Free When She Was Good by Philip Roth

and was the highest-scoring end at Liberty Center since the days of Bud Brunn himself. In about one second flat he would fake the defense right, left, then
cut
left, buttonhook, take a Bobby Rackstraw bullet right in the belly, then—with just a
shoulder
—fake right again, only to turn and zoom straight down the center of the field—until Gardner Dorsey, the head coach, blew his whistle, and Bill came loping on back in that pigeon-toed way he had, tossing a long underhand spiral toward the line of scrimmage, and calling out, “Heads up, baby.” Whereupon one of the onlookers beside Roy would say, “Ol’ Bill would have gone all the way that time,” or Roy might even say it himself.
    From over on the baseball field he would hear the band being put through their paces for Saturday’s game. “Attention, please, band.
Ba-and!
” he could hear Mr. Valerio calling through his megaphone … and really, it is about as good a feeling as he can ever remember having, hearing the band start up with the alma mater—
    A vic-to-
ry

For Li-ber-
ty
,
We’re going to
win
,
A vic-to-
ry
    —and seeing the first team (three consecutive years undefeated—twenty-four straight) rise up out of the huddle, clapping their hands, and the second team digging in, and Bobby Rackstraw, the spidery quarterback, up on his toes piping out the signals—“Hut
one
hut
two
”—and then, just as the ball is snapped, looking up to see a faint white moon in the deepening sky over the high school.
    For the hour of the day, for the time of his life, for this America where it is all peacefully and naturally happening, he feels an emotion at once so piercing and so buoyant it can only be described as love.
    One of the stars of the football team in the fall following Roy’s discharge from the Army was Joe “The Toe” Whetstone.He was a fleet-footed halfback (he’d done the hundred in 9.9) and the greatest place-kicker in the history of the high school—some said, the history of the state. Since the summer Joe had been dating Roy’s kid cousin Ellie, and on Saturday nights, while Julian and Roy were having a talk together, or a beer, Joe would come around to pick up Ellie and take her to what had become a weekly event for the Liberty Center Stallions, the victory party. He would sit with the two of them in the TV room while “The Princess Sowerby,” as Julian called her, decided what dress to wear. At first Roy didn’t have too much to say to Joe. He had never really traveled with the athletes in high school, or with any gang, if he could help it; you lost your identity in a gang, and Roy considered himself a little too much of an individualist for that. Not a loner, but an individualist, and there’s a big difference.
    But Joe Whetstone turned out to be nothing like Roy had imagined. You might have thought that with his reputation, and being so good-looking, he would turn out to be another one of those swell-headed wise guys (like Wild Bill Elliott, who was big for spitting through his teeth into the aisle at the movies in Winnisaw, or so Roy had heard). But Joe was respectful and polite to the Sowerbys—and to Roy too. It took a while, but slowly Roy began to understand that the reason Joe sat there in his coat, nodding his head at whatever Roy might say, and himself saying hardly anything at all, was not because he was looking down his nose at him, but because he was actually looking up. Joe might be the greatest high school place-kicker in the history of the state, but Roy had just come back from sixteen months in the Aleutian Islands, across the Bering Sea from Russia itself. And Joe knew it. One Saturday night when Ellie came bounding down the stairs, Joe jumped to his feet, and Roy realized that the famous Joe “The Toe,” with six different scholarship offers already in his hip pocket, was really nothing more than what Ellie was—a seventeen-year-old kid. And Roy was twenty, Roy was an ex-G.I….
    Very shortly Roy began to hear