell-bottoms. He’s wearing a white belt. I’ll kill him if he’s wearing white shoes. I look down at his feet. Mike Konigi lives to wrestle in Montana.
“You guys cultivate slobbery,” Mike says.
“Munch a bunch, Konigi,” I reply. “We’re headed for a wrestling match, not the fucking Wayne Newton show at Tahoe.”
“Would this stuff be okay to wear to the New Year’s dance?” Mike asks seriously.
“It’d be swell,” Otto says.
“Yah, it’s neat,” I concur.
“What’s Carla going to wear?” Mike asks.
“She’s got this long white dress,” I reply. “It’s a little more casual than a prom dress. In fact, I think it’s a nightgown. It’s got little yellow ducks on it. How about Keiko?”
“A long dress, too,” Mike replies. “Who you gonna take, Otto?”
“I don’t even know if I’ll go, Mike,” Otto says.
I have a great urge to chime in with some information, but I hold off for propriety’s sake and because Otto would beat me up. Otto’s got a giant throbbing blue-veiner for Romaine Lewis’s little sister, Rayette. She is probably the most beautiful girl in town, and that includes Belle. Our critical view may be slightly clouded because Rayette is black and seems mysterious to us. But if she’s not at least as beautiful as Belle, I’ll eat her panties off. But then I’d like to do that, anyway.
Rayette is one of those black girls like Leeland Wain’s wife, Joretta. Very delicately featured. A little turned-up nose, gigantic brown eyes, long thin bones, and tits like women in Marvel comics. The problem is she’s only fifteen. Otto takes her out sometimes, I know, because Romaine told me how nice Rayette said he was.
Except for their both being tall, Romaine and Rayette look so different it’s hard to believe they’re brother and sister. Every place Rayette is delicate, Romaine is obtuse. Rayette, for example, has very thin lips. But Romaine has a nose almost exactly like a gorilla’s, and as Balldozer noted Tuesday before the match, he’s got lips “like the brim of a chamber pot.”
“Hey!” Mike says to Otto and me. “Why don’t we get a few people together and have supper at my place after the dance?”
“Great idea,” I say, “but what’ll I eat? I can see your mom trying to feed me all that good Japanese food. ‘Sorry, Mrs. Konigi. Just a bowl of spinach, please. A little on the rare side. And a can of Nutrament for dessert.’ Sure,” I continue seriously. “I think Carla and I could go for that.” I’ll have to check to see if Carla was thinking of anything special for after the dance.
“Sounds great, Konig,” says Otto. “I’ll letcha know.”
Mike struts back down the aisle and I turn back to the Lolo National Forest of eastern Montana.
About two seconds later Mike’s little brother, Jerry, pops up beside us in an identical outfit. Jerry’s, however, is all wrinkled and covered in RyKrisp crumbs. “Was Mike telling you guys how he’s gonna give Keiko the big one after the dance?” Jerry asks.
“Didn’t say a word about it to us, Jer,” I reply.
“Don’t see how he could give her the big one,” Otto says, and turns. “I never promised to lend him my dick.”
Jerry laughs and scurries back down the aisle. We hear him laughing and repeating Otto’s line until Mike bops him with a sleeping bag. We stay with families from the other schools, so we have to bring sleeping bags.
We cross the Bitterroot River, which means it’s about time to get dressed. Coach is knotting his tie.
We have a rule that says David Thompson athletes have to dress presentably on road trips. That used to mean a tie and a sport coat. But last year we got it changed to include turtlenecks and letter sweaters. Still, we can’t wear jeans. Otto’s got a clip-on tie and a gold shirt he got for a dollar at the Safeway store. He’s got the shirt on now. He scoots by me and steps into the aisle to put on his good pants. He’ll wear his letter sweater, too. It’s a green cardigan with a gold DT. People always give us shit about our DTs. When we walk into a match some creepo always yells out, “Oh, here come the DTs!” Then he pretends to be drunk and wobbles around yelling about seeing snakes and spiders.
In my bag I’ve got a gray cotton turtleneck Mom bought me for road trips when we got the rule changed and an old-fashioned sleeveless pullover letter sweater and a big floppy thug hat Carla got me for my birthday. With my baggy bell-bottomed cords I look like an escapee from The Little Rascals show. Mom and I used to watch them on TV together. She’d get up early for work so she’d have plenty of time to put on her makeup. I’d sit with her and we’d watch The Little Rascals in her room. She loved it because she used to go to their movies when she was a kid. She said they were called Our Gang Comedy then. I was always late for school.
I suppose it would be smarter for us to just wear our good stuff right from home instead of getting dressed on the bus. But real comfort, like old jeans and flannel shirts, is something you don’t like to be without unless you absolutely have to. Not even for a six-hour bus ride.
We pull into the Custer parking lot and a few Custer and Battleground guys pelt the bus with snowballs in a friendly way. The Lewis and Clark bus isn’t here yet. The door opens and the sharp cold air rushes in. On a hill behind the school, snowmobiles swarm. Either the ring of their two-cy
cle engines or the shot of cold air arouses Kuch from the nap he began around Coeur d’Alene. I sit and wait for him while he knots his tie and pulls his hair back into a ponytail and fixes it with a rubber band. If he can sleep through a road trip he has truly achieved tranquility.
* * *
Schmoozler is off in a corner of the bleachers reading Semi-Tough to some Custer guys. They’re all chortling and guffawing. We beat them in a real close match this afternoon. I felt good all through my match. It went into the third round. We stuffed my nose before I went out and it only bled a little. I got really dizzy after it was over, though. When the ref raised my arm I had to grab on to him to keep from falling down. I lay behind the bench and didn’t get up until Otto went out to wrestle. Still, the gym seemed to spin when I stood up. We were down 24–20 going into Otto’s match. If he hadn’t pinned his man we’d have lost. The pressure was really on, but pressure doesn’t bother Otto. He’d led us out for our exercises yelling, “Corega! Coreeega!” He’s been fascinated with the word ever since he discovered I use that stuff instead of regular toothpaste. Coach made him captain for both the Custer and Battleground matches. Both teams have big tough heavyweights. The worst is over for us now, though. Custer is the tougher of the two, so tomorrow night should be easier.
Coach is going to have Doug Bowden wrestle in my place tomorrow night. That will give Doug some tournament experience and it will give me a little rest. Coach and I talked about it and decided missing one match wouldn’t make me lose my edge. Shute is only four days away.
Otto’s down behind the Lewis and Clark bench talking to Romaine. They’ve just finished their exercises and Battleground is out on the mat. The gym’s been full all day. Most people come and go, but the really interested ones bring something to eat so they can see all the matches. I met the folks I’ll be staying with. Their kid, Chris Carpenter, drew with Schmooz in a tremendous match this afternoon. Otto stops to say hello to Romaine’s folks on his way back up to where we’re sitting. They go to all of Romaine’s matches, even road trips. Rayette smiles up at Otto and I’ll bet half the gym bristles with hard-ons.
