'I've had enough broadcasting from your big dumb face.'
'I have to practice,' Raymond said.
'This goddamn set is not to be goddamn touched. Now I'm serious about that.'
'It's my set, John.'
'I don't care if it was a gift from your grandmother who knitted it herself.'
'John, I've never hurt a man on purpose in my whole life.'
'And you ain't tonight, shitfinger.'
Jessup was standing in front of the set now, guarding it. Raymond began to ease himself from the chair. I moved my head in order to see what the Lions would do on fourth and one inside the Minnesota 5. The fieldgoal team came on and I reached over and grabbed Raymond's arm.
'Go easy,' I said. 'We've got a hard week ahead of us. You're both tense. It's the tension. I feel it. Coach feels it. We all feel it. We're all tense and knotted up. Let's save the combat for Saturday. It's bound to be a long hard week. Toony, shake the man's hand.'
I was right about the kind of week it would be. We did everything wrong in practice and the coaches raged at us. I spent a lot of time with Myna. Nothing helped very much. Wednesday's practice was the worst of the year and when we were only slightly better the next day, Creed issued word that Friday's light workout would be canceled. He also called the team captains in and suggested we have a beer party that night, Thursday, no coaches, no females, no time limit. The throwing of the beer cans started half an hour after the party began. It went from there to fights, to mass vomiting, to singing and comradeship. A defensive end named Larry Nix kept punching a door until he busted through. A few people fell asleep in their chairs or on the floor. There was a pissing contest with about twenty entries trying not for distance but for altitude-a broom held by two men being the crossbar as it were, the broom raised in stages as contestants dropped out and others progressed. It was the most disgusting, ridiculous and adolescent night I had ever spent. The floor of the lounge was covered with beer, urine and ketchup, and we kept slipping and falling and then getting up and getting casually knocked down again by somebody passing by. Clothes were torn and there was blood to be seen on a few grinning faces. There were tagteam wrestling matches, pushup contests, mock bullfights, and other events harder to classify. A bunch of men jumping repeatedly in the air with their hands at their sides. Seven people in a circle spitting at each other's shoes. Lloyd Philpot Jr. ate nine hamburgers in twentyfive minutes. Link Brownlee chugged a bottle of ketchup. Jim Deering and his brother Chuck traded ten quick bolo punches to the midsection, apparently reviving a boyhood tradition. It was a horrible night. They took off Billy Mast's clothes and threw him out the front door. Somebody pushed Gus de Rochambeau and he skidded past me over the beer and piss and put his hand through a window. I took out my handkerchief and bandaged him. Then we sang one of the school songs, Gus and I, and I didn't know whether I was singing seriously or making fun of the song and in a very short while I didn't know whether I was singing at all or just listening to Gus sing. I thought I could hear my own voice but I wasn't sure and so I stood there with Gus, not wanting to leave if I was still singing, and I watched my teammates slip and fall into the beer and get up sick and laughing.
Since there was no workout scheduled for Friday, I thought it would be a good idea to end the week as it had begun, a picnic with Myna and the Chalk sisters. The cyclic redundancy might be beneficial. I needed a feeling of restfulness, of things content enough in themselves to begin again, and I thought the warm drawling chatter of an identical picnic might put me at ease. Myna was available and so was Esther Chalk. Vera had a class but we talked her out of it and assembled behind the Quonset hut. I lay on the blanket with my arms over my face.
'We could all live somewhere,' Myna said. 'I have all this money that's in my name. We could go to Mexico. A friend of mine knows where to get good stuS in Mexico City. We could buy a RollsRoyce and pick up some stuff in Mexico City and drive into the mountains.'
'You have money?' Esther said. 'Gary, she has money?'
'Half a million.'
'Oil depletion,' Myna said.
'Half a million dollars?'
'My father wanted to send me to Bryn Mawr. So I had this decision to make. Either I could lose all my excess weight and kill my blemishes with cobalt or whatever they use and go to Bryn Mawr and be a beautiful and charming young lady and risk being supermiserable because of the responsibilities of that kind of thing. Or I could come a little west to out here and be emotional and do what I want. They're both better than staying home and out here you don't get nagged by responsibilities like the responsibilities of beauty.'
'What are you going to do with the money?' Vera said.
'Gary,' Esther said, 'what's she going to do with the money?'
'I don't know.'
'She should keep it.'
'She should do whatever she wants,' Esther said.
'She should keep it,' Vera said. 'She should hold on to it.'
'I don't know much about things English. But the idea of riding around in a RollsRoyce sounds pretty neat. And it's her money.'
'But she shouldn't just throw it away. She should do something positive with it. Maybe open a shop. I'm into handicrafts, Gary. We could think up something worthwhile.'
'She can throw it away if she wants to. It's her money, Vera.'
'Don't call me that. You know how much I hate that name. You know how much I loathe and despise that name, you damn bitch.'
'Our mother named her after herself,' Esther said.
'She should have named you Vera. You're the damn Vera. I'm not that damn person. I'm just me. You're the Vera. You're more her than I am.'
'She gets this way, Gary. It's a real laugh and a half, isn't it?'
'You're the only damn Vera in the vicinity that I know of. It's the honesttogoddest truth, Gary. She's the damn Vera, not me.'
'Quiet,' I said.
'We can all go live somewhere in Mexico,' Myna said. 'We can live in a house in the mountains with a garden that's always full of flowers, the wildest colors in Mexico. We can buy a RollsRoyce and go. Gary, you drive.'
'We can buy four RollsRoyces,' Esther said.
'You don't need all that money to go to Mexico and live in a garden,' Vera said.
'But we're getting four RollsRoyces.'
'I think we should get just one,' Myna said. 'That way we stay together.'
'That's right,' Vera said.
'That way we insure staying together. And we can all study the works of Tudev Nemkhu who's this Mongolian sciencefiction writer who's got a real big underground following. He's in exile in Libya because his government frowns on scifi.'
'All of us in the mountains smoking our little pipes,' Vera said.
We sat around for a while longer. Myna read to us, bouncing on her haunches, pausing after certain passages to bite her nails. We heard the wind then. It came up suddenly, fanning sand into the air
18
The football team filled two buses and rode a hundred and twenty miles to a point just outside the campus of the West Centrex Biotechnical Institute. There the buses split up, offense to one motel, defense to another. We had steak for dinner and went to our rooms. All evening we kept visiting each other, trying to talk away the nervousness. Finally Sam Trammel and Oscar Veech came around and told us to get to bed. There were three men to a room. The regulars got beds; the substitutes were assigned to cots. Bloomberg and I had a reserve guard, Len Skink, sharing our room. For some reason Len was known as DogBoy. In the darkness I listened to the cars going by. I knew I'd have trouble sleeping. A long time passed, anywhere from an hour to 'three hours or more.
'Is anybody awake?' Len said.
