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.