Rash (15 page)

I was
eating a Chikun® Frazzie and listening to Gorp tell a story about a kid who’d lost a race with the bears.

“Scattered his guts all over. It stunk for weeks.”

“You saw it?”

“No. It was before my time. But I heard about it.”

“From who?”

“One of the blueshirts.”

I wasn’t sure I believed it, but I couldn’t rule it out, either. I looked away from Gorp and saw Dodo watching me. A pang of nostalgia worked its way up through my gut. I hadn’t thought about my old pepperoni team in weeks. I walked across the mess hall to where Dodo, Red, and a few other paperpants were sitting.

“Hey, Dodo; hey, Red.”

“Hi, Bo,” said Dodo, giving me a cautious look. “How’s it going?”

“Okay.” I tried to think of something to say to bridge the gulf between us. “Hammer works us pretty hard.”

“Yeah, right,” said Red. “Boo-hoo. You work a whole eight hours a day.”

“We have training, too,” I said, a bit irritated by Red’s tone.

“Must be rough,” he muttered, biting into a slice of Sausage and Mushroom Supreme.

“It is,” I said. I looked at Dodo, who was still looking at me as if I were a big strange foaming-at-the-mouth hound. “Look, you guys would be wearing gold shirts too if you could.”

“Whatever you say, man,” said Red.

I held out my half-eaten Frazzie to Dodo. “You want the rest of this, D?”

“No, thanks,” he said, looking me straight in the eye. “I’ve kind of got used to the pizza.”

I shrugged and turned away. Things had changed. The paperpants were all jealous as hell, but that was their problem. I went back to the Goldshirts’ table and sat down to finish my Frazzie.

Not all of our training involved running plays, getting hit, or being chased by bears. Every evening Hammer lectured us on the history of football. He told us stories about the great players of the past. On the good days he would show us movies. On the bad days he would just stand there and talk, and if you fell asleep, he would wake you up by firing a football at your head.

We also got educated on the great football plays. We learned to read Hammer’s odd-looking little drawings with all the circles and triangles and dotted lines. Football is more than just running the ball from one end of the field to the other while trying to inflict maximum damage on the opposition. Although, in truth, that’s 90 percent of it.

Three days a week we divided into two teams of nine, ten, or eleven players each—depending on how many of us were in the infirmary that day—and played a full one-hour game with no time-outs and no stopping the clock.

Despite the risk of permanent injury, maiming, or death, we lived for those games. Running flat out, equipment-free, while being chased by a herd of Goldshirts was nearly as much of a rush as punching Karlohs Mink, or running away from a bear. But one thing I had learned: If the bear is real, you run a lot faster.

I was complaining to Rhino one night that my gold T-shirt was too small.

“It’s too tight across the chest and shoulders,” I said. “Every time I get it back from the laundry, it’s shrunk more.”

Rhino said, “It’s not the shirt. It’s you.”

“Me?”

“You’re getting bigger.”

“You think so?” I looked at my reflection in the small mirror above our sink and flexed my right arm. It did look a little bigger. All that time in the weight room was paying off.

“I got the opposite thing happening,” Rhino said. “I’ve lost thirty-two pounds.”

“You’re kidding.” I’d just watched him put away six Frazzies and four cans of Pepsi at dinner.

“I think it must be the running,” he said.

“We’ve been doing plenty of that.” Hammer had been forcing us to run laps around the field. He had started us with twelve laps and added another lap every day. I didn’t
mind. I loved to run. But for Rhino it was pure torture. Watching him pound around the perimeter was painful. His face would be red going on purple, and every now and then he’d have to stop and gasp for air for a few minutes before continuing. One time his eyes rolled up into his head and he collapsed completely. Hammer woke him up with smelling salts, then made him finish his laps.

“What do you weigh now?” I asked, climbing up onto my bunk.

“Three sixty-six.”

“Better stay out of the wind. You might blow away.”

“I get down to two hundred, I’m out of here.”

“You’re almost there. All you got to do now is lay off the Frazzies.”

“Yeah, right.”

We both laughed, then Rhino unleashed an explosive Frazzie fart. I buried my face in my thin blanket and waited for the gas attack to pass.

Most nights were devoted to sleeping. I was too tired to think and too tired to dream. And when I did think, I thought about football. Maddy, Karlohs, my parents, Gramps, Bork, and all the rest of my former life seemed like a distant dream. I was living in a world of pizza, football, and polar bears. Nothing else seemed real.

Some nights I wondered why there was a football team at all. Did other plants have teams too, or was Hammer a lone psychotic, a holdover sports nut from the last millennium?

The other Goldshirts didn’t seem to know. According to Gorp, whose broken collarbone was almost healed,
Hammer had started the Goldshirts a few months earlier. He was one of the original team members.

“Hammer used to be a pro, back in the 2030s,” he told me. “Played fullback for the Omaha 49ers. He lost his job when the game was outlawed in the USSA. After that he played for Paraguay in the International League.”

“So why does he have
us
playing? Is he just reliving his glory days?”

“I dunno,” Gorp said. “As long as I never have to eat another slice of pizza, I don’t really care.”

Fragger had a different theory.

“What else is there to do up here? The closest town is Churchill, twenty-six miles away, and all they got there is a few bars, an airstrip, and lots of polar bears. This way he gets to watch us beat the crap out of each other for entertainment.”

Still, I had to wonder if there wasn’t more to it than that. We Goldshirts were being trained to beat the crap out of one another, sure. But I had the feeling we were also being trained to beat the crap out of somebody else.

A few
weeks after the bear incident my questions were answered.

It was a cloudy, cool, moist day. A fine mist drifted down from a low gray sky. Hammer lined us up outside at the fifty-yard line. He held up a red T-shirt.

“Anybody know what this here is?” he asked.

“It’s a T-shirt, sir,” said Gorp.

“Wrong,” Hammer said. “This is a
red
T-shirt. You know what you do when you see a red shirt?”

No one did.

Hammer ripped the shirt in two and threw it on the ground.

“You destroy it,” he said, grinding the scraps of red fabric into the earth with his heel. “One month from today you will be put to the test. You will represent the three-eight-seven in the first annual Tundra Bowl. You will be playing against the Coke Redshirts, and you will destroy them. Any questions?”

After a few shocked seconds Lugger raised his hand. “Sir . . . are they any good?”

“They’re big and ugly and mean, they’ve been training for six months, and you will destroy them.”

“Will they be coming here?” Fragger asked.

“No. We’ll bus up to their plant the morning of the game, and you will destroy them.”

We all thought about that for a few seconds. I tried to stop it, but my arm went up all on its own. Hammer pointed at me.

“What do we get if we win?” I asked.

“You
will
win,” Hammer said. “There will be no losing.”

I persisted. “But what do we get? What’s in it for us?”

Hammer’s face clouded. He took a deep breath through his nose, lips pressed tight together, then he smiled, showing two rows of small, perfectly even teeth. “How much time do you have left on your sentence, nail?”

“Thirty-four months.”

“Would you like to get out sooner?”

I nodded.

“Okay. When you win this game, I will recommend you for early release. All of you.”

“How early?” Lugger asked.

“We’ll see.”

“What about me?” Rhino asked.

“What about you?”

“I’m in for poundage, not for time.”

Hammer considered. “For you,” he said, “liposuction.”

We were all stunned. Suction had been illegal for twenty years.

“Good,” said Rhino without losing a beat.

“What if we lose?” I asked.

“You will not lose,” Hammer said. “You lose, you will run with the bears.”

After that, training ratcheted up to a whole new level. We lifted, ran, studied, and scrimmaged like it
mattered
. Even Lugger, the laziest among us, pushed himself to the limit.

In a weird way playing football was a lot like making pizzas: it had to be a team effort. Each of us was a part of something bigger, and if any one of us didn’t do his job, the whole effort failed.

A lot of our time was spent running plays. Hammer had us memorize twenty different plays. He gave them weird names like “the flea-flicker” and “one niner box,” and he had us run them over and over again until we could do them without thinking.

The three plays that seemed to work the best were the simplest. The W-down was your basic run-like-hell-and-catch-the-ball. The play required one very fast receiver (me), a solid wall of blockers (Rhino, Gorp, and Nuke), and one hard-throwing quarterback (Fragger). At the snap I would run a pattern—zig-zag-zig-zag—down the right side of the field, then turn and look for the ball at the count of four. Fragger was good—it was nearly always there.

The “nose dozer” was our simplest and most devastating play: Hand off to Rhino and let him run. Since it took at least four guys to bring Rhino down, it guaranteed us yardage every time.

A combination of those two plays gave us something we called the “Pineapple fizz.” I would take off downfield doing my zig and zag routine while Fragger would fake a
handoff to Rhino, then lateral the ball to Pineapple, our running back. Pineapple could usually pick up a few yards before the opposition figured out what was going on. At least that was the theory. It worked in practice, but we hadn’t actually tried it in a real game against real opponents.

Our other plays included the “double reverse,” the “Statue of Liberty,” and the “Hail Mary.” None of them worked all that well, in my opinion, but Hammer had us learn them anyway. He said some of the plays were so old that no one had used them in fifty years.

“I found out why Hammer is so hot to win this game,” Rhino said.

I hung over the edge of my bunk and looked down at him. “Why?”

“I was talking to Henry. You know Henry?”

“Henry the guard?”

“Yeah.”

Henry wasn’t as fat as Rhino, but he was close.

“Henry told me that Hammer has a bunch of money riding on the game. Like a couple-million
V
-bucks.”

“He’s gambling? Isn’t that illegal?”

Rhino laughed. “It’s all illegal—gambling, football, liposuction—what’s the difference. He does whatever he wants.”

“Would you really let them suction you?”

“You kidding? I’d let ’em take off my head if it would get me out of here quicker.”

Of all the Goldshirts, Fragger was the most gifted athlete.
He could throw, he could kick, he could run, and he could catch. One of our backup plays was the “quarterback sneak.” The way it worked was simple. Lugger, our center, would hike the ball to Fragger, who would take off running. No pass, no handoff, not even a fake. Just hike and run.

The play usually resulted in yardage, but Hammer didn’t like to use it. “You don’t want your quarterback getting injured,” he said. It was the only time I ever heard him worry about any of us getting hurt.

Fragger was gifted, but he was also sick in the head. He had to bonk somebody daily. Fortunately for us, he had a personal rule against hurting anybody wearing a gold T-shirt. The paperpants weren’t so lucky—every day at least one of them got kicked, jabbed, tripped, splashed, elbowed, or otherwise abused. It seemed to make Fragger feel better.

The blueshirts overlooked Fragger’s little escapades. I think they enjoyed his antics as much as he did. That is, until a kid named Monk showed up a couple of weeks before the big game.

Monk was a skinny, morose kid with limp black hair and protuberant eyeballs who, I later learned, had been sent up for growing tobacco and selling it to his classmates. If he’d been a couple of years older, they would have put him away for twenty years, but since he was a minor, he only got thirty months. Monk had been at the 3-8-7 for less than twenty-four hours when Fragger noticed his exceptionally high forehead and decided it would look better with a Frazzie wrapper thumbtacked to it. The kid was new and didn’t know the ropes yet, so when Fragger tried to use Monk’s forehead for a billboard,
the kid responded by punching him hard in the throat.

Monk wasn’t that big, but it was a good shot. Fragger went down like a sack of pizza flour. The blueshirts got interested in that real fast. Monk got slammed up against the wall and Fragger was whisked off to the infirmary.