King of the Mild Frontier by Chris Crutcher

Author:Chris Crutcher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2003-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

My further actions in response to all that nearly got me thrown out of school and put off my chances of getting close to something soft and warm until after high-school graduation.

If the really popular girls couldn’t see what a nice guy they were getting in me, or if they, in fact, didn’t want a nice guy, which a number of astonishingly socially conscious pump jockeys who worked at my dad’s service station were quick to tell me, maybe they liked being treated rough. At least that is the thinking that led me to place probably the most magnificent scab cultivated to that date in our hemisphere on Bonnie Heavrin’s desk.

It was early spring of my sophomore year, only weeks after I had driven with a few select friends to the McCall Bowling Alley on the night of the Sadie Hawkins dance. (The selection of those friends was done by the girls of Cascade, Idaho, not asking them to the dance.) At any rate, basketball season was finished and preseason workouts for track had begun. Cascade is situated in a high mountain valley nearly a mile above sea level, so in a normal year there are still snowbanks piled higher than your little sister well into the spring, and the high-school track remains covered in white. Early track practices are held on the soggy, potholed back roads of town. That year Ron Nakatani, our high jumper, practiced his form wearing a rubber suit, bar-rolling into a snowbank.

At the end of the regular workout, Buzzy Estell and I were practicing baton exchanges for the second-string 400-yard relay. Okay, the third-string 400-yard relay. In those days the runner who was to receive the baton would extend his left arm straight to his side, fingers curled and touching the outer thigh. The runner passing the baton would slap it into the receiver’s cupped fingers; the receiver would clutch it and run like hell.

On our first attempt Buzzy tried to slap the baton into my hand, stepped in a pothole, and missed, firing it onto the road directly in front of me, and I stepped on the baton at the same moment he stepped on the back of my track shoe. My right elbow was the first part of my body to hit the ground, and a huge strawberry, close to two-and-a-half inches in diameter, blossomed like the corsage I would have bought for Paula Whitson had she asked me to the Sadie Hawkins dance.

A week and a half later, I carefully peeled the gauze bandage off to reveal the beginnings of what would turn into a truly remarkable clot. The dark red base was marbled much as I believe Mars would look if yellow rivers fanned out over its surface. It stood a good quarter-inch high, and if I could re-create the exact mix of body fluids, I would sell it to the Hair Club, because what had been, before the accident, fine light peach fuzz had been fertilized into a bouquet of thick dark hairs that looked like rebars protruding from a broken concrete wall.

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