The Heartbeat of Halftime Read online

  “Why don’t you quit football?” She said. “Why don’t you quit everything and stay here twenty-four hours a day yourself?”

  I didn’t answer. Truth is, I would’ve if I’d thought that’s what my father wanted me to do. But I knew how much he loved football. And every time I played, it made me angry that he wasn’t there to see it. It made me so angry I was crazy, just as crazy as they all thought I was. Every time I threw a block, I threw it hard. I wanted to knock someone down for every time I looked over at the sidelines and didn’t see my father. I wanted to change it all somehow, but I couldn’t and it made me crazy mad sometimes. But at least we were winning. No one could believe it. It was going to be the greatest season ever, and I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was make someone else hurt as much as me, as much as my father.

  “We made the play-offs,” I whispered to him. Then I waited for him to whisper something back through the tubes in his throat. But he didn’t. I sat down on the floor beside his bed.

  “You don’t have to stay here tonight,” I heard my mother whisper.

  I opened my eyes a little and looked at her. I must have fallen asleep. It was dark in the room. She looked tired.

  “I’m afraid,” I said, coming out of the sleep and not knowing why I was even saying it. It was like I was in a dream and I was watching myself talk about things I didn’t understand.

  “It’s okay,” my mother said. “I’m a little afraid myself.”

  She sat down in a chair then and stared at me.

  “You look like him, you know,” she said to me. “In a few years you’ll look just the way he did when we first met. I’d like to have that back right now. With nothing in between.”

  She closed her eyes and talked softly. “It hasn’t been easy, I know. Not for you, not for any of us … . You should get some sleep.”

  Even as she said it, the very thought of it put her out like she’d been hypnotized to fall into a deep sleep whenever the word was mentioned. Within moments she was breathing long and heavy. Beside me the pump that filled my father’s lungs breathed for him. The same rhythm, day and night, not slower when he slept, not faster when he was awake. Steady. My own breath fogged the steel bar of his bed. There we were, the three of us sharing the same air, living and dying with each breath, afraid to breathe, afraid not to.

  21

  HOW TO PLAY FOOTBALL

  On Monday morning there was a huge banner stretched across the building. WAY TO GO, TEAM! it said, and all our names were on it. Taco Bell thought it was the greatest honor he could ever receive. I guess the only name he saw was his. He walked into the school like he’d just been crowned prince of the world. He was wearing his jersey so everyone would know who he was. Fact is, the only ones who really knew him were some of the guys in the band, and Katie. But Taco Bell walked through the hallways saying hi to everybody. And if there was a group of girls, he’d kinda saunter by, glance over at them, and raise his eyebrow like Elvis. When he did it to Katie, she said, “Oh, honey. Did you hurt your eye in the game?”

  That’s the kind of day it was. Even lunchtime was strange. We ate like kings, without looking over our shoulders. Ed and his pals were nowhere to be found. We knew they had lost, that Granite had beaten them up pretty badly. Somethng like 28 to 6. But, it wasn’t like them to not show up. No one was complaining, but it was strange.

  “Wonder where Fat Ed and his buddiesth are,” Spray Can said.

  “Who cares,” Taco Bell said. He was too busy celebrating. After lunch he ate six ice-cream sandwiches. “Victory lunch,” he called it, stuffing them into his mouth. The whole world seemed to revolve around us then. There was nothing in our way, nothing wrong with our universe, our world at school. Until I went back to my locker. That’s when I figured out where Ed Stebbings had been during lunch. There was a note taped on my locker. YOU’RE STILL A LOSER, it said in red ink, Ed’s trademark. And when I opened my locker I found that he had shoved the fire extinguisher hose through one of the little vents at the top and filled the whole thing up with water. Everything was soaked; all my books, my papers, my jacket. It meant that a week’s worth of homework would have to be redone. I guess the big guy from Granite was so mad he took it out on Ed. In turn, Ed took it out on me. Funny how anger gets passed around like that.

  “I’ll make him pay for this,” I said into my locker.

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

  “You’re always sneaking up on me,” I said to her, turning around.

  “You’re always talking to yourself,” she said. Then she looked at the inside of my locker. “Why is everything wet?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said. “Do you have any dry paper?”

  She reached in her bag and found me a pad of paper. I pulled out my soggy books and we walked outside and spread them out to dry. It was a warm day for late October. Seemed it was the first time I had noticed the weather for a long time. I copied my wet assignments onto dry paper and tried to explain more football to Leisl. I set up leaves and sticks as the players, but when I went to place a rock for the halfback, Leisl moved it and set down the bottle cap.

  “This is you, right?” She said.

  I was surprised. “Yeah, that’s me, the orange soda.”

  I went through all the power plays, the pitches and sweeps, and finally the pass plays. I explained the offense to her, what each player does on every play. I told her what makes a good guard, a good tackle, center, end, quarterback, fullback, and halfback.

  “See, each is different,” I said. “They each have something different to do. And they have to do it right or it won’t work, no matter how good just one of them is.”

  Then I showed her what would happen if the guard pulled the wrong way, or if the quarterback handed off to the wrong man, or the center hiked it on the wrong count.

  “Lots of things can go wrong,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Lots can go wrong. That’s what makes winning so great. There’s just not much chance of it.”

  “Where did you learn it all?” she asked me.

  “Mostly from my father,” I said.

  “You’re father plays football too?”

  “He did, a long time ago. He doesn’t play anymore. He doesn’t do much of anything anymore.”

  She smiled, I suppose she was thinking my father had just lost interest in the game, that he was like a lot of fathers, getting older and caring less about football.

  “He—he’s dying,” I said.

  I stood up to leave then, but I couldn’t think of a place to go. It was like my mind went blank and I was lost. I just stood there, looking around, waiting for someone to point me in the right direction.

  “You want to leave?” Leisl asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “Stay here,” she said. “Just a little longer.”

  I sat down.

  We didn’t say much more for a long time. We just sat together. Somehow I believed she knew how I felt. Maybe it was because she had been away from her family for a while. Maybe she had felt lost too. I wanted to tell her about my father, about everything we had done together, about the way he could put his big hands around a football, or on my shoulders and make me feel like I was the only thing in his life. I wanted to tell her I was angry because I didn’t have that anymore, I wasn’t part of anybody’s life anymore. I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t fair, that none of it was fair. But I couldn’t. And I didn’t have to. She understood how I felt and she sat there with me so I wouldn’t be alone. We watched the clouds for the rest of the afternoon. They were moving away from us, seemed like the whole world was moving away from us, slowly spinning off and leaving us stranded.

  22

  TACO BELL’S CRASH

  “Four teams make the play-offs,” Darrel explained to us. “They try to set it up so that number one and number two end up in the championship game. You guys are number four. That means you’re supposed to be an easy win for th
e first-place team, so they can coast into the championship game. Two and three play at the same time you do. Most of the time two wins, so they play one for the championship. But you never know. A team like you guys can come into the play-offs with a lot of momentum and mess everything up, surprise everyone by kicking butt and taking the whole thing. That’s what’s so fun about the play-offs. Anyone can win.”

  We were on our way to Bud’s Sporting Goods. Darrel was glad to drive his little brother anywhere then, long as it had something to do with football. We were on our way to buy tape for Bam’s ankle. I found out later that Bam never really had a sore ankle. He just had this Johnny Unitas trading card that he taped to his ankle every game for good luck. Bam was the most superstitious of all of us, and he wasn’t about to change anything for the play-offs.

  “Hey, Wing,” Darrel said. “Can you pull off a win here in the first round?”

  “Yeah,” I said, not wanting to play Darrel’s psychology games. He was always playing coach with us, trying to push us. It didn’t sit well with me. It was like he was trying to be a part of something that wasn’t his.

  “I know you will,” he said. “We just got to find a way to get you mad before the game.” Then he laughed. He didn’t understand. He’d known about my father all season and still he didn’t understand. He thought it was only about winning. It wasn’t. It was about not losing. It was about not wanting to lose anything anymore. But Darrel didn’t understand that. He just hadn’t lost enough in his life.

  “Whatever,” I said, looking out the window.

  “You’re a hard one to figure, Wing,” he said.

  “You just don’t get it, do you?” I said angrily.

  “I guess not,” Darrel said.

  We got Bam’s tape, and when we got home, Darrel threw us the ball for a while before practice started. That’s when we found out about Taco Bell. We were standing in the street when Katie rode her bike up and stopped beside us. She’d been crying, and she had this worried look on her face.

  “Tyler’s hurt,” she said, calling Taco Bell by his real name. She was trying not to cry again. “He’s really hurt.”

  “What happened?” Bam asked.

  “He crashed his bike,” she said. “Bad.”

  “Where is he now?” I asked her.

  “He’s home, but I think they’re going to take him to the hospital.”

  Taco Bell didn’t live too far from Bam. We could cut through a few yards, hop a couple fences, and we’d be there.

  “We’ll meet you there,” I said to Katie as we jogged away.

  I thought about Taco Bell’s mom on the way over. She was always against football. Said it was too dangerous. Poor Taco Bell had to take piano lessons just to make her happy. She’s big, like him; and she can make your life miserable if she doesn’t like you. And she doesn’t like Bam. She blamed her son’s “football fascination,” as she called it, on Bam.

  “Your ancestors must’ve been barbarians,” she said to him one time when he was waiting for Taco Bell to finish up a lesson.

  “Yes, I think they were,” Bam said, thinking she meant they cut hair. He was just trying to be polite. But ever since then, she hasn’t liked him. And she’s never liked football. She said Tyler would get hurt someday, it was only a matter of time. Well, I wanted to rush into his house and tell her he’d never been hurt playing football and that this was proof that football was safer than just about anything else he could be doing. I wanted to tell her that if he’d been playing football instead of riding his bike, he’d be fine, no injuries, no hospital, nothing.

  When we got to Taco Bell’s, Bam stopped on the porch and sat down.

  “I’ll wait here,” he said.

  I was about to knock on the door, but it opened. It was Taco Bell’s mother and she was helping her banged-up son limp out the door to the car.

  “Excuse us, please,” she said.

  Taco Bell wasn’t wearing anything but his underwear. His whole left side was scraped and red. His mother had scrubbed the wounds and put some kind of salve on them, and they were shiny and raw.

  Taco Bell whimpered. He was in so much pain, he didn’t pay attention to us at all. I’m not sure he could see us anyway. The side of his face was scraped pretty bad and his eye was nearly swollen shut. He winced with every step.

  “Is he gonna be all right?” I asked his mother.

  “That’s what we’re going to find out,” she said dramatically.

  Then she loaded him carefully into the car. He looked at us through the window, his eyes red and dry from crying too much. He didn’t try to wave, or say good-bye. He just looked at us. It was strange because we didn’t know what he was thinking.

  “Guess he won’t play the piano for a while,” Bam said.

  None of us laughed. We just stood there in the driveway, not knowing what else to say. Finally, Katie said what we were all thinking.

  “What about football—do you think he’ll be able to play?”

  Bam didn’t say anything. He looked at me for an answer.

  “He’ll play,” I said, not really believing it myself. “He’ll play.”

  23

  THE BIG SCAB

  Taco Bell didn’t make it to a practice that whole week. He even stayed home from school the first two days, and his mother wouldn’t let us even see him until Wednesday. When she finally let us in the house, Taco Bell was sitting at the piano, staring at a music book. When he saw us, he quickly moved to the couch and sat down. He looked like a villain in a Batman comic book. Half his body was a scab, the other half was perfectly normal. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, so we could see most of his scabs. They were the biggest scabs we had ever seen.

  “Let’s see you eat one of those,” Bam said.

  Taco Bell laughed. “My mom won’t let me,” he said.

  “We brought you these,” I said, handing him a pack of doughnuts. “You can save the scabs for later.”

  “Doughnuts!” he said excitedly. Then he tore the end off the box and had one eaten before he even knew what kind they were.

  “Are you going to make it to Saturday’s game?” I asked him.

  Just then his mother walked by.

  “Thanks,” he said looking sideways at his mother. “I could use some help with my homework.”

  When she was gone, he leaned forward and whispered to me.

  “She won’t let me out of the house.”

  “We gotta have you,” I said. “We’ve been working Farts all this week but he’s not getting it.”

  “Farts is too slow to pull,” Taco Bell said.

  “Tell me about it,” Bam said. “He don’t block much either. I’m gettin’ killed in the scrimmages. You know what it’ll be like in the game? Bam! … That’s what it will be like.”

  “You gotta make it,” I said. “It’s the play-offs.”

  Taco Bell touched the scab on his cheekbone softly and gave us this worried look. Then his mother called him from the other room.

  “Tyler,” she said, “you need to finish practicing.”

  “I will,” he answered.

  “Find a way,” I said. “Find a way.”

  When Bam and I left, neither one of us believed Taco Bell would make it to another game that season. We went through our last practice on Friday pushing Farts as hard as we could, but he just wasn’t getting it. He wasn’t fast enough to pull for the lead block; instead he just got in the way. And when he blocked straight ahead, he couldn’t move sideways fast enough to pick up the stunts the defense was throwing at him. He was slow and confused. But he had a lot of desire. We tried to get him up for it, tried to make him believe he could do it. But it was no use. He’d get all excited and shake like a true believer overcome with the spirit of football; then his feet would get all tangled up and he’d fall over on his can. He’d lie there, spit his mouthpiece out, and moan, “I can’t do it, I just can’t do it.”

  Poor Farts. He just didn’t have it. We decided we’d have to run everythi
ng to the left side and hope that he could hold off his man long enough for us to get a play off. We would also have to score early, because once they figured out where the weak spot was, they’d pound it all day long.

  That night, after we had piled into an old station wagon at Spray Can’s and driven to the field to mark our territory, we stood at midfield and tried to figure out how to beat West. West was the first team we had played that season. They had beaten us badly. We were sure they were counting on an easy win. That was about our only advantage. That and the forces of nature. Nothing else seemed to be going right. First off, Ray finished the ’57 Bel-Aire, so our cruiser was gone and we were stuck with this station wagon that was in for a muffler. Then when we got to the field, nobody could go. Me and Heat marked both end zones ourselves. Luckily his dogs were there or it would’ve been a pretty poor offering to the gods of nature.

  That made me think. So we didn’t have the cruiser. It hadn’t been big enough to get us all in anyway, at least not including Heat’s dogs. The wagon had enough room. It wasn’t fancy, but it got the job done. Maybe our offense for the next day had to be the same way. So Farts was slow. That just meant he wasn’t as fancy as Taco Bell. But Farts was big, bigger than Taco Bell. He ate more too, which gave him tremendous gas. That’s why we called him Farts. So maybe we just had to figure out a way to get the job done without pulling; you know, just basic plug-up-the-hole blocking. We didn’t need Farts downfield, or to pull around the corner on the sweeps. We just needed him to keep the defense out.

  We set up the offensive line right there in the dark. Then I marked off Fart’s territory.

  “Nobody gets through this part of the field,” I said to him. “All you have to do is keep people out.”

  “And we don’t care how you do it,” Bam added. “Just stop ’em, bam!, like that. Every play.”

  By the look in Fart’s eyes, I could tell that a huge burden had been lifted from his shoulders. He didn’t have to keep track of which direction he had to pull, or how to pass block, or who to pick up downfield. All he had to do was keep people out of the backfield.