The Black Hawk War: How I Swam Across a Sea of Jocks and Lived
Through and through, I’m a Tolkien-loving nerd. I’ve been that way since I saw the first installment of Lord of the Rings when I was eleven years old, and I haven’t gone back since then. Roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons have never really been my thing, but there would be entire weekends when I would spend my time watching “The Fellowship of the Ring” and reading my old, beat up copy of “The Hobbit” until I fell asleep on Sunday night.
Even though my Dad gave it to me for Christmas when I was ten, I still have that copy of “The Hobbit” and I’ve read it so many times that I’ve lost count. It’s a special edition, hard-bound and covered in fake leather, but it has definitely seen better days. It was dropped in puddles and left dangerously close to bowls of red and brown sauce at dinnertime, and the signs are there—the pages are stained in some spots. Still, the story never changed, and yet I could never stop reading it.
Annie and I were walking home from school the day everything changed. I had only been at Arling High School for about two weeks, and I was still trying to figure out my place in the crowd of almost 4,000 faces. Since she had already been there for a year, Annie had taken it upon herself to show me the fastest and easiest ways to get around school. She always seemed to have a shortcut for everything, including making it to Mr. Eldridge’s metal shop class from the gym in less than two minutes. She also knew a way to get from the band room to the football field and back in just shy of five, before the tardy bell rang. Though she tried to teach me how she did it, I was never really able to get the hang of it. Maybe she had tiny rockets inside of her sneakers so she could fly to class when I wasn’t looking. Still, I really don’t know.
Either way, she was showing me one of her shortcuts home: across the football team’s practice field, through the back of Riverside Acres, and then back to Aurora Lane where we both lived. We had only gotten to the practice field when we slowed down, talking about what had happened in class that day.
“Mr. Adler is getting really intense this week,” Annie said, sighing.
“Didn’t you just start that class though?” I asked.
“Yeah, but why do you think they call him Admiral Adler?”
“Because he used to be a Marine?”
“Well yeah, that too, but he runs a tight ship,” Annie said. “We’re having our first test on Friday and he said that how we do on Friday will probably determine how we do on the AP test in May.”
“Friday!” I said. “What could you guys have studied enough in two weeks so you could take a test over it?”
“The Black Hawk War, mostly,” Annie said, “plus a lot of other Native American-themed stuff.”
“What’s the Black Hawk War?” American history was always my worst subject, for as relatively little of it as there was. I was more of a math and science kind of guy.
“Well, it was when a bunch of Native American tribes living in Wisconsin and out near Rockford lost their land because the Americans had—watch out!”
I had enough time to respond, but I didn’t move because I didn’t know what I was watching out for. I knew as soon as something hard connected with the back of my head and knocked me sideways—it was a football. I barely managed to right myself before I could fall into the dirt, and there was a dull, throbbing pain where the end of the football had hit the base of my neck.
Lots of shouting followed—mostly Annie yelling that whoever had thrown the ball should have watched where he was aiming, that he could hurt someone if he wasn’t careful. Someone shouted back that she should shut up and keep walking, that girls shouldn’t be walking so close to a football field in the first place.
Even though I was rubbing my neck, I could see Annie’s fists trembling down by her sides. I knew she could probably beat up whoever had told her that bullshit, if she really wanted to. She had clobbered me hard enough to give me a nosebleed when we were growing up, and even now she knew where my weaknesses were—I’d lost count of how many times she had twisted my arm or grabbed my ear in order to get me to give up a piece of candy. I didn’t care though. I was more worried that the dude who said she should shut up would end up with a cracked skull.
“Ann, take it easy,” I whispered to her. “I’ve got this.”
“You’re okay?”
“Yeah… my head hurts a little, but I’ll be fine.”
“Just give us the ball back already!” one of the players in a maroon uniform shouted.
I was feeling like a jackass that day. Sure, I’d give them their ball back, and then some. I took a few big steps away from the ball, and then I kicked it as hard as I possibly could. It soared above the heads of the football players, over the width of the practice area and into the bean field just east of the school.
“What the hell?” the first player shouted again. “Are you retarded or something?”
“Eggers, you’re doing sprints for that!” an old man in a polo shirt and a Chicago Bears cap said. “Why are you just staring? Get moving!”
I gulped. He was coming towards us, his face red. He was holding a clip board—frankly, I was surprised he hadn’t thrown it to the ground already. I was probably going to get detention for life, or be forced to be the team’s water boy. Or maybe he’d be merciful and just kill me.
“Where’d you learn to kick like that?”
I just stared at him. I felt Annie tugging on my sleeve, but I couldn’t hear anything she said over the blood rushing around in my ears.
“I—I just kind of did it,” I said, stammering. “I mean, I used to play soccer in middle school, but that’s about all of the experience I’ve got with kicking…”
The man stared at me, bewildered. His face still looked like a ripe tomato. I later figured out that his face always looked like that—nobody really knew why though.
“Well. That’s quite the talent you have there!” he said. “Could you wait here for a second?”
“Uh… sure, I guess.”
I had no idea what was going on. The tomato-faced man jogged off towards the school, clipboard still in hand, leaving Annie and I with about two dozen football players of various shapes and sizes. I suddenly felt skinny. The defensive line was practicing with tackling dummies. A girl with long blonde hair was moving equipment around on the sidelines. What were we doing here?
“What’s even happening?” I asked Annie.
“Not sure,” Annie said. “Maybe he likes you or something?”
“He looked pissed.”
Annie shook her head. “I heard he always looks like that.”
“Who is he, anyway?”
“He’s Mr. Kettlesen,” Annie said. “He teaches biology and coaches varsity football after school. I heard he’s kind of weird.”
“In what way?”
“I’m not sure, but some of the jocks are always complaining about how he doesn’t allow them to swear or else they have to do sprints.”
“That isn’t that weird…”
“Only saying what I’ve heard,” Annie said. “Maybe it’s because they’re used to swearing a lot.”
I nodded. “That could be…”
Moments later, Mr. Kettlesen returned with several sheets of paper covered in unmarked boxes and spaces for signatures—my signature, my dad’s signature, a doctor’s signature. For a moment, I was wondering where the president had to sign on the papers he was giving me.
“Now… what did you tell me your name was?” he asked.
“I didn’t,” I said. “It’s Alexei Dyakov.”
“You’re Dr. Dyakov’s son?”
I nodded.
“My kids see him.”
I just watched him as he filled out a few parts of the paperwork and attached a bright orange Post-It note to the front. Half the people in town always told me things like that after figuring out that Dr. Vladimir Dyakov was my father. What was I supposed to say to that? It’s nice that he fixed your arm? I’m glad your cousin isn’t in pain anymore, but could you please give me a size medium instead of a small? Thank you for keeping food on our table, but why are you covering my English essay in red ink?
“Anyway, I’d like you to think about trying out for a placekicking position, if you have your father’s permission. We had one, but he’s out for the season. Something about an incident involving a Slip N’ Slide…”
“When are tryouts?” I asked.
“This weekend. If you can kick like that again and we train you a little bit to show you how things are done around here, you could be a shoe-in for the spot.”
“Okay, but how long will I have to practice before I actually play any games and stuff?”
“The first freshman game is in two weeks against Downers Grove Central,” Kettlesen said. “Think you can handle it?”
I bit my lip. “M-maybe… I feel like I’m in over my head already!”
He laughed. I would later learn that he rarely laughed—usually I thought it was when something small and supposedly meek was in pain.
“Don’t worry too much!” he said. “Just talk to your father and tell him to call me at the number right at the top of the front page if he has any questions.”
“Uh… alright then.”
“See you tomorrow.”
Annie and I shared a glance as we started walking home again. “Did all that really just happen?”
“I suppose it did,” I said. “Shouldn’t we hurry?”
“Why?” she asked, flicking a strand of red hair out of her eyes.
“Don’t you have marching band practice tonight?”
She gasped. “Crap, you’re right! Let’s hurry so I can go home and eat real quick!”
Life had been pretty different ever since Mom and Dad got divorced. We started having dinner around seven o’clock or later instead of at five because Dad’s hours hadn’t changed at all. Whenever he was on call, usually we’d be home alone and would have to fend for ourselves and order Chinese or pizza. Sasha and I had to learn how to wash and iron our own clothes before school the next day—it proved to be worse for him, but we both burned our hands quite a few times before we finally got the hang of it. Sometimes we ended up cooking everything before Dad came home.
Still, for some reason both of us were aware of but didn’t really understand, he seemed happier now. He’d offer to take us to the park on the weekends and mornings when we didn’t have school, and we’d go swimming in the lake or play soccer in the backyard. Sometimes he would get home as early as six o’clock and would cook our favorites—ham and fried eggs for Sasha, and baked apples for me. It was always a treat for us. For the two years where it was just the three of us, it was a different rhythm. I got used to it quickly though.
That night when I came home with the packet of papers for football, Dad had gone out and bought three new jars of peanut butter. My kryptonite.
“I’m not quite sure I’m following you, Alyosha,” he told me when he set the jars on the table after dinner. “I see all these boys coming into the office, and they’re always getting hurt from American football. I had one boy last year who had almost fifty kilos on you, and his femur was broken!”
In Russian, like many other languages, there’s a big difference between “futbol” and “Amerikanskiy futbol”. One is a sport played all over the world. The other, to many still, is a barbaric game played by western pigs. My father, however, seemed more worried about me getting hurt than whether or not the sport was actually barbaric.
“With the position they want me to play, I’m not likely to get hurt, Dad,” I explained. “I would only be on the football field for about five minutes out of the whole game, and with the way the papers explained it, the other players basically aren’t allowed to touch me.”
Sasha looked up from the puddle of egg yolk on his plate. “What position do they want you in?”
“Placekicker,” I said.
“Yeah,” Sasha added, “he’ll be fine. Placekickers almost never get hurt, Dad. The professionals play until they’re almost fifty sometimes.”
Our father still had worry marring his face—something we had seen less and less since Mom left. He put a new carton of pineapple juice on the table.
“When do they have to have an answer?” he asked. “I need to think about this.”
“The coach said that tryouts for the position are on Friday, so before then is best.”
He sighed. “Let me sleep on it.”
That stack of papers was on the kitchen counter the next morning, with his messy phonetic signature on all but one of the lines. Attached to the pile was a light blue Post-It note, which read in Cyrillic, “Okay, but I’ll need to give you a physical, got it?”
Within a few days, I was the new freshman placekicker for the Arling High School Redbirds. I had practice almost every day for two hours after school, but somehow I still found time to read more Tolkien. I was one of the jocks now though, potentially. I knew I couldn’t let them see any part of me that was weak or nerdy, or in any way different. I already got enough of that for being a Russian Jew. Nope, no Tolkien in sight while the other guys were around, especially if they were Varsity players.
Okay, who am I kidding? I’m still a nerd, but I don’t care. Let them see my copy of the Hobbit.
