The Heartbeat of Halftime Read online

  He laughed then for a moment before looking back to the TV.

  “Toast him!” I shouted.

  Just then the bad guy in the black space suit blew up from a direct laser hit.

  “Oooh,” we groaned.

  “Fried from the inside out,” Spray Can said. “What a way to go.”

  We heard a knock on the window. When I turned around, I could see Bam and Heat looking through the dirty glass. Spray Can opened the garage door out front, and even though it was a cold night, he left it open and turned on the heater. It wasn’t long before everyone else was there. Except for Taco Bell.

  “I knew we should’ve gone by his house,” Bam said.

  “He’ll be here,” I said. “We got time.”

  Heat’s dogs were a little nervous around Bob. It always took Bob a bit to warm up to the four Labs. Bob followed them everywhere they went, and it was funny seeing him try to keep up with all four. He was like a mother hen trying to keep four young roosters out of trouble. Heat’s dogs didn’t help much; they were into everything, their big tails swinging back and forth and knocking all kinds of stuff over. Spray Can moved the TV into the garage and everybody found something to sit on; some empty can or box or broken chair. The space show ended and a Western was on. We were cheering for the Indians when Taco Bell finally showed up. His face had blue stuff all over it and his hands were sticky. But his eyes were all excited.

  “There’s a wedding on at the church behind Smoky Joe’s,” he said as if it were better than Christmas.

  “So?” Bam said.

  “So …” Taco Bell said. “There’s lots of food and they got it all set up in the back, you know, close enough to that hole in the fence to make out with all kinds of cake and those chocolate things … . It’s good.”

  “We got a mission tonight,” Heat said seriously.

  “We can’t do it on an empty stomach,” Taco Bell said. “Let’s eat first, then go. Besides, I can’t go yet anyway; I just went an hour ago.”

  Sparky slugged him.

  “You bozo,” he said. “I been holdin’ it all night.”

  “I’m gonna pee my pants if we don’t get goin’ now,” Flame said.

  “C’mon,” Taco Bell pleaded. “We gotta do more than pee tonight. We got us a car, right?”

  We all looked at Spray Can then.

  “Do we?” I asked him.

  Spray Can was quiet for a long time. He wanted the suspense to build.

  “Do we have a car?” Flame asked. “Huh?”

  Spray Can smiled. “We do,” he said. “A very sthpecial car. Follow me.”

  No one dared say a word. We followed Spray Can as if he were some fairy godfather about to deliver on a dream. He walked straight out through the open garage door, around the corner of the small brick building, and stood beside the most amazing car any of us had ever seen. A 1957 Bel-Aire convertible. It had long fins. It was blue and white. It had no roof. It had a radio. And Spray Can had the keys.

  “Gentlemen,” Spray Can said like a royal butler, “your car awaits.”

  We all jumped on him, rubbing his head and calling him the greatest player of all time.

  “This is one for the Titan Hall of fame,” Taco Bell yelled as we all climbed in.

  It wasn’t easy getting seventeen guys in that car. We had to squeeze four in the front, seven in the back, and six in the trunk. The little guys were voted in the trunk, including Sparky. But they didn’t care. This would be one of the greatest adventures of our lives; they’d take it however they could get it. When we were all in, and Spray Can had the engine running, Heat tried to call his dogs.

  “No,” we all shouted. “There isn’t enough room.”

  “But they’ve always been there,” Heat said. “It’s theirs too.”

  “Sorry,” we all said. “We’ll have to do it without them this time.”

  And with that we drove away, into our dreams. We had crossed that invisible point of no return. We were suddenly teenagers cruisin’ in a convertible and so full of reckless adventure, we could’ve driven beyond the horizon to conquer worlds unknown, maybe even danced with girls. We were that sure of ourselves.

  The first stop, of course, was Smoky Joe’s. Everybody called him Smoky Joe because he smoked cigars all the time. There was always a cloud of smoke around his head. We parked across the street and got out quietly. Smoky Joe was old, so we knew he’d be asleep already. We crept along the side of his house, always staying low and in the shadows. We crossed under the wire clothesline in his backyard to the hole in his fence. It was a shortcut we often took, especially if we were being chased by Fat Ed. The hole was small and Ed always had a hard time squeezing through. If he ever got close, you were sure to lose him at Smoky Joe’s. We lay down in the shadows. Then everybody looked at me.

  “You’re the crazy one, Wing,” Bam said. “Go get us some food.”

  I moved to the hole in the fence and surveyed the grounds. Most of the people had gone home, but there were a few left up by the church. The food table stood off a bit, and no one was around it. There were bottles of soda in crates under the table and big chunks of cake on top. Trouble was, it was a good thirty-yard sprint from the hole in the fence to the table. And there was no cover, only a stretch of lawn.

  “Would you like drinks too?” I said.

  “Of course,” Taco Bell said. “Bring those peach sodas.”

  With those instructions I jumped through the hole in the fence and shot straight for the table. I sprinted as fast as I could and slid under the table like I was sliding home. In less than three seconds I had a crate of pop and was headed back to the hole in the fence. The bottles rattled as I skidded to a stop.

  “Enjoying the wedding?” I asked.

  “Oh, very much,” Bam said. “Have they cut the cake yet?”

  “I believe they have,” I said. “Would you like a piece?”

  “That would be delightful,” Bam crooned.

  “Be right back,” I said, running off toward the table.

  Just as I slid in this time, a man in a white jacket turned around from the people he was talking to and walked to the food table. I crouched down under the table and waited. Another man in a white uniform walked up to him.

  “Alex,” the first man said. “I don’t think we’ll be serving more cake tonight. Why don’t we clear this table and start cleaning up.”

  Then the man in the white jacket walked back to the people he was talking to and Alex was left to clear the cake himself. I heard him stacking dishes and I looked over at the hole in the fence for further instructions. Bam was there giving me hand signals. Wait, I could see him signal. Wait. Wait. Wait. Now!

  I jumped up and looked first for Alex, second for the biggest slab of cake on the table. I found the one they had been cutting from and it was almost too big to carry. But I didn’t have time to cut it. I grabbed the whole thing and took off running.

  It would’ve been a clean getaway too, if I hadn’t grabbed a part of the tablecloth with it. Dishes crashed to the ground behind me, Alex turned around, every wedding guest turned around. And there I stood, with this huge cake in my hands. There was only one thing to do: Run! I headed for the fence like it was the end zone. Alex was fast. In no time he was right behind me. When he didn’t catch me instantly, he became even more intent on tackling me. I slipped his grasp just before I got to the hole in the fence, and I could tell he was going to give it one more effort. I dove through the hole just as he lunged for me. I heard him hit the ground as I sailed through the hole and landed right on top of Taco Bell. Somehow the cake survived the handoff. Taco Bell was up quickly. He handed off to Bam, who turned and handed off to Heat. Spray Can was already in the car, and so was nearly everybody else. Just as I got to my feet, I heard Alex squeezing through the fence. I took off again as fast as I could go, but Alex was right behind me, running at full tilt.

  “Start the car!” I yelled to Spray Can.

  I heard the Bel-Aire fire to life just as I ra
n under the clothesline.

  You know, Smoky Joe is a short man. So when he strung his clothesline, he hung the wires just below six feet. Which is too bad for Alex, because my guess is he stands just above six feet. I guess that because one of those wires caught him right under the nose. I didn’t see much, but Bam said it looked like someone had thrown up a bag of white laundry.

  “There were arms and legs everywhere.” Bam said. “Then he landed with an awful groan. He got up pretty slow.”

  By the time Alex had figured out what hit him, we were on the road to another victory.

  20

  THE HARD WAY

  There’s nothing like a Friday night, lots of cake, and all the pop you can drink. Spray Can was a much better driver than we had figured. Turns out he drives all the time for Ray. He drives slow, though; says he doesn’t want to draw any attention to himself. So we poked along the back roads all the way to Granite High School, where we would play the next day’s game. We drank so much pop that by the time we got there we were so ready to pee that no one saw the guys sitting in the bleachers. We just ran onto the field, marked one end zone, and ran to do the other trying not to wet our pants. Then we met at midfield to talk about the game, the way we would if we were at home.

  “Well, what do we have here?” we heard someone say. It startled us because we thought we were alone.

  There was only seven or eight of them. But they were big; they were at least a year older than us. We’d find out later that they played on the team that would pound Ed Stebbing’s team the next day. They stood there looking at us, trying to figure us out.

  “You come down and piss on our field,” one of ’em said, “you just might make someone angry.”

  “That’s the idea,” I said without thinking.

  “Yeah?” the biggest one said, stepping up to my face.

  Before I could say anything else, he threw a forearm that caught me in the head and knocked me to the ground. I’ve never been hit so hard, by anyone. Stars shot through my head. I couldn’t hear anything. Before I could stand up, Bam landed on the ground next to me.

  “You little boys got anything else to say?” the big one said to us.

  No one said a thing. I stood up and he grabbed me by the shirt and threw me down. Then he turned and punched Taco Bell in the stomach. It may have been the only thing that saved us. Taco Bell threw up half a wedding cake and four bottles of peach soda. The boys from Granite laughed. They slapped our faces as we tried to walk away.

  “Go on home, boys,” they said. “Come back when you’re big enough to play this game.”

  Then they shoved at us and kicked our butts as we went by. We crossed the field in darkness, climbed into the Bel-Aire like battle-fatigued soldiers, and drove away.

  None of us said a word on the way back. Except for Taco Bell.

  “My stomach hurts,” he kept saying.

  When we got to Spray Can’s, everybody just climbed out of the car and walked home. We didn’t even look at each other. I guess everybody figured we deserved it for stealing cake from a wedding. It was our punishment and we tried to take it like men. But when we were around the corner, we could hear Spray Can kicking an empty gas can. Bang! You could hear him kick it, and it would rattle off the wall. Bang! I heard it nearly all the way home. Even when I knew I was too far away to really hear it, that can clanged around in my head, bang!

  The next morning we were so out of it that Coach had to stop us in the middle of warm-ups to ask us what was wrong.

  “Did you all spend the night dreamin’ the season was over?” he shouted at us. “Did you just figure that you didn’t want to make it to the play-offs?”

  No one said anything.

  “We win this game and we’re on to the play-offs, fourth seed out of four teams. We lose and it’s our last game. Has anybody here been to the play-offs?”

  No one raised a hand.

  “It’s worse than I thought,” he said.

  We knew we were in trouble. We just didn’t know how to get out of it. We were so demoralized by Friday night’s pounding that no one wanted to ever play the game again. Lucky for us, Granite had their worst game of the year. Every time they got a drive going, they fumbled. Their offense was having all kinds of trouble. Their only score came late in the first half when they blocked one of our many punts and their big defensive tackle landed on the ball in the end zone. They didn’t even make the extra point—another fumble. So when we broke for halftime, the score was only six to nothing for Granite.

  “It oughta be a hundred to nothing the way you guys are playing,” Coach said. “What is it going to take to pull you guys out of it? By some miracle we’re still in this game. If we want to win, all we have to do is play football. I don’t know what it is you guys are playing. It’s not football, it’s not the game you played last week against undefeated Cyprus. You knocked off the best team in the league, and now you’re losing to the worst. Let’s get it together. We’re a better team than this. We’re the Titans!”

  It didn’t inspire us much. Granite kept making their mistakes and we kept making ours. It was as if neither team wanted to win. Every time we made a mistake, I got madder and madder. I’d throw a block downfield that would send the linebacker sailing off the field like a bowling ball, but when I’d turn around Bam would be at the bottom of the pile, caught from behind before he could even hand the ball off.

  Coach was helpless. No speech about victory, or about the Romans, or even General Patton, could pull us out of it. We punted with two minutes left and it looked like it was going to be the ball game. I grabbed Spray Can before he went out on defense. I could hear that bang! I could hear Spray Can kicking the gas can.

  “Kick the can,” I said to Spray Can.

  “What?” he said back to me.

  “Like you did last night,” I said. “Kick the can like you did last night when you were mad. Kick the can!”

  Spray Can looked at me as if a light went on. He ran out onto the field and stood right over the center on the first play, his hands moving nervously, his feet jumping. I knew he was going to blitz.

  The quarterback barked the signal.

  Spray Can pumped his arms.

  The center hiked the ball.

  Spray Can charged. He charged like a madman. Bang! He was through the line. Bang! He hit the quarterback. Bang! He punched the ball loose. The ball tumbled away, bouncing in slow motion. Spray Can threw the quarterback aside and dove on the ball. Our whole team erupted. Now it was our turn to score. With less than a minute to play, we remembered why we had put on our pads that morning.

  But as our offense was taking the field, the older Granite team, the team that was about to hand Ed Stebbings his worst loss of the year, the team who only the night before had watched us desecrate their field and had made us pay for it, formed a line at the back of the end zone and started chanting like blood-crazed warriors.

  “Defense! Defense! Defense!”

  Our first three plays went nowhere. We were inside the thirty, but it was as if every word the older team chanted set up a barrier, a stone in a wall we could not push through. On third down, I had gone downfield to block. I caught sight of the players at the back of the end zone. I found the big guy that had slammed me to the ground the night before. He was shouting the loudest. He was enjoying seeing us crash and burn. I ran back to the huddle.

  “Throw me the ball deep,” I said to Bam. “A deep post. I can burn him.”

  “I’m not getting enough time!” Bam yelled back at me. “They’re on me before I can even throw the ball.”

  “Then run the 38 pitch to Heat,” I said. Then I turned to Heat. “But pull up and launch the ball to the back of the end zone. I’ll be there.”

  “Do it!” Bam said.

  I lined up wide in the backfield. Heat looked at me before Bam started the cadence. He could get it to me, I knew he could get it to me. I heard Bam bark: “Set! Hut! Hut!”

  I started off inside to get around the li
nebacker, cut outside to get on the outside shoulder of the deep safety, then veered toward the middle of the field. I could hear the crashing of helmets behind me. And I could see the big guy at the back of the end zone, standing without his helmet on, egging his younger team on.

  “Defense!” I heard him scream. I set my path right for him, then looked over my shoulder. Heat launched a high, arcing, wobbly spiral that looked like it was going to be too deep. I blew past the deep safety, running madly, looking over my shoulder, then at the big guy, the ball, the big guy. He saw me coming just as I reached out to haul the pass in only two steps before crashing out of the end zone. I didn’t slow down. The big guy stepped to the side, but I stepped with him. Bang! We hit heads. Too bad I was the only one wearing a helmet. He went down hard and came up angry. I rolled past him and jumped up just as the referee signaled touchdown.

  The big guy didn’t know who hit him until I pulled off my helmet to celebrate. I’ve never seen anyone so mad. One of his buddies was trying to hand him a towel to wipe the blood from his nose. He threw it away and screamed at us.

  “You haven’t won yet, you lucky little creep!”

  Then he marched around behind the end zone, throwing his arms up and trying desperately to motivate the younger team. But it was no use. Heat punched in the extra point and tossed the ball to the maniac just before the final gun went off. He threw it back at us and was so out of control his teammates had to drag him away. Titans 7, Granite 6.

  “We won,” I whispered to my father. But he couldn’t hear me, he wasn’t there. While everyone else was celebrating the victory, I walked away with my mother. She didn’t say a word, just drove me to the hospital while the rest of the team pushed and shoved and congratulated each other. I watched them from the backseat of my mother’s car, and I thought about them all the way to the hospital. That’s where my father was then. He got to be too much for my mother to take care of. She had to work, she said. She had to put him someplace where someone could watch after him all the time.

  “Why don’t you just quit work?” I said.

  She got angry then.