CHAPTER 25

The day after the night of the Squeaky Shoes, George Wilson called me over on the practice field and asked me if I would mind overseeing the rookie show. “You can produce it,” he said.

“You cut our best man, Imperiale,” I said, “a bona fide nightclub performer.”

“He played football like one,” said Wilson bluntly.

I said that I would do what I could.

“You’re expendable,” Wilson explained. “The other rookies have got their minds occupied.”

“I’m supposed to be worrying about Cleveland,” I said.

“Worrying isn’t going to help you against Cleveland,” Wilson said. He was being very cryptic that morning. “You might as well worry about the rookie show.”

He explained the purpose of the show—which was to give the rookies a chance to have fun at the expense of the coaches and veterans. Afterward, the veterans would entertain the rookies at a party. “Anything goes in the show,” he said. “There’s no rule book. Make it bawdy. That goes down well. There won’t be any dames watching. Put together some skits. You can be as rough on the coaches and the veterans as you want. Then there’ll be rookies who play kazoos and harmonicas and crap like that. They can play and fill up the time.”

“When are you going to schedule it?” I asked.

“You’ve got two days. We’ll have the rookie night the day after tomorrow.” He saw my dismay. “You’ll get help,” he said. “Barr and Gordy and Schmidt will give you a hand. Most all the Lions are goddamn frustrated actors.”

That evening at the team meeting Wilson requested that the rookies stay behind and take over the classroom to discuss their show. Barr, Schmidt, and Gordy stayed on as advisers, and so did LeBeau and Maher. It developed that none of the rookies—there were about ten of them left after the previous night’s cut—had musical skills. So LeBeau and Maher volunteered to play their guitars. Wilson was right about the veterans. They had many ideas for skits, and they all wanted to act in them. But the only rookie who seemed enthusiastic was Lucien Reeberg. He began to outline a complex skit he had in mind, but the veterans told him to calm down. “You can do a soft-shoe, Loosh,” they said.

Later that night, after our session was over, I wandered around the dormitory and talked to the veterans to find out something about rookie shows. Almost all the teams in the league had them, and afterward the veterans entertained the rookies at a party—a type of initiation ceremonial that took place usually a day or so after the last big squad cut. Some of the shows were especially lavish, I was told, particularly those put on by the two teams on the coast. Often there were memorable acts. John Gonzaga told me that when he played for the Washington Redskins a rookie appeared onstage who was a whistler, a great whistler, who came on with a paper bag over his head, his navel outlined in red lipstick, and he had control of the muscles around the navel so he could make it work like a mouth. Gonzaga said it was the damnedest thing he had ever seen, it killed the audience, and they kept at him to keep it up until the guy’s lips got dry, his whistle faded (it was hard enough to hear it through the bag), and his stomach muscles got tired, so that he stood there quietly—a paper bag over his head, and a lipsticked navel which wouldn’t work anymore—tuckered out, and they finally let him go.

The next day I skipped practice and spent the day in the cellar of Page Hall, where the school dramatic department had a roomful of costumes and props. I picked through the costumes for inspiration. I was not very hopeful.

My experience in the theater was limited, and what little there had been often seemed tainted with disaster. In one memorable early production of Macbeth, truncated for schoolboys, I appeared at the last moments of the play in a procession accompanying Macduff, who came onstage bearing Macbeth’s head on a spike. The head was artfully done, cut in profile from the side of a cardboard packing box, painted, and attached to a long pole. Macduff stumbled coming onstage, over a cable, I suppose, and the pole got turned in his hand so that what was displayed to the audience was not Macbeth’s head but whatever was on the reverse of the cardboard box, the letters BRILLO, I think, or LUX, quite distinguishable—in fact the announcement soared above Macduff’s procession as noticeable as an advertising blimp.

The Earl of Northumberland has the line that greets Macduff. He says: “Here comes newer comfort.” This unbearable line (under the circumstances) was delivered by the earl (an eleven-year-old classmate of mine) in a high soprano which was only slightly muffled by his spirit-gummed beard, and out across the footlights a fitful murmur rose from an audience trying to contain itself. It was unsuccessful. Suddenly, as sharp as a scream, a single high piercing bray burst from someone in the back of the theater, one of the fathers—probably the hardest that man had ever laughed—absolutely uncontrollable it was, catching up the rest of the audience with it so that our mournful procession moved through a storm of laughter so threatening that some of us, in spite of ourselves, looked out nervously across the footlights toward that dark wall of sound. No one knew what had gone wrong. There was a tendency to huddle together, eyes wide over the beards.

Malcolm, hailed as the new king, has the last speech in the play, and, as I recall, he got through it with great speed, his voice high and nervous, so that he seemed terrified to be crowned the king at Scone. On the uncertain note that Scotland has lost its tyrant, Macbeth, to gain a weakling, the curtain came mercifully down.

I did not mention my theatrical career to Barr, Gordy, and Schmidt. We met that evening and put the show together. I showed them the props I had found in the dramatic department, and it took us two or three hours to work out some skits.

The next day after supper Wilson led his coaches and the veterans across the school grounds to the gym. The basketball court had a stage set back from the sidelines. It was well-appointed, with a big curtain and flies and other accoutrements, including a big switchboard with levers which no one was anxious to fool with. We looked out through the part in the curtain and watched the audience seat itself in a big semicircle of fold-up chairs set out on the basketball court. Wilson sat in the middle with his coaches on either side.

Traditionally, throughout the National Football League, the rookie shows open on a chorus of big first-year linemen, wearing only jockstraps, high kicking in a thunderous cancan.

We stayed with tradition in our opening number, though some of our people wore additional props—some women’s hats along with the jocks, and Lucien Reeberg, the big three-hundred-pounder, wore a bell-shaped wire hoop used under Victorian ball gowns, and he spun a large beach umbrella above his head. He danced with such abandon to a full-volume record of Gaîté Parisienne that he nearly collapsed and brought down the cancan line with him. The others danced perfunctorily and self-consciously in their jockstraps, looking bleakly out over the footlights at the audience, which gaped at them and cat-called.

When the laughter died away, the curtain came down, and LeBeau went out in front with his guitar to hold the audience while the scenery was set up for the first skit. From out front we could hear the thump of strings as he sang his mournful songs.

The first skit was supposed to be a spoof of Commissioner Peter Rozelle’s league headquarters and the goings-on there. I played the part of Rozelle. The part fell to me by default, since no one else had time to learn the lines, such as they were. I wore a Napoleon hat, a cloak, a wooden sword, three cap pistols, and a rubber dirk; and I carried a pair of handcuffs, a tack hammer, and a frying pan. These artifacts, collected from the prop room in Page Hall, were supposed to suggest the inquisitorial aspects of Rozelle’s office. He was not popular with the Lions because of the heavy fines he had levied on five of them for gambling, and for the excommunication of Alex Karras, and when I clanked toward the footlights and said, “Howdy, I’m Petesy Rozelle,” the audience delivered up a stiff barrage of invective.

The most ingenious device in Rozelle’s “office” was a truth machine which spoke its answers—a role performed by four rookies seated bunched in close together on fold-up chairs and facing the audience. The “machine” was rigged in Rozelle’s favor, toadying to him, and when I put a question to it such as “What’s to be said about those who don’t think I—Pete Rozelle—am a grand fellow?” the rookie halfback from Iowa, Larry Ferguson, a Negro of dark blue hue, with birthmarks that crossed his face like tribal scars, would tap his foot three times, and at the third beat, he and the other rookies would reply in sharp unison:

“!”

A sharp obscenity, like a bomb going off.

Or I would ask: “What’s my feeling about the Detroit Lions?”

“! ’em”

I put a number of questions to the “machine” during the skit, and I wondered afterward—because the volume the four rookies put to their epithets was considerable—what anybody strolling out on the school grounds would have thought, a couple perhaps, one of the Episcopal bishops and his wife, out under the first stars of the dusk, strolling past the fountains, and then, across the lawn, suddenly hearing from the gym,

“!”

“My God, Ellen, did you hear that?”

“What? I didn’t hear anything.”

“Well, I don’t know… a whole congregation shouting… well… in unison… in the gym over there.”

“The African delegates, do you think?” she said. “In the gym?” She could see the loom of the building against the evening. “The bishops from Kenya and Ghana and Sierra Leone, and the other places—how nice. It makes you think, doesn’t it, Geoffrey?”

“Well, I don’t know… listen.”

In the warm jasmine smell of the evening they waited motionless on the gravel walk, high above them the thin whistles of the nighthawks still hunting, and then out of the darkness of the gym, distinct as a trumpet bray, rose a chorus of male voices:

“!”

She clung to him. “Geoffrey. There’s something odd going on in the gym.”

My imagination was never able to determine what happened then—whether the couple went and reported to some higher authority that “something odd” was going on in the gym. Or whether they continued their stroll undaunted through the school grounds, as if everything, even the crudities from the gym, was natural and to be endured, as if the nighthawks wheeling in the darkness above had abruptly changed their calls to:

“! ! !”

and nothing was to be done but accept it.

After the Rozelle takeoff was done, LeBeau filled in with his guitar while the stage was set for the following skit, which was based on the idea that the coaches were letting the veterans go in favor of a youth movement—each veteran being called by turn and dismissed by George Wilson. I played Wilson—still wearing the Napoleon hat, the cap pistols, the wooden sword, and the dirk. I sat at a table with a teacher’s school bell in front of me, and when I banged at it, Pat Studstill, playing the Hawk, would bring in a veteran (played by a rookie) and I would deliver a sharp address and order him cut from the squad. Studstill carried out the order quite literally: he was got up in a knight’s helmet he’d found somewhere and he carried an executioner’s ax made of cardboard on which he had made a suggestive smear of red paint. After my harangue, Studstill led the veteran behind a low curtain and the audience would then see the ax rise and fall above the curtain—a bit of imaginative theater that was Studstill’s own contribution—followed by a sharp squawk and the thud of a body hitting the floor. The sound effects varied—the squawks produced by different rookies Studstill had lined up behind the curtain, and the decapitation was usually indicated by the iron clang of a wrench. A folding chair was dropped once or twice back there, by the sound of it, and so was a toolbox.

The sketches gave a chance to divulge the peccadilloes of individual veterans; the players would turn in their seats to grin at the one of their number being lampooned, and he would scrunch down a bit, his chair complaining shrilly under him, and when it was finished he would perk up and twist around to jaw at the victim of the next characterization, loud in the relief that he himself had been done.

I had been supplied with an item or so about each Lion player who was lampooned in the skits. Barr, Schmidt, and Gordy had furnished most of the material, sitting around the previous night. Some of the items made little sense to me at the time, but they were effective enough when presented. For instance, they suggested that I explain to Danny Lewis, the big fullback, that he was being cut from the squad because he spent too much time in the bathroom. That did not seem particularly funny, but I said it anyway when the time came. “Besides, Lewis,” I said, finishing up my diatribe against him, “you’re getting axed because you spend too much time in the crapper. Take him away, Hawk.” It was some legend about him brought to light (I never discovered what it was) and the players brayed with delight to have it recalled.

The lampoons were mild enough. Gail Cogdill was spoofed for his overconcern with his health: “You’ve let your body go,” I remember shouting at the rookie playing the Cogdill role. He was teetering slightly, bent forward awkwardly on a pair of children’s crutches. “Cheating your body… You’re finished here,” I cried. The same phrase turned up in the spoof of Harley Sewell, in which his determination was mocked, and also his weight, which was light for his position. “Harley!” I shouted at the rookie, who was wearing a doll’s cowboy hat high on the crown of his head. “We ask you to get your weight up—to eat like an elephant and crap like a bird. Harley, you’ve been cheating your body!” I yelled. “You been eating like a bird, crapping like an elephant… etc. etc.”

Milt Plum’s personal appearance was made fun of: he was invariably fastidious, his hair neatly combed, long for a football player’s, every strand of it straight, even in the rigor of a scrimmage, as if it were pasted down with an invisible lacquer. It was always a surprise to see him arrive at the sidelines and wrench off his helmet; no matter how hard he had been knocked around in the scrimmage, even if his nose dripped blood, he would display hair groomed smooth as a banister’s newel. In the skit about him (he was played by Lucien Reeberg, still wearing his hoop, who in his eagerness to perform played a number of veterans) I cried out to him: “I’m sorry, Plum, but we’ve got to let you go. Ever since you came here from the Cleveland Browns, the coaches and I have been trying to do something about your personal appearance, you know, to get your hair cut and combed neatly. Scooter McLean even showed you how to hold the comb and apply the hair set. We showed you how to work a pair of nail scissors, clip, clip, clip, and we tried to show you that you can’t brush your teeth without opening your mouth. Well, you haven’t done it, Milt, and you look like a sheepdog out there… etc. etc.”

After twenty veterans had been cut, the curtain came down, a piano was wheeled out, and I thumped at it for a while. The show was concluded with a few short skits based on the filming of television commercials. One of them had George Wilson trying to record the line of a television commercial without including an obscenity. I played the part of a harried television producer. John Gordy played Wilson. The line he was trying to get straight was: “I like Marlboro, a man’s cigarette.”

I would say, “Let’s try it again, Mr. Wilson,” pointing a shoe box at him and turning an imaginary handle to indicate a camera.

Gordy would furrow his brow and announce, “I like Marlboro, a ! cigarette.”

“No, Mr. Wilson,” I would say. “We haven’t got that quite right. We’ve let that word creep in there. Let’s give it another try.”

So Gordy would say: “I like Marlboro, a man’s !.”

“No, not quite right.”

“I like !, a man’s cigarette.”

“No…”

“!”

There was a merciful blackout at the skit’s close, somewhat delayed since Dennis Gaubatz, the big rookie linebacker, who had refused to dance in the cancan line and had been relegated to “lights,” was slow at the switch—the actors stood poised like wax figures as the laughter died at their last lines, and Joe Schmidt, standing in the wings, hissed, “Lights, Gaubatz, for Chrissake.”

The last skit of the evening was a toothpaste commercial. I said, “Crest toothpaste is proud to bring you the results of one of its surveys. We have two schoolchildren here—on the left little Roger Brown, who is one of two hundred children who for the last six years has been using toothpaste with fluoristan. On my right is John Gordy, who is one of two hundred children using Crest toothpaste with hydrochlorophlexiphil. Now, Roger, will you tell the viewing audience the results of the survey of your group.”

Lucien Reeberg, who was playing Brown, hammed it up, simpering and carrying on and getting as much into his meager line as he could, which was considerable, considering the line, which was brief: “We had twenty percent less cavities.”

After Reeberg was done, I asked, “And now, John Gordy, what about your group?” cranking the imaginary wheel on the shoe box.

Gordy was playing himself. He had removed his bridgework—all his front teeth had been knocked out in some past football war—and at my question he opened his mouth in a cavernous grin, not a tooth to be seen in the front of his head, and he reported loudly: “No cavities at all!”

He kept his mouth ajar, leaning forward slightly, motionless, as I was, and from the wings we finally heard Joe Schmidt say, “Lights, Gaubatz, for Chrissakes, lights.”

They were doused, the curtain was drawn, and when the lights went up again Gordy slipped his teeth back in, and we all went out in front and took awkward bows.

The veterans and coaches came up and crowded around. John Gonzaga said there were things about the show to be remembered, which was high praise considering the number of rookie shows he had seen, and the acts he remembered, such as the player who wore the paper bag and had the lipsticked navel.

Afterward, we piled into cars and the veterans took the rookies out. The coaches told us to watch ourselves. In the past, a number of bars and restaurants in the vicinity had been decimated on rookie night, so the veterans had hired an empty hall on the top floor of the Veterans of Foreign Wars building on the main road to Pontiac. Joe Schmidt was in the car. He said how important the rookie night was—how it made you feel you belonged. After his weeks of ostracization because of the veterans’ love for the linebacker, Flanagan, whom he replaced, Schmidt was finally accepted in a drinking bout, out on the town, exactly like rookie night. He was plied with liquor. He tried to fake being drunk by reeling around tossing down ginger ale from a shot glass, but they caught him at it, and at two a.m. he was just barely conscious that he was playing the drums in a Salvation Army band. But it was a great night for him.

A tremendous racket was going on when we arrived. We could hear it as we parked the car out in the back lot. Our group, arriving late, hurried up the stairs. Everything had been prepared up there—a large galvanized garbage pail, with a mop handy, was in the middle of an open enclosure of long tables. Within, the rookies sat. In front of them, on the tables, were the big mugs, and the pitchers of beer ready, and around the perimeter the veterans leaned across, shouting at them to stand and drink up. Toasts were ordered—to Bruce Maher’s son, born that afternoon, to the president’s son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, also born that day, and to die the next—the big men standing up on their chairs, the beer soaking the shirtfronts, as they shouted the children’s names, and drank to them—and then more names to toast, the coaches, Alex Karras, Dean Rusk, Dinah Washington, Jean Seberg, Pete Rozelle’s grandmother, and as the lists went on the rookies began to weave.

Harley Sewell drank down an entire pitcher to show the rookies the proper way to drink—the beer sliding down his open throat as if poured into an open drain. Roger Brown also gave some drinking lessons—pouring the beer from the pitcher into a mouth cupped wide as a hippo’s, it seemed, his throat barely working as the beer, like Sewell’s, ran unencumbered to his stomach.

For their final toasts, the rookies were subjected to Cardinal Puff—the familiar fraternity drinking game in which the initiate must follow a prescribed ritual, in exact order; if he makes a mistake in word or gesture, or gets the order wrong in the toasting sequence, he must drink his mug down and start again from the beginning. The veterans were strict judges, quick to penalize, and after a while some of the rookies were barely able to get out the first line, which is, “Here’s to Cardinal Puff for the first time.”

Harley Sewell came by and caught me looking on.

“What you doin’ out here, rook? Git on in there.”

I got in the rookie enclosure. Bob Whitlow, the first-line center, sat across from me. He had me drink some warm-up toasts—to his hometown; to the high school there, and its football coach; and then Sewell leaned across and I drank a toast to his hometown.

“St. Jo, Texas!” I called out.

When Gail Cogdill stopped by, I drank a toast to his hometown without being asked.

“Worland, Wyoming!” I shouted. “Population: fourteen.”

It took me almost five mugs to get through the Cardinal Puff exercise. Whitlow was easy on me the last time. When I stood up and left the enclosure, the room was reeling slightly. I went up and concentrated on the wording of an enlarged copy of the Constitution framed on the wall. I went and stood at a window, pulling the rattan shade aside to get some air. Outside the neon lights along the main street beat steadily. The noise behind me was deafening.

I launched myself back into it. At the far end of the hall, a number of the local people were peering in, standing at the head of the stairwell. They crowded the door, quite a few of them; in the back was a row of craning faces, with one in the far back that bobbed up and down, as if the fellow, short of stature, were bouncing on a trampoline to see.

“Wha’ you suppose those folks think?” I shouted happily in the uproar. “They look confused and concerned.” I went slowly up to them. “Ladies an’ gen’l’m’n, the Detroit Lions,” I announced. “A grand, finely turned, superbly con-conditioned football aggre-aggregation who here, in this grand hall of yours, for your eyes alone, are doing their daily con-conditioning exercises.” I swept a hand behind me. “Gym work,” I said bluntly.

Their attention remained caught by the goings-on. I turned. It seemed, at sudden glance, a shipboard scene—a promenade deck, storm-lashed, with an occasional scud of beer flying, the footing difficult as the big men, their shirtfronts soaked, swayed and skidded, shouting, gripping each other for support. A number had succumbed to malaise, two at the garbage pail, a third at the window, the rattan window shade askew across his shoulders as he bent out over the parking lot.

“Boats! To the boats!” I shouted—an alarum that went unnoticed in the confusion.

After a while, the veterans began guiding the rookies down to the cars, supporting some of them, one or two being carried, Reeberg for one, the veterans shoulder to shoulder under him calling out directions, “A little down on your side,” as they moved down the narrow stairs like furniture movers.

I drove back to camp with Terry Barr and John Gordy.

“Tonight was a picnic,” Barr said. “Some of those rookies were walking.” He seemed incredulous.

“Oh,” I said weakly.

“In Bobby Layne’s time, a rookie was never able to get home on his own pins. That was the rule.”

They talked about their first rookie night. Both of them had arrived in camp late—from the All-Star game in Chicago in which they’d played—missing a week or so of training, coming in on the day of the rookie night, it turned out, and after a long practice they were taken out on the town with the others. Barr was returned to his room barely conscious. He was put under a shower, briefly, fully clothed, then laid out on his bed, still clothed. They dropped him there as if they were discarding him.

He was there a half hour or so, too miserable to move, though he was conscious of the water squelching in his shoes when he moved his toes. The door to his room swung ajar and he saw the coaches watching him, head coach Buddy Parker with a clipboard. A bed check, apparently. He managed a weak smile. “That’s Barr,” one of the coaches whispered to Parker.

Down the hall, when Parker and his staff looked in, John Gordy was being sick into a pail as the door opened. He also managed a smile. He recognized Parker. He tried to say “Hi, Coach.” He raised himself off the bed, but the coach slapped the door shut before he could get the words out.

Gordy and Barr described the considerable consequences of what Parker saw that night, and its effect on him. The rookie night was on a Saturday. On Monday in Detroit there was a “meet the Lions” banquet, to which over five hundred Lion boosters paid ten dollars apiece to eat a chicken-and-peas dinner; they were to be entertained by introductions to players and coaches, then listen to speeches from club officials, and a guest speaker, Otto Graham, the ex–Cleveland quarterback. Parker, the main speaker, sat at the end of the dais. He sent his chicken and peas away, and sat staring out across the room. Otto Graham got up when his turn came and made a number of jokes about the after-hours deportment of the Lion players, which was a surefire cause for merriment. He said, among other things, “They have an early bed check at Cranbrook so the players can duck on out the windows and get into town for the parties.” Everybody laughed hard, and the players looked into their coffee cups with self-conscious grins.

The Detroit sportscaster, Bob Reynolds, who was the master of ceremonies, then introduced Parker, cuing the applause for him by referring to abilities which made him the “best coach in the league.” The applause was heavy, the big crowd rising along with Parker as he moved for the lectern, tearing a paper he held in his hand into tiny scraps. He seemed somewhat grim, but that was his manner. Everybody settled in his seat, belts were loosened, smoke rose in clouds from cigars tilted in contentment, and ears were tuned for soothing words about the coming season, perhaps a wry joke or two which would be applauded as much for his attempting it as for its efficacy, Parker not being a man at ease in public.

When it was absolutely quiet, Parker said in a low monotone, “I quit.” He did not pause for emphasis, but continued straight on: “I got a situation here I can’t handle. These ballplayers have gotten too big for me, or something. I’m getting out of Detroit football—and I’m getting out tonight. So long,” he said, and moving laterally along the dais to his seat he sat down.

There was what the press referred to the next day, according to Barr and Gordy, as a “huge silence,” finally broken by some incredulous, somewhat tentative, shouts of “What? What?” The master of ceremonies, Reynolds, rose stiffly—his mind apparently set on getting on with the program no matter what—and asked Parker, in that case, if he minded if George Wilson would tell the audience what could be expected of the 1957 Lions. Parker made a resigned gesture, and Wilson, confused and startled, moved to the microphone and mumbled a few words about the team, his mind obviously distracted by Parker’s statement, until his feelings got the better of him and he said sharply: “This is serious. I hope Buddy stays and we win the championship. I don’t want to get mixed up in any crap, and that’s it!”

The audience jumped up and began shouting. Reynolds came back on the microphone, still confused, to say that he had never faced such a situation and didn’t know what to do. “If I was a newspaperman though,” he said, “I’d know enough to start running for the door.”

Some of the newsmen did just that, and others stayed around, rushing from group to group of boosters, players, and coaches, trying to find out what was going on, and hearing in the background the voice of General Manager Anderson booming over the ballroom. “Good old Andy,” said Barr. “He took over the microphone and was trying to calm everyone down. But it didn’t work out, and he finally gave up.” Barr remembered Anderson leaning into the microphone and concluding the evening with just what he would have said had the proceedings sailed along smoothly. “That finishes up tonight’s program,” he called out to the storming, confused crowd. “Thank you.”

“So that was how George Wilson became head coach,” I said.

“They gave him the team when Buddy Parker quit,” Barr said, “and he went on and won the championship with it.”

He turned the car through the gates and into the school grounds.

“There’s no telling,” he said, “if it was the rookie night and seeing all those players boozed up that did it. I mean the guy could have had some tea leaves turn up wrong. He was awful superstitious.”

“Listen,” Gordy said as Barr parked the car.

Out across the lawns drifted snatches of song, bursts of ribaldry, and occasionally distant hallooing, like the cries of campers lost in a forest.

“From the sound of it, some of them are in the fountains,” Gordy said. “Best way to get them sobered up.”

Barr said, “Pietrosante spent his rookie night in one of those fountains. He got in there, and the water was warm, like lying in moss, he said, and he dozed off. Somebody came along the gravel walk just before daylight and the sound of the steps woke him up. This guy sees him and stops. A gardener, Nick thinks he was. He looked in at Nick, his face like he’s seen a corpse in his fountain, a guy drowned in there, naturally, because it looks like that. But then Nick jumps up, big, you know, with the water rushing off him, and I guess he was flailing around because he didn’t know where he was, of course, and this gardener or mailman, whatever he was, seeing this in the darkness give a squawk and he lit out, I mean to tell you.”

A distant splash and a high-pitched yell drifted out at us.

“I wonder if they’re up in the Milles fountain,” I said, “in there with those nine-foot stick-like nudes.”

“Horrible,” Gordy said, thinking about the statues. “Of course the rookies might go for those stone gals; or maybe that’s Brettschneider up there, giving them the old club rush. A little rough handling by the Badger might improve those statues.”

We walked past the gym. “What about George Wilson?” I asked. “What’s he make of the rookie night?”

“He doesn’t pay this any heed,” Barr said. “He shuts his door good and tight. He knows it’ll be a better team for it. The rookies are part of it now, they’ve been initiated—you too,” he said, looking over. “Can’t you feel it?”

“I feel soused,” I said. We went along the gravel walks. “But I know about the other thing too,” I said.