I say “our” foreign exchange student, not like we owned her or anything, but because she had kind of adopted us. Tena actually adopted Crash because she said he seemed so “European” – whatever that means – and I was just there as part of the package deal. Crash and I are kind of a buy-one-get-one-free kind of thing like LeBron James and Duane Wade or, more aptly, SpongeBob and Patrick.
Wearing my brown #99 jersey, I was anxious to show Crash the catch from my morning trap run – three muskrats and a mink – and was equally anxious to watch Tena freak out when I pulled the tarp off their corpses.
We didn’t say much, me and Tena, as we sat there like Israelites waiting for Moses. Finally we heard the buzz of his scooter and saw him turn the corner, decked out in his dorky black bike helmet and gray parka.
Crash never got to school more than a minute before the final bell, because he worked until the last possible second. He had a different job than any other kid I knew. It wasn’t mowing at the golf course or sacking groceries at the store. Crash was an on-line day-trader. I don’t have the slightest clue about it, except that he says he can get a half hour’s worth of work done before school because the markets open an hour earlier on the East Coast. It’s the darnedest thing.
Crash even has one of those Blackberry things, not just your average flip phone like the rest of us, and when a particular stock he’s bought reaches a certain level he gets an automated email telling him such. So at various times of the day, when his pocket vibrates, he asks the teacher if he can go to the bathroom but instead runs down to the school library or just into the hall and gets on the Internet to buy or sell whatever he’s got going on. He actually had his doctor write a note to the principal claiming Crash has a bladder condition, so all the teachers let him go whenever he asks. They think he has a weak adolescent bladder, but actually he is pulling in more coin in a week than they do.
It works quite well for me too, as I give him all my trapping money and he’s parlayed that into about 10 times what I would normally have. My mom thinks I’m dealing drugs. For all I know I could be but they’d be Pfizer or Merck.
This morning’s trading must have been good because he had an exceptionally goofy grin as he pulled in next to us.
Most guys might be a little tense or nervous on game day, but I knew better than to ask Crash if he was as wound up as I was. He didn’t get nervous – just wasn’t in him. We could be standing on top of a burning building at midnight and rather than scream for help he’d be more apt to look around and say: “Hey, Badger, look to the north-northwest and you can see the Big Dipper.”
There is only one thing that gets Crash upset, and that’s losing. He is the worst, sorest loser I’ve ever seen. Fortunately, it doesn’t happen often. It doesn’t matter if it is ping pong, football or trading stocks; he is an absolute idiot when he loses. Crash still hasn’t gotten over our only loss of the season, in the second game of the year. It turned out to be the reason we were playing on the road tonight and not hosting the playoff game.
It’s a long, strange story, but, hey, that’s why you are reading this crap. Right?
It was a Saturday afternoon game against the Norway Center Sardines and I’d finally convinced Crash to go out with me the night before to teach him how to shoot pistols.
We went out to my dad’s pasture and I set up some targets. I gave Crash a couple ear plugs and we got blasting.
After we’d each fired off about 20 rounds from my dad’s .357, I turned to him and said: “We’d better head in. It’s getting dark.”
Crash looked at me and screamed in his nasally voice: “What?”
I said: “We better get back.”
He screamed again: “What?”
I hollered as loud as I could: “Take out your ear plugs!”
When he pulled them out of his nose, I knew we were in trouble. Unbeknownst to me, he’d put them in his nose instead of his ears, because, as he would later claim, he thought they were to keep him from inhaling gun smoke.
Crash was still deaf as a bat at noon the next day, two hours before kickoff, so he devised another of his genius schemes. It would not have been a problem running the plays in and out from the sideline to the huddle, but the problem was Crash hearing what the play was. And we couldn’t exactly holler it to him, as odds are the other team hadn’t been out the night before shooting pistols with ear plugs stuck in their nose and would hear us.
So Crash thought it would be cool if he used his Blackberry to get plays. Coach borrowed another Blackberry from the doctor in town, and Coach emailed the plays in to Crash and we would all read the play off that. Then Crash would stuff the Blackberry down the front of his pants, run the play, and we went on to stuff Norway Center 52-0.
All was good, as Crash’s hearing began to return on Monday, just in time for the announcement from Coach that we had to forfeit the game because the Sardines’ coach heard one of our fans bragging about our system. He turned us in to the South Dakota High School Activities Association and some tight-ass there said it was illegal and made us forfeit.
Crash went home, made a fat cardboard silhouette of the Norway Center coach, came over to my house and fired 50 rounds through the .357 – pretty much turning the cardboard cutout into confetti.
The good news is – he stuck the ear plus in the right holes this time. After all, Crash is no dummy.
***
Coach Ed “Fitz” Fitzpatrick is in his third season as the Snapping Turtles coach. He came to us after retiring from a stellar 40-year coaching career at some school in Boston. They say he was the second-winningest coach in the history of Massachussetes.
The old Irishman says he moved to South Dakota to get some fresh air and catch walleyes. After a year of sitting in a boat pretty much non-stop, he got sick of fishing, sold his boat and announced his intentions to take over one of the worst football programs in the state so he could turn it around and show he “still had it.” Shindler won the bidding war between Sturgis and Mitchell.
Rumor has it the deal-maker was an unlimited tab at Stan’s Corner Bar. Stanley Tucker is the team’s biggest booster and swears on a stack of Field and Stream magazines that he would never engage in such underhanded and immoral recruiting tactics, and the nosey Activities Association wasn’t able to prove such, so Coach is our coach. It’s just coincidence that nobody has ever seen Coach pay for a beer at Stan’s despite going through about a case of Sam Adams a week.
Despite the massive hops intake, Coach remains a fit and wirey 155 pounds. His temper still goes from 0 to 60 in four seconds and his players would run through a brick wall for him. He loves us and we love him. But man can that dude yell.
Coach always wears his Red Sox cap backwards and pulled down tight to his baggy ears. He is apparently oblivious to South Dakota winters, or maybe his blood always has enough of Stanley’s anti-freeze in it, as every day he sports a plain white t-shirt, black shorts, sweat socks pulled up just below his knees and white Nike running shoes – not very original but a morning time-saver for him for sure.
After seven winless Turtle seasons, Coach Fitzpatrick came on the scene and we won two games his first year, then four the second year and now we are 9-1 and a game away from playing for the state title. Thank you, Stanley Tucker. Wink, wink.
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