CHAPTER 28

On the day of the Cleveland game we rode into Detroit by bus, two of them. The rookies kept together, and they got in the second bus. The team was dressed in street clothes, with ties, and almost everyone wore blazers, the regulars with the Lion insignia, a striding lion, snarling, below the breast pocket.

Brettschneider sat on the broad backseat of the bus and read out loud the horoscopes from the morning paper. His own was, “Have a day of relaxation and fun.” The players supplied him with their birth months, and he looked them up and read the prognostications. Mine was, “Gad about socially, for today you will be at your best.”

He read aloud the daily joke: “They call them bikinis ’cause they hardly cover the girls atoll.” A groan went up. Then we had the daily quiz. “Here’s a tough one you may want to come back to later,” said Brettschneider. “Who said: ‘Give me liberty or give me death’?”

Someone said from the back of the bus, “Karras… talking about freedom to say any fool thing that crosses his mind.”

With the first game at hand, Alex Karras’s name had come up bitterly and increasingly as the team was finding it hard to accept the fact that because of his year’s suspension for gambling it was going to perform without his extraordinary skills.

His presence had not only been missed on the field but also in the social life of the training camp—particularly in the dining room, where he put on his skits and monologues, constantly banging the water glass for attention. He had an absolute flow of free association, and his fantasies seemed to spring forth, never set pieces, but spontaneous and extemporized. In California, the following year, when he had been reinstated in the league, I heard him bang his water glass and rise in the role of a high-school coach at the team dinner following a disastrous year. He said, “Thank you… ah… for your…” Then undecided what he was thankful for, he looked bleakly out over the dining room through the large black spectacles that gave him such an unsuspecting professorial look. His inflection as the high-school coach was perfect: a somewhat high, nervous, ingratiating voice, not quite a whine, sometimes infused with an abrupt and false boom of confidence—his palms turned up as if the disaster was simply a question of fate.

“We had our problems this year,” he said. “For example, we didn’t have enough helmets to go around and some of the fellows had to wear coal scuttles. Then, we had the big problem over the shoes, that time we took a trip to play against the Highland Cream Teachers, and the football shoes didn’t arrive in the team equipment trunks. The fact was that the team trunks didn’t put in an appearance either. Mr. Friday Macklem—where’s Mr. Macklem? There he is, down at the end, good to have you with us, Friday—well, Friday made the sort of mistake we’re all liable to make and he sent the team trunks to Sioux Falls, where he thought we were playing against one of the junior high schools there. That was the mistake. We played Sioux Falls last year. We got beat something horrible. I don’t know why Friday had it on his mind to send the team trunks to that place rather than to Beverly, Ohio, which is where the Highland Cream school was waiting for us. We stood around on the field for the longest time waiting for the team trunks, and naturally they never turned up. So we played the Cream team in street clothes. Most of the fellows not wanting to get their clothes mussed up or their shoes stepped on, we did not play an especially ‘hard-nosed’ type of game. We got beat horrible.

“Of course,” said Karras, raising a finger for emphasis, “there were some bright moments during the season, very bright. Well, there was a bright moment when the team bus broke down on Route 62, twenty-seven miles from the Pillsbury High School field. They had three All-States in their backfield and if we’d ever got there we would have been beat horrible. There were some other bright moments. But I think the time has come to award the Dan LaRose Memorial Trophy for the Most Desire Shown by a Player on the Pompano High School Team. As you know, the award has been vacant for the past three years—that is, we, the coaches, had a little difficulty finding someone who measured up to the qualities of the late Dan LaRose, whose memory we honor with this grand trophy. Dan, as you know, died of shingles.” Karras rapped his glass sharply. “We will all bow our heads in memory of Dan LaRose.”

During these monologues the players would drift in to eat, some carrying their empty trays off when they were done, but almost everyone stayed. If Karras wasn’t on his feet, the latecomers would say, “Has Alex done anything yet?” pleased to hear if he hadn’t and that they were in time. They’d say: “He’s a riot, that cat.”

When Karras involved the players and the rookies in his skits, calling on them for a speech, they would rise, caught up in the spirit, and do their best. He called on Friday Macklem to explain about the team trunks; also he asked Les Bingaman, the “principal of Pompano High,” to say a few words. Often, those called on who were not equipped with such a free flow of imagination would rise half out of their chairs, groping for words, and would murmur, “For Chrissake, Alex,” and sit down.

Sometimes, though, the performers were inspired. When I heard the high-school monologue, which was delivered in the team dining room at Ricky’s in Palo Alto, California, where the Lions were preparing for two games on the coast, Karras called on a rookie to speak as the elected captain of next year’s Pompano High football “aggregation.”

“Let’s hear it for the new captain!” Karras called, beating his water glass with a spoon.

Dutifully, we applauded. I was a visitor there in Palo Alto for just a day or so, looking in on my old teammates, and I never caught the rookie’s name. He rose slowly, his features constricted as he thought of what he might say. I expected him to murmur, “For Chrissake, Alex,” and sit down. But instead, he blurted out, “I don’t want to be captain,” and in the burst of laughter he found time to build a notion, a line of attack.

“I don’t want to throw a wrench into the works,” he said, “and disappoint all you folks at this fine dinner—but the fact is I came to Pollapo High…”

“Pompano,” corrected Karras.

“… Pompano High to concentrate on my music studies. I was coming along just fine on the violin. Then, in one of those beatings we got last year—the one against the high school in Marietta—I lose the use of the forefinger and thumb of my left hand.” He held up his hand with the appropriate fingers curled out of sight. He was in control, knowing just where he was going, and enjoying himself. “So I take up the trombone,” he said. “I could hold it all right, and pump the slide with my right hand. Then the team gets beat horrible in Duluth and some big crud steps on my right hand and there go three of those fingers and I can’t work the trombone slide properly. Well, I take up the saxophone. It hangs from a ribbon around my neck, you know, and I got three fingers on my left hand going for me, and two on the right to play the keys. So I’m coming along fine on the sax, playing some simple tunes with some easy fingering, when in the next game the team gets beat horrible and I get me such a fat lip they feed me through a tube and they tell me my jaw’s broke. They wire it up so’s I can play football, but there’s no more saxophoning. I still got my right arm going good, and two fingers on it that work, so I take up the gong, the chimes, and some of those percussion instruments that you can beat, holding the stick or the mallet in the two fingers of my right hand. But then in Beverly, Ohio, in that game where the team trunks don’t arrive, I get that arm snapped. So all I got left going for me are my feet. What I wanted to tell at this dinner is that I’m continuing my music studies and using those feet to pump the organ for Mrs. Ritchie in the Baptist Church down on Elm Street. The fact is that I’d lose the use of those feet if I played one more year with the Pompano team. That’d finish up my music studies for sure. What would I tell Mom? So I feel I must decline the honor of being captain.”

The rookie sat down to a storm of applause.

Karras was delighted. He rapped his glass. “Well, this is sad news,” he said. He shook his head. “We’ve heard the word ‘quitter’ in this room. I was going to award the Dan LaRose Memorial Trophy for the Most Desire Shown by a Player on the Pompano High School Team, and the scroll that goes with it, to the new captain. I guess, under the circumstances, we had better sing the school anthem. Will you please join me in the school anthem.”

He rapped his glass and sang in a keening, desperately high voice:

Pompano High, by God,

Fairest of them all…

My year at Detroit, the previous year, I heard so much about Karras that I felt I knew him. I referred to him by his first name. On the bus into Detroit I said to the player next to me, “Well, we’re going to miss old Alex this afternoon.” The player shrugged. He was Dave Lloyd, the big linebacker from Georgia who said, “Welcome to pro ball” when he smacked me down in my first scrimmage. I could not remember many other words from him. He was the antithesis of Alex Karras. He was a loner, who sat by himself in the dining room and kept clear of the cliques. So there were rumors about him—one of them, of course, that he had killed a man. He had worked a cattle ranch in the West, and he was supposed to have found a ranch hand fooling with his girl under a chuck wagon—that was what they said; it had happened a few years before—and he had hauled this cowboy out and cuffed the life out of him. He seemed a gentle man to me, with a curious habit of nodding whenever he smiled. On the bus trip he told me that what he liked most about playing for Detroit was being left to himself. He appreciated that. At Cleveland, where he had first come up to the pros, it wasn’t possible to walk down a corridor without having the coaches leap out at him to quiz him on his game assignments. It was rough on the nerves.

I had my mind on the upcoming game—thinking about my plays—and it was a relief to sit next to someone so quiet.

At first, it was more relaxed on the bus than I had thought it was going to be—with much less tension than there had been on the bus to Pontiac. The players talked easily. Behind me, Brettschneider was talking about an old girlfriend of his who sold yo-yos on the road—a particular model that lit up when it reached the bottom of the string. He was a good storyteller; in the rear of the bus the players leaned over the backs of their seats to listen to him.

But then what was in the back of everyone’s mind came rapidly to the fore. As we entered the outskirts of Detroit a silence descended on the bus, quite abruptly, as if we’d suddenly been asphyxiated by the thought of what was coming—thirty men swayed by the bus’s motion staring straight at the back of the seat in front of them; it was not the silence of the dumb: the tension was palpable—everyone so keyed up that finally a player could no longer contain himself and he’d bark out, “Get it up, Detroit!” and that would set off an explosion of feet stamping on the bus floor and a babble of exhortations, and then just as abruptly the silence would descend again, the quiet bus rocking along, so that one thought of a herd of aroused animals propelled by some nameless dread into a momentary, noisy flurry of motion and milling, and then motionless again, yet still tense, the big heads watching.

The players never tired of talking about the phenomenon of tension building up on the day of a game. If a team was “up,” it could perform prodigies, and each ballplayer would be swept along in the effort, playing better than he could even imagine, until everything he did seemed performed in an atmosphere of exhilaration. Before the Thanksgiving Day Green Bay game the year before, when they had won one of their great victories, the team said that the tension had built up so that they could hardly breathe—it was like a ground mist around them—and George Wilson, who usually gave a little locker-room talk to build them up just before they went out on the field, knew that he could break the extraordinary tension if he fooled with it, or said too much. So he called out, “OK, let’s get ’em!” quite softly, but hard, and the team rushed out and played such an extraordinary game that the Green Bay players kept looking at them oddly, as if they suspected them of sniffing some sort of elixir.

Sensing the tension, and being part of it oneself, was not necessarily pleasurable. It was trying and difficult to get through the hours before a game, and the players adopted different habits to cope with the wait. Some preferred to go off by themselves. At the nine-o’clock breakfast one could see them eating the game-day steaks and the honey—the sauces locked away—seated almost in the bishops’ section of the dining room to remain separate. I was one of them. The reason for our apartness, I think, was a fruitless attempt to keep time from passing. Involvement with others seemed to make the time go quickly, and one would look at one’s watch suddenly in the middle of a conversation or a bridge game to find that a great, uncontrolled gulp of time had gone, and that the final confrontation was that much closer. One wanted time stopped, at least I did. It seemed to go slower for me if I kept to myself, yawning cavernously, almost caving in on the hollowness I felt in my stomach, and staring every once in a while at the sweep of the second hand on my watch in some woebegone sense that I could control time by keeping an eye on it.

As the day moved on—despite my concern—I became aware of another drift, this a slow, universal move toward the confrontation in Detroit Stadium. In their homes fans were beginning to think about the game, and the officials were packing their striped shirts in kit bags; as we set out for the stadium by bus, so were the Browns sitting around in their Detroit hotel, their bus waiting for them down on the street. It was often a slow, meandering movement, like the progress of a pair of amoebas—often some element of the whole lingering behind (a player walking back across a hotel lobby to buy gum)—but it was always an inexorable motion toward confrontation. Finally the two teams would walk down a corridor and be in a locker room just a couple of walls away. Ultimately the confrontation was actual: like hideous magi the Browns were sprung up just a yard away across a line of scrimmage, with all their heft and skill bent on obliteration of the people opposite, who were us.

Other players craved the confrontation and they did what they could to make the time pass—they slept, or organized card games, or there was conversation.

The year after my participation I went down to Philadelphia one weekend to watch the team play the Eagles. After the game-day breakfast with them in the hotel, John Gordy took me up to his room. Alex Karras was his roommate.

Gordy said, “Alex will be telling stories, or doing some damn thing that’ll keep our minds occupied. There’ll be a bunch of guys up there.”

“He takes the day of the game calmly?” I asked.

“Hell no,” Gordy said. “He gets sick before every game—violently.”

“Well,” I said tentatively, “why don’t we drop in on Friday, or somebody else. Friday, if pushed, can talk enough to keep one’s mind occupied.…”

“Alex will be all right,” Gordy said.

There were some other players sitting around the room—Terry Barr, Jim Gibbons, and Gary Lowe. Karras was lying on his bed staring up at the ceiling through his big horn-rimmed glasses. His torso was enormous. In his self-deprecatory manner he used to say that if the rest of him was in proper proportion to his torso he’d be eight feet tall. On the field he ran, his teammates said of him, like a “mad duck,” but they used to swear softly thinking of his ability.

I had seen him once the year before at the training camp; he was standing in the corridor down from my room, holding his young son, who was just learning to walk, by the hand. He was wearing Bermuda shorts, and what struck me was that the conformation of both father and son was exactly the same—the big torso and the stubby legs, natural in his baby son, but surprising to see in the father, as if in fact Karras was a blown-up image of the boy, done by hauling trick mirrors around. What destroyed the similarity was a cigar set immediately in the center of Karras’s mouth, with his lips pursed around it, so that it seemed a comic prop. But the jaunty angle of the cigar didn’t disguise his gloom. He was an outsider that year. The players nodded, and called to him in false gaiety. It was obviously difficult for him, and he never came out again.

He also had an uncomfortable year with the Detroit management and the commissioner’s office. Good behavior was a prerequisite of his being allowed back to play for the Lions. Both the management and the league disapproved of Karras’s ownership of a bar called Lindell A.C. His partners were suspected of underworld links; the place had a flavor and a clientele which were suspicious. Karras was urged to give up both his partners and his ownership of the bar—the intimation being that reinstatement might be impossible if he didn’t. Karras was furious. The guarded remark was not one of his traits; nor guile. The lack of these got him into trouble in the first place. “It’s normal to make a small bet on yourself,” he had said in a radio interview, which, since league regulations prohibited gambling, had forced Commissioner Rozelle’s hand and led to Karras’s suspension. His banishment did not change his ways; he chafed under it. His defense of his ownership of his little bar was vociferous, and he said the choice of his friends was his own, and not a concern of the league’s. The dialogue often got into the papers. His teammates shook their heads when they read about him. They said, “What he says is honest and honorable—but why, just for once, can’t he keep his goddamn mouth shut?”

Nor was the Lion management particularly pleased with Karras’s choice of professions during his banishment. He had a short career in wrestling, which—as one might expect from Karras—was stormy enough to keep the front office on its toes. For one of his matches he was scheduled to fight Richard Afflis, a former lineman on the Green Bay Packers, who had moved on to villainous roles in the morality spectacle of big-time contemporary wrestling. Afflis fought under the name Dick the Bruiser, and his trademark in the ring was a ferocious countenance usually covered with blood, in fact some sort of red liquid, cow’s blood, perhaps, which flowed from a reservoir in a large patch he wore up on his forehead.

A week before the fight Afflis turned up in Karras’s saloon to shout obscenities in what was thought to be a publicity stunt to promote the match, and probably was, until things suddenly got out of hand. There was a midget friend of Karras’s in the saloon, a forty-three-pounder named Major Little, whose return fire of verbal abuse finally ignited Dick the Bruiser, and a brawl erupted. The police were called, and the Bruiser, who was wielding a pool cue, was wrestled into submission by eight policemen, one of whom suffered a fractured wrist. They were able to truss him up, binding his hands and feet, and then they moved him out onto the sidewalk, clumsily, like men carrying a large rolled-up carpet, to await the police wagon.

A week later, fed with details on the saloon brawl, a big crowd turned up in Detroit’s Olympia to watch the fight—the main event on a card which included Doctor Big Bill Miller, the Sheik, Kit Fox, Moose Evans, and others—many in the general admission seats armed with dried peas to wing at the villains, particularly Dick the Bruiser.

Once again, the midget, Major Little, had a fateful hand in the proceedings. From his front-row seat his height restricted his view of things to the wooden underpinnings of the ring, so in the third or fourth minute of the bout, after fruitlessly trying to see what was happening, he clambered up onto the apron and into the ring itself and crouched in a corner, his back up against the ring post, for a view that though unobstructed was certainly close to. Karras, up to that point, had performed creditably: he had tossed the Bruiser out of the ring four times, and had been tossed out once himself, and he had hit the Bruiser’s patch with sufficient force to get the cow’s blood dribbling down. He had been less successful at looking fierce. With his glasses off his large, professional face, he simply looked puzzled, and then dismayed, when the shrill imprecations suddenly rose startlingly close at hand, and he looked to see his friend, the midget, up in the ring shrieking at the Bruiser. His attention wandered, and he turned and made some shooting motions with his hands. He shouted, “Major, God damn it, get on down out of there!” his back now turned to the Bruiser, who loomed up close and then in an apparent departure from the script, which usually calls for the villain’s defeat, he rushed at Karras from behind and grasped his neck in what is called in the trade an “Adam’s-apple choke hold.” The Bruiser persevered: he got Karras down and pinned him, and the fight, which was for one fall, was awarded him, his hand raised aloft in a rain of dried peas.

With all this going on, Karras’s chances of reinstatement seemed slim. But then he began to change. His teammates said it was his love of football which made him curb his tongue and improve his conduct. He got out of wrestling. Stories about him disappeared from the papers. Finally he quietly gave up his partnership in the bar, and a year from the date of his suspension he was called in by Commissioner Rozelle and reinstated.

“Has he changed?” I had asked Gordy as we walked into the room.

“He’s just the same,” Gordy said. “But he’d have done a lot to get back—he wanted to so much.”

Gordy introduced me to him, and Karras stuck out a hand, remaining absolutely flat where he was on the bed.

I wished him luck that afternoon in the Eagle game. I found a chair in the corner and sat down. He raised up slowly and looked down between his feet at the television set against the wall opposite the foot of his bed. It was on. The sets were almost automatically turned on as soon as one walked into a hotel room, flicked on like pulling up a window shade, not because there was a specific program to see, but to create a second window in those airless rooms to glance at as one might glance out the real window at the walls of the air shaft opposite. “Look at that,” Karras said. He was staring moodily at the image. An advertisement was showing—a young man in sharkskin trousers and a yachting jumper sitting on a boulder with the surf piling around, with a girl in close to him, and he was inhaling deeply on a cigarette. “Look at that guy,” said Karras. “They always have good-looking guys puffing on cigarettes. They put cigarettes in Milt Plum’s mouth and snap color pictures of him for the big magazines and Milt doesn’t even smoke—he hardly knows how to hold a cigarette. They had to teach him. What about me? I’m a longtime smoker, known how to hold a cigarette since I was eight, I inhale and all, and when the wind’s down and I get a little practice, with the pressure really on me, I can put together a smoke ring, think of that. Why not me, then, instead of Plum? The reason is they only pick the good-looking guys, and the good-looking girls. They look at me, blowing away on those smoke rings, and they think, well, he’s OK on those rings, but he’s got the face of a mechanic who’s got squashed working under a large touring car. There ought to be a union of us ugly cruds. I’d like to see an ad, a TV ad, in which this great mountain of a girl comes out, just horrible-looking, with a name like Betty Home, and she’s advertising nylons, y’see, and she draws on a pair of nylons over these enormous fat thighs. ‘Sheer,’ she says, working her lips up the way those thin models do.”

“You’re beautiful, Alex,” someone said.

“Who am I kidding?” Karras said. “I know I’m not very pretty, but then the girls I talk to aren’t very pretty either.” He groaned. “Even with them I can’t make out. I couldn’t make out if I had the Hope Diamond hanging from my neck.” He dropped back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. “It wasn’t always like that. In my other lives I had some grand times.”

It was Karras’s fantasy that he had lived a succession of different lives—stretching far back into the past. He had been, among other things, an aide-de-camp to both General Washington and Adolf Hitler.

“What about Hitler?” one of the players asked. “What was your impression?”

“Hitler was not an ordinary Joe,” Karras said expansively. “You knew that when you were around him as much as I was. He had this obsession to hold his breath for more than three minutes.”

“No! Could he do it?”

“Nowhere near. He got red in the face very quickly, and there’d be this little popping sound when the air came rushing out. He never lasted more than eight or nine seconds—shortest-breathed man I ever saw.”

“How about the others? Did you know Rommel, Hess, Goering, and all those…?”

“Certainly, I knew all those cats, Rundstedt, Goering—Bavaria Fats, we called him—and Rommel. He had a terrible weak stomach, Rommel did. He used to get sick all the time. I’d come rushing up to him in the morning to fling the salute at him, and say, ‘Hello, hello, heil, heil, good mornin’, gener’l,’ and he’d get sick. Hitler never trusted him for that reason. Why, he’d come striding up to Rommel at headquarters and say, ‘A fine day to mount ze attack against the filthy Schweinhund Monty, the Britisher.’ Rommel, he’d lean over and get sick into one of those tall nickel-plated upright ashtrays you find in the smoking section of the railroad coaches—the kind with a button on the side of the stand you push and the trap door opens and the cigar falls down. I carried one of these things around for Rommel when he was at headquarters, ready, with my thumb on the button. Hitler was suspicious of those ashtrays. ‘What is that thing?’ he’d always say. I think he had an idea it was a bomb. ‘It’s an ashtray,’ I’d say. ‘It’s General Rommel’s ashtray.’ Hitler’d take a long look, and he’d say, ‘Why doesn’t the general carry a smaller model around—that thing’s three feet tall. What’s wrong with those little pocket ashtrays, the kind with a hotel name on the bottom? Besides,’ Hitler said, ‘he doesn’t smoke, Rommel, what does he need a big thing like that for if he doesn’t smoke, answer me that!’ ‘Well,’ I said quickly, ‘the general smokes hemp.’ ‘Oh well, no wonder,’ Hitler says. ‘Why not say so in the beginning?’”

“What about Eva Braun? Tell us about her.”

“Eva Braun was my sister.”

“No!”

“She was. You may not think so, my looking the way I do, but in that life I was smart-looking, a blond cat, with boots that went up clear to the crotch, shiny as brass, and in company people was always saying, ‘Who’s that good-looker?’ Real Aryan I was.”

“Tell us more about Eva.”

“She and Hitler didn’t get along at all.”

“No!”

“My sister had this terrible laugh, a sort of cackle, and when Hitler came fooling around, pushing that mustache at her, why, she’d let out this cackle. Hitler could never figure why she was laughing. ‘What’s wrong?’ he’d ask, looking behind him, thinking some clown back of them was making faces. Her cackling was horrible. ‘You laughing at one of Bavaria Fats’s jokes?’ he’d ask.”

Gibbons said, “History books say they were quite a pair.”

“That was for appearances,” Karras said. “They had to show that Hitler had normal feelings for women. So the public-relations people took a bunch of pictures of the two of them together, she standing under a waterfall bare-ass, and Hitler next to her, getting his uniform wet. You ever see Hitler bare-ass? The answer is no. The fact was, and everybody around headquarters knew it, that Hitler was a woman—my aunt, if you really want to know, Aunt Hilda, and quite a trial she turned out to be to the rest of the family.”

“Did Eva know about that?”

“The fact is she didn’t. And you know what fooled her?”

“What?”

“That mustache. You’d think it was false, Aunt Hilda being a woman and all. Well, that mustache was absolutely real. Aunt Hilda shaved five times a day. After a while Eva got over her cackle, and toward the end she fell for Aunt Hilda. No one wanted to disillusion her, so they got a marriage going there in the Berlin bunker. The Russians were turning up, so the pair committed suicide, which was maybe good for Eva. She’d have found out—”

“That Hitler was Aunt Hilda.”

“Her own mother!” said Karras. “Aunt Hilda was Eva’s mother, you see. Eva didn’t know that, of course. She thought she was an orphan. And guess who Eva’s father was?”

“Who? Bavaria Fats?” someone suggested.

“You’re looking at him,” said Karras comfortably from his bed.

“You! Come on,” said Gary Lowe. “Eva Braun was your sister.”

“Both sister and daughter,” Karras said proudly. “Adolf Hitler was my wife.”

“That’s horrible,” said Gordy.

We sat there reflecting on the tangled family tree of the Nazi hierarchy, the television set murmuring slightly in the background.

“Well, I hope things weren’t as horrible as that in General Washington’s time,” Gordy finally said.

Karras stirred. “General Washington was beautiful. I was at Valley Forge, you know, real cold there, feeding on owls’ heads, we were, and such things, and the general would come through the campfires and strike these poses and he’d say, ‘Men, we will endure,’ things like that. He was just beautiful. But they get a lot of things wrong about him. You recall the cherry-tree story?”

We nodded.

“He had to cut that tree down. What did it have but the Dutch elm disease, easiest thing in the world to see, that cherry tree was top-heavy with it, and if Washington hadn’t fetched an ax to it, everything around would have been infected.”

“Why didn’t George tell his father that?” Gordy asked. “He’d have saved himself a whipping.”

“Young George had false teeth, you know, a full set, even as a young boy, and when his daddy called him in to ask him about the cherry tree, he tried to explain about the Dutch elm disease, but out came a lot of clacking. Washington’s teeth fitted badly, and when he spoke he either did this clacking, or sometimes a whistle, a high whistle.” Karras demonstrated the whistle. “So when his daddy said, ‘Who cut that tree down?’ he was only able to understand through all that clacking and whistling that his son, George, had, but he couldn’t understand the reason. So he took a switch to him. Beat him half crazy.”

“How could you understand him saying ‘We will endure’ and things like that at Valley Forge,” someone asked, “if Washington had this speech difficulty?”

“We couldn’t understand him,” explained Karras. “But he got into all these poses, you see. He’d stand around among the campfires, and when he crossed the Delaware he struck a fine pose that time, with his foot up there on the bow, so you always knew what the guy had in mind. You know actually who spoke the Farewell Address?”

“Who?”

“You’re looking at him,” said Karras. “What happened was that I stood right behind the general up there on the platform and I spoke the words for him. He was like a wood dummy, clacking his jaw, but you couldn’t tell unless you were right up close that it was me.”

“How about his staff? How did they understand his orders?”

“Well, lipreading—they were all deaf-mutes,” Karras went blithely on. “That’s not generally known, but Washington’s closest people—Lafayette (French Fats, we called him), General Gates, and the rest of them—they could hear nothing; but they could lip-read. That’s why in the portraits of Washington all the generals and the staff people are standing around staring at him. You hear that’s devotion they was showing. Crap. They was looking at his mouth in case Washington had it in mind to say something, so they could begin their lipreading and hop to it if there was something to be done.”

There had been some other lives Karras hinted at: he had been something during the Civil War—he wasn’t sure what. Something low, he thought, a camp follower perhaps.

Between lives, he told us, he would find himself on an airliner flying in heavy cloud banks, or often above them, with the sun shining. The ground was always out of sight, though he would press his forehead against the windows to look for it far down through the clouds, never succeeding, though often the clouds fell away into deep valleys that seemed to drop for miles. The flight was always very smooth and long, with pretty stewardesses coming by and leaning over to offer beef bouillon, and when the evening came their trays had tall drinks on them. He was always very tired on these flights, utterly relaxed; through half-closed eyes he would watch the stewardesses in the aisle, and when they came by he would hold out his cup for the bouillon, or the tall drink if it was in the evening. On the third day, perhaps the fourth, when he was beginning to feel more lively, a mist would suddenly settle in the cabin, increasingly thick, so that it began to take on the same consistency as the clouds outside, the walls of the cabin disappearing in it, and finally the back of the seat in front of him, so that in its thickness he felt himself in the clouds themselves, the wind beginning to sweep across his face, and as he felt himself begin to fall and turn, he knew his time was coming to be someone else and he would cross his fingers and hope to Christ he wasn’t going to be a goddamn jockstrap athlete again.

“Well, what would you hope to be?” Gary Lowe asked.

“How the hell do I know?” Karras said. He seemed ill-tempered suddenly. “I tell you nothing can be worse than this—lying around in a little hotel room like a bunch of cruds. Then we get out on some field and knock some guys around for a lousy pile of pennies. What sort of a life is that? It’s crud,” he said. He raised up off the bed. He looked very sour.

“Let’s clear out of here,” he said. “I got to find me a place to puke.”

When we got out in the corridor, he hurried on down in front of us and began punching at the elevator button.

“That’s a mood, isn’t it?” I said quietly to Lowe.

“Alex is ready,” Lowe said happily. “He’s right as rain. He’s up for the game.”

“Does he mean it when he says he’s going to get sick?”

“Sure he will,” said Lowe. “Just as George Wilson tells us to go out there and rock them, out in the can we’ll hear Alex lose his lunch. Sure. And then in five minutes he’ll be out there on the field making the poor fellow from Philadelphia opposite him pay for it.”

We crowded into the elevator. No one said anything going down. Karras would sit alone in the bus.