by Rick Bass
When the bell would ring, the boys sitting behind and next to Laura DeCastagnola were slower getting out of their desks than the rest of the class, and they walked oddly, holding their books at a ridiculous angle, close in and below their waists, as if aching from an unseen cramp. She had a jawline that you wanted to trace with your fingers. There was never a flatter, smoother region of face than that below her intelligent cheekbones. She made A’s, and she was nice, and quiet, but she laughed like a monkey.
She would explode with her laughs, giggling and choking on them. She wore her cheerleader’s dress on Friday. The blouse white without sleeves, the skirt gold. There were white socks. She wasn’t sweet on anybody. She was everybody’s sister. When she went to the football games and cheered, she was unique, standing under that vamp of mercury haze gold twinkling light—a huge vacuum cleaner could have sucked it and all of its charged magic away, leaving us only under a night sky out in the Texas prairie— unique in that she was always conscious of the score, and cared that we won, more so than about the party afterwards.
“Go, KEN!” she would scream. Ken Sims, breaking free, getting to the sideline and racing down it in his gallop, running all wrong, feet getting tangled up, no forward body lean, a white farmboy from Arkansas, the leading scorer in the city that year. Calves like bird’s legs. If Laura had had a boyfriend, it would have been Ken.
We’d see Big Ed, too, up in the stands, with his scarecrow wife, who looked to be ten or fifteen years older than he, and was seven feet tall, with one of those small bug-like dark rubies in the center of her forehead, though she was not Pakistani, but pale, looked as pale and American as Wichita, or Fort Dodge. Big Ed would be watching Laura as if no one else was down there, and while the rest of the stadium would be jumping up and down, moving, orchestrating to Laura’s leaps—her back to us, when Ken was running—Big Ed would be standing there, as motionless as a totem.
I would nudge Kirby and point, secretly, up to Big Ed—his eyes would be riveted on her, his mouth slightly open, as if he was about to say something—and we would stop watching the game for a second, and be troubled by it. We didn’t see how he could be thinking it: lusting after a student, and such a nice one.
And down on the field, Ken, or Mark, or Amos, would score. Our band would play that brassy little elephant song. And Laura would leap, and kick, and throw her arms up and out. We were on our way to an undefeated season, that senior year. Who would want to lose any games in their last year? So we didn’t. And we thought we were ready for that step, going out into the real world, and beyond.
It was such a time of richness that there was more than one hockey team, even—the struggling Aeros weren’t enough. They played in the Spectrum, and were nothing more than an oddity, like so much else in the town at that time, and destined for a short life. The only reason at all people went to see them was because Gordie Howe, the Canadian legend, was making a comeback at the age of 48, and was both playing for and managing the team, and his two sons were playing for the Aeros with him, and he was scoring goals, and winning games.
But the other team was one that no one knew about, a seedier, underground version of the Aeros, and they played far out on the west end of town, on the warped and ratty ice rink in Houston. It was out on the highway that led into the rice fields, and tickets to the game were only fifty cents. The name of the team was the Juggernauts, and they played anybody.
We were driving then, had been for a year. We were free. Kirby had a sandy blue Mercury, one of the Detroit old iron horses from the sixties that would throw you into its back seat if you accelerated hard, and we would, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, race out into the night, away from the city’s suburban lights, and we would pay with pennies, dimes and nickels—for Kirby and I had vowed never to work—and we would grip our tickets and step through the low doorway and go down the steps and into all the light, to see the Juggernauts, on the arena that served as a children’s skating rink in the day.
When we would get there, the Juggernauts would still be out on the ice, down on their hands and knees, with thick marking crayons such as the ones used to label timber in the woods, and they would be marking crudely the hexagrammatics and baffling limits and boundaries of their strange game. I have been to wrestling matches, since that time, and that is what the hang of air was like, though the fans were quiet, and many wore ties, and sat up straight, waiting: hands on their knees, even the women’s legs spread slightly apart, as if judging equipment at an auction, or even animals. It was the way anything is, anything that is being anticipated.
The games were sometimes violent, and always fast. We could never get the hang of the rules, and for us the best part was before the game, when the players crawled around on their knees with their marking crayons, laboring to draw the colorful, crooked lines, already suited up, and wearing the pads that would protect them.
On a good night there would be maybe thirty-five fans: girlfriends, wives, and then too, the outcasts, spectators with nothing else to do. There were people there who had probably driven from Galveston, just for the nothing event. The few cars scattered around in the huge parking lot outside nearly all had license plates with different colors. Most of the players were from Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and even beyond. It seemed odd to play the sport in the springtime, as they did.
Everyone got their Cokes for free at the games. The players didn’t get any percentage of the gate, and they didn’t even get to play for free, but instead had to pay the Farmers’ Market a certain fee just to keep the lights on and the ice frozen; they paid for that chance to keep playing a game that perhaps they should have been slowing down in, or even stopping.
None of the Juggernauts wanted to stop! You could hear them hitting the boards, the sides of the walls, when they slammed into them. They skated so hard, and so fast! It was hypnotic, and you felt you could watch it forever.
Ed Odom drove a forest green Corvette to school, the old kind from the sixties—older even than Kirby’s—and he didn’t park in the faculty lot, but rather, on the other side of the concrete dividing posts, on the students’ side, and he would arrive early enough in the mornings—steamy already, the sun rising above the apartment buildings and convenience stores, turning the haze to a warm drip that had you sweating even before you got to your locker—and he would cruise, so slowly, with the windows down, one arm hanging out, around and around the school, two times, three. Everyone saw him, and he saw everyone, and would nod vaguely, a smile that looked just past and to the side of a person, sliding away. He seemed to be like an athlete, getting ready for an event.
In class, he would grow disdainful when the guys tried to ask him about his “Vette:” what it would do, how long he had had it, how much he had paid for it. He would look at some odd spot in the room—a trash can, or the place in the comer where the walls met the ceiling—and would seem disappointed in whomever had asked the question, almost frozen with the disappointment, if not of that, then of something else—and he would seem to be unable to move: pinned down by a thing. His head would be cocked very slightly.
But one day he came to class looking like a thing from a Halloween movie: all cut up and abraded, bruises the color of melons and dark fruit, and a stupid expression on his normally wary face. His arm was in a sling. He looked as if the event had just happened, and he had come straight in off the street to find a phone. There was blood soaked through his gauze. The girls gasped. He looked straight at Laura DeCastagnola, who looked a little more shocked, and horrified, and also something else, than even the other girls—and even the guys, most of whom had no stuffing—even the guys looked away, and were queasy, could not look straight at him. Kirby and I watched the class, and it seemed only Laura was the one who could not take her eyes off him: one hand up to the side of her face, the way we all wanted to do, either in the dark or the light of day, while we whispered our promises eternal to her.
He sat down, slowly, without grimacing—focusing his mind somewhere else and far away
to do so, it was easy to see—and we respected him forever, for that—and he opened the geometry book, and began to lecture.
Three days later, as the bruises began to wane, and he moved more easily, he finally told us—but our anticipation had long passed, after his initial refusal to tell us, back when it had first happened, and we had grown churlish and lost curiosity, and were merely disgusted at his childishness in holding the secret—all of us except Kirby and me, who were still hoping very much to find out. It was a thing that grew, in us, rather than fading away.
He had been driving down the highway, he said, and had opened the door to empty his litterbag—onto the highway!—and had leaned over too far, and had rolled out. His wife had been with him, and she had reached over with her long left leg and arm and drove, after he fell out.
“I bounced,” he said, “like a basketball. While I was bouncing, and holding my ribs to keep them from breaking, I counted.” He paused and looked intelligent, as if he had trapped us in a game of chess, but by now it was agreed upon, as if we had a pact, not to give him pleasure, and no one asked him, and he had to volunteer it.
“I bounced,” he said clearly, enunciating quietly and with his teeth—it was like the words were an ice cream cone, and he was eating it slowly, on a hot day—“twenty-two times.”
His wife, he said, drove to the next exit, went below the overpass, and came back and got him. Helped him back in the car.
We drove to the hockey games whenever we could. They didn’t start until nine o’clock. Obviously all the players came home from work and ate supper first. The games lasted until eleven, twelve o’clock. There were fights among the fans sometimes, but rarely among the players, as in real hockey. I think that the fact they played among themselves, again and again, too many dulling intrasquad games, is what made this different. Though too it could just have been the spring. There weren’t any wars, and there wasn’t any racism, not in our lives, and we weren’t hungry. There weren’t any demands. Sometimes Kirby would pay for the tickets; sometimes I would.
Sometimes there would be a team not from our area, playing the Juggernauts: a northwest junior college’s intramurals champions’ team, or another, leaner and more haggard traveling band of ruffians, hangers-on in the sport: a prison team, sometimes, or worse. On these occasions the Juggernauts would rise from their rather smooth-skinned and sallow good-natured (though enthusiastic) boys’-school-type-of-play—happy, energetic zips of the skates, long gliding sweeps of mellowness on the ice, cradling the puck along and beaming—and on these invader nights, against the teams down from Connecticut, from Idaho, and Sioux Falls, they would turn fierce, like the same boys now squabbling over a favorite girl. On these nights of the visitors, the ticket prices rose to a dollar, and attendance would swell by half.
There would even be someone there with a camera and flash, a skinny youth but with a press card, perhaps real but probably manufactured, and good equipment, and he would be crouched low, moving around and around the rink like a spy, shooting pictures. And though there was no reason for a photographer to be there—the Juggernauts were in no league, none of these teams were, there was no official record of wins and losses—certainly no newspaper coverage—despite this, the Juggernauts always played hardest and wildest when the photographer was there. It could have been one of the players’ sons or even grandsons, but that did not matter.
They skated with their bellies in, those nights, bumped into their opponents without apologies and knocked them to the ice (or were knocked to the ice themselves), and charged around on the ice with short savage chopping steps of their skate blades, as if trying in their anger to mince or hash the rink into a slush. Some of them would breathe through gritted teeth and shout, making low animal sounds.
The Juggernauts had a player we all called Larry Loop. He wasn’t their captain, or anything—they were a band, not a team—and Larry Loop was large and chesty, and he raced down the ice in those crunching little high-knee steps whether they were playing against ax murderers or a seminarian’s school. Friend or foe, Larry Loop would run on his skates rather than actually using them, and could travel just as fast that way, as it was the way he had taught himself to skate, and it was a thing to watch. You could tell he was not from the north. You could tell he had not grown up with the game, but had discovered it, late in life. He was big, and the oldest man on the ice, grey-headed, tufts of it sticking out from behind his savage, painted goalie’s mask— though he was not a goalie—and more often than not when he bumped into people, they went over.
It was amazing, actually, how easily the people Larry Loop crashed into went over when he hit them. They were just like something spilled. I think now that he had this great tactician’s eye for analyzing, and would time his approach and hits—running at this odd, never-balanced velocity—so that he always made contact when they were pretty severely off-balance themselves: his victims nearly always seemed to be waving a leg high in the air, or grasping with both arms for useless sky, as they went over. And he would run a little farther, definitely pleased with himself, definitely smug, and then remember to turn back and look to see where the puck was, if it was still even in play.
He was called Larry Loop, we decided, because as he ran, he swung his stick, high and around, above his head, in a looping, whipping, exuberant circle, like a lariat, like a child pretending with one arm to be a helicopter. We almost expected to see him lift off. When you were close to it, you could hear the whistling sound it made.
He would gallop down the ice, waving his stick, drawing penalties for it the whole way, and I think it helped wind him up for the impact. He was what is called in hockey a “goon,” an enforcer-type whose best contribution to the game is usually restricted to rattling the opposition’s better players.
Except that pretty often Larry Loop would score goals, too. Again, perhaps, those strategian’s eyes, theory and logic, because everything was all wrong, it shouldn’t have been happening, he drew his stick back incorrectly and almost always shot improperly, off-balance. But one thing the thirty or so of us had learned from watching him was that when he was open and did shoot on goal, it was probably going to go all the way in.
When he scored, he went wild. He would throw his stick down onto the ice and race off in the opposite direction, in that funny little stamping run, and throw his masked face back, up at the low ceiling, and beat on his chest with his heavy gloved hands, and shout, “I am in LOVE! I am in LOVE!” It was funny, and it was frightening, too, to Kirby and me, like a visit to New York City for the first time, and we liked to believe that all the wildness and uncertainty and even danger in the world was contained there in that tiny skating rink, set so far out in the prairie, in the spring, heavy overhead blowers spinning, inside, to prevent the ice from melting. It was more ice than any of us had ever seen, that little arena, set so far out away from the rest of the town.
The wind coming across us, our faces, driving back into town— and it was town, then, and not yet city—it was as it had been on the way out to the game, only better, because there had been hope, going into the game, and it had not let us down. Larry Loop had been good and wild.
The rules were confusing, but we liked to watch. There wasn’t any danger of, say, one of the players going down with an injury, while the rest of them crowded around him, until one of them looked up into the stands, directly at us, and motioned, or ordered, one of us to go down there and fill in: substitute. Those damn rules—not knowing what to do, and the panic such a thing would give us. It would be a horrible thing. We drove with the windows down, and felt as if we had escaped from something.
“When you are born,” Big Ed said—and he turned and looked at the farthest side of the class and crouched, as if expecting an attack—there was maybe one small snicker, though by now, this late in the spring, most of the class was tired of his old grey-headed mock-youth—“the hospital, or wherever it is you were born, records the sound of your voice.” He straightened up from his crouch a
nd looked less wild, even calm.
“They record your first cries, the squawls you make when the doctor spanks you”—his eyes were looking at the floor, drifting everywhere but over Laura—“and they catalogue them with the FBI.”
He was lecturing now, not story-telling. “Because every voice is like a set of fingerprints. They have special machines that separate and classify every broken-down aspect of your voice— and you can’t disguise it, it’s more unique than a set of fingerprints, it’ll give you away quicker than anything, on a computer. Because those things in your voice that they pick up on tape don’t ever change, over your life.”
He seemed to take, for once, a pleasure in the actual content of this story, rather than in just the telling of it. Emily Carr, Laura’s best friend but not a cheerleader, raised her hand and asked him—and she had a deep, husky, odd sort of voice, as if something was wrong with it, and was perhaps hoping it would change, with age—“What if you weren’t born in a hospital? Or were born in a tiny little country hospital, where there wasn’t even electricity, just a midwife?” Emily was from Oklahoma, and if possible, nicer even than Laura. Maybe because her voice was funny and off, but she went out of her way to smile at you, not afraid that you might get a crush on her, whereas Laura was shy and quick with her laughing monkey flash of white teeth, as if afraid she might lead you on into thinking something else. It was maybe like she already had someone. But it wasn’t Ken! Ken was always running, running: sweating with the team. Scoring those goals.
