pledges left in the circle, and now Mike Rogers stepped into the circle to thin the herd. Woom! Two pledges went down, but the other four hung on. “Get in here,” Rogers said, and I stood across from him, taking a few shots from a skinny kid who surprised me by being ferocious while Rogers told the last four how Woom! Ball used to be worse, that every pledge test had been softened for the likes of pussies like them. Woom! Until a kid named Jim Ulsh took that ball point first and looked to have come apart inside. Woom! Until another named Dave Mazur clutched himself as if he’d cracked a rib because a ball from Rogers thunked wide. Rogers and I were between the two pledges left, screaming Woom! as if the sound itself could take the air out of somebody. Woom! Rogers shouted once more, but then he seemed to lose heart and tossed the ball to me so unexpectedly that I had to bat it away before it hit my face. “Let’s get this run over with, all you pussies,” he said, herding the pledges upstairs and outside, keeping Ulsh and Mazur for a trip to the emergency room “just in case.” “Let’s go,” I said. I loved running. I’d run third or fourth on Kent State’s cross country for three years by then. The pledges broke for the road that ran out of town. I was taking them a mile out, a mile back, and I ran beside the last two Woom! Ball survivors, matching their strides, the three of us watching for lights in windows at quarter to six, not one of those pledges asking me about the blond hair I didn’t have the last time they’d seen me. Sunday afternoon, Art Arthurs, the only other English major in my fraternity, and I had washed our hair with peroxide. He was a senior, but he’d pledged with me, spring, 1968, as a sophomore transfer. Unlike me, he kept his hair short, and there was a scattering of butch and femme jokes when we decided to room together. King and queen ones, too, because my cross country letters didn’t carry much
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