Kick (7 page)

Chapter 09

“Carolyn, I started this little adventure with a clear head and as much patience as I could muster,” I said, looking at my half-finished breakfast. “Now my head isn't clear, my patience is gone, and this kid is jeopardizing my job.”

“Jerry, how is Kevin—”

“If something had happened to him while he was playing Sherlock Holmes yesterday, it would have looked bad on me because I'm supposed to be keeping an eye on him,” I said. “What I think I want to do is to pack it in. I'll just call Judge Kelly and tell him that this kid needs to be in custody.”

“You went into this thinking that these kids don't always think things through, but that they deserve a chance,” Carolyn said. “Isn't that right?”

“I'm going to talk to him today,” I said. “And if one answer is shaky, I'm finished with him.”

“Is he coming here?”

“No.”

I knew I didn't want to bring Kevin to the house or any other place where we would be sitting down talking like normal people, because the boy wasn't normal. He had called me at half past eight, all excited, to tell me that he had followed the woman who worked for the McNamaras to her house and into her building.

If there had been something fishy going on, if what we had suspected about illegal aliens being mistreated was true, he might have found himself in a situation he couldn't have come close to handling.

Human Resources had posted a notice of state physicals down at Sea Girt. It was a bit of a trip, but I knew I needed time to cool off. I called Buddy Wright and asked if I could bring Kevin down and let him take a physical.

“He a good candidate?” Buddy asked.

“No, he's just a kid, but I want to bust his chops a little,” I said.

“Bring him over,” Buddy said.

There hadn't been any mistaking my anger when Kevin called. The conversation had started with his bubbling over about how clever he had been to trail Dolores from a distance and had ended with me yelling into the phone. When I picked him up in front of his house, I just unlocked the door and didn't even look at him.

We drove for ten minutes with him leaning against the passenger's side door, as far away from me as possible. When we reached the Garden State Parkway, he finally spoke.

“We going to juvenile prison?”

“What were you thinking?” I asked. “Just tell me what you were thinking so I can try to wrap this old head around it.”

“I was thinking . . . ”

“You
weren't
thinking!”

“I thought I was thinking that you were trying to help me,” he said. “You were telling me good stuff about how to stay out of jail and you talked to Mr. McNamara. I just wanted to do something that was useful to you.”

“By playing junior detective and putting yourself in danger?” I asked. “Or by alerting anybody who might have been doing something illegal that the police were watching them?”

“I thought you said that the investigation had ended.”

“If there's possible criminal activity going on, we don't stop investigating until we know it's
not
going on,” I said. “That shouldn't be too hard for you to understand.”

We pulled off the Garden State and took 34 into Sea Girt. I knew being mad didn't help anything, but I was furious with Kevin. I parked and he followed me into the front door of the Sea Girt Barracks.

I signed in and found Buddy in the gym. He and his staff were putting some applicants for state trooper through their physicals. I told Buddy what I was facing with Kevin.

“Put him on the line,” Buddy said. “Let's see what he's made of.”

I knew Buddy was trying to give me a chance to calm down, so I motioned for Kevin to get on the line of men and women trying out for the next rookie class.

“And after every station, come back over here and talk to me!” I said.

Kevin looked a little confused, but he joined the first line.

The police department physical consisted of four timed tests. The first one consisted of push-ups. Each candidate was given two minutes to do as many push-ups as possible. The minimum standard was eighteen.

“He looks like a nice kid,” Buddy said as we watched the guys doing push-ups.

“Nice, but clueless,” I said. “The only reason I'm around him is that his father fell on duty.”

“Not state?”

“Highland.”

I watched when it was Kevin's turn. He got into position, and when the signal was given I could see him pumping furiously. He did twenty-seven push-ups, his face turning a bright red from the exertion. He was breathing hard when he came over to where I was sitting on a fold-up chair near the wall.

“Talk!” I said.

“I want to be useful,” he said, trying to catch his breath. “Really, I do. About six months after my dad died, some people came over to the house. One of them was my cousin Jorge. I think he was my cousin; maybe he was just a friend of the family. He said I was the man of the house. He asked me if I had a job. I didn't. I was thinking about getting a part-time job to help out.”

“Group B, line up!” a cadre was calling.

Kevin looked around. “They said I was in Group B,” he said.

“So what are you doing over here?”

I watched as he ran over to his group. The task was sit-ups, and I watched as a man in his thirties struggled to reach a sitting position, The cadre timing him looked down at the candidate, holding the clock so that the man could see it. The cutoff was twenty sit-ups, and it was clear the guy wasn't going to make it. He didn't, and you could see the disappointment. If you failed one of the cutoffs, you were automatically disqualified for the state police.

Kevin was young and light and started the sit-ups as he had the push-ups, in a furious spurt. He slowed down at the end but he made the cutoff. He walked back to me.

“Next time, run back to me!” I said. “Talk!”

“There was a poem by an Irish writer—my dad was Irish—that said that when things went really wrong, the bad people would be active and the good people would sit around and do nothing.” Kevin looked around the barracks, and I could see he was feeling bad. “He used to say to me that all he ever wanted was for me not to be somebody who sat around and did nothing when there was something that needed to be done.”

“Even if you had to do something stupid?” I asked.

“He mentioned . . . that there were a thousand excuses,” Kevin said. “All you had to do was to put your hand out . . . ”

“You remember the name of the poem?” I asked.

“‘The Second Coming,'” he said. “By Yeats.”

Group B was being called again, and Kevin took a deep breath and went back to where the cadre was standing with the stopwatch. There was a group of people gathering along the paneled walls of the gymnasium. They had failed the tests and were already on their way home. The test wasn't that hard for youngsters, I thought. It was good to weed them out.

The third test was the mile-and-a-half run. I was pretty sure that Kevin could do it. They took everyone outside and put them into two groups. One group of about fifteen would start first and then the other group would start two minutes later. They had to do the mile and a half in no more than 14.25 minutes.

I watched the first group take off and then saw Kevin go to the side of the track. It looked for a minute as if he was going to vomit, but then the cadre whistled for his group to go and he started.

It was strange to think of him running around with all those wild thoughts in his head, all that extra weight. I could imagine him sitting on the edge of a field with a father who taught him how to kick a soccer ball, who gave him little speeches about life, and even read him a poem that defined the role of a good human being. For all the world could see, there was simply a skinny kid with a temper running around the track with the older people, his long strides slightly more graceful than theirs, his body a lot less muscular but still growing, but inside there was a young man stumbling toward an uncertain future with a boldness that sometimes wasn't clear even to him.

He raced back and I saw the sweat on his forehead and brows. The kid was in good shape.

“Make sure to drink some water before the next event,” I told him.

He went to the cooler, lined up behind two other guys gasping for air, and took a drink.

“It might not seem like it, but I can handle myself,” he said.

“Against what?”

“I'm doing okay here,” he said, looking over his shoulder at some of the candidates taking the physical.

“You're doing okay because there aren't any bad guys here, Kevin,” I said. “These are guys who don't have a choice but to play by the rules. Once you leave this gym, all the rules are out the window. If they weren't, you wouldn't need young adults in the peak of physical condition to keep order.

“Talk!”

Kevin looked around as if something was going to pop up and give him a clue. “I thought what I was doing was right,” he said. “At least I didn't think I was doing anything wrong.”

“Does this affair have anything to do with Dolores?” I asked.

“No, I just thought I was helping you—”

“If I want your help, I'll ask for it,” I said. “You were helping Christy?”

He shrugged. “Now I don't know who I was helping.”

“You saying you can't talk to me?” I asked. “Or you saying you won't talk to me?”

“If I knew exactly what . . . what to say, then I would say it,” Kevin said. “Do you always know what to say?”

“No, but I always know when I need to be talking to somebody besides myself,” I said.

The last test was a seventy-five-yard run through a small obstacle course.

“You don't have to do this one if you don't want to,” I said. “We can go home now.”

“I'll do it,” Kevin answered.

“Why?”

He bit his lip as he looked around. “I think I can handle it,” he said.

I sat down and watched as Kevin lined up with the others. The course wasn't that long, only seventy-five yards, but there were turns and railroad ties that had to be negotiated. The candidates were proving that they had the stamina and coordination to run after a culprit and catch him in 19.5 seconds. The first guy who started off did it too quickly and fell, sliding into one of the cones he was supposed to negotiate.

Kevin looked up at me and I gave him the thumbs-up sign. I thought he could handle it too. He did.

I had a few words with Buddy and he complained about the level of applicants he was getting. For as long as I've known Buddy, he's been complaining but still turning out good officers.

The ride home was different from the ride down to Sea Girt. I was still riding with a thirteen-year-old, but he wasn't a stranger anymore.

“Can I trust you?” I asked when we reached his house.

“Yes, sir.”

“I hope so,” I said. “What it will mean—me trusting you—is that you've finally learned to trust me and the rest of the world. I'll be talking to you.”

“Sir?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

Chapter 10

I closed Sergeant Brown's car door and walked up the driveway. It was dusk. The sun had all but disappeared below the horizon, creating an eerie combination of shadows and light. I didn't realize I would be putting Sergeant Brown's job in jeopardy. I just wanted to help him. And Dolores. I thought Sergeant Brown would understand what I was doing, but now I was in trouble. Again.

Mom and Grandma were in the den, watching an old DVD of
Betty La Fea
, a Colombian soap opera. I could hear them laughing. I tried to sneak past the door. But my mother's mom senses kicked in.

“So how was it?” she asked without even turning around.

“Fun,” I said, starting up the stairs. I wasn't about to tell her Sergeant Brown almost lost his job because of me and I might be sent back to juvie.

“Come sit with us,” Mom said, making room for me on the sofa.

Living with two women was hard. All I wanted to do was go and play video games upstairs. They just didn't understand me.

Reluctantly, I plopped down on the sofa.

“What did he say?” Mom asked, patting my back.

“He said that I was a bright athletic young man who would make a good police officer.”

“Is that all?” Abuela asked.

“More or less,” I said.

I wasn't lying; I just wasn't telling the whole truth. I thought it probably would be better to leave out the “reckless, loves to lie, sneaky, a car thief, and will probably spend the rest of his life in jail if he doesn't get himself killed within the next few days” part.

There was an awkward silence.

Mom paused the DVD. “I know it's been hard for you the past couple of years,” she said.

Betty's face was frozen in the middle of her conversation, her eyes closed behind her thick-rimmed glasses, her mouth wide open, braces showing. It was no secret why the show was called
Ugly Betty
.

“Are you feeling a little bit better?” Mom said. “I still can't understand why you stole that car. You're not helping yourself by not talking to me.”

“Okay,” I said, and walked upstairs.

Later that night I lay looking up at my ceiling and the small vent centered above my bed. When I was little, I used to imagine that monsters were going to come out of that vent and eat me at any moment. My dad would run in and tell me it was all okay, never once getting angry at me. He even considered moving the vent, but then he'd have had to tear up the ceiling.

If only my dad were here now, I'd tell him everything that happened. He would have sorted things out. I know he would have. But it looked like I would have to get through this on my own. By trying to protect Christy, I was really hurting her. I bet that's what my dad would have said. And my mom, too, if I told her.

I was slowly drifting apart from Mom and Abuela. I could feel it. Conversations with them never used to be awkward, and now I knew they felt sorry for me all the time. I didn't want anyone feeling sorry for me.

Some kids at school said they hated their dads. They were lucky just to have a dad. Suddenly, I wasn't sure why, a wave of anger and resentment came over me. I punched my pillow, leaving an imprint of my fist on it. It took me a moment to cool down. God and I hadn't always seen things eye to eye. Or whatever God saw out of. I turned over, and the glow of the time on my digital alarm clock blinded me. My eyes adjusted just enough to see the picture behind it. Of my dad.

Cal and Tyler came over the following Friday. We hung out for most of the afternoon, then decided to get dinner in town. Cal wanted to look in some stores and stuff, and I just wanted to leave the house.

I washed up and changed my shirt before going.

“You're looking good.” Mom fixed my collar when I came downstairs. “Just don't get into trouble.”

As I was leaving with my friends, I heard Mom tell my grandma that soon the
chicas
would be all over me.

It felt good to get out of the house. This was what I wanted, just hanging and not worrying about being sent back to juvie or anything else.

“If I don't get my grades up, I might not be able to finish the soccer season,” Ty said. “Mrs. Winters gave me an F in science. I think she loved failing me. I don't get why some teachers teach if they hate kids.”

“Come on, I don't think she hates us,” Cal said. “She probably just got picked on in high school or something and this is her revenge.”

“You ever see her hand back a test with an F on it? She likes to watch kids fail. And do you see how big her Fs are? They cover the whole page!” Ty said.

We hung around the mall for over an hour. Other kids from school were there. We checked them out as they checked us out. A couple of kids there tried to start a fight with us. I thought we could take them, but I realized that wasn't a good idea.

I had almost forgotten about the arrest, being caught up in conversation and all, but not quite. No matter what, it was always gonna be in the back of my mind. Well, I hoped not
always
.

Then the three of us walked to Cold Stone Creamery on the other side of the mall. I got an icy blue Gatorade and Cal and Ty got ice cream. We sat outside the store at one of the aluminum tables.

“Yo, Kev, what's it like always being with that cop?” Cal asked. “What is he, a sergeant or something?”

“I guess he's all right,” I said. “At first I thought he was just interested in getting information about the arrest, but now I'm thinking he actually wants to help me.”

“That's cool,” Ty said.

“But I really don't need any help,” I said. “I'm fine and I just want to forget about it and get on with my life without him around all the time or having to answer a thousand questions.”

“Yeah,” Cal said. “Sure.”

My friends looked at each other, but nobody asked me anything else. They understood I didn't want to talk about it.

For the next fifteen minutes we sat around trying to figure out which soccer teams in our area were the best. We decided that every team had a weakness and we'd have a chance to move on in the tournament.

“I think when we're on, we have the best team play,” Ty said. “Our team play matches up with anybody's.”

Cal's ice cream had looked so good that I decided to get some, too. As I returned with my cake batter and crushed Oreos, Cal nudged Ty and pointed across the mall.

“Hey, Christy and Emily are coming over here.”

I didn't know why I felt a sense of panic, but my stomach knotted up just seeing Christy. I put my ice cream on the table and quickly went back into the store. I zigzagged my way through the crowd toward the bathroom. Inside, I splashed cold water on my face and dried it off with paper towels.

Sometimes going to school was boring, and there were times when even soccer practice wasn't that interesting. And I had been to the mall so many times, it wasn't the most exciting thing in the world, either. But now the boring parts of life were starting to look good. I knew Christy's drama was getting heavy on me, but I didn't know it could make me sick to my stomach.

I waited a few minutes until I thought the coast would be clear, but came out only to find that Christy was still talking to Cal. She saw me through the window, stopped her conversation with Cal, and entered the shop.

“Hey!” Christy said.

“What's up?” I asked, trying not to show that I didn't want to see her.

“How come you've been avoiding me?” she asked.

“I'm not . . . I don't know,” I replied, looking at the floor. “I've been thinking—how come you let me go to jail and you never told the police what really happened? I haven't told anyone. I figured it was up to you.”

“I'm really sorry, Kevin,” Christy said. “You know how my dad is. If I say anything, it'll get back to him and I'll
really
be in big trouble. You know that.”

“Is it always gonna be like this?” I asked. “I'm still the one in the most trouble.”

“I hope not,” Christy said.

Her eyes started to water up. I gave her a napkin. There was no way I wanted to have to explain to Cal and Ty why she was crying. I took her hand and we walked outside together.

Emily was hovering over my ice cream.

“Mmm. That looks good,” Emily said. “Can I have some?”

“Sure,” I said, and pushed it toward her.

I hoped her lipstick didn't come off on it. I hated that.

“Thanks. I'm thirsty, too,” Emily said. “Can I have some of your drink?”

No, not the Gatorade! I thought.

I forced a smile and handed her the drink.

We left Cold Stone Creamery and started to walk home. Cal and Ty teased me about Emily having a crush on me.

“And my man just brushed her off,” Ty said.

The air had gotten slightly colder outside, and I could see my breath rise up as I said good-bye. We split up and went our separate ways home. Going out with the guys had taken my mind off things. For a while.

“Wake up, sleepyhead—you're going to be late for your game!” my mom called the next morning. “I made you eggs and
chicharrón
. It's all ready for you downstairs.”

“All right,” I groaned. I was still sore from Thursday night's practice and had just woken up. I glanced at the clock; it read 11:00. “Mom, it's way too early.”

“Kevin, humans are not nocturnal creatures. You can't sleep all day and stay up all night.”

My muscles were tight, and I struggled to bring myself out of bed. I got out of bed and walked drowsily down the stairs with my eyes half closed, following the smell.
Chicharrón
, bits of juicy pork still attached to the skin of the pig, was one of those things that sounded gross but tasted delicious.

The quarterfinals were about an hour and a half away at Fort Dix. I thought it was strange that the soccer fields for the State Cup quarterfinals, semis, and finals were right smack in the middle of a military base camp.

I fell asleep in Sergeant Brown's car on the ride to the field, and when I woke up, I didn't feel much like playing.

Getting my bag out of the trunk, I squinted across the complex to see which field we were playing on. Coach Hill's bald head and stocky figure were easy to spot, and most of my teammates were already there in their red and white uniforms.

“Get your head ready to play soccer!” I heard Coach yell as I approached the team. “We've made it this far, but so far, we haven't proven anything. The teams we've played have been all right, but not sensational. Today we have more of a challenge. The Oceanside Tsunamis are going to put up a fight. As for their defense, I think it's kind of slow and disorganized. Did you hear that, forwards? We have to take advantage of their defense to counteract their offense. Kevin, you and Ricky have to keep the pressure on their defense. I don't care if you get tired. Suck it up and keep the ball moving.”

I was going to have to pace myself.

“The Tsunamis have some pretty good players who can be a threat to score at any given moment. Watch out for Santiago—he's their best player and one of the best in the state. Cal, if you don't you think you can handle his speed, I'll put Mike on him, or you guys can alternate if you need a break. He's going to be a handful, but remember, great teams win championships, not great players. We need team players to step up today, not individuals. Let's see how well you guys can handle pressure.”

On the field we warmed up, and I was feeling better. I looked for Santiago and saw a kid who was taller than I thought he would be. He dribbled up and down the field, getting loose, and I could see he could handle the ball. I started feeling nervous, but it was a good kind of nervousness.

We huddled and got a last few words from Coach, and then it was time to play.

“One, two, three, Raiders!” we shouted.

I shot a look at Sergeant Brown on the sideline as I ran to my position and he smiled. I was glad he was there to watch me. Maybe it was a sign that he'd forgiven me for following Dolores.

The game got off to a slow start. The Tsunami offense controlled the ball. They were just playing it back and forth. They didn't score, but they didn't let us get the ball, either. I didn't have to run much since the ball was on the other side of the field most of the time. Not a good sign.

Slowly, our defense started to push them back and the game shifted to my side of the field. I was closing down the nearest defender as soon as they received the ball. I knew the defenders were feeling the pressure and were bound to make a mistake.

Suddenly, one of their defenders played a lax ball. It looked like it was rolling in slow motion. Shawn intercepted the ball at midfield. There was only a sole defender in sight. I was running in line with Shawn, having to hold my pace back a little so that I wouldn't be offside if he passed it to me.