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Undefeated The ambulance was always parked along the sideline as our football team unloaded thundering off the bus like a stampede of Sir Lancelots. It didn't scare us. We were young and tough, immortal as a dream, except for our ex-wide receiver who'd died in a car wreck between seasons. This senior year was for him. The school band rattled and boomed and the cheerleaders bounced around pumped up athletes making clumsy declarations for victory in his honor. Last year's undefeated season had ended with a win in a rain storm and a wrestling celebration in the mud that had been the thirty yard line, then more horsing around outside the locker room. Before coach made us quit, I was wrestling our wide receiver, my friend, trying to stuff cold wet leaves up his jersey and down his pants, making him into a soggy scarecrow, feeling his laughing warm against my face. It was the last time we ever touched. New Year's Eve he was dead, crushed under a seventeen year-old car that for an instant must have felt like a huge football helmet illegally spearing him in the back, while our lives rushed on like an eighty-eight yard touchdown run. The ambulance was there that night too. Before the police made me leave, I watched our broken friend lying motionless on the frozen gravel road under the flashing lights and immortal old stars. |
We went undefeated again and dedicated the trophy to his memory or spirit or something, but he gave me a more personal gift to remember him by; a small scar on my right elbow from that rainy autumn night he tackled me on the wet leaf-stained cement outside the locker room to celebrate. |
C minus Right in the middle of his geography report on South America, while we were all busy taking notes, Jerry Bowens, the wiry left guard on our football team, stopped... After a nervous pause we all looked up in his direction towards Venezuela and Colombia with our ink pens ready for the next fact, just in time to see Jerry pass out in front of the map and collapse to his right off the portable podium towards Ecuador. He rolled down the teacher's desk through Peru, his left hand grabbing at Bolivia and crumbled out of sight in the direction of Chile ripping a big earthquake and landslide through the map as he went. We heard his head bounce against Argentina, then a low primal moan oozed out from under the desk from Uruguay and Paraguay. While the teacher and one alert student helped Jerry Bowens out of the room three little countries Guyana, Surinam and French Guinana hung on by a few threads from the roller above the blackboard. We all just sat there staring at what was left of Brazil, hoping that this would at least delay the test on Friday. |