Brothers in Arms

He ain’t heavy. Keith Poole has never said that about his brother.

Marc weighs 185 pounds, and everything below the chest is dead weight. He must be helped into bed at night and back into his legs in the morning, a wheelchair that is virtually immovable without batteries.

He ain’t heavy? Marc also has never said that about his brother.

Keith is 185 pounds’ worth of overmatched wide receiver. Not the fastest, never the most athletic. Each week during the football season he needs inspiration to face an opponent who finds him as intimidating as a desert breeze.

He ain’t heavy, he’s my . . . . Forget it. It’s a line from a movie that someone made into a song. The reality is, the burden each carries has carved lines into the young faces of Keith Poole and brother Marc.

And yet, eight years ago, they decided it didn’t matter.

In an unusual pact forged in a sour-smelling hospital on the edges of hell, they wrapped their arms around each other and lifted.

Marc, a high school junior who had just been paralyzed in a car accident, asked Keith to help him die.

Keith refused.

Keith, a high school freshman devastated by the fall of his idol, asked Marc to keep silent while he quit football.

Marc refused.

It was a pact with no parameters, no signatures, based only on that strange, unconditional attachment one has for another whose veins carry the same blood.

The boys sometimes didn’t know what they were doing. Or how they could continue doing it.

But for eight years they have kept that pact, straining under weights that have caused Keith to sob and Marc to rage, and both to ask midnight questions of the ceiling.

On Jan. 1 in Pasadena, the world will be witness to the triumphant answers.

Keith Poole will jog onto the Rose Bowl field as this country’s hottest wide receiver, playing for unbeaten and national-championship hopeful Arizona State.

Marc will roll into the Rose Bowl’s wheelchair section as the Sun Devils’ most fervent fan, arms waving, neck straining, trapped in body but not heart.

Their jerseys will be the same. Their expressions--binoculars have shown this--will be the same.

People will wonder how Keith makes those one-armed catches, those leaping grabs over bigger defensive backs.

“Playing for two,” he says.

People will wonder how Marc can withstand four hours in the hot sun surrounded by unfamiliar fans, far from family, unable to even properly clap.

“Somebody’s got to watch out for my little brother,” he says.

*

Across the sprawling campus of Arizona State, they appear no more related than two bits of tumbleweed.

They have separate friends, separate lives, Marc living independently in a campus dorm, Keith living in an apartment several miles away.

But intentionally, and with great effort, they are always just a nudge away.

Keith can find his older brother at virtually every football practice, sitting there with a cockeyed cap and sharp advice if sought.

Marc can find his younger brother at the end of his bed.

That is where Marc has a device that will dial Keith’s phone number with a touch from the back of his hand, lifted carefully by the only part of his arm that works.

“The panic button,” their mother, Lois, calls it.

Sometimes during the middle of the night, trapped in a distressing situation familiar to quadriplegics, Marc pushes that button. And every time, Keith picks up.

Usually, Keith then calls one of Marc’s paid attendants. But sometimes he handles it himself, driving over in the middle of the night to make his big brother more comfortable.

“He always says, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I hate to bother you,’ ” Keith said. “And I say, ‘What, are you crazy?’ ”

The arrangement has been the same since Marc enrolled here last year, leaving his Northern California home for the first time on his own, taking the risk because he felt his brother needed him.

Maybe it was the signed ball that Keith sent him, unsolicited and without a note, after his first Pacific 10 touchdown.

Maybe it was the time Keith somehow found him in a distant wheelchair section and pointed there after a touchdown in his first game with the Sun Devils at California.

When Keith scolded him for being late to a game last year--”What’s your problem? Be there! I need you there!”--Marc knew his instincts were right.

“I don’t know what I would do without him,” Keith says. “Watching him during practice, after I score, seeing him on campus. It sounds corny, but he is what keeps me going. He is everything to me.”

Marc hears this and laughs.

“I’m the one who feeds off him,” he says. “He’s my inspiration.”

Funny little thing, this pact. So full of life, yet born on a night of impenetrable darkness.

*

Brothers.

Ask anyone to describe the Poole boys of Clovis before the night of Oct. 26, 1988, and that is what they would say, a simple word filled with complications.

Brothers.

“Every day they would pound each other,” Lois said. “I would say, ‘Some day, you guys are going to become best friends.’ They would say, ‘Yeah, right.’ ”

In the then-rural community outside Fresno, their home featured a huge treeless front yard and half a basketball court in the side yard. There were intense games every day.

“Our football was tackle, and Marc always tackled hard,” Keith remembered. “He and a buddy on one team, me and a buddy on another team.”

And the results were always the same.

“The game would always end up in a fight, and I would always come in crying,” Keith said.

Both boys excelled in sports but Marc was almost 50 pounds heavier, and two years older, and never gave Keith a break.

“He would make an all-star team, I would remind him that he was only an alternate, while I had made the first team,” Marc said. “I never gave him any credit. I always gave him grief. I guess as an older brother, that was my job.”

Said Keith: “He would always say, ‘You’re horrible. You’re horrible.’ ”

How would Keith respond?

He would tell his brother he was fat, then run like the dickens.

“I could never catch him,” Marc said. “That’s when I first knew he was fast.”

Then came the phone call from paramedics shortly after dinner.

Even considering the 25 touchdowns he has scored for the Sun Devils since--tying a school record for wide receivers--Keith has never been faster than on that night.

The boys’ parents were out celebrating their anniversary. Keith 14, was home watching the two younger children, talking on the phone to a girlfriend.

Then the operator broke in, telling Keith an ambulance driver needed to speak to him.

Just a block away, Marc, 16, had been sitting in the passenger seat of his best friend’s truck as they drove home from a high school team dinner.

Another car ran a stop sign, ramming into the truck and sending it flipping several times.

Marc’s best friend ended up in his arms, dead. Marc ended up virtually unscratched, but unable to move.

Keith slammed down the phone, called a neighbor over to watch the children and jumped on his bike. He arrived at the accident site just in time to ride to the hospital with his brother.

While Marc moaned in the back, Keith cried in the front.

It wasn’t until they arrived in emergency room that Keith realized he was still wearing only boxer shorts--and no shoes.

“I looked down and my feet were all cut up,” he said.

He and his parents hovered around the intensive care unit for nearly two days, feeling as helpless as his brother was.

“Marc thought he had a football injury, and was screaming for us to take his helmet off and there was nothing we could do,” Keith said. “I would never wish this on anybody.”

Although his parents eventually persuaded Keith to leave, he has never really left.

“Nothing was discussed,” Lois said. “Keith decided he was sticking by Marc, and that was it. It got so we could not get him to go home.”

A month later, when the rest of the family took a much-needed break by celebrating Thanksgiving at a relative’s house, Keith stayed with Marc.

“It was lousy hospital turkey, and I was pretty messed up, but I knew he was there,” Marc said.

Shortly after that, in the quiet of one of their countless hours together, Marc asked Keith a favor.

“The injury had taken away my self-image, my ego,” Marc said. “It all went out the door. It was a big deal for me just to eat a sandwich. I was looking at all I lost.”

He asked Keith to help him commit suicide.

“He said, ‘I want to die. Help me do it,’ ” Keith said. “In some ways, I was also thinking, ‘That would be best.’ I idolized this guy. I didn’t want to see him live a crummy life.”

He ain’t heavy? This was heavy. Keith thought about it for a moment, then tightened his belt.

“I said, ‘Dude, no,’ ” he said. “It killed me to say it, but I said it anyway. ‘No.’ ”

Eight years later, Keith still swallows hard.

“I said, ‘Marc, we’re gonna get through this. We are gonna get through this.’ ”

Eight years later, Marc shakes his head.

“If I had died, think of what I would have not been part of,” he says. “Think of all I would have missed.”

*

And think of what Keith would have missed.

At the time of the accident, he wasn’t playing freshman football because he thought he was too small.

Coaches who had seen him in Pop Warner leagues were practically begging him to sign up, and he was going to relent until the night the paramedics called.

“After the accident, I said, ‘Forget it,’ ” Keith recalled. “ ‘No more sports. If Marc can’t do it, I’m not doing it. It’s not right. No way.’ ”

He began hanging out in troublesome neighborhood places after school. His work ethic was swallowed in teen apathy.

He was rebelling against the accident, and against a new role that involved everything from feeding his brother to suctioning his lungs.

Lois heard him crying one night and asked what was wrong.

“All my life, I’ve been the little brother,” he told her. “Now I’m the big brother, and I don’t like it.”

It was time for another brotherly chat. And some advice from the real big brother.

“The next year, there was a sign about Clovis High football tryouts, and Marc said, ‘You’ve got to do that,’ ” Keith recalled. “And I’m wondering, ‘Why?’ ”

Then Marc flattened him.

“He said, ‘Man, you’re good,’ ” Keith recalled. “I’ll never forget that. After all those years of hearing him cut me down, he finally said I was good.

“I figured, ‘If he said it, I’m doing it.’ ”

He tried out, made the team, was voted most valuable player on the junior varsity in his first season and seven years later is on the verge of a once-unlikely NFL career.

Once it was just Marc saying it. Now everybody is saying Keith Poole is a good football player.

“Regardless of his size or how fast people think he is, when it’s game time on Saturdays, he’s the man,” Sun Devil quarterback Jake Plummer said.

Like on the Saturday against top-ranked Nebraska, when he caught a 25-yard touchdown pass on the game’s opening drive to begin a 19-0 upset.

Or on the Saturday against North Texas, when he caught three touchdown passes and ran for another score.

Eleven of his 46 catches have been for touchdowns, and he has averaged 18.7 yards a catch.

“His moves are not real dramatic,” Sun Devil Coach Bruce Snyder said. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, God, did you see that move!’ But all of a sudden, he’s over there, and he’s open.”

Then there was the game in Tucson against archrival Arizona, when Poole made a one-handed catch that made every highlight film, and a leaping catch that had one sports announcer screaming, “White men can’t jump? Oh, yes, they can!”

He also lost a fumble.

Later, after Marc had been hugged raw by friends after screaming until he was hoarse, the real big brother smiled.

“How about that?” Marc said. “Told you my bro was good. Damn good, isn’t he? [Pause.] Now we got to work on that fumble.”

*

A year or so after the accident, Keith Poole walked into the house, leaned over and slugged Marc in the arm.

“Hey, what was that for?” Marc cried.

“Payback time,” Keith said.

Lois remembers smiling.

“For a while, I was worried it was becoming an unnatural relationship,” she said. “To see Keith finally paying him back for all those poundings he took, that was great.”

It was just the start.

Today, the brothers holler at each other like any brothers, complain to their mom about each other and snicker at those who think they are angels.

Last year, in the midst of an argument, they were interviewed for a Fresno TV spot. They hammed it up for the spot. Then that night, while watching it, they argued again.

“Marc would watch himself say something nice about Keith on TV, then scream, ‘I can’t believe I said that. I can’t stand him!’ ” Lois said. “It was great. It was so . . . normal.”

That normality was reached two summers ago, when the boys reunited after a four-year separation during which they attended different colleges.

To outsiders, it appeared the boys had never been farther apart.

Their last names had even become different.

Marc had taken the name of their biological father, Strohmaier. Chuck Strohmaier and the boys’ mother had divorced when the boys were toddlers, but he later housed Marc while he studied at two Bay Area junior colleges.

The boys’ interests also had become different.

Marc was hoping for a career in sports marketing. Keith wanted to work in construction or with troubled children.

But they still talked on the phone nearly every day. And Marc grew tired of watching Keith from afar, sensing that Keith was also weary of getting inspiration over the phone.

Keith wasn’t coming home, so Marc figured he had little choice.

One day, Marc announced he was moving to Tempe. By himself. Just like that.

He was willing to risk living alone for the first time since the accident, because it would mean living near his brother.

If it were a song, this would be the chorus, signifying a joyful embrace. In reality, there was worry.

“I thought, ‘That’s impossible,’ ” Lois recalled. “I said, ‘OK, we’ll see how long it lasts before he comes back.’ ”

Keith got the news from Marc, hung up, then called his mom.

“I said, ‘I’d love for him to come, but during football season, I can’t take care of him all the time,’ ” he recalled.

Then he phoned Marc.

“And I told him, ‘I’ll be there when you need me, but I can’t do any full-time thing.’ ”

Marc responded in typical fashion, saying, “Man, I won’t bother you with any of that stuff, you’ll see. It’ll be great.”

Keith hung up again, found a board and made a makeshift ramp that would make his apartment somewhat wheelchair accessible, canceling plans to move into a second-story condo.

And it has been just as promised. Great.

“He’s such a stud,” Keith said. “Everyone likes him. I’ll be feeling bad at practice and I look over at him and his great attitude and I think, ‘How can I possibly feel bad?’ ”

Said Marc, “Watching over Keith is, like, my job.”

There were tough times early. Marc missed much of last season when he was hospitalized for a skin condition.

But Marc has called Keith only a few times for emergency help. And Keith has always answered.

Keith thinks of all those times Marc should call, but doesn’t, choosing to spend an uncomfortable night instead of bothering his brother before a big game.

“Do you know how much he has to build himself up to make that call?” Keith said. “It’s so hard on his pride. I would do anything for him.”

Their spirit has spread to a Sun Devil team known for its closeness.

“Everybody says they would rather give up life than go through what Marc has gone through,” Plummer said. “Yet he’s out there, every practice. He set Keith straight. And Keith is there for him. It’s a neat story.”

Not that Marc doesn’t still bang his chair into walls and curse.

Not that Keith doesn’t stay awake at night and cry.

“It gets to me sometimes,” Keith said. “Actually, it gets to me a lot.”

And not that their mother still doesn’t find the situation somewhat impossible.

“I don’t know how either one of them has stood it,” she said.

Then the boys will go to dinner, and some little kid will walk up and say he wants a wheelchair like Marc’s, and the boys will laugh and all the stares and strains will momentarily disappear.

And the younger brother will think, “Thank God nothing happened to him.”

And the older brother will think, “Thank God I’m still here.”