and my mother. I jump up and down a few times to get the blood flowing. I sense an opening. A huge opening.
“Tell you what. Forget winning just one match. How about if I win the whole damn thing today, you let me go to spring break, and you pay my way?”
Mom hears my counter. “What?”
“All or nothing,” I say. “If I win the first match but lose in the finals, I don’t go to spring break.”
Dad looks at me, then at Mom. He offers me his hand. “Deal!”
I turn my back to my parents. I approach the wrestling mat, wondering how long it will take before Dad realizes he’s made a sucker’s bet.
My opponents are fucking toast.
I come out against the second seed from Prep like a man possessed. I throw a double-leg takedown and get him on his back for a near-fall ten seconds into the match. I keep throwing my favorite move, the butcher, in which I do a cross-face, grab my opponent’s elbows out from under him, and then twist him around to his back like a human pretzel. Twice he tries to put a double-arm bar on me when I’m in the down position, and twice my double jointed arms laugh at his futility. The points start piling up, and the ref calls the match in the beginning of the third period by technical fall 19–4.
The ref raises my hand in victory. My dad stands two rows up in the bleachers, cups his mouth with his hands, yelling, “What’s the word?”
I pump my fist at him. “Haughty!”
Jed Pahl, the first seed from Taylor, walks onto the mat. I bump his shoulder as I pass him, and not by accident. I smile an evil smile. My head is dizzy. I’m ready to kick his ass.
I can’t sit still waiting for the final round to begin. I warm up to a mix tape of Guns N’ Roses and Van Halen songs, making sure to hit both “Paradise City”—replacing “Paradise” with “Panama” in the lyrics of course—and “Panama” on the playlist. Unlike most wrestlers, I like neither the song “Lunatic Fringe” nor the movie Vision Quest, although I’d knock the back out of Linda Fiorentino.
Finally, they call us up. Jed and I walk to the center of the mat. We shake hands. I’m jumping up and down, staring at him. Jed won’t make eye contact, but nonetheless seems unfazed by my posturing. He won his first match easily, pinning the third seed from Rosehaven in the middle of the second period. The ref blows the whistle to start our match.
I’m not a technical wrestler, but Jed makes me look like one. He tries to throw a standing single, and I see his move like it’s in slow motion. I sprawl, the combined strength and leverage of my legs and hips sending Jed to the mat stomach first. I can hear the wind being knocked out of his lungs. I whizzer him, coming back into a quarter nelson and sneaking in a couple punches to his midsection. With the alternative being suffocation, Jed goes slack, dropping his shoulder blades.
The ref slams his hand on the mat while blowing his whistle. I have never beaten Jed in five previous tries, or even made it past the second period. On the sixth try, I pin him forty-three seconds into the match.
It’s the shortest finals match of the entire Taylor Sectional. Nearly as bad as the beat down Notre Dame gave West Virginia in the Fiesta Bowl four weeks ago to win the national championship. If it’s possible, Dad appears happier for me in victory than he was for his Irish. He’s screaming like a goddamn girl. He points at me. I point back.
Haughty!
Chapter twenty-four
Möchten sie Gegottenbush?
Ja, ich möchte Gegottenbush.
German is not my strongest subject. My dialect is Germanglish with a slight southern Indiana drawl. I can’t conjugate verbs. The whole der/die/das noun-gender thing will forever mystify me. And I make up words when I don’t know—or don’t like—the German equivalent. Take for instance, the German word for sex, Geschlectsverkehr. Like the German language as a whole, it’s unwieldy, soulless, just plain old ugly. But Gegottenbush? Now that speaks to me. And it’s damn funny.
I am thinking about Gegottenbush with Beth Burke. As I sat in fourth-year German, I was tempted to ask the teacher if I could go to the restroom—to do some more intensive “thinking” about Gegottenbush with Beth Burke. That’s about the time the school nurse interrupted the class to tell me my mom had delivered the baby.
In the wake of two miscarriages, this pregnancy was, by contrast, uneventful, sedate even, lulling my parents into a sense of security. Against doctor’s orders, Dad and his eight-and-a-half-months pregnant wife made the cold February trip up to Notre Dame for their twenty-year reunion. Mom’s water broke on the floor of the basketball court five minutes after the Notre Dame-USC game ended. Dad had said to me over the phone, “God knew to wait.”
I pull into our driveway. Dad’s car is parked outside, the engine still rattling from the drive back from South Bend.
I walk into the family room. Mom is already asleep on the sectional along the back wall, buried beneath layers of old quilts. Grandpa George and Dad are watching television in separate chairs, my brother asleep on Dad’s chest.
My brother. After fourteen spirit-breaking years of sisterhood, I have a fucking brother!
“Hey there.” Dad’s voice is just above a whisper. He starts to sit up. I wave him off. “Dad, you’re fine. Stay down.”
Grandpa George stands up, beaming. “Isn’t he beautiful, Johnny-uh-Hank? Spittin’ image of his brother if I’ve ever seen one!”
My father raises his fingers to his lips and turns to Grandpa. “Dad, quiet.”
Grandpa sits down. “Sorry about that.”
“Well, son?”
I look at Dad. “Well, what?”
“You want to say hi to your new baby brother, Jack Henry?”
Just as she did with me, Mom vetoed John Henry Junior. She came close this time, but Jack is the name on his birth certificate, not his nickname. As for girl names, I refused to look at the list. It’s the late eighties, so I could guess “Caitlin” and have about a one in three chance of being right. I never even entertained the idea of a girl, convinced I could somehow will my brother into being.
Mission accomplished. “How’s he doing?” I ask.
Dad rubs the back of Jack’s head. “You’re looking at it.”
A baby sleeping on his father’s chest, one of those framed moments you want to keep in your pocket. I’ve never seen Dad like this, save in photos. Those old, perfectly square early-seventies pictures of me as a newborn, the more rectangular ones of Jeanine. The clothes change, Mom’s hairstyles are all over the place, but one thing is constant—Dad’s eyes. The surrender. The contentment. The eyes of a parent falling in love all over again.
“So the trip back was okay.”
“Yeah, other than when I tried to avoid the stoplights in Kokomo.”
“Dad, you didn’t.”
“I did.”
“You got lost on the back roads of Indiana with a postpartum mother and a newborn in the car?”
“Way lost. We’re talking Amish country lost.”