Iron Gut, Golden Lung Pt. 12
43
“Greetings, sports fans, to the days of tears and triumph!” said Herb Duhon of the Broussard Duhons, legendary announcer and voice of Louisiana State Biological Sports. Saturday brought the opening day crowd, about a hundred spectators in the bleachers; their wide buttocks flattened on the metal, they fed on lumps of cayenne pepper fries from boxes shaped like canoes. They inhaled buckets of soda to wash down ten-dollar corndogs. Girls in shorts bounced babies on their knees and muttered impatience for when the athletes would show. A home audience of family members, girlfriends, and aficionados; the stalwarts who kept score of rankings and showed up fifty to ninety-five percent drunk, wielding cardboard lungs, foam intestines tottering on their heads. Ready to hurl Mardi Gras beads and herald their hero with chants of “Breathe, ‘Miah, Breathe!” for the first time in nine months.
Downwind from the chatter and noshing of snack food, Herb Duhon slid his loafers off under the desk and reviewed his notes. It would be a long day with eighteen events and he was settled in, his traditional scotch and soda on hand beside the microphone. At stations along the track gathered fifty starters, twenty-four alternates, thirty-two meds, five coaches, thirty assistant coaches, ten judges, and twelve referees; two apiece of paste boys, dream boys, oxygen boys, and spit boys; four cameramen filming for the campus cable access station; five cameramen handling the SEC Network livestream; thirty iPad-wielding med students representing their individual schools; two all-purpose tech guys, a man with yellow whiskers and an eroding Iron Maiden shirt accompanied by a teenaged assistant who may have been his son; twelve EMTs on the bench looking anxious for their smoke break. The one and only Herb Duhon reminded the audience they had five minutes to hit the snack bar before the meet. Made garbled and godlike on the loudspeaker, his voice was pure radio, tenorous and masculine, designed to enter the home and become part of it.
After his announcement the song “Baby Come Back” resumed softly rocking from the sound system. Herb’s desk stood at the eastern end of the track near two sets of five wooden boxes for the Tracters. During competition the athletes would swallow electronic trackers, sending a Cheetos-eye-view of their intestines to Herb and the judges’ screens. His job entailed making a narrative from the heroic churn of their insides. Over forty years he’d seen kids pass out, shit, and scream. He’d seen urethras break and douse the astroturf in the sparkling piss of detoxified bladders and accentuated each heartache with the trademark wit he’d developed as host of the game show Le Bon Temps. It was tic-tac-toe crossed with culture; you had to answer a question only a Cajun would know to get the square. Everyone in Acadiana had an in-law who’d been a contestant during its 1970s heyday. Before that gig, he worked as a minor league baseball commentator for the Broussard Civets. Like Edward R. Murrow and Orson Welles, those venerable lords of the FM tubes, he would iron his suits and massage his hair into a gray pompadour every morning because true class carried over electromagnetic waves.
While sports commentary made him a celebrity, he considered his main contribution to local flavor as being the grand old man at Lucy’s Bar & Grill, where from Happy Hour till zydeco he would spin stories of the times he saw Ringo, Dylan, and Stevie. (He wouldn’t give a last name. “Wonder?” some would ask. “Nicks?” others would say. The answer was both.) Once, he had sought more from life. That brief stint at KTAE in Pittsburgh when he’d hoped to replace the moderately beloved Myron Cope on Steelers play-by-play, his dreams shattered when the fat-faced station manager fired him for sounding “too southern.”
Overall, it was a good career he would jokingly describe as “a forty-year-long retirement.” (Though sometimes at night he could hear the manager, that deplorable yankee, criticize him from beyond the grave.) What he never expected was his role in the meteoric rise of Jaelin Freeman, who would climb the slimy rope of her guts to stardom.
Jaelin had expected the coach would ask her to lie.
That made sense, right? Whatever Jeremiah dropped down the drain warranted some hush-hush mafia type deal where she went home and said nothing. To her bewilderment, Coach suggested to her in vague words and worried expressions that Jeremiah’s future required she fill in for the stricken Latoilais.
She found herself in the hallway outside the track in a purple tennis skirt and sports bra donated by the white girl Katie, her arms crossed over her chest to pretend it was the air conditioning making her tremble and not the psychological turmoil of having just left a CT scan that inexplicably existed in the basement of a college field house for an intestinal X-ray conducted by a pair of oily-skinned meds so frazzled at their unanticipated task they were screaming directions at her. Lie down! Stay still! The man she blamed for this chaos stood before the team with his fingers laced over his khakied lap and tears in his eyes.
“Mike Pepperdeen used to tell me there are moments that break us and moments that chain us. A chain can be any length. It can be any color. But once it’s on you, it stays on.” He’d probably practiced this speech in front of the mirror. “But broken bones mend. And nobody breaks more than athletes because nobody works as hard as we do.” Waitresses. Postal workers. Drug dealers. “I look around and I see broken people.” No lie there. Hands in pockets, fists clenched, eyes swollen, the young athletes appeared traumatized. Ever anomalous, Jeremiah gave Coach his undivided attention, unnervingly vigilant. “Go out there and mend. Because I tell you,” Coach pumped his fist, “nothing heals like victory. Win every heat for Dave. Win semifinals for Dave. Take it all . . . for Dave!”
Jaelin grit her teeth through their applause. She spoke affirmations to herself. This will heal us and honor him. We should do it for Dave, last seen wheeled into an ambulance with IVs stippled up his arms.
A Post-it on Herb Duhon’s sheet said LSU had a last minute replacement for Dave Latoilais and he thought little of it, other than to note she shared a last name with the returning star Respirater. So many coloreds in Louisiana named Freeman. He spouted facts about the teams until the station manager’s decaffeinated voice told him over the headset they were ready. Herb Duhon spoke into the mic: “Welcome, friends, to the Bayou Bio Bowl! We have a humdinger of a meet today—LSU hosting Mississippi, Texas A&M, University of Florida, Tennessee, and Auburn. As ever, we are simulcasting live on 98.1 The Eagle and Tiger TV right into your lovely homes across South Loozeeanna. Here comes LSU onto the field.”
They ran out in that springy way athletes did, waving to the crowd. The cheering hit a sharp estrogen spike when Jeremiah Freeman appeared; colored girls exploded with “Breathe, ‘Miah, breathe!” A stud that Jeremiah, his stamina comparable to the great Darrell Elba, his eloquence with nose and mouth reminiscent of Larry Beaux in that magical ‘83 season. An arachnoid predator, a golden-lunged demigod, and like all great athletes something of a bastard, too disdainful to look his opponents in the eyes.
Behind that bastard came a hauntingly pretty black girl who wore her hair in tight plaits. She looked about eighteen but seemed spiritually older. She had a name but Herb Duhon thought of her like a mystery knight from the King Arthur books he would read as a boy living on ten acres of bean farm, an only child with nothing to do but injure himself seeking the Holy Grail.
She had to be related to Jeremiah, given their similarities in the mouth and brow, and it intrigued Herb Duhon how her presence changed his nature. Whereas he typically moved with slinky cool, like his very blood contained the Duke Ellington Orchestra, today he looked tense, the focus that carried him to number two in the league concentrated on the task of literally watching Jaelin’s back. That alone hinted at an interesting story behind this case of nepotism and Herb snapped his fingers at a paste boy. “Go ask Coach Guidry about that girl! Hurry!”
Jaelin looked out of her element, even simpleminded. She did stretches. Stretches! For an eating contest! “Our newest member to the LSU team is Jaelin Freeman,” Herb Duhon informed the crowd. “She looks a little lost.”
An impulsive move to hide his admiration with derision. Chuckles erupted from the bleachers and Jaelin shot him a hateful glare. He blushed guiltily. The brother had a similar glare for Herb except scarier, and Herb Duhon wished he could hide under the bleachers. The hulking animus whispered something to his anima. Mouth pursed in an indivisible line, she adjusted her overlarge sports bra and Herb was grateful to have the desk in front of him. The loose skin on her torso puddled into a roll of fat above her waistband, her belly marked with a hairline scar. Overwhelmed by lust and shame, like a child scolded by Meemaw, Herb Duhon waited for a chance to slip in his famous “Barns are burnin’!” catchphrase.
The paste boy returned with a note saying she’d beaten diverticulitis. What a story! Words erupted from him like the Holy Spirit had possession of his larynx. “This is a true miracle, ladies and gentlemen. A year ago they said this brave little lady wouldn’t live to see her twentieth birthday. She fought her way back and here she is competing for the first time!”
Jaelin cringed adorably. Herb loosened his ascot.
Nearby two older people took their seats behind a desk, each living proof why Biological Sports engendered such loyal fans: they could become refs and scorekeepers. The elderly Cajuns reclined in string-bottomed chairs, opening their notepads as jittery green numbers counted to fifty in the upper right corner of their late ‘80s Panasonic television.
That hoss Donyelle Jones, an All-American with quite the pro record, guided Jaelin to the toilets on Herb’s right hand. She took the third box from the left, and as soon as she sat began smoothing the fabric of her skirt over her crotch, fidgeting to make her bare ass comfortable on the cushion. When at last she found that position, the sweetheart began to prep herself, moving her lips in a conversation only she could hear.
Jaelin felt like the seed fallen on hard soil in the parable. Already she’d sweated through her sports bra, a conspicuous stain in the middle of her cleavage. Her self-preservation instincts told her to walk away and leave this team to its fate, before she became party to further disaster.
“Keep it together,” she whispered to herself, and as a meditation let her gaze drift to the equipment in disarray on the sidelines: enema tubes, stethoscopes, thermometers, nasal sprays, syringes, two red biohazard cans, tub of Vaseline, defibrillator, bouquet of oxygen tanks. A DIY intravenous kit consisting on three fluid bags plus a six-pack of isotonic saline in plastic bottles and five bags of lactate, two rolling stands, rubber tubes, a leather case of tiny needles made to slip neatly in the vein. Orange five-gallon Gatorade cooler, gallon of potassium chloride, a couple dozen water bottles, plastic Albertsons bag of protein bars, jar of vivid yellow turmeric the Wavers would gag down between bouts for an NCAA-approved neuron boost, Ex-lax, ipecac syrup, cans of Tracter paste she’d seen the industrious Salivaters use as weights for squats. “Pretty cool stuff,” Jeremiah would not have said in his endless griping about outdated and cheap materials. Her teammates looked prepared, certainly more so than she.
Two seats to her right she could see Donyelle still visibly shaken from his partner’s accident. She scanned the other players. Ribcages prominent under their jerseys, collarbones that could hold water, and hipbones poking through the nylon of their skirts, it became clear metabolism factored strongly in their recruitments, a squad of pixies around whom she felt ponderous. Anxieties multiplied; she wondered the legality of subbing on a college team. But everyone had gone along. She repeated this to herself: they went along. Including Jeremiah.
To her immediate right sat a legacy athlete, the third generation of Cheatham County Harvest Eating champs. He considered himself the hip update to the family dynasty. Unlike Pa and Pap Pap, obese men who needed scooters to shop at Kroger, he was tiny. Instead of pies and hot dogs, he crammed green paste and hoped his good looks would make him a star.
To her left sat a former Hawkins County beauty queen who’d discovered digestive sports after a lifetime of bulimia. She despised how haggard the colored girl looked. The beauty queen had gotten her hair done for the opening meet; having her scalp singed with curling irons and spending hours looking like the Starship Enterprise crashed through her head hadn’t been fun. But she did it, only for this chick to show up looking like Raggedy Ann. And those abs! How did a girl like that develop the gut flora to balance whatever genetically modified trash she stuffed down her gullet?
Herb Duhon spoke over the loudspeaker. “In her regular life, Jaelin likes to teach etiquette to littler ladies than herself at her local church. What a sweetheart, eh? Let’s see what this little lady can do.”
The Cheatham County legacy felt ill and the old announcer’s weird obsession with the new girl wasn’t helping. Could this dried-towel-looking motherfucker just shut the fuck up? He’d always had doubts about his team’s method of fasting for five days, bingeing high fiber five days, fast, binge, repeat all summer. Lo and behold, he got constipated.
Hence last night he took a laxative. Now, nauseated from the mucus secretions inside of him, it took all his fortitude not to weep from the pain near his spine, sharp, throbbing, like his guts sprouting mouths to puke upon his sacroiliac. He looked to the Tennessee bleachers and saw his big sister come from her Arkansas farm. She removed her toddler’s chubby hand from his mouth to make him wave stickily at his uncle. Her smile said, “No matter what you’re a winner to us,” worse than being called a loser.
The black girl said hello to him and he nearly strangled on gratitude.
Herb Duhon noticed Jaelin offer both opponents handshakes. The beauty queen refused to look at her, but the legacy clamped her hand like a lamprey on an eel. It reminded him of Jackie Robinson and Peewee Reese conquering racism. No—Jesus on Golgotha! The humble boy was Saint Dismas praising Christ before they died while the catty bitch would burn in Hell like that other guy whose name no one remembered.
A stout boy in a polo ordered Jaelin open her mouth. She had the familiar sensation of latexed fingers probing her gums. He stuck a funnel between her teeth and she panicked watching him lift a bucket of algae-looking slop. From his pocket the boy retrieved a Listerene-green pill. She examined this new torture implement: through a red-tinted window no bigger than a cuticle, she could see a microchip.
Could be toxic. Could be an implant to spy on her. She spit out the funnel. “No.”
The boy looked baffled. Donyelle leaned across the Cheatham County legacy to whisper, “It’s the tracker. It transmits your progress to the refs.”
She perspired in her bra. No—no more things inside her. She sucked in her lips like a baby refusing dinner.
Judging by the expressions around her, they expected her to gulp the bugging device. After all, didn’t she train for this? Each passing moment threatened to ruin the lie. The Cheatham County legacy gave her hand a sympathetic squeeze and she pulled away. Inwardly asking God for strength, she fixed her face to look aloof and opened wide for the funnel. Like a hog being fattened, she swallowed the concoction and tracker with it. Shit tasted like dead grass.
When it was over she slouched against the wooden seat back. Success.
She waited an hour.
“All those late night talk show hosts make fun of competitive digestion,” Donyelle told her on the bench, staring into space. “Other night I saw Jimmy Fallon talking shit. I’m like, “Nigga, you ain’t funny.’ You ever watch SNL? He giggled in every skit.”
“You’re rambling,” said Jaelin, her patience smothered under the paste in her belly.
It took him a moment to reel his thoughts back from the horror that befell Latoilais. Then he explained to her what the hell was going on.
She was competing in the 3 meter sprint and 6 meter dash, six meters being the length of the small intestine. First, the paste would pass through their stomachs. At that moment, it was being pooped in a bolus from her first sphincter (everyone had three, like a trio of guardians the dungeon-crawling hero must battle in her quest) and into her belly where acid would dissolve it like a fallen satellite plunging through the atmosphere. From there it would change into a substance called chyme and launch from the starting line into her small intestine. Before long they would sit back down for qualifying heats. The three fastest competitors would medal in the 3 meter sprint; the eight fastest would wait an hour then proceed to 6 meter semifinals. The final two would engage in a head-on race to the end of the small intestine. Each segment of competition had a designated point in their digestive process for the tracker to cross.
Jaelin let the information sink in. “It sounds long.”
He nodded. “Digestion is the hardest Bio Sport. We’re competing even when we’re not.”
“My guts already feel—”
“Biome,” he stated. “A gut is a beer belly. We have biomes.”
Her stomach cramped, and she wondered if that upset the tiny submarine sailing her acids. She looked to the fans and pictured junk food sizzling in their bellies. They stared back, a hundred people soaking in her semi-nudity.
Donyelle listened to her concerns, not for long before he interrupted her. “The best thing you can do right now is work on your anal clenches,” he said, squeezing her hand before he left to speak with another Tracter.
Alone, she looked for her brother and found him on the Respirater bench at the far side of the field, with Coach in his ear. The more Jeremiah nodded agreement, the more she cringed. Her memory flashed to other adult males standing over him like Coach did now. Please, they said. I care about you, they said. Be a man, they said, then, Fine, have it your way.
Witnessing their connection made Jaelin want to love Coach Guidry. But Nanna taught her to believe first impressions. She would never trust the man.
The Lidders and Wavers left to set up for their meets on different parts of the field. Nothing else to do, Jaelin watched the Salivaters compete in front of her. Among them she noticed East Indians, Mexicans, and a coldly beautiful Arab girl in a pink hijab. One hugely fat boy from Tennessee had hair like a black mop. A pair of lanky identical twins played for A&M. A girl on the Auburn team had a dozen rings in each ear and six in her lips. Jaelin could count the traditional athletic bodies on one hand.
Enter Katie Bourque, a small pretty woman, her tangled hair tied behind ears that stuck out. Based on Jeremiah’s stories, Jaelin could feel her toes curl to finally see the crazy white girl who could hock a loogie in a spittoon at twenty feet and missed two games after eloping with a forty-year-old musician who turned out to already have a wife. Sadly, it made sense Jeremiah would find her intimidating.
In competition, the Salivaters leapt like ballerinas and spit with the precision of snipers. Katie went fifth. “For LSU, Katie Bourque,” said the old announcer over the loudspeaker. “The eight meter specialist has been a workhorse in her past two seasons. She’s coming off last year’s disappointment where she fell short of qualifying for Nationals by point-eight points. She placed fourth overall in five meter spitting, seventh in eight meter spitting, ninth in the high spit. At the line, Katie Bourque.”
From the stands someone yelled “Princess of Spit!” and applause echoed down the rows.
Katie spat. Her loogie arched a good twenty-five feet to splash the corner of the bullseye.
The announcer roared: “Yes! It doesn’t come any closer than that.” Katie strutted before the crowd, yelling, “I’m a bad bitch, man!”
An overweight ref in an ill-fitting striped shirt flashed finger signals at a straw-hatted scorekeeper. In the mere seconds it took for her to scrawl on her pad, a spit boy leapt from the sidelines to wipe the target clean and return crouching to his post.
“Bourque takes the lead!” said the announcer. Jaelin leapt up from the bench in joy. Katie swigged water and spat a triumphant geyser in the air. She embraced Jaelin and they bounced across the astroturf, and Jaelin found herself giggling, struggling to keep up with Katie in some furious zydeco.
Soon enough, she was on the potty again. The buzzer went off. Nothing left to do but clench her anus.
From his corner of the gym Jeremiah watched her, his belly a wasp nest. He knew sphincter clenches could hurt like abdominal crunches, especially for a novice. He wondered if she’d eaten breakfast, or was that cow cud her only meal that day? Thankfully, this would end soon. She would lose and return to safe, boring Houma with a story for Nanna.
He tried to put her from his mind when the ref called him to sit in the middle of five folding chairs in a semicircle. Coach whispered to him, “It’s only heats. Pace yourself.”
Reminded he loathed moderation, Jeremiah strode across the rubber, and, in accordance with Emperor Taisho’s Rules of Engagement, bowed at the waist to his opponents. Eight eyes goggled confusion back at him. He sighed in disappointment at these kids, a bunch of alternates.
“You’re back?” The mocking voice belonged to Fernando Mercado of Florida. Tall and round-faced, broad of shoulder, his gut made it clear he hadn’t kept up with cardio over the summer. “I heard you ran back to Houma since you couldn’t beat Villanova.”
“You speak of her victories like they yours,” Jeremiah replied, and turned away from him.
Inwardly, he had to give Villanova props. Beyond making her alternate play the first meets while she saved her strength, staying home sent a message she considered the state of Louisiana beneath her. Her moves were subtle yet always effective. Well, he could do psychological warfare too. First, he unzipped his jacket. Then he unpeeled his shirt to unveil swelling muscles to the delight of women in the stands. He gestured at the meds to wait a second, hold on, chill out while he removed his track pants. At last, he stood naked save for a Speedo. Dress code required only that the Respirater allow access to their chest, and Jeremiah found clothing restrictive.
Smirking at his opponents’ discomfort, he turned from them to find himself face to face with Villanova. Her sudden appearance caused a startled, regrettable noise to escape his lips. A head shorter than him, she reposed coolly with her hands in the pockets of her blue-and-orange windbreaker. Her eyes, amber and circled with dark talc, told him nothing. Moment by moment, tension constricted his throat.
“Jeremiah,” she said. Without another word, she moved with pantherine grace to her teammates exploding with laughter at Jeremiah’s expense.
“Did you see that?” Fernando yelled. “He really thought you didn’t come!”
Consumed with loathing, he watched Villanova whisper instructions to her alternate. She was a beautiful brown woman with straight black hair in a high ponytail. Plus, she had a fat ass. A black girl ass. An antigravity soul food ass in team-colored running shorts. The vixen wore them to sabotage her male opponents, who would find it hard to breathe through a sudden biosynthesis of excess testosterone. With a show of indifference far from his true feelings, he gazed elsewhere until she’d returned to the sidelines.
He took the chair to the right of Fernando, every seat spaced six feet apart so sportsmen could employ neither aura nor chakra nor chi to disrupt one another’s inhalations. Emperor Taisho really did think of everything. The touch of the bland medic sticking wireless electrodes to his chest gave his crotch a mild thrill. He breathed deep, exhaled. This was the “blue moment” when the whirlwind of possibilities narrowed to practical things. The softness of the rubber under his bare feet. The itching on his scalp. The uncomfortable chair. He let his gaze float over the room like the disembodied camera in an old gangster flick, Scarface or Carlito’s Way, zoom in, scorekeepers dunking their gnarled hands in a red-and-white-striped popcorn tub, pan up, three women in the front row pointing to Jeremiah and saying they wished they were younger. On the same row sat four stoners freshly risen off the couch, amused at the very existence of the sport. Pan down to the field: the air boy waiting with an oxygen tank. Zoom on his opponents: to his left sat a kid from U-Miss, a high school wrestler until he’d herniated a disc in tenth grade. He’d authored a beloved series of tweets about how Bio Sports had drawn him from the brink of suicide. A brave move but stupid, advertising his emotional weakness. Two chairs to the right sat a Vietnamese boy with a fashionable haircut and huge thorax. Podunk newspapers made a big deal about him, but Jeremiah analyzed the tape; he breathed with the crisp rhythm of a mature Respirater until around a minute in when he overexerted with lispy breaths like a baby. Nothing but hype, and Jeremiah looked forward to exposing him.
Before the meet, Jaelin had told him their horoscope: “The most important thing today is that you listen to your conscience, even if it puts you at odds with everyone else. If your inner voice tells you that a certain course of action is wrong, you must not ignore it.” He didn’t know what the words meant but kept hearing them regardless.
On the other side of the gym, Jaelin was winning.
“And the newcomer is in the lead!” said Herb Duhon. “Freeman, followed by Jones, Cramer in third. Outstanding navigation of the jejunum from the Louisiana . . . sophomore . . . I believe. She’s cleared the duodenum and shows no signs of slowing down. Look at the rhythm of those guts. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Of all the three-dimensional intestines on his TV only hers mattered. How swiftly the red dot moved through her tunnel. He pictured her walls pulsing, mucus lubricating the brown chyme. The LSU crowd cheered. Herb Duhon sought to temper their expectations.
“Remember, ladies and gentlemen, the chyme must contain its consistency during digestion. Anything diarrhetic is automatic disqualification. Can the little lady from Houma keep up the pace?”
An alert from the tracker indicated a hundred milliliters of bile surging into her intestine.
“Her liver has opened and bile has entered the race, folks. Can it absorb the fatty acids? If this bile cannot take out the lipids and neutralize her stomach acid then this will be where the beauty’s story becomes a beast.” The drama! His pulse! Herb Duhon ripped the ascot from his throat and flung it in the air. “Bile is in the mix! Her lipids—By God!—they’re emulsifying! Emulsification! Solubilization! Bicarbonate and water! Bile! Oh glory, bile!
“Back from the Pearly Gates! She is Lazarus! She beat illness, now can she take it all?” He was reminded of Danica Patrick almost winning the race and had a sudden memory of the colored housekeeper on his family farm, the first woman he’d ever loved though she never knew. Cameramen magnetized to Jaelin. The stands became a sea of Tiger scarves. A hand over his rollicking heart, Herb Duhon patted down his hair with the other.
“Do it, girl! Digest the food, by glory!” He saw the beauty queen grow tired; God punishing her for her transgressions. Repent, you heathen girl, for She has risen!
Jaelin puckered her anus without cease. According to Donyelle, it kept the chyme flowing. But as wordless taunts burst from the stands like brown water from a spigot, the cameras flashed, the judges maintained their embalmed expressions and she experienced the humiliation of sitting on a toilet in public she realized that working her asshole helped keep her thoughts on the physical.
Clenches differed little from kegels. Often when bored at work she would squeeze her vaginal muscles to remind herself they existed. People she told this took it as an overly complicated way of touching herself. (True.) She thanked God for kegels. Pleasant warmth radiated from her crotch and she tried to remember whether Donyelle warned her she’d end up wanting to make babies with everyone in the room. Nervous and proud and horny, she clenched.
“She’s a bubble blower!” Herb Duhon ejaculated. “She’s a paper airplane! Will the Freeman family dynasty be born on this day?”
Happiness exploded between her heart and vagina. The graveyard of her stomach became a garden. A quasar expelled from her anus with a C sharp and a pleasant buzz in her asscheeks. Bashful at first, she realized everyone was farting. Possibly shitting. An exodus of wheezing methane! Explosions! Jaelin Daneesha Freeman, a farting horny woman!
In the Respirater corner, a handful of fans remained after the bulk had left to watch the Tracters. The judges set the clock for two minutes.
In the back of his mind Jeremiah heard a voice. You weak. Uncle Shawn? Stupid. Ma? You’ll die in the streets. Nanna? Weak stupid dead bad worthless weak stupid dead bad worthless weak stupid dead bad worthless weak stupid dead bad worthless weak stupid dead bad worthless weak stupid dead bad worthless weak stupid dead.
The buzzer went off and bam! Everything disappeared but the contest.
Jeremiah Pepperdeen’d at full speed. In his periphery, he saw Fernando raise his arms, ole! Elongating his torso to open the airwaves, a disciple of the de las Cruces Method.
Twenty breaths in and Jeremiah’s diaphragm was begging for mercy. His universe contracted to the organs within his breast, ally and enemy to potential. Doing good, he told himself. Every breath made him a samurai decapitating another enemy, littering the battlefield with heads in oni faceguards. He heard girls in the bleachers scream and allowed himself a half-second of vanity. They saw his belly pump out and in faster than the female eye could register, his face still as a porcelain King Zulu in a glass case, awesome as the twilight sky. Not an ounce of fat on him, aglow with the sweat excreting from his mighty chest and down his abs to the elastic band of his Speedo. He was Eros, god of lust, exhaling valentine-tipped arrows to skewer the hearts of girls screaming for his biceps and spandexed cock. He switched from Pepperdeen to kundalini, ignoring the clock cruelly placed on the scorekeepers’ table. His diaphragm struggled like Atlas to lift the lungs. A pixie in his brain told him to rest and he stomped it in his headlong rush to victory. Where was Jae? Somewhere across the field, lost to sight in the fog of breath. Diverticulitis. A disease for farm animals and fat people. Made no sense she got it so young and the hospital made it worse. Lead in the air. Benzine in the food. Uranium in the water. He could feel the branches of his lungs shrivel. He saw Jaelin’s hollow cheeks and overlarge accusing eyes. Fracking state. They poisoned my sister. Girls chanted, “Breathe, ‘Miah, breathe!” He told himself, FIGHT. Fight like Jae did. Iridescent in his memory bloomed smells of cane outside Houma, mistflower off the lowlands that slunk into the Gulf of Mexico like a scoundrel. He thought he heard a buzzer but only snapped awake when the ref lifted his arm.
“Eighty-five-point-one breaths per minute!” said the ref. “The winner!”
His lungs skewered, ravaged, and poisoned with carbon dioxide, he fell to his knees. A cramp stabbed his gut. From the sidelines rushed a boy to fix the oxygen mask over his mouth and force sweet air into his lungs. Applause rose to the vaulted ceiling. An arm around his aching stomach, he rose on shivering knees and waved.
But they applauded someone else. Across the field stood Jaelin, looking bewildered, even ashamed. Words fell on him like confetti: “She won!—Did you see that?—She’s so pretty!”
He ran to her. A voice from Heaven said, “First place in the three meter sprint, Jaelin Freeman!” It became a roar. “Jae-lin! Jae-lin! Jae-lin!” He got there in time for Coach Guidry to rush past and haul her into his arms. She was laughing and crying.