Spooner (24 page)

Then came an afternoon about halfway through October when Tinker gathered his players at the beginning of practice and announced
that he intended to make Lemonkatz into a football player. The reason for the announcement was anybody’s guess. Possibly Lemonkatz’s
father had called him, asking him to make his boy a man—Spooner had heard of things like that, throwing the child into the
river to teach him to swim—or maybe it had nothing to do with Lemonkatz; maybe Mrs. Tinker hadn’t been giving Coach 100 percent
on the home front. Whatever the cause, something had changed, and as always for Lemonkatz, the change was not good.

Fifteen minutes after the announcement was made, Tinker caught Lemonkatz cheating on his six-count burpies and sent him twice
around the goalposts carrying a tackling dummy, then brought him up from the back of the line six times in a row to face Russell
Hodge in agility drills.

Russell Hodge was an invulnerable, unapproachable knot of muscle and hostility—invulnerable from the left, at least; you could
sneak up on him from the right where the yellow jacket had stung him deaf—a consensus all-conference linebacker for three
straight years, second-team All-State in his junior year. Or had been until the afternoon he tossed Miss Degruso the music
teacher into an open locker and slammed the door shut on her fingers and knee. Miss Degruso suffered two broken metacarpals
and a cracked femur in the attack, and Russell was suspended not only from school but, several days later, in spite of Tinker’s
calling in favors from his friends on the school board, from the football team. Miss Degruso was a tiny thing—had fit nearly
entirely into the locker—and until this incident, had been quite a cellist.

Tinker called a special meeting of the squad to break the news. There had been only one other special meeting that year, when
a kid named Neal Meredith was killed crossing the train tracks on his way home. Tinker said now what he’d said then, that
setback
was only another word for
opportunity
.

In spite of that speech, the Golden Streaks lost 33–20 in a game that was not as close as the score. Leaving Coach Tinker
8-1 for the second year in a row, so close and yet so far, and nothing for comfort but the bitter satisfaction that Miss Degruso’s
string quartet had canceled its annual Thanksgiving recital because her left leg couldn’t comfortably accommodate her instrument.
Comfortably
, he loved that. In the end, you always found out who wanted it bad enough and who didn’t.

The struggle to change Lemonkatz continued through the long last month of the season. Week after week, Tinker screamed and
blew his whistle, and week after week Lemonkatz dropped the dummies when he held them in blocking practice or turned away
from other linemen in the agility drills, sometimes even covering his head. He feigned new injuries and once was discovered
lying among the blocking dummies—it was uncanny how a human of his amplitude could disappear into a horizon of smaller objects—eating
a whole box of Baby Ruth candy bars that he’d smuggled into practice under his jersey.

Tinker grabbed him from behind and dragged him back to practice, candy bars falling out here and there like pieces of Lemonkatz
himself. Later half a dozen of his teammates tied him to the bicycle rack, and the following day they threw him into the bleak,
icy waters of the school lagoon, where he clutched his heart and screamed that he couldn’t swim. And through all this, he
cowered and puled and sometimes cried, but he would not be moved from the place he occupied in his life and had decided was
his.

At every practice a time would come when Tinker seemed to remember that day with the candy bars and stopped whatever he was
doing, the afternoon suddenly quiet, and called for Lemonkatz, and eventually that singular, awful, puling noise would be
heard in the silence and Lemonkatz would appear from his hiding place behind the rest of the players and get into his lineman’s
stance, his behind too high in the air, the hip pads coming out of his pants and all his weight on the back of his feet—almost
like a circus act, that moment Spooner could never stand to watch before the elephant or the bear was forced up onto its hind
legs—and wait in that posture for the whistle that would signal Russell Hodge or Ken Jonny or one of the others that it was
all right to maim him. It was like a reward to be given Lemonkatz in this way, and depending on Tinker’s mood it could go
on for ten straight minutes, sometimes five turns for two or three different players in a row.

Afterwards, when it was over for the day, Lemonkatz would collect himself slowly, limping or holding his stomach or his wrist
or his groin, and go back to his spot at the end of the line.

The day came, inevitably, when Lemonkatz would not get up. When he lay in the dirt and wouldn’t move, even with Tinker kneeling
next to him, blowing his whistle into Lemonkatz’s earhole and screaming that he wasn’t giving even 10 percent.

Tinker assumed—the truth was, everybody assumed—that Lemonkatz was pretending again that he was hurt, and Tinker threw down
his clipboard and picked him up as if he weighed no more than the uniform itself, just lifted him up off the ground and set
him on his feet and began to scream in his bleeding-voice-box voice that if Lemonkatz didn’t fire up now, he would be lying
in the dirt for the rest of his life. At least that was what he seemed to be saying. The words were unintelligible, lost in
the spit and noise Tinker made getting them out, a noise, it seemed to Spooner, that might have been around back when language
was first invented, when all of us had pelts like Lemonkatz’s and our most artistic ancestors first felt the urge to articulate
their cravings to eat or murder or fuck something squirmy, and it all came out of Tinker at once, in one long, horrible howl.

Even under this remarkable assault, Lemonkatz remained Lemonkatz. He dropped back onto the ground as soon as Tinker let go
of him, nursing his leg. Tinker picked him up again and head-butted him—this while Lemonkatz was still inside his helmet—opening
a gash on Tinker’s forehead so wide that it seemed to have lips.

The blood blossomed up and then ran like a leak in the bathroom pipes over Tinker’s face and shirt, and when he blew his whistle
again little bits of blood-covered spit came out of the top and blew into Lemonkatz’s face too. And he screamed, “Run it off,
Lemonstick! Run it off,” and then he turned Lemonkatz around and punted him, lifting him slightly off the ground. Lemonkatz
started for the far goalpost, limping badly, weeping. It took the rest of the afternoon for him to finish four laps, which
was the standard distance for running it off.

Tinker’s blood dripped steadily off his head as Lemonkatz did his laps, and various members of the team were inspired by this
bloodletting into murderous acts of their own, which set off murderous acts of retaliation, and by the time practice ended,
half a dozen players required stitches and fingers were bitten and broken and there was hardly an unbloodied face on the team
and Tinker was joyous with the afternoon’s work and with life itself, and jogged in happily with his players, not noticing
that Lemonkatz had stayed behind, collapsed beside a blocking dummy. And was still out there five hours later, ten o’clock
at night, weeping, when his mother and father found him and took him to the hospital in Chicago Heights.

Russell Hodge, it developed, had broken Lemonkatz’s femur, coincidentally in the same spot he had broken Miss Degruso’s, four
inches above the knee. Lawsuits were filed, legal depositions taken, state-mandated student-injury reports filled out. Tinker
himself filled out one of these reports, taking full responsibility for what had happened, although noting in the
additional comments
section that in fairness to all concerned, Lemonstick had NOT specifically notified anyone that his leg was broken.

In football you have injuries
, he wrote,
and if anyone was to blame, it was the inventors of the Game of Football and those like myself, committed in the effort of
molding today’s youth!

The team went 8–1, again, and as an addendum to his financial settlement with the school district, Lemonkatz was given a varsity
letter and allowed to ride on the team bus to the last two away games. He sat alone, still the outcast, and still there.

A month later the school board issued its findings in the matter, mildly remanding Coach Tinker for leaving Lemonkatz among
the blocking dummies but also noting that due to the darkness of the hour, it was an understandable error to have made.

Spooner’s mother read the school board’s findings in the paper and swooned at the injustice.

But not only that.

That same week—the week after the season ended—the Lions Club threw a standing-room-only luncheon on Coach Tinker’s behalf
at the VFW meeting hall and presented him with a five-hundred-dollar gift certificate from Goldblatt’s department store.

And Spooner’s mother counted the days until some Lions Club do-gooder wandered up Shabbona Drive and tried to sell
her
raffle tickets. It is probably unnecessary by now to point out that she took these things personally, but it was strange
even to Spooner that of all the people she talked to about it, she seemed angriest when she brought the matter up with Calmer.