Lost In Summerland by Barrett Swanson

Author:Barrett Swanson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640094192
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2021-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

CALLING AUDIBLES

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

—LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

On the afternoon of September 11th, 2001, I was at football practice. Unlike Americans who lived in cities and thus feared their own buildings might be attacked, residents of Brookfield, the suburb of Milwaukee where I grew up, harbored no such immediate concerns. While folks in New York hunkered down with loved ones or attended mass vigils, my teammates and I were suiting up. Our locker room was a chamber of institutional gray, rife with damp tile and cold metal benches, muggy with odors that only teenaged boys can manufacture. I’m sure there was some talk of what happened, but all I remember is the weird reverential silence, which was disturbed only by the susurrus of practice jerseys getting pulled over shoulder pads and the blunt staccato of cleats on the hallway tile as we trotted out of school, toward the practice fields.

Our coaches probably had some elaborate pedagogical justification for their decision to hold practice, one that had little to do with preparing for Friday’s game against West Allis (a team with a scrawny offensive line and an anemic defense) and more to do with distracting us from the nonstop montage of blazing skyscrapers and people jumping to their deaths that we all watched on classroom TVs that morning.

Our varsity coach was an old leathery man with a newscaster’s coiffure of dime-colored hair. As he patrolled the practice field and surveyed our efforts, his default expression was that of someone who has just eaten a gas station hot dog and now regrets it. Suffice it to say that he took absolutely zero in the way of shit. Unlike the passel of assistant coaches who tried to buddy up with us by shit-shooting and cracking-wise, Coach never ingratiated himself with his players, preferring instead to hang back and win our respect with his frosty disposition. But halfway through drills that day, Coach tweeted his whistle and sent us for a water break, which was the only time during practice when we were allowed to remove our helmets and take a knee. Such was a jarring moment. For two hours, you regarded your teammates through bulky gladiatorial masks, which gave their appearances a dark predacious aspect, but during water breaks, the helmets would come off and out came these doughy innocent faces—an album of big kind eyes, zit-greased miens, cheeks that sprouted sporadic facial hair. It was like you all of a sudden remembered that these guys had moms at home who kissed them goodnight and laundered their underwear.

I remember kneeling there and swilling water in the end zone—the ground torn up and cratered from our cleats—when Coach corralled all of his assistants over to the goal post, saying “Com’ere, boys.”

Wearing ballcaps and beer guts, the coaches tottered over, their brows furrowed with curiosity. Reluctantly, they congregated near him, like disciples around a lesser prophet. He pointed up at the limpid blue sky. “Boys, there’s not a single plane in that sky tonight.

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