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jerrygabriel.net Marauders Writers' Forum, fall 2000 and anthologized in Punch and Pie, Gorsky Press (2003) We traveled like gypsies to these little towns-places called Mudsock and Comersville and just plain Water. We set up tarps sometimes and cooked hot dogs on fires started inconspicuously in a corner of the parking lot, or back in some small wood where an unnamed brook ran. Because we knew the Marauders would likely be in the finals, we planned accordingly, stocked up on supplies, took catnaps in Terry Winston's conversion van, located the best diner in town. We'd have a trophy in the end; we knew that. And when we all rolled back into Falls late, Cooley's would buzz with reveling. There would be things broken, of course, maybe even some minor injuries, but who cared? Those things were part of life when you were really living it. We sat on all of those uncomfortable wooden bleachers for hours on end-days, sometimes-donning our maroon and gold sweaters and polo shirts. We knitted hats and gloves of those colors for our children and grandparents. We smoked under the empty skies in elementary school parking lots at half-time, when you could see all the way to the next galaxy and the cold made you giddy. And afterwards, we liked to have a quick celebratory swig before driving back to Cooley's where we would celebrate in earnest. Somebody always had a bottle of something or another under the car seat. We gave high fives, sometimes even embraced each other. These were not normal times. We drove recklessly, joyously through the hills and honked our horns to hamlets and empty gas stations, farms and darkness. That winter, we followed the Marauders with fervor, cheering them with an almost Roman bloodthirst, calling for annihilation. Only a few had been there in other seasons-in the days when the Marauders had worn hand-me-down uniforms and played below five hundred. Graham Wilson, the old vet, who sat in bibbed-overalls and chewed on a perpetual Swisher Sweet, he'd been one of them. He'd followed them for decades into every dinky one-horse town in southeast Ohio, every backwater gym where five opposing boys and a ref could be scrounged up. Late, after we'd returned from a victory, he'd tell stories about it at Cooley's, of less talented teams, of boys we knew-some now sitting with us-who as men would work for the county road crew, the tile plant, Odd Lots. In these tales, there were crooked referees, hostile crowds, buzzer beating jumpers, and always somehow heartbreak, which killed us, that heartbreak. It killed us. We loved to listen to Graham Wilson because even if we hadn't been there, they were our stories too. It was our heartbreak. One of those stories of heartbreak, our first, was in the making one cold February evening, right in the heart of winter, when darkness comes on too early. We made the drive after work and shuffled toward the school from our corps of minivans and Dodge Colts, the vinyl seats cracking under us from the cold. We slapped each other on the back, traded jocular insults. We smoked one last cigarette and then descended the stairs into this CCC-constructed building, ducking to miss the low asbestos-wrapped pipes. We came out on a long, dark hallway, and it seemed improbable that this was even a school; it seemed more a hospital or a factory's dank basement. But the high-pitched noise of new sneakers stopping on a polished floor drifted toward us from the far end of the hall. There were voices, too, a low murmur. When we turned a corner to find ourselves in the gymnasium, we all felt the excitement that we knew well by then, right down the spine, it went. It was a feeling we lived for. Great caged phosphorous bulbs lit the gym from above, and we saw immediately, in two neat lines beginning at half-court, our Marauders, in the middle of one of their elaborate warm-up drills. After watching dozens of times, it still wasn't clear what kind of magic they were using to move that quickly. At the other end of the court was a group of ragamuffin boys clad in unmatching jerseys. One of them wore a pair of work boots with no socks and had a head of hair in bad need of a brushing. We glanced at one another, suppressing laughs, though something here felt sad, too. So many of us had fallen into our lives in the months and years leading up to that time-an abysmal rut of receptionist by day and movie renter by night. It was monotony. We were beaten down, really, gaining weight in unproud ways. We lived off Tommy's Pizza and Yankee Burger, Milwaukee's Best, strawberry daiquiris if we were in a good mood. We were not the picture of good living, and we talked nostalgically and too often of the time we'd been to Virginia Beach. It was always, Remember that little restaurant we found down on that side street near the water? The Outrigger, was it? Pirate Jack's? And, the reply: My God did they have good jumbo shrimp. A confirming nod, a wistful look, a whispered Damn. To suggest going again seemed no less daunting than a manned mission to Mars. And the Marauders, in the heart of their youth and on the verge of life, with their shiny maroon and gold uniforms, their snappy warm-up drills, their hustle-they pulled us out of it; we all readily admitted that these boys had saved us. We were convinced that we would have followed them to the end of the earth. And their parents we treated as royalty. We were so thankful for them having brought these beautiful guardian angels into the world that we bought them hot pretzels and coffees. We made them macramé and quilts and gave them badges with their son's photos on them. We bought their gas and gave them the motel rooms with the river views when we were down on a long trip to West Virginia. At 25-0 that February, the Marauders were unstoppable. Certainly they'd had good years before. Walter Haskins, who was the press operator at the Daily Messenger, had made a scrapbook of their history for us-clippings he'd dug out of the paper's archives. He showed it around sometimes at games, in lulls in the play, or in someone's van on the road to an out-of-the-way tournament. The Daily Messenger had always followed the Marauders because their coach, Sam Paris, was the sports editor there and had written all twenty-five years of Marauder history himself. And we enjoyed looking at the photos of these boys who were now men, reading about the limits of their accomplishments, their failures. The more limited the past, we somehow reasoned, the more promising the future. We had become part of the Marauders early that season, on a whim. One day sitting around Cooley's, someone said we should go down to Winslow to see these boys play. There was some grousing, but we weren't doing anything to speak of, and so we piled in some cars and drove the hour to see them put a good beating on these Winslow boys. Afterwards, we drove all the way to Parkersburg to find an open bar where we could celebrate. Later, we even took to going to some of their practices at the old Central Furnace Elementary gym; we cheered them even there, during their drills. In retrospect, it is clear that our expectations might have been unfair, but to even speak of fairness is to miss the point. We needed them and they appeared, winners, riding a streak. No one doubted that we would walk into Akron in March and sweep the state tournament. There was talk of an AAU National Tournament berth, a trip to Atlanta. And so, when, that overcast February evening, we found ourselves in yet another insubstantial hamlet, this one somewhere in Grover County, trailing at the beginning of the second period by eleven points to a group of kids who looked more like peasants from some forgotten epoch than a basketball team, we panicked. Coach Sam Paris was a second-rate newspaperman; it was incontrovertible. But he had a way of sapping every ounce of potential out of eleven and twelve year-old boys. And this team's potential, we were given to understand, was unrivaled in anyone's memory. Their leader was a boy named C.R. Conner, who was actually thirteen and had to use a fake birth certificate, which we learned that Haskins had created himself in the Messenger's pressroom. Already in sixth grade, though, Conner had been mentioned in a small piece in Street and Smith as a promising young college prospect, and there had been on occasion coaches from far-off cities to the north snooping around Marauder games, trying to get a look. When he scored, which, most nights, he did with ease, we whooped and hollered and carried on. We couldn't help but express our joy in wild gyrations and raised fists. Conner moved so gracefully, slicing through opposing defenses for scores: reverse lay-ups, turnaround jumpers. His instincts were those of someone twice his age and the other boys looked to him for leadership and inspiration, and he never let them down. Except that night, in this town-there was some argument about whether it was called Riverton or Woodville-he faltered. He looked tired, like he hadn't slept, and we-shamefully; there are no excuses to be offered now-we suggested a number of unjust possibilities for this, among them drugs, a pregnant girlfriend, more failed classes. We were at the height of our powers then. People at work or at the mall in Sugarton seemed to notice the new confidence, and sometimes even said as much. We felt invincible. We enjoyed bowling a few games occasionally and we all had personal bests that year. But we grew boisterous and arrogant, ridiculing folks on other lanes, calling back to the bar to have our beers brought to us. We talked loudly and wore loud clothes, funny hats. And we drank enormous amounts, enormous, thinking perhaps that if we pretended to be nineteen again, some physical change might in fact occur. It did not. And being asked by the management to not return was not enough to even dent our mania. With the Marauders down, though, we felt the wind knocked from us. It wasn't something we had prepared for. This game was meant to be a mere warm-up for an upcoming tournament in Kentucky. We'd been using our energy reading Fodor's, booking rooms in Huntington, planning side trips to some local caverns and Hillbilly Hot Dogs. This-this-was a practice, really. No more. Neither Riverton nor Woodville was even on any of our maps. At first, we cheered louder. We tongue-lashed the referees. But these boys in their ancient Converse-again, there is dispute about what they were called, whether the Rockets, or the Green Dragons; someone thought the Flying Tigers-they had come to play. The scene was lurid, a horrible dream, the elementary cafeteria/gym, its floor sticky from spilled Jell-O or whatever, its walls covered in fading construction paper Valentine hearts and cupids. It didn't make any sense, yet these ragamuffin boys were almost effortlessly crushing the Marauders. With Coach Paris, whose play-calling we also began to question, we grew apoplectic. We all felt helpless, as if we were citizens of Carthage, waiting for Hannibal to make the world safe again. Paris called time-outs and we could hear him berating the boys, the scuff of chalk on chalkboard, the seething breath forced between his teeth. The quiet in between his barks was deafening. He looked around the huddle and his gaze fell on Conner, who looked back at him with bewilderment in his eyes. The rest gasped for air, like men emerged from the depths. Mrs. Hollins announced to the rest of us that she could not watch this. She went to her car where, she later admitted, she found a distant university's classical radio station to which she could ride out the loss. She said she thought about the garden she would plant that spring, creating vast mental lists of all that she would put in it, the variations of potatoes and beans and squash, and all the ways she would care for those things. Inside, we ate candy bars and drank flat soda and some of us prayed, but the lead grew inordinately. Our boys were hesitant. They seemed such little children just then. Paris' assistant, Michael Watson, a sixth grade science teacher at Hilltop Elementary, talked to Paris, entreated him. He would observe the court and then scribble maniacally on the chalkboard and show it to Paris, but Paris would look away; inconsolable. Paris himself had been the sixth-man on Falls High's only championship team of the last thirty years, and a few remembered him as the unskilled kid who came in to make life miserable for an opposing guard. He was prone to starting fights, one man remembered, though some of the other old-timers believed that the coach of that time had put him up to many of those fights, had sicced him on an opposing star in order to get them both ejected. Paris, though, was no stranger to defeat, just as he was no stranger to victory. Though many of us had looked judgmentally upon his poor writing for years, we had all gained a great deal of respect for him as a coach, and when Carla Randolph began to assert that this was his fault-and many of us tried on that idea, of course-one of the true followers-it may have been Graham Wilson himself, who had fought off the Germans one yard at a time at the Bulge, turned to a group of us and said, "Just look at y'all. Y'all make me ashamed to be a Marauder." And then we were all ashamed. At half-time with the Marauders down by 24, some of us went to look for a bar in the little village-just a little shot in the arm to bolster ourselves, we said. On our way out, we passed the cafeteria kitchen that the Marauders were using as a locker room. The door was ajar and we could see that Paris was in the face of C.R. Conner, spit spraying from his mouth as he tore into him. The other boys sat impassively beyond them, exchanging water bottles, some of them sat with their hands splayed on their bowed heads like young men who had just lost wives in a natural disaster. *** Dim and dusty neon signs offered Bud and Miller Lite through the single, television-sized window outside the Racoon Creek Tavern. It was bitter cold, well below zero, and we shuffled through the interminable flurries and the sand parking lot frozen solid. There were four trucks parked in the lot with provocative bumper stickers. It was not Cooley's, but we needed direly to regroup. Inside, the locals leered at us from their barstools. A few of them played pinball on dirty machines that looked old enough to have been the first ones the area had ever seen. As we sipped at our drinks, Turner Olson suggested that perhaps the game was fixed. Impossible, we said. We speculated on such theories as the full moon and the re-emergence of Paris' ex-wife in Falls the week prior. But we couldn't get our finger on the situation. None of it seemed to add up. Soon, we ordered a second round. Someone said that we should be getting back, but none us made a move toward the door. Soon, Terry Winston was telling stories about his days as a Marauder, fifteen or twenty years back. "Paris was tough," he was saying. "A mean streak a mile long." His eyes lit up as he tried to retrieve that past so far behind him. He talked of a time when his knees were good and of a game he once scored 21 points in. We listened like second graders at story hour. He told tale after tale, about this or that boy-we knew all of them-about Paris. One anecdote involved Paris, a boy named Chuck Wolf, and a full water bottle Paris had thrown across a gymnasium at the boy. "It flew," Winston said, "right over his head and through one of the stain glass windows of this Catholic school's gym over in Chillicothe." We all laughed at the image of Paris throwing a bottle at this boy, and then there was a quiet when our laughs trailed off. Terry Winston shook his head. "He'd scream bloody murder at us," he said. "Every minute of every game. He threatened us and insulted our manhood." He looked up to all of us sitting there at the table. "We never won a game," he admitted. "We did not win one game. Not ever." Mindy Hagan put her arm around him. He lowered his head and raised it again. "But he would come into the locker room afterwards and he would tell us how proud he was of us, and that he thanked God for us." Winston was on the verge of tears when Tad Phillips thought to order a bratwurst from the rotisserie from behind the bar, and the moment was averted. We all remembered then that we hadn't eaten and we all ordered bratwursts and more beers and there was a general clatter as these things were delivered to us and as we paid for them. Every one of us must have had a moment of realization around then when it was clear what sort of people we were. We were not what any of us wanted to be, and after a while it sunk in that we could not go back to that gym and show our faces there. This caused us to drink more, and hours later, when there was not a soul left in this tiny bend in the road save its official residents and three carloads of lost Fallians, we stumbled to our cars and drove off into the cold of a winter night, our futures once again dried up. We passed the aging elementary school on our way out of town. It was lit by one dim yellow security bulb burning at a lonesome corner, the void of its parking lot obliquely illuminated. We were silent as we slipped back into the forests of that country, the winding roads, the nothing that that place sometimes is. We checked our Rand McNally for the way home, and after several wrong turns and desolate stretches of emptiness, we made our way back into Moraine County and then into Falls proper. It was two in the morning then, and we drove past Cooley's, which was dark and closed, and we were all thankful not to face the choice of going in. We went home to our various residences, to the quiet of the lives we hoped we'd escaped. Those lives, of course, were still there waiting for us, just as we'd left them months before, and we all felt them slip back toward us that night as we lay awake and waited for dawn. *** When dawn finally did come, it was barely recognizable, overcast and filled with more flurries and cold and wind. When the paper came out that afternoon and confirmed the rumor that had been circulating around town all morning-that the Marauders had won the night previous in a come-from-behind victory-many of us were at Cooley's, hiding in coves in the back, eating fish sandwiches. We were wordless. A few tried to dig up the old enthusiasm, saying that the folks down in Moorehead, Kentucky better get ready, that the Marauders were going to storm the place. But no one was convinced, and we sat there quietly in long stretches. And then a curious thing happened: Graham Wilson walked in with a small entourage behind him, men and women we'd known our whole lives, but who just then seemed unrecognizable, as foreign as a carload of Ukranians walking into that bar. Wilson had an artificial leg-the old heavy kind made of some wood-and he walked with a wiry old cherry cane that seemed such a perfect symbol of his own dogged perseverance. He left his group and came over to ours. Wilson was decades older than us-many decades, in some cases-and we all knew he understood things that we were very far from understanding. He approached our table and looked at us for a long minute without saying anything. He breathed heavily and pulled the unlit cigar from his mouth. We waited, preparing to take on the truth of his words. What we expected didn't come. He shook his head, but not in a way that disgraced. He said, "I reckon them boys we played last night took it hard. I near felt bad for em." We waited. He looked around the room like there might be a cue out there in the smoky place for what to say to us. He might have said, "You people are pathetic," and he would have been right. But he said no such thing. What he said was so much harder to take. He said, "We'll need you all down in Ken-tuck next week. We'll need ever last one of youns." And then he limped over to the bar and ordered a brandy and a Genesee, like he always did. We sat there, rattled. Nobody spoke for the longest time. There was just the noise of glasses being raised to mouths, of dried fish being chewed. The wind outside howled against the ancient building, and we sat on the edge of our seats, all seemingly waiting for something inside to snap. Lifetimes of experience told us to go one way, while every thing else said to go the other. We sat without words and fought in ourselves and finally we slid from our seats and paid our tabs and said quiet good-byes and then every one of us walked through the oak door that led to the world outside. We pulled our collars up and put on our mittens and hats, and we bolstered ourselves against that winter afternoon, and then we walked right into it, some of us without sound, some of us mumbling to ourselves, and a few of us with clenched fists and our voices crying out-part request, part demand-to the town of Falls or the heavens or some unnamable thing inside. Indecipherable, guttural noises, grunts of the inarticulate, the sound of that part of us that already knew how we would answer Graham Wilson's demand.