Free Ghosts of Tom Joad by Peter Van Buren Page B

time the fat cop came over panting and tomato-faced to see how I was doing, I told him that Tim and Pam probably weren’t coming back. He put his hand on my shoulder and said something about, “Not if I can help it, son.” This time, before he turned back, I told him Tim and Pam weren’t in the river. Nobody drowned. Nobody was missing. Tim and Pam had just run away. When he asked me how many in the boat, I didn’t want to lie and so I said, “Five officer, honest. Maybe you misunderstood me?”
    For some reason then the fat cop got angry with me, using cuss words and all. Me, Muley and Rich ended up having to call our parents from the police station, and later they had to pay a fine for us endangering a law enforcement official and wasting emergency resources such as the fire truck and flashlights. That cost me most of my summer allowance money and my dad was pissed. Muley’s dad screamed at him for twenty minutes after Johnny Carson was over that night, and swatted his ass for the first time since fifth grade. Rich got off easy, but his old man was upset, saying that if Rich had drowned, or had been arrested for real, there’d go his senior year on the football team and there’d go any chance of playing ball at some college, why’d he think he could throw away his life like that? Tim never got to make out with Pam that night, but they didn’t go to jail eitherand he walked her home and she said maybe she’d think about it. It was the first time I realized you could die without getting old first, and that stuck with me.
    W E LOVED FOOTBALL because we had grown up loving football. Muley, me, and most of my friends, including Tim and Rich, played football. Our town had two teams, our team and some other kids who sort of made a team from the parochial school, but they only played against other kids in the God league. We played for Reeve, and in Reeve that was close to being with God. We played in the Southwestern Conference against other towns and then when we were winners we’d play in Regionals and up to, maybe in the year of 1977, State Championships. Everyone knew the year before Rob had gone on to actual tryouts at Ohio State, and in the past the Bernard boys had both made the team at OSU, even if they did not play much in the one game we saw on television each Thanksgiving weekend.
    Muley was thinking back to football training camp, and said to me:
    I remember Coach’s whistle, how it sounded bigger and louder in the locker room than outside, sort of telling you in there Coach Polanski was what mattered. He’d wait for us to start peeling off the sweaty gear and then gather us around him. He’d say things like, “Alright. I know it’s late and you all want to get outta here, but lemme say something about today’s practice. I think you all let your dicks hang out too much this summer. You better shape up, boys, or we’re all in for some long practices. Hell, I find chunks of better men in my shit every morning.”
    Old man Polanski didn’t want us to let down Reeve, and Reeve loved him back for it. He was officially a teacher at the high school, History of Our United States, which was only about from Columbus to the Civil War, even though the textbook went up to the Korean War. Everyone on the football team got an A from him except Ron Curry, who he thought wasn’t pulling his weight. Coach was stuck, ’cause the school board made it a rule that anyone who showed up every day for practice could be on the team, so we wasn’t violating laws made by sissies who probably never even played the game themselves. Back in our dads’ day, not just anyone got on the team. It was called Judgment Day, when everyone was gathered on the field at the end of summer and Coach called out names. Winners forward, losers to the locker rooms, and fuck you and your life in Reeve if you were on the wrong side of the line. Different now, sort