The Underdogs

by Mike Lupica

  “Dad, I know that. I’m not an idiot.”

  “I’m not working in another factory. Did it once. Once was enough.”

  It was another story Will knew by heart, how his dad, along with half the population in Forbes, had been laid off when the Forbes Flyers doors shut for good.

  All those jobs, just gone.

  Will knew a lot about his dad. Like how he had grown up with Ben Clark’s and Toby Keenan’s dads here in Forbes, how the three of them had played high school football together until Joe Tyler hurt his knee. How they’d all grown apart after that. How many years later Mr. Clark had started over with the bottled-water plant in Castle Rock and had offered Joe Tyler a chance to work there, telling him he could start on the assembly line with an eye toward moving up to a management position.

  How Will’s dad turned him down. Just like Will had turned Ben down.

  To Joe Tyler a factory was a factory. Being trapped inside one symbolized everything that had gone wrong in his life since he’d hurt his knee.

  Now Will said, “Dad, I’d never ask you to take a job you hate.”

  “Sometimes,” his dad said, not looking at Will, “I drive by in the mail truck and see you sitting on the riverbank.”

  “I like looking at the water, you know that. I always have.”

  “You’re my dreamer, pal. You think I don’t know some of your dreams?”

  Will smiled. His dad must have felt it on him, because he turned now and smiled back.

  Joe Tyler said, “It’s my own fault, the way I’ve turned out.”

  “You’ve turned out great,” Will said, knowing the words came out too fast.

  “Hush and listen. The only job I ever really cared about was football. I never saw myself as anything other than a football player.” The smile was gone now, just like that. “I won’t let you make the same mistake I did, putting all your eggs in one stupid basket.”

  Will didn’t want to have this conversation tonight, one they’d had before. The one about there being more to life than football.

  Not when you’re twelve, Will thought. And not when they’re about to take your season away.

  Right before halftime, Will heard the snoring next to him. He got up, lowered the volume on the TV, went upstairs and fired up his old Dell laptop, the one the guy at the little computer repair store downtown was already calling “vintage.”

  Will went to Google and looked up Forbes Flyers the way he had many times before and stared at the pictures of the cool old high-top black football shoes with the wings on the sides. It was a way to take himself back to when his town was still a real town, when flying still seemed possible.

  But he couldn’t help himself and began to look at this year’s shoes, a pair of New Balance 897 cleats, for grass fields, and the 996 turf shoe, for turf fields like the one Castle Rock had. Both reminded him of the old Forbes Flyers.

  Will Tyler looked at a pair of football shoes he might never get to wear for a long time, like he was shopping for an iPhone he might never own, or an iPad.

  He powered down the Dell thinking, What’s the point?

  That’s when the idea hit him.

  One Hail Mary pass to save the season.

  CHAPTER 03

  It was the end of August. The unofficial end of summer.

  Usually Will couldn’t wait for school to start.

  It wasn’t for the classroom part or the studying part. Certainly not for the homework part. Will was an average student, at best. He looked forward to school for one reason only: the start of football.

  And he wasn’t alone, even though the number of kids his age trying out for football in Forbes seemed to get smaller every year, the way the town did.

  “The way I see it,” Tim LeBlanc said to Will the next morning at Shea, “we might as well skip school this year. Or at least the hard parts.”

  “All due respect,” Will said, “but what parts of school aren’t hard for you?”

  Tim said, “You ever notice how nothing good ever comes after ‘all due respect’? It’s like asking your punter to make a tackle. What comes after it hurts no matter how you look at it. Kind of like this plan of yours. All due respect and all.”

  Will had told Tim about his Hail Mary play first thing when they got to Shea. But Tim had reacted as if Will had told him he was putting an SOS note in a bottle and setting it adrift at sea.

  Will wasn’t discouraged.

  A good play was a good play.

  Tim had been Will’s blocking back from the time they’d started playing on the team for ten-year-olds. He was a head taller than Will and outweighed him by at least twenty pounds, and if the offensive line didn’t open up the holes for him, Tim did. Tim’s weight, in fact, was one of the reasons that Forbes had quit the Pop Warner league two years ago and helped form the West River league.

  When they were in fifth grade, Tim had barely made it under the weight limit for guys their age. After the season was done, Tim’s dad said that he wasn’t going to make his kid lose five pounds, or whatever it was, the next season if he wanted to keep playing football.

  “I’m against kids being told they’re too anything,” Nick LeBlanc had said at the time. “Too big, too small, too slow, too anything.”

  The crazy thing, at least to Will, was that Mr. LeBlanc was now the president of the town council. Meaning he was now one of the adults telling Will and Tim that their town was too poor to play in their league this season.

  Tim loved playing football almost as much as Will did, just for the sheer fun of knocking people over on offense and defense. Yet he acted like it was his job now—maybe because his dad was coming across as one of the bad guys—to explain what he called “the dollars” to his best bud.

  He started explaining them again to Will now.

  “You make the money we need sound like a million dollars,” Will said. “It’s not.”

  “No,” Tim said. “But the ten thousand might as well be a million right now.”

  Ten thousand dollars. Tim had already explained to Will what the money bought:

  The equipment, first of all. The cost of the vans needed to transport kids to the away games. The fee for someone, a firefighter or police officer or nurse, to handle the EMT van at games in case somebody got hurt. Money to pay officials for home games. And an insurance fee.

  Will imagined the numbers stacking up against him like guys on the other side of the football trying to stop him on a shortyardage play.

  Ten. Thousand. Dollars.

  Just the cost of new uniforms alone was going to be about five hundred dollars per player. Most of that went for new helmets, in a world where grown-ups kept trying to make the helmets safer every single year because of all the attention being paid to concussions, from boy leagues all the way up to the pros.

  Especially in the boy leagues.

  Will and Tim took a break from throwing passes to each other, sitting in the grass in one end zone, the day stretching out in front of them the way summer days were supposed to. Even latesummer days. Nowhere to be right now except here.

  “Well, I woke up feeling lousy about our situation,” Tim said, “but now I show up here and find out that my man is a man with a plan. And, as everybody knows, where there’s a Will . . .”

  Why did everybody think that joke was so stinking funny?

  “Don’t,” Will said. “I mean it.”

  “Touchy.”

  “About this? Yeah.”

  The last word came out in two parts, as if Will had broken it in half.

  Tim said, “Thrill, you know I always believe you can do things nobody else can.”

  Tim had nicknamed him Will the Thrill, or just Thrill, explaining that every time Will had the ball in his hands, there was a decent chance he would be taking it to the house.

  “But you gotta know,” Tim said, “that stuff like this only works in the movies.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I have a lot of opinions on things I don’t kno
w about.”

  Will said, “Tell me about it.”

  “Hey, just because I’m an idiot doesn’t mean I’m always wrong.”

  Will was on his back, throwing the ball into the air, thinking how great it looked against the blue sky, catching it.

  “I even thought about writing to Mr. Castle Rock.”

  It’s what they called Ben Clark’s dad.

  “Come on, man!” Tim said, sounding like one of the guys on ESPN. “That would be like the Steelers going to the Ravens and asking for help.”

  “I know,” Will said. “It’s why I didn’t do it. We can’t take a handout from them and then go try to beat them.”

  Will gripped the ball, stood up, said, “Go deep.”

  “I was born to catch passes.”

  “No, you were born to open holes for me.”

  “Tragically, the only holes we might have to worry about this season are the ones in the ground here.”

  Tim took off down the field. Will yelled after him, “You gotta believe!”

  Over his shoulder Tim yelled, “I know you stole that from some old guy.”

  Will let the ball go, a perfect spiral, not bad for a running back. Just as Tim reached for it, he stepped in one of the holes in the field and went down the way Will had the day before.

  It was hard to get Will to laugh these days.

  But he laughed now.

  At noon Will and Tim went their separate ways, knowing they’d be back by two o’clock, when a bunch of the guys from last year’s team would be gathering for a game of touch football.

  Before he left, Tim said, “You gonna tell the other guys your plan?”

  “I wouldn’t call it a plan, exactly. More like what it is. A prayer.”

  “But are you gonna tell?”

  “Not yet. I don’t want them to get their hopes up.”

  “But it’s okay to do that with me?”

  “Look at it this way,” Will said. “This time I’m the one trying to open the hole. One big enough for a whole team to run through.”

  Will walked home to have lunch by himself. It was that way for him most of the time. Sometimes, Will’s dad would meet him at home for a quick sandwich before heading back to work.

  Other times, even if he was walking the downtown route, he’d hustle home to do the same thing, Will watching him eat with one hand and rub his bad knee with the other.

  But today, Will knew, his dad was on the other side of Forbes. So the house was absolutely quiet. It was a quiet he’d grown used to, a part of his life from the time he’d been old enough to be in the house alone. Even then his dad would make sure that one of the neighbors would be home, either Mrs. Pomerantz on one side or Mrs. Bailey on the other.

  It was the kind of quiet that only having a mom could change.

  He had no memory of Ellen Tyler. Just pictures. And old home movies he’d never watched. But the pictures were everywhere in the house, showing a pretty, dark-haired woman smiling at the camera, Will almost always in her arms or at her side.

  In one of them, she had her arms out, laughing, as Will came to her. Will’s dad told him it was taken when he was first learning to walk.

  Someday, he told himself, he’d watch the movies.

  Just not yet.

  One time Tim had been talking, not really thinking about what he was saying, and he told Will that he couldn’t remember a single time in his life when he walked through the front door of his house after school, or at lunchtime in the summer, and his mom wasn’t there waiting for him.

  As soon as he’d said it, he knew.

  “Oh, man, I’m sorry,” Tim had said.

  “No worries.”

  “You can’t be dumber than me.”

  “Well,” Will had said, forcing a smile, “we sort of knew that already. Seriously, dude, forget it.”

  Only Will never had. Ever since, he’d think about those words whenever he came into the small two-story house on Valley Road. Not the one his mom and dad had lived in when they had first gotten married, over on the other side of town, closer to the factory. His dad had sold that one the month after the funeral, and he and Will had lived in an apartment for a couple of years before they moved to the house on Valley.

  The only time Joe Tyler went past his old house near the factory was when he was delivering mail. He’d never even taken Will to see it.

  “That was one life, bud. Now you and me got another one going, just the two of us.”

  Then his dad used a football expression he used a lot. “The ball’s not round,” he said. “It’ll take some funny bounces on you. You still gotta pick it up and keep running.”

  Will checked his e-mail first thing when he got to the house, knowing it was ridiculous to think he might have already gotten a reply. Or that he’d ever get a reply. He wasn’t even going to tell Tim he’d checked when they met up back at Shea for the touch football game.

  That didn’t mean he was giving up hope.

  He made himself a peanut butter sandwich, washed it down with a glass of milk. Went back upstairs, checked his e-mail again. Nothing. Came back down, watched a little bit of SportsCenter, saw a couple of reports from the pro-football training camps. Grabbed a Gatorade to take with him back to the field, knowing he was going to get there before anybody else. He didn’t care. Even now, he was happier at Shea than anywhere else. It was a football field. In Will’s mind, even a bad field was better than none. And there was going to be a game today, even if it was touch, even if it wound up four-on-four or five-on-five.

  As far as Will was concerned, whatever the numbers, he would be happy to play, even if it was just until dinnertime. When he and the guys would get together like this, it was a day he never wanted to end.

  About a block from Shea, Will started to run, Gatorade in his left hand, football in his right. He ran easily at first, then picked up the pace, finally going full tilt, cutting around the hedges that enclosed one end of the field.

  He had just made his turn toward the field when a ball came out of the air and hit him on the head.

  That’s when he looked up and saw the girl.

  CHAPTER 04

  He was lucky it didn’t catch him square in the face instead of the side of his head, right above his ear. It still rang his bell.

  Big-time.

  Will looked down at the ball and saw that it was the same as the one his dad had bought him last Christmas, a regulation NFL ball, with the commissioner’s signature under the laces.

  He reached down and felt it, understanding why the inside of his head was buzzing: the sucker was as hard as a rock.

  Will took another look in the direction where it had come from and saw that the girl was the only person at Shea. She was standing about forty yards away, right in the middle of the field. She looked to be a little taller than Will was, or maybe a lot, with long hair, long legs. When she saw him staring at her, she put a hand up, as if to say “my bad.”

  No kidding, Will thought.

  He carried both balls toward her, along with the Gatorade bottle he’d managed not to drop. When he was close enough to her, this girl he’d never seen before, she said, “I yelled for you to look out, but you must not have heard me.”

  Will said, “Yell louder next time. And I’m okay, by the way. Thanks for asking.”

  “C’mon,” she said, “how bad could it have been? You didn’t even go down.” Smiling now. “Like you did yesterday when the ground tripped you up.” She snapped her fingers and said, “And so close to pay dirt.”

  “Wait a second. You were here? Watching me?”

  “Not spying on you, if that’s what you’re suggesting. Just waiting for you to clear the field after your game of one-on-none. Do you cut back that well when there are actual players on the field?”

  He couldn’t help it, he felt embarrassed now, worried that his face might be getting red. Picturing himself zigzagging down the field like a maniac and then ending up on the ground. Knowing something, even at the age of twe
lve: no guy wants to look clumsy or weird in front of a girl, even one he doesn’t know.

  He was about to ask for her name when she said, “I was just trying to see if I could kick one over the hedges. But I was wide right.” She smiled again. “As you found out, the hard way.”

  “Hold on,” Will said.

  He turned and took a good look at where the hedges were on Arch Street, near the arches that were the entrance to Shea.

  “You,” Will said, “kicked a football, this football, from here to there?”

  She shrugged. “Usually I’m a lot more accurate.”

  “No way.”

  “I’m just putting this out there,” she said. “But way.”

  “Punt or placekick?”

  “Seriously? Placekick. If I’d punted it, you would have just seen it flying overhead, like an airplane.”

  “You can’t kick it that far.”

  “And you know this . . . how?”

  “Nobody I know who’s my age . . . How old are you?”

  “Twelve.”

  “No twelve-year-old in town can kick a ball that far.” Now Will looked around at her feet. “Where’s the tee, then?”

  She smiled again. As annoying as she was, Will had to admit it was a pretty great smile. “Now you’re just being plain old mean. A tee?” Still smiling at him, she said, “Tees are, like, for boys.”

  “Funny.”

  “I have my moments. But what’s really funny is that you seem to be telling me that since no twelve-year-old boy you know could kick one that far, it would be impossible for a girl to do it.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Saying that.”

  “Yeah,” Will said. “I guess I am.”

  “Well, at least we’re clear on one thing.”

  “What?”

  “Getting bonked on the head didn’t knock any sense into you.”

  Will shook his head. “I think I got it now. Before long, I’ll be apologizing to you because I got hit by a ball you say you kicked that far.”

  “If I didn’t,” she said, “how’d the ball get there?”

  Will had no answer for that one, so he said, “Do it again.”