I was no child anymore, it seemed. I had seen things die and be dead and also undead, come back to life to flourish and fret others, once the beasts had grown large enough. I was getting larger, too. Too large in places, it seemed, not quite large enough in others. Junior high had come and gone, leaving in its wake nothing but questions, generally regarding my genitals, and how large I could expect them to be, or not be, at some point in the future.
And yet, the years dragged their feet like tired children. When would I be grown, liberated of this man who made us work for free for people who hadn’t even asked us to, who made us pluck hot organs out of pendulous creatures, and who went into debt just to buy guns so that we could obtain meats that could easily have been purchased at the store, if we’d had any money in the bank, which we didn’t, owing to the many guns?
He yelled, whipped, drove us like beasts, was out of his mind. Wanted us to have a life that might no longer be possible, and bent himself and his conscience every whichaway to make it happen. Whatever he did, he did it brutally, but for the most part he also did it honestly. Cheating required skills that Pop did not have, such as the ability to whisper and make at least one good friend. Pop didn’t have friends, which he believed were things meant for women and children, as were holidays and happiness. A real man didn’t need all that. All a man needed was a gun and a woodstove and maybe, if things got bad, a towel for the blood. He did not cheat unless it served some larger moral good, such as the rigging of the company car into a family car. But that had been justified in his moral calculus, which made it the opposite of cheating: It had been a duty.
He was righteous, and crazy, and liable to explode, but he did not cheat.
Except when he had no choice.
It happened one cool November evening, with the hiss of fried pork chops and the pedantry of Jeopardy’s Alex Trebek wafting down the hall to my room, where I was staring into the mirror at my changing body. It was a glorious thing, this body, and I admired it, its pubescent blubber melting away and hair arriving in secret places with disturbing speed.
“You’re a man now,” I said to the thing in the mirror. I flexed. What power.
There was a knock at the door. I jumped onto the bed, covered myself in a pillow, turned my book over, feigned reading. “Come in.”
It was Pop.
There had been a great rift between us for months, ever since I’d stabbed the dagger of treason into his back by quitting the football team, and I had begun to worry that I was no longer a son to him, but a turncoat. Pop had been a football hero, then a coach, then my coach. My quitting was a tragedy, a royal abdication. I might as well have expressed an interest in joining the U.S. Men’s Knitting Team.
Something had died between us.
Then came this knock at the door.
“What you doing under that pillow, boy?”
“Reading.”
“What about?”
It was a slightly lusty Dean Koontz novel about a hermaphrodite whose sons possess the ability to telekinetically transport themselves through space and time, and so I said, “It’s about science.”
“Neat,” he said. I could tell something was wrong, as my father was not generally enthusiastic about science. “I need you to do something,” he said. He was also not a big asker of things. “Fetch them old cleats you got and get dressed. We going to Pearl.”
There was only one thing in Pearl worth going to on a Thursday night: a complex of dirt football fields as flat and red as a Mars plateau.
“Why?” I said.
“I need you to suit up.”
He walked out.
That was odd. Not because I preferred hermaphroditic literature to football, but because I was in high school, and Pop coached a peewee team. Let me say that again: He coached a team full of ten- and eleven-year-old fatlings, whose soft little necks had trouble holding up a helmet. My neck, along with the rest of me, was fully formed. I was fourteen.
Was this a joke? Perhaps the old man was being funny. And then I remembered, my father did not tell jokes.
The horn on the Dodge bellowed. I grabbed my cleats, ran toward the sound.
Pop, they said, had been a beast on the grass, a true wonder in athletic contests, despite being as round and thick as a mastodon. They could say this because it was back when they had mastodons. The man had a head like a medicine ball, legs like Doric columns, shoulders like two HoneyBaked hams on either side of a very wide room. It was generally agreed that he would eventually play ball for Coach Vaught at Ole Miss or, at the very least, wrestle bears for a living. Then, during a fateful high school game versus Hernando, he broke one of the more necessary bones in his leg, and—just like that—the dream died. And so, since he would not be making any game-saving sacks or game-winning scores, he set himself to making something even better: a little man, just like him, who might fill those cleats and carry the mantle, live the unlived dream. No son of his would have a choice in the matter. The gravity and density of Pop’s DNA would be too much to ignore.
It took him three marriages, but finally, he got him a boy.
“Hot damn!” Pop said, that long-ago day, in a hospital just up the road from Graceland. He was excited, because he’d seen a pecker. He devoted the next eighteen years of his life to raising up the little thing attached to the pecker. The little thing, of course, was me.
“It’ll make a man out of you,” he was always saying. Like the time he told me to saw a deer in half. He handed me a rusty bone saw old enough to have been used by Grant’s siege engineers at Vicksburg and told me to run it through the dead thing’s pelvis.
“It’ll make a man out of you, boy!” he said, handing me the saw. “And don’t be sawing through his nuts, neither.”
This is advice I’ve taken everywhere with me: Don’t be sawing through an animal’s nuts. Speaking of nuts, that’s what Pop was about football. It had everything required to make a boy into a man: brutality, blood, a concession stand.
On the way to Pearl, we spoke little. I had so many questions, like “Do you really expect me to hit all those children?” and “Have you lost your mind?” We powered up Highway 18 in the Dodge, not even a radio station to break the tension. He stared ahead, as he always did, with the frozen gaze one typically associates with Arctic musk oxen.
I was worried. I was not a big rulebreaker. I did not like the idea of flouting what was clearly league policy about age limits. Some of the boys who played up in Pearl, they were big. I might not stand out too much. But still. What if I was caught?
“So—” I said.
“I got you at fullback,” he said, looking straight ahead into the black.
“Oh.”
“We running the wishbone.”
“Good.”
I had no idea what the wishbone was. Some kind of formation. Also, a salad dressing. I suppose he could sense my wondering, because he soon explained that he was expecting only ten players to show and needed one more or else he’d have to forfeit. I suggested there’d be dozens of teams at the park and that he shouldn’t have a problem finding an eleventh from another squad, some boy of some eager father who wanted his boy to get more reps in.
“Yeah, but you know the plays,” he said.
“True, true.”
I remembered none of the plays. Pop was always doing this, assuming I knew more than I knew about whatever game it was he’d ordered me to play. Overestimating my talent. Believing his DNA had won the battle with my mother’s and that I was like him in every athletic way, even though history had shown us both otherwise.
When I was six, he mounted a basketball goal in our driveway, believing the angularity and velocity of the sport would at least teach me to juke, which would be of help in football later on. But juking, as well as dribbling and shooting, were somewhat problematic due to my enormous head, bequeathed to me by Pop through the miracle of genetics. He could manage his own enormous head fine, having the adult body to go with it, but I could not, and I worked hard to keep it from hurling toward the ground at dangerous speeds, which is what gravity desires to do to all enormous children’s heads. Invariably, one of our family basketball games would end with my feebly attempting some sort of layup, while Newtonian physics attempted to introduce my skull to the driveway. I would jump, and slip, and come crashing down headfirst onto the concrete.
Mom would shriek and run to my aid, but not Pop.
“My boy’s got a powerful head!” Pop would say.
Next, he put me on a baseball team with boys three years older than me, hoping I’d rise to the challenge. Mercifully, they put me in right field, a clear signal to all that I was mentally disabled. On the rare occasion when a ball limped my way, I’d hurl it toward the infield and would be as shocked as everyone else to see it flying in the wrong direction, toward the heads of children on other fields. The parents shrieked, sought medical help, but not Pop.
“The boy’s got a powerful arm, don’t he!” he would say, sirens in the distance.
As I got older, I filled out a little, foreshadowing my future girth and power, but still lacked hand-eye coordination, as well as eye-foot, foot-foot, and head-wall coordination. In games of Two-Hand Touch or the regrettably named Smear the Queer, to be sure, I struck people and objects with great frequency. Once, after scoring a touchdown, I broadsided my grandfather’s barn and knocked two planks loose. Cousins ran inside for something to soak up the blood, but not Pop.
“Seems like he’s got him some powerful legs, too,” he said, while relatives pried me from the me-shaped hole.
When I turned ten, Pop announced that I would play football. The time had come. Glory. It was an August afternoon when he took me outside, pulled from his trunk enough football equipment to make a house payment, and told me to put it on so he could hit me: shoulder pads, Puma cleats, a jockstrap large enough for a Viking warlord. I put it on, and he got down opposite me.
“Say, Hut, hut,” he said.
“Why?”
“Just say it.”
Nothing’s quite as horrifying as watching your extra-large father—for all practical purposes the Incredible Hulk with a heart condition and comb-over—squat down, look you in the eyes, and ask you to ask him to hit you.
“Hut, hut,” I said, and I soon found myself blessed with the gift of backward flight.
“What are you doing to my baby?” Mom said, as I lay there, my nose bleeding, my life-force pooling into the dry, sandy ground.
“That’s how a man hits,” he said.
Pop had never been my coach before. He was safer in the bleachers, telling himself harmless lies about his boy. But coaching. Someone could get hurt. Me, for example.
Pop poured everything into my teams, building squads that might array themselves around me and help carry me to some future exaltation. He did this by trolling the playgrounds and trailer parks of our community, filling the roster with previously unknown athletes, boys whose time in juvenile detention had precluded their involvement in youth sports. He made the acquaintance of other large men, who might have large offspring, and many did. He signed up poor black children, whose parents could not afford the registration fee, or the equipment, or the gas money to get to games, and he paid for them from his own pocket. Which is to say, we had a roster full of large, fast, hungry, and very grateful athletes. Also, we had no savings.
“You spend too much on football,” Mom said.
“It’s his future we talking about,” Pop said. “He’ll play college ball one day.”
“I sure would like to take a vacation one day, or maybe get some new Sunday dresses.”
“I sure would like you to cook us some dinner.”
Was this how a husband was supposed to talk to a wife? I recognized a superior control in my mother, a Hoover Dam harnessing a righteous fury and turning it into a whole other thing. I could see a regal confluence of grace and power in her body and face when Pop spoke to her like this—was it a joke between them, or not a joke at all? When she looked at him, there was a willful weakness in her eyes, mouth, the closed lips, the unclenched jaw: Was it love, or pity, or a prayer?
I was old enough to know she had options: She could have left him, for example, or poisoned him, which she had many opportunities to do, given that she controlled the means of production of the dinners he so deeply loved, but she wasn’t going to poison him and she wasn’t going to leave, because she’d been left once before—and so had he: twice. I’m sure she was starting to see why. It was a miracle he hadn’t been killed by a woman somewhere along the way, and I think Mom must have known it. She was his protector.
“No other woman would put up with this,” she’d say.
“Shit,” he’d say. “I’m a catch.”
“And I ought to throw you back.”
She stayed with him out of love and sacrifice: It would have been a cruel act to release my father back into the world, to devour more women. He was safer this way, steamrolling her. She could take it. She didn’t mind lying down. It was a comfortable position, convenient for both napping and reading.
And for ducking the volcanic power of the man, and he was a volcano. You just had to get out of his way, and that’s what Mom did. She loved the volcano, saw through his magma to something hurting underneath it. She did not run from the gaping maw, but stood there on its rim and cooked it a pan of cornbread, which the volcano liked very much, and helped calm it down.
Nevertheless, the volcano had no money for new Sunday dresses for her, because of all the spending on football, and so she came up with a plan, which was to tutor local children for extra money in the afternoons at our dining room table, which meant the delaying of the making of the daily cornbread, which typically would’ve meant the volcano would bring desolation, but in fact was fine, because that meant Pop could keep us longer at football practice every evening and make us run more laps around the field. It worked out for everybody. Mom got a new dress or two, and Pop got his football team, and I got to spend more time getting concussions, which taught me a valuable lesson, which I have since forgotten, due to the many concussions.
We won bowl trophies and whipped many teams across the county. Pop soon became a vaunted member of the fraternity of coaches, a real bootstraps kind of hero. And I am grateful for what he did. It was fun, all the healthy camaraderie, the sleepovers after games, the time spent with my mother in the hospital while suffering from mild brain-bleeding.
I toughed it out, fought through phalanxes of giant corn-fed children, tried my hardest to do something right. I could barely understand the cryptic metaphors Pop used in his coaching.
“Eat his lunch!” Pop would shout from the sidelines.
“Eat his what?”
“His lunch.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Let me hear some leather pop!”
“Leather?” I would say. It sounded like something he’d pried out of a dictionary of nineteenth-century hobo slang.
“You know,” he’d say, clapping.
None of us was wearing leather, as far as I could tell. Should we be? Did he want me to carry some kind of a whip?
“Take a two-by-four to him, Junior!”
“To who?” I’d say. “There’s eleven of them.”
“Yo deddy crazy,” my teammates would say, and I didn’t disagree.
If pictures are worth a thousand words, the look on my face in team photos of this era says something like, “I am uncomfortable and hot.” My face is strained and stiff, the countenance of a fatalist who is suffering from a high-fiber diet. I seem to be making private signals to the camera, suggesting my location and how a well-trained team of SEALs might extract me.
Over the next four years, I tried to quit football approximately eight hundred and forty-two times. There was one rough game where a fullback, who seemed way too old for junior high, had abused me. His age, of course, was an assumption of mine, based entirely on his lush and rather full mustache.
“I think he collapsed one of my lungs,” I said.
Pop, as ever, pretended not to hear. “You coulda eat his lunch.”
I dreamt of being in a terrible car accident and losing the use of my limbs, which, I believed, would make it easier to quit. During a physical in Jackson, I got the brilliant idea to have a physician sanction my unfitness to play.
“Our other doctor said I have a heart murmur,” I said. “I could die.”
“You won’t die.”
“But I might die.”
“Not from that.”
“But one day.”
“One day, yes,” he said, putting a credentialed hand around my vitals and making me cough.
Back at home, I kept trying. “It’s just . . . there are so many extracurricular activities I could do,” I said.
“We got to get you a multivitamin, firm you up.”
“Like maybe the quiz bowl team.”
“Make a muscle,” he said, groping my bicep.
With my other arm, I extended an envelope. “Did you see this invitation I got to join Mensa?” I asked.
“Men’s who?”
“It’s for geniuses,” Mom said from the kitchen. “My baby is a genius.”
Pop looked toward the sound of dishwater, confused. “Your momma’s gone crazy,” he said.
“It just seems like maybe I should focus on things besides football,” I said.
“You mean, like baseball?”
“Like maybe the chess team.”
Something inside him turned to ash. You could see it. He stared into the middle distance, as though reaching back through memory for some tenuous relationship between chess and balls.
Soon, I spiraled into a whorl of decadence with the chess and science clubs, learning very different kinds of offensive moves and establishing control groups and reveling in the empirically verifiable company of other disappointing children. Pop and I didn’t speak for weeks, until that night when he came knocking and told me to find my cleats.
We arrived at the Center City Complex of Pearl, Mississippi, and I remembered that I did not very much like Pearl—a community best known for its excellent marching bands, violent dogs, and high rates of venereal disease. Their peewee teams were notoriously nasty, unmannered, and good. We didn’t know why they had always been so much better and stronger and faster than us, but we suspected it had something to do with having stepfathers who abused them. The only consolation, for those of us from outlying rural communities, was that they would all soon be in prison.
Pop opened his door, got out. It was night. The halogen glow formed a dome around the park, over which moved low gunmetal clouds. A gust of wind blew off Pop’s baseball cap, and his hairflap came unmoored, rose to attention.
“I got your pads in back,” he said and walked toward the lights.
I found all my old gear, the ancient jockstrap that smelled of spring meadows. I undressed right there in the grassy glen, preparing to don equipment that I had first worn four years earlier, when I was not yet the size of a Viking warlord as I was now, owing to a strict regimen of Cool Ranch Doritos. I had grown as big as Pop, but not in the right way. Not with the muscles.
A quart of sweat later, I made a jarring lurch onto the field, like Dr. Frankenstein’s hopeful monster duct-taped inside a protective barrier of sofa cushions. My knees refused to flex, and my shoulders had grown too large for the shoulder pads, which now perched atop my clavicles rather than astride them, giving the effect of small and functionless wings sprouting from my neck.
I joined my teammates, most of whom seemed too small, stunted even.
“Who are you?” a small uniformed boy asked, looking up.
“I’m Coach Key’s son,” I said.
“You’re big,” he said, poking a finger deep into the fatty tissues around my exposed gut. More of the younglings gathered around me, as children are wont to do with Jesus and clowns.
“How old are you?” they said.
“He’s tall as my uncle.”
“What grade is he in? Hey, what grade are you in?”
“He ain’t got no grade,” Pop said, strutting over. “He’s homeschooled.”
It was strange to hear my father lie so imaginatively.
“I’m in high school, and I have a driver’s permit,” I wanted to say. But I knew it would blow Pop’s cover. Then, during warm-ups, the taunts began.
“Ain’t he a big one?” I heard, off to my right, from the Pearl side.
“The big ones is always stupid,” another said.
“Hey, boy!” they said. “I bet you too big even to fit in the short bus!”
They howled. The Pearl parents appeared to believe I was slow of speech and had something of a gland problem.
“Good luck tonight, hon!” a tattooed mother said. “He’s about to bust outta that uniform, ain’t he!”
I said nothing, just stared dumbly, which only strengthened their belief in my retardation. I ignored them, tried to be the bigger man. I was the bigger man. Bigger than some of the parents, even.
“Grab a knee,” Pop said.
It was almost time. My teammates looked up to me, and I looked up to Pop, and Pop looked at a point approximately thirty degrees above the horizon, as though he’d sighted a large formation of ducks he wished to murder. It started to rain.
“Lead us in a prayer,” Pop said to me, and I did as I was told.
I was disoriented, at first, by the giant-headed children raging around below me in the rain. Then, four plays in, I got steamrolled by a child I hadn’t seen coming and landed sideways in orange mud. My teammates gathered around me, their dripping helmets wreathing the dark sky. One of them kicked me.
“I think Coach Key’s son is dead.”
I elbowed myself to a sitting position. My small attacker was the size of a ferret but appeared to be feeding on amino acids and gunpowder.
“I tole you he was dumb, Rusty!” his teammates said to him, high-fiving. It was embarrassing, getting whipped by a fifth grader named Rusty.
What happened next would become the stuff of peewee football lore.
In short, I sort of became an enraged gorilla. At fullback, I folded up children like bad origami, including Rusty, who soon took to running in the opposite direction, shrieking. I chased down the largest players, knocked them into a new day of the week. I started calling the plays, took the handoff, ran over as many athletes as possible, which required several awkward turns and parabolic vectors, before entering the end zone. On my second—or was it my third?—touchdown, I dragged at least four defenders across the plane, along with one of my own pocket-size teammates, who had become excited and was riding me like a homecoming float.
“It feels so good!” he said.
“It does,” I said.
I ran around children, over them, under them, and, at one point, fulfilled a childhood fantasy by throwing and then catching the very same pass. I made their running backs drop balls merely by barking at them.
“He’s got the rabies,” they said. “He’s an animal.”
And I was. I played with abandon, both because I knew it would be my last football game ever and also because, owing to puberty and the shrinking properties of cotton, my jockstrap finally fit.
“Thatta way, boy!” Pop said. “Stack ’em like cordwood!”
Ah, yes! The metaphors—they all made sense now. I started inventing my own.
“I just ate a tree!” I said to a fallen Pearl athlete. Or, “I’m about to grow a new head!”
“That don’t even make sense,” Rusty said, from across the line.
People were starting to talk. I saw them pointing, whispering. I knew there might be inquiries made about the depth of my voice and the hair on my arms and the date on my birth certificate. From what I could tell and hear, it was believed that I was either in high school or the greatest athlete in the history of Mississippi youth sports.
By the time the game was over, the field was littered with bodies. Children cried in pain or wept in joy, depending, rolling around celebrating and/or lamenting in the soupy carnage. Parents and coaches were on the field to tend the wounded. Referees shook their heads. The score was 63–0, and—I am not making this up—every point was mine.
Pop put his hand on my shoulder, and we beheld the spectacle of the battlefield together, where an alternate history played itself out, unraveling backward like reversed game tape, a glorious past where I had not quit, where I had inherited the best qualities of this beast on the grass that was my father.
“We whipped ’em good,” he said.
I couldn’t help thinking that he’d wanted me to play, to feel what it was like to be him, at least for one game. To him, it wasn’t cheating. It was fathering.
Pop knew what was coming, and we got out of there quick, while children tried to get my autograph or a lock of my hair, and league officials loitered to get a look at the young Sasquatch. On the way home, we spoke little. My ears rang like they always did after games, but now it was from all the cheering. To my knowledge, nobody ever pressed the matter. Pop was allowed to continue coaching and did so for many years.
There in the truck, in the dark, plowing through fat gems of rain, Pop spoke first. “I sure would like you to play again,” he said. “In high school at least.”
“Pop,” I said, “I hate football.”
“A man likes to see his boy play.”
I had terrorized many young children on that field, had eaten many lunches, had perhaps ruptured important organs and caused internal hemorrhaging. It felt great. Somehow, even then, I knew that this sort of triumphant feeling could never be achieved at our nation’s many science fairs.
“It’s fun to whip a little ass, ain’t it?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “It kind of is.”
And for once, it was no lie.