DESTROYER #45: SPOILS OF WAR

Warren Murphy

For Margaret Richardson McBride, with love and appreciation, and for the Glorious House of Sinanju, P.O. Box 1454, Secaucus, NJ 07094

One

On the day he pushed the man off the Pontusket Bridge, Artemis Thwill knew he was free. More than free. He was launched. He hadn't expected to kill the man, or even start to push, even though he had often thought such things. He would be standing near a curb watching a woman balance two heavy packages and wonder what it would look like if he threw a body block into her lower spine. Artemis weighed 228 pounds. He was six feet, two inches tall and had played linebacker for Iowa State.

He was a senior vice-president for Inter-Agro-Chem. So Artemis Thwill did not go around throwing blocks into ladies with packages. He went around offering to help carry packages, joining the Congregational Church, and coaching in the Pee Wee League.

But he would see the little boys with their big expensive shoulder pads and their little twigs of neck between the two and imagine himself roaring onto the field yelling, "Let's have some real hitting, you little spoiled-ass bastards!"

Then he would see himself smash a fist into one

of the wobbly helmets on the twig necks and collapse a kid with a satisfying thwump. Then he would take a pair of little ankles with his fingers and use his 67-pound offensive tackle as a swinging club and go through his lineup screaming that this was where he was separating the men from the boys, as he separated a birdlike ten-year-old arm from its shoulder joint.

All this he imagined. He even imagined the parents staring horrified at the crushed bodies lying around the Pee Wee League field. And he would say, "They never would have made real football players. Get this shit off my field."

That was the scene that played in his head as he wrote a lengthy report on how football was physically and emotionally unhealthy for the children, . and formed a parents' league for sane athletics.