The Heartbeat of Halftime Page 4

  “Are you ready?” he yelled.

  “Yeah, we’re ready,” Bam shouted back when we were climbing out of the car.

  “How ‘bout you, Wing?” he said to me. “You ready, huh, huh?”

  “Shut up,” I said. “This isn’t your game.”

  “That’s right,” Darrel said, after thinking about it for a minute. “I’d make sure I’d win, if it was. You got what it takes to make sure, Wing, huh?”

  I didn’t say anything back, just walked ahead of him, feeling him staring at me like he wanted to kick me or somethin’.

  “What’s with you?” Bam said when we were stretching out.

  I didn’t answer that, either. I was eager to get the game started and I was looking over at the other team, their blue-and-white uniforms jumping up and down in perfect sync like a platoon of soldiers. I wanted to get up right then and run toward them, crash into ’em, send every one of them flying like bowling pins. But I figured my chance would come.

  It did, the very first play of the game. We won the flip and would receive. Heat and I lined up deep to take the kick. It sailed in Heat’s direction, but I cut in front of him, hauled in the kick, and headed right down the middle. By the time I hit the swarm of blue jerseys, I was running faster than I ever had before. Taco Bell cut in front of me to pick up one of their guys, and I shoved him right into the oncoming traffic. It was a good block, but there was someone else right behind him. I hit this tall kid at full speed and knocked him right onto his butt. Someone hit me from the side, but I stepped through it, then cut to the outside and straight-armed another blue jersey. I picked up speed, heading down the sideline right in front of our team. I could hear them screaming, I could see them jumping up and down. I could also see the kicker, the last man between me and the goal line. He had the angle on me and was coming fast. I usually would have tried to get lower than him, to hit him hard and get a few extra yards with him riding on my back all the way to the ground. But this time I stayed high. I lowered my head just enough to meet his. We cracked head-on like two rams. Boom! He stumbled backward, and I spun off him and sprinted the thirty yards to the goal line. I let the ball drop out of my hands in the end zone, and before the whole team piled on top of me, I caught a glimpse of Darrel. He was wearing a big smile, and I looked at him, telling him, Yes, I have what it takes. No one gave it to me, and no one is going to take it away.

  I stood by Heat while the defense took the field. It took him a bit to say something to me, but he finally did.

  “We been talkin’ about it,” he said. “You got something to prove, maybe with your pop, maybe somethin’ else. That’s good. But you’re not the only one.”

  The next offensive series, Heat ran sixty yards in three carries. He was running like a fugitive, and it took at least three men to take him down each time. Bam called time-out on the seven yard line, and while Coach was jogging out onto the field, Bam grabbed us both by the face masks and smacked our heads together.

  “What is it, huh?” he yelled at us. “What is it?”

  “We got somethin’ to prove,” Heat said. “Do you?”

  Bam nodded his head.

  “What’s wrong?” Coach said when he got there. “Somebody hurt?”

  “No,” Bam said. “I got two backs who are running like freight trains … bam … bam! Who do I give it to?”

  “Fake the sweep left and run the bootleg right,” he said. “The whole modern world will follow these two prophets and you’ll be the lone sinner standing in the end zone.”

  Bam smiled. It was his turn to prove something. He had never scored a touchdown, and the thought of it made his whole face light up. I pulled left, Heat took the fake, and we headed for the goal line. Taco Bell pulled and went right, but Bam didn’t need him. It was a long moment before anybody, including the referees, knew that Bam had scored. Bam was celebrating with Taco Bell and the refs were sorting out the pile on the other side of the field, trying to figure out who had the ball.

  The other coach figured it out and threw his clipboard down and pointed at Bam. Bam just laughed and danced all the way back to our bench. Darrel picked him up when he got there and asked him how it felt.

  “I don’t ever want to feel anything else,” he said.

  And we wouldn’t, not that day. Spray Can had somethin’ to prove too, so the other team never scored. Spray Can was everywhere. He gave us good field position and he got the rest of the defense fired up and sort of crazy like himself. We scored again in the third quarter after Bam hucked me a long pass and I brushed the sideline inside the ten trying to keep my balance. Then Heat pounded his way through the middle and all three of us had TDs. First time ever. When the game was over, we wanted to play another one. Coach was saying something about the Greeks but no one was listening, ’specially me. I was looking around to see if Pop was still there. I saw him earlier, kind of off by himself, leaning heavy on a cane Mom had bought him so he could get around better. But he must not have stayed very long. When I couldn’t find him, I walked off, away from the rest of the team. I wanted to be alone. I didn’t feel a part of anything. I hadn’t won for anybody but myself, and I wanted to keep it that way.

  11

  THE LEGEND OF ED STEBBINGS

  When the bell rang, we ran all the way to the lunchroom. We were first in line. First to sit down at our table. We spread out like royalty, sharing chicken legs and tossing each other grapes. It was our day, our lunchroom, our table, our trays. Food that we would normally wear was suddenly transformed into a feast for the gods.

  “I believe I’ll have another piece of chicken,” Taco Bell said like the Prince of Wales.

  “Yes,” Bam said. “It is cooked to perfection, isn’t it?”

  “Quite lovely,” said Flame. “Compliment the chef for me will you, Master Wing?”

  “I’ll tell him,” I said, not wanting to spoil the atmosphere.

  A strange silence fell over the lunchroom then. It took a moment for the others to notice it, but it hit me like a blast of cold wind. And as soon as I felt it, I knew where it came from. Ed Stebbings had just walked in the room. Not a person moved. They all stared at Ed and his gang, waiting. Then the wave of whispers washed across the lunchroom. You could hear the message before it got to you. “They lost,” the wave said. “They lost.”

  We were stunned. We’d never thought to find out if Ed had won on Saturday. He always did. And we were so caught up in our own victory that we didn’t care about anything else until we saw him standing there, waiting to get his lunch. He was the inmate now, waiting, staring like an animal, wanting to hurt somebody. The look on his face was so mean, so angry. No wonder the room went deadly silent. Ed wasn’t about to cower away from anybody. He gave that look to all of us, one at a time. He dared anyone to say something about the game, about the loss. Nobody would. After he collected his lunch, he sat down with the rest of his angry crew. By now every single eye was turned to him. He sat for a moment, then threw his head in his hands.

  “We lost!” he cried. “We lost!”

  We were all in shock.

  Then he jerked his head up and screamed at us all. “What do you think I am, a crybaby like all of you? We lost a game! So what! Any of you have a problem with that?”

  Suddenly, we became very interested in what we were eating.

  Ed stood up and walked over to our table. The forks stopped moving, the mouths stopped chewing. No one even breathed.

  Ed stood behind Taco Bell.

  Taco Bell stared at his green beans. Ed picked up a spoonful of beans and mashed them in Taco Bell’s white cake.

  “Do you have a problem with the way I played on Saturday?”

  Taco Bell just shook his head quickly, like a mouse in the paws of a cat. Ed pushed his face next to Spray Can.

  “Do you have a problem?” he said, slowly pouring Spray Can’s milk over the chicken.

  “No,” Spray Can said reluctantly.

  Then Ed moved over beside me. He reached slowly for m
y piece of cake as he began to talk. I held a fork in my hand and stabbed so hard at Ed’s hand that the fork bent on the table when I missed him.

  “Why you—” he started angrily. But just then the principal walked in.

  “Congratulations!” he said to all of us. “You finally won a game. There will be many more wins, I’m sure.”

  He walked closer and looked at Ed and me together.

  “Well,” he said. “I guess Ed has come to congratulate you too.”

  “Yes, he has,” I said, and everyone sighed in relief. “Ed just came over here to tell us how good we played, and, and he offered to buy me an ice-cream sandwich.”

  “Well, that’s very nice, Ed,” the principal said. “I’m glad I was here to see it. Don’t let me stop you.”

  Ed’s face was so tight, I thought it was going to rip apart from the inside out. He somehow forced his mouth into a smile and threw his arm around me.

  “That’s right,” he said. “I’m going to buy my little hero an ice-cream sandwich.”

  The two of us walked awkwardly to the vending machine. Ed pulled his arm off me so he could find a quarter in his pocket. His hand was shaking, he was so mad. When the ice cream dropped out, he handed it to me like it was an expensive present he spent all day shopping for.

  “There you go, champ,” he said sarcastically, and patted me on the head. I unwrapped it slowly while he watched me. He was burning inside.

  “That’s very nice, Ed,” the principal said, putting his hand on Ed’s shoulder.

  While he talked to Ed about being a good sport, I took a nice big bite of that ice-cream sandwich. Ed fumed. His whole body was shaking. The veins on his head were pumping like they were about to burst. I knew as soon as the principal left, mad Ed would grab the ice cream out of my hand, shove it in his mouth, then dunk my head in the wet-garbage can. So when the principal stepped between us to tell Ed what a marvelous human being he was, I looked around until I caught sight of a chunk of chewed gum sticking to a skinny girl’s lunch tray. I pulled it off and stuffed it inside the sandwich. The principal finished his speech to Ed, patted me on the shoulder, and walked away. We both stood there, Ed watching the principal and keeping a hand in front of me so I couldn’t leave, and me smiling like I was so glad to have a new friend. When the principal was gone, Ed looked at me.

  “Give me that!” he sneered, snatching the ice cream from me. “If we weren’t in school right now, I’d rip your guts out and stomp you to bits and serve you up to all these losers!”

  His arm swept out in front of him, and he had a crazy face like Hitler’s in those newsreels they make us watch in history. I just smiled, and Ed the angry dictator chomped down hard on that ice cream. It took a few chews before he found the skinny girl’s gum, but I was gone by then, clear out in the hallway, running to my next class. I did hear him yell though. I bet they heard that yell all the way to the football field.

  12

  THE HEARTBEAT OF HALFTIME

  I don’t know how I missed it the first time. Maybe the first win was just too much like a dream. And maybe there are times when you just don’t feel anything. So it wasn’t until the next game that I discovered the heartbeat of halftime.

  Halftime. It’s when you take a good look at everything. The stuff that’s going right, and the stuff that’s going wrong. Then you try to adjust so you’re doing more of the stuff that’s going right. But see, it’s also kind of a quiet time. A time when you can feel your own heartbeat. Thump thump. Thump thump. Like that. A big beat, a little beat. Each of them has something to say. If you’re winning, the big beat tells you so. But then there’s that little beat that says maybe you could lose, maybe. There’s always that chance. And it’s the same when you’re losing. The big beat says there’s no way to come back, but the little beat says maybe, maybe we can win. Thump thump. Like that.

  So in the next game, we were behind 7 to 6 at halftime. It was the game Spray Can jammed his thumb and sat out the whole second quarter. When halftime came, we were walking away from the field to talk about what was wrong and what was right that day. I shoved Spray Can, almost knocked him down. I guess I was just mad that he was out of the game.

  “They wouldn’t a scored if you’d just stayed in,” I said to him.

  “I jammed my thumb,” he sprayed.

  “You gave up,” I said angrily. “You quit, that’s all. You just quit.”

  “No I didn’t,” he said.

  Then he pushed me, hard.

  “You came here to lose,” I said, and I pushed him back.

  He took a swing at me then with his good hand and hit me just above the eye.

  “Loser!” I shouted at him.

  He swung again, but missed.

  “You got something to prove?” I screamed in his face

  “Yeth!” he shouted.

  Coach stepped in before Spray Can could swing at me again.

  “Prove it!” I yelled at Spray Can. “Prove it!”

  Coach didn’t say anything then. He just looked at the anger in my eyes, and the hurt in Spray Can’s. He grabbed us both by the jerseys and led us to a spot of shade. Then he made everybody sit down and take off his shoulder pads. He still didn’t say anything, no speech about the Greeks or Homer, no shouting about victory. He looked at us hard, then pulled the marker off his clipboard and told me to stand up.

  “Do you have something to prove, Wing?” he said to me in a quiet voice.

  I looked at him, right into his eyes, and said, “Yes.”

  “Come here,” he said.

  When I stepped forward, he wrote something on the front of my T-shirt. No one could see what he was writing but me. When he was finished, he looked me in the eyes and said what he had written on my shirt: “Prove it!”

  Then he turned me around so everybody could see what he had written.

  “Prove it,” he said again.

  We all nodded our heads, quietly, understanding the message.

  “Prove it out there,” he said, pointing at the football field. “Prove it every time you touch the football, ever time you block. Every time you step on that field, figure out what it is you have to prove and do it!”

  Then he handed the marker to Spray Can, to Heat, to Bam, to Flame, to everyone on the team. And when we were finished, he shouted, “Do you have something to prove?”

  “Yes,” we shouted back.

  “Do you?”

  “Yes!”

  “Are you losers?”

  “No!”

  “Then go prove it!”

  The second half of that game was a lot different from the first. It wasn’t just Heat who had a good game, or Spray Can who played like a madman, or even me. We were like a crazed platoon storming the beach at Normandy. On the opening kickoff we attacked so hard, the ball was knocked loose and we recovered on the twelve yard line. It was like a swarm of madmen, not just one. Bam kicked off and we thundered down the field, yelling like warriors and crashing through blockers like they were made out of cardboard. After recovering the fumble, we scored on the very next play. Bam handed off to Heat on a power play and he ran right over the middle linebacker, then the safety. It was like turning a bull loose and watching him charge through a corn patch.

  There was no celebration when Heat scored. He just let the ball drop out of his hand and trotted back to the huddle to get ready for the conversion. Bam looked at him, then at the rest of us, and called the same play. Heat stepped through the line this time like he was stepping through a curtain for an encore. I almost expected him to take a bow. But he didn’t. He jogged back down to midfield to get ready for another kickoff.

  Bam boomed the kickoff deep, and the rest was all Spray Can’s defense. They’d line up on the ball and Spray Can would jump around, slapping them all on the helmets with his good hand and shouting “Prove it! … Prove it right here! … Right now!”

  And they did. The other team never gained so much as an inch the rest of the game. And our offense was relentless. We
scored three touchdowns that second half. Two by ground with Heat, and one by air, to me. It was a deep post, the one we worked on every day at practice, the one I dream about in my sleep, the one I have run a thousand times in my front yard. I ran my pattern and the ball was there, as easily as if we were all sitting down to a picnic and Bam tossed me a sandwich. I didn’t break stride. I didn’t have trouble hauling the ball in. It just came naturally, like I was born to catch passes.

  The band started playing after that touchdown. It was just after the two-minute warning. No one recognized the song they were playing, and the beat didn’t seem to match the melody. As I stood on the sideline listening to the band and watching our defense play out the rest of the game, I thought maybe this was all how it should be. Maybe nothing is ever perfect and all you can do is play hard, play it the best way you know how. Even if you’re only in the band.

  I looked around for my father then. It was the first time I had looked for him all game, even though I knew he wouldn’t be there.

  “He’s too tired,” Mom had said before I left the house that morning. “Just too tired to make it to a football game.”

  13

  LOOKING FOR LEECHES

  Spray Can was at my house just after supper that night. We walked down by the canal with a flashlight to look at the leeches. You could see ’em too, big ones moving in the murk. Leeches are like nothing you’ve ever seen. Sometimes they’re all sucked in tight and look like the top of a mushroom, and other times they’re all stretched out and you think you’re watchin’ a slow water snake. We sat on a tree branch that hangs over the water and shined the light into the canal watching the water boogers, as Taco Bell would call them, ’cause they look like something that comes out of your nose when you sneeze.

  “There’s one,” Spray Can said, pointing the light just below our feet. “Look how slow he moves.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He’s got no place to go.”

  Spray Can left the light on him for a time, then let it search around in the smelly water for another leech.