"You came here."

"Hey, Robinson," Kimbrough said.

"I'm here because I'm a chronic ballbreaker. First, it's not likely any other school would have me. Second, I wanted to disappear."

"But you're here," he said. "We're all here."

"I can't argue with that. How's your milk? Jessup says the milk is putrid."

"Which one is he?"

"Hey, Robinson," Moody Kimbrough said. "We don't wear sunglasses indoors around here. We don't do that- hear?"

"Mind your own business," I said.

I watched him coming toward our table. I thought briefly about the fact that he outweighed me by forty pounds or so. Then I got up and hit him in the stomach. He made a noise, an abrupt burp, and hit me in roughly the same spot. I sat down and tried to breathe. When I raised my head finally, Taft was just finishing his dessert.

6

We stood in a circle in the enormous gray morning, all the receivers and offensive backs, helmets in hands. Thunder moved down from the northeast. Creed, in a transparent raincoat, was already up in the tower. At the center of the circle was Tom Cook Clark, an assistant coach, an expert on quarterbacking, known as a scholarly man because he smoked a pipe and did not use profanity.

"What we want to do is establish a planning procedures approach whereby we neutralize the defense. We'll be employing a lot of playaction and some passrun options off the sweep. We'll be using a minimum number of sprintouts because the passing philosophy here is based on the pocket concept and we don't want to inflate the injury potential which is what you do if your quarterback strays from the pocket and if he can't run real well, which most don't. We use the aerial game here to implement the ground game whereby we force their defense to respect the run which is what they won't do if they can anticipate pass and read pass and if our frequency, say on second and long, indicates pass. So that's what we'll try to come up with, depending on the situation and the contingency plan and how they react to the running game. I should insert at this point that if they send their linebackers, you've been trained and briefed and you know how to counter this. You've got your screen, your flare, your quick slantin. You've been drilled and drilled on this in the blitz drills. It all depends on what eventuates. It's just eleven men doing their job. That's all it is."

Oscar Veech moved into the circle."I want you to bust ass out there today," he said. "Guards and tackles, I want you to come off that ball real quick and pop, pop, hit those people, move those people out, pop them, put some hurt on them, drive them back till they look like sick little puppy dogs squatting down to crap."

"The guards and tackles are over in that other group," I said.

"Right, right, right. Now go out there and execute. Move that ball. Hit somebody. Hit somebody. Hit somebody."

Garland Hobbs handed off to me on a quick trap and two people hit me. There was a big pileup and I felt a fair number of knees and elbows and then somebody's hand was inside my facemask trying to come away with flesh. I realized Mr. Kimbrough had issued directives. On the next play I was passblocking for Hobbs and they sent everybody including the free safety. I went after the middle linebacker, Dennis Smee, helmet to groin, and then fell on top of him with a forearm leading the way.

Whistles were blowing and the coaches edged in a bit closer. Vern Feck took off his baseball cap and put his pink face right into the pileup, little sparks of saliva jumping out of his whistle as he blew it right under my nose. Creed came down from the tower.

7

Of all the aspects of exile, silence pleased me least. Other tilings were not so displeasing. Exile compensates the banished by offering certain opportunities. Each day, for example, I spent some time in meditation. This never failed to be a lovely interlude, for there was nothing to meditate on. Each day I added a new word to my vocabulary, wrote a letter to someone I loved, and memorized the name of one more president of the United States and the years of his term in office. Simplicity, repetition, solitude, starkness, discipline upon discipline. There were profits here, things that could be used to make me stronger; the small fanatical monk who clung to my liver would thrive on such ascetic scraps. And then there was geography. We were in the middle of the middle of nowhere, that terrain so flat and bare, suggestive of the end of recorded time, a splendid sense of remoteness firing my soul. It was easy to feel that back up there, where men spoke the name civilization in wistful tones, I was wanted for some terrible crime.

Exile in a real place, a place of few bodies and many stones, is just an extension (a packaging) of the other exile, the state of being separated from whatever is left of the center of one's own history. I found comfort in west Texas. There was even pleasure in the daily punishment on the field. I felt that I was better for it, reduced in complexity, a warrior.

But the silence was difficult. It hung over the land and drifted across the long plains. It was out there with the soft black insects beyond the last line of buildings, beyond the prefabs and the Quonset hut and the ROTC barracks. Day after day my eyes scanned in all directions a stunned earth, unchangingly dull, a land silenced by its own beginnings in the roaring heat, born dead, flat stones burying the memory. I felt threatened by the silence. In my room at home, during my retreats from destructive episodes of one land or another, I had never even noticed the quiet. Perhaps silence is dispersed by familiar things; their antiquity is heard. All I had feared then was that my mother, bringing my lunch upstairs, would forget to comment on the weather. (These reports were indispensable to my progress.) But now, in the vast burning west, the silences were menacing. I decided not to eat meat for a few weeks.

One day in early September we started playing a game called Bang You're Dead. It's an extremely simpleminded game. Almost every child has played it in one form or another. Your hand assumes the shape of a gun and you fire at anyone who passes. You try to reproduce, in your own way, the sound of a gun being fired. Or you simply shout these words: Bang, you're dead. The other person clutches a vital area of his body and then falls, simulating death. (Never mere injury; always death.) Nobody knew who had started the game or exactly when it had started. You had to fall if you were shot. The game depended on this.

It went on for six or seven days. At first, naturally enough, I thought it was all very silly, even for a bunch of bored and lonely athletes. Then I began to change my mind. Suddenly, beneath its bluntness, the game seemed compellingly intricate. It possessed gradations, dark joys, a resonance echoing from the most perplexing of dreams. I began to kill selectively. When killed, I fell to the floor or earth with great deliberation, with sincerity. I varied my falls, searching for the rhythm of something imperishable, a classic death.

We did not abuse the powers inherent in the game. The only massacre took place during the game's first or second day when things were still shapeless, the potential unrealized. It started on the second floor of the dormitory just before lightsout and worked along the floor and down one flight, everyone shooting each other, men in thenunderwear rolling down the stairs, huge nude brutes draped over the banisters. The pleasure throughout was empty. I guess we realized together that the game was better than this. So we cooled things off and devised unwritten limits.

I shot Terry Madden at sunset from a distance of forty yards as he appeared over the crest of a small hill and came toward me. He held his stomach and fell, in slow motion, and then rolled down the grassy slope, tumbling, rolling slowly as possible, closer, slower, ever nearer, tumbling down to die at my feet with the pale setting of the sun.