The Heartbeat of Halftime (9 page)

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Authors: Stephen Wunderli

BOOK: The Heartbeat of Halftime
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THE HARD WAY
T
here's nothing like a Friday night, lots of cake, and all the pop you can drink. Spray Can was a much better driver than we had figured. Turns out he drives all the time for Ray. He drives slow, though; says he doesn't want to draw any attention to himself. So we poked along the back roads all the way to Granite High School, where we would play the next day's game. We drank so much pop that by the time we got there we were so ready to pee that no one saw the guys sitting in the bleachers. We just ran onto the field, marked one end zone, and ran to do the other trying not to wet our pants. Then we met at midfield to talk about the game, the way we would if we were at home.
“Well, what do we have here?” we heard someone say. It startled us because we thought we were alone.
There was only seven or eight of them. But they were big; they were at least a year older than us. We'd find out later that they played on the team that would pound Ed Stebbing's team the next day. They stood there looking at us, trying to figure us out.
“You come down and piss on our field,” one of 'em said, “you just might make someone angry.”
“That's the idea,” I said without thinking.
“Yeah?” the biggest one said, stepping up to my face.
Before I could say anything else, he threw a forearm that caught me in the head and knocked me to the ground. I've never been hit so hard, by anyone. Stars shot through my head. I couldn't hear anything. Before I could stand up, Bam landed on the ground next to me.
“You little boys got anything else to say?” the big one said to us.
No one said a thing. I stood up and he grabbed me by the shirt and threw me down. Then he turned and punched Taco Bell in the stomach. It may have been the only thing that saved us. Taco Bell threw up half a wedding cake and four bottles of peach soda. The boys from Granite laughed. They slapped our faces as we tried to walk away.
“Go on home, boys,” they said. “Come back when you're big enough to play this game.”
Then they shoved at us and kicked our butts as
we went by. We crossed the field in darkness, climbed into the Bel-Aire like battle-fatigued soldiers, and drove away.
None of us said a word on the way back. Except for Taco Bell.
“My stomach hurts,” he kept saying.
When we got to Spray Can's, everybody just climbed out of the car and walked home. We didn't even look at each other. I guess everybody figured we deserved it for stealing cake from a wedding. It was our punishment and we tried to take it like men. But when we were around the corner, we could hear Spray Can kicking an empty gas can.
Bang!
You could hear him kick it, and it would rattle off the wall.
Bang!
I heard it nearly all the way home. Even when I knew I was too far away to really hear it, that can clanged around in my head,
bang!
The next morning we were so out of it that Coach had to stop us in the middle of warm-ups to ask us what was wrong.
“Did you all spend the night dreamin' the season was over?” he shouted at us. “Did you just figure that you didn't want to make it to the play-offs?”
No one said anything.
“We win this game and we're on to the play-offs, fourth seed out of four teams. We lose and it's our last game. Has anybody here been to the play-offs?”
No one raised a hand.
“It's worse than I thought,” he said.
We knew we were in trouble. We just didn't know how to get out of it. We were so demoralized by Friday night's pounding that no one wanted to ever play the game again. Lucky for us, Granite had their worst game of the year. Every time they got a drive going, they fumbled. Their offense was having all kinds of trouble. Their only score came late in the first half when they blocked one of our many punts and their big defensive tackle landed on the ball in the end zone. They didn't even make the extra point—another fumble. So when we broke for halftime, the score was only six to nothing for Granite.
“It oughta be a hundred to nothing the way you guys are playing,” Coach said. “What is it going to take to pull you guys out of it? By some miracle we're still in this game. If we want to win, all we have to do is play football. I don't know what it is you guys are playing. It's not football, it's not the game you played last week against undefeated Cyprus. You knocked off the best team in the league, and now you're losing to the worst. Let's get it together. We're a better team than this. We're the Titans!”
It didn't inspire us much. Granite kept making their mistakes and we kept making ours. It was as if neither team wanted to win. Every time we made a mistake, I got madder and madder. I'd throw a
block downfield that would send the linebacker sailing off the field like a bowling ball, but when I'd turn around Bam would be at the bottom of the pile, caught from behind before he could even hand the ball off.
Coach was helpless. No speech about victory, or about the Romans, or even General Patton, could pull us out of it. We punted with two minutes left and it looked like it was going to be the ball game. I grabbed Spray Can before he went out on defense. I could hear that
bang!
I could hear Spray Can kicking the gas can.
“Kick the can,” I said to Spray Can.
“What?” he said back to me.
“Like you did last night,” I said. “Kick the can like you did last night when you were mad. Kick the can!”
Spray Can looked at me as if a light went on. He ran out onto the field and stood right over the center on the first play, his hands moving nervously, his feet jumping. I knew he was going to blitz.
The quarterback barked the signal.
Spray Can pumped his arms.
The center hiked the ball.
Spray Can charged. He charged like a madman.
Bang!
He was through the line.
Bang!
He hit the quarterback.
Bang!
He punched the ball loose. The ball tumbled away, bouncing in slow motion. Spray Can threw the quarterback aside and dove on the
ball. Our whole team erupted. Now it was our turn to score. With less than a minute to play, we remembered why we had put on our pads that morning.
But as our offense was taking the field, the older Granite team, the team that was about to hand Ed Stebbings his worst loss of the year, the team who only the night before had watched us desecrate their field and had made us pay for it, formed a line at the back of the end zone and started chanting like blood-crazed warriors.
“Defense! Defense! Defense!”
Our first three plays went nowhere. We were inside the thirty, but it was as if every word the older team chanted set up a barrier, a stone in a wall we could not push through. On third down, I had gone downfield to block. I caught sight of the players at the back of the end zone. I found the big guy that had slammed me to the ground the night before. He was shouting the loudest. He was enjoying seeing us crash and burn. I ran back to the huddle.
“Throw me the ball deep,” I said to Bam. “A deep post. I can burn him.”
“I'm not getting enough time!” Bam yelled back at me. “They're on me before I can even throw the ball.”
“Then run the 38 pitch to Heat,” I said. Then I turned to Heat. “But pull up and launch the ball to the back of the end zone. I'll be there.”
“Do it!” Bam said.
I lined up wide in the backfield. Heat looked at me before Bam started the cadence. He could get it to me, I knew he could get it to me. I heard Bam bark: “Set! Hut! Hut!”
I started off inside to get around the linebacker, cut outside to get on the outside shoulder of the deep safety, then veered toward the middle of the field. I could hear the crashing of helmets behind me. And I could see the big guy at the back of the end zone, standing without his helmet on, egging his younger team on.
“Defense!”
I heard him scream. I set my path right for him, then looked over my shoulder. Heat launched a high, arcing, wobbly spiral that looked like it was going to be too deep. I blew past the deep safety, running madly, looking over my shoulder, then at the big guy, the ball, the big guy. He saw me coming just as I reached out to haul the pass in only two steps before crashing out of the end zone. I didn't slow down. The big guy stepped to the side, but I stepped with him.
Bang!
We hit heads. Too bad I was the only one wearing a helmet. He went down hard and came up angry. I rolled past him and jumped up just as the referee signaled touchdown.
The big guy didn't know who hit him until I pulled off my helmet to celebrate. I've never seen anyone so mad. One of his buddies was trying to
hand him a towel to wipe the blood from his nose. He threw it away and screamed at us.
“You haven't won yet, you lucky little creep!”
Then he marched around behind the end zone, throwing his arms up and trying desperately to motivate the younger team. But it was no use. Heat punched in the extra point and tossed the ball to the maniac just before the final gun went off. He threw it back at us and was so out of control his teammates had to drag him away. Titans 7, Granite 6.
“We won,” I whispered to my father. But he couldn't hear me, he wasn't there. While everyone else was celebrating the victory, I walked away with my mother. She didn't say a word, just drove me to the hospital while the rest of the team pushed and shoved and congratulated each other. I watched them from the backseat of my mother's car, and I thought about them all the way to the hospital. That's where my father was then. He got to be too much for my mother to take care of. She had to work, she said. She had to put him someplace where someone could watch after him all the time.
“Why don't you just quit work?” I said.
She got angry then.
“Why don't you quit football?” She said. “Why don't you quit everything and stay here twenty-four hours a day yourself?”
I didn't answer. Truth is, I would've if I'd thought
that's what my father wanted me to do. But I knew how much he loved football. And every time I played, it made me angry that he wasn't there to see it. It made me so angry I was crazy, just as crazy as they all thought I was. Every time I threw a block, I threw it hard. I wanted to knock someone down for every time I looked over at the sidelines and didn't see my father. I wanted to change it all somehow, but I couldn't and it made me crazy mad sometimes. But at least we were winning. No one could believe it. It was going to be the greatest season ever, and I didn't care. All I wanted to do was make someone else hurt as much as me, as much as my father.
“We made the play-offs,” I whispered to him. Then I waited for him to whisper something back through the tubes in his throat. But he didn't. I sat down on the floor beside his bed.
“You don't have to stay here tonight,” I heard my mother whisper.
I opened my eyes a little and looked at her. I must have fallen asleep. It was dark in the room. She looked tired.
“I'm afraid,” I said, coming out of the sleep and not knowing why I was even saying it. It was like I was in a dream and I was watching myself talk about things I didn't understand.
“It's okay,” my mother said. “I'm a little afraid myself.”
She sat down in a chair then and stared at me.
“You look like him, you know,” she said to me. “In a few years you'll look just the way he did when we first met. I'd like to have that back right now. With nothing in between.”
She closed her eyes and talked softly. “It hasn't been easy, I know. Not for you, not for any of us … . You should get some sleep.”
Even as she said it, the very thought of it put her out like she'd been hypnotized to fall into a deep sleep whenever the word was mentioned. Within moments she was breathing long and heavy. Beside me the pump that filled my father's lungs breathed for him. The same rhythm, day and night, not slower when he slept, not faster when he was awake. Steady. My own breath fogged the steel bar of his bed. There we were, the three of us sharing the same air, living and dying with each breath, afraid to breathe, afraid not to.
HOW TO PLAY FOOTBALL
O
n Monday morning there was a huge banner stretched across the building. WAY TO GO, TEAM! it said, and all our names were on it. Taco Bell thought it was the greatest honor he could ever receive. I guess the only name he saw was his. He walked into the school like he'd just been crowned prince of the world. He was wearing his jersey so everyone would know who he was. Fact is, the only ones who really knew him were some of the guys in the band, and Katie. But Taco Bell walked through the hallways saying hi to everybody. And if there was a group of girls, he'd kinda saunter by, glance over at them, and raise his eyebrow like Elvis. When he did it to Katie, she said, “Oh, honey. Did you hurt your eye in the game?”
That's the kind of day it was. Even lunchtime was strange. We ate like kings, without looking
over our shoulders. Ed and his pals were nowhere to be found. We knew they had lost, that Granite had beaten them up pretty badly. Somethng like 28 to 6. But, it wasn't like them to not show up. No one was complaining, but it was strange.
“Wonder where Fat Ed and his buddiesth are,” Spray Can said.
“Who cares,” Taco Bell said. He was too busy celebrating. After lunch he ate six ice-cream sandwiches. “Victory lunch,” he called it, stuffing them into his mouth. The whole world seemed to revolve around us then. There was nothing in our way, nothing wrong with our universe, our world at school. Until I went back to my locker. That's when I figured out where Ed Stebbings had been during lunch. There was a note taped on my locker. YOU'RE STILL A LOSER, it said in red ink, Ed's trademark. And when I opened my locker I found that he had shoved the fire extinguisher hose through one of the little vents at the top and filled the whole thing up with water. Everything was soaked; all my books, my papers, my jacket. It meant that a week's worth of homework would have to be redone. I guess the big guy from Granite was so mad he took it out on Ed. In turn, Ed took it out on me. Funny how anger gets passed around like that.
“I'll make him pay for this,” I said into my locker.
“Who are you talking to?” I heard Leisl say.
“You're always sneaking up on me,” I said to her, turning around.
“You're always talking to yourself,” she said. Then she looked at the inside of my locker. “Why is everything wet?”
“It's a long story,” I said. “Do you have any dry paper?”
She reached in her bag and found me a pad of paper. I pulled out my soggy books and we walked outside and spread them out to dry. It was a warm day for late October. Seemed it was the first time I had noticed the weather for a long time. I copied my wet assignments onto dry paper and tried to explain more football to Leisl. I set up leaves and sticks as the players, but when I went to place a rock for the halfback, Leisl moved it and set down the bottle cap.
“This is you, right?” She said.
I was surprised. “Yeah, that's me, the orange soda.”
I went through all the power plays, the pitches and sweeps, and finally the pass plays. I explained the offense to her, what each player does on every play. I told her what makes a good guard, a good tackle, center, end, quarterback, fullback, and halfback.
“See, each is different,” I said. “They each have something different to do. And they have to do it
right or it won't work, no matter how good just one of them is.”
Then I showed her what would happen if the guard pulled the wrong way, or if the quarterback handed off to the wrong man, or the center hiked it on the wrong count.
“Lots of things can go wrong,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Lots can go wrong. That's what makes winning so great. There's just not much chance of it.”
“Where did you learn it all?” she asked me.
“Mostly from my father,” I said.
“You're father plays football too?”
“He did, a long time ago. He doesn't play anymore. He doesn't do much of anything anymore.”
She smiled, I suppose she was thinking my father had just lost interest in the game, that he was like a lot of fathers, getting older and caring less about football.
“He—he's dying,” I said.
I stood up to leave then, but I couldn't think of a place to go. It was like my mind went blank and I was lost. I just stood there, looking around, waiting for someone to point me in the right direction.
“You want to leave?” Leisl asked.
“I don't know,” I said. “I don't know.”
“Stay here,” she said. “Just a little longer.”
I sat down.
We didn't say much more for a long time. We just sat together. Somehow I believed she knew how I felt. Maybe it was because she had been away from her family for a while. Maybe she had felt lost too. I wanted to tell her about my father, about everything we had done together, about the way he could put his big hands around a football, or on my shoulders and make me feel like I was the only thing in his life. I wanted to tell her I was angry because I didn't have that anymore, I wasn't part of anybody's life anymore. I wanted to tell her that it wasn't fair, that none of it was fair. But I couldn't. And I didn't have to. She understood how I felt and she sat there with me so I wouldn't be alone. We watched the clouds for the rest of the afternoon. They were moving away from us, seemed like the whole world was moving away from us, slowly spinning off and leaving us stranded.

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