by David Moskowitz

“Day Traders” appears in David Moskowitz’s short story collection Sharks On Fire.

It’s only practice, but the boy’s been down too long. You train your kids to get up and back into the huddle as quickly as possible, even if they’ve just given up a big play. Especially then—quick recovery shows confidence, strength. You’re almost men, you tell them, so writhing on the ground won’t draw a late flag: Save the histrionics for soccer, and go look it up if you don’t know what histrionics means.

You had been standing at the other end of the field and don’t know what happened or who is injured, but your assistants have already sprinted to the down player. They run, you walk—not because your knees are as bad as you like to let people believe or because you’re old and out of shape and have a belly that’s first trimester max. No, you walk because a coach is supposed to care, but he’s also supposed to be calm, level-headed, in control. Panic loses respect. You need to pretend it’s a real game: find out who’s hurt and start thinking, Who’s going in? while your trainers attend to the injured kid. Caring and worrying are in your job description, but so are X’s and O’s. You make adjustments in personnel or line formation, not kinesiology.

You can’t, won’t pop a dislocated shoulder back into its socket, or even a finger gone perpendicular the wrong way. Fingers are supposed to be easy, like those noisemakers you get on New Year’s Eve—grab one end, give it a tug.

And pop.

They’re called trainers, but to you they’re medics without sutures and hypodermics. They not only re-align body parts but watch out for dangers worse late hits or chop blocks— sunstroke and dehydration. You only know the vomit rule: once means you’re a man, treating fear like a cat does hair—balling it up inside and yuking it out. Twice means your body is telling you to get inside and call it a day. Three times or more demands a trip the emergency room. That Minnesota Viking, Korey Stringer: he vomited five times in one practice and by the time his brain shut down, he was running a 108 degree fever while submerged in a tub of ice.

But Orange County in October is nothing like the Midwest in mid-August. It’s dry and in the 60’s. Besides, Stringer had belly full of ephedra while even your the varsity players don’t take enough creatine to make pissing the renal equivalent of wind sprints. Sports aren’t their future; otherwise they might risk steroid acne for an extra 20 pounds of muscle. Better yet, their parents aren’t the kinds who’ve been getting tossed from the stands since T-ball. Your boys’ parents understand that for every Earl Woods, Richard Williams or Jack Elway placing a golf club, tennis racket or football into their future superstar’s cradle, there’s a thousand Marv Marinovich’s—even if the kid develops some talent, he’s too unstable to perform.

You blocked for Marv’s boy, Todd, at USC during their Rose Bowl campaign—mostly in practice. An offensive lineman just good enough to get the full-ride scholarship, you rarely started a game and had no illusions about going pro, even in Canada. Todd and his magic arm did reach the NFL—the Raiders—but he got cut for mediocre play and worse conduct. Conduct? The Raiders? It was around the time Guns and Roses booted their drummer: like Todd, he couldn’t handle his heroin.

Heroin? Not your boys. They’re good kids—all of them—and that makes this tougher: whoever’s injured is automatically the last person you’d want to see hurt.

Beer and pot are your biggest concerns, and you can always tell when one of the ADHD crowd has sold his Ritalin: he’ll do something stupid that means extra push-ups or laps around the track—and then he doesn’t seem to mind. One of your favorite things about this job is your power to make teenage boys run laps for anything, even swearing.

But Coach McCullers, they complained, sometimes you just gotta say something—especially across the lines. You know what gets said in the trenches.

In the trenches. You love that: as if the Battle of the Ardennes was fought between the front fours of France and Germany. But you called it war too, and now you’ve got a casualty who isn’t getting up.

The boys kept pushing: So what do we say, coach?

Do more than just insult them, you said in your best George C. Scott-as-Patton, confuse them. If you want to call someone a mother-effer, call him an Oedipus.

“Sounds like a faggot,” one kid snapped back. You didn’t see which one. The others wouldn’t give up the culprit, so the whole team took a trip around the track, in pads. Team unity, then tolerance: teaching one value at a time.

Maybe you should have spent more time stressing that “giving it your all” doesn’t mean abandoning thoughts of self-preservation.

You never say things like, “I teach the game.” You’re a coach. Go to class, you tell your players—behave, do your work, and don’t cheat—and I got your back. And you do: the teachers like you, and give your players some leeway on due-dates and makeup exams. Their big headaches come from the honors kids, with their whining, their hi-tech cheating schemes and their parents who are worse than any Little League taskmasters. These parents track their kids grades and test scores like day traders watching their stocks. IBM and TRW to GPA, AP and SAT.

You still can’t see the down kid, and can no longer lie to yourself about your measured pace: it’s not your weight, or your knees, or some self-imposed sense of calm holding you back. It’s fear and doubt, clinging to your legs like a horde of pee-wee tacklers, maturing with your every step: through Pop-Warner, jr. high, high school—by the time you reach your destination you’ll have Refrigerator Perry and Ray Lewis holding you back.

Would I move faster, you wonder, if I knew whether the kid was really hurt or just got the wind knocked out of him? No, you think, you wouldn’t know how you’d respond any more than you knew this was going to happen when you woke up this morning. Or when half-way through practice you left the main scrimmage to spend some “you’re an important part of the team” time with your place-kicker. You couldn’t know, and that’s how you like it. Knowing the future isn’t worth it. You’ve seen enough Twilight Zone television: People get the next day’s newspapers and are all set to make their fortune playing the lottery, the ponies, or the stock market. Then they find that story. Maybe it’s their obituary or about a presidential assassination and their efforts to prevent the tragedy only bring it about. That’s the lesson: the only thing worse than knowing the future is trying to respond to it.

Ask Oedipus.

One of those shows featured a stock broker who lost everyone’s money, including his own. As he was tearing the eviction notice off the apartment door, he found the magic newspaper on his welcome mat. Of course, nobody he knew with money wanted to talk to him. You changed the channel before you saw the end. It reminded you too much of Leigh Johnson, who played safety opposite you in college. Even then he knew that he was going to became a stockbroker. Others’ greed is more dependable than your own body, he’d say, and if you’re smart, it’s a safe life—just collect commissions. When you told him you wanted to coach, he said that was for has-beens with no money and fewer skills, not the never-weres smart enough major in something other than general studies or communications. Besides, he said, nowadays kids are almost as bad as their parents: You make them run too many laps or not give them enough playing time and they’ll find a reason to sue. Tell the district office you tried to kiss them in the shower.

Now you wish Leigh had reminded you that a stockbroker is only involved in his clients’ financial, not physical, well-being.

The last time you saw Leigh, he said he was out of the business even before you could launch your preemptive, “I got nothing to invest.” Greed was still fashionable, but Internet-trading made brokerage houses obsolete. Day traders don’t need analysis or to know product or personnel. They care no more about a company than the boys in Vegas lose sleep over the pain behind the injury reports. But point-spreads don’t affect the outcome and that’s what makes sports special. You never know when the U.S. Olympic hockey team will beat Russia or Buster Douglas gets Mike Tyson on an off night. Football’s especially rich in random factors: played outdoors with a ball that isn’t round, so you never know how it might bounce.

Or a neck might snap.

It’s scary how calm the scene around the kid is. There’s no shouting, no pointing fingers, no impromptu prayer circles—but the quiet accidents are the worst. Joe Theisman’s broken a leg on Monday Night Football was an anatomical pirouette worthy of a thousand replays and did more for his legacy than his Superbowl wins, but it was still just a shattered bone. Drew Bledsoe walked away from a tackle nobody paid too much attention to and his spleen was in an operating room bucket by sundown. Dale Earnhardt’s fatal accident doesn’t get shown much, but not out of respect—NASCAR’s grand old man died in television’s equivalent of a fender bender.

Please be o.k., you pray. Please don’t be dead. These kids don’t know death with its funerals, grief counselors and special assemblies. These aren’t inner-city gang kids, base kids with fathers overseas, or trailer park meth-lab offspring. These kids have their share of drugs, divorce and domestic drama, but there’s enough in the checkbook to handle the cleanup. These are middle class kids.

No, they’re upper class, like you were.

Still, you had death in high school. One day at lunchtime, a pickup truck ran into a light post while the driver was messing with the radio. All three kids riding in back died. You knew them by sight, but not well enough to recognize their names when the announcement came over the loudspeakers.

You remember the grief, and the questions: Who let these kids off campus? Why were they riding in the back? Who is responsible?

The Irvine World News showed photos of the scene, once the bodies were gone and Caltrans had hosed down the asphalt. Every time you listen to The Doors you think of that accident Jim Morrison saw as a kid—before the cleanup crews arrived: “Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding.” You’ve seen blood on the field. Cuts and scrapes and compound fractures. No crimson fountains up ahead—at least that would mean a beating heart.

One of the fatalities was a goth girl. A senior, she’d actually written a will and wished for Book of the Dead-style photos to appear with her obits. The family sided with school brass in the battle between the yearbook committee and the administration, so the memorial featured pictures from her freshman year, before the makeover.

Nobody recognized her. She had red hair and wore that same smile you see in team photos on kids playing ball just to please their parents.

You don’t look at the other players’ jerseys, so you can’t eliminate names from the possible wounded. It’s better that way. The longer you don’t know whose down, the longer images of his parents stay out of your head. At least by now you’re convinced the lack of activity means he is definitely alive and maybe just paralyzed. Just paralyzed. Maybe he’ll be one of those who become special people because of their disability. You’ll wheel him out to the sidelines during the games—the team’s good luck charm. Everyone can rub his head or his belly and he’ll absorb all of their bad luck. He’ll write an inspirational book. Go on Oprah. Become a motivational speaker. Be set for life. Hook up with Gerald Klein, that crippled multi-millionaire, and co-host an investment show on MSNBC.

No, his money will come from suing the district. You know those liability release forms have the teeth of a Hollywood pre-nup, and you’ll be named as well. You’re in charge. You’re the authority figure. It doesn’t matter that you were on the sidelines. Or that he refused to learn that the play is never over and got hit by a cheap shot. Or that he took the whistle as a license to start daydreaming about blowjobs.

After that accident in high school, your dad asked, What the hell you needed a pick-up for in this town?

Surfboards, you said.

Fiberglass stretchers, he called them. Two decades in the Coast Guard rescuing drunks in million-dollar yachts made him wary of the ocean’s random power. At least the boy’s on land if something happens, he told your mother when she objected to your playing ball. Every time Dad worked in a storm, Mom would get on your ass about homework. Try to steer you into a nice safe job, like lawyer or accountant.

Your future? Co-defendant. Pariah. The man who killed football at Hamilton High. You’ll never coach again. Then what?

“Why did you leave your last position?”

“An all-American kid with hopes and dreams and promise severed his spinal cord while he was under my supervision.”

A kid. You don’t “teach” the game and you don’t call your boys “son.” It doesn’t feel right in your mouth. You have two daughters who are young enough that you don’t get nervous whenever you hear your players talk about their girlfriends. And while this boy may be crippled for life, you’ll watch your girls grow while you sit at home waiting for your wife to come back from the second job she has to take. Sitting there, getting fatter on American cheese and mayonnaise sandwiches, which is all you’ll eat because they’re cheap. You’ll sit there, circling want-ads in front of Judge Judy. Maybe finish off your defense-depleted savings playing day trader, mistiming nickel price swings in stocks, and losing an additional eight bucks with every late response. Prove Leigh Johnson wrong. After all, he suggested you might make a decent day trader: coaches said you could smell what an opposing linebacker was going to do—too bad you were too small to respond effectively.

Ease down, you tell yourself. Nobody’s got their cell phone out. Nobody’s talking to 9-1-1—or their lawyers.

A couple of the other players see you coming and back away, leaving only the injured player and the trainers hovering around him. His jersey has ridden up his body and as you get closer, you feel yourself moving faster, like the exposed flesh below his floating ribs is the ball, and you’re about to kick off on opening day. Why not? If he’s down for good, how much more could it mess up your life?

Get up, you want to scream. Get up, goddamnit.

DAVID MOSKOWITZ is an adjunct professor teaching English on campus at Pacific University (Forest Grove, OR), and online at Ashford University. His work has appeared in publications including The Comics Journal, Vortext, Soundings, Rhapsoidia and numerous magazines covering electronic gaming. He also supplied the movie-length script to the U.S. version of the Japanese computer game Knights of Xentar. He lives in Venice with two houserabbits of his own and a variable number of foster bunnies.