Hitler family finances after paying for surgery. Almost as big a mess as Arnold’s Tiger football career, untimely ripp’d. He wouldn’t run again till the beginning of March, and then only tentatively. Still, he could practice throwing, and his arm and accuracy improved. In spite of being essentially out of play for his sophomore year, he was the clear choice for starting JV quarterback the next.
As an invalid, he found another way to be of Tiger service: tutoring. Tutoring three of the nine black students who had newly joined the team. Tutoring math or English or social studies, sometimes all—whatever they needed to keep their grade-point averages above 65 so they could qualify to play. Talking with his new charges, Arnold’s eyes were opened to the unfamiliar world of “separate but equal”: I. M. Terrell High, up in Fort Worth, had been “their” school, a good school, one they preferred. Teddy Marshall, now a Mansfield senior running back, was having trouble switching over.
“So what were you doing at Terrell?” Arnold asked over a first-order equation. “What were you learning?”
“Nothin. We din’t have no homework, we din’t have no tutors, like you. Teacher come into class and she give you somethin to read and she goes out. She leaves some other student in charge. At the end of the period, she comes back and tell you somethin to read for the next day.”
“I thought you said you didn’t have homework.”
“Well, hell, they never ast about it the next day, so what the hell. What you think people doin with their nights? Homework? Forty-five girls last year in the maternity ward. Eighteen Terrell guys sentenced to the chain gang.”
“So are things better here?”
“Things are OK, but you know, man, it’s hard to keep quiet when you git called nigger twenty times a day. But, hey, man, I don’t have to get up at 5:30 every mornin to take the bus. An git home at 6:30 after my folks is through eatin.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“But this math shit is hard. I mean, what it have to do with me, man? I know this algebra and then I get a job as a dishwasher—if I can get one. What a dishwasher got to know algebra for?”
“Some college is going to snap you up on a football scholarship. Then you’ll have to know this stuff.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll believe it when I see it. Ain’t no one’s called this nigger yet.”
“They will, Teddy, they will.”
Arnold also had difficult studying to do. All the quarterback responsibilities—it was overwhelming: learning all the calls, all the two- and three-play packages, not getting fooled by an overshifted defense, understanding the T-formation, I-formation, Warner Single Wing formation, Shotgun, Wishbone, Veer formation, Eagle Defense, 3-4 Pass defense, 4-3 Pro defense, Oklahoma defense—he had to know and call them all. He had to be familiar with the strategies and tactics of the dozen teams the Tigers played, and of the others they might meet should they make it to State: the Paolo Duro Dons, the Nacogdoches Dragons, the Lubbock Westerners, the Big Spring Steers, the Abilene Eagles, the Amarillo Golden Sandies, the San Angelo Bobcats, the Sweetwater Mustangs, the Lamesa Tornadoes, the Midland Bulldogs, the Ysleta Indians, the Wichita Falls Coyotes, the Highland Park Scotties, the Tascosa Rebels, the Lamar Vikings, the Carter Cowboys, and of course those impostors who dared to take the same name, the Texarkana Tigers.
He was sitting on his bed one night, three weeks postsurgery, manipulating his chess pieces on the board in a single-wing shift to the left, when an agonizing pain shot through his left knee.
“Fuck! Goddamn!” He had thought he was healing.
“Arnold, watch your mouth!” Was that his father? It didn’t sound like his father. His knee began to tingle and buzz.
“A man’s belly shall be filled with the fruit of his mouth,” his knee said to him.
“Grandpa? Nonno Jacobo?”
“So who else talks to you in your knee?”
“You haven’t been there for a long time.”
“I haven’t had to.”
“How are you, Grandpa?”
“Terrible. It’s a mess in here. Swollen like I’m squeezing to death. It’s the archetype of Jew, Arnold—up to his eyeballs in a cistern, thinking about the infinite.”
“What infinite?”
“I’m thinking about the fish, Arnold, what about the fish? Did God name the fish? He brought before Adam all the beasts of the field and all the fowl of the air. To name them. But what about the fish? Who named the fish? Names are important. Words are important. Keep your mouth clean. A vessel for the holy. Death and life are in the power of the tongue. Next time I wash your mouth out with soap.”
Arnold laughed. “How are you going to do that?”
“Don’t give me any of your lip, you Texas ignorante. You want your knee to get better? You want an inside contact or not?”
“Can you get me better by Christmas?”
“Sha! Kina hora! You mean Chanukuh?”
“What’s Chanukah?”
“For this, I raised your mama? Not Christmas. January. Second week in January.”
“You promise?”
“Would I lie?”
“No.”
“You promise you’ll keep your mouth clean?”
“Yes.”
“OK. End of the second week of January, you get up off your little goyish tush . . .”
“Grandpa, I’m six foot one. Two meters.”
“Big, little, it’s still a tush. You start to work out. Slow. Understand? Slow. You’ll be full speed ahead by April. I’ll put my boys on it.”
“What boys?”
“Leave it to me, you little pisher. Say hello to the folks.”
And the buzzing clicked off. Just like that. The tingling and buzzing stopped.
“Grandpa? Are you there?”
No answer.
Eleven
Arnold Hitler became the language maniac of his school, constantly correcting and criticizing, but with such wit and humble charm that he got away with murder. His teachers loved him, even those who showed up as defendants in his underground language sheet, The Last Word. Much of the school was on his staff: students and staff slipped notes-on-the-overheard through the vents in his locker, some of which made it into his “Language Alert” column.
“Arnold, I hear they’re thinking of calling the library the ‘Learning Resources Center,’” wrote a faculty member. “What do you think of that?” He responded with a Mencken-like diatribe in the next issue.
Arnold Hitler, a lowly junior, had become the local language repository, and Mansfield High by and large embraced his efforts. By and large—with the exception of at least one person, let’s call him Claggart, who also slipped notes into his locker: “Hey, asshole, wanna meet me behind the school after practice today? I got some hot idioms for you to shove. Come alone.”
In November 1966, Arnold Hitler found a missive in his locker too intimate to publish. It was a quote from someone named James Thurber about America needing a “psychosemanticist” to treat “the havoc wrought by verbal artillery on the fortress of reason,” our current language being a tongue “full of sound and fury, dignifying nothing.” Who was this guy Thurber? he wondered. Under the typed text was a note beautifully handwritten in italic script: “His seals barketh up our tree. Love, your Billie Jo.”
“Your”