Out of Position (9 page)

“So what are you worried about?”

It sounds silly and petty, saying it out loud. “We used to talk about gays in sports, and how it would just take one popular athlete coming out to start a waterfall. He’d be so thrilled to find out one of our star players is gay.”

“He might call the paper.” I nod. “Okay,” Salim says. “I know my memory is not always perfect, but Lee, is that not what you had intended to do from the start?”

“No. I just wanted to get one of them in bed, show them that they could be a little bit gay. Give them that thought next time they said ‘faggot’, that ‘hey, that’s me too’. Make ’em stop and think, hard as that is for them.”

“Despite the fact that most studies show that the more a homophobe suspects he’s gay, the more homophobic he tends to be?”

I glance at the weasel’s profile. His eyes are fixed on the road, but his ears are fixed on me. “Okay, so maybe some of it was wanting to have that to hold over them, too. In case something else happened.”

“You could threaten to go to the paper.”

“Yeah,” I say, reluctantly.

“So partly you worry that Brian will do this because it is what you yourself might do.”

“Well, yeah. Brian and I always used to think alike.”

The ‘used to’ hangs in the air until Salim dispels it. “Why do you not want to go to the papers? Afraid he’d hate you?”

“Partly,” I admit. “But I think more… he’s really good. I mean, I knew he could be good, but he’s just on a whole other level this year. He could go pro, Salim. There was a scout from the Dragons at the last game.”

“For him?”

“Could be him, could be our left guard. He’s no slouch either.”

The weasel chuckles. “I don’t know how you know these things.”

“I’ve been watching football for a long time.” I grin at him.

“I have been to three games with you and I still do not see the things you see. I see players running into each other like bumper cars.”

“It takes practice, I keep telling you. And you have to look up from their butts once in a while.”

He sighs. “Then why do they dress them so tightly?”

 
Brian and I used to argue over which player on our team had the best ass. We would do it in the stands, which was fine because we’d never say out loud what we were looking at, just “hey, number 61.” “Oh, yeah, but look at 37.” “I still like 61.” Anyone with half a brain could figure it out, but at a football game that still excludes half the audience, even at a liberal arts school like Forester. It was daring and it made us feel dangerous without putting ourselves in real danger.

For pro football, I liked to watch in our suite in the dorms, where we were pretty much out to the whole floor, so we were expected to make comments like “holy cow, I’d like to have him under my tail” and so on. We sat between the girls and the guys and had a blast. Even when I moved off campus for monetary reasons, I went back to the dorm every Sunday afternoon during football season.

Being out and open around football grew intertwined with our identities, me and Brian. I know that when I watched it alone, over Thanksgiving at home with my father, or over the winter break, it was different, not as much fun somehow. Not that I wasn’t out to my parents, but I wasn’t about to go lusting after athletes in front of them either. And when I was home, I wasn’t Wiley Farrel: gay fox, I was Wiley, son of Brenly and Eileen Farrel, who once stumbled downstairs naked at the age of seven and announced to a dinner party that my clothes were trying to strangle me. Watching football at home was a family thing; but football itself had become for me something different, and I couldn’t go back to the way it used to be. And now, it was something different still.

 
Salim might not understand football, but he loves concession food. While I scour the sidelines for pro scouts, and make my usual pre-game eye contact with my boyfriend (My
boyfriend. My
boyfriend.), he finds the hot dog stand and returns with four dogs and a pair of drinks. I eye the food dubiously. “How many of those are for me?”

He gives me a cheerful grin. “As many as you want.” He hands me one of the drinks. “Plus this sparkling water.”

“Sparkling water?” I taste it; it’s hypersweet.

“Okay, they did not have sparkling water.” He hands me one dog with mustard, and I take it with a grin.

“This is Dijon mustard, right?” I say, licking up one of the bright yellow gobs.

“Absolutely, my friend,” Salim says. “And one hundred percent pure chicken dogs.”

I make a show of sniffing the dog before biting into it. “Ah, haute cuisine.”

Salim’s already halfway through his dog, yellow smears all over his brown and white fur. “I love it,” he says. “Any scouts here?”

I point down to the sidelines. “There’s the guy from the Dragons again. In the green jacket, see? And I think there’s a guy from the Orcas on the other sideline. He’s got a clipboard and a camera and he’s wearing their colors, blue and white.”

“Where do the Orcas play?” he says around a mouthful of hot dog.

“Millenport,” I say, fiddling with the binoculars. “Yeah… there’s their logo on his shirt.”

“Are they any good?”

“No.”

The game starts with some fanfare; it’s the second round of the Division II playoffs, after all. Forester is in the playoffs for the first time in five years. Their reward for winning their first game, their first playoff win in twenty-one years, is to play the Chikewa State Firedogs.

“Are the Firedogs any good?” Salim asks.

“Number one in the polls,” I tell him, watching the players as they line up. “Their QB is insane. See him there, number 14, the white wolf chatting up the cheerleader?”

“Insane is good?” Salim takes the binocs. “Nice,” he murmurs, “Bleached, though. You can see the roots in his tail.”

“Nothing fake about his arm,” I say. “Wait ’til you see him throw.” I haven’t, personally, and I’m kind of excited about it on a couple levels. I love great displays of athleticism, and everything I’ve read says Seito’s the best in D-II, and he could probably start in D-I. He wasn’t recruited because he wasn’t anything great in high school, but he’s come along really well, and the scouts are likely here to see him, not my tiger.

That’s okay. The other thing I’m excited about is watching my tiger defend against the wolf’s passes. Because it doesn’t matter who the scouts came to see. They won’t miss a great performance.

“Are you cold?” Salim asks me as they line up to kick off.

“No.”

“Your paws are shaking. And you’re rocking back and forth.”

I clench my paws together. “I just want him to do well.”

Even though I’m staring at the field, I can feel his eyes on me. They make my whiskers twitch. “I have never seen you this nervous.”

“It’s a big game,” I say, “and you didn’t come to last week’s.”

He chuckles, and pats my arm. “He’s going to do fine. Look, they won the coin toss. That’s good, right? And here comes your tiger.”

“Yeah.” The Firedogs offense comes out too. They line up across from each other. Here we go.

I should’ve known better than to worry about Dev. He knows his routes and assignments now, and he sticks to them perfectly, even when it’s clear they have no intention of throwing to his side of the field. The white wolf shows his arm on the second play, dropping back and then heaving a perfect pass that drops to the ground on the ten yard line only because his receiver lets the ball go through his paws.

“Wow,” I breathe, and Salim looks at me.

“That was good, huh?”

I nod. “We’re in trouble.”

But by halftime, Chikewa Falls is only up 10-7. Dev gets near the ball four times; once he swats it out of the air, twice he makes a great tackle, and once he bobbles a possible interception and drops it. The Firedogs get their only points on the ground; Forester gets theirs the same way on the other side.

Late in the third quarter, Dev is playing back as the Firedogs’ two wideouts speed up either side of the field. The faster one, a jackal, is on Dev’s side of the field, while the jaguar on the other side has been getting most of the passes. They’ve run this play a couple times and always gone to the jaguar, but this time the jackal looks more focused. “Don’t be fooled, Dev,” I mutter under my breath. Again, no need to worry. He glances toward the jaguar and fakes a step in that direction; just as the white wolf cocks his arm to throw, my tiger spins and heads for the jackal. They meet at the ball, and while the jackal is faster, Dev is taller. He reaches up with one huge paw and swipes the ball out of the air, skimming the jackal’s outstretched paws, and this time Dev hangs on, stumbling and then regaining his feet, dodging the Firedogs who have suddenly been turned into defenders, getting back to the fifty before the jackal tackles him and takes him down.

I’m on my feet with the rest of the Forester students screaming and cheering, and I see him look up at me as he struts off the field into a swarm of hugging and high-fives. Three plays later, our QB dodges and jumps, staying alive as the diagrammed play degenerates into a free-for-all downfield, and finds our lumbering tight end, of all people, alone on the five. He hits the badger with a perfect strike and Kiley trots in for the score. 14-10 Forester.

“Holy shit,” I say to Salim. “We might be going to the semis.” He blinks. “This is good, right?”

Both defenses play inspired ball through the middle of the fourth. The white wolf tries two more deep passes, completing one to the jaguar while Dev breaks up the other, but they can’t get more than a field goal out of it. 14-13 Forester. We can’t do anything against them and they get the ball back with five minutes to go.

The white wolf tries another pass to the jackal. It’s perfectly placed, dropped right into his outstretched paws. Nothing Dev can do but tackle him, but he does that well. They run the clock down with some running plays, and normally I wouldn’t be worried about a field goal because D-II kickers almost universally suck, but theirs has made two already today. I see him practicing on the sidelines, a rabbit with a decent leg, and when they get to the twenty, I slump back in my seat.

Salim looks at the scoreboard and then at me. “If they kick it, they win,” he says.

“Yup.”

The rabbit comes out with twelve seconds on the clock. Dev is lined up to help block, but Chikewa has a good unit. They snap, it’s a perfect hold, and the rabbit puts it through. 16-14 Chikewa. Eight seconds left.

Our only hope is with our QB, but Darron doesn’t have the arm strength to make it all the way downfield. I think the coaches told the return guys to get as much yardage as they could, because when they catch the ball on the fifteen, instead of downing it right away, they take off. It’s a red fox carrying the ball, one of our receivers, and he’s got enough moves to make it to the fifty. Unfortunately, he breaks for the sidelines too late, and they slow him down just enough. Time’s up. Game’s over.

I see Dev’s shoulders slump and I want to run down there right away, hug him, tell him everything’s going to be okay. Instead, I grab Salim’s paw. “Come on.”

He squeaks as I drag him to the aisle and down, against the flow of dispirited Forester students. “Where are we going? Ow! You crazy fox, slow down!”

“Hush,” I say. “Just play along.” I watch the teams on the field shaking paws and am glad to see Dev meet Seito and hug him. The two exchange some words, and I see the wolf shaking his head, and the two of them laughing.

We get down near the field and I angle to my left. The crowd’s thinned out now, so I can see the Dragons scout, a tall, hefty cougar in a green jacket scribbling some notes on his clipboard. When we’re within a few feet of him, I start talking to Salim very loudly about the Forester defense, things like “we’d never have gotten that far without Miski” and explaining a couple of the better plays I’d seen him run. Salim didn’t have to do much to play along, just ask some questions, but he’s pretty good at that.

The scout’s ears flick back as I start describing one of the other plays, and say to Salim, “Not many people would notice his work on that one.”

“I saw that play.” The scout says. He turns to look at me. “You a friend of his?”

“Yeah.” I grin. “But he’s still a good player.”

The scout nods, still studying me. “What did you think about Chikewa going away from the cover 2 late in the game?”

“They knew our QB couldn’t beat ’em. They’ve got some good DBs and our wideouts are only average. Our strength is our running game.”

“Who’s the second-best player on your team?”

“Our left guard,” I say promptly. “That’s why we run all our plays to his side. He opens holes for the running game and gives us time to get off a good pass. He had a pretty good game too.”

“Yeah, he did.” The scout hesitates for a moment, then reaches into his pocket and hands me a card. “Morty DeWitt. I’m with the Dragons.”

I take the card and grin. “I know. I’ve seen you at Forester’s last couple games. I was hoping you were watching Dev.”

“We are,” he says, “not that that means anything.”

“I know.” I give him a nice smile. “Just glad to see he’s generating some interest.”

He squints and tosses his clipboard into his bag. “You don’t happen to know what lit a fire under his tail, do you?”

Salim coughs into his paw. I look angelic as I say, “I think he finally saw his potential and decided to live up to it.”

He nods and hefts his bag. “Good for him. I see lots of kids who never get that far. I need to work out the final numbers, but chances are good we’ll see him at some of the combines. And you’ve got a pretty good eye, too.” He indicates the card, which I’m still holding. “If Miski gets invited to the combine, you come along too. Give me a ring and I’ll take you out for a drink.”

I flash the card back at him and tuck it into my pocket. “Thanks,” I say. “I will.”

 
Brian wanted to go to Hollywood after college—after an appropriate internship on Broadway, of course, learning theater the classical way. As an English major, I was aware that my career choices were equally limited. I ran through the usual gamut of options: take up a business minor and write ad copy until my novel was published, work a shitty retail job until my novel was published, or live in my parents’ basement until my novel was published. I never doubted that I would write a novel, and all through my sophomore year I studied the techniques of novel writers diligendy.