“Frost heavies are hard to see at night,” Jack told Lambrecht. “They’re so low to the ground that the headlights don’t reflect in their eyes, and they’re the color of the road.”
“But what are they?” Lambrecht asked.
Those bus rides were pure improv! “Look, just don’t go out of your dorm at night, Lambrecht—not at this time of year. Frost heavies are nocturnal.”
“But what do frost heavies do?” Lambrecht asked. He was getting agitated, in the peculiar way that lightweights express their agitation—his voice was pretty shrill under normal circumstances. That must have been what prompted Mike Heller, the team’s heavyweight, to put an end to Jack’s game. Heller was a humorless soul. He was a grumpy guy with too much baby fat to be a legitimate heavyweight; he never won a match, at least not one Jack saw.
“For Christ’s sake, Lambrecht, can’t you read?” Heller asked. “The sign says frost heaves, not frost heavies. You know heaves, like heaves in the road? Fucking potholes, you moron!”
“That’s one and a half points against you, Mike—correction, make that two,” Coach Clum said. (He was never really asleep.) “A half-point for Christ, a half-point for fucking, and one full point for moron, which you truly are, Lambrecht—but moron is a derogatory word, if I ever heard one.”
“Damn!” Heller said.
“Make that two and a half,” Coach Clum said.
“So frost heaves are just bumps in the road?” Lambrecht asked.
“I’m surprised you don’t have frost in Arizona,” Jack said.
“In parts of Arizona, we do,” Lambrecht replied. “We just don’t have the road signs—or the heaves, I guess.”
“Jesus, Lambrecht!” Heller cried.
“That’s three, Heller,” Coach Clum said. “You’re not having a very good road trip.”
“When does Heller ever have a good road trip?” Jack asked. He had no points against him for the month. He knew he could afford one.
To Jack’s surprise, Coach Clum said: “That’s two against you, Burns. It is derogatory of you to call our attention to Heller’s losing record, but it’s also dismissive of Lambrecht’s intelligence to encourage him to imagine that frost heavies exist, that they have eyes and are low to the ground—”
“—and they’re the color of the fucking road!” Lambrecht interrupted him.
“That’s a half-point against you, Lambrecht,” Coach Clum said.
They were somewhere in Rhode Island, or maybe it was Massachusetts. They were a long way from Maine, Jack knew. How he loved those nights! He turned his flashlight back on and redirected his thoughts to the task of memorizing “Dover Beach”—not a short poem, and one with an overlong first stanza.
“ ‘The sea is calm tonight,’ ” Jack read aloud, thinking it magnanimous of him to change the subject.
“Save it for Drama Night, Burns,” Coach Clum said. “Just memorize it to yourself, if you don’t mind.”
He wasn’t a bad guy, Coach Clum, but he never accepted what he presumed was the vanity of Jack having his cauliflower ears drained. When Mike Heller called Jack a “sissy” for not wanting to go through the rest of his life with cauliflower ears, Coach Clum not only awarded a point against Heller for sissy, which was clearly derogatory—the coach made Heller get his next cauliflower ear drained. “Does it hurt, Mike?” Coach Clum asked the heavyweight, standing over him while the fluid from the damaged ear was being extracted in the training room.
“Yeah,” Heller answered. “It hurts.”
“Well, then, the right word for Burns wouldn’t be sissy, would it?” the coach asked. “Vain, maybe,” Coach Clum said, “but not sissy.”
“Okay, Burns is vain, then,” Heller said, wincing.
“Right you are, Mike,” Coach Clum said. “But vain is a point against you, too.”
One night on the team bus, when Coach Clum and Jack were the only ones awake, Jack had a somewhat philosophical conversation with him. “I want to be an actor,” he told his coach. “I wouldn’t say it was vain for an actor not to want cauliflower ears. I would say it was practical.”
“Hmm,” Coach Clum said. Maybe he wasn’t really awake, Jack thought. But Coach Clum was just thinking it over. “Let me put it to you this way, Jack,” he said. “If it turns out that you’re a movie star, I’ll tell everyone that you were one of the most practical wrestlers I ever had the privilege to coach.”
“I see,” Jack said. “And if I don’t make it as an actor—”
“Well, making it is the point, isn’t it, Jack? If you don’t turn out to be a movie star, I’ll tell everyone that I never coached a wrestler as vain about his ears as Jack Burns.”
“I’ll bet you it turns out being a practical decision,” Jack told him.
“What’s that, Jack?”
“I’ll bet you a whole dollar that I make it as an actor,” the boy said.
“Since we’re the only ones awake,” Coach Clum whispered, “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, Jack.” It was the school philosophy again. As Mr. Ramsey (who had read the handbook more carefully than Jack) could have told him, there was no gambling at Redding. Jack shut his eyes and prayed for sleep, but Coach Clum went on whispering in the dark bus. “Memorize this, Jack,” the coach whispered. “If I had to guess—guess, I say, not bet—you’re going to end up being a starter somewhere.”
“You can count on it,” Jack told him.
That was Redding. To Jack’s surprise, and Emma’s—not to mention how shocked Alice and Mrs. Oastler were—he loved the place. It was what such schools are, or can be, to some boys. You travel to what seems, or is, a foreign country; your troubles may travel with you, but nonetheless you fit in. Jack Burns had never fit in before.
17. Michele Maher, and Others
Jack did not fit in at Exeter, where he was admitted on the strength of Redding’s reputation for building character—with the additional support, in the admissions office, of Exeter’s wrestling coach, who knew that Coach Clum’s boys were “grinders.” Jack was a grinder—a hard-nosed kid, if little more—and while he was good enough to wrestle on the Exeter team, he was not at all prepared for how difficult a school Phillips Exeter Academy was.
That Noah Rosen was also admitted to Exeter (Noah deserved to be) was Jack’s salvation. Coach Hudson, the Exeter wrestling coach, further intervened on Jack’s behalf: the coach arranged for Noah to be Jack’s roommate, and Noah helped Jack with his homework. Jack’s memorization skills notwithstanding, Exeter was so academically demanding, so intellectually rigorous, that his abilities at mere mimicry just couldn’t keep up. The memorization helped him, both as a wrestler and as an actor-to-be, but Noah Rosen kept him in school.