Out of Position (29 page)

“What’d you talk about?”

Now he looks at me. “He just wanted to say hi.”

“How did he know you’d be there?”

“Well,” he says, “I expect he read it in the Society column.”

I can feel us teetering on the edge of an argument. It’s not worth it to make that extra push. After all, it’s not like Lee’s not allowed to stay friends with him. And I’m too worn out physically right now to be ready for one anyway. “Speaking of Society,” I say, “why the new outfit?”

That gets me a smile. “I just wanted to look nice for the new football season. Did I pass?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Does this mean you’re going to be doing that a lot?”

“I don’t know.” He rubs a finger around his water glass, collecting the condensation on it and then licking it clean slowly. “Did you like it?”

I never know what to say to that. If I say yes, then it’s like I only like him when he dresses as a vixen. If I say no, then I’m rejecting him, somehow. So I sidestep it, watching him lick his fingerpad, and say, “You fooled Fisher and Gena. At least for a bit.”

He grins. “You tigers are all easy to fool.”

“Just don’t pull anything like in my dorm that time.”

He lowers ears and eyebrows, challenging me with his stare. “Oh?”

“It’s just… it’s different here. This is serious.” That stare worries me, because I know it means he feels I’m holding him back. “It’s not you, it’s the guys and the team and all. This is, y’know, professional.”

“Really? In a professional football league?”

I flatten my ears. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Then how did you mean it?” He puts his elbows on the table and rests his muzzle on his paws. I can feel us coming closer to that edge again. It’s part of the excitement and tension of being with him.

This time, though, I feel like I need to go further. I search for the right words. “The guys here are… they’re more hardcore. In college, you know, we were all just goofin’ around, it wasn’t serious. Here, it’s… it’s real life.” I can feel how real it is, in my aching muscles and joints.

“You think I’m just playing around?”

“Well, what are you doing?”

I should’ve known better than to hope that would slow him down. “If you don’t know, then I don’t know what to tell you.”

“You want me to just,” I lower my voice, “introduce you ’round the locker room as my boyfriend?”

“No,” he says.

“Cause maybe we can wait until I make the team before I try to get kicked off it.”

“You don’t know you’ll be kicked off.” He looks around the steak house at the linen tablecloths, the couples talking low over candles, all male-female. The only all-male groups are the boisterous hyenas in the corner booth and the aged deer at the long table celebrating some kind of business dinner. “Someone’s got to do it. Someone’s going to do it. Eventually.”

“If someone’s gonna do it, it’ll have to be someone like Jaws, a star who’s so tough that people won’t dare make fun of him and teams will sign him no matter what. He could get arrested for anything short of murder and he’d have a five-year contract waiting when he got out.”

“Is he?”

“What? Arrested? No, he’s a boy scout. Except for, y’know, if you get in his way on a run…”

Lee shakes his head. “I mean, is he gay?”

“How the hell should I know? He could be.” I lower my voice again, looking at the raccoon couple next to us. They’re four feet away, within earshot, but they seem to be absorbed in each other. “I could be the only one.”

“You’re not.” He takes a drink of water. “Odds are there are at least three or four on every team.”

“Okay, but we don’t exactly have a pre-game prayer circle, or flame-off, or anything. What about you? Does Morty know about me?”

He jerks as if he’d gotten a static electricity shock. “Of course not. I wouldn’t put your career in danger like that.”

“What if I wasn’t a football player? What if I was just a guy?”

“Sure,” he says, but then his ears droop and his shoulders sag. “Maybe.”

“Does he even know you’re…”

We sit there in silence, eyes locked, him waiting for me to finish the sentence, me knowing I don’t have to. Finally he shakes his head, slowly. “No.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Face it, we’re just in careers where we have to sneak around. In ten or fifteen years, when I retire…”

“It’ll change before then,” he says. “It just won’t be us doing the changing.”

“I’m okay with that,” I say. “I’d rather sneak around and be safe. Have a chance of making it those ten or fifteen years.”

He doesn’t respond. The waiter returns just then to ask if we want dessert. I’m still hungry, but he’s not, and I can wait. So we hold off on dessert and just take a short walk through the hot summer night. We deliberately stay away from the subject of our relationship and talk instead about his work with the Dragons. It’s his second full year with them, his first scouting college games on his own. They have him full time on the college circuit, watching film from game after college game. I thought he’d be going to the Dragons games when the season started, or to the upcoming opponent games, but there’s apparently a whole other branch of the scouting department that handles those duties. He’s a draft scout, which means he just evaluates talent for the club to draft. So Saturday night, he should be technically watching games live, but there’ll be plenty of time to watch the film later.

As a small concession to his job, we turn on the Game of the Week in the hotel room. At least, the TV is in front of us and our faces are both turned toward it, him on his stomach and me on his back, but for the life of me I couldn’t tell you what the score was or even what teams are playing. Lee probably could, but he’s always been better at multi-tasking than I am. I do remember thinking it would’ve been funny if someone scored a touchdown at just the right moment, but the scoring in the game doesn’t happen until later, when I’m resting with my whiskers brushing his ears and the world is taking its time, spinning lazily around us.

Steez grabs me the next day and pulls me into Coach’s office, the first time I’ve been up close and personal with Coach Samuelson. The whole office smells like wolf; he’s really put his mark on it. I can’t even smell Coach Kimble’s scent any more, and he was a wolf too. Samuelson is a standard grey coloring, darker down the muzzle, but what I see most is the intensity of his gaze. He tells me that usually this goes the other way, that they’re the ones who suggest players change positions, but they think it’s a good idea for me. He’s holding up a different playbook than the one I’ve got. It’s got the same red and gold logo on it, but it says “Linebackers.”

Steez, standing behind him with his arms folded, just nods as Coach asks how serious I am about this new position. I give the wolf the same speech. He fixes me with those yellow eyes before holding out the playbook. “It’s yours if you want it.”

I weigh the Cornerbacks’ playbook in my paw. I know it backwards and forwards. Can I learn another whole book? I don’t really have a choice, I remember. It’s move forward or get out of the way. I drop my book on his desk and grab the Linebackers’ book. My claws snag the plastic cover.

“Careful with that,” Coach says.

Steez gives me a feline smile. “You are now mine. Linebacker practice nothing like cornerbacks. Linebackers meeting tomorrow.” He points at me, and I see his ropy tail lashing again. “Do not be late. Rest of today, regular workouts. Go!”

I go, stash the new book carefully in my locker, and attack the calisthenics with renewed energy and purpose. For the first time this year, I feel myself maybe stepping across that divide, into confidence and security.

Ogleby calls me the next morning. “What’s this I hear about you changing positions?” he demands. It’s funny to hear him demand in his high-pitched ferret voice.

“Who called you?”

“It’s in the paper! Something about you in the paper and I didn’t put it there. What the hell?”

“It seems like a good fit,” I said. “Coach is cool with it.”

“Jesus Lion Christ on a goddamn stick, ‘Coach is cool with it? Is Coach in charge of your career? You know the work I go through trying to figure out the goddamn market for you? Get the best deal I can, and you go changing positions on me?”

“Calm down,” I say. Ogleby’s a half-decent agent, as Lee says, by which he means he’s about half a decent agent. But he is the only one I’ve got.

“Don’t you tell me to calm down. I tell you to calm down! That’s my job!”

“Okay, but I gotta get to practice in a couple minutes,” I say.

“Are you in at this position? Definitely in? You’re going to make the cut?”

“I don’t know. I’m practicing with the linebackers…”

“Are you the best? Going to start this year maybe?” He’s gone from furious to overly excited in about thirty seconds.

“I don’t
know.
Listen, I need to go to practice or I won’t start.”

“Call me after they tell you. Call me right away, you hear?”

I hang up the phone and shake my head. If I get a starting job — I don’t even let myself imagine that — I’ll be only the second one of Ogleby’s clients to be starting, and the other one is on special teams. So I get his excitement, but it’s still annoying.

I put Ogleby out of my mind after that, because I have to absorb everything. The linebackers practice alone first, then have regular drills with the team, then go back to practicing alone in the afternoon. The morning practice isn’t any worse than with the corners, which is to say it’s still hell. The afternoon linebackers meeting, though, is where I first get the idea of what I’m getting into.

“Position of linebacker is most important one on the defense,” Steez says in a booming voice. “Is difference between success and failure. Teams know d-line will rush the quarterback and stop the running lanes. They know safeties and corners cover wideouts. They plan for that. What they don’t plan for is what you’re going to be doing. Sometimes you’ll drop back, sometimes you’ll rush forward. It all depends on your ability to,” he starts ticking off on his fingers, “learn the opposition, read the defense, react to the play. Learn, read, react. Learn, read, react.”

The cornerbacks coach with the Dragons only used the word “learn” about the playbook, so that we wouldn’t end up in the middle of the field while the receiver we were supposed to cover was heading all alone to the end zone. I look around during the talk. The other new guys to the linebacking corps have that “yeah, yeah,” bravado grin on, except for the coyote with a ragged ear, who looks to be my age. He’s focused on Steez, his eyebrows arched together. Killer just looks bored. Gerrard, sitting to one side of the coach, stops in his survey of the crowd when he sees me looking at him and returns my stare. I look away.

“What is the number one skill of a top linebacker?” Steez looks around at us.

The coyote with the ragged ear raises a paw and says, “Tackling.”

Steez shakes his head. “No.”

Killer shoots the coyote a scornful look. “Speed,” he says without raising his paw.

“No.” Steez folds his arms and half-turns toward Gerrard.

“Decision making,” the coyote says, not bothering to disguise the distaste on his muzzle as he looks at Killer.

Oh, great. Decision making. Don’t you actually have to know something before you can make decisions about it?

 
“Don’t worry so much about that,” Fisher tells me that evening. His tail waves lazily behind him as he tosses a football from one paw to the other. We’re sitting in my room in the last of the daylight, me on the bed with my new playbook, him walking off the day’s workout. He says at his age he needs to cool down as much as he needs to warm up. I don’t see how he still has the energy to walk around after the day of practice we just went through. “You’re a good study. You’ll pick it up.”

“In two weeks?” I don’t even look at him, just keep reading the playbook.

He laughs and claps me on the shoulder. “You’ll make it past the first cuts. You’re smarter than I was when Victorino was trying to get me to learn the D-line playbook.”

“So I have three weeks.” The circles and crosses all blur in my eyes. I try to re-focus on the page.

“Listen,” he says, “talk to Gerrard. He’ll help you out.”

“Why would he do that?” I ask, wishing he’d just let me study.

Charm has this way of bashing the door so it swings open and slams the wall when he comes in. He almost whacks Fisher’s football when he does it this time. “Hey, Gramps!” he booms. “Quick game of 360?”

Kickers have about one percent of the practice the rest of us go through. We hate them. “Can’t.” I gesture to the playbook. “Go look up Snaps.”

“Ah, he’s studyin’ too.” Charm fumbles the football when Fisher tosses it to him, bends down to pick it up off the floor. “Everyone’s so stressed around here. Guys need to relax or else they won’t perform.”

I look up in time to see his smirk. “Speak for yourself,” I say.

“You should work on your catching.” Fisher’s looking at Charm. “Might actually have to play football one day.”

Charm smirks, then wings the ball hard across the room. Fisher snaps it out of the air with one paw and grins. “I don’t have claws,” Charm says.

“All the more reason.” Fisher tosses the ball lazily in one paw. His claws aren’t extended, I see. “You got to devote yourself to the game. Can’t do it half-assed. Hey. How many kickers does it take to score a touchdown?”

“Let’s see you kick a field goal, Gramps.” The horse has his arms folded, staring at Fisher.

“I thought that was my nickname,” I say.

“Might as well be,” Charm says. “Can’t tell the two of you apart no more anyway.” He stamps the floor, shoots me a look, and stomps out.

“Don’t let ’im distract you,” Fisher says. “One on every team. Thinks talent’ll carry him anywhere he needs to go. You want to stick around in this league, you gotta apply yourself, study, learn. Not enough to just show up and do your job. You need to be prepared to do anyone’s job. You need to know the game inside and out. If it was just about talent, I’d be playing golf on brown grass about now.”

“Do I have to learn golf?” I half-joke, still studying the plays.