The Heartbeat of Halftime Read online

  So after we beat Cyprus, we were all at Spray Can’s. Ray was gone and we sat on this old couch out behind the shop, drinking pops, throwing the cans like footballs, and burping so loud our throats hurt. Taco Bell could get off the loudest burp. It sounded like a bear growling in the woods.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” he’d say, holding his arms out like he was conducting an orchestra. Then he’d open his mouth wide, expand his chest, and let it go.

  “Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrpf.”

  “Too bad Katie isn’t here to hear that one,” Bam said.

  We all laughed, except for Taco Bell. He just looked at us and didn’t say anything.

  “C’mon,” Bam said. “I’m jokin’ you, man.”

  Taco Bell smiled.

  “I mean,” Bam continued. “Katie could probably beat it.”

  Then Bam burped himself.

  “Like that,” he said. “She could probably burp at least that loud.”

  That’s all it took. Taco Bell charged like an angry bull and tipped the whole couch over. We were all laughing as he threw us around and hit us with the cushions.

  “No one makes fun of my girlfriend!” he shouted.

  Suddenly we were all quiet.

  “Girlfriend?” we all said at the same time.

  Taco Bell held a cushion in front of him. “Yes,” he said. “She’s my girlfriend.”

  “How can she be your girlfriend?” Heat asked. “Did she say so?”

  “Yes, she did,” Taco Bell said, hugging the cushion.

  Then Bam asked the question we were all thinking but just couldn’t find a way to say. It was a question we had wondered about since we first started winning; it was something we would wonder about until it happened to each of us.

  “Did you kiss her?”

  There was a long silence. We wanted to know everything. How to do it. What gum to chew. Did you have to do it more than once? Would a girl make fun of you if you didn’t want to? Did it mean you would have to marry her? And most of all, what did it taste like? We waited for Taco Bell to answer, to answer everything we wanted to know about kissing in this one question.

  “Did you kiss her?” Bam repeated.

  “No,” Taco Bell said quietly.

  We were all relieved. Higher knowledge was put off until a later time, perhaps a time when we would be ready to accept its consequences. After all, kissing a girl would have to mean that you liked her, that you wanted to spend time talking to her instead of burping with your buddies. That was just too much to give up right then.

  “So how can you say she’s your girlfriend if you haven’t kissed her?” I asked Taco Bell.

  “‘Cause she said she wants to be,” he answered.

  “You will have to kiss her, you know,” I said as if it were a threat.

  Taco Bell got this look on his face like he wanted to say “I will not.” But he couldn’t say it. Even he knew the inevitable, that yes, he would have to someday kiss a girl. I think secretly he was looking forward to it. But it would have to wait until after our last game.

  17

  THE CRAZY MAN

  On Monday we ate in peace again. Taco Bell was the center of attention, sitting at the head of the table, talking about his sideburns, wishing they were longer. The more we won, the more he became like Elvis. I was happy to let him have the spotlight. I didn’t feel much like talking to anybody anymore. All I wanted to do was play football. Everything else seemed like a waste of time. So I sat there quietly, eating my lunch and looking away from our table. That’s when I saw Ed. I don’t know how long he’d been staring at me, but it must’ve been for a long time. When I caught his eye, he mouthed the words “You’re dead,” and held up his fist. I wasn’t in the mood for his threats, so I smiled at him and tossed a handful of cooked peas at him.

  He went berserk.

  He picked up all the peas and held them up to the faces of everyone at his table.

  “I’ll kill him!” he kept shouting. “I’m gonna kill him!”

  When he had all his buddies as mad as he was, he stormed over to our table, kicking over chairs as he came. When he arrived, I stood up, shoved my lunch tray out of the way, and stared back at him. They all surrounded me. Taco Bell stopped singing, and for the second time that year, everybody in the whole lunchroom went quiet. Ed was so mad, he was having a hard time finding the right cuss words; so I started the conversation.

  “Lose another game, Ed?”

  This question, and I guess my willingness to ask it, caught Ed completely off guard. Ed’s not real bright anyway. He likes people to back down when he tells them to. It confuses him when they don’t. Ed fumbled around his head for the right answer, and all that he could come up with was: “So?”

  He shouted, the way he shouts everything, to give it meaning. Before I could say anything else, and before Ed exploded with rage, the janitor stepped up from behind him.

  “Yeah,” he whispered. “I heard you guys lost again.”

  “Who are you!” Ed screamed before turning around. When he did, he realized what he had done.

  “Oh, nobody,” the janitor calmly said. “Just the guy who can throw you out of here. Be too bad. You can’t play football if you get kicked out of school.”

  “He threw these at me,” Ed pleaded, holding up a pea.

  “Oooh, that could be dangerous,” the janitor said. “Too bad I didn’t see it.” And with that, the janitor turned back to his mop.

  “When football is over,” Ed sneered into my face. “So is your life!”

  Ed and his buddies walked away like they were going off to prepare for war.

  “You are crazy!” Taco Bell said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe I am.”

  “You’re gonna get us all killed,” Taco Bell said.

  “You’re not sittin’ in the garbage dump anymore, are you?” I said back to him. “You wanna spend the rest of your life in someone else’s crap, go ahead.”

  Taco Bell was quiet then. I think I hurt his feelings a little. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t gonna put up with it anymore.

  “You do have something to prove, don’t you?” Bam said, smiling. “It’s about time.”

  Everybody laughed then, except me. I walked away and stood at a window and watched the cars drive by in the distance. I know it sounds strange, but I wished my father was there to see what had just happened in the lunchroom. I wished we could talk about it the way we talked about football. “Did you see me throw those peas?” I would ask him. “I don’t know why I did it.”

  “You stood up to him,” my father would say. “That’s good, but be careful.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I mumbled into the glass.

  “Who are you talking to?” I heard someone say.

  I was embarrassed, you know, how you would be if someone caught you talking to yourself. So I didn’t turn around very fast.

  “Nobody,” I said still looking out the window.

  “Oh. I thought maybe you were talking to me,” I heard the voice say.

  I turned around then and there she was, Leisl. I hate it when girls sneak up on you like that.

  “I was just throwing some peas in there, and well …” It was the only thing I could think of to say, and it must’ve sounded pretty stupid.

  “Peas?” she said. Now she was really confused. First I’m talking to the window; then I tell her about peas.

  “Well, there’s this guy in there, Ed. Fat Ed and I play football …”

  “Football, I know,” she said. “I’ve watched you in the big hard hat.” She kind of giggled then.

  “That’s a helmet,” I said. “You must think it’s a stupid game.”

  I started to walk away then, but when I turned around she said, “I like football.”

  “Who are you talking to?” I said, acting surprised.

  She laughed and walked toward me. “I would like you to tell me more about football.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  That day, after school, she walked home
with me. I usually walk with Bam, so I had to hide until he gave up on me and went home alone. Then me and Leisl walked the long way, away from the canal and down past the small market. We stopped there for a soda and sat on the curb. Practice didn’t start for another hour, so we had time to talk. I found some bottle caps and tried the best I could to explain football to her. It’s funny, I never really thought about it. You know, why there is football, why I play. I lined up bottle caps for offense and defense and explained that one team was trying to put the ball in the other team’s end zone.

  “It’s kind of like war,” I said, maybe trying to understand it myself. “Each team has its own territory. They guard it for a while, then try and take ground from the other team. Whoever gets in the other team’s territory the most, wins.”

  Leisl nodded her head.

  “Let me introduce the players to you,” I said. Then I swept the bottle caps away so I could line them up as they came out.

  “And now,” I said in my announcer’s voice, “playing left end and weighing ninety-eight pounds, The Flame.”

  I moved the bottle cap out to the left and Leisl laughed.

  “At left offensive tackle, weighing a massive one hundred forty-two pounds, we have Rhino!”

  I made cheering noises and Leisl clapped. Then I introduced the rest of the players. The Grizz playing left guard, Cobra at center, Taco Bell at right guard, Junior at right tackle, Rocket at wide receiver, Bam at quarterback, Heat at fullback, Lights at flanker, and, last but not least, Wing at halfback.

  Leisl cheered. I started laughing. She had purple lips from drinking a grape soda. My lips turned orange. We were pointing at each other and laughing. Then she reached out and touched my lips, first to see if it rubbed off. Then she traced my smile.

  “You’re laughing,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’ve never seen you laugh.”

  “You’ve been watching me?” I asked her.

  “Some,” she said. “Mostly your face is long, like this.”

  She made a scowling face then, a face that I didn’t realize I was wearing until she pointed it out to me.

  “My face looks like that?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “No wonder everyone thinks I’m crazy.”

  “Your friend says you’re angry,” she said.

  “Taco Bell?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does everybody talk about me?”

  “Some,” she said. “Whenever they talk about football.”

  “I didn’t think anybody else in the school cared about our games.”

  “They do,” she said. “And they say that you are making the team win.”

  “Because I’m angry?”

  Leisl didn’t answer. She smiled at me and said, “You’re not angry now.”

  I shook my head.

  “Tell me more about football,” she said, looking down at the bottle caps.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I got practice tonight.”

  She looked disappointed. Then she reached down and picked up the halfback bottle cap, the one that was supposed to be me.

  “Okay,” she said. “You can tell me later?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  We stood up and got ready to leave.

  “Thanks for the soda,” she said, rubbing her purple lips.

  I laughed and rubbed my orange lips. “See you tomorrow,” I said.

  I walked home then, rubbing my lip for a while. But the closer I got to home, the longer my face got. By the time I got to practice, I was the angry one again.

  18

  UNCHARTED TERRITORY

  That afternoon’s practice went by quickly. We didn’t learn any new plays for our game against Granite. We just worked on our sweeps and passes. Granite was big, but they were slow. Coach figured we could outrun them to the corners or deep on the pass. So mostly we worked on timing. It was a good practice, and we felt pretty confident about the Granite game. Granite had only one win so far that year; we all figured we could beat them. But we had one problem. It was an away game, across town. How were we going to get down there the night before to mark our territory? We sat down under the elm tree and tried to figure it out.

  “I’m not walkin’ all the way down there,” Taco Bell said. “We wouldn’t even be back by morning.”

  “We could sleep there,” Bam offered. “Be like camping out.”

  “We wouldn’t get enough sleep,” I said. “We want to play well, don’t we?”

  We all agreed. The last thing we wanted to do was wake up tired. Besides, our parents would find out somehow and that would ruin everything. We had to find a way.

  “Have your brother drive us,” Heat said to Bam.

  “Thought of that,” Bam said. “They have their own pregame ritual. Every Friday night they all get together and have pizza; then they go down to Mortensen’s junkyard and break things and yell and stuff. He’s not gonna miss that to watch us all take a leak.”

  “Yeah,” Taco Bell said. “Can’t you see us asking him. ‘Uh, Darrel, will you take our whole team to the bathroom, please?’”

  Everybody laughed.

  “I’m just gonna walk it,” Heat said.

  “Why don’t I just get one of Ray’s cars?” Spray Can offered.

  “You drive?” Taco Bell said.

  “Sure,” Spray Can said. “I do it all the time. I’m almost sixteen.”

  “You’re only thirteen,” Bam said.

  “I got a Idaho driver’s license,” Spray Can said. “Ray made me get it before we moved down here so I could help him get parts. You can drive when you’re fourteen in Idaho.”

  “This is Utah,” Bam said.

  “You’re fourteen?” Taco Bell said, realizing that Spray Can must have been held back a grade.

  Spray Can looked down then. I guess he was embarrassed. We all knew he wasn’t too bright, but none of us knew he’d had to repeat a grade.

  “So I done fourth grade twithe,” he said, wiping his face afterward. “Big deal. Are we goin’ or not?”

  “I’m in,” I said, and stepped next to Spray Can.

  “You’re always in,” Taco Bell said. “You’re crazy.”

  I just nodded my head.

  “I could use a little road trip,” Bam said, stepping next to me.

  It didn’t take long for everyone else to join in, everyone, that is, except Taco Bell. He just stood there looking down at his feet and kicking at a weed in the dry grass.

  “Wonder what Katie will say when she finds out her boyfriend is a chicken?” I said.

  For the second time that season, Taco Bell went crazy over a girl. He must’ve really been in love. He came at me with everything, swinging, kicking, screaming. He was like the Tasmanian Devil. It took everybody else to hold him down.

  “I’ll kill you!” he kept yelling. “I’ll kill you!”

  His face was red and he was breathing like an animal. He hit me only a couple of times, which didn’t really hurt. But when Taco Bell settled down, Bam had a bloody nose.

  “Why don’t you hit like that in a game … bam, just like that, bam, bam! Bring that girl to the game and we’ll make fun of her to rile you up.”

  Everybody laughed, even Taco Bell. But it took him a little longer.

  “I woulda gone, you guys,” he said. “You don’t have to say stuff like that.”

  “You’re the crazy one,” I said. “You shoulda seen your face.”

  Taco Bell laughed. “Well, you looked pretty scared.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess I was.”

  Taco Bell looked at me then, wanting to tell me that he wasn’t mad anymore, that there was no reason to be scared. He didn’t understand that it wasn’t him I was afraid of. I didn’t even know for sure what it was. I couldn’t explain how I felt. But Spray Can knew. He’d been alone long enough to know how it felt. And he knew I didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Ray goes for parts most weekends,” Spray Can
cut in. “There’s always a few cars around with keys in ’em.”

  “So we meet at the garage on Friday night,” I said, nodding at Spray Can.

  “That’ll work,” Heat said.

  That’s how it was settled. We would mark our territory on someone else’s field. It would be the true test of the force of nature.

  19

  ON THE ROAD

  We couldn’t think of anything else the rest of the week. We even had a hard time concentrating at practice.

  “Go home and meditate,” Coach said to us. “Think about the spoils of victory. A loose mind will spell defeat, for all of us. Meditate, men. Meditate on the victory at Marathon, the conquest of the Gauls. Meditate.”

  And with that, he closed his eyes and waved us home from the last practice before Saturday’s game.

  It was Friday afternoon. D day, Taco Bell called it. “The day we drive.”

  We spent the rest of the afternoon at the canal, sitting on the wooden bridge tossing pebbles into the water. No one said much; we just stared at the tiny splashes until they turned orange from the setting sun. Then we looked at each other as serious as we could.

  “This is it,” Bam said. “See you in a couple hours.”

  We all went home to dinner, to sit nervously until it was dark enough to leave.

  “I’m going with Taco Bell,” I told my mom.

  “To do homework, I hope,” she said.

  I didn’t answer. And I didn’t look back.

  I was the first to arrive at Spray Can’s that night. Spray Can was right. Ray was gone for the weekend. At least this time he’d left Spray Can with some food. He had eaten two TV dinners by the time I had gotten there. He cleared the empty trays off the couch for me and I sat down with his dog Bob. There was a space movie on and Spray Can was cheering for the bad guy, of course.

  “Fry his butt with the laser,” he shouted at the TV. “Toast him!”

  Then he looked at me.

  “You can get something from the fridge if you want,” he said.

  I rummaged around and found half a candy bar. I broke a piece off and gave it to Bob. Then I sat down and looked at Spray Can.

  “Do you think I’m crazy?” I asked him.

  “Sure,” Spray Can said. “Who isn’t?”