Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [177]
Woods's father had been a hell of a football player in college, and tried to raise his son to be more of the same. Woods grew up on a ranch, but his father made sure there was a football around, and he was one son who spent his boyhood running out for passes. As soon as his hands were large enough, he was pulling them in over his shoulder. When he got through high school, there was an athletic scholarship at the University of Wyoming.
At Wyoming, the real talent seemed to be imported from the East. Woods got the idea that just as the greatest potatoes grew indigenously in Idaho, so football players came naturally from Pennsylvania and Ohio. Woods had always thought he was pretty good and pretty big and pretty crazy until those eastern football players came in from the mill towns. Six of those Polacks, Bohunks, and Italians shared the same girl all freshman year. It wasn't that they couldn't have others, it was that they liked keeping it in the family. It was better that way. One of those monsters, right out of the middle of defensive line, got so tired one night of being turned down by a new date that he proceeded to urinate on her.
Another night, with a lot of snow on the ground, a group of them took off in two cars for a ride through the mountains. A bottle of booze for each car. On the way back, in a snowstorm, the lead vehicle came around a curve, went into a skid, and smashed into a snow bound Chevy by the side of the road. There were only two football players in the first collision, and they jumped out into the middle of the highway. Woods, in the second car, following at high speed, came around the same turn and went into the ditch to avoid hitting them. The two from the first car and the three in the second got together and lifted Woods's car onto the road again. That felt so good that the fellows from the first car now ripped their license plates off, and pushed the vehicle over the mountain and into the ravine. It struck on rocks with the great noise of thunder, and made soft deep sounds like the wind when it plowed through deep snow. They watched with the awe attending large events.
Of course the car they had smacked into was a mess. So they decided to roll it down the highway. Woods tried to talk them out of that. Right in the middle, he could not get over the fact that he, with his own big reputation to maintain, was being the peacemaker.
He failed. They set that wreck rolling. A police car coming up the grade just avoided a head-on collision. Some rich alumnus settled the cost. One did not lose five talented sophomores for too little.
Woods never starred. After a while he was too scared. You could get maimed out there. The coach he liked moved on, and the new coach disapproved of the hours Woods had to give to pre-med labs.
Told him to switch to Phys. Ed. Woods didn't. He never starred.
Nonetheless, he didn't have any illusions about the scope of the problem. There were two kinds of human beings on earth and maybe he had been placed to know both kinds. The civilized had their small self-destructive habits and their controlled paranoia, but they could live in a civilized world. You could tinker with them on the couch. It was the uncivilized who caused the discomfort in psychiatric circles.
Woods had long suspected the best-kept secret in psychiatric circles was that nobody understood psychopaths, and few had any notion of psychotics. "Look," he would sometimes be tempted to tell a colleague, "the psychotic thinks he's in contact with spirits from other worlds. He believes he is prey to the spirits of the dead. He's in terror. By his understanding, he lives in a field of evil forces.
"The psychopath," Woods would tell them, "inhabits the same place. It is just that he feels stronger. The psychopath sees himself as a potent force in that field of forces. Sometimes he even believes he can go to war against them, and win. So if he really loses, he is close to collapse, and can be as ghost ridden as a psychotic."
3
For a moment, Woods wondered