bobby luke was sitting on the front steps of Staley Hall, the living quarters for the football team. It was another hot and empty afternoon; everybody else was indoors; the campus seemed deserted. I sat a few feet away from Bobby, spreading my arms along the top step. He looked my way with a slight grin, his eyes nearly shut. I stretched my legs and gazed out at the distant parade grounds. Nothing moved out there and the heat rolled in. The night "before, we had opened against a school called Dorothy Hamilton Hodge. Taft Robinson gained 104 yards rushing in the first half and we left the field leading 24—0. Creed didn't use his reserves until there were only five minutes left in the game. By that time we had eight touchdowns; apparently he wanted to make news. Since Dorothy Hamilton Hodge was considered a typical opponent (with one exception), it was obvious that we'd have a winning season. We were better than any of us had imagined and it just seemed a question of how many points we'd score, how few we'd give up, and how many records would fall to Taft Robinson. The exception was West Centrex Biotechnical, an independent like us and a minor power in the area for years. The previous season they had swept through their schedule without the slightest hint of defeat, yielding an occasional touchdown only as a concession to the law of averages. The game with Centrex, which would be our seventh, was already shaping up as the whole season for us. If we could beat them, Creed's face would be back in the papers, we'd get smallcollege ranking, and the pro scouts would come drifting down for a look at the big old country boys. Bobby glanced up now. A side door of the science building had opened. A girl stepped out, stood for a moment with her arms folded, then went back in.

"Snatch," Bobby said.

The sky 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 practically nothing else. He was simply a shy boy who had little to say. Even the brickwall 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 demanded by history, a way of affirming the meaning of one's straggle. 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 sounds, lullabies processed through intricate systems. Or maybe the remark just satisfied Bobby's need to be loyal to someone. Creed had............