T. Boyle - Without a Hero

Ray Arthur Larry-Pete was stunned. He’d given his life for this, he’d sweated and fought and struggled, filled the bloated vessel of himself with the dregs of defeat, week after week, year after year. He was flunking all four of his Phys. Ed. courses, Suzie thought he was a clown, his mother was dying of uterine cancer and his father — the man who’d named him after the three greatest offensive linemen in college-football history — was driving in from Cincinnati for the game, his last game, the ultimate and final contest that stood between him and the world of pay stubs and mortgages. “You don’t mean,” he stammered, “you don’t mean we’re going to forfeit , do you?”

For a long moment the Coach held him with his eyes. Faint sounds echoed in the corridors — the slap of sneakers, a door heaving closed, the far-off piping of the basketball coach’s whistle. Coach Tundra made an unconscious gesture toward his pant leg and for a moment Ray Arthur Larry-Pete thought he was going to expose the prosthesis again. “What do you want me to do,” he said finally, “go out there and play myself?”

Back in his room, Ray Arthur Larry-Pete brooded over the perfidy of it all. A few hours ago he’d been sick to death of the game — what had it gotten him but obloquy and bruises? — but now he wanted to go out there and play so badly he could kill for it. His roommate — Malmo Malmstein, the team’s kicker — was still in the hospital, and he had the room to himself through the long morning and the interminable afternoon that followed it. He lay there prostrate on the bed like something shot out in the open that had crawled back to its cave to die, skipping classes, blowing off tests and steeping himself in misery. At three he called Suzie — he had to talk to someone, anyone, or he’d go crazy — but one of her sorority sisters told him she was having her nails done and wasn’t expected back before six. Her nails. Christ, that rubbed him raw: where was she when he needed her? A sick sinking feeling settled into his stomach — she was cutting him loose, he knew it.

And then, just as it was getting dark, at the very nadir of his despair, something snapped in him. What was wrong with him? Was he a quitter? A whiner and slacker? The kind of guy that gives up before he puts his cleats on? No way. Not Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot. He came up off the bed like some sort of volcanic eruption and lurched across the room to the phone. Sweating, ponderous, his very heart, lungs and liver trembling with emotion, he focused all his concentration on the big pale block of his index finger as he dialed Gary Gedney, the chicken-neck who handled the equipment and kept the Gatorade bucket full. “Phone up all the guys,” he roared into the receiver.

Gedney’s voice came back at him in the thin whistling whine of a balloon sputtering round a room: “Who is this?”

“It’s Fontinot. I want you to phone up all the guys.”

“What for?” Gedney whined.

“We’re calling a team meeting.”

“Who is?”

Ray Arthur Larry-Pete considered the question a moment, and when finally he spoke it was with a conviction and authority he never thought he could command: “I am.”

At seven that night, twenty-six members of the Caledonia Shuckers varsity football squad showed up in the lounge at Bloethal Hall. They filled the place with their presence, their sheer protoplasmic mass, and the chairs and couches groaned under the weight of them. They wore Band-Aids, gauze and tape — miles of it — and the lamplight caught the livid craters of their scars and glanced off the railway stitches running up and down their arms. There were casts, crutches, braces, slings. And there was the smell of them, a familiar, communal, lingering smell — the smell of a team.

Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot was ready for them, pacing back and forth in front of the sliding glass doors like a bear at the zoo, waiting patiently until each of them had gimped into the room and found a seat. Moss, DuBoy and Kitwany were there with him for emotional support, as was the fifth interior lineman, center Brian McCornish. When they were all gathered, Ray Arthur Larry-Pete lifted his eyes and scanned the familiar faces of his teammates. “I don’t know if any of you happened to notice,” he said, “but here it is Monday night and we didn’t have practice this afternoon.”

“Amen,” someone said, and a couple of the guys started hooting.

But Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot wasn’t having any of it. He was a rock. His face hardened. He clenched his fists. “It’s no joke,” he bellowed, and the thunder of his voice set up sympathetic vibrations in the pole lamps with their stained and battered shades. “We’ve got five days to the biggest game of our lives, and I’m not just talking about us seniors, but everybody, and I want to know what we’re going to do about it.”

“Forfeit, that’s what.” It was Diderot, the third-string quarterback and the only one at that vital position who could stand without the aid of crutches. He was lounging against the wall in the back of the room, and all heads now turned to him. “I talked to Coach, and that’s what he said.”

In that moment, Ray Arthur Larry-Pete lost control of himself. “Forfeit, my ass!” he roared, slamming his forearm, cast and all, down on the nearest coffee table, which fell to splinters under the force of the blow. “Get up, guys,” he hissed in an intense aside to his fellow linemen, and Moss, DuBoy, Kitwany and McCornish rose beside him in a Human wall. “We’re willing to play sixty minutes of football,” he boomed, and he had the attention of the room now, that was for sure. “Burt, Reggie, Steve, Brian and me, and we’ll play both ways, offense and defense, to fill in for guys with broken legs and concussions and whatnot—”

A murmur went up. This was crazy, insane, practically sacrificial. State gave out scholarships — and under-the-table payoffs too — and they got the really topflight players, the true behemoths and crackerjacks, the ones who attracted pro scouts and big money. To go up against them in their present condition would be like replaying the Gulf War, with Caledonia cast in the role of the Iraqis.

“What are you, a bunch of pussies?” Ray Arthur Larry-Pete cried. “Afraid to get your uniforms dirty? Afraid of a little contact? What do you want — to have to live with fifty-six-to-nothing for the rest of your life? Huh? I don’t hear you!”

But they heard him. He pleaded, threatened, blustered, cajoled, took them aside one by one, jabbered into the phone half the night till his voice was hoarse and his ear felt like a piece of rubber grafted to the side of his head. In the end, they turned out for practice the following day — twenty-three of them, even Kitwany, who could barely move from the waist up and couldn’t get a jersey on over his cast — and Ray Arthur Larry-Pete Fontinot ascended the three flights to the Coach’s office and handed Coach Tundra the brand-new silver-plated whistle they’d chipped in to buy him. “Coach,” he said, as the startled man looked up at him from the crucible of his memories, “we’re ready to go out there and kick some butt.”

The day of the game dawned cold and forbidding, with close skies, a biting wind and the threat of snow on the air. Ray Arthur Larry-Pete had lain awake half the night, his brain tumbling through all the permutations of victory and disaster like a slot machine gone amok. Would he shine? Would he rise to the occasion and fight off the devastating pass rush of State’s gargantuan front four? And what about the defense? He hadn’t played defense since junior high, and now, because they were short-handed and because he’d opened his big mouth, he’d have to go both ways. Would he have the stamina? Or would he stagger round the field on rubber legs, thrust aside by State’s steroid-swollen evolutionary freaks like the poor pathetic bumbling fat man he was destined to become? But no. Enough of that. If you thought like a loser — if you doubted for even a minute — then you were doomed, and you deserved 56–0 and worse.