Football Hero (2008) (2 page)

THE TEAM WAS SPREAD
out across the grass, spaced evenly in rows like chocolate candies in a box. Ty found a spot in the back and reached down to touch his toes with everybody else. Every time he began to work on his shoelace, Coach V started them doing a different stretch, until Ty simply gave up.

After stretching, Coach V barked out an order. The lines compressed to one side, and the team ran back and forth across the width of the field in waves. Agility drills. High stepping. Backpedaling. Shuffling. Crisscrossing. The whistle blew again, and Coach V shouted for quarterbacks and receivers to come with him, and for the linemen to go with Coach Full. Everyone seemed to know exactly what to do and exactly where to go. Ty did his best to follow along,
slipping into the back of a line of receivers who began dashing down the field for ten yards before breaking in at a forty-five-degree angle, a post route, to catch a pass from one of the three quarterbacks.

Halpern Middle School had more than two thousand kids in three grades, and Ty had only been there since the winter break, so he knew only a few of the boys in his line. One he did recognize was Calvin West, a tall, broad-shouldered boy with blond hair that hung like a curtain around his tan face. Calvin told everyone he’d grown up in San Diego, on a surfers’ beach. He wore a shark’s tooth on a thin leather choker around his long neck. When Ty stepped up for his turn, Calvin recognized him from the back.

“Lewis!” he shouted, pointing toward the adjacent field and grinning at the other boys. “The girl’s softball team is practicing over there.”

Everyone laughed. Ty ignored them and crouched down into a stance, ready to run. The quarterback yelled, “Hike,” and Ty took off, ten yards of blurred hands, feet, and long, thin legs. He gave a small head fake to the outside, as if some defensive back were covering him, then he broke to the inside the way the others had. Ty felt his foot leave the shoe and take off like a bird. The world tilted, then flipped, and he felt the heavy jolt of the ground popping his chin and chipping off the end of a tooth.

His ears burned at the sound of howling boys. He got up slow, brushing at the grass embedded now into the surface of his bare knees.

“What the heck was that?” Coach V asked, fighting back a smile.

“My shoe,” Ty said.

“No-name tear-away specials,” Calvin West said to a chorus of more hooting.

“All right,” Coach V said, glowering at the boys, “cut the crap. Let’s go. Next.”

Ty staggered over to his shoe, scooping it up just in time for the next boy to flash past him, make the break, and catch the pass. Ty jogged to the back of the line and sat down to relace his shoe. He missed his turn but got the laces even and tugged them tight. This time the other side snapped off.

“Ty!” Coach V called from over where the quarterbacks stood. “You with us or not?”

Ty felt the pressure build up behind his face, and the ducts in the corners of his eyes began to work. But before anyone could laugh, he sniffed, jumped up, kicked off both shoes, tore off his socks, and lined up in a stance, ready to go. Coach V shook his head but nodded to Michael Poyer, the team’s first-string quarterback, who hiked the ball. This time, Ty streaked forward, made the break, and looked for the ball, ready to catch it. The ball came late, though, way behind him.

“You gotta
really
lead him,” Coach V said, barking at Poyer.

“I tried,” Poyer said, shaking his head.

“Do it again,” the coach said. “Ty?”

Ty nodded and jogged back to the front of the line. His feet tingled at the touch of the prickly grass between his bare toes. He ran the pattern with blazing speed; the ball came late again, high and fast, but this time only an arm’s length behind him. Ty left his feet and spun. The sun’s rays blinded him. His hands flashed out into space and felt the sting of the leather ball.

TY SNATCHED THE FOOTBALL
from the air and hit the ground running up the field. He kept going until he reached the goal line, then slowed and jogged back.

“Wow,” Poyer said, looking from Ty to Coach V.

“Wow is right,” the coach said.

West stood silent with his arms folded across his chest until, in a low voice, he said, “Let’s see how cute he looks with a free safety waiting to tear his head off.”

Ty got into the back corner of the sports bus and split open his ragged paperback copy of
Watership Down
. He had plenty of time. His was the very last stop. Ty’s aunt Virginia and uncle Gus didn’t live in one of the big new houses with sprawling lawns that people thought of when they thought of Halpern.
Neither did they live in one of the dozens of renovated colonial houses clustered around the heart of the historic little village with its antique shops, fancy restaurants, pubs, and expensive clothing stores.

Aunt Virginia’s house was little more than a trailer with a roof.

“Kid. Kid! Let’s go, I got my bowling league.”

Ty peered over the seat to see the bus driver’s eyes glaring at him from the big rectangular mirror up front. He fumbled with the book, turned down the corner of the page, and slipped it into his pillowcase.

“Sorry,” he said, jumping down the steps and onto the gravel shoulder of rural Highway 626. The bus hissed and pulled away as Ty started down the dirt track. Overhead, a robin sang from its perch on the electric pole. Ty rounded a bend, and the scrubby trees on either side of the track opened into a small grassy clearing. His aunt’s house cowered at the back of the clearing, beneath a towering stand of thick pines.

Instead of climbing the stack of cinder blocks that served as the front step, Ty skirted around the house and down a small dirt trail that disappeared into the pines. He needed to use the bathroom, and Ty wasn’t allowed to use the one in the house. Forty feet inside the tree line, the path ended at a bright blue Porta Potti. Ty took a deep breath and pulled open the door, hoping to finish his business before he had to take
another breath and failing as he always did.

Not long after Ty had arrived in Halpern, Uncle Gus found the broken Porta Potti at a dump just outside Newark. Ty spent an entire Saturday digging the five-foot-deep hole. Then he helped Uncle Gus roll the bright blue plastic capsule off the back of his truck and out into the pines, where they set it up over the top of the pit. It wasn’t so bad to go out into the woods, especially since the weather had warmed up, and Ty really understood. His aunt and uncle hadn’t been looking to have a twelve-year-old boy dumped on them, and they deserved the privacy of their own bathroom. They already had to share it with their quiet and quirky teenage daughter, Charlotte, who took hour-long baths that outraged Uncle Gus, which prompted Aunt Virginia to snap at him like a lioness protecting her cub.

Ty trudged back to the house, past the woodpiles, and in the side door, where he washed his hands in the laundry room. Along the wall rested a stale mattress that Uncle Gus called a perfectly good bed. At night, Ty would tip it down onto the faded particle-board floor. The walls boasted bare two-by-four studs trimmed with electric wire, pipes, and an open vent that sometimes leaked heat into the otherwise chilly little space.

When he shut off the water and the pipes stopped their groaning, his aunt’s voice pierced his eardrums.

“Ty!” she screamed.

Ty snatched a damp towel from the floor and dashed into the kitchen.

“I didn’t hear you, Aunt Virginia,” he said, drying his fingers. “I was washing my hands.”

His aunt kept her long, straight hair tucked behind her ears, and it made the big round glasses she wore seem like the bottoms of two soup cans, each with a single black bullet hole punched in its center to serve as an eye. Two overgrown eyebrows—thick like woolly-bear caterpillars—dropped scowling toward the bridge of her long, narrow nose. Her lips, pale as rain-soaked worms, stretched tight across her big teeth.

“Where were you?” she said, her words trembling with rage.

“Spring football practice, Aunt Virginia,” Ty said.

“Today’s your
birth
day,” she said.

“So I thought you wouldn’t mind.”

“So I thought you wouldn’t mind,” she said, mimicking him with a high-pitched song, tilting her head from side to side before she frowned again. “You were told that we had a surprise for you when you got home. Did you forget? Are you
that
stupid?”

Ty didn’t answer. His eyes lost focus as he drifted back to an earlier time.

A little bald man shook his fist at Tiger for taking his parking spot. The two of them had driven their
dad’s Subaru from their campsite to the grocery store in Racquette Lake to pick up the marshmallows he’d forgotten to pack.

“Why didn’t you smash that guy’s face?” Ty asked, hurrying after Tiger into the store. “Or cuss him out anyway? You were there first.”

Tiger snatched a bag of marshmallows from the shelf, smiled at him, and said, “It doesn’t matter what someone else thinks of you or what they say about you. You have to know what you are, who you are. That’s what matters. A guy like that, just pretend every time he opens his mouth that it’s a fart. That’s all it is anyway.”

Ty grinned.

“What in the
world
do you think is so funny?” Aunt Virginia asked, the color of her face showing hints of purple.

AUNT VIRGINIA LEANED TOWARD
Ty so that he could smell the remains of the tuna sandwich she’d eaten for lunch.

“I, uh, I was thinking about something else, Aunt Virginia,” Ty said.

“Don’t you go into one of your trances on
me
,” she said. “Save those shenanigans for Mrs. Brennan. Your
uncle
will be back soon and he is not happy. You can just chop wood until he gets here.”

Ty knew better than to ask for something to eat, even on his birthday. He knew he’d be fed sooner or later, just not when he wanted and certainly not if he asked. Part of the reason he didn’t feel so bad about the way his aunt treated him was because Charlotte would occasionally get a taste of it herself. For every
minute Aunt Virginia spent crooning over Charlotte’s pink nail polish or braiding her scraggly blond hair, she’d spend another minute grouching at her about wiping her feet or getting a C in math.

So Ty didn’t take it personal. Even though Aunt Virginia had been his father’s sister, he figured that deep down, kids rubbed her the wrong way. She also found it hard to pretend that they didn’t get on her nerves. If nothing else, she was honest.

The other consolation was that Ty’s father had apparently gotten Aunt Virginia’s share of familial affection. Ty had enjoyed over eleven years of kisses, hugs, and regular praise from both his parents. So, when he calculated it out, even spending the next six years with Aunt Virginia and Uncle Gus would leave him well ahead of many kids.

Ty returned to Uncle Gus’s mountain of wood, pulling thick logs off the pile, splitting them with the dull ax, and placing their splintered parts neatly onto the stacks. From the top of a pine tree, a song sparrow trilled, then cocked its head to watch. Dizzy from the work, Ty set a fresh stick of wood on the chopping block and let his arms fall to his side. Small storms of insects swirled in the light that glinted at him through the trees. Ty turned his face into the small breeze to dry his sweat and heard the broken rumble of Uncle Gus’s black F 150 with the big white cover on the back.

When he opened his eyes, Uncle Gus’s face glowered at him through the tint of the cracked wind-shield. Beside him, Charlotte’s face glowed like a small moon, her features as expressionless as the craters on the dead planet. Ty raised the ax, half as a salute, half to prove that he’d been at work. His uncle slid down from the truck and marched toward Ty with a big round belly and a bowlegged stride.

Uncle Gus’s hair had already begun to gray, but it was thick as a rug and only stayed brushed over to the side with help from a tin of greasy pomade. A matching walrus mustache covered most of his mouth. The corners of his milky green eyes, like the mustache and the rolls of fat in his neck, drooped toward the ground. His business, a cleaning service, had left his stumpy strong hands chapped, red, and hard as granite.

He pointed a stout cherry finger at Ty as he approached and Ty’s stomach sank. From the corner of his eye, Ty saw Aunt Virginia pop out of the washroom door and stand with her arms folded across her chest like an angry spectator. From the truck, Charlotte gave him a sympathetic look before she ducked down behind the dashboard, pretending to adjust the radio.

“You,” Uncle Gus said, his voice and finger trembling together. “You slacker. Lazy. Tricky. Lying.”

Uncle Gus’s eyes were set close together, sometimes
making him appear to be cross-eyed, especially when he was mad. His face expanded, turning colors before he let the air out, hissing like a busted radiator from beneath his mustache.

“
He
went to football practice,” Aunt Virginia said in her singsong mimic.

“Football?” Uncle Gus said, stopping in his tracks, his dark eyebrows wrinkling. “It’s your birthday. You’re
twelve
.”

“That’s why I thought you wouldn’t mind.”

Uncle Gus shot an accusing look at Aunt Virginia. He would often complain to her, out of the blue, that she spoiled Ty and no good would come from it.

Uncle Gus snapped his fingers at his wife before holding his hand out, palm up. From her apron she produced a rolled-up document tied with a bit of red yarn in a knot, so that the ends hung limp without the fanfare of a bow. Uncle Gus’s fingers curled around the paper tube. He slowly swung his arm toward Ty before he opened his fingers again.

“Work is a privilege,” he said in a whisper. “You need to learn that. Happy birthday, boy.”

Uncle Gus jiggled his hand until Ty reached out and took his surprise. He slipped the yarn off the end of the tube and unrolled it to find an official state document, the paper thick and coarse to the touch, the ink letters fat and fancy. Ty’s heart pattered as he read, thinking the certificate might have
some connection to his parents and would somehow hold the key to his freedom. Maybe it was a bond or some hidden cache of wealth that would pay for college.

But as his stomach settled and he began to decipher the words, his daydream turned into a nightmare.