Sue was in her forties, so she just missed out on the time when female athletes were coming into their own. Even so she would have had a tough go of it because her sport of choice was football. So often Sue wished she had been born a boy, not because she wanted to sleep with other girls (which she certainly did not, high school gossip to the contrary) but because she wanted to compete in a man’s game at a man’s level. She considered it a cosmic misfortune that she had been super-sized at birth but handed the sex of a woman. By the time she was sixteen she was six feet three inches tall, weighed two hundred and fifty pounds with the sleek, muscular haunches of a draft horse, and she could bench press three hundred. So, Sue decided to right a cosmic wrong and go out for the football team. She was bigger than any of the guys except for the star defensive end who had her by a hair. Still, the coach dug in and said no way. She was a girl; she’d get clobbered; he didn’t want to be responsible for child abuse.
“Why not take up soccer?” he said. Sue pointed out that their school had no soccer team to which the coach threw up his hands and insisted, “No can do.” Then he pulled his sweat pants out of the crack of his ass, took a sip of his diet Pepsi, and said, “Excuse me. I got practice.” Sue never had been one to take no for an answer, she decided this called for drastic measures. How to prove that she had the stuff to play football? When she finally thought of a way, she knew somebody was going to get hurt, but she didn’t think it’d be her. Whatever. Sue was willing to take that chance. Guts for days!
“Stop thinking,” she said to herself. “Get to it.”
And she did.
At lunch the next period, in the cafeteria in front of the entire school, she knocked the tray out of the defensive end’s hands and told him to watch where the fuck he was going. He didn’t know what to do.
“Are you gonna apologize or what?” she demanded.
“You bumped into me,” he retorted.
“You calling me a liar?” She went right up in his face. Then she pushed him.
“You better cut this shit out,” he threatened.
“Why? You gonna hit me?” she said.
“You’re a girl, goddamnit,” he squealed totally confused about what the hell was going on here.
“I think you’re a pussy,” she replied.
“What the hell are you?” he said.
“You calling me a pussy? Huh? You insulting my sex? Huh?”
He was completely bewildered, and then she smacked him across the face. “Does that feel like pussy, asshole?” she taunted. “Does it?”
“Let her have it,” shouted one of his teammates. “She’s asking for it.”
“Yeah, kick her ass,” yelled somebody else.
“He can’t,” Sue yelled back. “He’s afraid of a girl. He ain’t nothing but pussy himself.”
At that, the poor kid lost it and punched Sue so hard she fell backwards into a table. The rest of the students expected to see blood and tears. What they got instead was a smile on Sue’s face. “Is that your best shot?” she wanted to know. “You didn’t kill me with it, and you’re going to remember that mistake for the rest of your life,” at which point she charged head first, speared him in the belly, and landed two hard shots to each side of his jaw before he hit the floor. Later, in the nurse’s office, he didn’t remember anything after she came at him. The school still refused to let her play football. In fact, the administration refused to let her continue as a student. They kicked her out and wouldn’t let her back in the door. Not that she gave a shit. As soon as she came of age, Sue joined the Coast Guard and struck out for what she hoped would be more interesting than watching TV and chewing whale blubber.
It was there that she got her nickname and met the love of her life.
***
The Coast Guard wasn’t as interesting as she thought it might be. Sue found herself wishing she had joined another branch of the service, the Navy or Air Force, so at least she could have gone some place exotic. Her first tour of duty was in the Aleutian Islands which, as far as she was concerned, was a serious dearth of imagination on the part of the bonehead who made the decision to deploy her there. Stationing an Alaskan Indian in the Aleutian Islands. Come on! Where’s the brains in that? So, Sue put in for a transfer to Key West because she heard it was a happenin’ town, only she got shipped to Mobile Bay off Alabama instead. Shore duty. Perfect. A six foot three inch woman of color in the redneck capital of the world. Sue was in a world of misery. She thought of going AWOL, someplace in the Arctic that didn’t have a name. How would they ever find her? She decided they wouldn’t and was damn close to taking off when a chunk of pure, unadulterated happiness came her way.
Each day when she got off work Sue would head for the gym where she’d bench press herself into near catatonia. Then she’d go outside to the track and run for miles. After all that, it didn’t matter to her where she was. She’d sleep until reveille the next morning. One day, after her workout, she climbed into the stands on the side of the track to stretch her tired legs out in the late day sun. Hey, now! What…was…that? Hercules in a sweat suit? Oh…my…God. There, walking into the center of the infield, was the biggest guy Sue had ever seen. Taller than she was. Heavier by seventy pounds at least. Bulked. Ripped. Gorgeous, so gorgeous she had to turn her head away. You don’t stare at an eclipse of the sun. And he was a man of color though she couldn’t tell his country of origin. All she knew was that in about three seconds she wanted to go there. With him. Now. That very instant.
She watched as he took off his sweat suit and stood there in shorts and t-shirt. He made Mr. Universe look like a famine victim. Was he even real? Was he some kind of special effect? He leaned over, unzipped a royal blue, ballistic cloth bag he had carried onto the field with him, and took out a steel ball the size of a cantaloupe. She watched mesmerized as he hoisted the shot in one hand to his right shoulder, drew a half-circle in the dirt with the left toe of his Adidas, tucked the shot next to his chin, held his left arm straight out and up from his shoulder, whirled his massive body like the Tazmanian devil, and launched the shot. It sailed like a cannon ball fired from a frigate. My God, the torque in that man’s body! The graceful immensity of it all. Sue watched him work out all the rest of that afternoon and the next, never failing to marvel that such bulk could move like liquid.
***
The closest thing Sue had heard thus far in the way of sexual endearment was that fucking her was like hanging onto the steering wheel of a runaway eighteen-wheeler on a steep downhill grade with no seat belt. Men did not whisper sweet nothings in her ear. They begged for mercy. Ultimately, as far as Sue was concerned, they were a bunch of little itty-bitty things, not worth the time or effort. If she had lived in Japan she would have hung out with Sumo wrestlers, but it seemed she wasn’t going to get any further than Mobile. OK, she was tough; she could live without it…until the day the man who put the shot walked onto that field. She lost her breath; her heart crumbled like a cookie; her legs went weak. On the third day he walked over to her and said, “Hi, sexy.” By the time those three syllables crossed his lips she belonged to him heart, soul, and all the good parts in between.
He was a full-blooded South Sea Islander, a Samoan, which accounted for his size. She didn’t know it, yet, but her lover to be was hung like a whale. Once they were intimate, which was two steaks and six beers after they met, she took to calling him “Moby Dick,” and he took to whispering “Sweet Ass” in her ear. When they coupled from behind he said her ass looked like a big, beefy heart. He’d explode into her like a broke loose fire hydrant which set off a chain reaction of orgasms that put them both onto a new planet. When he came he’d kiss her hard on the spot where her ass met her spine, then he’d whoop and cry out, “Oh, Lord, thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” His name was Manny, and he was the love of Sue’s life. They became inseparable, like a brace of matched Percherons in a field with no fence.
***
Manny was the type of man who always went for the gold, no matter what he did. The thing about the shotput was that he intended to compete in the Olympics, intended to break the record and make his name, then open a gym and eventually a chain of gyms in southern California. He and Sue would be equal partners. Maybe they’d call their place “In the Buff” or “Buff It Out.” They discarded the names “Gym Dandy,” “Butt Factory,” and “Venus Envy,” though Sue kind of giggled with the idea of calling it “Moby Dick’s,” maybe have a logo of a giant sperm whale on their business cards, but Manny wanted to keep that moniker just their little secret, well, maybe not so little but only theirs nonetheless. He truly was a sweetheart, her sweetheart. “Old Faithful” she sometimes called him for a change of pace.
***
The thing about sudden death is: it’s so sudden. One instant the person is there, and the next nanosecond he isn’t. There’s the body. It’s still warm. There’s sweat on the brow. The person still holds whatever it was he was holding when he died unless it rolled from his hand in which case the object was still there, was just that second held in his hand which still has the shape of the thing. Maybe the eyes remain open, but they don’t see you anymore, those eyes that were always filled with you. Where did the person go so quickly? Why did they leave their loved one so empty, so scared, so desperate, so all in an instant so achingly alone?
***
Even though she adored him, Sue was not the type of woman to always sit in the stands and watch her man do his thing. Manny sensed this (and, if he hadn’t, she would have eventually told him), and one day at practice he strolled over to where she sat and said, “Come on, doll, I’ll show you how.” He was having a little difficulty catching his breath, but he’d really been working out hard. The trials were coming up, and Manny intended to intimidate the competition from the first toss. He’d been beating the record all week long in practice, and he was ready for war.
They walked side by side to the throwing circle, bumping hips as they went, playing around. He picked up the sixteen pound shot and was showing her how to hold it when, seemingly out of the blue, he said, “Sue?”
“What, babe?” she answered.
He fell to the ground beside her and was dead by the time she knelt down. The autopsy showed that his heart was simply too small for his body. It was congenital, was always only a matter of time. Who knew? For Sue, the love of her life had come and gone. The rest was just marking time.
Sue’s was a big-shouldered grief. Everybody thought she was really tough about it, but Sue knew that if she uttered even a single syllable she’d cut loose a black hole of Hell and sorrow. She’d swallow herself up. Grief kept her moving like a vagrant hopping freight trains. It took her to the end of the world but not beyond, for her sense of ultimate survival was as big as the rest of her. It stepped in at the right time. She stopped at the edge and settled. If ever there was a place with a chance that somebody big as Sue might pass through, that place was Alaska. She thought, “Some time or other you’ve got to take a stand, and where does matter”.
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