Where You Once Belonged(6)

Because he was bigger now. He was taller and stronger—taller and stronger than anybody else in school. By the time we graduated in the spring of 1960 he was six feet four and weighed two hundred and forty pounds. But he wasn’t fat then. He was still heavily muscled, broad-shouldered and thick-boned. So at least physically he was more than just that one year ahead of us. He was like a full-grown man among mere children, a colossus among pigmies. He had already begun to shave the bristle on his chin in the eighth grade—at a time when the rest of us hadn’t even begun to contemplate peach fuzz yet—and in high school he had a thick mat of black hair on his chest. It stuck out through his white tee shirts like little black pins. He was a kind of high-school boy’s high-school boy: the supreme example of what was possible in the absolute.

The most obvious evidence of this, though—to us and to all of Holt County—was the fact that he was an excellent athlete. He started every high-school football game for four years. He played fullback and linebacker and almost single-handedly made us worth a damn. The rest of us weren’t much good. I wasn’t. (I played end. I was skinny, slow-footed, nearsighted, ignorant of technique and reluctant to cross the middle; I might manage to catch a pass if nobody was breathing down my neck, but only if the ball hit me square in the hairless chest.) But Jack was. Jack was something. He was a superb athlete. He was the hotshot that made it all go. When we were juniors he won the northeast conference for us. And when we were seniors he took us to the state championship, through the conference and then the playoffs and finally to the last game—which in the end we managed to lose anyway. We were playing a team from the Western Slope and they had us at a disadvantage: they were able to field more than one real player.

But in high school our teachers had that at least as leverage. Like the rest of us, he was required by state rules to pass at least three-fourths of his classes if he expected to play football. And Jack managed that in his own fashion too. He feigned attentiveness during math and history and English classes—that is, he didn’t actually go to sleep—and when he was called on to recite he rose up and made jokes. Then there were shouts of laughter from the boys in the back rows and tittering among the girls up front. In short time our teachers learned not to call on him at all.

Still he had to take tests and turn in papers as we all did. And that’s where Wanda Jo Evans came in.

Wanda Jo Evans loved him. I believe, if such a thing is possible, that she even loved him more than he did himself. She adored him, idolized him, worshiped him, hung on him. All of that and no exaggeration either. She wasn’t even the only one; she was merely the most obvious and conspicuous about it. Well, she was a nice girl, really pretty and creamy, and still a little plump then too in a high-school-girlish sort of way, a little given to baby fat yet, with strawberry blonde hair and soft gray eyes the color of clouds. She had full breasts too and round white arms. So if she was in love with Jack—and she emphatically was—the rest of us were more than a little in love with her and would gladly have sacrificed that proverbial left appendage of ours to have changed places with him. But Wanda Jo didn’t even notice us. She didn’t see us. We were mere background and bit-players to her. Or just smoke maybe. For it was Jack alone that she loved.

So of course she helped him. She made neat little precise crib sheets for him and she learned to compose his term papers in his own sprawling and childish hand, receiving as reward for this constant adoration and these daily efforts at school the exclusive right to ride beside him, to hang on his arm in the middle of the front seat of his old Ford pickup while he raced and helled up and down Main Street on Friday and Saturday nights with the gear-shift stuck up between her creamy white knees.

We envied them all of that then. Such things matter in high school. They seem primary at the time, essential. At least they seemed that way to us who were Jack’s classmates.

But it was on the football field that he made his real mark during those years. In public, I mean. For, as I have said already, he was a hell of a football player: peerless and incredible and brutal. The whole town thought so. Indeed there are men in Holt today who will still tell you, even taking into account what he did later, that Jack Burdette was the best fullback and linebacker that Holt County ever produced. And no doubt they are right. The coaches from all the area colleges and universities thought so too; they began to pay attention to him when he was still only a sophomore.

Consequently it was about then that his father, old John Senior, began to pay attention to him as well. The old man came to all of the games and when something happened on the field you could hear him yelling obscenely from the stands. Afterward he came down into the locker room and stood around between the benches, smelling of beer and whiskey and slapping us on the shoulder while we got out of our pads. He made drunken little speeches to us. “By god,” he’d say. “Goddamn it, you boys, you sure …” And so on. His face would be inflamed with the drama of it all, with his own high emotion and the pregame mix of liquor, and then the spit would begin to fly. Meanwhile we would be waiting for him to finish, or at least to get out of the way, so we could take a shower. But he was proud of all the boys, though he was proudest, of course, of Jack. There was a lot to be proud of. In the fall during those years the old man made money by betting on all of the high-school football games with the men from other towns.

Then in the winter of 1959, about a month after we had played our last game, the old man died. That is, he was killed. By a freight train in the middle of town. Later the railroad company would put up crossing guards and flashing lights, but there were neither of these then.