Rash by Pete Hautman Page A

on the field, surrounded by a ring of fire. I blinked, and my eyes adjusted. It wasn’t a ring of fire, but it might as well have been—we were surrounded by Goldshirts.
    All of them. I looked back at the door, and somehow I knew it would not open. Rhino let out a soft grunt, spread his tree-trunk legs, and tucked his head turtlelike between his massive shoulders. I scanned the circle of grinning faces, looking for a way out. Gorp, wearing a sling, stood front and center. Fragger was right next to him, tossing a football from one hand to the other.
    I braced myself for the beating of a lifetime.
    Instead they all smiled and began to clap.
    We’d made the team.

Being a Goldshirt meant better food, extra sleep, and plenty of respect from the paperpants, which was what we called the other inmates. I didn’t have to worry about getting beat up or forked by Fragger, and, of course, I got to wear the gold T-shirt and denims. I put mine on the first day. Rhino’s had to be ordered special, on account of his enormity.
    Being a Goldshirt wasn’t all Frazzies and sack time. We had to work just like everybody else. They pulled me and Rhino off our pepperoni team and sent us to shipping and receiving, which was where all the other Goldshirts worked. For eight hours a day we boxed and crated frozen pizzas, unloaded supply trucks, and performed various other tasks that required lifting, pushing, pulling, and pounding.
    It was part of our training.
    After a short Frazzie and Pepsi break we had another four hours of training. That meant weight lifting, calisthenics, drills, classroom time, and scrimmages. The Goldshirts, it seemed, were all about football. We were Hammer’s boys, and there was nothing Hammer likedbetter than to watch a good rough-and-tumble game of tackle football.
    The whole idea of actually playing a contact sport like football probably sounds pretty crazy. Any sport in which players smash into one another while running at full speed has got to be insane. Believe me, it is—and doing it without pads, helmets, braces, masks, or gloves is flatout psychotic. We averaged about three injuries a week. During my first two weeks as a Goldshirt we had a concussion, two broken bones, a shoulder separation, two dislocated fingers, and a broken nose. Lesser sprains, bruises, and cuts were counted in the dozens.
    The first few times I hit the field I was terrified. Hammer was determined to teach me to catch. Fragger kept passing the ball to me. The idea was to catch it and run it down to the end of the field. Problem was, there was this wall of Goldshirts charging me. I kept dropping the ball. Didn’t matter. They tackled me anyway.
    I went to bed every night exhausted, bruised, and aching, and I woke up feeling worse. But I learned. I learned to find that ball in the sky, and forget about the rest of the world for that one crucial second. Just me and the ball. I learned to avoid getting hit so often and so hard. I even got used to the idea of getting hurt. And here’s the strangest part of all: Every day we beat the crap out of one another, but we still became good friends. We were all on the same team. We learned to trust one another. Even Fragger turned out to be an okay guy—if you were a Goldshirt.
    Naturally we had our disagreements. Like the time I got into it with Bullet.
    Hammer had divided us into sides. I was offense. We were running a trick play called the “flea-flicker.” Fragger, the quarterback, handed the ball off to me, I ran it toward the line of scrimmage, then stopped and tossed the ball back to Fragger, and he passed it downfield to the wide-open Sam Rogers.
    The play worked perfectly, but I didn’t get to see Rogers make the touchdown because one full second after I’d tossed the ball back to Fragger, Bullet slammed into me, hard.
    It was a wrongful hit. He knew it and I knew it, even as I was flat on my back gasping for air. Bullet, standing over me, offered a hand.
    “Sorry, man,” he said.