Wrestling Sturbridge (9 page)

Our program doesn’t have the type of budget some of these top-ranked schools have, sending their teams to tournaments in Las Vegas and Chicago and Iowa. The biggest deal we get is an overnight trip to Allentown for the Lehigh Valley Holiday Invitational. Of the eight teams there, three of us are ranked nationally.

Coach lets me go along, even though I’m not wrestling, and we win the title by two points over Phillipsburg, New Jersey, which
USA Today
has at number six. Digit loses his first match of the season in the final to a kid from Maryland, but Al stays unbeaten by pinning a guy from Bethlehem on the day before Christmas. Hatcher wins, too.

We also finish ahead of Northampton, which according to
Keystone Wrestling News
was the best team in Pennsylvania. Not any longer.

We sneak a few beers in the back of the bus on the way home from the tournament. Coach sits up front and brags to the bus driver about what a great team we have. It’s only his fourth season here, and he figures he’s got a lot to live up to.

Digit spends most of the time staring out the window. He led going into the final period, but got taken down twice in the last minute. He says he learned something. I think he’s the most likely of us all to win a state title this year, because he’s so intense. We still hang out most
nights, but he heads home by nine. Me and Al and Hatcher usually sit on Main Street at least until Rite Aid closes. But Digit’s drifting off. Even after a match he doesn’t quite let go—he keeps running it over in his mind. So he’s even more distant today, since he lost. He’s not mooning anybody like Al and Hatcher and some of the others are.

When our heavyweight, Billy Avery, presses his bare butt against the glass, it covers the whole window. We all crack up at that. Digit opens another beer. Hatcher takes a red pixie football out of his gym bag and tosses it at Billy, but it misses by two feet and hits Anthony Terranova in the head. Anthony throws the football back at Hatcher, who grabs it and whips it back. This time it hits Billy, who starts pulling up his pants in a hurry.

By the time we turn off the turnpike by Scranton, there’s one cracked window, a pool of beer on the floor, and a couple of ripped seat cushions. Coach yells back at us to shut up for a while. Al starts singing “Downtown Train,” and Digit joins in.

I go with Mom and Dad and Grandma to the 5:00
P.M
. service on Christmas day. I stopped at Kim’s house for a few minutes just before. She gave me a tape of her psych-up music. I got her a ceramic whale.

So we’re driving to the church and Mom asks me about her. “I guess you two really like each other?” she says.

“I guess.” I’m not exactly sure. I mean I like her fine, but nothing seems to be happening.

“Seems like a nice girl,” says Dad, who met her after the last home match.

Grandma snorts. “I hope she knows how to keep her legs crossed,” she says, just oozing with Christmas spirit.

Me and Mom and Dad just look at each other and roll our eyes. We’ve reached the church. Jerry Franken and his wife are the greeters. His wife winks at me and smiles a big toothy smile. Jerry gives me a light punch on the arm. “We knocked off some big boys yesterday, huh?”

“We’re number one,” I say, kind of ironically, I think. It’s hard to be bothered by this guy.

“See you Tuesday?” he asks.

“Sure.” School’s closed this week. We’re putting on a clinic at the Y for little kids.

We sit in a pew and wait. I check my watch and it says 5:06, and I can see we’re in for high comedy again. Reverend Fletcher and the wimpy youth minister, Paul Long, will show up in about three minutes, bursting through the doors singing “Joy to the World” at the top of their lungs. They’ll be just so surprised to see the church full of people, having completely forgotten that they’d scheduled a service for this afternoon. “We were out caroling,” Fletcher will say, removing a red-and-white striped scarf.

“Did we schedule a service?” Paul will say, looking at a little girl in the front row. She’ll laugh and say yes. He’ll turn to the Reverend in surprise, and they’ll say in spontaneous unison, “Well, then let’s have a service.”

Maybe you can sense that they’ve done this before.

I hear them coming up the steps. They’re singing “Hark the Herald Angels …”

Get me out of here.

I walk down the hill to Al’s house late Tuesday morning, crossing the footbridge over the river. The clinic’s at noon. Al’s father answers the door and I step into the living room. I haven’t been here in about a month; there’s too much unspoken tension between me and Al. If Digit’s around, it’s easy to avoid, but one-on-one it’s almost impossible to ignore. Al has something I have to get, and there’s no way to share it even if we would.

I can see him in the kitchen, on the phone. His father points to the couch and tells me to sit down. He’s wearing old stained work pants and a sleeveless white T-shirt.

“He’s talking to Joe,” he says. Al’s brother. I think he’s stationed in Texas.

“You off today?” I ask.

“Yeah.” He stretches out his left arm and yawns. “I always take a day or two after Christmas. Coke or something? Orange juice?”

“I just ate. But thanks.”

He straightens out some newspapers on the coffee table. He’s got a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray on the table, too, but it looks like he forgot about it. The ash is about two inches long.

“Dad.” Al’s standing in the doorway with the phone. His father comes over and takes it, and goes into the kitchen.

“Hey,” Al says to me.

“Hey. You ready?”

“Need my jacket.”

I follow him into the kitchen. His old man is laughing into the phone. “Never a dull moment,” he’s saying. Al points to the kitchen table, where there’s a package of salami and some crackers. “You hungry?” he asks me.

“No thanks.”

Al grabs his father’s shoulder and says he’ll be back for dinner. “Tell Joe I’ll talk to him again soon.”

We head down the walk and Al pulls his gloves out of his pocket and puts them on. He looks over his shoulder at the house as we cross Court Street. “My mom died two years ago,” he says.

“Two years today?”

“Yeah. It’s real hard on him. But he’s doing okay.”

“He seemed okay. That’s why your brother called?”

“Pretty much. We try to stay close.”

“Yeah.”

We walk in silence for a few blocks. We have to cross back over the river to get to the Y, which is down the other end of town.

“Lot of kids signed up?” Al says.

“I heard about fifty.” That’s a lot of kids for the Y’s small gym, but we’ll squeeze them in. It’s first, second, and third graders today. The older kids get their turn on Thursday.

The gym is old—it used to be an armory, and if you’re playing basketball you can’t shoot from past the top of the key without hitting a girder. But there isn’t a kid in town who hasn’t spent a lot of hours in there, playing hoops or indoor soccer or floor hockey.

The Y is in the far corner of town, where the river makes its right angle. We enter the gym and about twenty little kids come running over to see Al, slapping five with him or just looking at him in awe. They don’t ignore me either, but Al gets most of the attention. They even want autographs.

Jerry Franken blows his whistle and tells everybody to sit in the bleachers. They hustle over, laughing and shoving, and Jerry goes over the agenda. Mostly we want them to have fun, to get a feel for the sport. Mostly they want to try and annihilate each other.

We break into groups more or less by size. I’ve got mostly second graders, and we go over some basic moves for about forty-five minutes. One really skinny kid named Cody keeps asking if they can do tag team matches, but I tell him that’s just on TV. After a while I let him and three others wrestle me at once. I let them pin me after a couple of minutes.