Rats Saw God Read Free Page B

wouldn’t get his picture in thebook. Like the astronaut, Doug’s parents fretted over their son’s lack of popularity as well as his reluctance to participate in a high school social life they undoubtedly equated with malt shops and drive-ins. They had been, of course, joiners when they were his age. And though Doug won the yearbook bet, I’d be willing to make my own wager at the level of delight his parents took in his choice of peers. The Skate or Die club picture, which I’m certain the yearbook staff intentionally placed on the back side of a pizza coupon, featured sixteen scabby-kneed, male, potential “other cuts” models. I never set foot on a board, but I would follow them on a bike and hang out by the drainage ditch as they practiced maneuvers up and down its sides.
    I didn’t pose for the group picture or sign up on the roll that Doug had to turn in to the office. For almost exactly the same reasons Doug needed to be in the yearbook, I wanted to be excluded. I had a goal in mind—no activities would appear by my name in the yearbook.
    My freshman year was rounded out by the landing of my first job—concessionaire extraordinaire at the Clear Lake Cineplex. There were so many things I loved about my job; where to start? Let’s see, the red-and-white vertically striped shirt, the white paper Beetle Bailey cap, the button saying S TEVE AT YOUR SERVICE, or possibly the opportunity to pour rancid, fluorescent-hued nacho cheese for classmates who pretended not to know me.
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    The most telling thing I can think of to say about the man who sired me is this: He walked three miles to school, uphill,both ways. With other adults, this would be hyperbole, but in the astronaut’s case, it’s true. He would walk to school at the highest point of Yakima, Washington (his birthplace, verifiable by the weathered B IRTHPLACE OF A LAN Y ORK legend on the “Now Entering” sign), then he would take a school bus down into the valley where he would pick grapes with the migrant workers before walking another three miles back home, uphill.
    He might have stayed in Yakima his entire life if not for the first in a series of classic Alan York adventures. In a rare social excursion, he and a couple of friends went tubing down the Yakima River, which runs for thirty miles along the bottom of Kittitas Canyon. The river is notoriously dangerous, and given the number of drunken college students from nearby Central Washington University who float it, it’s a wonder more don’t drown than the annual average of two or three. To the point: Young Alan, in a feat that would today be re-created as an episode of Rescue 911, pulled some wasted college freshman out of the water and saved her life by administering CPR. Her uncle was an aide to the Republican senator from Washington who recommended the young dogooder for the Air Force Academy. As if it could get any cheesier, the woman he saved was my mother. They dated most of my father’s senior year in high school, married in the summer, and moved to Colorado in the fall of 1959.
    Alan had had no time for sports and school hadn’t challenged him. That changed at the academy. His scholarship gave him his first modest ration of free time, and rather than spend it with his new bride, he went out for the footballteam. Never mind that he’d played only sandlot ball, he had tenacity and spunk. He played quarterback or cornerback. One of those.
    If you compare pictures of the astronaut from his last year of high school with ones from his first couple of years at the academy, it’s as if he went through a second puberty that corrected all the shortcomings left by the first. He was as skinny as me in high school. Wiry, though. Hauling around grape crates had given him biceps. Other than girth, the change can be seen in his eyes. Though his expression doesn’t change much over a