The Throat

John Ransom said, 'Hi,' the first time we faced each other in a game. These preppies are a bunch of cupcakes, I thought. When play started, he hit me like a bulldozer and pushed me back at least a foot. The Brooks- Lowood quarterback, a flashy bit of blond arrogance named Teddy Heppenstall, danced right past me. When we lined up for the next play, I said, 'Well, hi to you, too,' and we butted shoulders and forearms, utterly motionless, while Teddy Heppenstall romped down the other side of the field. I was sore for a whole week after the game.

Every November, Holy Sepulchre sponsored a Christian Athletes' Fellowship Dinner, which we called 'the football supper.' It was a fundraiser held in the church basement. The administration invited athletes from high schools all over Millhaven to spend ten dollars on hamburgers, potato chips, baked beans, macaroni salad, Hawaiian Punch, and a speech about Christ the Quarterback from Mr. Schoonhaven, our football coach. Mr. Schoonhaven believed in what used to be called muscular Christianity. He knew that if Jesus had ever been handed a football, He would have demolished anyone who dared get between Him and the endzone. This Jesus bore very little resemblance to Teddy Heppenstall, and none at all to the soulful, rather stricken person who cupped His hands beneath His own incandescent heart in the garish portrait that hung just inside the church's heavy front doors.

Few athletes from other schools ever attended the football suppers, although we were always joined by a handful of big crew-cut Polish boys from St. Ignatius. The St. Ignatius boys ate hunched over their plates as if they knew they had to hold in check until next football season their collective need to beat up on someone. They liked to communicate threat, and they seemed perfectly attuned to Mr. Schoonhaven's pugnacious Jesus.

At the close of the season in which John Ransom had greeted me and then flicked me out of Teddy Heppenstall's way, a tall, solidly built boy came into the church basement near the end of the first, informal part of the football supper. In a couple of seconds we would have to snap into our seats and look reverential. The new boy was wearing a tweed sports jacket, khaki pants, a white button-down shirt, and a striped necktie. He collected a hamburger, shook his head at the beans and macaroni salad, took a paper cup of punch, and slid into the seat beside mine before I could recognize him.

Mr. Schoonhaven stood up to the microphone and coughed into his fist. A report like a gunshot resounded through the basement. Even the St. Ignatius delinquents sat up straight. 'What is a Gospel?' Mr. Schoonhaven bellowed, beginning as usual without preamble. 'A Gospel is something that may be believed.' He glared at us and yelled, 'And what is football? It too is something that can be believed.'

'Spoken like a true coach,' the stranger whispered to me, and at last I recognized John Ransom.

Father Vitale, our trigonometry teacher, frowned down the table. He was merely distributing the frown he wished to bestow on Mr. Schoonhaven, who was a Protestant and could not keep from sounding like one on these occasions. 'What are the Gospels about? Salvation. Football is about salvation, too,' said the coach. 'Jesus never dropped the ball. He won the big game. Each of us, in our own way, is asked to do the same. What do we do when we're facing the goalposts?'

I took my pen out of my shirt pocket and wrote on a creased napkin, What are you doing here? Ransom read my question, turned over the paper, and wrote, I thought it would be interesting. I raised my eyebrows.

Yes, it's interesting, John Ransom wrote on the napkin.

I felt a flash of anger at the thought that he was slumming. To all the rest of us, even the St. Ignatius hoodlums, the cinder-block church basement was as familiar as the cafeteria. In fact, our cafeteria was almost identical to the church basement. I had heard that waiters and waitresses served the Brooks-Lowood students at tables set with linen tablecloths and silverware. Actual waiters. Actual silverware, made of silver. Then something else occurred to me. I wrote, Are you Catholic? and nudged John Ransom's elbow. He looked down, smiled, and shook his head.

Of course. He was a Protestant.

Well? I wrote.

I'm waiting to find out, he wrote.

I stared at him, but he returned to Mr. Schoonhaven, who was telling the multitude that the Christian athlete had a duty to go out there and kill for Jesus. Stomp! Batter! Because that was what He wanted you to do. Take no prisoners!

John Ransom leaned toward me and whispered, 'I like this guy.'

Again I felt a chill of indignation. John Ransom imagined that he was better than us.

Of course, I thought that I was better than Mr. Schoonhaven, too. I thought I was better than the church basement, not to mention Holy Sepulchre and, by extension, the eight intersecting streets that constituted our neighborhood. Most of my classmates would end up working in the tanneries, can factories, breweries, and tire recapping outfits that formed the boundary between ourselves and downtown Millhaven. I knew that if I could get a scholarship I was going to college; I planned to get out of our neighborhood as soon as possible. I liked the place I came from, but a lot of what I liked about it was that I had come from there.

That John Ransom had trespassed into my neighborhood and overheard Mr. Schoonhaven's platitudes irritated me, and I was about to snarl something at him when I noticed Father Vitale. He was getting ready to push himself off his chair and smack me on the back of my head. Father Vitale knew that man was sinful from the mother's womb and that 'Nature, which the first human being harmed, is miserable,' as St. Augustine says. I faced forward and clasped my hands in front of my plate. John Ransom had also noticed the surly old priest gathering himself to strike, and he too clasped his hands on the table. Father Vitale settled back down.

There must have been some envy in my irritation. John Ransom was a fairly good-looking boy, as good looks were defined in the days when John Wayne was considered handsome, and he wore expensive clothes with unselfconscious ease. One look at John Ransom told me that he owned closets full of good jackets and expensive suits, that his drawers were stuffed with oxford-cloth shirts, that he owned his own tie rack.

Mr. Schoonhaven sat down, the parish priest stood to give a prayer, and the dinner was over. All the football and baseball players from St. Ignatius and Holy Sepulchre began to move toward the steps up to the nave.

John Ransom asked me if we were supposed to take our plates into the kitchen.

'No, they'll do it.' I nodded toward the weary-looking women, church volunteers, who were now standing in front of the serving tables. They had cooked for us, and most of them had brought beans and macaroni in covered dishes from their own kitchens. 'How did you hear about this, anyhow?'

'I saw an announcement on our notice board.'

'This can't be much like Brooks-Lowood,' I said.

He smiled. 'It was okay. I liked it. I liked it fine.'

We started moving toward the stairs behind the other boys, some of whom were looking suspiciously at him over their shoulders.

'You know, Tim, I enjoyed playing against you,' John Ransom said. He was smiling at me and holding out his hand.

I stared stupidly at his hand for a couple of beats before I took it. At Holy Sepulchre boys never shook hands. Nobody I knew shook hands in this way, socially, unless they were closing a deal on a used car.

'Don't you love being a lineman?' he asked.

I laughed and looked up from the spectacle of our joined hands to observe the expressions on the faces of Father Vitale and a few of the women volunteers. It took me a moment to figure out this expression. They were looking at me with interest and respect, a combination so unusual in my experience as to be rare. I understood that neither Father Vitale nor the volunteers had ever had much contact with someone like John Ransom; to them it looked as if he had come all the way from the east side just to shake my hand.

No, I wanted to protest, it's not me. Because I finally understood: every year, Holy Sepulchre sent out flyers about the Christian Athletes' Fellowship Dinner to every high school in the city, and not only was John Ransom the first Brooks-Lowood student who had ever come, he was the only student from the entire east side who had ever been interested enough to attend the football supper. That was the point: he was interested.

The other boys were already up in the church vestibule by the time John Ransom and I reached the bottom of the stairs. I could hear them laughing about Mr. Schoonhaven. Then I heard the voice of Bill Byrne, who weighed nearly three hundred pounds and was the Bluebirds' center, saying something about a 'dork tourist,' and then, even more horribly, 'some east side fag who showed up to suck Underhill's dick.' There was a burst of dirty laughter. It