Where does the road to ruin start? That’s the point of getting all this down, I’m told. To get the handle on some choice you made. Or was made for you. By the bullies that curdled your heart’s milk and honey, or the ones that went before and curdled theirs. Hell, let’s blame the coal guys, or whoever wrote the book of Lee County commandments: Thou shalt forsake all things you might love or study on, books, numbers, a boy’s life made livable in
pictures he drew. Leave these ye redneck faithful, to chase the one star left shining on this place: manly bloodthirst. The smell of mauled sod and sweat and pent-up lust and popcorn. The Friday-night lights.
In my time I’ve learned surprising things about the powers stacked against us before we’re born. But the way of my people is to go on using the words they’ve always given us: Ignorant bastard. Shit happens.
This is how. Late October, deep into the season, we’re up six against Powell Valley at home, running a sweep, our third or fourth of the night. I’ve got eyes in the back of my helmet for the defensive end, Ninety-Six,
one of those assfists you can spot in the lineup before you ever go head-to- head. It’s in how he stands, his whole resentful body bent around what he’s missing. Anything you might have in the way of luck or love was stolen from his share, and he aims to get it back by drilling into the best man he sees. He’s had his eye on me all first quarter.
In this sweep I’m blocking for the tailback, to let him come around me between the outside hash marks, looking for daylight. Ninety-Six gets a full head of steam and hits me low, taking me down from the side, legs first.
The first thing I feel is breathless, no wind, with him and others on top of me, nothing unusual. Legs pinned. A normal tackle with some extra hate for
me to remember him by. He takes his time getting up, an elbow in my kidney, pissing me off.
Pain doesn’t get to your brain as fast as other things. Like being mad, and a little shamed, that you’re down with other men still on their feet. The third or fourth thing I know is my knee is bent the wrong direction. I see it. Fuck the devil’s red ass, does that son of a bitch hurt. Getting my legs under me
is the plan, but the knee won’t execute. The knee is roaring. My teammates are yelling, Coach is yelling at somebody offsides, and I’m not liking how they’re looking at me. I’m hurt, okay, but in this game, pain is not the enemy. Failure is your enemy. Being too slow, missing an opening, miscalculating a pass, these things you control. Doing it right is your only friend, messing up is your foe, and the distance between them is all you are here to care about. The rest is landscape. Pain is the turf under your cleats.
Pain is weather. You pull your legs under you and heave up thinking: Rainy day. Walk it off. Don’t pull me out, Coach, I’m good to go.
That’s not how it went.
Pain can scramble you. If it is weather, it can be a storm tearing off the roof of your mind. The hours and days after that tackle are like a deck of shuffled cards. Maybe they’re all still here in my brain, but damned if I could tell you which way they came about. I know the game ended in a loss. I was toted off the field to let that happen. Me telling Coach it’s not that bad, put me back in the game: that’s probably half the cards in that deck.
Pleading, while I sat under my five-pound icepack. U-Haul’s red eyes on me. He’s eating this up, that this happened to me. I recall his use of unnecessary force while icing and wrapping my leg. No doubt thinking salaried men don’t tend the injuries of pissants.
I recall trying to watch the game, losing focus. The ringing in my ears. Pain is a sound, a pull. It’s fire. Then I’m at the house, at the bottom of the stairs looking up. Coach bracing me up on one side, Angus the other. Those stairs. Me bottoming out in a helpless bawl. Coach almost falling apart too, saying not to worry, Dr. Watts would come in the morning and he’d get me right. Angus quietly making up Mr. Dick’s downstairs sofa bed for me. The cripple bed.
I wasn’t awake all night but didn’t exactly sleep. I kept looking under the sheet, feeling a pool of blood that wasn’t there. At some point I turned on
the light to be sure. It had turned black and was deformed, like a leg with a basketball stuffed inside. I was in my underwear. Somebody must have cut
off my uniform pants, that card was gone from my deck, good riddance. If I dozed off I had nightmares. Going at my leg with a hacksaw, trying to get rid of it. Biting different body parts till they bled. A weird sound would snap me out of it, and it would take a minute to understand the sound was coming out of me. Pain is water, of a drowning kind. You waterboard awhile, come up for air, go back down. You’re afraid you’ll die, and then
you’re afraid you won’t. That’s where I was, at the time of Doc Watts showing up in the morning.
Watts was team doctor. He didn’t make it to many games, but was friends with Coach since they played together at UT. He and Coach said things I wasn’t really hearing, ACL this, meniscus that. To rule out a fracture I needed to go to the hospital in Norton to get x-rayed. I thought: You and what goddamn army are moving me out of this bed. Possibly I said this out loud. Angus was hovering in the doorway big-eyed, listening. He said I also needed an MRI, for that we’d have to go to Tennessee, and they’re slammed down there so a three-week wait. He’d get me in to see an ortho, which is a bone specialist, again a two-week wait. The prescription would hold me till then. I stopped caring around this point because the little white submarine- shaped pill he’d given me to swallow was starting to sing its pretty song in my head. Cool relief, baby, let’s you and me go cruising Main. Just hold my hand. Lortab was her name. Blessed, blessed lady.
I laid out of school and practice for a week. I can miss one game, I thought.
Nobody was pleased, except probably U-Haul, but all I had in me was a
ten-yard gimp hop through the living room in my sad droopy drawers to the downstairs head. Mattie Kate in the stands. Otherwise sleeping my life away on the couch bed. Every four hours I’d wake up, empty the tanks if needed, goddamn the whole mess to hell, and cruise away again, thank you Lortab. Doc said to double them up, and set an alarm and keep that good stuff in my blood around the clock. Eating I don’t recall, though I must have. Only the bottles of lime Gatorade standing by to wash down the pills.
Coach and Doc Watts launched an offense on the bone doctor (or rather, his poor receptionist) and got me an appointment for the next Monday, early, before the busy man went into his surgeries. I wasn’t excited for it. What if he wanted to cut on me? I was in no mood. Coach said not to worry, the bone guy would get me fixed up. Maybe in time for next Friday.
At school the rumors flew. Absent Demon was way more interesting than the real me. Angus came home to report my leg was: (1) broken, (2) not broken, (3) sprained (sprung, if we’re technical), (4) amputated (above the knee and below, pick one), (5) I was medivacked by helicopter to the brain hospital in Nashville and in a coma. Angus laughing. Me, just watching the clock. She had the rumors list written down her arm in marker, reading it all out. I was still an hour out from my next date with Lortab, and in no version of reality was I going to hold out that long.
Angus got quiet then, studying my sheet-covered leg. This was up in my room, after an assisted crawl up the stairs for privacy and better bathroom access. A guy needs his dignity. Angus was cross-legged on the bottom of my bed in her denim overalls and red socks. Hair up in the devil-horn knobs she’d taken on as her favored look.
“Hurts, huh.”
I laughed, just a bark: ahhuh. I told her I used to think I knew what hurt was. But this leg I would trade for the worst busted face and ribs my stepdad ever gave me. I’d even throw in cash. Her gray eyes edged up from my leg to my face. “That is one screwed up economy, bro.”
“Meaning what.”
She shrugged. Scooted over a little and recrossed her red sock feet, making herself at home on my bed. “You don’t have to trade one cockup for another one. What about like, trading up? Just get this shit over with, looking to better times ahead.”
“Gee, never thought of that. I bet next week the doc will wave his wand over this fucked-up knee and I’ll run a seventy-yard touchdown and we’ll all fart perfume. Why don’t you go out for cheerleader, miss sunshine?”
She shook her head, a small, quick move, not looking at me but out the window. What to do with Demon, the hard kid to handle. Age-old question. I felt meanness bubbling up inside me, like a burp of sour vomit. I made myself swallow it back down. “Sorry,” I said.
She looked back at me. Lord, those eyes. “What the hell are you so scared of?”
Dori had asked the same question. Clearly I needed to shore up some leaks. “You don’t know what it’s like to be me, is all I’m saying. To be sidelined, with no family or anything.”
Her eyes changed color, I swear. Light gray to darker. Didn’t say a word, but I knew what she thought. Coach was trying to give me things I refused
to take. Maybe family was one of them. That and the silver money card she flew around on. I leaned over and grabbed the little orange pill bottle I’d hardly taken my eyes off of in the last half hour. Press-screwed the cap, gulped down my Lortabs and Gatorade. Closed my eyes, breathed. The pill itself tasted of rescue. I opened my eyes to the stare of Angus. She was weirdly patient, in a manner that could wreck you.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said. “Coach is great and everything.
Because I’m the best tight end he’s had coming up in a lot of seasons. That’s the reason I’m here.”
“You really think that’s all.”
“Christ, Angus. He put me through tryouts, right after I came here. He checked me for speed and ball handling and I did pretty good, or I guess
more than pretty good, and he told me I could stay. You didn’t know that? It was right after Christmas, down in his office. Deal struck.”
She didn’t know that, it was plain to see.
“Don’t act shocked. The man’s got his job to do. And right now, my speed and ball handling are for shit. Not a great position to be in.”
She started picking a loose thread in the sheet, really pulling at it. She would maim the sheet if she kept that up. The type of thing that kids get smacked for in certain homes, starved for in others. Punishments vary widely among households. “I’ve always expected to pull my weight here,” I told her. “That’s all I want. I’m not one to ask for handouts.” Maybe I sounded like an old man. Mr. Peg, former miner, hillbilly pure. Why wouldn’t I.
“For God’s sake, Demon. You’re a kid.” “Am I, though?”
She shook her head, small and fast again. I wasn’t trying to be difficult, just straight. It’s all I knew how to be, with Angus. “He’s not going to kick you out because you got injured, playing his game,” she said. “Give my father some credit.”
I’d not known her to call him “my father” before, ever. He was Coach. I told her I didn’t think he’d give up on me, because I was important to the team. I planned on finishing out the season, with two years left to make my name as a General. I didn’t spell out to Angus what she couldn’t understand: that without football I’d be nobody again. That the loser Demon was still right there under the surface, and if I lost the shine, I was nothing. I’d never get Dori.
Somehow Angus decided she’d cheered me up. She went back to her list of my rumored sorry fates. “On the good side, you’re rocking the vote for homecoming court.”
“Bullshit, I’m only a sophomore.”
“I’m just the messenger here. You, sire, are headed for coronation.” “Not happening. Anyway, I don’t want the pity vote. If I win, it’s got to
be for my ripped physique and shallow personality.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “I see that. But you’d better take what you can get. It’s not a pity vote if you’re injured in the line of duty. Like that soldier thing. Purple cross.”
“Purple heart,” I said. “Shit for brains.”
She smacked the flat bib of her overalls. “Dope!”
Her clowning was known to pull me out of a mood, but in this case it was the Lortabs. I was nodding off to happyland. Should take a piss first.
Bedwetting was an ever-present danger on this regimen. You aim for that brief window where the pain is tamped down to bearable, but you’re not yet too dopeshit to haul ass out of bed. She watched me tilt and lever myself off the mattress, knifing in loud breaths until I was upright.
“Aw jeez, Demon. You gotta update the under wardrobe.”
She wasn’t wrong. The old cottonbottoms had lost all hope of whitey or tighty.
June must have got it through the school pipeline via Emmy, so there’s no telling what injury she thought I had. But I woke up and there she was, staring at my pill bottle. Straight from work, in her white coat with the
plastic name tag. Under the coat, a black sweater and pants. The sexy way she bent forward straight-backed, like a hinge from her narrow waist, put
Dori into my head. If not for the pain I could have pitched a tent right there. “Hey!” I said, sounding hoarse and groggy. I might have double-doubled
up the Lortabs. Doing the same thing day in, day out, you can forget if something happened an hour ago or yesterday.
“How long have you been taking these?” I thought about it. “What day is today?”
She blew out a puff of air and swiveled around. Coach was in the doorway, red hat, lanyard and whistle around his neck, looking like any minute here he might make June run suicides. “Who put him on these?”
“I think the boy’s in good hands,” Coach said. “Watts has been a doctor since you were cheerleadin’ in your little skirt and bobby socks.”
She turned back to me. “Demon. Would you like me to have a look at that leg?”
I said okay, and she sat down on the bed. I could smell her soap, the same fruity sweetness that followed Emmy around, and again I thought of Dori, wishing I knew what she smelled like. “How much you going charge me?” I asked, vaguely realizing I was slurring.
She gave me a wink. “Friend of the family discount. After you’re all better, you can come clean out my gutters.”
Upside-down boat houses have no gutters. I had to claw through some brain cotton to get the joke. She pulled the sheet down and whistled, long and low, like calling a dog. She was supposed to have a dog by now. What happened to Rufus? What does it mean if a doctor sees your injury and
whistles? Not good. She touched and pressed on different parts of my leg, feeling the pulse at my ankle. If I’d ever imagined June feeling me up, not saying I did, this wasn’t it. She was all business. I was glad Angus had talked me into some decent gym shorts.
She covered me up and rested both hands on her lap, looked at me. Biting her lip. I wished I was asleep. Waiting to wake up from this assfucked turn of events.
“I saw your radiology report,” she said, “and I’m not very happy with it. I know you’re still waiting for your MRI, but I don’t think it’s going to be good news. I’m sorry, I hate this for you. But the only thing that will help
this injury is a diagnosis and the right course of treatment. Not wishful thinking. Trust me. I’ve seen too many patients try.”
“There’s no fracture.” This was Coach.
She twisted around to face him. “I’m not happy with the X-ray because there could be trouble in the growth plate that got overlooked. It wasn’t a perfect angle, and there was no lateral mediolateral. If Watts or whoever’s supposed to be looking after Damon has neglected to order a follow-up, I can call that in for you right now.”
Coach said nothing. Twirling the lanyard around and around his finger.
June turned back to me. “What would you like?”
To stop hurting like hell. I shrugged. “To be good enough to play by next Friday?”
“Oh, hon.” She put her hand on top of my hand, and something rushed my chest so hard I held my breath to stop from tearing up. She was shaking her head. I focused on the shiny mink pelt of her hair, and let the words turn to bubbles over her head. Out for the rest. Of the season.
Coach’s orbiting lanyard dropped dead. He said something. She said something. He dropped the nice and told her whose house this was. She grabbed up my pill bottle and shook it at him. “Playing with fire,” she said. And so on. I was the little kid wishing Mom and Dad would quit fighting.
At one point she came back over and asked me, close to my face, did I
know what I was taking. She said it was hydrocodone and something. Not oxy then, I said, and she said it was really no better than that. I was struggling for words and possibly catching the asshole bug from Coach
because I asked her whatever happened to Kent’s “pain is a vital sign” and all that.
She hissed at me: “Kent Holt is a fucking hired killer for his company.”
Those words, from her mouth, stopped my clock. She and Coach left the room, but I heard them out in the hall. Coach using his fifty-yard-line voice, and she was also plenty loud enough, telling him she used to see two or
three narcotic patients a year and now that many every day. Then she gave up on him and came back to work on me. Telling me how pain is a body’s way of taking care of you, letting you know when to stop. Telling me to think of my future. She had no clue. My future was football. Playing through the pain is what you do.
She left, I slept. Woke up confused, then ticked off. I wasn’t some child, having my little pharm party. I was going by the book, doctor’s orders.
Being a General was serious work. Coach knew. She didn’t.
By the time I got in to see the bone doctor, the basketball-size knee was down to a softball. All week it had been parading its bruise rainbow: black- green-yellow-brown. Coach found me some crutches and I was getting around. It felt good to move. Except for hurting like hell.
The bone doctor turned out to be a long-jawed man with skeleton hands and no time to spare. He checked me over in the hospital waiting room, on his way to a day of cutting people up. All I could think of in those plastic chairs was the night Mom OD’d and I got thrown in the deep end of the foster shitpool. I’d been swimming ever since. I wished I was five and could hold Coach’s hand while I dropped my sweatpants and let Dr. Bones
poke my leg. He said the same as June about not trusting the first X-ray. Even without the MRI he could see surgery was indicated. Meniscus this, ACL that, the leg needed to be stabilized, my PCP should get me into a cast and PT. More letters than you want to hear. He reupped my Lortabs and said to come back after I got the MRI. I thought Coach would ask him how soon I could get back to playing, but he didn’t.
After we got out to the car, I told Coach I didn’t want those skeleton
hands cutting me open. He looked over at me, the square teeth behind his lips, freckled hands gripping the wheel. Rarely had I told him, flat-out, what I did or didn’t want. Any foster kid can tell you why.
“I hear you, son,” he said. Then he called Watts on his car phone and we went straight to the pharmacy to pick up my new prescription. Coach was going to run in, but I said I’d go. Wanting to prove something. I got out and crutched across the lot, all stupid proud. I got this, I’m thinking, as the
doors swoosh open. I got this, down the aisle to Pharmacy. They said fifteen minutes. I browsed magazines and condoms and found a place to sit down on a crate of Ensures.
Finally they yelled my name. I paid with Coach’s card. The white paper bag had a thing stapled to the outside, pretty obvious, that said OxyContin. That shook me. I was still trying hard, playing I got this, but on my way out I stumbled, running smack into a homeless guy.
“Whoah, you blind?” he said, in such a pitiful way that I sorried myself all over him: sorry, careless, my bad, sorry. Coach was watching from his car. I gave the guy another look and almost lost my breakfast. He must have said I’m blind. He had no eyes, just two caves in his wrinkled face. A big nursey dog on a harness. Not homeless, just a person going into Walgreens for whatever drug they give a guy so he can stand his life in the hopeless fucking darkness.
I got in the car feeling rattled. Those empty caves. Blind, blind, blind
