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Madison was sitting at the end of the lower bleacher, staring at his shoes. I thought he looked embarrassed.
    I couldn’t believe it! Lednecky was telling us to go out there and deliberately play dirty football, and everyone was eating it up. To tell you the truth, I was real confused.
    Lednecky stepped forward again, raising his hands for quiet. “Okay,” he said. “Now besides that, we’re still going to have to go out and play good football, so let’s hit the field.”
    I was one of the first ones out, jogging around the track to warm up. Carter fell in with me about halfway through the first lap. Lednecky had given up making us run the mile every day to get Larry Ingram’s time under six minutes—he’d never made it under seven and a half—but I always liked to get a little distance in by myself. It loosened me up, and I usually used the time to get psyched up for practice. That day I was just using it to figure.
    “What do you think?” I asked Carter.
    “About what?”
    “About Lednecky giving us thumbs-down on that black kid. Sounds kinda low to me. I mean, we’ve got agood team; we shouldn’t have to pull that kind of crap.”
    “Aw,” Carter said, “forget it. Coach gets a little wound up sometimes. He doesn’t really mean anything by it.”
    “Tell Boomer that.”
    Carter laughed and shook his head. “Yeah, that’s for sure. What the hell, though, if the guy’s as good as Lednecky says, we won’t be able to catch him to hurt him.”
    The whistle blew, and we headed in.
    I was hoping Coach would let it drop, but he harped on Washington the rest of the day. The defense was set up to key on his every move. He was by far their best athlete, and he played quarterback, so that wasn’t unusual; but still, a lot of talk was about how to put him out of commission. Boomer was thriving on it. It seemed to give his life new meaning. I got into an argument with him about it after practice—I can be such a dumb-butt at times—and almost cut my life short. He was talking about “sending all them grrs back to Africa on a leaky boat,” and for some reason I felt the urge to lay out what I’d learned about civil rights—in Lednecky’s government class, for Christ’s sake—for him.
    “You ever had any problem with blacks, Boomer?” I asked.
    “Damn right,” he said. “Bunch of ’em jumped my old man once. In a service station can. There was four of ’em. Had knives, too.”
    “What’d they do?”
    “Took every damn thing he had, buttbreath. What the hell’s it to ya? You some kinda nigger lover?”
    “Geez,” I said, “I don’t know. Only one I ever met was an editor down at the Statesman . He seemed nice enough.”
    Boomer started toward me. The boy’s got no sense of humor. I was looking for Carter, whose job it is to keep me alive in tough situations. “You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, Banks. An’ I get sick of your smart mouth.”
    “Come on, Boomer,” I said, putting my hands up for protection. “I’m just saying it seems like a raw deal to give a guy just because he’s black.”
    He stopped and threw his towel in my face. “If I was Coach, I’d get rid of you, wussy. If you’re too yella to help out the team, why don’t you get out? Go hop in the sack with Sanders. I did.”
    “Hey, screw you, Boomer,” I said. The mention of Becky’s name made me forget who I was and how dearly I loved life.
    “Oh, yeah?” he said, and his right hand came acrossmy face with a loud pop. My four front teeth, which are on a bridge, flew across the room. I lost them to a baseball bat when I was a freshman.
    Carter stepped out of the shower. “Hey, what the hell’s going on?” he yelled.
    I was standing away from Boomer with blood trickling out of my nose and a big gap in the front of my face. My cheek burned, and I hated that scumbag’s guts.
    “Wussy here thinks he’s a damn silver rights leader,” Boomer said.
    I didn’t bother to correct him.
    Carter looked