Necessary Roughness (9 page)

“I guess.” My fingers started nervously playing with each other. Was this guy being so cheerful because he had good news—or was he being cheerful because he was preparing me for bad news? Or was he just practicing his bedside manner?

He cleared his throat and shuffled the film, rattling my nerves at the same time.

“Your ankle’s not broken,” he said. “We just need to fit you with an air cast. But we’re still talking two-three weeks of rehab before you go back to play.”

I wanted to kiss him.

“And you’re going to have to be careful in the future.”

“I will, I will,” I said, practically hopping off the table. Let the Iron River Mafia try to get me again. It doesn’t take a whole lot of guts to gang up on one bone-tired guy. If they wanted me to give up and die, that was going to be the very reason for me to keep on going. I was one tough L.A. mo-fo.

I hated sitting out the next game. While everyone else suited up, I wore my civvies and sat on the far end of the bench reserved for guys like Otto Jensen, a special-ed kid who was on the team but never played.

Every time we scored a touchdown, I got up, ready to get in the field for an extra point. Then I’d sit down, embarrassed, glad only Otto was there to see my mistake.

Jimmi went in as kicker. He made one extra point, failed another. His punt got returned for a touchdown.

There is a God, I was thinking. We still won.

In shop we were doing woodworking, which was kind of cool.

Shop was required for boys, home ec for girls. Next year we could take automotive repair as an elective, but I knew Abogee was going to make me fill up that space with calculus instead.

Young, on the other hand, wanted to give up her home ec class to take calculus now.

“Home ec is so stupid,” she told me. “And the trig class bores me to tears.”

Mr. Ripanen said no way, however.

“He had the nerve to say I’d probably appreciate the home ec classes after I was married. And he called me
young lady.”

“Maybe he couldn’t resist the pun,” I said.

“People around here aren’t subtle enough to pun.”

“They’re not very pun-ny, eh?”

“Shut up, Chan.”

*  *  *

Me, I enjoyed the easier classes. I loved being able to get all my homework done in study hall and still have enough time to flip a paper football around with Mikko. I don’t think people at Iron River are necessarily dumb, they’re just not that uptight about school.

Some of the kids at El Caldero, a magnet school, were just too intense about studying. The Korean kids were the worst.

“Jae Moon’s dad said that if he got into Harvard, he’d get a BMW,” my friend Andy told me once as we watched Jae lug home a wheelbarrel’s worth of books.

“So if his abogee can afford to buy him a BMW, why doesn’t he send him to private school?”

“Don’t know. Maybe he can’t because he’s too busy saving up for the car.”

I had cut out a football shape from a flat piece of wood. I’d planed it, stained it, painted on the stripes and laces. Now I was using this electric pen that would burn lines right into the wood for the finishing touch.

MIKKO • ALL-PRO • RIPANEN
I wrote in the middle of the plaque, squeezing in the last letters. When it stopped smoking, I handed it to him.

“Why, that thing is bee-yootiful, Chan!”
ALL-PRO
grinned. “I need to glue something on the back so I can hang it on my wall.”

“Mr. Munchie,” he called to our teacher, “do you have those little mounting hooks?”

Mr. Munchie paused, looked at my work. I beamed proudly back at him.

“That’s not exactly what I had in mind, Chan,” he said, smoothing his mustache. “I was hoping you’d make something more realistic.”

ALL-PRO
was working on a bear. A few of the other guys were doing fish.

“You mean that’s
not
a real football?”
ALL-PRO
gasped.

“It looks like something you’d buy at the state fair,” Mr. Munchie said, walking away. I didn’t know if it was good or bad, but I assumed the worst. I wasn’t worried, though. Abogee wouldn’t go ballistic over a poor grade in shop.

“Only the classiest state fair,” I told Mikko.

After we won our next home game, the talk was that we were all going to go to some big party.

ALL-PRO
and I went to the parking lot for our ride. Rom was waiting, at the wheel of a pickup truck.

“We’re not going to the party in
that,”
I said to Mikko.

But he’d already vaulted into the back with some of the other guys.

They sat expectantly, like a bunch of migrant farmworkers, which reminded me of L.A.

Almost every day the Mexicans would wait in a crowd in front of the Extravaganza, with their rakes and shovels and whatnot. It looked like there was going to be a rumble or a revolution. But no, a guy or a lady would drive up in a Beemer, and another would follow in a pickup. The Beemer person would lean out and go you, you, you, and you, pointing with a finger, and the guys would hop in the back of the pickup to be taken to the rich person’s house for a full day of farm or yard work. The others would wait until other people showed up, or if they didn’t, they would go home to wait for another day.

Manuel did this for a time, he’d told me. He hated those rich people.
Los pinches ricos,
he called them.

“What’cho lookin’ at?” Rom growled, gunning the engine.

“C’mon, Chan, let’s go,” said Mikko.

“Yah, okay.” I jumped in. I was picking up some weird Swedish accent from these guys. Next thing you know, I’d be yodeling.

Rom drove about a hundred miles an hour over an unpaved country road, making those of us in the back bounce around like a bunch of beets. I grabbed the side of the truck and hung on.

The truck skidded off the road.

“Duck,” said
ALL-PRO,
pushing on my head.

Two seconds later, I heard noises like bones crackling. Leaves were falling all around us like pieces of paper.

I think we were running straight into a line of trees. What a stupid way to die, I was thinking.

Then everything stopped. I looked up. The night was jet-black. No light, not even pinpricks of stars.

I made sure my teeth were intact.

“Damn,” I couldn’t help saying. “Where are we?”

“We’re at Rushmore, an abandoned mine pit.” Mikko’s voice. “Come on this way.”

A mine pit? I wondered as I followed his voice. Leaves, brush, and stones moved underfoot.

Suddenly there was light. Warm orange light from a bonfire burning at the center of a huge crater. This place really was a pit, surrounded by walls of rock and a ring of trees. Now we could all see each other in the fire’s glow.

“Glad you guys finally got here,” said one of the girls, a cheerleader. She still had her short skirt on. It made me feel cold just looking at it.

Most of the guys rushed the beer. I edged toward the fire, trying not to shiver.

“You’re lucky we’re having this Indian summer,”
ALL-PRO
remarked. “Some years it snows in September, and you’d be freezing your little L.A. butt right off.”

Indian summer?
This wasn’t exactly what I’d call loincloth weather. I’d been getting plenty frosty in
practice, especially in the morning when there was no chance of the sun providing any warmth. Otto, the special-ed kid, had started wearing thermals under his uniform. But he was the only one.

It didn’t take me too long to determine that Rainey Scarponi was there with a bunch of girls from the tennis team. I’d have known where Rainey was anywhere. I wanted to go up to her and talk to her—but right now that seemed about as conceivable as flapping my arms and flying off to the moon. I turned to
ALL-PRO
.

“How’s Gary doing?” I asked. I didn’t really care, but I sort of felt obligated to ask. After all, if not for him, I wouldn’t be on the team.

“I’m sure he misses us.” Mikko walked over to the keg, which was sunk into the ground. He grabbed two cups and filled them up.

“I don’t miss him a whole lot, though,” he continued. “He’s a total weeg, always inciting Rom and Jimmi into all sorts of stuff. That kind of person is bad for the team.” He handed one beer to me. “I like having you around better.”

I didn’t know what to say to this, except “Thanks.” I took a sip of my beer, but I didn’t suck it down. I’m not all that crazy about the taste of it, to tell you the truth.

“Does Rainey Scarponi have a boyfriend?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

Mikko laughed. “You still got your eye on her? I don’t think she’s seeing anybody. She doesn’t go out with a lot of guys. Don’t exactly know why—she’s a pretty girl. But then again, Rom and Jimmi and Gary really got on her case last year—to give you an example of their weeginess.”

“Like how?”

“They started calling her ‘the sausage queen’—you know how her dad owns Scarponi Sausages. But this was totally out of the blue, just to be mean.”

“What a bunch of knobs.” I was beginning to believe more and more that Rom and Jimmi had to have had a hand in what was done to me. I would have suspected that Gary guy, too, except he was home with two broken legs.

“It got pretty bad. At homecoming they had this sign out on the field before the game. It said ‘Rainey Scarponi, Bohunk Sausage Queen.’ ”

“Did they get suspended, or what?”

Mikko shrugged. “No one could prove they did it.”

“What?” I said, feeling outrage for this girl I’d hardly talked to.

Mikko shrugged again. “We probably should’ve done something about it. But do you know anyone who can hold a line better than Rom?”

“No.” I didn’t. No one came close.

“Come on,” Mikko said. “Let’s go talk to her.”

*  *  *

Rainey Scarponi had blue eyes. Bluer than blue, behind long, dark lashes that knocked me out. She didn’t look exactly excited to see us. She smiled kind of stiffly.

“Hey, Rainey,” Mikko said. He sounded a little stiff himself. “Have you met Chan? He’s the new guy from L.A.”

“Not formally,” she said. “Hi, Chan.”

“Hi, Rainey.” Rainey, Rainey, Rainey. It was like I’d heard that name before, but I know I’d never known anyone named that. Maybe I’d dreamed about her, maybe it was one of those predestination/past-lives kind of crap, who knows? I already felt protective of her, like I’d kill anyone who ever tried to hurt her.

But the problem was, I couldn’t think of a single thing to say—again. The waves in my brain had gone dead and flat as Christmas decorations after Christmas. I’d blame all the times my brain had bounced around in my helmet for this, but it somehow only happened when I was trying to talk to her.

“So, do you miss L.A.?” she asked. I paused, opened my mouth—and then all this stuff just came bubbling out. I turned into a blab-o-matic, talking on and on about how the air in L.A. was so dry that we had a cactus on our lawn, how we used to play soccer in a garbage-strewn park, how I missed going to the beach. I guess “Do you miss L.A.?” was
a question I’d been dying to answer, but no one had bothered to ask until now.

Mikko had gone somewhere. Rainey and I kept talking.

The autumn moon, which had been caught in the high branches of the trees, pulled clear. It was so bright, it looked like a disk stamped out of new copper. I felt like sitting down and writing a poem rhyming “moon” with “Rainey,” but first I wanted to keep talking to her, for about another hundred years.

There was a touch on my elbow. My heart nearly stopped beating.

“Hey, Chan.” An unexpectedly deep voice behind me.
ALL-PRO.
“Sorry to break up the party, but Leland’s going back into town. Didn’t you say you needed to get back in before eleven?”

I checked my watch. It was ten forty-five.

Abogee and O-Ma would be coming back from the store around eleven thirty.

Here I was, on a moonlit night, with a girl with awesome black hair. I was close enough to kiss her. I could have kissed her. Well, I’m pretty sure I had the guts to do it. But now it was too late. I had to go.

I wanted to kill myself.

Opening day. I had been at Froggie’s since eight in the morning polishing, stacking, mopping—you name it. I ran hot water through the Slurpee machine and the most amazing iridescent colors came out.

Young came in too. She doesn’t like to do a lot of heavy lifting because she’s afraid for her hands, so she did the dusting and kept me company.

I had to stock the magazine rack and found—much to Abogee’s surprise—that Bong had sold some porno magazines when he ran the place. The magazine jobber had come by and given us the exact same inventory Bong had used, and that included
Playboy
and
Penthouse
and this magazine called
Jugs
that was lying between
Family Circle
and
Popular Mechanics.
I don’t know if it was Bong or the franchise, but that incident was the closest thing I’d ever seen to Abogee saying something bad about his brother.

Abogee’s one of those people who’s religious but doesn’t go to church. He would if he had the time, I
suppose. He called the distributor up and called him all sorts of names in Korean, including “devil.” Not only that, he wanted the guy to bring his truck back right that minute and take away the “filth.” It really wasn’t the guy’s fault, since Bong had ordered the magazines in the first place, but I think Abogee probably blamed the guy as a corrupting influence on Bong.

Anyway, I preferred our old store to this one. At the Extravaganza, no one told us where to put the beef jerky, exactly how much soap you needed to clean the floor. And we didn’t have those god-awful contraptions like that thing Young and I dubbed the “hot-dog Ferris wheel”: a circular cage containing a dozen hot dogs slowly rotating under glass, sweating in the beam of a hot light.

But the biggest drag by far was the uniforms: paper hats and aprons that said
FROGGIE’S EXPRESS
on them. The hats were the pits because they had two cutout eyes that were supposed to look like the top of a frog’s head, but the model they’d used was obviously a toad, and these distinctions were important to me.