“The Quarterback Speaks to His God”
by
Herbert Wilner
Bobby Kraft, the heroic old pro, lies in his bed in the grip of medicines relieving his ailing heart. Sometimes he tells his doctor your pills beat my ass, and the doctor says it’s still Kraft’s choice; medicine or open heart surgery. Kraft shuts up.
He wasn’t five years out of pro football, retired at thirty-six after fourteen years, when he got the rare viral blood infection. Whatever they were, the damn things ate through his heart like termites, leaving him with pericarditis, valve dysfunction, murmurs, arrhythmia, and finally, congestive failure. The physiology has been explained to him, but he prefers not to understand it. Fascinated in the past by his strained ligaments, sprained ankles, torn cartilage, tendinitis, he now feels betrayed by his heart’s disease.
“You want to hear it?” Dr. Felton once asked, offering the earpieces of the stethoscope.
Kraft recoiled.
“You don’t want to hear the sound of your own heart?”
Sitting on the examining table, Kraft was as tall as the short doctor, whose mustache hid a crooked mouth.
“Why should I?” Kraft said. “Would you smile in the mirror after your teeth got knocked out?”
This morning in bed, as with almost every third morning of the past two years, Kraft begins to endure the therapeutic power of his drugs. He takes diuretics: Edecrin, or Lasix, or Dyazide, or combinations. They make him piss and piss, relieving for a day or two the worst effects of the congesting fluids that swamp his lungs and gut. He’s been told the washout dumps potassium, an unfortunate consequence. The depletions cramp his muscles, give him headaches, sometimes trigger arrhythmias. They always drive him into depressions as deep as comas. He blames himself.
“It has nothing to do with will power,” Dr. Felton explained. “If you ran five miles in Death Valley in August, you’d get about the same results as you do from a very successful diuresis.”
To replenish some of his losses, Kraft stuffs himself with bananas, drinks orange juice by the pint, and takes two tablespoons a day of potassium chloride solution. To prevent and arrest the arrhythmia, he takes quinidine, eight pills a day, 200 mg per pill. To strengthen the enlarged and weakened muscle of his heart wall, he takes digoxin. Together they make him nauseous, gassy, and distressed. He takes anti-nausea pills and chews antacids as though they were Life Savers. Some nights he takes Valium to fall asleep. If one doesn’t work, he takes two.
“I can’t believe it’s me,” he protests to his wife, Elfi. “I never took pills, I wouldn’t even touch aspirins. There were guys on coke, amphetamines, Novocaine. I wouldn’t touch anything. Now look at me. I’m living in a drugstore.”
His blurred eyes sweep the squads of large and small dark labeled bottles massed on his chest of drawers. His wife offers little sympathy.
“Again and again the same thing with you,” she’ll answer in her German accent. “So go have the surgery already, you coward ox.”
Coward? Him? Bobby Kraft?
“I have to keep recommending against surgery,” said Dr. Felton, named by the team physician as the best cardiologist in the city for Kraft’s problems. “I’m not certain it can provide the help worth the risk. Meanwhile, we buy time. Every month these hotshot surgeons get better at their work. Our equipment for telling us precisely what’s wrong with your heart gets better. In the meantime, since you don’t need to work for a living, wait it out. Sit in the sun. Read. Watch television. Talk about the old games. Wait.”
What does coward have to do with it?
This morning, in his bed, three hours after the double dose of Lasix with a Dyazide thrown in, Kraft has been to the toilet bowl fourteen times. His breathing is easier, his gut is relieved; and now he has to survive the payments of his good results.
He’s dry as a stone, exhausted, and has a headache. The base of his skull feels kicked. The muscles of his neck are wrenched and pulled, as if they’d been wound on a spindle. His hips ache. So do his shoulder joints. His calves are heavy. They’re tightening into cramps. His ankles feel as though tissue is dissolving in them, flaking off into small crystals, eroding gradually by bumping each other in slight, swirling collisions before they dissolve altogether in a bath of serum. His ankles feel absent.
He’s cold. Under the turned up electric blanket, he has chills. His heart feels soaked.
He wants to stay awake, but he can’t help sleeping. By the sixth of his returns from the bowl, he was collapsing into the bed. Falling asleep was more like fainting, like going under, like his knee surgery— some imperfect form of death. He needs to stay awake. His will is all that’s left him for proving himself, but his will is shot by the depression he can’t control.
By tomorrow he’ll be mostly out of bed. He’ll have reduced the Lasix to one pill, no Dyazide, piss just a little, and by the day after, with luck guarding against salt in his food, he’ll have balanced out. He’ll sit on the deck in his shorts when the sun starts to burn a little at noon. He’ll squeeze the rubber ball in his right hand. He’ll take a shower afterwards and oil himself down to rub the flaking off. He’ll look at himself in the full-length mirror and stare at the part of his chest where the injured heart is supposed to be. He’ll see little difference from what he saw five years ago when he was still playing. The shoulders sloping and wide, a little less full but not bony, the chest a little less deep but still broad and tapered, the right arm still flat-muscled and whip-hanging, same as it was ten years ago when he could throw a football sixty yards with better than fair accuracy. What he’ll see in the mirror can infuriate him.
He once got angry enough to put on his sweat suit, go through the gate at the back fence and start to run in the foot-wide level dirt beside the creek bed in the shade of the laurels. After five cautious strides, he lengthened into ten hard ones. Then he was on his knees gasping for air, his heart arrhythmic, his throat congested. He couldn’t move for five minutes. By the next day he’d gained six pounds. He told Elfi what he’d done.
“Imbecile!” She called the doctor. Kraft, his ankles swollen, was into heart failure. It was touch and go about sending him to the hospital for intravenous diuretics and relief oxygen.
It took a month to recover, he never made another effort to run, but he knew even today, that after all this pissing and depression, exhaustion and failure, when he balanced out the day after tomorrow and he was on the deck and and the sun hit, nothing could keep the impulse out of his legs. He’d want to run. He’d feel the running in his legs. And he’d settle for a few belittling house chores, then all day imagine he’d have a go at screwing Elfi. But at night he didn’t dare try.
When she gets home from her day with the retards, she fixes her Campari on ice, throws the dinner together, at which, as always, she pecks like a bird and he shovels what he can, making faces to advertise his nausea, rubbing his abdomen to soothe his distress and belching to release the gas. After dinner he’ll report his day, shooting her combative looks to challenge the boredom glazing her face. They move to the living room. Standing, he towers over her. He’s six foot two inches and she’s tiny. His hand, large even for his size, would cover the top of her skull the way an ordinary man’s might encapsulate an egg. She stretches full length on the couch; he slouches in the club chair. She wears a tweed skirt and buttoned blouse, he’s in his pajamas and terry cloth robe. He still has a headache. His voice drones monotonously in his own ears, but he’s obsessed with accounting for his symptoms as though they were football statistics. When he at last finishes, she sits up and nods.
“So all in all today is a little better. Nothing with the bad rhythm.”
He gets sullen, then angry. No one has ever annoyed him as effectively as she. He’d married her six years ago, just before his retirement, as he’d always planned. He knew the stewardesses, models, second-rate actresses, and just plain hotel whores would no longer do. He’d need children, a son. And this tiny woman’s German accent and malicious tongue had knocked him out. And sometimes he caught her reciting prayers in French (she said for religion it was the perfect language), which seemed to him—a man without religion—unexplainably peculiar and right.
Now, offended by her flint heart (calling this a better day!), he goes to the den for TV. He has another den with shelves full of his history—plaques, cups, trophies, photos (one with the President of the United States), footballs, medals, albums, video tapes—but he no longer enters this room. After an hour, she comes in after him. She wants to purr. He wants to be left alone. His headache is worse, his chest tingles. She recounts events of her day, one of the two during the week when she drives to the city and consults at a school for what she calls learning-problem children. He doesn’t even pretend to listen. She sulks.
Words go back and forth. He didn’t think he could do it, but he tells her. In roundabout fashion, the TV jabbering, he finally makes her understand his latest attack of anxiety: the feel of his not feeling it. His prick.
She looks amazed, as if she were still not understanding him, then her eyes widen and she taps herself on the temple.
“You I don’t understand,” she sputters. “To me your head is something for doctors. Every day I worry sick about your heart, and you give me this big soap opera about your prick. Coward. You should go for the surgery. Every week you get worse, whatever that Dr. Felton says. You let all those oxes fall on you and knock you black and blue, then a little cutting with a knife, and you shiver. When they took away your football, they broke your baby’s heart. So now, sew it up again. Let a surgeon do it. You don’t know how. You think your heart can get better by itself? In you, Bobby, never.”
When it suits her, she exaggerates her mispronunciation of his name. “Beau-bee. Beaubee. What kind of name is this for a grown man your size, Beaubee?”
He heads to the bedroom to slam the door behind him. After ten minutes, the door opens cautiously. She sits at the edge of the bed near his feet. She strokes the part of the blanket covering his feet, puts her cheek to it, then straightens, stands, says it to him.
“I love you better than my own life. I swear it. How else could I stay with you?”
He hardly hears her. His attention concentrates on the first signs of his arrhythmia. He tells her, “It’s beginning.” She says she’ll fetch the quinidine. She carries his low sodium milk for him to drink it with. He glances at her woefully through what used to be ice-blue eyes fixed in his head like crystals. He stares at the pills before he swallows them. He can identify any of them by color, shape and size. He doesn’t trust her. She can’t nurse, she always panics.
His heart is fluttering, subsiding, fluttering. Finally it levels off at the irregularity of the slightly felt extra beat which Felton has told him is an auricular fibrillation. Elfi finds an excuse to leave the room. He sits up in bed, his eyes closed, his thick back rammed against the sliding pillows, his head arched over them, the crown drilling into the headboard.
The flurries have advanced to a continuously altering input of extra beats. They are light and rapid, like the scurryings under his breastbone of a tiny creature with scrawny limbs. After ten minutes, the superfluous beats intensify and ride over the regular heartbeats.
There’s chaos in his heart. Following a wild will of its own, it has nothing to do with him, nor can he do anything with it. Moderate pain begins in his upper left arm, and though the doctor has assured him it’s nothing significant, and he knows it will last only through the arrhythmia, Kraft begins to sweat.
The heart goes wilder. He rubs his chest, runs his hands across the protruding bones of his cheeks and jaw. Ten minutes later the heart begins to yank as well as thump. It feels as if the heart’s apex is stitched into tissues near the bottom of his chest, and the yanking of the bulk of the heart will tear the threads loose. Again and again he tries to will himself into the cool accommodation he can’t command. Then at last it seems that for a few minutes the force of the intrusive beats is diminishing. He dares to hope it’s now the beginning of the end of the episode.
Immediately a new sequence of light and differently irregular flurries resumes. The thumpings are now also on his back. He turns to his right side, flicks the control for the television, tries to lose himself with it, hears Elfi come in. She whispers, “Still?” and leaves again.
The thumpings deepen. They are really pounding. The headache is drilled in his forehead. It throbs. He thinks the heart is making sounds that can be heard in the room. He claws his long fingers into the tough flesh over the heart. It goes on for another hour. He waits, and waits. Then, indeed, in moments, they fade into the flutter with which they began. After a while the flutter is hard to pick out, slips under the regular beating of his heart, and gives way at last to an occasional extra beat which pokes at his chest with the feel of a mild bubbling of thick pudding at a slow boil. Then that’s gone.
His heart has had its day’s event.
Kraft tells himself: nothing’s worth this. He’s told it to himself often. He tells himself he’ll see Felton tomorrow. He’ll insist on the surgery.
Afraid of surgery? Coward? She wasn’t even in his life when he had his knee done after being blindsided in Chicago. He came out of the anesthesia on a cloud. The bandage on his leg went from thigh to ankle, but the girl who came to visit him—stewardess, model, the cocktail waitress—he couldn’t remember now, she was the one whose eyes changed colors—she had to fight him off because he kept rubbing his hand under her skirt up the soft inside of her thigh. She ended on his bed on top of him. He was almost instantaneous. He had to throw her off, remembering his leg, his career. But was it really that Felton runt who was keeping him from surgery?
In despair now, could he really arrange for the surgery tomorrow? Not on a knee, but on his opened heart?
Bobby Kraft’s heart?
“That’s crap,” he once said to a young reporter. “Any quarterback can throw. We all start from there. Some of us do it a little better. That’s not what it’s all about. Throwing aint passing, sonny, and passing aint all of quarterbacking anyway.”
“You mean picking your plays. Using your head. Reading defenses?”
“That’s important. It’s not all of it.”
“What’s the mystique?” the youth asked shyly, fearful of ignorance. “Not in your arm, not in your head. I know you all have guts or wouldn’t play in such a violent game. If it’s a special gift, where do you keep it?”
“In your goddamn chest, sonny. Where the blood comes.” He smiled and stared icily at the reporter until the young man turned away.
Actually, Kraft worked hard mastering the technical side of his skills. If he needed to, for instance, if the wind wasn’t strong against him, he could hang the ball out fifty yards without putting too much arc in it. It should’ve been a heavy ball to catch for a receiver running better than ten yards to the second. But Kraft, in any practice, could get it out there inches ahead of the outstretched arms and have the forward end of the ball, as it was coming down, begin to point up slightly over its spiralling axis. That way it fell with almost no weight at all. The streaking receiver could palm it in one hand, as if he were snatching a fruit from a tree he ran by. It took Kraft years to get it right and do it in games.
There were ways of taking the ball from the center, places on it for each of his fingers, ways of wrist-cradling the ball before he threw if he had to break his pocket, and there was the rhythm set up between his right arm and the planting of his feet before he released the ball through the picket of huge, upraised arms.
He watched the films. He studied the game book. He worked with the coaches and his receivers for any coming Sunday. What the other team did every other time they played you, and what they did all season was something you had to remember. You also had to be free of it. You had to yield to the life of the particular game, build it, master it, improvise. And always you not only had to stand up to their cries of “Kill Kraft,” you had to make them eat it. The sonsabitches!
That’s what Kraft did most of the week waiting for his Sunday game. He worked the “sonsabitches” into a heat. Then he slid outside himself and watched it. It was like looking at a fire he’d taken out of his chest to hold before eyes. Tense all week, his eyes grew colder and colder as they gazed at the flame. By game time he was thoroughly impersonal.
Sunday on the field in the game, though he weighed 203, he looked between plays somewhat on the slender side, like someone who could get busted like a stick by most of those he played among. He stood out of the huddle a long time before he entered it through the horseshoe’s slot to call the play. Outside the huddle, except in the last minutes when they might be fighting the clock, his pose was invariable. His right foot was anchored with the toe toward the opening for him in his huddle about nine feet away, the left angled toward where the referee had placed the ball. It threw his torso on a rakish slant toward the enormous opposing linemen, as though he’d tight-rigged himself against a headland. He kept the knuckles of his right hand high on his right ass, the fingers limp. His left hand hung motionless on his left side. Under his helmet, his head turned slowly and his eyes darted. He wasn’t seeing anything that would matter. They’d change it all around when he got behind the center. He was emptying himself for his concentration. It was on the three strides back to the huddle that he picked his play and barked it to them in a toneless, commanding fierceness just short of rage.
Then the glory began for Kraft. What happened, what he lived for never got into the papers; it wasn’t seen on television.
What he saw was only part of what he knew. He would watch the free safety or the outside linebackers for giveaway cues on the blitz. He might detect from jumping linemen some of the signs of looping. The split second before he had the ball he might spot assignment against his receivers and automatically register the little habits and capacities of the defending sonsabitches. He could “feel” the defenses.
But none of it really began until, after barking the cadence of his signals, he actually did have the ball in his hand. Then, for the fraction of a second before he gave it away to a runner, or for the maximum three seconds in the pocket before he passed, there was nothing but grunting and roaring and cursing, the crashing of helmets and pads, the oofs of air going out of brutish men and the whisk of legs in tight pants cutting air like a scythe in tall grass and the soft suck of cleats in the grassy sod, and the actual vibration of the earth itself stampeded by that tonnage of sometimes gigantic, always fast, cruel, lethal bodies. And if Kraft kept the ball, if he dropped his three paces back into his protective pocket, he’d inch forward before he released it and turn his shoulders or his hips to slip past the bodies clashing at his sides. He would always sense and sometimes never see the spot to which he had to throw the ball through the nests of the raised arms of men two to five inches taller than himself and twice as broad and sixty, eighty pounds heavier. One of their swinging arms could, if he didn’t see it coming, knock him off his feet as though he were a matchstick. He was often on his back or side, a pile of the sonsabitches taking every gouge and kick and swipe at him they could get away with. That was the sweetness for him.
To have his ass beaten and not even know it. To have that rush inside him mounting all through the game, and getting himself more and more under control as he heated up, regarding himself without awareness of it, his heart given to the fury, and his mind to a sly and joyous watching of his heart, storing up images that went beyond the choral roaring of any huge crowd and that he would feed on through the week waiting for the next game, aching through the week but never knowing in the game any particular blow that would make him hurt. Not after the first time he got belted. They said he had rubber in his joints, springs in his ass, and a whip for an arm.
The combination of his fierce combativeness and laid back detachment infuriated the sonsabitches he played against. They hated him; it made them lose their heads. It was all the advantage Kraft ever needed. His own teammates, of course, went crazy with the game.
They wound themselves up for it in the hours before it, and some of them didn’t come down until the day after, regardless of who won.
Kraft depended on their lunacy. He loved them for needing it. And he loved them most during the game because no one ever thought of him as being like them. He was too distant. Too cunning. Too cold. But on the sideline, among them, waiting for his defensive team to get him back into the game, he might run his tongue over his lips, taste the salty blood he didn’t know was there, and swallow. Then he’d rub his tongue across his gums and over the inside of a cheek, and an expression of wonder might flicker across is face, as if he were a boy with his first lick at the new candy, tasting the sweetness of his gratified desires, not on his tongue but in his own heart.
Three more months passed with Kraft delivered up to the cycles of his illness and medicines and waiting and brooding. Then he was sitting in his sweat socks and trunks at the side of the pool one late afternoon. He gazed vacantly at the water. His chest had caved a little; and his long head seemed larger, his wide neck thicker. Elfi had been reading on a mat near the fence under the shade of a laurel.
“So how long are you going to live like this?” she asked. Immediately he thought she was talking sex. “Two more years? Five? Ten?” She crossed her arms over her slender, fragile chest. “Maybe even fifteen, hah? But sooner or later you’ll beg them for the surgery. On your knees. So why do you wait? Look how you lose all the time you could be better in.”
His answer was pat.
“I told you. They can cut up my gut. They can monkey with my head. They can cut off my right arm even, how’s that? But they’re not going to cut up my heart. That’s all. They’re not putting plastic valves in my heart.”
“Again with this plastic. Listen, I am reading a lot about it. There are times they can put in a valve from a sheep, or a pig.”
He looked at her in amazement. He stood up. She came to his collarbone; he cast a shade over all of her.
“Sheep and pig!”
He looked like he might slam her, then he turned away and headed for the glass door to the bedroom.
“Your heart,” she said. “You have such a special heart?”
When he turned she looked up at him and backed off a step.
“Yeah, it’s special. My heart’s me.” He stabbed his chest with the long thumb of his right hand.
“You think I don’t understand that? With my own heart I understand that. But this is the country where surgeons make miracles. You are lucky. It happens to you here, where you are such a famous ox. And here they have the surgeon who’s also so famous. For him, what you have is a—is a—a blister.”
He glared. She backed off another step. He turned and dove suddenly into the pool, touched bottom, came up slowly and thought he could live a long time in a chilly, blue, chlorinated water in which he would, suspended, always hold his breath. He rose slowly, broke the water at the nearer wall, hoisted himself at the coping and emerged from the water, with his back and shoulders glistening. He was breathless, but he moved on to the bedroom. He didn’t double over until he had closed the glass door behind him. While he waited for his throat to empty and his chest to fill, he hurt. He got dizzy. Bent, he moved to the bed and fell on it. He stretched out.
He napped, or thought he did. When he woke, or his mind cleared, words filled him. He clasped his hands behind his neck, closed his eyes and tried to shut the words out. He got off the bed and stood before the full-length mirror. He put his hands to his thighs, bent his weight forward, clamped the heels of his hands together, dropped his left palm to make a nest for the ball the center would snap. Numbers barked in his head. When he heard the hup-hup he moved back the two swift steps, planted his feet, brought his right arm high behind his head, the elbow at his ear, then released the shoulder and snapped the wrist. He did it twice more. He was grinning. When he started it the fourth time, he was into arrhythmia.
Kraft consults Dr. Felton. Felton examines him, sits, glances at him, gazes at the ceiling, puts the tips of his index fingers to a pyramid point on his mustache, and says, “I’m still opposed, but I’ll call him.” He means the heart surgeon, Dr. Gottfried. They arrange for Kraft to take preliminary tests. He has already had some of them, but the heart catheterization will be new. A week later Kraft enters the hospital.
An hour after he’s in his room, a parade of doctors begin the listening and thumping on Kraft’s chest and back. A bearded doctor in his early thirties who will assist in the morning’s catheterization briefs him on what to expect. He speaks rapidly.
“You’ll be awake of course. You’ll find it a painless procedure. We’ll use a local on your arm where we insert the catheter. When it touches a wall of the heart, you might have a little flurry of heartbeats. Don’t worry about it. Somewhere in the process we’ll ask you to exercise a little. We need some measurements of the heart under physical stress. You won’t have to do more than you can. Toward the end we’ll inject a purple dye. We get very precise films that way. You’ll probably get some burning sensations while the dye circulates. A couple of minutes or so. Otherwise you’ll be quite comfortable. Do you have any questions?”
Kraft has a hundred and asks none.
The doctor starts out of the room, stops, comes back a little haltingly. He has his pen in his hand and his prescription pad out.
“Mr. Kraft, I have a nephew. He’d get a big kick out of . . . ”
Kraft takes the extended pad and pen. “What’s his name?”
“Oh, just sign yours.”
He writes: “For the doc and his nephew for good luck from Bobby Kraft.” He returns the items. He feels dead.
In the morning they move him on a gurney to a thick walled room in the basement. He’s asked to slide onto an X-ray table. They cover him with a sheet. He raises himself on his elbows to see people busy at tasks he can’t understand. There are two women and two men. All of them wear white. One of the women sits before a console full of knobs and meters on a table near his feet. Above and behind his head is a machine he’ll know later is a fluoroscope. In a corner of the room there’s a concrete alcove, the kind X-ray technicians hide behind. One of the men keeps popping in and out of its opening on his way to and from the fluoroscope. The ceiling is full of beams and grids on which X-ray equipment slides back and forth and is lowered and raised. The other man plays with it, and with film plates he slides under the table. A nurse attaches EKG bands to his ankles.
The two doctors come in. They are already masked, rubber-gloved, and dressed in green. The bearded one introduces the other, who has graying hair and brown eyes. A nurse fits Kraft’s right arm into a metal rest draped with towels. “I’m going to tie your wrist,” she says. She ties it and tucks the towels over his hand and wrist and over his shoulder and biceps. She washes the inside of his shaved arm with alcohol, rubbing hard at the crook of his elbow. The bearded doctor ties his arm tightly with a rubber strap, just above the elbow, then feels with his fingers in the crook of the elbow for the raised vessels. He swabs the skin with the yellow Xylocaine and waits. The other doctor asks the nurse at the console if she is ready. She says, “Not yet.” He looks at Kraft, and Kraft looks up at the rails and grids.
In a few minutes the bearded doctor injects the anesthetic into several spots high on the inside of Kraft’s forearm. It takes ten more minutes before the woman at the console is ready. She gets up twice to check with the man in the alcove. The older doctor goes there once. When the woman finally signals she’s ready, Dr. Kahl says, “OK.” Kraft looks. The older doctor stands alongside Kahl. The scalpel goes quickly into Kraft’s flesh in a short cut. He doesn’t feel it. Kahl removes the scalpel, and a little blood seeps. The doctor switches instruments and goes quickly into the small wound. Blood spurts. It comes in a few pumps about six inches over Kraft’s arm, a thick, rich red blood. Kraft is astonished. Then the blood stops. The towels are soaked with it.
“I’m putting the cath in.”
The older doctor nods. He turns toward the fluoroscope. Kraft watches again. The catheter is black and silky and no thicker than a cocktail straw. Still Kraft feels nothing. Kahl’s brow creases. He’s manipulating the black, slender thing with his rubbered fingers. He rolls his thumb along it as he moves it. Kraft waits to feel something. There is no feeling. He can’t see where the loose end of the catheter is coming from. He turns his head away and takes a deep breath. He takes another deep one. He wants to relax. He wants to know how the hell he got into all this. What really happened to him? When? What for?
“You’re in,” the older doctor says.
The thing is in his heart.
It couldn’t have taken more than ten seconds. They are in his heart with a black silky tube and he can’t feel it.
“Hold it,” the nurse at the console says. She begins calling out numbers.
“How are you feeling?” Dr. Kahl asks. Kraft nods.
“You feeling all right?” the older doctor repeats, walking toward the fluoroscope.
“Yeah.”
They go on and on. He feels nothing. He hears the older doctor instructing the younger one: “Try the ventricle . . . Hold it . . . What’s your reading now . . . There’s the flutter . . . Don’t worry about that, Mr. Kraft. . . Watch the pulmonary artery . . . He’s irritable in there . . . Withdraw! . . . Fine, you’re through the cusps . . . Try the mitral . . . You’re on the wall again . . . How are you feeling, Mr. Kraft?”
Kraft nods. He licks his lips. He tries not to listen to them. When the flutter goes off in his chest, he thinks it will start an arrhythmia. It doesn’t. It feels like a hummingbird hovering in his chest for a second. Something catches it. Occasionally the other doctor comes beside Kahl and plays for a moment with the catheter while he watches the fluoroscope. The bearded doctor chats sometimes, saying he’s sorry Kraft has to lie so flat for so long, it must be uncomfortable. Does he use many pillows at home? Would he like to raise up for a while?
The arm hurts where the catheter enters it. Kraft feels a firm growing lump under the flesh, as if a golf ball is being forced into the wound. Kraft concentrates on the pain. He thinks of grass.
“How much longer?” he asks.
“We’re more than half way.”
In a while the nurse tells him they are going to have him do the exercises now. Something presses against his feet. The brown-eyed doctor talks.
“We have an apparatus here with bicycle pedals. Just push on them as you would on a bike. We’ll adjust the pedals to keep making you push with more force. If it gets to be too much work, tell us. We want you to exert yourself, but not tire yourself.”
What’s he talking about, Kraft asks himself. He begins to pump. There’s no resistance. He pumps faster, harder.
“That’s fine. Keep it going. You’re doing real fine.”
He gets a rhythm to it quickly, thrusting his legs as rapidly as he can. He expects to get winded, but he doesn’t. He’s doing fine. He almost enjoys it. He concentrates. He feels the pain in his arm and pumps harder, faster. He imagines he’s racing. For a moment it gets more difficult to pump. He presses harder, feels his calves stretch and harden. He gets his rhythm back. They encourage him. He licks his lips and clasps the edge of the table with his left hand and drives his legs. He forgets about any race. He knows he’s doing well with this exercise. It will show on their computation. They’ll tell him his heart is getting better. The resistance to his pumping gets stronger. He pumps harder.
’’That was very good. We’re taking the apparatus away now. You feel all right?”
“Fine.”
Kraft closes his eyes. There’s the pain in his arm again. His forearm is going to pop. It’s too strong a pain now. They are moving in the room. He grinds his teeth.
“We’re going to inject the dye now,” the older doctor says.
Kraft turns his head and sees the metal cylinder of the syringe catch glinting light for a moment in Kahl’s raised hand. He sees the rubbered thumb move; a blackish fluid spurts from the needle’s tip. The needle goes toward his arm—into the wound or the catheter, he can’t tell. He turns away.
“You’ll feel some heat in your head very soon. That’s just the effect of the dye. It’ll wear off. You’ll feel heat at the sphincter too. Are you all right?”
Kraft nods. He turns away. Why do they keep asking him? He sees the man from the alcove hurrying with X-ray plates that he slides into the slot under the table just below Kraft’s shoulder blades. He hurries back to the alcove. The doctors call instructions. The voice from the alcove calls some words back and numbers. Kraft closes his eyes and tries to think of something to think of. He thinks if Elfi could—then Kraft feels the rush. It comes in way over the pain in his arm. It raises him off the table. He feels the heat racing through him. A terrific pounding at his forehead. It doesn’t go away. He tries to think of the pain in his arm, but he feels the heat rushing through him in a rising fever. Then it hits his asshole and he rises off the table again. It burns tremendously. They have lit a candle in his asshole and the burned flesh is going to drop through.
“Wow!”
“That’s all right. It’ll go away soon.”
It does, but not the headache. It burns and throbs in his forehead. He hears metal dropping under the table. The man runs out and removes film plates. Someone else inserts others. They call numbers. The plates fall again. They repeat the process. He closes his eyes. The rush is fading, but the headache remains, throbbing.
“How you doing?”
“All right. My head aches.”
“It’ll pass.”
“How was the exercise part?”
“You did fine. We’ll be through soon. How’s the arm?”
“Hurts.”
“No problem. More Novocaine.”
“No. Leave it.”
They hurry again. Words are exchanged about the films. Someone leaves the room. Someone enters it later. Kraft keeps his eyes closed. The ache is still in his forehead, but he thinks he might sleep.
“Well, that’s it,” the bearded Kahl says. Kraft looks toward him, then down at his arm. The wound is stitched. He hasn’t felt it. The doctor covers it with a gauze pad and two strips of tape. The catheter’s gone. Kraft sees no sign of it. They wash his arm of blood and get him onto the gurney. He hears someone say “I think we got good results.” The older doctor tells Kraft they’ll know some things tomorrow. “It looks good.”
Back in his room Elfi is waiting for him. He gets into bed, and they leave. She throws herself on him. She’s breathless. Her cheeks are streaked, her eyes are red. She’s been crying. She’s almost crying now.
“I don’t want to talk about it now,” he says when she begins to speak.
“I don’t want to hear it. That’s the truth. Listen, I’m going home. Beaubee, I’m not good here.”
She rushes from the room. He contemplates the increasing pain in his arm. It reaches into his biceps now. He keeps thinking about his heart. They had their black tube in his heart. The sonsabitches.
On the next day, just before lunch, reading a magazine in the chair in his room, he sees Dr. Gottfried for the first time. With him, in his white coat, is the gray-haired doctor from the catheterization. Dr. Gottfried is in the short-sleeved green shirt and the green baggy cotton trousers of the operating room. He has scuffed sneakers, and the stethoscope—like a metal and rubber noose, hangs from his neck. He looks tired. He has the sad eyes of a spaniel. And yet the man—in build neither here nor there, just a man—introduced by his colleague, stares and stares at Kraft before he moves or speaks, like a man before a fight. He keeps looking into Kraft’s eyes, as if through his patient’s eyes he could find the as yet untested condition of his true heart. He keeps on staring; Kraft stares back. Then the great famous doctor nods; a corner of his mouth flickers. He has apparently seen what he has needed to—and judged. He leans over Kraft and listens with the stethoscope to Kraft’s chest. He could not have heard more than three heartbeats when he removes the earpieces, steps back, and speaks.
“Under it all, you’ve got a strong heart. I can tell by the snap.”
Kraft, the heroic old pro, begins to smile. He beams.
The doctor speaks in a slow, subdued voice; Kraft’s smile fades.
“There’s no real rush with your situation. However, the sooner the better, and there’s a cancelled procedure two weeks from today. We can do you then. I’ll operate. Right now I want to study more of the material in your folder. We’ve got several base lines. I’ll be back soon. Dr. Pritchett will fill you in and answer any questions you have. He knows more than anyone in the world about pulmonary valve disease.”
Leaving, Dr. Gottfried moves without a sound, his head tilted and the shoulder on that side sagging. When he closes the door, Kraft turns on Dr. Pritchett.
“What operation? He said my heart’s good. You said you got good results on that catheter. The fat one yesterday said he got good results on his machine.”
The doctor explains. The “good” results meant they were finding what they needed to know. They are all agreed now the linings of the heart should be removed. A simple procedure for Dr. Gottfried—“he’s the best you could find”—even if the endocardium is scarred enough to be adhesive. They are also agreed about the pulmonary valve. It will be removed and replaced by an artificial device made of a flexible steel alloy. “Dr. Gottfried will just pop it right in.” We’re not, however, certain of the aortic valve. “Dr. Gottfried will make that decision during surgery.” Positive results are expected. There’s the strong probability of the heart restored to ninety percent efficiency and a good possibility of total cure. Of course, you’ll be on daily anticoagulant medicines for the rest of your life. No big affair. The important point, as Dr. Gottfried said, is the heart is essentially strong. Surgery, done now, while Kraft is young and before the heart is irrepairably weakened, is the determining factor. Of course, as in any surgery, there’s risk.
“Have I made it clear? Can I answer any questions, Mr. Kraft? I know we get too technical at times.”
“I’m not stupid.”
“No one implied you were.”
Emptying with dread, Kraft slips his hands under the blanket to hide their trembling. “Will I still need pissing pills after the operation?”
“Diuretics? No. I wouldn’t think so.”
“No more arrhythmia?”
“We can’t be sure of that. Sometimes the—”
“Then what kind of total cure, man?”
“I can’t explain all the physics and chemistry of the heart rhythm, Mr. Kraft. If you’d continue to have the arrhythmia, it would be benign. A mechanical thing. We have medicine to control it.”
“You said I did great with the exercises.”
“Yes. We got the results we needed.” Dr. Gottfried returns, still in his operating clothes, holding the manila folder, looking now a little bored as well as fatigued, his voice slow, quiet.
“Any questions for me?”
“The risk? Dr. What’shisname here said . . .”
“There’s ten percent mortality risk. That covers all open heart surgery. A lot of it relates to heart disease more advanced than yours, where general health isn’t as good as yours. There’s risk however, for you too. You know that.”
Kraft nods. He suddenly detests this man he needs, who’ll have the power of life over him. He closes his eyes.
“As I said, there’s no emergency. But I can fit you in two weeks from now. You could have it over with. Decide in a day or two. I’d appreciate that. Talk it over with your wife. With Dr. Felton. Let us know through him.”
Home again, Kraft, on his medicines, pissed, grew depressed, endured his headaches and lassitude, the arrhythmias, the miscellaneous pains, his sense of dissolution, the nausea; and, as before, continued to blame himself as well as feel betrayed. He submitted, and he waited. He never looked in the mirror anymore. While he shaved, he never saw himself. Sometimes he felt tearful. On the few days that he came around, he no longer went out to the sun and the pool but stayed indoors. He called no one, but answered the phone on his better days and kept up his end of the bullshit with old buddies and some writers who still remembered. No one but Elfi knew his despair.
When he passed the closed door to the den of his heroic history, his trophy room, he wasn’t even aware that he kept himself from going in. The door might as well have been the wall. What he kept seeing now was behind his eyes: The face of Dr. Gottfried. It flashed like a blurred, tired, boneless, powerful shape, producing a quality before which Kraft felt weak. He began to exalt the quality and despise the man and groped for a way by which he could begin to tell Elfi.
One night, in bed with her, a week after he’d made the decision to go for the surgery, which was now less than a week away, with the lights out and her figure illumined only by a small glow of clouded moonlight entering through the cracked drapes, he thought her asleep and ventured to loop his hand over her head where he could easily reach her outside shoulder. He touched it gently. It was the first time since his discovery of his impotence that he’d touched her in bed.
Immediately she moved across the space, nestled her head in his armpit, and pressed against his side. He resisted his desire to pull away. He was truly pleased by the way she fit.
“Every day now I pray,” she said. “Oh, not for you, don’t worry. You are going to be fine. I swear it, how much I believe that. You don’t need me to pray for you. I need it. I do it for myself. Selfishly. Entirely.”
He spoke of what was on his mind. “That surgeon’s freaking me.”
“You couldn’t find anyone better. I have the utmost confidence. To me that is what you call a man. You should see in his clinic. What the patients say about him. The eyes they have when they look at him. He walks through like a god. And I tell you something else. He has a vast understanding.”
He moved his hand from her arm. “It’s my heart, not yours.” His voice fell to despair. “It’s a man thing. You can’t understand. A sonofabitch puts his hand in Bobby Kraft’s heart. He pops in some goddamned metal valve. He’s flaky. He freaks me.”
“I tell you, I feel sorry for you. Too bad. For any man I feel sorry who doesn’t know who are his real enemies. Not to know that, that’s your freak. That’s the terrible thing can happen to a man in his life. Not to know who his enemies are.”
“That’s what he is,” Kraft declaimed in the darkness. “He’s my enemy. If there’s one thing I’ve always known, that’s it. The sonsabitches. Now Gottfried is. And there aint no game. I don’t even get to play.”
“You baby. Play. Play. It’s because all your life you played a game for a boy. That’s why you can’t know. Precisely. I always knew that.”
He pulled away from her. He got out of bed and loomed over her threateningly.
“Go on back home, Kraut. I don’t need you for the operation. To hell with the operation. I’ll call it off. How’s that?”
“Here is home, with you. Try and make me leave. I am not a man. I don’t need enemies.”
He got out of bed to get away. The bitch. She’d caught him at a time when there was nothing left of him.
Kraft enters the hospital trying to imagine it’s a stadium. The act lasts as long as his first smell of the antiseptics and the rubbery sound of a wheeled gurney. He tastes old metal in his mouth. He refuses the tranquilizers they keep pushing at him. He wants wakefulness. Elfi keeps visiting and fleeing.
He has nothing to say to her. She wants his buddies to come, she says he needs them. He says if one of them comes, that’s it. He clears out of the hospital, period. He wants to talk, but he can’t imagine a proper listener. For two years he endured what he never could have believed would’ve befallen him. There was no way to understand it, and this has left him now with loose ends. He can’t think of any arrangement of his mind that could gather them. They simply fall out.
It occurs to him he doesn’t know enough people who are dead.
It occurs to him he isn’t sick enough. He thinks he will be all right. He thinks he will be able to brag about it afterwards. Then he sees his heart and Gottfried’s hand, and he wants the man there at once to ask him what right he thinks he has.
It occurs to him he never really liked football. It was just an excuse for something else.
It occurs to him he just made that up. It can’t be so.
He wonders if he has ever really slept with Elfi. With any woman.
He laments his development of a double chin.
Sleep is a measure of defeat. Before games he never slept well.
Here, even at night, he keeps trying not to sleep. Most of the time he doesn’t. He asks one of the doctors if it will matter in the outcome that he isn’t sleeping now. The doctor says, Nope.
On the morning of the surgery, a nurse comes in. She sneaks up on him. She jabs a needle in his arm before he can say: What are you doing? She leaves before he can say: What the hell’d you do? I told you I aint taking anything will make me sleep. He begins to fight the fuzzy flaking in his head. He thinks he will talk to himself to keep awake and get it said. Say what?
Say it’s only me here to go alone if there’s no one going with me when he comes down like that from my apple to my gut to open where my heart is with a band of blood just before the saw goes off and rips from the apple to the gut down the middle of the bone while they pull the ribs wide the way mine under the center’s balls when I made the signals to my blood and was from the time it ever was until they saw the goddamned Bobby Kraft slip a shoulder and fake it once and fade back and let it go uncorked up there the way it spirals against the blue of it, the point of it, leather brown spiralling on the jolted blue to the banging on me that was no use to them. You sonsabitches. Cause the ball’s gone and hearing the roar of them with Jeffer getting it on his tips on the zig and in and streak that was going all the way cause I read the free safe blitz and called it on the line and faded against his looping where Copper picked him up and I let it go before the rest caved me with their hands pulling my ribs now and cranking on some ratchet bar to keep me spread and oh my God his rubbered hand on. Gottfried down with his knife in my heart’s like a jelly sack the way he cuts through it with my blood in a plastic tube with the flow of it into some machine that cleans it for going back into me with blades like wipers on cars in the rain when I played in mud to my ankles and in the snows and over ninety in the Coliseum like in hell before the roar my God. Keep this my heart or let me die you sonsabitches. Pray for me again Elfi that I didn’t love you the way such a little thing you are, and it was to do and I couldn’t, but what could you know of me and what I had to and what it was for me, born to be a thing in the lot and the park, and in the school too with all of them calling me cold as ice bastard, and I wasn’t any of that or how would I come to them in the pros out of a dink pussey college and be as good as any of them and better than most of all those that run the show on the field that are Quarterbacks. Godbacks goddammit. The way he’s supposed to, this Gottfried with that stare and not any loser. Me? A loser? Because I cry in the dread I feel now of the what?
Biblioklept 