LIFTER

by Crawford Kilian

  “Hey, right on,” said one of the Tricycle Rats. I could never tell them apart, and I wasn’t about to start trying now.

  “Well, it’s good to see somebody who actually practises what they preach,” I said.

  “Huh?” said Jason.

  “Never mind.”

  “Well, so everybody thinks you’re some kind of a hot football player all of a sudden. But we know you’re still a jerk.”

  “Yeah, but so what?” I asked. “I mean, with all the problems of the world, why should you worry about me?”

  “For one thing, because you’re a lot smarter than you really are. For another thing, because you got no class. And for another thing, you blindsided me in that game.”

  “Oh, baloney,” I said, and the next thing I knew I was staggering back into the wall with the right side of my face ringing like a gong. Jason had slugged me and I hadn’t even seen it coming.”

  “You - you know, you’re a classic sociopath,” I gasped.

  Classic sociopaths are never impressed by that kind of talk. The Tricycle Rats grabbed my arms while Jason drew back for another punch. I turned on the Effect, but not fast enough to avoid a sock in the stomach. Then I used the Effect to whirl me and the Rats counterclockwise. That swung the guy on my left arm right into the wall, and sent the other one crashing into Jason, who swore as the two of them fell backward into the urinals. Jason Murphy with his skinny backside wedged into the bottom of a urinal was a very cheering sight. I feasted my eyes for a moment, thought about getting off a good parting shot, and then decide to just get out while the getting was good.

  Pat’s Antennae picked up my adrenaline aura as soon as I came back into the lab.

  “What’s the matter?’

  “Just got punched out by Jason in the can,” I said a little thickly. The inside of my cheek was a little ragged, and my jaw hurt.

  “What? Why?”

  “He got a chance.”

  “Well, that sucker has gone far enough. Let’s turn him in.”

  “Forget it. Living well is the best revenge.”

  “My idea of living well is to put Jason’s head in a Cuisinart.”

  “Forget it,” I insisted. “I’m already all knotted up about the game. I don’t need anything else right now.”

  “Butᚓ”

  “Look, you’re hitting a thousand against Jason so far, but I’m not, and I don’t want to. He’s just a distraction.”

  She subsided, thanks more to a glower from Gibbs than to my own irrefutable logic, and the subject was dropped.

  The day went on, getting steadily gidder. Lunch was a mob scene, with the team and the fans all hanging around, and I found it really hard to pay attention to my afternoon classes - partly because I was nervous and partly because my jaw hurt like mad. After school I brought Pat home; Melinda made an early dinner and we had a good time cracking jokes and making bets on how long I’d survive. Then we left for the game.

  The school looked different in the early evening, with the floodlights blazing down on crowded stands. I hate to admit it, but this was the first Terry High football game I’d ever attended, and I was observing everything with a kind of anthropological interest. The mood in the locker room was a lot different from the afternoon practices; guys were talking more loudly than usual, laughing more abruptly. I got my shoulder punched a lot.

  Finally we were all dressed up and ready to go. Gibbs had been standing around, not saying much, but now he took up a position by the door to the corridor that led out to the field. He was looking sharp in blue slacks and his blue-and-gold coach’s Windbreaker, and his expression was grim.

  “This game is a test,” he said after a long pause. “It’s a test of how well we can come back after losing Powell. It’s a test of how well we can adapt our plays to Stevenson, and how well he can adapt to a game he’s not familiar with.”

  He was putting on enough pressure to pop my eardrums; everybody looked at me.

  “We are up against one of the best teams in the state,” Gibbs went on. “They are tough, they are smart, and they are quick. They always come to play. They’ve heard about Stevenson, and they are going to test him and try to shake him up. Our job will be to give them so much else to think about, they may not even notice Stevenson until he’s in the end zone.”

  "This is a physical team we're playing against tonight. They like to hit hard. We are going to have to hit harder, or they will take our own field away from us. Will we let them do that?"

  “No, sir!”

  “Damn right we won’t. We’re going out there and scare them sick.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “We’re going to make those people out there realise that they have seen the game of the year, a game we’ve won!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “What are you waiting for?”

  With a rumble and a clatter, we took off past him, down the corridor and out onto the field. The crowd was cheering, the band was playing, and I thought it was all silly but fun. We did our warm-up exercises and got ready for the kickoff.

  Gibbs kept me out of the game for the first quarter. He sat next to me on the bench, analysing San Cristobal’s strategy and pointing out the players I’d have to watch out for. It was helpful, but also demoralising: I could barely follow what was going on, while Gibbs sat with his legs crossed and his hands in his Windbreaker pockets, predicting what San Cristobal would do before they even came out of their huddle. Then they’d do it, as if he’d devised their plays. In the melee of thrashing bodies out on the field, Gibbs could pick out a single player and discuss the guy’s performance in detail - while I was still trying to find the guy.

  When I finally went in, early in the second quarter, we were down 7-0. Gibbs didn’t seem to care; in contrast to the way he screamed at us in training sessions, he was calm and quiet. He let Jerry Ames decide on the plays, and the only message he sent with me onto the field was to keep up the good work.

  I’m not going to bore you with a yard-by-yard account of my noble-exploits. In the second quarter I scored twice, within five minutes, and Gibbs pulled me off again before San Cristobal could figure out what had hit them. The crowd was noisy; I ignored it until a piercing whistle rang out. I recognised it as Melinda’s, and glanced over my shoulder. She and Pat were in the fourth or fifth row, directly behind the bench, and having a disgustingly good time.

  At half time I went back to the locker room with the team, expecting Gibbs to praise us to the skies. Instead, he sandblasted our egos with a detailed description of our technical errors, physical inadequacies, and moral lapses - including mine, and he didn’t make allowances for my neophyte status.

  “Now, people, our visitors are considering what to do in the next quarter, and I expect they’ll decide to get physical and try to scare us into making even more mistakes. They’ll be waiting for Stevenson especially, and try to take him out or scare him.”

  Whoopee, I thought.

  “So we’re going to teach them very quickly that it won’t work. Stevenson, remember how you took out Quackenbush the other day?”

  “Yes, sir.” So did Sean; he had bruises all over his rib cage.

  “Right away, on our first play, I want you to take out that big tackle of theirs, that Al Suarez. I don’t care if you don’t make any yardage, so long as he learns to treat you with respect.”

  “Yes, sir,” I repeated dully. Colliding with Sean had been a lot like jumping face-first into a wall. Suarez was even bigger than Sean.

  “You don’t sound at all that eager, Stevenson, and I don’t blame you. But if you don’t, those people are going to treat you like a trampoline. They don’t want to see you score any more touchdowns.”

  “Okay, Mr Gibbs.”

  “Good.” Having rubbed our noses in our failings, he now began to build us up again, praising Jerry’s quarterbacking, Sean’s tackling, saying something good about each of us and holding out the glorious opportunity of a whole new half awaiting us.

  I
t was a great performance; even while part of me was marvelling at what a master manipulator Gibbs was, the rest of me was overdosing on adrenaline and slavering to get back into action.

  On our first play in the third quarter, Jerry did as Gibbs had ordered: handed me the ball as I took off around right end. I was getting up a lot of speed, and if I’d wanted to I probably could have outrun Suarez without looking too fast. But I saw him coming and let him intercept just as I piled on some more Effect.

  Thud.

  I hit him with my shoulder, hip, and knee virtually simultaneously, so hard the football nearly popped away from me. Suarez said “Huhhhh!” and spun away before he toppled. I could hardly breathe, but I was still on my feet with a little momentum, so I kept going. Touch number three.

  As with Jason, I trotted back to see my opponent on the ground. But his coach was kneeling beside him, and another coach was opening a little satchel next to Suarez.

  Sean Quackenbush slapped my backside as I passed. “Way to go, Stevenson! Geez, you really thumped him a good one. I kind of sympathise with the poor guy.”

  I couldn’t even see Suarez now because of all the players and coaches circled around him. Time-out had been called; after a few minutes, a couple of kids scuttled out onto the field with a stretcher. Suarez went off on it to a burst of applause.

  I saw some of the San Cristobal players looking at me thoughtfully as we carried on with the game. The next time I carried the ball, they came at me low, trying to grab my legs. I lifted over them. Touchdown number four. The Terry High fans were jumping up and down, the band was playing the theme from Rocky (which nearly made me sick), and Mr Gordon was grinning away up in the stands.

  The next time I was off the field, I could hardly hear Gibbs because of all the uproar in the stands behind us. He told me to keep it up, and not to be afraid of hitting anybody else who got in my way.

  “Is Suarez okay?” I shouted in his ear.

  “I expect. He’s built to take it.”

  San Cristobal came back pretty strongly about then, and scored another touchdown that was elegant even to my amateur eye. They were playing wide-open ball now, taking chances and exploiting opportunities they knew might never come again. By the end of the third quarter, the score was 28-14 and San Cristobal definitely had momentum. Early in the fourth quarter they scored yet again. Gibbs turned to me.

  “Get in there and do your thing, Stevenson. Don’t be afraid of them.”

  So I did, and I wasn’t. Jerry Ames handed me the ball and I took off, outrunning my own blockers in a few steps. Nobody on the other team even got close, and we made the conversion just as the quarter ended. The score was 35-14.

  As we were getting reorganised for the fourth quarter, San Cristobal’s coach sent in a substitute who went from player to player, speaking briefly to each one. I came off the field at that point.

  “You’re doing very well, Stevenson,” Gibbs said. “That should about do it. They did their best and it wasn’t good enough. They’ll start to come apart in this quarter.”

  Instead, the guys from San Cristobal went berserk.

  In less than five minutes they scored a touchdown, made the conversion, and sacked Jerry Ames right out of the game. Gibbs sent in Mike Palmer, and they sacked him, too, but not as badly. Then they scored another touchdown, and the score was 35-28. We were suddenly very much on the defensive.

  Jerry Ames, sitting on the bench with his ankle puffing up, explained what was going on.

  “They heard that guy of theirs, Suarez, is in real bad shape. Couple of broken ribs, maybe some internal injuries. They took him to the hospital. So the team’s kinda browned off.”

  Gibbs didn’t say anything, and neither did I. But I felt odd. I hadn’t meant to put the guy in hospital.

  We were playing badly now; the team obviously missed Jerry, and Mike was a good guy but they rattled him on that sack. When San Cristobal got the ball team, they marched downfield with it, shoving us out of the way or going right over us. At this rate they were going to tie it up, and after the pasting they’d taken, that would be as good as a victory for them.

  “Get back in there,” Gibbs ordered me. “We need somebody fast out there to catch their runners.”

  The San Cristobal fans start booing when I came out, which made me feel uncomfortable. Their team watched me trot out with cold expressions on their faces. I had a feeling they wouldn’t mind losing the game if they could stomp me flat in the next few minutes.

  I hadn’t had much experience playing defence, and on the first couple of plays I didn’t have much to do. Then San Cristobal’s quarterback popped a soft, low pass right over my head; I didn’t even have to lift to intercept it, and I can see now that they wanted me to.

  With the ball under my arm I took off, but one of their players grabbed me by the leg just as about three others piled on. I hit the ground and an instant later felt a blinding pain in my back; one of them had kneed me in the kidneys.

  “That’s for Big Al, buddy,” the guy hissed in my ear. “And it’s just for starters.”

  I lurched to my feet, barely able to stand upright. A dull growl came from the monster in my basement. It was one thing to hurt a guy unintentionally, but something else again to go gunning for somebody. This morning I’d been punched in the face by one jerk, and now some two-hundred-pound clown had nearly broken my back. Who needed this?

  In the huddle, I asked Mike Palmer to try a quick, short pass to me once I got past the line of scrimmage. He agreed; after five touchdowns, I was pretty popular.

  On the play, Mike faked a hand-off and then dropped back while I short around the left end. The pass was beautiful, fast and accurate, and I looked it into my hands the way Gibbs had taught me.

  Meanwhile, San Cristobal’s whole backfield was converging on me. I pivoted away from one guy and accelerated toward another - the character who’d kneed me. We collided hard, harder than he was ready for, and ricocheted apart. I saw him lose his balance, then I was away, with the crowd roaring and the band playing.

  At that point the fight really did go out of San Cristobal. The guy who’d kneed me was writhing on the grass, clutching his leg. The others stood around looking at me in a different way, and I realised that they were actually scared of me - me, the famous athletic simpleton.

  It was all going on like a silent movie, because the crowd was yelling on one side and booing on the other, and it was almost impossible to hear what people on the field were saying. We watched San Cristobal’s latest casualty go off the field between two other players, his bunged-up leg lifted just enough to keep weight off it. His coach met him on the sideline and gave him a sympathetic pat.

  When play finally resumed, we just stalled, playing slow, time-wasting football until the end of the game. San Cristobal never came back.

  Being back in the locker room didn’t feel the way I’d expected it to. Everybody was definitely up, cheerful and bubbly. Guys kept slapping me on the backside and highfiving me, but I couldn’t seem to get in the mood. In the shower, I kept thinking about Suarez in the hospital and the other guy with his leg wrecked - maybe as bad as Gibbs’s.

  They’d gone out ready to get hurt, sure. But they didn’t know about lifting, or how the Effect could turn a guy into a battering ram. So I didn’t exactly feel like a conquering hero about my heroic conquests.

  The weedy young guy from the radio station was in the locker room while I was getting dressed. He introduced himself, stuck a microphone in my face, and asked how it felt to score five touchdowns in one evening.

  I could’ve said something smart-arse, like “Quintuple the feeling of scoring one touchdown”; instead, I just muttered that it felt ok.

  “Nobody could believe your speed, Rick,” the guy said with a big grin full of brown teeth. “And you’re clearly not intimidated by your opponents, no matter how big they are. What’s your secret?”

  Out of sheer nerves, I nearly lifted then and there.

  “I dunno,” I s
aid. “I guess if you’re moving fast enough, you’ll get through. Uh, excuse me, I’ve got to meet some friends.”

  He didn’t want to go away, but Gibbs loomed up and shooed him.

  “You did very well tonight, Stevenson.”

  “Thanks, Mr Gibbs.”

  “Feeling a little down?”

  “Well, yeah. About the guys who got hurt.”

  “It happens. Just one of the risks we all run. With a different set of breaks, it could’ve been you on that stretcher.” He gripped my shoulder for a moment and looked into my eyes. It crossed my mind that he’d been on a stretcher once, and now he was looking for someone else to do the things he couldn’t do on the field anymore. “I’m not going to try to tell you to forget about it. Just try to keep it in perspective.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I finished getting dressed and waded out through crowds of fans. Flashbulbs were going off in my face, and a couple of tenth-graders even asked for my autograph. I felt silly, especially when Pat and Melinda started waving on the edge of the crowd.

  “Hey, there he is!” Melinda yelled. “Wow!” I struggled through the mob to reach them, and she hugged me. “Were you ever great! I couldn’t believe it. I think I’ve wrecked my voice. How did you learn to run like that?”

  “Chasing Marcus. Hi,” I said to Pat. She grinned and gave me a thump on the chest with the handle of her cane.

  “What d’you guys want to do now?” Melinda asked. “Go get a pizza, or what?”

  “Let’s just go home and take it easy,” I said. “I’ve had enough for one night. Besides, Pat and I are going on a hike tomorrow, so we better make it an early night.”

  “Your wish is my command.”

  This was a side of my mother’s personality I wasn’t too happy to learn about. At least Pat was keeping her cool. We went off to the car park with Melinda on my left arm and Pat on my right; Melinda drove us home in her old beige Volvo station wagon.

  We had a quiet, comfortable hour or so, listening to Mozart and Vivaldi while we drank tea and ate huge slabs of spice cake. The conversation was easy and animated, even though I didn’t say much. Pat and Melinda chattered away about the game and the music and the cake; every once in a while, Pat caught my eye and winked. Finally, around 10:30, I yawned and said it was time to take Pat home.