Divisions (Dev and Lee) (38 page)

“I didn’t.”

“I know.”

“I would now, though.”

He sighs. “That’s not constructive.”

“No. But tell me you don’t know how I feel.”

There’s a pause. The stupid “Jingle Bells” song goes off and a commercial comes on. Father says, “I do. But do you know how I’m feeling? I’m sad at what’s been lost. Your mother is still the person I married.”

“No, she’s not. Didn’t you hear her? Once you change, you leave your old life behind.”

“I don’t believe that, and I don’t think she does either.”

“She said it loudly enough.” I squeeze my paws together in my lap.

He drives us down a ramp and onto the highway. Focusing on the merge, he’s quiet until we settle into a lane of traffic. “You weren’t exactly giving her a chance to be understanding.”

“She locked my room. She
burned
my clothes and books!” The posters, the books, the plush toys, all the things I hadn’t really wanted until an hour ago, imprisoned behind stupidity and anger. The denim jacket…gone.

Father spares me a quick glance. “That was over the line. I will have a talk with her about respecting property, if you want, and I’ll try to get the rest of your things. But you didn’t handle it well.”

“What was I supposed to do, say, ‘Okay, you’re right, I’ll just leave’?”

“If your only other option was to call her a ‘scheming bitch,’ then, yeah, I’d say that sounds about right. She’s still your mother, and you’re still her son.”

“She’s not your wife.”

I regret that right away, even though he doesn’t react. “Sorry,” I say. “I mean…”

“No, you’re right. She’s not. But she is still your mother.”

So as to keep the peace, I don’t let out the voice in my head, the stubborn refrain singing,
No, no, no, she’s not.

It takes us an hour to find a place to eat, by which time I’m a little calmer. We get dinner at Pasta Roma, an Italian place that neither of us has been to before, a place with no associations from our past. Those places are harder to find than you’d think in the big city twenty minutes from where you grew up. And Pasta Roma has wine, a cheap house chianti that usually I wouldn’t think of as drinkable. I’ve only gotten through a glass and a half of it when Dev calls.

He’s on a break from practice. I can hear the other guys in the background, talking and laughing. Dev wants to know if I’m done moving my stuff, and when I laugh, he says, “That’s one of the bitterest laughs I’ve ever heard from you. What happened?”

So I give him the whole story, abridged because Father’s sitting there and his ears go down farther and farther with every detail I recall, and because the wolf couple one table over keeps flicking their ears to listen. “She burned your shit?” Dev says, and Father definitely hears that, because he sighs and stares down at his plate of salad.

“Yeah,” I say. “Look, I’m going to finish up dinner. I’ll be back tomorrow morning but I wish I were coming back tonight.”

“I do too,” he says. “Look, I got calls from a couple reporters about the Pilots quote today, but I just put them off. I didn’t hear from Brian again. And whatever this thing is that he wanted you to ask me about, don’t worry about it.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Okay. Thanks. Love you.”

“Love you too,” he says.

Our pasta dishes arrive then, in a cloud of warmth and mouth-watering cheese and marinara sauce scent. Next to us, the wolves are back in their own conversation. I inhale the strong, rich tomato, with just enough garlic to sharpen the flavor without overwhelming it. When the waiter leaves, my father says, “I’m glad you have Dev, and some of his teammates.”

“I am too.” I’m hungry and a little buzzed, meaning I’d better get some food in me. I lift my fork and plunge it into the pasta, and say, “Thanks,” before taking the first hot bite.

“Christmas was nice. His teammates seem like good guys.”

“They are. I guess you’ll get to know them better, if you’re managing their money.”

We make small talk until the waiter takes our plates away. Then Father says, in a low voice, “I’m sorry this is so hard on you.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I mean…” He takes a breath. “You’ve made this worse, for sure. But you didn’t do anything to deserve it, not to start with. If you were dating a female tiger, well, Eileen would still have issues, because you remember the thing with her sister who ran off with that fennec.”

“I thought that would make her more understanding.”

Father swirls his wine and breathes in the aroma from the glass. “Sometimes it does. Sometimes you think you’re not going to be like your parents. And then you run into a hitch and you panic because not being like your parents didn’t work.”

“I’m a hitch, now?”

He raises an eyebrow. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“I mean, I think that’s underselling it. I’m way more than a hitch. I’m a huge tree falling across the path. I’m a burned-out bridge.”

That gets a little bit of a smile. “I don’t think the bridge is completely burned out yet. But the point is, we taught you to be yourself, and you went and did that in a way we weren’t expecting.”

“You handled it well enough. Aunt Carolyn handled it. Jesus, even Dev’s backwards auto mechanic father handled it.”

“Carolyn rebelled against her parents so thoroughly that I’m not sure she could do anything else now.” He drops his gaze back to his wine and takes a drink, the red staining his white muzzle until he wipes it clean. “I thought your mother had left that behind too.”

“I guess sometimes we can’t leave behind the things our parents teach us,” I say, and lift my glass to him. “Thanks for at least teaching me some things I want to keep.”

It’s only later, when I’m trying to sleep on his couch, that I start to process the whole day. I get angry again, shaking and clenching my fists, and I want to call Dev just to vent. But Father’s still sleeping upstairs and Dev’s probably asleep too. So I just stare up at the ceiling and I vow that I’m going to do whatever it takes to discredit those Families United fuckers. I’ll leave the job in Yerba, I’ll work with Brian, whatever it takes. This is my goal now, this is my passion…

And I think about Dev, him and Brian. Ice replaces the fire in me, and I close my eyes. I can’t do that to Dev. If I become a crusader, the pressure on him won’t stop. Even if I cut Brian completely out of the loop, it won’t matter. Everyone I work with will be asking me, why isn’t your boyfriend doing these things? I’ll be talking about it constantly at home because otherwise I won’t have anything to talk about. I’ll lose touch with football, I’ll lose touch with one of the important things Dev and I have in common.

Did she change because I wasn’t talking to her? Or did I stop talking to her because she changed?

If I choose this path, will it take me farther from Dev? Will he and I end up shouting over boxes in the front hall, or just quietly slipping apart? I squeeze my paws together over my chest as though there’s a tiger there, and now there’s no ice, no fire, just an empty aching hollow inside my ribs.

I want my tiger. I want to go home.

Sunday approaches like a freight train—not barreling full-speed, but creaking its way interminably through a railroad crossing when you’re sitting in the car waiting. Saturday night I don’t fall asleep in the first ten minutes I’m lying in bed, so because I don’t want to stay up half the night, I take a couple Ambien. The trainers gave us a small supply; the coaches don’t like that, but they like tired players even less.

And I wake up Sunday feeling pretty refreshed. Lee’s flying in earlyish, and after what he went through, I really want to pick him up. But he’s already arranged for Hal to get him and take him to the game, and even though I want badly to hug him, I also want badly to win this game.

So I drive to the stadium, and on the way I put everything out of my mind: Brian, Lee’s mom, the Pilots quote, all that shit, everything except the football game. I dress as the other guys filter in, from the outside and from the training room where the ones who need it are getting painkillers. These days, that’s half the team. My ribs are a little sore, my toe is sore, but it’s not at a level where I need a shot yet. So I just dress, talk with Charm, and try to relax.

Surprisingly easy. To Charm, games are very much like watching them on TV except that sometimes he gets to run out and kick. So he’s not worried. Hellentown doesn’t have exceptional special teams. We put the ball down, he kicks it. His casual attitude is infectious, and so by the time we get Coach’s serious speech, I’m able to absorb it. Hell, I’m raring to go.

“We beat these guys already,” Coach says to a quiet locker room. It feels like he turns and looks every one of us in the eye. “I’m proud of how you have all come together as a team. It hasn’t been easy. There have been a lot of challenges. But you have met and conquered every one of them.” Even Strike is here for this one, uncharacteristically quiet. “I don’t think there’s ever been a year like this one, for a lot of reasons.” Here it feels like his eyes are on me. “But there’s one really big reason. There’s never been a year when a Firebirds team could go out and win their division on the last game of the season.” Teeth flash as he looks around. “It ain’t gonna be easy. They want it as bad as we do, maybe more. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned about this team, it’s that you don’t give up. You go out there and you leave your best on the field, and every one of you is a winner. So let’s go!” We yell. “Let’s fight!” We yell louder. “Let’s
win!
” We scream, we stand, we stomp. “On three, Firebirds! One, two…”

“FIREBIRDS!” The locker room and our ears ring.

And I think that’s loud until we jog out of the locker room and into the deafening roar of Chevali Stadium. I try to find Lee’s section and fail, until the national anthem plays, and then I see the numbers. I have no chance of finding him up there among the red and gold that looks like a Hilltown autumn. But even as I’m looking, the anthem is over, the game’s getting started. If the week was moving slowly, today is speeding by.

We lose the toss and Hellentown chooses to receive the ball. Charm kicks it way downfield for them, but they have a good runback to the thirty. My helmet’s on, I’m running out onto the field, and here we go.

The receiver I’m most responsible for is number eighty-three, the fox who usually lines up in the slot. On film, he demolishes one-on-one coverages like the one we use—he had an amazing run against New Kestle last week. Last game, though, I kept him pretty frustrated, so we’ve been looking at film to see what the Pilots might see, what changes they might make in the game plan to face us again.

On the first series, it doesn’t look like much is different. He comes across the middle, I check the play. On passing plays, I stick to him. They run a few times, try going deep and miss, then get a long gain to our thirty, where the fox catches the ball once for five yards and I tackle him.

As we’re getting up, he kind of shoves me away and says, “Don’t mistake me for your boyfriend, homo.”

A nearby fox in a Firebirds uniform laughs shortly, a kind of “ha.” I think it’s Vonni for a moment and start to say, “Hey, what the fuck?” when I see the number and realize it’s not; it’s Colin, coming in to take a couple plays while Vonni, who chased the Pilots receiver all the way down the field, catches his breath.

“Fuck off,” I say, but I say it softly and I say it only in my head, so I won’t get into trouble. Last thing I need in this game is to get into another fight like in Millenport. Certainly not with my own teammates.

The fox trots back to the Pilots huddle and Colin walks down to the sideline, staying in for the next play. Gerrard comes over to me. “They’re gonna go to him again,” he says. “What happened there?”

I tell him, briefly, and assure him I’m okay, staring at the fox. “He wasn’t like that the first game.”

He claps me on the shoulder. “They’re gonna try to rattle you however they can. You need to stay focused.”

Pike, nearby, turns his head. “Hey, Coach,” he says, “We got his back.”

“Don’t you get distracted either,” Gerrard says. “Keep your eye on that damn 98 and get around him next time.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Pike turns to Brick, says something in a low voice, and the two of them line up.

Gerrard points to the fox as the Pilots come back to the line. “Head in the game,” he says to me.

“I’m good. You just watch that deer.” The Pilots have a white-tailed deer, slippery and fast, who backs up their primary running back, and he’s in on this down.

“I’m telling you, they’re going to pass to eighty-three.” That’s the last thing Gerrard says, because the offense is set and the snap is coming.

Standing back from the line with my eye on the fox, I think, we planned for all kinds of plays they might run, formations they might change. We never planned for them to get into my head—we thought that one guy with his Jesus comment was just one guy running his mouth. It’s ridiculous, anyway, that him calling me “homo” would sting after all I’ve already been through, but it does, a little. It makes me feel like I don’t belong out here. Ironically, I guess, when I used to call someone “fag”—in college—it was a kind of inclusive insult. Because hey, you fag, get outta there, and hey, fag, you’re not gonna beat me. It was something we’d call each other and so using it made you feel like part of a group. And what would Lee say about that?

Eighty-three is nothing like Lee. He’s a foot taller, his tail’s a different shade, the voice is lower and nastier. He’s more like Colin, but even Colin has a smoother, lighter voice. Eighty-three sounds like he’s been smoking his whole life, which would make him the first canid I’ve met with a smoking habit.

And there’s no reason for me to feel excluded. My teammates are behind me, and I only have to glance up into the stands to see the signs supporting me. “DEV’S DIVAS” are still up there, and there are lots of other signs too—

All that vanishes from my mind the moment movement starts. I shadow the fox, and even though I feel like I got off a half-second slower than I should have, I’m right there when the lion at quarterback cocks his arm and throws. I reach out and feel the hard leather of the ball against my pads, and a moment later it goes tumbling to the ground and the fox keeps running to the sidelines while I pull up.

“Nice work,” Gerrard says as we get back.

“Thanks,” I say, but I’m thinking, I coulda had that interception. Another half-second, another six inches, and my paw closes around the ball instead of just deflecting it. They line up for the field goal and their kicker, a dappled grey horse a little smaller than Charm, knocks it through to put them up 3-0.

The missed interception bothers me all the way back to the bench, where I sit and listen to Steez tell us what we need to be doing better. We’re keeping the runs down to 3-4 yards, but he wants us to get more penetration, to get some tackles in the backfield. We listen, I process what he’s saying, and when he’s done I look up into the stands toward Lee. I feel like he’d be disappointed that I missed the interception, but he’d be disappointed that I let that fox’s remark get to me, too. And he’d say, “That’s the kind of thing that you could be helping prevent.”

Shit. I need to remember how much I love him, how much I want to do well for him, how much I want him to be able to come to a home playoff game here and how much I want to come home to him after that. They only got three points. We can still win this.

But Hellentown is playing pretty inspired defense, too. They double-cover Strike on pretty much every play. Jaws runs well, but when we get down to their twenty, Aston underthrows Strike in the end zone. The cheetah lunges forward, not in time to stop one of their cornerbacks from grabbing the ball out of the air. Strike tackles him immediately, but it deflates us. We were so close and now we have nothing to show for it.

I go back out onto the field with more determination, and as Pike breaks up one of their run formations, Gerrard and I bring down the white-tailed deer for a two-yard loss. On the next play, Carson tackles the tight end at the line. We rush the lion on third down, and he has to throw the ball away. So they don’t get any points off the turnover, and we feel good.

The problem is that Aston is trying too hard now. He throws too fast, too long, and he doesn’t look for Strike at all on the next series. Ty catches a nice pass for a ten-yard gain, but we can’t get past midfield, and we have to punt it back to them.

At least we have better field position. This gives us on the defense more incentive to keep them contained, and we do, until most of the way through the second quarter. Their deer, the finesse back, slips past Brick, jukes past Gerrard. I run after him, but it’s Norton who tackles him, well into our territory.

“Hold tight!” Gerrard yells at us. “Hold tight!”

That fox, eighty-three, is ready again, and I know they’re going to throw to him. I’m ready, and when the play starts, I watch for him to break. I bump him at the line, throwing off his timing, and then he breaks for the sidelines. It was probably a precision play, or else the quarterback is throwing away from me, because the ball goes off the fox’s outstretched paw, out of bounds to the side.

Momentum carries me into him; I put my paws out to stop myself. Again, he growls and shoves me and says, “I told you, homo, I’m not your cocksucking boyfriend.”

I can’t see his face, but if I could, I feel like I’d punch it. Instead, I back up, holding my paws up, and say, “I know you’re not. My boyfriend can catch.”

He comes after me as I go back to the line, not physically, just trotting near me and jawing. “Maybe you should get him out there on your offense, then. You fuck all those faggots too?”

“Naw,” I say. “We’re just getting ready to fuck your sorry asses.”

“Hey!” Pike yells, pointing at the fox. “Quit tryin’ to pick up Miski and get back on your own side.”

“Fuck you, seventy-three,” the fox says, but picks up the pace and gets back to his huddle.

I come back to the line angry, seething, but Pike’s comment makes things better, and Gerrard pats my shoulder, which helps too. Their next play doesn’t go to me; it falls incomplete, and they have to try a field goal. This kick wobbles a bit and just clears the crossbar. 6-0.

Our offense goes back out with a minute and a half left. Aston’s yelling as they go: “Come on, let’s get something on the board!”

The Pilots have a good line, and the linebackers are pretty good—two wolves and a jaguar. I’ve seen them on film a little, and it’s good to watch them live. The wolves are beasts against the run, and the jaguar seems to be everywhere. Time and time again, Jaws finds a hole in their defensive line and one of the wolves is right there. I’m reminded of Fisher’s story about the big black wolf, Von Werner, who took out an offensive lineman in the playoffs so hard the guy never recovered.

Gerrard points out something the wolves are doing, and together we watch, and we’re watching the defense so closely that we miss our offense doing something wonderful and unpredictable: they run Strike behind the line, where he takes a handoff from Aston and dashes around the end. Rodolf throws a block for him and Strike sprints down the sidelines, to their forty, thirty, and now we’re watching him and cheering him on to the twenty, only their safety to beat, now to the ten and—

—and the safety trips him up, and Strike, Firebirds colors back in his fur, a flame on the back of each paw, tumbles out of bounds at the nine. The crowd goes nuts. We go nuts. Aston rushes the guys down to the line and they set up without a huddle. The Pilots’ linebackers get to their spots quickly and efficiently, ready for the snap. Aston tosses the ball to Ty, quickly, on the opposite sideline. Their linebackers are ready for him, but the fox spins around one wolf before the other pushes him out at the two.

Now the crowd is frantic. I’m excited, jumping up and down, and so is Zillo behind me and Charm beside me and everyone except Gerrard, who’s just staring out at the field as though he can see what’s going to happen ahead of time. Forty-one seconds left, and we have a timeout, so the coaches take a chance on Jaws, but the defensive line closes up and the linebackers get a good push behind them, and he’s stopped for no gain. Thirty seconds. We don’t use a timeout; Aston drops back again on third down and looks for Strike, but he’s doubled, and Rodolf is covered and so is Ty, and Aston tries to drop it off to the tight end but the Hellentown jaguar is right there and grabs the ball first.

We hold our breath. For a moment, my heart turns to stone and I think everyone else’s does too. But then the jaguar bobbles the ball, and our tight end slaps at it, and it’s on the ground, the pass is incomplete. We have one more shot.

“Go time,” Charm says, and fits his helmet on as Coach Samuelson makes the hand signal for the timeout. But Coach waves Charm back as Aston comes to the sideline. “Strawberry cheesecake right,” he says, calling in the play, and shows Aston and Strike and the other receivers something on his clipboard.

“No kick,” I say.

“Ballsy.” Charm takes his helmet off. He doesn’t seem that upset to be missing the chance to kick. “They can do it.”