Don't Worry About the Kids (6 page)

Mr. Marcus wasn't very big, but we all knew he'd played halfback at a teacher's college in Pennsylvania, and once, on a hot day at the beginning of the season, he came to practice in short pants and I'd never seen such powerful legs. They weren't hairy, either. Just broad, smooth, and muscular. When he was teaching during the day, though, all his power seemed gone. He taught social studies and he could never control a class. I didn't have him for a teacher yet because he taught ninth and tenth grade and I was only in the eighth, but the guys on the team from the ninth grade would talk in the locker room about crazy things that went on in his classrooms. They said that some of the students actually smoked or made out right in front of him.

What seemed especially strange to me, though, wasn't anything Mr. Marcus said or did, but this look he had on his face when he walked through the halls. It was as if he were lost. The way my classes were arranged, I used to pass him in the halls three or four times a day and sometimes I'd say hello to him. He always said hello back to me, but I had the definite feeling that when I was out of my uniform, he didn't know who I was. He seemed to be thinking about something else, I thought, and when I was home remembering what his face had looked like as we passed each other, I'd start thinking that I'd been wrong: it wasn't as if he were lost, really—it was more as if he had lost something.

He was never lost at practice, though. His eyes were all fire then. Especially when he began to get us ready for the big game against St. Dominick's on Parents Day.

St. Dominick's was an orphanage about twenty miles away, run by Jesuits, and we were playing them for the first time. Mr. Marcus told us that he'd seen them play the year before and that we would have to play more than perfectly if we expected to win. By this time we'd played six games, winning four of them, and I wasn't starting but I was getting in, usually near the end—at garbage time—when either victory or defeat seemed certain. I didn't expect to get into the St. Dominick's game, however, because even though I was hitting harder and playing better than ever before, so were the other guys. Dr. Hunter showed up at two of our practices that week, and once, when we were running through our kickoff return drill, I saw him pat Mr. Marcus on the shoulder in a friendly way. Until then I'd had the feeling Dr. Hunter didn't like him. It was nothing he ever said, but what he didn't say. He'd stopped by our house twice after that first time, and both times I'd tried to entertain him while Mother got ready to come downstairs, by telling him about our team. But whenever I said something nice about Mr. Marcus, and waited for him to say something back, he either changed the subject or agreed with me. He never added anything.

“You certainly are a quiet lad,” he said to me one night, when, as usual, I'd run out of things to say. I shrugged. Nobody else I knew ever used a word like “lad,” I thought to myself, looking down at the rug. But then he added something that made me look up fast. “Not at all like your father was, are you?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I—I don't really remember him much…”

“Of course,” he replied, but before I could get up the courage to ask him for more information, Mother had come down.

I went upstairs to my room, so they could talk. After the first time he came by, I'd begun to think of the fact that he might eventually marry Mother. The thing was, though, that every time I began to imagine what it would be like to have a man like Dr. Hunter for a father, I'd wind up by thinking of what it would be like to have Mr. Marcus as one. I knew this was foolish, especially since Mr. Marcus was seven or eight years younger than Mother, but I thought about it anyway and I wondered a lot about what he did after he went home from practice. I kept thinking what a waste it was that a man like him wasn't married, and how sad it would be if he somehow went the rest of his life without a son or daughter of his own.

I tried hard, a few times that week, to get Mother to talk about my father again, but she wasn't very interested. She did bring down a box of photos for me to look at one night—and after going through the first few, of them before they were married, going to Coney Island and Jones Beach and to her parents' home in Connecticut together, she got up and told me to come to her if I had any questions. All the photos were marked on the back, she said. Then she went upstairs.

I looked at the photos for as long as I could, but without Mother next to me, to give me stories about what wasn't in the photos, I got depressed. I closed my eyes tight a few times, and tried to force myself to remember things I'd done with my father, but it was hard, and the only clear pictures that came into my head were ones of him laughing and giving me a ring for my thumb that he'd made out of a folded dollar bill—and another of him tossing me into the air and of how scared I was until I fell back down and he caught me and rubbed his rough beard against my cheek. I went upstairs and gave my mother each of these memories—asking her if he'd ever told her how to make a ring out of a dollar bill, and if he used to toss me in the air a lot or just once in a while, and if his beard had been very thick—but even though she answered my questions, she didn't add things to her answers, and she made me feel I was intruding on a part of her life I didn't have any right to.

The day before the St. Dominick's game, Dr. Hunter made a speech in our assembly about how we should be as friendly as possible toward the boys from the other school. They were less fortunate than we were, and he hoped we would all learn something from watching them and meeting them. The speech made me squirm. Words weren't going to do any tackling for us, I said to myself. But there was something else that was making me uneasy, and that was the way Mother was acting. When I turned to look at her in the back of the assembly hall, her cheeks were flushed, and this annoyed me. A lot of things annoyed me about her during this period, I know—the way she walked down the halls, the way she stopped to look in mirrors so much at home, the way she smiled at Dr. Hunter and the other teachers, the kind of clothing she wore—and the best way I can explain is to say that during this period, for the first time in my life, I was unhappy that Mother was pretty.

I certainly felt this way when we went to Parents Day together. Very few of the mothers came up to her to ask her questions about their children, but a lot of the fathers did, and the way she smiled, and the way they tried to impress her or make her laugh, bothered me. I kept wanting to go over to her and order her to stop—or to grab her and take her far away—and at the same time I kept wishing she would just pay a little more attention to me, and that she'd ask me about the game and about what our chances were and if I thought I'd get to play.

We were going through our passing drills when the St. Dominick's team arrived. They came in a pale yellow school bus, and they already had their uniforms and cleats on when they stepped down from the bus onto the field. Mr. Marcus went over to their coach, who wore a priest's black shirt and white collar, and shook hands with him, and while they talked we kept going through our drills, trying to act indifferent to their arrival. Their uniforms were black and gold, and I think we were all surprised at how new and clean they were.

I noticed, too, how serious they were about everything they did, even their jumping jacks. The other thing I noticed, of course, was the blacks on their team. Almost half their squad was black and there were also a few Puerto Rican-looking players. Although we had seven or eight at our school, and a few of the other teams in our league had one or two black players, I felt certain we were terrified by the sheer
percentage
of blacks on their team. One of the players standing near me confirmed my suspicion by saying that he wished we had “a few of those” on our team. “Can they run!” he exclaimed. I turned to him, wanting to contradict him, but I didn't say anything because I had to admit that my reaction had been pretty much the same. I assumed that black athletes were faster than whites, and that a team full of blacks would be almost impossible to beat.

By the time the whistle blew for the kickoff, our spirits were high, though, and the guys were all patting each other on the rear end and everybody was giving everybody else encouragement. On the sidelines the students and parents were watching and clapping for us, and the girls stood together and did cheers most of the guys pretended to be annoyed by. I looked for my mother, but she wasn't there. We huddled around Mr. Marcus. “They look fast,” he said, “but they're not very big. If you hit hard on the opening play, the game is ours. Is that clear? Hit hard and keep hitting. Drive, drive, drive! Let the man opposite you know you're the boss, okay? I think we can win this game. What do you think—?” We yelled back that we would kill them, smash them, obliterate them, and then Mr. Marcus put his hand into the middle of the circle and we thrust our own hands in, pyramiding them until he shouted,
“Let's go!”
and then we all let out a big roar and the starting team ran out onto the field.

We kicked off and St. Dominick's ran the ball back to the twenty-five-yard line, but on the first play from scrimmage, Charlie Gildea reddogged into their backfield and smashed this little black kid. The ball skittered out of his arms and John Weldon, our left end, fell on it. I threw my helmet into the air and raced down the sideline with the others to get closer to the play. Mr. Marcus tried not to seem excited, but I could tell he was just as thrilled as we were. Charlie Gildea went around right end on the first play after that and gained three yards. Mr. Marcus yelled at our guys to hit hard and I believe they were hitting as hard as they could, but on the next play I watched the way the St. Dominick's team dug in on defense. They dumped Guy Leonard to the ground for no gain. As I expected, Charlie Gildea went back to pass on the next play. I didn't watch him, though. I watched the line. The three St. Dominick's linemen charged through our men as if they weren't there. Charlie sidestepped one of them but the other two smashed him for a ten-yard loss.

Going back to pass again, on fourth down, Charlie was pulled down on the forty-two-yard line. It was their ball, first and fifteen to go, and it took them exactly four running plays to cover the fifty-eight yards they needed for a touchdown. The crowd was quiet. The St. Dominick's coach was yelling at his boys, and none of them were even smiling. Mr. Marcus was angry. “X-15!” he called. “And stop looking at the ground-look into their eyes. I want them to know they're in a ball game! Pick out a man on the kickoff and lay him flat!” X-15 was a reverse play, and it worked. The St. Dominick's team charged too quickly, and before they knew it, Charlie Gildea was in the clear, along the far sideline. Their safety man pulled him down on their own thirty-yard line, and we went wild. The thrill was short-lived. After the first play, when Guy Leonard gained four, our guys seemed to die again. As soon as the ball was snapped, the first thing you noticed was that our linemen seemed to move back a step, in unison. I could tell that Mr. Marcus noticed also because he started calling our guys girls, and right in front of the parents.

A few of us were still shouting encouragement to the guys on the field, but it didn't make much difference. After we gave up the ball, St. Dominick's began chewing up yardage again. “What's the matter?” Mister Marcus yelled. “Didn't you ever see a straightarm before? Christ!” He smacked his head with the palm of his hand and looked to either side of him. “Eddie,” he called. “Where's Eddie?”

I ran to him, my heart pounding. “Go in for Shattuck. Show these girls something, okay? You show 'em, Eddie.”

I dashed onto the field, pulling my helmet on and snapping the chin strap. “You're out, Shattuck,” I said in the huddle. St. Dominick's was on our thirty-yard line. The other guys stared at me and none of them said anything, but I knew they were probably thinking that Mr. Marcus had put me in for spite. I didn't care. The first quarter wasn't even over and I was getting a chance to play. I lined up at right end, and when the ball was snapped, something went click inside my head. I took a step back, so as not to be taken in, and then I saw men moving toward me with the ballcarrier behind them. I charged forward, hand-fighting past the first man. The second man hit me with a cross-body block and laid me flat, however, and all I could do as the ballcarrier went by was to reach out with my hand, snatching for his ankle. I missed, and looking up I saw that he was laughing as he chugged by, his white teeth gleaming inside his brown face. Charlie Gildea came up from the secondary and made the tackle. He helped me up. “Good try,” he said.

“I'll get him next time,” I said. I heard my name and I looked sideways. Mr. Marcus was having fits. “Eddie!
Eddie!”
he was wailing. “How many times do I have to tell you? When you see men coming at you like that, don't try to fight them all—roll up the play and leave the tackle for somebody else. Is that clear? Roll it up!” I nodded and set myself for the next play. They ran the other end and made a first down. On the following play, though, they came my way again, and I did what Mr. Marcus wanted. Instead of trying to fight my way to the ballcarrier, I faked at the first blocker and then threw myself into him, low and sideways. It worked. He toppled over me and the other blocker tripped over him and the ballcarrier was slowed down long enough for Guy Leonard to bring him down for no gain.

The first half ended with the score 28 to o, in favor of St. Dominick's. Between halves I lay under this big apple tree in back of the school, alongside the players, sucking on oranges. The St. Dominick's team stayed on the field, under the goalposts. Nobody said much. Mr. Marcus paced up and down, and it seemed to me he had a million things he wanted to tell us and felt frustrated because he'd get to say only a few of them. In the distance I could see some of the fathers playing catch with a football. Beyond the football field I thought I spotted my mother, near where they were serving coffee and hot chocolate. I wanted her to look at me—to watch me sitting with the other guys and to be proud of me. I wanted her to know what it meant to me to have gotten into the game so early, and I wished too that I could just hear her voice—even if she was only laughing at some stupid joke one of the fathers was telling her—but, at such a distance, I couldn't be sure it was her.