The Knee
Bob Johnson
Sports Fiction & Essay Contest 2014 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Fiction
Eliot Sampson turned forty-four that summer and joined a city soccer league, but when he asked Danielle if she might come to his games, she told him she had better things to do than watch him run around with Mexican and Brazilian boys half his age. She worked full-time like he did and otherwise was busy driving Nolan to baseball games and basketball camp and golf lessons, and if Eliot's priorities were in line with their place in life he'd be helping her, not finding excuses to play more games himself.
"It's a new inning, buddy," she said. "It's your son's turn now."
So she wasn't there on a Saturday afternoon when Eliot saw an opening as wide as a school bus between two defenders and tried to dribble through it, and the gap closed with a speed that astonished him, and his cleats caught in the turf as someone collided with his right knee, and he felt his ACL separate like a frayed shoelace. She wasn't there as he writhed and moaned on the grass, while the teenager who'd knocked him down knelt and murmured soothing words in Portuguese.
When the pain eased enough for him to stand, his teammates walked him to the sidelines, and there he covered his head with a towel and sobbed, not from the pain, though the pain was blinding, but because he feared he'd hurt himself not for weeks or months, but for life. His knee had swollen like an angry grapefruit and throbbed with every heartbeat. He waited until the end of the game before he limped to his car and drove home. Danielle had taken Nolan to swim class, so he found a plastic bag in the pantry and filled it with ice. He was sitting on the couch with his leg propped up when she and their son came in.
"I'll be okay. It's not that bad," Eliot said, though sweat had beaded on his forehead and his voice was reedy with pain.
Nolan stared at his knee. "Wow, Dad. Did you cry?"
"Nope," Eliot said. "A boy should never let the other team know when he's hurt."
Nolan's hair was wet and plastered in gold ringlets to his head, his shoulders broad for a six-year-old. He'd recently been drafted from T-Ball into the Minor Leagues, where he played with boys two and three years older, and the only time he cried was when his team lost. "You're not a boy, Dad," he teased. Danielle sighed and sent him to find dry clothes.
There was a time she had given Eliot's stubborn vitality its due, if only because it mirrored her own. They'd met at a coed softball game eight years earlier, Eliot playing third base for the Ford dealership and Danielle at bat for the radio station where she sold air time. Eliot was thirty-five and knew he was handsome. At six-foot-three he had the smooth face and sunny air of a young Ronald Reagan. He had lettered in three sports in college and was at home on the playing field as a preacher in the parsonage.
Danielle's first hit went foul, but the way she strode into the pitch, the way she posed like DiMaggio, the way she grunted like a man, told everyone she was no slouch herself. Nevertheless, Eliot turned his back to her and made a show of calling the outfield in. When he looked again she was glaring at him, and she adjusted her stance so the next one would take his head off. When the line-drive came it split the gap between him and the shortstop, and he launched his lanky body and snagged the ball two feet off the ground.
The crowd exploded over the catch, but she turned and jogged to the bench without a backward glance. Afterward in the bar she grinned and let him buy her a beer and told him it didn't matter how spectacular a defensive play looked; it still amounted to a single out in the scorer's book. He grinned back and said her line-drive might as well have been an infield popup, for all the good it did anybody.
Soon they were working out together, running marathons, playing tennis. Danielle wore her hair in thick, blonde plaits, and sported sleeveless t-shirts to show off her muscled arms. Wherever they went people's eyes followed them, and their tit-for-tat gamesmanship became the talk of their social circle. If work kept him long and he missed their five-thirty spinning class, he ate a dinner of broiled chicken and broccoli and went to the gym that night. If other couples joined hands and crossed the finish line side-by-side, she picked up the pace at mile twenty-four and was waiting in the juice tent when he arrived. If her lob shot flirted with the baseline, he inevitably called it out, and their arguments at the tennis club were legendary.
They married on a golf course and celebrated in the hours before the ceremony by playing eighteen holes with the best man and bridesmaid, and on hole number twelve Danielle accused Eliot of improving his lie in the rough with his wedge and he denied it, and that nearly ended the union before it began.
Now she sat at the end of the sofa with his foot in her lap. "Tell me," she said.
"It's a game changer, babe," he said. "I think it's the ACL."
She heard the emotion in his voice and looked away. He had only cried twice in her presence—first when Nolan was born, and again two years later, after she'd miscarried the second time and the ob-gyn told them another child was unlikely. Her fibroid tumors were too big and too many. Their removal would relieve her pain, but the procedure would permanently damage the uterine wall. And at thirty-six...well, thirty-six wasn't twenty-six.
"You're running too much besides," the doctor had said. "Thirty-five miles a week might be good for your heart and body fat, but that much pounding increases your fibroid pain, to say nothing of its impact on your menstrual cycle." He took off his glasses and pointed them at Danielle. "You need to slow down."
In the car on the way home she'd sat with her arms folded as he wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. He'd had dreams of a duo of champions, like Roger and the Mick. "Just stop it," she said finally. "Moping never fixed anything."
That evening she locked herself in the bathroom so long that Eliot finally knocked, but only when Nolan asked at the door for a story did she emerge, red-faced and grim, and that was the closest Eliot ever came to seeing her weep.
She had the fibroids removed and eased her way back on an elliptical machine in the basement. Afterward she joined a group of neighborhood mothers on morning walks, though Eliot told her the women looked like clowns in a shooting gallery, with their spandex and pony tails and tiny pink barbells, and the comical way they gunned their elbows up and down. She answered that her life had changed and she was embracing it and she expected his support.
Danielle rose now and went to the kitchen and returned with a bottle of Gatorade and a damp washcloth. He gulped the drink, then closed his eyes as she dabbed his forehead.
"Maybe it's a sign," she said.
He groaned and shook his head. "It's not a sign," he said, but in that moment Nolan returned and asked his mother to play catch. Danielle gave Eliot a meaningful look before standing, and in another moment he heard the sweet, decisive chunk of balls hitting ball gloves in the back yard, and the sound only deepened his mourning.
To the extent that he thought about it, he believed that his physical gifts—his height, his looks, his nimble grace—were the keystones to his family's good fortune. From the sun-kissed deal on their house in the cul-de-sac to their seamless admittance to the country club, from his presidency on the neighborhood board to his ascension at the car dealership—he could pinpoint the moment when a smile or the friendly pressure of his hand had tipped each contest his way.
He and Danielle drove the newest Ford SUV each year. They wrote a check and hundred-year-old oak trees were gouged from their back yard to make way for a swimming pool. On the sales floor Eliot often felt himself stealing home, while his customer was still warming up in the bullpen. When Nolan was born the obstetrician noted his big hands and predicted he'd be a pitcher one day, so Eliot named his son after the man-god himself, the greatest pitcher the majors had ever known, even giving him the middle name of Ryan.
On Monday they dropped Nolan at soccer camp and drove to the orthopedist's office. The man was a neighbor and Taurus driver and golf partner and had arranged for an MRI that same morning.
"It's the big one, Eliot," the doctor said when Eliot and Danielle sat across from him. "There's no sugarcoating it."
Without surgery, Eliot could lead a full and active life, but sacrifices would have to be made. No more plant-and-twist sports of any kind. No more turning abruptly to chase down a fly ball. No more cross-over dribbles on the basketball court. Strength exercises and a brace would help, but even then the knee might give out at the odd time.
"You turn sharply when someone calls your name," the doctor continued, "and the world drops out from under you. You go down in a heap."
With surgery, on the other hand, Eliot could expect a knee close to the original. A piece of his own tendon would be grafted into the torn space, spanning it like a bridge. The frayed ends of the ligament would knit their way across the expanse, joining in the middle. Within a year he'd have a connection nearly as good as new.
Eliot looked at Danielle. "Then it's a no-brainer, isn't it?" She was examining her hands in the sunlight from the office window and didn't answer.
The doctor's eyes moved back and forth between them. "On the other hand," he said, "you'll be forty-five. Men your age sometimes forego the surgery because they no longer play the hard games. They can still jog and play golf and do yard work, and—"
Danielle had lifted her chin to say something, but Eliot's angry laugh silenced her and the doctor both. "Not a chance," he said. "I'm not dead yet."
In the car neither of them spoke until they neared the practice field and saw Nolan waiting at the chain link entry gate. As the Explorer came to a stop Eliot turned on Danielle. "You went belly up and now you think I should," he said. "Just to be fair."
"You don't even know what I was going to say," she hissed, but in that moment Nolan opened the door and threw his gym bag and soccer ball into the back seat with such violence that the ball rebounded off the opposite window and grazed Eliot's head. The boy was crying with rage because his team had lost a scrimmage game, and only after they'd stopped for pizza did he become fit for polite conversation.
Eliot had the surgery three weeks later. The incision began at the top of his kneecap and ended two inches below, and its edges were fastened together with staples. He wore a brace—a cumbersome assembly of neoprene, Velcro and aluminum—and lurched around on crutches. Danielle drove him to a soccer game the Saturday following the operation, where he sat on a lawn chair in the burning sunshine as his teammates slapped his shoulders and said the crew wasn't the same without him and marveled at old man joints so frail that a minor collision snapped them like dry twigs. He smiled gamely and replied that their play had visibly declined in the weeks since he'd been away, and he promised to make things right next season.
In the car ride home he sat with the seat leaned back and his shirt drenched in sweat and his knee buzzing like a hornet's nest. Danielle glanced at him. "Hail the returning hero," she said, but he was too exhausted to respond.
He began his rehabilitation at a physical therapy center—a sunlit complex staffed with young people in blue warm-up pants and white t-shirts—where he lifted weights strapped to his ankle and rode a stationary bicycle. Each session ended with him face down on a padded table, while a bearded twenty-two year old named Victor leaned against his shin and tried to touch his heel to his butt cheek. His knee had stiffened considerably and any progress was torture. If he'd gained an inch of flexibility since the last appointment Victor called him a bad dude and assured him he'd be back to mowing the lawn in no time, and Eliot endured the pain by imagining the young man opposite him in a rugby scrum.
When he could bend his knee enough to drive he took his turn ferrying Nolan to practices and games. Pop Warner football had begun and Nolan played in the Mitey Mite division with boys six, seven and eight years old. Eliot sat moodily on the sidelines and noted how powerful his son had become—how he drove his shoulder into the blocking sled and made it rear off the ground, how he didn't let up until the whistle blew, how even the older boys deferred to him. Afterward Nolan's coach told Eliot the boy was a natural—the apple hadn't fallen far from the tree—and Eliot mouthed words of pride and enthusiasm, though all he felt was jealousy, followed closely by a sense of vertigo, of tumbling helplessly from a great height. He blamed the latter on the Vicodin he took for his pain.
And then suddenly he began to feel better. From one day to the next, it seemed, his pain subsided, his energy began to return, his knee grew stronger. At physical therapy he added more weight to his lifting routine. He spent more time on the stationary bike and made the sprockets sing. He growled at Victor to push harder in the bending drills until the young man finally told him that his gains were meant to be incremental. To hurry would be to tempt re-injury.
"I admire your spirit, dude," Victor said. "But the flesh is still weak."
Eliot replied that he'd spent a lifetime testing his body's limits and knew what his flesh could and couldn't take.
At home he doubled the intensity of his workouts. He began walking on the elliptical machine and jogged in the shallow end of the pool. Research told him that ACL patients in superb shape sometimes returned to full-pivot sports six months after surgery and it had been a mere three for him, and he decided it was fitting that Eliot Sampson would defy all medical expectations—like the cancer patient whose tumors disappear on their own.
At the end of each routine he lay on his stomach on the living room floor and badgered Danielle into bending his knee, pushing his heel toward his buttocks. He insisted that she track his progress with a tape measure, and the distance to go, once nearly three feet, had shrunk to fourteen inches.
And that's where Danielle found him on a hot Sunday afternoon—chest-down on the hardwood floor, naked but for swim trunks, wet from his laps in the pool.
"Bend me, babe," Eliot said.
She sighed and knelt behind him and leaned against his ankle. He cried out as she reached the knee's rigid limit, but the moment she eased up he barked at her. "Don't stop," he said. "This is a key time for me." She pushed again, and again he cried out. She leaned all of her weight to the task until Eliot's heel hovered a foot above his buttocks. He squirmed and moaned and flattened his palms against the floor to brace himself. "Push! Push!" he shouted.
Then she released him so abruptly his knee straightened like a bow and his chin bounced off the hardwood. He rolled onto his back and stared at her. She was standing over him with her hands on her hips and her eyes closed.
"I have things to do," she said, though her jaw was clenched so tightly only her lips moved. "I have groceries to buy, a child to raise." She opened her eyes and looked down at him. "Property taxes are due next Monday. The man is coming tomorrow to service the air conditioning. The school nurse thinks Nolan might have a peanut allergy." She began to weep, and she covered her face with her hands. "Who do you think you are?"
Eliot raised himself on one elbow and reached out to grasp her calf. "I'm trying to get better as fast as I can so I can help," he said, but she turned and walked through the kitchen and out of the house. He heard the garage door open and close and the Explorer drive away.
Eliot was lying on his stomach with his chin in his hands when Nolan came into the living room a few minutes later.
"What's the matter with Mom?" the boy said. "Was she crying?"
"She's just tired of Dad being hurt," Eliot said. "We all are." He stared at the wood grain in the floor beneath him and considered what he'd said to Danielle. He was trying to get better as quickly as possible. When he was on his feet and active, the whole world was happier. If she needed more help he'd be thrilled to oblige, but he couldn't do it if he was a cripple, could he?
"Tell you what," he said suddenly to the boy. "How about you help me?"
Nolan was sitting on the floor beside him. "Help you with what?"
Eliot stretched flat and bent his knee so his foot waggled in the air. "Help me get better. Bend my knee like Mom does."
The boy rose warily and stood behind him. He grasped his father's large foot and carefully leaned into it. "That's right," Eliot said. "Now push my heel down toward my bottom."
Nolan put his shoulder to his father's ankle and walked forward with short, cautious steps. When the knee reached its limit and Eliot began to groan, the boy let go as if shot through with electricity. "No, no," Eliot said. "Keep going. If you don't make it hurt Dad will never play ball again."
Nolan leaned against Eliot's foot and pushed harder, but then his father winced and ground his knuckles into the floor and the boy relaxed once more. Eliot twisted and glared over his shoulder. "Dammit, Nolan," he said. "Do what Dad says. Make me feel it."
Nolan Ryan Sampson stepped back and considered the situation. He was just six years old, but he stood nearly four feet tall and weighed sixty-three pounds. He was more used to praise than criticism, so his father's anger confused him, but then he remembered that his coaches often got mad too, and the only way to make them happy was to try as hard as he could. He eyed the body splayed on the floor before him, and then he crouched and drove his shoulder into his father's ankle with all his might. When he felt resistance he gripped the hardwood with his sneakers and drove harder. Eliot's hips lifted off the floor, there was a sound like a carrot snapping, and his right heel slammed against his buttocks, pinned beneath the weight of his son. Eliot screamed and rolled onto his side, and his face turned putty-white like the skin of a volleyball.
Nolan disentangled himself and watched as his father held his knee and keened shrilly through clenched teeth. For a moment the boy feared he'd made a mistake, but then Eliot spoke. "It's not that bad," he gasped. "It's not that bad."
Nolan waited, but his father didn't say anything more. For a full minute Eliot sucked air into his mouth and blew it out loudly through his nose, but then something in him relaxed and he lay still. His eyes closed, and he breathed quietly. His hair was still wet from the pool, and he had pulled both knees to his naked chest and looked to be asleep. Nolan decided he had done a good job. His dad's heel had touched his bottom and now he was resting.
The boy stood and went into the kitchen and found a juice pack in the refrigerator. He fetched his ball glove from the counter and sat on the back porch steps, sucking juice through a straw and waiting for his mother to come home. He'd made his dad better, and he knew she'd be happy to hear about it.
