The Education of Arnold Hitler. Marc Estrin

in the fourth quarter, with a first down at the Eagle forty-seven, Arnold dropped back to pass. He saw flanker Gordon Headlee open, but his touch was too soft, and the ball fluttered, a high fly up for grabs. Interception! His second in the game. The imposter was quickly dumped, but the moment, it turned out, was fatal. With 2:27 left in the game, the Eagle quarterback threw the finest pass of his life, a sixty-two-yard bomb to his left end, to tie the score, 13-all, and the extra point was good. In the last two minutes of play, Arnold led a fierce attack from his own thirty-yard line. After three successive first downs, between short, successful passing and brutal inching-over pileups, the Tigers were at the Eagle thirty-five, third and five. Forty-six seconds on the clock. The wide receiver went into motion, Arnold dropped back to pass, hesitated a split second, faked a handoff to the left, and started around the right, angling low for the end zone. This time Boomer was on him, lunging at him high in a full-speed blitz, smashing his enormous bulk down on Arnold’s neck.

      Force = mass × acceleration. The force was great.

      All right. So what? He got trashed. It was part of the game. Looking up at his assailant as he lay crumpled on the ground, he reached out for a hand—a not uncommon collegial courtesy—and instead met the most hate-filled eyes he had ever seen glowering from the huge face towering over him.

      “C’mon, you fuckin pussy, get up. You motherfuckin nigger-lover pretty boy, c’mon, let’s see how tough you are.”

      Sticks and stones may . . .

      “Get up, you prick, you goddamn pretty boy, nigger-lovin pussy-prick, Mr. Joe Rah-Rah Nigger-Jew.” And he spit. The striped-shirts broke it up. Boomer spit again and lumbered away.

      Nigger-lover? Nigger-Jew? The imprecations had spread two hundred miles to Abilene? Was he to have revenge wreaked upon him by every porcine racist in Texas high school football? And what was this “Jew” thing?

      As he struggled to get up, helped by his teammates, Arnold vomited a little on the field. Just a little. And he wobbled to the bench to recover, his head between his knees.

      “Arnold.”

      It was Jacobo.

      “Arnold, can you hear me?”

      “A lot of static, Nonno, a lot of static.”

      “You want to know what the ‘Jew’ thing is?”

      “What Jew thing?”

      “What he called you—Nigger-Jew.”

      “Who?”

      “Signore Galumpho out there.”

      Ten seconds’ silence.

      “Arnold?”

      “Sorry, my head is spinning.”

      “In that case, I have a riddle for you: So the old lady says, ‘Sam, close the window. It’s cold outside.’”

      “Here, too, Grandpa. We had snow. . . .”

      “And the old man says, ‘Nu, and if I close the window, will it be warm outside?’”

      “Is that the riddle?”

      “No. The riddle is, what color are the speakers?”

      Arnold paused to listen to his head hurt.

      “From the way you say it, it sounds like a Jewish joke.”

      “An if ah opens de winda, is it gwine be warm out dere?”

      “Grandpa!”

      “Well?”

      “Colored.”

      “Can you imagine this story in a Swedish accent, or a French accent, or Deutsch or Italiano?”

      “No.”

      “Colored and Jew, eternal pair, the only two who could make such a story. Why’s that?”

      “Grandpa, I have a headache. I can’t think.”

      “Think later, then. I have one more question—easy: What’s the object of Jewish football?”

      “Tell me,” Arnold said wearily.

      “To get the quarter back.”

      “Grandpa, that’s racist.”

      “So is Galumpho. Ciao, bambino.”

      And he hung up.

      . . .

      When the whistle blew on their first defeat, the Tigers gathered at the fifty-yard line to pray an altogether different petition from the prideful locker room thank-you of two hours earlier. Coach Crews washed the boys in the waters of Babylon as they wept over their impotence in the strange land of defeat. The passer and the receiver had much to bemoan that night.

      When BJ got home, he was the one to discover the four slashed tires on the family car.