End Zone by Don DeLillo Read Free Book Online Page A

roared for a second. I looked up and saw it finally, a fighter, sunlight at its wingtips, climbing, lost now in the middle of the clear day. Bobby tried to spit past his shoes but didn’t make it, hitting the left pants leg. Saliva hung there, glistening, full of exuberant bubbles. Bobby hummed a bit. I listened, trying to pick out a tune of some kind. Bobby was a strange sort of kid, lean but strong, a very sleepy violence radiating from his sparse body. He was famous for saying he would go through a brick wall for Coach Creed. Young athletes were always saying that sort of thing about their coaches. But Bobby became famous for it because he said pratically nothing else. He was simply a shy boy who had little to say. Even the brick-wall remark was reserved for close friends in situations that called for earnestness above all else. We had all heard about it though, how often he used it, and I tried to figure out exactly what it meant to him. Maybe he had heard others use it and thought it was a remark demandedby history, a way of affirming the meaning of one’s struggle. Maybe the words were commissioned, as it were, by language itself, by that compartment of language in which are kept all bits of diction designed to outlive the men who abuse them, all phrases that reduce speech to units of sound, lullabies processed through intricate systems. Or maybe the remark just satisfied Bobby’s need to be loyal to someone. Creed had done plenty to command respect but little or nothing to merit loyalty, a much more emotional quality. He kept to himself, using his assistants to temper and bend us, coming down from the tower only to correct a correction, living alone in a small room off the isometrics area — a landlocked Ahab who paced and raged, who was unfolding his life toward a single moment. Coach wanted our obedience and that was all. But Bobby had this loyalty to give, this eager violence of the heart, and he would smash his body to manifest it. Tradition, of course, supported his sense of what was right. The words were old and true, full of reassurance, comfort, consolation. Men followed such words to their death because other men before them had done the same, and perhaps it was easier to die than admit that words could lose their meaning. Bobby stopped humming now and tried to spit past his shoes again. The sun was directly overhead. Sunlight covered everything. I smelled casual sweat collecting under my arms and soon the soreness in my body began to ease just slightly. Two girls left the administration building and walked slowly across campus toward the women’s dormitory. It took about ten minutes and we watched them all the way.
    “Gash,” Bobby said.
    In time I let my head ease back on the top step and I closed my eyes. I was moving into the biblical phase of the afternoon, the peak of my new simplicity. A verity less thaneternal had little appeal. I prepared myself to think of night, desert, sorrowful forests, of the moon, the stars, the west wind, baptismal mist and the rich myrrh of harvested earth. Instead I thought of tits. I thought of flaming limbs, a moody whore’s mouth, hair the color of bourbon. Quietly I sweated, motionless on the steps. A girl in a cotton dress on a bed with brass posts. A ceiling fan rubbing the moist air. Scent of slick magazines. She’d be poorborn, the dumbest thing in Texas, a girl from a gulf town, movie-made, her voice an unlaundered drawl, fierce and coarse, fit for bad-tempered talking blues. I listened to Bobby hum. I had forgotten to add a new word to my vocabulary that day and I resolved to do it before nightfall. I tried to get back to the girl again. It was a different one this time, roundish, more than plump, almost monumental in her measureless dimensions. She removed her tessellated blue-green sweater. It was all happening in a Mexico City hotel. I heard Bobby stir. The girl became the hotel itself, an incredible cake of mosaic stone. I continued to perspire quietly.