War and Watermelon (9 page)

Esposito is down near the goal line, waiting to return the kick. I'm not looking forward to colliding with him at full speed.

The referee blows his whistle. I take a quick glance at the bleachers. There are maybe a hundred people watching; my parents are up there.

The cheerleaders are on the cinder track. Guess they have to cheer for both teams.

The kick is high and kind of short. I watch it for a second before coming to my senses and darting down the field.

Box-and-in. Box-and-in
. Esposito has the ball and is already past the twenty, coming straight up the middle. So I box in at the thirty-five. By luck I time it just right, because he jukes past a tackler and cuts toward me, angling past two others but slowing down as he searches for an opening.

I dive at his legs and wrap my arms around him. He shakes me loose, but I've stopped his progress and two of my teammates take him down.

Feels great to make that first hit. I jump up. Mitchell is on top of Esposito. He gets up and yells, “Yes!” smacking my hand.

We trot off the field. Coach Epstein says, “Nice hustle.”

I walk to the bench and hold a paper cup under the watercooler, then take a drink. The cheerleaders are waving their pom-poms and yelling, “Go, Bulldogs!”

For today, my side is the Bulls and the other is the Dogs. I step to the sideline to watch, next to Tony.

It doesn't take long for the Dogs to score.

“Return team!” calls Coach Powell, who's in charge of our side today.

So I'm back on the field. I'm not usually on the return squad, but for this scrimmage I am. Me and Tony are midway back, on opposite sides.

The kick is way short. It bounces between us and we run toward it. Tony scoops it up and collides with me, then turns upfield and is swamped by tacklers. The ball comes loose and Magrini falls on it.

“Nice going,” Tony says to me as we jog off the field.

“What?” He was the one who fumbled.

“You knocked the ball out of my hands.”

“No, I didn't.”

“Yeah, you did.”

By halftime it's 33–0, so Coach Epstein makes Ferrante and Salinardi switch teams (and jerseys).

Aside from the kickoffs—and there have been a lot of them—neither me nor Tony has seen any action.

Technically we're the third-string running backs, but I can guarantee that even if Esposito, Delcalzo, Mitchell, and Colaneri went down with injuries, the coaches would shuffle things around so we'd still be substitutes. They'd put Stephie Jungerman in before I ever started at tailback.

Coach Powell finally sends us in for the start of the fourth quarter.

Ferrante looks at me, then at Tony, then back at me. “Let's try the forty-five pitch,” he says. “On one.”

I line up behind Tony, hands on my knees, and try to resist looking at the space between the left tackle and end. I've never run this play to the left. Since it's a pitchout, I'll have to catch it on my weaker side.

The gap is big and I dart through it. Tony slows a linebacker and I head toward the sideline, running like a scared rabbit. Esposito takes me down, but I gain at least six yards.

Tony leaps and punches me in the shoulder. “Way to move!” he says.

Tony gains about half a yard on the next play, and Ferrante seems hesitant in the huddle as we regroup. “Forty-six pitch,” he says slowly. “No, wait. . . . Okay, forty-six pitch. On two.”

That's Magrini's side of the field, and he's been making tackles for losses all afternoon. Ferrante steps back and waves us closer. “Hit the line fast,” he whispers to Tony. “I'll be behind you.” He shifts his eyes to me. “Follow me.”

Tony runs through the line and makes contact with the middle linebacker. I fake to the right and shift back as the secondary converges on us, taking two steps past the line and diving.

They pile up on me, but I'm sure I have the first down, just short of midfield. The referee signals that I do.

Ferrante claps his hands hard in the huddle. “We're moving,” he says. “We're marching.”

But Tony gets only a yard on first down, and I can get only one more on second. Ferrante throws a long incompletion on third down and then gets sacked on fourth.

Esposito goes forty-two yards for a touchdown a few plays later, and suddenly it's 40–0.

“That sure turned in a hurry,” Tony says, shaking his head.

“We were in a groove,” I say. “We'll get it back.”

The score is meaningless. We need a drive. We keep it on the ground and start eating up yardage again: Tony for three, me for four. It's basic stuff, handoffs up the middle.

We cross midfield. Ferrante calls the pitchout again. I can see myself making a couple of moves, outrunning the secondary, and reaching the end zone. I can taste it.

I take the pitch and dart past Lorenzo, but he sticks out a hand and pulls my arm back, causing me to bobble the ball. I duck to my right and hold on, but I'm forced to spin hard to regain my footing, and I get blindsided by a linebacker. The ball comes loose. I can't find it. Neither can my teammates. Lorenzo dives on it and yells, “Mine!”

“You gotta hold on to that ball!” Coach Powell says as I reach the sideline. “Fumbles kill football teams. They cost us games!”

I stand by myself, keeping my helmet on so no one can see my eyes, and watch the minutes tick away on the clock. Salinardi leads a methodical drive down the field, and the game ends with them at the fifteen-yard line.

We were moving the ball. And just like last week, I fumbled it away.

No way I'll ever carry it again. No way I'll get another chance.

I
sat around for the rest of the weekend and listened to the radio. Tony stopped by on Sunday, but I didn't leave the house. No motivation.

I just went through the motions at practice today, but nobody noticed. The coaches spent most of the time installing new plays—an end around reverse, a screen pass. I sat and watched. Maybe I should quit before the games start.

If there's any good news, it's that the Mets have won nine out of ten. But there isn't any good news as far as I'm concerned. Not after that fumble on Saturday.

I woke up at three in the morning that night, sweating after dreaming that I was carrying a watermelon across the Sea of Tranquility, running as fast as I could as the rain poured down and lightning struck. I dropped the melon and kicked it as I tried to pick it up, and it rolled down a grassy hill faster than I could ever run in my life. When I turned back I was naked and sixty thousand people in football uniforms were calling me Sue and yelling at me to get off the football field. Forever.

Then the people in football uniforms turned into Vietcong, and I watched helplessly as Ryan got gunned down, right in front of the stage and Arlo Guthrie.

Sounds funny, huh? Try dreaming it. It isn't.

Here's my new top five songs:

The bottom three:

I hear Ryan coming home from Shop-Rite. My parents went to bed an hour ago, so there shouldn't be any arguing tonight. I pull on some shorts and walk downstairs.

“What's happening, brother?” he says. He's got the refrigerator open and is fishing around for something to eat. He takes out a plate of roast beef from Sunday covered in foil, sniffs it, and puts it back. He opens the freezer and pulls out a Fudgsicle. “Want one?”

“Sure.”

He sits on the couch in the family room, and I take the love seat. We leave the light on in the kitchen but leave the family room dark.

He sighs loudly, then takes a bite out of the fudge bar. “Tonight was a drag,” he says. “And why am I eating ice cream? I spent the past eight hours going in and out of a walk-in freezer. I practically have frostbite.”

“Mets got rained out,” I say. “They play two tomorrow.”

He nods. “They're doing good,” he says, but he sounds distracted.

My fudge bar starts to drip, so I put about half of it in my mouth and run to get a napkin. I bring him one, too.

I've got that new song going through my head, and I've only heard it twice.
Tracy . . . da da da da
. Hmm. It's catchy.

We're quiet for several minutes. I can't remember any more words, but the few that I do keep running over and over in my mind.

Ryan says, “Damn,” barely loud enough to hear.

“You all right?”

“Yeah,” he says. “A little bummed out. . . . Sort of confused.”

“Me, too.”

He laughs lightly. “What are you confused about?”

“I don't know. . . . You going to that dance Thursday?”

He shakes his head. “Working till eleven every night this week.”

“Oh.”

“You thinking of going?” he asks.

“Thinking, yeah.”

“You should.”

“I don't know.”

Ryan is a great dancer, or at least an energetic one. A few years ago he stayed home from school one day because he was sick or something. And when I got home at lunchtime, he was dancing in the family room to an Elvis record, jumping up and down and swinging his arms and his head.

The house behind our yard has a sloping driveway, and you can see straight across to it from the big picture windows in our family room. So I looked over there, and about eight kids—Jerry Ashenberg, Ramon Hernandez, at least two of the Foleys—were in the driveway laughing and pointing, probably more amazed than anything. Ryan waved and kept dancing. He didn't care.

I hear some thunder. That's the pattern lately: hot all day, threats of rain late at night. Ryan wraps his ice-cream stick in the napkin and lies back, hanging his feet over the end of the couch.

I don't know how much to ask him. He's always been the one I go to with problems, way more than I'd go to Mom or Dad. I know he's troubled, but how much could I help him?

“So, what are
you
confused about?” I ask.

“Stuff. Turning eighteen, mostly.”

“Yeah. . . . I know.”

There's another long silence. That's okay; we're thinking.

“I mean, I want to go to college,” he says, “but
eventually
. Not because somebody almost literally has a gun to my head. If they'd end the frickin' war, this wouldn't be an issue. You know?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“I mean, that's some hell of a choice—go study economics or basket-weaving for four years, or get your head blown off in Southeast Asia. Nice priorities.”

I swallow. I lie back, too.

“It's not even like we have a right to be there,” he says. “Frickin' Nixon. Frickin' war mongrel.”

That's the last thing we say for a while. I stare at the ceiling for five minutes. There's more thunder and I can see a few streaks of lightning off in the distance. I shut my eyes.

I should go upstairs. Turn on the radio and see if they'll play that “Tracy” song again so I can get some of the lyrics down. Four words is all I've got.

“See, you have to think for yourself,” Ryan says. “This ‘my country, right or wrong' crap doesn't make us better; it makes us stupid.”

It sounds like he's talking out loud to himself, but that isn't like him. I guess he's talking to both of us, testing out his theories. “Don't follow the flock if they're leading you over a cliff,” he says.

“I hear you.” I have no idea what it'd be like to face the end of what I know. To get shipped halfway across the world and put myself in the direct path of somebody's gun—a lot of people's guns and bombs and grenades.

Ryan nods off on the couch, and I just watch him snore. He's fidgety in his sleep, and I don't remember him ever being like that. We always used to sleep like babies here, safe in this house and in this town. I never even thought about being in danger before. I doubt he did either, at least not before this year. I haven't had a good night's sleep in a month.

I won't quit football. How could I wimp out of something like that when I compare it to what Ryan's facing?

And that dance, too. I'm going. I've been thinking about Patty, even though I try not to. Not about making out with her or showing off by walking along the Boulevard with her; just about that hint of a smile she shows me sometimes. Just that possibility that she likes me. I think she's just shy.

I could see it happening. We're at the dance and she tells me she's had a crush on me all summer. That she's so excited to finally be alone with me.

I could definitely see it happening.

It's almost starting to feel urgent.

Urgent that I
make
something happen. Not with her, specifically, or on the football field or whatever. Just something. Something big.

Because you never know when it'll be too late. When you might eat your last hot dog, or get sent to Vietnam, or wake up and find out you're dead.