The Underdogs (3 page)

He started explaining them again to Will now.

“You make the money we need sound like a million dollars,” Will said. “It's not.”

“No,” Tim said. “But the ten thousand might as
well
be a million right now.”

Ten thousand dollars. Tim had already explained to Will what the money bought:

The equipment, first of all. The cost of the vans needed to transport kids to the away games. The fee for someone, a firefighter or police officer or nurse, to handle the EMT van at games in case somebody got hurt. Money to pay officials for home games. And an insurance fee.

Will imagined the numbers stacking up against him like guys on the other side of the football trying to stop him on a shortyardage play.

Ten. Thousand. Dollars.

Just the cost of new uniforms alone was going to be about five hundred dollars per player. Most of that went for new helmets, in a world where grown-ups kept trying to make the helmets safer every single year because of all the attention being paid to concussions, from boy leagues all the way up to the pros.

Especially
in the boy leagues.

Will and Tim took a break from throwing passes to each other, sitting in the grass in one end zone, the day stretching out in front of them the way summer days were supposed to. Even latesummer days. Nowhere to be right now except here.

“Well, I woke up feeling lousy about our situation,” Tim said, “but now I show up here and find out that my man is a man with a plan. And, as everybody knows, where there's a Will . . .”

Why did everybody think that joke was so stinking funny?

“Don't,” Will said. “I mean it.”

“Touchy.”

“About this?
Yeah.
”

The last word came out in two parts, as if Will had broken it in half.

Tim said, “Thrill, you know I always believe you can do things nobody else can.”

Tim had nicknamed him Will the Thrill, or just Thrill, explaining that every time Will had the ball in his hands, there was a decent chance he would be taking it to the house.

“But you gotta know,” Tim said, “that stuff like this only works in the movies.”

“You don't know that.”

“I have a lot of opinions on things I don't know about.”

Will said, “Tell me about it.”

“Hey, just because I'm an idiot doesn't mean I'm always wrong.”

Will was on his back, throwing the ball into the air, thinking how great it looked against the blue sky, catching it.

“I even thought about writing to Mr. Castle Rock.”

It's what they called Ben Clark's dad.

“Come on, man!”
Tim said, sounding like one of the guys on ESPN. “That would be like the Steelers going to the Ravens and asking for help.”

“I know,” Will said. “It's why I didn't do it. We can't take a handout from them and then go try to beat them.”

Will gripped the ball, stood up, said, “Go deep.”

“I was born to catch passes.”

“No, you were born to open holes for me.”

“Tragically, the only holes we might have to worry about this season are the ones in the ground here.”

Tim took off down the field. Will yelled after him, “You gotta believe!”

Over his shoulder Tim yelled, “I know you stole that from some old guy.”

Will let the ball go, a perfect spiral, not bad for a running back. Just as Tim reached for it,
he
stepped in one of the holes in the field and went down the way Will had the day before.

It was hard to get Will to laugh these days.

But he laughed now.

 

At noon Will and Tim went their separate ways, knowing they'd be back by two o'clock, when a bunch of the guys from last year's team would be gathering for a game of touch football.

Before he left, Tim said, “You gonna tell the other guys your plan?”

“I wouldn't call it a plan, exactly. More like what it is. A prayer.”

“But are you gonna tell?”

“Not yet. I don't want them to get their hopes up.”

“But it's okay to do that with me?”

“Look at it this way,” Will said. “This time I'm the one trying to open the hole. One big enough for a whole team to run through.”

Will walked home to have lunch by himself. It was that way for him most of the time. Sometimes, Will's dad would meet him at home for a quick sandwich before heading back to work.

Other times, even if he was walking the downtown route, he'd hustle home to do the same thing, Will watching him eat with one hand and rub his bad knee with the other.

But today, Will knew, his dad was on the other side of Forbes. So the house was absolutely quiet. It was a quiet he'd grown used to, a part of his life from the time he'd been old enough to be in the house alone. Even then his dad would make sure that one of the neighbors would be home, either Mrs. Pomerantz on one side or Mrs. Bailey on the other.

It was the kind of quiet that only having a mom could change.

He had no memory of Ellen Tyler. Just pictures. And old home movies he'd never watched. But the pictures were everywhere in the house, showing a pretty, dark-haired woman smiling at the camera, Will almost always in her arms or at her side.

In one of them, she had her arms out, laughing, as Will came to her. Will's dad told him it was taken when he was first learning to walk.

Someday, he told himself, he'd watch the movies.

Just not yet.

One time Tim had been talking, not really thinking about what he was saying, and he told Will that he couldn't remember a single time in his life when he walked through the front door of his house after school, or at lunchtime in the summer, and his mom wasn't there waiting for him.

As soon as he'd said it, he knew.

“Oh, man, I'm sorry,” Tim had said.

“No worries.”

“You can't be dumber than me.”

“Well,” Will had said, forcing a smile, “we sort of knew that already. Seriously, dude, forget it.”

Only Will never had. Ever since, he'd think about those words whenever he came into the small two-story house on Valley Road. Not the one his mom and dad had lived in when they had first gotten married, over on the other side of town, closer to the factory. His dad had sold that one the month after the funeral, and he and Will had lived in an apartment for a couple of years before they moved to the house on Valley.

The only time Joe Tyler went past his old house near the factory was when he was delivering mail. He'd never even taken Will to see it.

“That was one life, bud. Now you and me got another one going, just the two of us.”

Then his dad used a football expression he used a lot. “The ball's not round,” he said. “It'll take some funny bounces on you. You still gotta pick it up and keep running.”

Will checked his e-mail first thing when he got to the house, knowing it was ridiculous to think he might have already gotten a reply. Or that he'd
ever
get a reply. He wasn't even going to tell Tim he'd checked when they met up back at Shea for the touch football game.

That didn't mean he was giving up hope.

He made himself a peanut butter sandwich, washed it down with a glass of milk. Went back upstairs, checked his e-mail again. Nothing. Came back down, watched a little bit of SportsCenter, saw a couple of reports from the pro-football training camps. Grabbed a Gatorade to take with him back to the field, knowing he was going to get there before anybody else. He didn't care. Even now, he was happier at Shea than anywhere else. It was a football field. In Will's mind, even a bad field was better than none. And there was going to be a game today, even if it was touch, even if it wound up four-on-four or five-on-five.

As far as Will was concerned, whatever the numbers, he would be happy to play, even if it was just until dinnertime. When he and the guys would get together like this, it was a day he never wanted to end.

About a block from Shea, Will started to run, Gatorade in his left hand, football in his right. He ran easily at first, then picked up the pace, finally going full tilt, cutting around the hedges that enclosed one end of the field.

He had just made his turn toward the field when a ball came out of the air and hit him on the head.

That's when he looked up and saw the girl.

H
e was lucky it didn't catch him square in the face instead of the side of his head, right above his ear. It still rang his bell.

Big-time.

Will looked down at the ball and saw that it was the same as the one his dad had bought him last Christmas, a regulation NFL ball, with the commissioner's signature under the laces.

He reached down and felt it, understanding why the inside of his head was buzzing: the sucker was as hard as a rock.

Will took another look in the direction where it had come from and saw that the girl was the only person at Shea. She was standing about forty yards away, right in the middle of the field. She looked to be a little taller than Will was, or maybe a lot, with long hair, long legs. When she saw him staring at her, she put a hand up, as if to say “my bad.”

No kidding,
Will thought.

He carried both balls toward her, along with the Gatorade bottle he'd managed not to drop. When he was close enough to her, this girl he'd never seen before, she said, “I yelled for you to look out, but you must not have heard me.”

Will said, “Yell louder next time. And I'm okay, by the way. Thanks for asking.”

“C'mon,” she said, “how bad could it have been? You didn't even go down.” Smiling now. “Like you did yesterday when the ground tripped you up.” She snapped her fingers and said, “And so close to pay dirt.”

“Wait a second. You were
here
? Watching me?”

“Not spying on you, if that's what you're suggesting. Just waiting for you to clear the field after your game of one-on-
none.
Do you cut back that well when there are actual players on the field?”

He couldn't help it, he felt embarrassed now, worried that his face might be getting red. Picturing himself zigzagging down the field like a maniac and then ending up on the ground. Knowing something, even at the age of twelve: no guy wants to look clumsy or weird in front of a girl, even one he doesn't know.

He was about to ask for her name when she said, “I was just trying to see if I could kick one over the hedges. But I was wide right.” She smiled again. “As you found out, the hard way.”

“Hold on,” Will said.

He turned and took a good look at where the hedges were on Arch Street, near the arches that were the entrance to Shea.

“You,”
Will said, “kicked a football,
this
football, from here to
there
?”

She shrugged. “Usually I'm a lot more accurate.”

“No way.”

“I'm just putting this out there,” she said. “But
way.
”

“Punt or placekick?”

“Seriously? Placekick. If I'd punted it, you would have just seen it flying overhead, like an airplane.”

“You can't kick it that far.”

“And you know this . . . how?”

“Nobody I know who's my age . . . How old are you?”

“Twelve.”

“No twelve-year-old in town can kick a ball that far.” Now Will looked around at her feet. “Where's the tee, then?”

She smiled again. As annoying as she was, Will had to admit it was a pretty great smile. “Now you're just being plain old mean. A
tee
?” Still smiling at him, she said, “Tees are, like, for
boys.
”

“Funny.”

“I have my moments. But what's
really
funny is that you seem to be telling me that since no twelve-year-old boy you know could kick one that far, it would be impossible for a girl to do it.”

“I'm just saying.”

“Saying
that.
”

“Yeah,” Will said. “I guess I am.”

“Well, at least we're clear on one thing.”

“What?”

“Getting bonked on the head didn't knock any sense into you.”

Will shook his head. “I think I got it now. Before long, I'll be apologizing to you because I got hit by a ball you
say
you kicked that far.”

“If I didn't,” she said, “how'd the ball get there?”

Will had no answer for that one, so he said, “Do it again.”

“Fine with me,” she said. “Your ball or mine?”

“Your call.”

“Yours.”

Will handed her his ball, which looked a lot older, a lot more worn than hers. Hers had that shiny feel you got with one just out of the box.

“You want me to be your holder?”

She said, “No, thank you.”

He noticed she was wearing khaki-colored shorts with big pockets on them that came to her knees, old Converse sneakers with no laces, and a black Manchester United T-shirt. A pretty cool shirt, Will thought.

She placed the ball gently in a patch of grass that was a little higher than what was around it, getting it to stand up on its own. Placing the ball like she knew what she was doing.

When it was just right, she said, “There.” Not to Will. Merely pleased with herself that the ball was the way she liked it, tilted just slightly toward her. Already Will had the feeling that this girl was pleased with herself a
lot.

Then she turned and measured off her paces, stopped and took two steps to her left, the way placekickers did in real games.