Shots on Goal (5 page)

I wave over the other midfielders—Rico and Hernandez—and we huddle up before the second half begins. “The forwards don’t get it,” I say.

“They’re idiots,” says Rico. “Joey’s brain goes in one direction. He hasn’t passed backwards in his life.”

“So holler at him,” I say. “And at Dusty, too. Keep yelling for the ball. And work with me. We have to keep the pace down, and we have to control the offense. Our guys can’t think and dribble at the same time.”

Hernandez is just nodding and sniffing. He’s got major allergies.

Rico scowls. “They’re never in position. That one time Mitchell made a great cross from the corner, and I look up and Joey’s over in the corner, too. Like that does a lot of good.”

I shake my head. Rico starts laughing all of a sudden. “Joey,” he says, shaking his head. “What a meat grinder.”

Joey takes the kickoff, sending it to Trunk, who eases it back to me, and I dribble down the field. I pass to Rico. He yells to Trunk and passes it ahead to him. Soccer’s like
pinball when everything’s working, the ball flying from point to point, making a zigzag path down the field.

We’re clicking now, one-touch passes moving it toward their goal. But now Joey’s got his head down, dribbling into a cluster of red-and-silver jerseys. “Joey!” I yell. “Joey!” But the ball is already lost.

Rico intercepts it before they can cross midfield. He sends it back to me, and I beat one guy and race downfield. I pass it to Hernandez and he returns it. Now I can dribble, four more steps and I’ll shoot. But there are blue shirts near the goal: Joey, Trunk, Dusty. I loft it into the box; Trunk gets control. He slides it toward the corner and Joey fires it, high and hard, into the net. It’s tied.

I run back, angry, because it should work like that every time. Most of these guys don’t have a consistent awareness of anybody but themselves. And we can’t beat a good team playing one on eleven.

The pace finally slows as the third quarter winds down, and the fourth is more of the same. Both teams make runs late in the game, but Herbie makes two great saves for us and their defense doesn’t let us in there again. So it ends 1–1.

I sit with Rico on the bus on the way back to Sturbridge. “We should have beat those guys,” I say.

“If Pelé up there had half a brain,” he says, meaning Joey, who’s sitting about six seats up.

“He does,” I say. “Maybe even five-eighths.”

I shake my head. It’s frustrating. Joey’s fast, opportunistic. He scores goals and gets girls. But I don’t want to be like him.

Well, okay, sometimes I do.

        
*
(I am not kidding.)

After practice on Friday Joey comes up to my locker and sits on the bench. “Tonight, right?” he says.

I shrug. “Yeah.” Football game. Shannon and Eileen.

“We gotta get moving,” he says.

“It’s only quarter after five.” What the hell is he up to now?

“We’re meeting them at six-thirty. And we gotta stop at work.”

“Why?”

“Gotta get something.”

“The game’s not till eight.”

“I know.”

He takes a sweatshirt out of my locker and stuffs it into his gym bag. I just look at him, but I’m sure he has a reason for needing my shirt.

“You’ll see,” he says.

We leave the locker room and head down to Main Street, walking quick but not saying anything. “Kenny’s got something for us,” Joey finally says, and I figure it has to be alcohol, because there’s nothing else I could imagine Kenny getting for us that would be of any use.

We go in the back door and Joey peeks into the kitchen. “Carlos here?” he says to Kenny, who’s at the broiler, poking at a steak with a big fork.

Kenny shakes his head without taking his eyes off the
meat. He’s got a cigarette hanging from his lip, which should have been enough to answer the question. Carlos threatens to fire Kenny at least once a week for smoking when he’s making food, so he doesn’t do it if he thinks Carlos is around.

I follow Joey into the walk-in and he unzips the gym bag. He reaches behind the giant plastic jars of salad dressing and pulls out two bottles of apple wine. He puts one in each sleeve of my sweatshirt, then carefully rolls up the shirt and puts it back in the bag. Then we leave.

“You better take this,” he says as we cross the parking lot, handing me the bag. “My parents would kill me.”

Before I can react he starts walking backward in the direction of his house. “Meet me at the bottom of the path at quarter after,” he says. “They’re gonna meet us up on the cliff.” Then he turns and runs off.

So I’m left standing there with the wine, saying to myself that my parents would kill me, too. I’m two blocks from the YMCA, so I head there. I can stash the stuff in my brother’s locker until after dinner.

The cliff overlooks Sturbridge from high above. You can drive up from the other side, but the only way up from town is a long twisting path through the woods. It takes about eleven minutes to walk up. I ran it with Tommy every morning this summer in four and a half.

We’re halfway up when Joey sticks out his arm, grabbing my shoulder. He nods toward the down side of the hill, where two deer are browsing on the undergrowth. They’re bucks—a nice-sized six-point and an average spike. Joey
pulls back an imaginary bow and goes, “Sproing.” They look up, black eyes on us, still chewing slowly, staring us down. The bigger one snorts, swishes his tail, and takes one leap away, then walks about twenty feet and stops. The smaller buck follows. They stare at us again from deeper cover, and the big one lowers his head, eyes still on us.

“I didn’t think bucks hung around together in the fall,” I say.

“They ain’t in the rut yet,” Joey says. “Not entirely. They’ll start fighting over the does soon. Choosing their harems.” He starts walking again, a little faster than before. I’m lagging behind, so he turns to speak: “The ones with the bigger horns always win.”

There’s a cleared spot at the top of the hill about the size of a baseball diamond, with two picnic tables and a small parking area behind us. You can see the whole town spread below you.

It’s a warm evening. From this height the town’s football shape is most evident—it’s a flat oval set down between the hills. All around us the hardwoods are showing their colors—rusts and ambers and bright oranges and reds.

So if you imagine a football-shaped town (I’m not saying it’s perfectly symmetrical), then the stripe running toward us is the Pocono River, which reaches the bottom of the cliff and makes a hard turn along the edge of town. And the lacing—right down the middle of the ball (the downtown is just three streets wide)—is Church Street, dotted with six different spires. They’re all doing well; Christianity is our most important religion, ahead of football and wrestling.

Route 6 curves in and forms the other stripe, with the cinder block factory just beyond it and the football stadium at the far edge, diagonally across from us tonight. We’re about 220 feet above town here. The high school is a block over from the stadium, on the first rise of the hill on that side. That side of the hill climbs as high as over here, though not quite as steeply.

We’re sitting on the rim of the bowl up here, with the steepest drop right below us. There’s a low wooden snow fence, but it’s easy to clear. You’d die if you fell. Or at least you’d get seriously mangled.

Shannon and Eileen aren’t here yet (I don’t know why we didn’t meet at the bottom and walk up with them; that’s how I would have done it), so we scout around for a good place to drink. You can’t do it out in the open, because the cops sometimes ride up here, especially on nights when there are likely to be parties.

Technically this is a town park, in honor of somebody who donated the land for it, but the only real indication of that is a memorial stone and the Christmas star display, which they light up after Thanksgiving. It gives a pretty cool effect; it’s like forty feet tall, so you can see it from everywhere.

Since this is such a small town, there isn’t a whole lot of mystery about girls you’ve gone to school with your whole life. But Shannon and Eileen went to Immaculate Heart through eighth grade, so our paths haven’t crossed much. All I know about Eileen is that she plays field hockey and has kind of a pug nose and red hair. Shannon is a gymnast and a hurdler, and I guess you’d say she’s willowy.

“Looking good,” Joey says suddenly, gazing toward the path,
at the grand entrance. Shannon’s a head taller than Eileen, a lot narrower at the hips, and is the only one of the two that is not sweating heavily. She’s smiling at us as they approach.

“Nice night,” Shannon says as they reach us.

“Easy for you to say,” says Eileen. “You just glide up that hill like it’s nothing.” She opens her mouth wide and hangs out her tongue. She’s got a sleeveless yellow shirt on so she has easy access to her armpits, one of which she wipes with the palm of her hand. She sniffs the palm and wipes it on her jeans. “So where are the refreshments?” she says.

“Follow me,” says Joey. He starts walking across the grass. There are some big rocks on the side, and you can climb down easy and get out of sight. There’s some broken glass—it’s not like we’re the first to ever drink up here—but the park’s mostly clean.

“Would you ladies care for a view of the town?” Joey says. “Or a cozier spot beneath the pines?”

They both laugh. “I want to see my house,” Eileen says. “I haven’t been up here in years.”

So we sit partway down the rocks and Joey opens one of the bottles and takes a swig. He passes it to Shannon, who hands it to Eileen, and then it reaches me.

“Hey, I can see Herbie’s bench,” Joey says.

“Herbie, too,” I say.

“No, it ain’t.”

“Yes, it is,” I say.

“You can’t tell.”

“Who else sits there?” I ask. There’s definitely a guy on the bench, and it sure looks like Herbie from here. What are we, five hundred yards away? “It’s Herbie.”

“It’s Herbie,” says Eileen, squinting into the distance. “His shirt says I Am a Macho Stud.”

“He’s got a new zit on his chin,” says Shannon. “And there’s a speck of tomato sauce or something on his lip.”

I reach for the bottle again. “Believe me, it’s Herbie.”

“Hi, Herbie,” Shannon says, waving in his direction. “Come on up.”

When she waves you see the individual muscles in her forearm, lean and sinewy. She brushes her hair back behind her ear and catches me staring at her. She smiles and flicks up her eyebrows. She’s sitting cross-legged, slightly above me to my left, with a denim jacket tied around her waist. Eileen is on my level, facing me, but closer to Shannon. Joey is next to her, squinting out toward town.

“That is Herbie,” Joey says after a few more minutes, and we all laugh.

By seven o’clock there’s a definite momentum downtown toward the stadium. More cars are moving that way than the other, and people in the streets are heading there, too. It’s getting dark and the streetlights have come on. We’ll have to get off the hill soon or we’ll have a hell of a time getting down.

There’s an inch or two left in one of the bottles and I’m feeling pretty good. The buzz will hit when we stand.

“How many points we get for this?” I ask Joey. This is an ongoing discussion we’ve been having about how to be cool, how to earn a place among the elite.

“A few,” he says. “So far.”

“What points?” Eileen asks.

“Status points,” I say. “Unofficial.”

“You mean like what level you’re on? What clique?”

“Like that. Yeah.”

Eileen laughs. “You give yourself points for going out with me?”

I blush and laugh and shake my head. “Yeah.… I don’t know. But you know what I mean. People do keep score. Maybe not with points exactly …”

Shannon sits up real straight and smiles. “I think Joey’s worth at least a half a point for me,” she says. “What do you think, Eileen?”

“Maybe three-quarters. What about Bones? I get any points for being with him?”

“I’d give you one,” Shannon tells her. “Two if he tries to make out with you later.… Five if you let him.”

Not likely. I try to turn this back to a more serious discussion. “You know what I mean. It used to be—like when our parents were in school—being in sports was the coolest thing you could do. Now the coolest people aren’t even into sports. If you’re in a heavy-metal band or you deal drugs and carry a weapon you’re way up there.”

“True,” Eileen says. “Or if you’re screwing some older guy.”

Me and Joey turn our heads slowly toward Shannon, then look away fast.

“You guys,” she says. “Filthy minds.” Then she laughs and reaches for the bottle, and we all watch her drain it.