The Crazy Horse Electric Game by Chris Crutcher

breathing life back in.
    He stops as if slapped into consciousness. “Okay, okay. I’m okay. Is he breathing? Tell me if he’s breathing.”
    Jenny looks up between breaths. “Get the boat,”she says and puts her mouth back over Willie’s.
    Still stunned, Big Will swims to the boat, pulls himself in and cranks the engine. Above the roar, he hears Jenny scream, “He’s breathing! He’s breathing! It works! Oh, God, it works! He’s alive!”
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    The boat is left in the water; the Bronco speeding for Lambert, the nearest town with a hospital. A shivering Jenny sits in the backseat with Willie’s head on her lap, running her fingers through his wet hair. Willie’s mother is in shock beside them, but she moves the blanket up around Willie’s shoulders, the way she tucked him in when he was three. Johnny can’t stop shaking in the front seat, his eyes glued to the road, as the sun drops like a rock, leaving the eastern Montana landscape shrouded in a dank grayish brown.
    Willie hasn’t regained consciousness.

CHAPTER 6
    Willie pulls on two pairs of sweats in the early-morning darkness of his room, then feels his way to the closet and down under the pile of dirty clothes for his Nikes. The temperature outside is well below zero, and he digs out extra socks, his gloves and a pullover ski mask. The digital clock over his bed says five-thirty. He feels his way downstairs and through the kitchen, already sweating under the load of clothing, then out the back door to the alley. He bends down to stretch out his legs, leaning curiously to his right. Three months out of balance. The first three months of the rest of his life. “Use it,” Dr. Swanson had said when Willie asked him how he could get his body to work right again. “I have no idea how much you can get back because we’re not sure what the damage is, or where it is. These things areunpredictable. The only way you’ll ever know is to work it and work it and work it. The human brain has an amazing ability to compensate. When one part shuts down, often another part covers for it. But you have to work it constantly to let that other part know what it’s compensating for .”
    So finally Willie is running. Two months it took him to muster the courage to leave the house. He faked terrible headaches to stay home from school so the other kids wouldn’t see him this way, but one day Big Will came into his room and said that, headaches or no headaches, Willie was by God going to get back with it. Enough was enough.
    He went to school late that first day; walked through the doors after the bell so he could negotiate the hall and the lockers and the stairs in relative obscurity; forgo explanations.
    They clapped when he pushed the door open with his cane and limped to his desk in first-period English. Johnny and Petey ran up and slapped him on the back as if he’d just pitched the final out in the Crazy Horse Electric game; and Jenny put her hand on his arm and cried. She was the only one who had actually heard how he talked now; or how he didn’t talk. She had watched him work so hard for his words, felt the pain of wantingto help, to talk for him in those long silences when he struggled to get what was in his head out through his mouth; watched the beads of sweat break on his, forehead as his stomach tightened, his throat constricted, pushing, forcing the words out. But that day, his first back, Willie just said “Hi” to everyone and sat at his desk like it was a cocoon. His classmates were so careful; Willie felt pitied.
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    This morning Willie decides to go for a mile and a half. His gait is uneven; right side jogging, left side following—dragging. There is no rhythm, no way to breathe evenly. He has a purpose in running this early in the day: It’s dark; no one will see. As he gets in better shape, able to run farther, and as the days get longer, he’ll