Out of Position (39 page)

“I dunno,” he says. “Might not be a bad idea. I wouldn’t mind, if that’s what you’re worried about. I know you don’t mean it.”

“That’s great,” I say. “If I can’t have a real boyfriend, at least I can have a fake engagement.”

He sighs. “I’m sorry, hon. I know this is hard.”

“You don’t have any idea how hard it is.” I’ve got one paw down on my sheath as I say that.

“Believe me,” he says, and then coughs. “Stop touching yourself.”

And it’s not much, but that little bit of relief, of amused connection, gets me through the night.

Not the next day, though. I’m grumpy and angry, and although I execute well during practice, I snap at teammates instead of encouraging them, grunt replies, and generally act like an asshole. I know this and it’s okay with me, because I’ve been treated like shit, I think. So I know it’s probably not a good idea for me to pick up the phone when my parents call, as I’m watching TV in my loft near the end of the day. Reflex kicks in and I pick up anyway, putting the TV sound on low.

“Just wanted to say you looked good on Sunday,” Dad says, after the usual pleasantries.

That should make me feel good. It should make me feel great. But it doesn’t. “Thanks,” I say, my voice dull.

“Won’t be long before you’re starting, will it?” He sounds hopeful, happy almost.

“Yeah.”

“I told Jerry down at the store on Monday, you watch, my boy’s gonna be in that starting lineup. He said they changed your position around, and there was no way, but I told him. I told him.”

I can’t reply to that. The vise in my chest twists tighter. “So,” my father goes on, “you hear anything? Maybe it’ll be week after next? Definitely by Thanksgiving, right?”

It would be so easy to lie, so easy to say, “Yeah,” and let the conversation slide on by. Except it’s not easy at all. “Probably not,” I say.

“Oh.” There’s the disappointment. “Well, when, then?”

“Did you see Killer play this week?”

“Killer?”

“Corey, the guy who starts at my position.” He sounds bewildered. “I guess so.”

“He’s good. They’re using me to motivate him. I’ll probably be a backup for a while.” I relish the bitterness of the words. “That doesn’t sound very promising.”

Being a career backup in the league is not a bad living, of course. I could tell him that. I could tell him how much I love the game and the challenges, the practices where everyone learns a little more about working with each other, the way it feels when I break up an offensive play. “It’s okay,” I say.

“Listen, Dev, if you ever want to come work at the auto shop…”

“Christ, Dad.” My voice is getting louder. “I want to play football. I don’t want to work in the damn shop.”

“It’s a good shop,” he says.

“I don’t give a damn! If I wanted to work there, I’d be working there now!”

He’s getting more angry now, too, rising to meet my mood. “I’m just saying, if you’re not getting what you want out of this job…”

“What you want and what I want are not the same! I’m fine!” I yell.

“You don’t sound very fine, is all,” he says, in that tone that when I was ten meant I was real close to getting my ass whupped.

“How the hell would you know?” I growl, and without waiting for an answer, I throw the phone across the room. It smacks into a corner of the wall and makes a nasty sound as it falls, an electronic death rattle. Even from the couch, I can see the twisted shape, the exposed wires. I turn the TV up and lean back.

I have to use the phone in the locker room to call Lee the next day and leave him a message explaining why I won’t be able to answer his calls for a couple days. I know I should get a new phone, but I keep putting it off, and then it’s game day and there’s no time any more. Week three: New Kestle.

New Kestle isn’t a great team, but they’re not a bad one either. They finished 8-8 last year, ahead of us in the division, and this year they’re 1-1 in week three, just like us. Their main strength is the running game, which means that when I get out there, if I get out there, I’ll be coming up to the line a lot. Their quarterback tends to make rash decisions, and their receivers aren’t very fast. But their running back is quicksilver, a stag who can slip between the best of tacklers and who’s been known to lower his head and use his antlers to clear the field when he has to. And they like to run him to the weak side—my side.

But all through the first half, it looks like I won’t be seeing much action. Killer is on his game again, breaking up plays, tackling receivers, so energized that Steez has a huge smile on his cougar muzzle at halftime, with the score tied 3-3. Coach Samuelson tells us how proud he is of our defense and how the offense is going to step it up in the second half. I hear very little of it, spending most of my time staring at the bench where, apparently, my career is headed.

Through the third quarter, we trade touchdowns and the score remains tied. I’m sitting on the sidelines at the beginning of the fourth, when New Kestle starts another drive. I should be paying more attention to the game, but I’m still feeling like the day is grey and overcast even though the sun is scorching on my fur. I look up mostly when I hear loud cheers from the crowd, which happens again about a minute into the fourth.

Only it’s not a cheer, it’s a collective gasp followed by a grumble that mounts into a loud booing. That’s not a good sound. Means something bad happened to one of our players. I stand, with everyone else on the bench, and stare up at the replay on the big screen rather than out onto the field.

There’s New Kestle’s stag, sweeping around to the weak side. There’s Killer, coming to meet him. The stag lowers his head.

Now, in the league, you’re allowed to use antlers as weapons, if you’ve got ’em. The reason behind this is that according to the Orwell Act, the league can’t discriminate based on species, and that includes self-mutilation, so you can’t ask any of the antler crew to lop off their headgear to be eligible, though you can rule that they have to cap their points. As balance, though, defenders are also allowed to grab your antlers and use them to bring you down, if you have ’em. One of the things we went over this week was not to go for the antlers, and here’s why: the safest way to grab a deer’s antlers is from behind, and if you get behind this deer, chances are he’ll be off to the races before you get a paw on his antlers. You definitely have to tackle him from the front or side. And — this is true for all runners, but especially ones with poky things sticking out of their heads — you have to tackle him low.

This is what Killer, in his rediscovered enthusiasm, has forgotten. On the field, he’s hidden by a crowd of players, and I see our team doc, a grey stallion, trotting out with his assistants in tow. Back on the screen, Killer squares off as the deer runs at him. He guesses right, juking with the deer, but the deer’s fast, and nearly gets by. Killer doesn’t go low. He grabs at the antler, throwing the deer off balance. The deer stumbles forward, Killer after him. He grabs the antler again and spins the deer around, but loses his own footing in the process. They fall together, Killer on the bottom, in a slow-motion dance that is mesmerizing in its inevitability. The deer’s antlers swing inexorably toward Killer’s chest and shoulder, meeting them at the same time as they hit the ground.

I gasp with the crowd as one of the antler points goes
through
the shoulder. That shouldn’t happen. They cut away almost immediately, just as Killer’s muzzle starts to open in a yowl, back to the first tackle. Zooming in, we can see two of the antler caps come off as Killer swipes at them. So that’s how the points were exposed.

“Miski!” Steez is yelling at me. “Out there now!”

The connection finally clicks in my head between the injured player lying on the field with an antler-sized hole in his arm and my role with the team. I jump to my feet and grab my helmet.

The crowd is still quiet, stunned from the injury. As I jog out to the line, I look up at the fans, all sixty-odd thousand of them, skunks and badgers, deer and rabbits, wolves and wolverines. And foxes, lots of foxes. None of them mine, but it’s not too hard to imagine him out there. I know he’s watching.

Gerrard and Carson stand on either side of me as we watch Killer get carted off the field. “Don’t grab the antlers,” Gerrard tells me.

“No fucking shit.”

“They love that screen to the weak side,” he says. “I’ll signal if I see the formation.”

We stare across the line at the stag, who’s had his antlers re-capped and is talking to his quarterback. He meets our looks belligerently. “I’ll break his fucking knees,” I say.

Gerrard grins and punches my arm. “Good.”

Carson clears his throat. When we turn to look at him, he fixes me with his feline eyes and says, “Don’t fuck up.”

I shake my head. They get Killer off the field and play resumes. Lining up, I start to think about it. This is it. I’m the starter now. Killer’s out, he’s gone, he’s on the disabled list for weeks, maybe the rest of the season. It’s all on me.

I’m still thinking about that when the ball snaps and I realize I have no idea what the play is. People are running around and I’m just chasing them, with no idea where I’m supposed to be. Fortunately, the play isn’t in my area, and nobody really calls me on it. But I get a look from Carson, and when I glance at the sidelines and see Steez, I hear his voice in my head saying, “Back in the game!” I think of Lee, watching on TV.

We line up again. I clear my head of everything but football. The New Kestle team lines up across from us, stylized unicorns on their helmets. I know this play, I know what I need to do. Gerrard calls to me, “Weak side screen! Weak side screen!” and I can see it developing in my mind. The ball snaps. I shadow the stag until he catches the ball, then I take his legs out from under him. Five-yard loss. I trot back to the line and pump my fist to the cheering crowd, then slap paws with Gerrard. We line up again, and I play football.

Our side holds them scoreless while our offense scratches out another score. They get the ball back and drive down the field, and I make a couple more tackles, to the point where the stag starts to avoid me. On one play, he jukes away from me and stumbles against his own teammate, giving Gerrard time to knock him down. The ball comes tumbling loose. Fisher happens to be the one closest to it. He scoops it up and starts to run. I sprint after him and tackle one of the Unicorns giving chase, leaving him clear to the end zone.

Our two-score lead holds up. We’re 2-1 after three games, halfway to last season’s victory total already. The mood in the locker room is barely restrained glee. Coach gives us a speech about not getting too cocky, but he’s got a big canine grin on his muzzle and we’re all on our feet, elbowing and punching and grinning along with him. He brings us down a bit toward the end, when he asks us to bow our heads in a quick prayer for Killer to get better fast. I don’t even feel guilty about amending my prayer to say “but not so fast that I can’t keep his job.”

Coach and Steez come up to me afterwards, distracting me from the guys who are ribbing our stag, Kendrick, asking him why he hasn’t ever put an opposing player in the hospital. Coach tells me that I did great, that for now they’re going to put me in to start next week, and “we’ll see how it goes” after that. But Steez grins at me as Coach leaves and says, “You do good.”

I have to wait until I get home to call Lee, and that doesn’t happen until after the celebratory dinner and several drinks. Okay, technically I give him a quick call from the bar to tell him I’ll call him later, and he tells me I did great and then says some other stuff that makes me feel all warm and I have to hang up. But it’s not ’til I get home that I curl up in bed, bouncing on the mattress and making plans to see him at his place in Hilltown next week. Even on the cheap temporary phone I had to pick up on the way to the bar, he sounds more cheerful than he has in weeks. And if he’s not quite as cheerful as I am, well, who could be? I’ve just gotten a starting job and a boyfriend back all in the same night. I don’t even snap at Ogleby when he calls to gush at me. In fact, I tell him that we’ll be on the road for the next couple weeks, but that when we get back, to set up another date with Caroll, that we’ll talk then about the engagement. That sends him into spasms of agent delight, during which I do hang up.

We have Monday off, because we won. The way we’ve been playing, most of the guys aren’t worried about our next game, at Hilltown. They’re 0-3 so far this year. “We could beat ’em with one leg tied behind my back,” is how Charm puts it. Still, it’s my first start, and I want to make sure we don’t take them lightly. That
I
don’t take them lightly. So I go into the facility, exhaust myself in the weight room, and then sit in the film room to see what we’ll be facing next week.

In walks Fisher. We haven’t talked since the fight. He doesn’t say anything, just plops down in one of the other chairs and watches along with me. I cycle through a bunch of film from Hilltown’s last game, and when that one’s done, I load the week 2 game.

“They suck,” Fisher says.

I start to cue up the tape. “Yeah, but so did we last year.”

“Not like that,” he says. “They were three and thirteen and they’ve gotten worse.”

He’s right, of course. I can’t see anyone who makes me the least bit nervous about facing them. But perversely, I keep arguing with him. “Don’t get cocky.”

He snorts. “Don’t give me advice.”

I let that one hang, starting the tape. We watch the game film in silence, taking notes. Colin comes in partway through, watches the game with us, and then chats a bit when the tape is over. When he asks, “Gonna watch another tape?” Fisher and I glance at each other.

“Already watched last week’s,” I say, and toss it to him. “It’s pretty much the same.”

“Yeah,” Fisher says. “I’m gonna hit the weights.”

“Right.” Colin heads for the VCR as Fisher and I leave.

Outside in the hall, it’s clear he wants to say something but doesn’t know what. So I start. “Great touchdown.”

“Thanks for the block. And congrats on the starting job,” he says.

“Hey, I didn’t arrange for idiot-boy to get his arm gored.”