15

Dave Brick was doomed to carry the obscene name Skeleton Ridpath had given him, but Del Nightingale's was altered for the worse during football practice on the Friday evening of the first week of October. White Del and Morris Fielding and Bob Sherman and I sat on the bench with several others - freshmen and sophomores - our JV team had lost our first game the previous week. Chip Hogan had made our only touchdown. The final score had been 21-7, and Mr. Whipple and Mr. Ridpath had spent the four practices since the game frenziedly pushing us through exercises and play patterns. Sherman and I hated football, and already were looking forward to our junior year, when we could quit it for soccer; Morris Fielding had little aptitude for it, but suffered it gamely and performed as second-string center with a dogged persistence Ridpath admired; Del, who weighed little more than ninety pounds, was entirely hopeless. In the padded uniform which made the rest of us look swollen, Del resembled a mosquito weighted down with sandbags. All of the exercising tired him, and after we had run through tires and done fifty squat-jumps, Del could scarcely make his legs move through the rest of the practice.

After the squat-jumps, Ridpath lined us up before the tackling dummy. This was a heavy metal frame like a sledge on runners, with the front poles padded to the size of punching bags. We were in two long lines, and in pairs rushed at the padding and tried to move the dummy. Chip Hogan and three or four other boys could make it turn in a circle by themselves. Morris Fielding and I jolted it back a foot or two. When Tom Flanagan and Del hit it, Tom's side moved abruptly and Del's not at all. Both boys fell in the dust.

'Straighten it out and do it over,' shouted Mr. Ridpath. 'Push it back - we need blocking in the line.'

Flanagan and Nightingale pulled the cumbersome dummy back where it had been. They rushed the step and a half forward and grunted into the padding. Again Tom's charge pushed it in a jerky sideswiped movement and Del collapsed.

'What the hell are you, Florence Nightingale?' Ridpath screamed.

Florence. That absurdly Victorian name: Ridpath laughed at his own invention, and all of us laughed too: Del had been christened. At that moment Whipple appeared, cherubic and red-faced in his satiny coaching jacket, and Mr. Ridpath ran across to the field where the varsity team was just now beginning to do calisthenics; but the change of coaches had come too late for Del.

'Stand on my shoulders, Florence - I'll move it for you,' shouted a muscular, amiable boy named Pete Bayliss. And that sealed the name for Del.

For the rest of the hour we desultorily ran through plays.

We shared a locker room with the older boys, and after practice, when the pads and sweatshirts had been put away and we had just returned from the showers, the varsity boys came noisily into that sweat-smelling, echoing place. Skeleton Ridpath was among them, covered in dirt and with a bruise on his left cheek - he played only because his father made him, and in the last quarter of the varsity game which had followed ours, he had committed two fouls.

The seniors and juniors began throwing their helmets into their lockers, shouting back and forth. Skeleton Ridpath undressed more slowly than the others, and was just untying his pads when most of the other varsity players were already in the shower across the hall. I saw him looking across the room at us, smiling to himself. When he had stripped down to his jockstrap, he stood up, stepped across the bench, and walked halfway over to us… 'I guess this is a c-d school now,' he said, his hands on the bones of his hips.

'He looks like a graveyard,' Sherman whispered in my ear. Ridpath glanced at us, irritated that he had missed Sherman's comment, but too inflamed by his hostility to be distracted.

'We take girls now, I guess,' he said, staring at Del Nightingale. Del had tucked his chin down and was wriggling into his trousers.

'Hey, Florence. Do you know what happens to girls when they're caught in locker rooms? Huh?'

'Shut up,' Tom Flanagan said.

Ridpath raised a hand as if to slap Flanagan - he was at least seven feet away. 'You little creep. I'm talking to your date. Is that what you are, Florence? His date?' He stepped forward: he was almost half again as tall as Del, and he looked like an elongated bony white worm. He also looked crazy, caught up in some spiraling private hatred: it was obvious that his remarks were not just casual school insults, and the dozen of us left in the room froze, really unable to imagine what he might force himself to do. For a second he seemed a demented, furious giant.

His bruised face twisted, and he said, 'Why don't you suck - '

Tom Flanagan catapulted himself off the bench and rushed toward him.

Skeleton put out a startled fist and jabbed Tom in the chest. Then saliva flew from his mouth, his face worked in fury and bafflement, and he knocked Tom backward into our bench.

Bryce Beaver, one of two juniors who would later be expelled for smoking, came in from the shower naked, with a green school towel around his neck. 'Hey, Skeleton, what the shit are you doing?' he asked, amazed. 'Your old man'll be here in a second.'

'I hate these little farts,' Skeleton said, his bruised dirty face still a mask of loathing, and turned away. From the back he looked skinned and fragile.

The outside door opened and clanked shut. Mr. Whippie's voice carried to us, saying, '… work on all the Y plays, get Hogan to find those receivers… ' Bryce Beaver shook his head and began toweling his legs.

Mr. Ridpath and Mr. Whipple came into the locker room, carrying with them a scent of fresh air, which lingered only a moment. I saw Mr. Ridpath struggle to keep his smile as he glanced at his son.