Quicker (an Ell Donsaii story) (12 page)

That said, Ell didn’t comprehend her instructor’s Machiavellian plan. She’d been shown a full speed, then slow motion video of an apparently easy routine. She had no idea that the gymnast she’d been watching had won a gold medal in the last Olympics. Then without an opportunity to realize that most of her classmates wouldn’t even be able to mount the bars, she was called to the front of the class to try it, while she was deep in her zone due to her anxiety over being singled out first. By now her pulse throbbed very slowly in her ears.

She paused, hoping to damp down her zone. Mabry yelled, “What are you waiting for? The bars don’t come to Mohammed!” In what seemed like very slow motion to Ell, she ran a few steps, bounced on the mounting springboard, and leapt up to grasp the high bar while intentionally over extending her hips well beyond what the video demonstration had shown. Then she “kipped” by kicking her legs up into flexion and then kicking them back, thrusting herself up to an arms extended position, hips against and shoulders above the bar. Deep in the zone, this felt very, very easy to her. Her movements felt like they were in very slow motion and so she carefully positioned herself in significantly more flexion than had been demonstrated in the video, then she thrust her hips against the bar and kicked up into a handstand on the bar. She made the handstand shaky and wavery, pretending that she could barely balance on the bar and hoping that she wasn’t overdoing it. The Lieutenant hadn’t said anything so far, so she dropped out, under and back up the other side of the bar to another handstand. She swung back down, released for the demonstrated transfer to the lower bar and
continued on to perform the entire simple routine that had been demonstrated on the video including the dismount.
The entire time Ell continued to perform markedly below her capability, placing her hands differently than she had seen in the video, making unsteady, bobbling handstands, moving off center on the bars, bending her knees unlike the demonstration and then she purposefully fell down on the dismount. She had no idea that the mistakes she purposely made, which seemed large to her, were actually relatively minor and wouldn’t have cost very many points in a college competition.

Joy was in the class and told Phil about it later. “So Instructor Mabry was spotting for her to fall on the mount like the rest of us eventually did, but Ell just whips on by and does the whole routine! Mabry is just standing there with her mouth hanging open, then getting more and more pissed. By the time Ell fell down at the end, Mabry is red in the face. She’s looking down at her clipboard, then she looks up at Ell and bellows. ‘Cayydet!’ she looks down at Ell’s nametag, ‘Donsaii, is it?

“Yes ma’am?

“The info you filled out for PT at the beginning of this semester didn’t say anything about you being a gymnast! If it did, you wouldn’t be in this class! Did you think you could just slip in an easy grade this way?’ And Ell gets a real meek, ‘I screwed up’ look on her face and says ‘No Ma’am.’ And Mabry says, ‘How many years of gymnastics have you had? And Ell, timid as can be, says ‘Two years Ma’am.’

Ell carefully never told anyone how old she had been when she took those two years.

Mabry was one of the coaches for the Academy’s gymnastics team and two years or no two years, once she got over her tiff she realized she had a potentially excellent gymnast on her hands. She immediately started proselytizing Ell to try out for the team. There were a lot of benefits to being on a team at the Academy especially for Doolies, not the least of which was a chance to eat at the “training tables” and not spend your meals sitting at attention.

Ell gave a lot of thought to her resolution to avoid sports and focus on academics. Eventually she decided that during her freshman year the benefits outweighed the costs. Therefore, when they announced that the “sign up” for “walk ons”, for various sports would be in the dining hall after the evening meal, Ell went to the gymnastics team table. Two first class (senior) cadets staffed the table, talking earnestly to one another. Ell arrived and stood at attention for a couple of minutes before one deigned to look up at her and say “What?”

Ell looked down, saw the cadet’s name was Korsov and said, “Cadet Korsov, I would like to try out for women’s gymnastics Ma’am.”

Korsov looked her up and down and said, “You’re pretty big. How much gymnastic experience do you have?”

“Just a couple of years Ma’am.”

“Oh, come on, Ms.” she looked down at Ell’s nametag, “Donsaii, is it?”

“Yes Ma’am.”

“We’re not asking just anyone who ‘feels like it’ to apply. You need to have a realistic chance of competing at the collegiate level!”

Ell focused on the wall behind Korsov, “Yes Ma’am, I believe I do Ma’am.”

“Really?” Korsov said with a droll tone.

Ell continued looking straight ahead, “Yes Ma’am.”

“Well, port me your name and info here and I’ll get you put on the list for the tryout tomorrow at 4. But you’d better not be wasting our time.”

“No Ma’am.” Ell had Allan send her info to Korsov’s AI and after being dismissed, headed back to her room.

The next morning she received a posting to the gymnastics tryouts which specified what gear she should dress in and provided an excuse to relieve her from her other duties. She arrived at the gym just before 4PM and was able to watch some of the current gymnasts working on their routines before her tryout. Korsov shook her head when Ell arrived but she and another senior level cadet took Ell and two other “walk on” hopefuls over to the floor exercise mat and simply said “show us what you can do on.” Ell had hung back and jockeyed carefully to place the other two Doolie girls in front of her so they would go first. She watched them tumble across the mat, doing hand springs and a few dance moves. They weren’t as good as some of the college gymnastic videos Ell had been watching on the net but one did do a “double backflip.”

When Ell’s turn came she was irritated to notice that Cadet Korsov wasn’t even watching her but had focused on one of the team’s gymnasts on the bars across the room. The other senior cadet, name unknown to Ell, waved for her to go ahead though, so she stepped out onto the mat, just slightly into the zone. Ell carefully scaled her performance, much of it consisting of elements she had watched on video but never performed, to be just a little better than the routine of the gymnast who’d been practicing her floor exercise when Ell came into the gym. However, it was far better than the performances of the two other “walk ons.” She finished back in the corner she had started from and found Korsov glaring at her.

Korsov looked down at her e-slate. “Two years?!”

“Yes Ma’am.”

Korsov and the other senior cadet looked at one another, then Korsov said, “That’s bullshit! But,” she shrugged, “you can ‘walk the walk,’ you’re on the team.” She looked at the other two girls and shook her head. Their shoulders drooped as they headed for the exit.

Once on the team Ell spent much of her first couple of weeks trying to gauge how “good” she could safely be without attracting inordinate attention. After that, her stress level dropped so that she lost the tendency to immediately go into the zone when called on and once again only “zoned” when she actually wanted to.

At first Ell watched the other gymnasts already on the Academy team and carefully performed just a little better than the worst girls on the team. After a while she allowed her level of performance to gradually build until she was the number five member by the time they started competing in meets. That was all the higher she wanted to go because Korsov was now number six. She intended to continue competing at that level for the rest of the season.

Then she got caught up in team spirit at her first real meet.

She’d missed the team’s first meet, a real shellacking by BYU because she’d had the flu. Therefore, Ell’s first actual competition was against Navy, a high-pressure Academy rival. BYU had had bigger and significantly better team but Navy was more their size and the team was anxious to get a win. Ell’s scores were good but not extraordinary on the first routines. The same was true on the floor exercise and the uneven bars but the competition was wrapping up and Air Force was just a little behind.  As she came to the vault the team started rabidly cheering her on, hoping for a good score to result in a little “catch up.” Courtney, the team captain, came up to whisper in her ear. “Stay calm and just do the best you can, a good score on this could pull us even.” A little too excited with all the team fervor Ell decided to do one vault at a pretty high level. She purposefully dropped mildly into “the zone” as she began her run. The world slowed, her stride achieved great precision, she hit the board like a small explosion, then fired off the table into a Yurchenko double with a twist, holding back only moderately from a maximum effort. She stuck her landing but made it look like she might have to take a step by wavering a moment after she landed.

The audience began cheering wildly and the judges were stunned. Her vault had been nearly flawless and the height and distance were excellent. Ell’s score didn’t just bring the team up to a tie but actually gave them a slight lead. Her teammates were so ecstatic Ell gave in to temptation and decided to push it some on the beam too. She didn’t try to do anything special or highly difficult; she just inserted smaller “bobbles” than she usually did and stuck the landing with only a slight waver rather than her usual step. Again the crowd went wild.

Linza, one of the Doolie gymnasts ran up to hug Ell, “that routine was great!” Linza had never personally witnessed an entire routine performed with only minor bobbles. “Ell! No sways to center, no hand waving? You made it look like the beam was two feet wide!” Ell’s routine wasn’t of great difficulty, so once again she didn’t get an extremely high score. Nonetheless, its near perfection had the judges looking at each other in wonder and her score on beam had the fewest deductions of the meet.

The gymnastics coaches didn’t miss the significance of these events and suddenly began thinking of Ell Donsaii in a whole new light. Could she be pushed to even higher levels? Were more of these “near flawless performances” available? Could she hit “flawless” with more difficult routines?

The answers to these questions were all yes
– if
the team really needed such performances in a meet. This happened at more and more meets and Ell Donsaii slowly became a “dark horse” of the American gymnastics scene. Some began to wonder if this sudden apparition from nowhere was good enough for the Olympics the next summer. Established athletes and their coaches were vehemently opposed to such an “inexperienced” and “old” gymnast even getting a trial for the Olympic squad which usually was made up of pre-college girls. If those detractors did find out that, despite being halfway through her Freshman year of college, she was actually only sixteen they were stunned.

Back at the Academy there were complaints that she couldn’t train for the Olympics and yet keep up with her duties. Coach Mabry had long since gotten over her “peeve” and become Ell’s greatest supporter. Mabry began pushing every button she could to ensure that Ell would be allowed to try out.

***

Three days later Jamal came home to find his light on again.  For a moment he wondered again how the man had gotten in, but it seemed unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Jamal coded open his door and walked over to where the man sat.

It was the same man. “Well?” was all he said.

Jamal picked up his slate from the coffee table and opened it to the news page showing the wreck on the freeway. It had been attributed to youthful vandals who “would not have understood the terrible thing they were doing.” Jamal had been horrified to find out that a young woman had been driving the van. She and her father who sat in the seat behind her had both been killed by the concrete block. The young woman’s son in the other back seat had been unharmed, but orphaned. Realizing that he had slaughtered a mother and grandfather in front of their young son produced a
Déjà vu
that had sent Jamal reeling into the bathroom to throw up. The irony that killing a mother and grandfather was exactly what had been done to him was very evident to Jamal. He had skipped his classes that day and considered killing himself in atonement.

He hadn’t had the courage.

“Here,” he said, handing the news story to the man.

The man peered quizzically at the slate. Jamal suddenly realized that the man’s command of written English was probably poor. “The automobile wreck there. I caused it. Two Americans were killed.”

The man looked back down at the pictures. “Chickenshit! Couldn’t look them in the eye I suppose.”

“I didn’t want to be caught. The investment made in me would have been wasted.”

The man looked at Jamal like a particularly undesirable specimen of insect. “Yes, of course.” He grunted, “Well, you need more training it seems. Tickets will be delivered. You will spend the first part of the summer in a training camp. But now you must make reservations to go to Dallas at the end of the summer.”

“What is in Dallas and when should I be there?”

Another grunt, “The Olympic games. Arrange to be there two weeks before and for the duration of the competitions.”

***

Ell’s AI notified her that she was excused from her 10 o’clock class to report to the Academy Commandant’s office. The notification didn’t say why, so she was very nervous when she knocked on the doorframe. “Cadet Donsaii reporting as ordered, sir.”

“Come.”

Ell stepped inside and saw Coach Mabry and the gymnastics head coach in the office with the Commandant. Her heart fluttered, wondering if maybe someone had decided that her gymnastic performances were outside the realm of possible. She came to attention and saluted.

The commandant said, “Cadet Donsaii, your coaches here want you to be able to try out for the Olympic team. What do you think about this opportunity?”

“Sir, it is likely that I am too old and inexperienced to succeed.”