Necessary Roughness (7 page)

“Ready?” ALL-PRO’S teeth almost glowed in the dark.

It couldn’t be. The varsity team results were supposed to be announced today—but after school, at practice, I thought.

“Welcome, welcome,” boomed ALL-PRO’S dad. “Here’s the day we’ve all been waiting for, to find out who will be the representatives of the Miners for the upcoming football season. Let me turn the mike to
Mike—har, har—head coach of the varsity team, Mike Thorson.”

As the audience cheered,
ALL-PRO
whooped like an Indian. Young gave me a look, like who
is
this guy?

Coach took the stage.

“This will be our most exciting season in years,” he said, his tan washed out a bit by the strong stage lights. “The last time we went to the state tournament was ten years ago!”

“Bo-ring,” whispered Young. “Can you believe we get out of class for this?”

“Shhh.” I was engrossed.

“With this year’s lineup, we’ve got a record number of seniors returning, a junior who played varsity last year, lots of talent. This team is
experienced.”

A titter rose from the audience. Ever dignified, Coach ignored it.

“Let’s start with the captains. Returning senior quarterback, Leland Farrell.”

From the audience, the senior QB climbed onto the stage amid cheers, shook hands with the Ripanen-Thorson-Kearny triumvirate, took a helmet, and stood with it tucked under his arm. The cheerleaders’ pompoms made a sound like rain.

Monster Rom Kreeger was the other captain. Young jabbed me with her elbow and whispered “That’s Pigpen” when he got called.

“Our junior quarterback, Mikko Ripanen.”

“Hmm,” said Young.
“He
made the varsity team.”

ALL-PRO
got out of his seat leisurely and sauntered to the stage. He was all solemn shaking hands with the coaches, but when he was supposed to shake his dad’s hand, he reached out and pinched his cheek—to loud roars of approval.

Mr. Ripanen put his hand to his cheek and pretended to swoon.

“People in this school are weird,” Young remarked.

More roars, laughter while other names were called.

“And last but not least is our kicker, Jann Kim!”

Jann, Chan—close enough. He could have called me Jennifer, for all I cared.

Young’s mouth was open, moving slightly, as if she was saying, “It couldn’t possibly be you!”

I floated all the way to the stage. One helmet winked under the lights. I grabbed it. I did my best to look stern, tough, like everyone else in line—but I just smiled like a goon.

“And the whole school totally clapped,” Young recounted for everyone at dinner. “I had no idea Chan was going to make the
varsity
team.”

“It’s no small accomplishment, that’s for sure,” Mrs. Knutson agreed as she poured ketchup on her hamburger. “You should be very proud, young man.”

The only one who didn’t say anything was … guess who. He just muttered darkly to O-Ma about her need to economize, meat like this was expensive. I felt like telling him to quit picking on her.

Is it too much to ask that he be happy for me once in a while? I worked hard for this. On weekends I helped him fix up the store—no small task—and I’d even repaired the leaky sink in the kitchen and fixed up Mrs. Knutson’s lawn, which had been well on its way to reverting back to wilderness. But if it doesn’t come on a piece of paper, with the grades A through A, he just doesn’t give a damn. Abogee didn’t say anything through dinner. Not
even “Pass the rice”—he just reached across O-Ma and grabbed the bowl. Mrs. Knutson politely looked away, just like the first day we sat down to eat together and Abogee belched at the table.

Obviously he was mad. It was a silence you could hear, like when you put a blank tape in the stereo and crank up the volume. The silence just blasts you.

But this time I wasn’t going to give in. I wasn’t going to panic and say “Okay, Abogee, I’ll quit football and work in the store” just because I was afraid he’d sulk.

I knew Abogee was testing me, like in those fairy tales where if I chose the right answer, I’d be rewarded with riches and kingdoms (that is, Abogee not being mad for a while). If not, I’d fall through a trapdoor into a pit of alligators.

The events of the last weeks churned like laundry inside my head. The leaving. My last soccer practice. Saying good-bye to Sujin. The endless ride to get here. Eating lunch alone.

If he didn’t have the balls to ask me to quit football
out loud,
I wasn’t going to answer, either.

I think he was afraid I would say no, out loud.

“Go out on the slant, long,” Mikko said to me, waving his arm toward somewhere out on the field. “Don’t turn around until I tell you.”

I ran out. The rain-sopped field squished like a sponge beneath my feet.

“Now!” he yelled. I turned. A bomb crunched me right between the numbers.

“Hug it to ya, or you’re gonna lose it,” Kearny shouted in disgust. “Whatsdamatter, your fingers all greasy from that Chinese food?”

Kearny really yanked my chain sometimes. I think he knew it and enjoyed doing it, too. He was always chewing out people in public, questioning their manhood, trying to get the larger guys to absolutely flatten the smaller ones. It was all part of what he called the “necessary roughness” of becoming a football player. I thought that was bull.

But I wasn’t so stupid as to mouth off to him. I knew who controlled the roster for the games.

I had the kicking down pretty well. I could kick at different angles, I could adjust for the wind. I was getting to the point where I could figure out if we needed a straight-ahead boot or a puffy little floater to get through the uprights.

But we all had to play more than one position. Coach thought I should be a running back or a safety, since I was fast. Mikko was trying me out at wide receiver. It was a little frustrating learning the ropes for so many positions, but Coach made it clear that there wasn’t room on the team for a guy who
just sat on the bench and came out when it was extra-point time. That fancy stuff was for the NFL, he said.

To end practice, after the gauntlet, we had to do a mile run in under nine minutes, which we did. Then we had to do hundred-yard sprints in pads and helmets in under eighteen seconds, which Rom and some of the other bulky linemen
didn’t
do, so Coach made us start over from zero. Run. Run. Run till your gut explodes.

The third time, Rom came huffing in at over twenty seconds. I think Leland saw that if Rom hadn’t made the sprints yet, he never would. Leland stuck his finger down his throat, hacked up some watery gruel, and the coaches let us stop.

“Let me remind you, gentlemen,” said Coach, as we all lay sprawled out like lawn ornaments. Kearny made us get up and move around. “Our first game is next week. Two-a-days start tomorrow. Kindly get your butts to the locker room before six.”

“What’s two-a-days?” I asked Mikko. “Is it like One-a-Days plus Iron?”

“It is what it is, idiot,”
ALL-PRO
said back. “Get ready for the practice from hell.”

At five thirty in the morning it is dark. Like opaque dark. I thrashed around for my football stuff, clothes to change into, grabbed my book bag, and headed downstairs.

Abogee was already up. He was sucking down a bowl of ramen. Well, Oodles of Noodles from Northland Foods to be exact. It was perfectly quiet except for that sound, the one that a drain makes right after it’s unclogged.

He looked at me a little quizzically, noodles hanging down from his mouth like a mop, but didn’t say anything, not even “good morning.”
SCH-LOOP!

“Hi, Pop,” I said, not waiting for a reply. I slapped peanut butter and honey together to make four sandwiches. Mikko had turned me on to this combo, which was far tastier than the Spam-plus-mayo, warm and probably salmonella-laden by lunchtime, that Mrs. Knutson seemed to favor. It was nice of her to offer to make our lunches, but Young was always wondering
if she was actually trying to kill us off so she could get new tenants. Maybe ones that didn’t go
SCH-LOOP, SCH-LOOP
in the wee hours of the morning.

I was out the door by five forty-five. The back of my teeth felt a little fuzzy—I’d forgotten to brush them. No big deal. In football, a certain amount of seasoning is required.

The air was heavy with moisture, which clung like pollen around the pale illumination of the street lamps. There was absolutely no sound except for the slight breathing noise the early morning makes. Perfect. The library was dark, like it was sleeping. I blew out clouds of breath and began jogging toward the school, not because I was late, but because I was feeling frisky.

I cut across the field by the school. Dew slobbered water all over my shoes. The sky had turned from frying-pan black to gunmetal gray. Another day.

Rom was the only one in the locker room when I arrived. This was the first time I had seen him without Jimmi Beargrease attached to his side.

“Hey, Rom,” I said as I sat down to change into my cleats. He didn’t look up. He was sitting there in his practice shirt, pants half hitched up over the hugest, hairiest thighs I’d ever seen.

Young was right. He did stink. It was the putrefying smell of someone who eats a lot of meat: digested gristle, muscle, veins, and melted fat.

“What are you?” he said, his voice flatter than the EKG of a dead person.

“What?”

He poked me as if he were testing a package of ground beef. “I said, what are you? A chink or a jap?”

Whoa. This guy was my teammate. Or was supposed to be.

“You have a very eloquent way of putting things,” I said. “I’m neither Chinese nor Japanese. I was born in Korea.”

I finished with my cleats, threw on my practice T-shirt. It crackled slightly, with salt.

“And what are you?” I asked, still trying to figure out exactly what he was getting at.

Rom growled. He reached over and poked me again. “Huh. I’m one hundred percent American, nigger—and don’t you forget it.”

Holy cow. This guy was calling me chink, jap,
and
nigger. I didn’t realize I was so many things to him.

The locker room door opened and a couple of guys shuffled in.

“Hey, Chan. Hey, Rom.”

I felt a slight chill in the breeze they’d let in, and then I realized I’d been sweating.

Jimmi didn’t show up to the morning practice. No one asked where he was, either. He was there in the afternoon,
though. When I walked home with Mikko, I asked him about it.

“Oh, Jimmi lives in the Neeshawatin Res,” he said. “He’s Indian, if you haven’t guessed.”

“Hi, Mikko,” called a blond girl in an
IRON RIVER CHEERLEADERS
jacket. She licked an ice-cream cone as she eyed
ALL-PRO.

Mikko half-waved at her.

“A few of the kids on the res go to school here,” he went on. “But it’s like almost an hour away. Jimmi can’t get in for practice in the morning, but Rom gives him a ride home at night.”

“Rom and Jimmi seem like a weird combination,” I said. “I mean, especially given Rom’s, uh, opinions.”

“It is kind of strange,” Mikko agreed. “But to each his own, I suppose.”

We walked down Iron Mining Way. Mikko lived on Taconite Avenue, where all the nice houses in town were.

“You live in that big house by the library, don’t you, Chanster?”

“Uh-huh.” Someday Mikko was going to find out we only rented the top floor of Mrs. Knutson’s house, but I didn’t want to tell him right now.

Tackling drills. Kearny would toss a ball to the runner, and the defensives went for the tackle.

Catch the friggin’ ball, I goaded myself. Mikko had
given me some gloves with sticky fingers, kind of like the Korean grocer ones, and they helped.

“Hup,” said Kearny in a bored voice as he sent the ball into a lazy spiral. All eyes were on me as I moved out to get it.

“Down you go, jap boy,” hissed Jimmi, cutting me off at the knees and grinding my head into the ground.

Then, under cover of his back, he punched me, in the soft underbelly place where the pads don’t cover.

I saw green. The contents of my stomach rose upward, clamoring to become puke.
“Gak.”
I swallowed it. It burned the back of my throat.

“Kim, get up, you pansy,” Kearny yelled. “Toughen up.”

I forced myself to stand, hawked up some phlegm, and spat. There was dirt in my mouth guard.

Damn if I wasn’t going to kill Jimmi when the positions were reversed.

“Hup!” Jimmi ran out. I charged. His waist felt like a tree. It was like bringing down a water buffalo. One-two. I did it.

“Jeez-us—what’s that you’re doing, a dance?” Kearny sneered. “I thought
I
was going to be your date on Saturday.”

Jimmi snickered.

This was just one drill, one practice, I told myself.

The coaches told us to hit the showers, and I went
with Mikko to do a few laps around the track. He always did extra after practice,
ALL-PRO
always went two hundred percent. I admire that in a guy.

Today we had a great view of the girls’ tennis team. Every so often, since the courts were next to the field, they ended up whopping their balls over the fence and had to come and pick them up.

“Who’s that?” I motioned to a girl whose hair was even blacker than Young’s and mine, and was so thick she had it tied on the top and bottom.

“Rainey Scarponi,” said Mikko. “Her dad owns Scarponi Sausages.”

I tried not to make it look like I was staring at her, but gads, she was beautiful: long legs, muscular arms, and that hair. I must have a thing for girls with messy hair.

“Put your eyes back in their sockets, would ya?”
ALL-PRO
gibed, punching me in the arm.

We ran, not talking anymore. At one point Mikko gave me a goofy, smirky smile, and I found myself grinning back, for absolutely no reason at all. We still didn’t say anything to each other. In the fading light our shadows made one shadow.

“I joined the band,”
Young announced at dinner.
“I get free flute lessons fourth period.”