Keeper

by Mal Peet

  “And you found it, this thing you were looking for?”

  It was darker now, and the city below Faustino’s office was a jazzy dance of neon signs and traffic. The big man went to the window and looked down at it all, spreading his large hands on the glass. “No,” he said. “It found me.”

  GATO TURNED AWAY from the city and said, “It happened on the day I broke the one rule I had made for myself. Like I said, I used to follow tracks into the forest until they ran out, and then I would either turn around and follow them back or maybe explore a little way off the path. But never more than just a little way, so that I always knew where the track was. The one thing I was truly afraid of was getting lost, of being lost in there when the darkness came in. So that was the rule I set myself — never lose sight of the track. And then one day I broke this rule. I don’t know why. I think perhaps I saw a bigger patch of sunlight through the undergrowth ahead of me, and my curiosity was stronger than my common sense. Whatever. Anyway, I shoved through the foliage, clambering over a fallen trunk that was soft with rot and moss, and pushed aside a curtain of thick, fleshy leaves. And found myself in an open space.

  You probably don’t think this remarkable. But if you knew the jungle, you would find it hard to believe me, because an open space in the jungle is not possible. Something, anything, will occupy any space where it can find light to live and grow. Yet here was this clearing, and it was covered in grass. Yes, grass. Short grass. Turf. Impossible. Absolutely impossible. I walked out onto this grass very slowly, far more alarmed by this clearing than by any plant or creature I had met in the jungle itself. And it was very, very quiet. The whirring and clicking and calling and screeching of the forest became blurred and then died away.

  I was in a space that was about one hundred yards long and maybe half as wide, and I had walked out of the forest at a point about halfway down its length. I looked at first to my left and saw how the clearing ended in a dense, shadowy wall of trees. Then I looked to my right. And froze.

  Standing there, with its back to the trees, was a goal. A soccer goal. Two uprights and a crossbar. With a net. A net fixed up like the old-fashioned ones, pulled back and tied to two poles behind the goal. My brain stood still in my head. I could hear the thumping of my blood. I must have looked like an idiot, my eyes mad and staring, my mouth hanging open. Eventually I found the nerve to take a few steps toward this goal, this quite impossible goal. The woodwork was a silvery gray, and the grain of the wood was open and rough. Weathered, like the timber of old boats left for years on a beach. It shone slightly. The net had the same color, like cobwebs, and thin green plant tendrils grew up the two poles that supported it.

  It seemed to take an age, my whole life, to walk into that goalmouth. When I got there, I put out my hands and held the net. It was sound and strong, despite its great age. I was completely baffled, and stood there, my fingers in the mesh of the net and my back to the clearing, trying, and failing, to make sense of all this.

  And then my fingers began to tremble, and then my legs, because I was suddenly certain that I was not alone. I do not know how I forced myself to turn around.

  And here I find the words difficult, Paul. I could say that he stepped out of the trees, but that is not quite right. He moved into the clearing, that is true, but he did not seem to be solid until he stopped moving. You know how sometimes you get bad TV reception, and there is a kind of shadow that follows the picture, so that things seem to happen twice? It was a bit like that: I watched him move and saw him standing still at the same time.

  He was a goalkeeper, but I had never seen a uniform like the one he was wearing. He wore a high-necked knitted sweater. Green, like the forest. And long shorts made of heavy-looking cotton. I was immediately interested in his cleats, which were high, clumsy looking, made of brown leather and laced in a complicated way — the laces went over and under his foot and were tied at the back of his ankles. He wore an old-fashioned cloth cap with a big peak, which cast a deep shadow over the upper part of his face so that I couldn’t see his eyes. Perhaps because of this, his face had no expression whatsoever. Under his left arm he had a soccer ball — not the kind we played with in the plaza, but a brown one, made of leather, with a pattern like bricks.

  There we stood, facing each other. All I could hear was my heart pumping. What I wanted, most of all, was not to be there. It was like having a nightmare and knowing that you are having a nightmare and that all you have to do is wake up, but you can’t wake up. I was trembling like a leaf in the rain. I must have moved, made some sign of running back the way I had come, because he spoke then. The Keeper spoke, and that really scared me.

  You know how American movies get dubbed in this country, Paul? The actor speaks, and someone else’s voice says the words in our language, and the actor’s lips don’t quite match the soundtrack. The way the Keeper spoke was like that. Out of sync. The words seemed to take a long time to reach me.

  And what he said was: ‘There. Your place. You belong there.’

  So of course I flipped. Maybe I screamed — I don’t know. But the next thing I knew I was plunging through that curtain of leaves and hurling myself over that rotting mossy tree trunk and running stumbling back to where I hoped, prayed, my house was.

  That night, in my hot, dark room, I shook like I had the fever. I dreamed it all again and again: the clearing, just as I had found it, but bathed in light as if a million electric lamps burned down onto it. A light so brilliant that it drained color from everything, and the only shadow was the one that hid half the Keeper’s face below the peak of his cap. The clearing, the goalmouth, the trees, were all silver beneath a black sky. In the dream I looked up at the silver trees, and they were swirling wildly, as if in a great wind. And the wind had a voice, a huge whispering voice that said: There. Your place. You belong there.

  I pulled myself out of this dream I don’t know how many times during that night. But each time I fell back into sleep I was there again, in that windswept silver-lit clearing with the Keeper. I could not escape him. And those same words, over and over again: There. Your place. You belong there. Sometimes the wind spoke them; sometimes he did, his mouth moving before the words came. Toward dawn, exhausted, I dreamed the dream one last time and heard the voice again. Except that this time it was not the voice of the wind, and it was not the voice of the Keeper. It was my own voice, saying: Here. My place. I belong here.

  I was a wreck the next morning. Mother took one look at me and dismissed the idea of school. She made me strong tea and put me into Father’s hammock in the shade of the pepper tree.

  In the afternoon I went down to the plaza to watch the game. I sat on the veranda of the café next to old Uncle Feliciano, Nana’s brother, the one with the crooked leg. He bought me a Coke, paying for it with a filthy, crumpled note that he found somewhere inside his many layers of ancient clothes. Then he rested his chin on his hands, which were cupped over the handle of his walking stick. We watched the game: the arguments, the calls, the appeals to the invisible referee, the goalscorers falling to their knees with their arms raised like the players on TV.

  After a while, Uncle Feliciano spoke, without turning his head to me. ‘Why don’t you play?’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t feel so good. A touch of the fever, I think.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ said Uncle Feliciano. ‘You don’t play no more. You haven’t played for a long time. I noticed.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Maria says you go into the forest.’

  It took me a moment to remember that my grandmother’s name was Maria.

  ‘Sometimes,’ I said.

  ‘And I can imagine what Maria says about that,’ Uncle Feliciano said, still watching the square. ‘All those nightmare stories of hers. She has told you those?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  The old man made a crackling noise that might have been laughter.

  ‘Old women,’ he said. ‘They have not many pleasures. One of them is to fri
ghten young boys.’

  Then he did turn to look at me, and he took a hand from his stick and stroked the side of my face with a bent finger.

  ‘You have seen something,’ he said.

  I concentrated on my bottle of Coke.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. He looked back at the game, but he was not watching it. ‘You have seen something in the forest. I can tell. Listen to me. You think I am an old fool. Maybe I am. But I bought the Coke and you can listen to me until you have finished it.’

  I had about three mouthfuls left in the bottle.

  ‘It is about respect,’ the old man said. ‘Respect. You know what this word means?’

  ‘I think so, Uncle,’ I said.

  ‘I think you do not,’ he said. ‘I did not know what respect was when I was your age. But let us agree that you do know. So, if you respect the forest, there is nothing, nothing, in there that will harm you. Believe me.’

  He made a gesture like someone clearing cobwebs from a path in front of him. ‘All this,’ he said, ‘this plaza, this metal church, the game here, all this is here only because the forest allows it. Your father thinks that the forest can be beaten, cut back. Does he still go around the house on Sundays with his machete?’

  I smiled. ‘Yes, Uncle, he does.’

  ‘Ha! He is fighting a losing battle, and he thinks he can win it. Does he think that when he and his friends have cut down the whole forest there will be a beautiful world for him to live in? A world of red dust to be happy in?’

  I had one mouthful of Coke left. I lifted the bottle to my lips. The old man reached across and stopped my arm.

  ‘Trust the forest,’ he said. ‘Respect it. You are not exploring it. It is exploring you.’

  I finished the Coke.”

  SO I WENT back in, just as I knew I would.

  I didn’t look, but I knew that the moment I stepped into the clearing the Keeper appeared too. I walked, as steadily as I could, to the goalmouth. I don’t know why. Perhaps I thought I would feel safer there. I turned to face him. He was exactly the same: invisible eyes and the old leather ball in the crook of his arm. Motionless.

  We stood facing each other as before. Then he began to walk toward me. My mouth went completely dry. The desire to run away was almost too strong to resist. Then he stopped, about twenty yards from me. He put the ball on the ground and stepped a few paces back from it. Somehow I knew what I was expected to do, so I did it. I bent my knees, lifted my shoulders, spread my arms. I was awkward, I know, trying to fill that goalmouth. I knew who I was: Cigüeña, the Stork.

  Nothing happened.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ I was amazed to hear my own voice.

  Then he moved in that way of his, like one photograph melting into another. He struck the ball with incredible force. It went past me with a noise like a gasp. The net bulged and hissed, and the ball rolled slowly back out of the goal past my feet. Which were frozen to the spot. I had not moved at all.

  The Keeper’s lips moved out of time with his words. ‘What were you waiting for?’

  My head buzzed with questions, and I somehow stammered them out.

  ‘Who are you? What do you want? What do you want me to do?’

  And then I found the right question: ‘Why have you brought me here?’

  The Keeper walked toward me then. My whole body flinched, but I stayed there. He stooped and picked up the ball with one hand.

  ‘To keep goal,’ he said. ‘You know that.’

  ‘I do not know that,’ I said. ‘I am not a goalie. I cannot play soccer. I have stopped playing soccer.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you stopped so that you could start to learn. We have a lot of work to do. Let us begin.’”

  El Gato put the tips of his long fingers together and rested his hands on the table. “Two years, Paul. Almost every afternoon for two years. And at the end of that time I knew pretty much everything I know now. Okay, I have played professionally for fourteen years, two of them in Italy, and I am stronger and maybe a little faster than I was back then. But everything I know, really know, about soccer and keeping goal I learned in the forest.”

  Faustino could not think of anything to say, which was a new experience for him. He looked sideways at the goalkeeper, wondering if perhaps this story was a complicated joke of some sort. But Gato’s face was quite settled and without mischief. So the writer cleared his throat and said, “And how did it work, this, er, training regime in the jungle? Was it just the two of you?”

  “Well, yes and no. I discovered that there are many teachers in the forest. I will come to that. But on that first day the Keeper began by crushing me — completely wiping me out. He simply put shot after shot past me, saying nothing, just placing the ball on the grass, stepping back one or two paces, fading slightly, then coming back into focus and shooting into the net. I jumped and twitched in the goalmouth like a hooked fish but never once got so much as a finger to the ball. My eyes filled with sweat and tears of frustration. After a while I stopped trying to block his shots and just stood there between the posts watching him. And when I stopped, he stopped, too.

  ‘Good,’ the Keeper said. ‘You have already learned to keep still. Stay there and tell me where this next shot is going.’

  ‘How? What do you mean?’

  ‘Watch me, boy. Not the ball, me. And when my foot hits the ball, tell me where the shot is going. High, low, left, right. Shout it. Don’t move, don’t try to stop it, just shout out where the shot is going.’

  He placed the ball on the grass and stepped back. I watched him take two quick paces, and as he struck the ball, I yelled, ‘High, right!’ The ball flew into the top corner of the net above my right shoulder.

  ‘Again,’ the Keeper ordered. I rolled the ball to him. While it was still moving, he dropped his right shoulder slightly and shot at me with his left foot.

  ‘Low, right!’ I screamed. The ball streaked into the net to my right, one inch above the grass. I picked the ball out of the net and turned to face him.

  ‘The hard thing,’ he said, ‘is to know how we know something. Explain how you knew where those shots were going.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ I said. ‘I just guessed.’

  The Keeper put his hands on his hips. ‘Give me the ball,’ he said. ‘And let us test your guesswork some more.’

  He put ten more shots past me, and I called them correctly eight times.

  ‘You are reading the body,’ he said. ‘When a player shoots at your goal, he will do things that tell you where he wants the ball to go. He will lean slightly to the left or the right to put weight into the shot, and his own weight onto one foot or the other. He will drop one shoulder, and almost always his shot will be in a line with that shoulder. Most players cannot help glancing, for a fraction of a second, at where they intend to send the ball. A right-footed player may fake a shot, but if he lifts his right arm up and back, he will then shoot. These things can be learned. But an instinct for them is a gift. As I thought, you have this gift.’

  I was pleased with myself. But for just a few seconds, because the Keeper then said, ‘But this gift is nothing in itself. It does not make you a keeper.’ He put the ball on the ground a few yards out from the middle of the goal. The place where the penalty spot would have been.

  ‘Now you have to beat me,’ he said. He walked past me into the goalmouth, moving in the blurred way I was slowly becoming used to. I shrank away from him as we passed.

  I was no great shot, Paul. Like I said, I was a tall, skinny kid, and I was never sure where my balance was. But I had listened to what the Keeper had told me. I thought about how to disguise my shot. I decided to take it with the inside of my right foot and put it low to the Keeper’s left. I didn’t look at him, or at where I was sending the shot. I looked only at the ball. I hit it well. And when I looked up, the ball was in the Keeper’s hands, and he was no longer in the middle of the goal. He had somehow, magically, arrived at exactly where I
had aimed the shot.

  He threw the ball out to me. ‘Again,’ he said.

  And this time, just as I made the shot, he lifted his right arm and the ball flew into his hand as if I had aimed it there. He threw the ball out to me.

  ‘Again,’ he said.

  Time after time, and every time, he drew my shots to him. He seemed to make no effort at all. He was simply, easily, in the place where I did not want him to be.

  ‘You are reading me,’ I said.

  ‘No. I am telling you where I want the ball, and you are obeying. Let me tell you something. When there is a penalty kick, most people think that the penalty taker is in control. But they are wrong. The penalty taker is full of fear, because he is expected to score. He is under great pressure. He has many choices to make, and as he places the ball and walks back to make his run, his mind is full of the possibility of failure. This makes him vulnerable, and it makes the keeper very powerful.’

  ‘Are you saying that the keeper can decide where the penalty shot goes?’

  ‘Yes. Great keepers can do this. But as I said, you have a long way to go. For one thing, you do not know what your eyes can do. Come here tomorrow, and I will teach you to see.’”

  “I did go back, of course, that next afternoon, and he was standing there, as before, with his back to the dark wall of the forest. Waiting.

  I walked into the clearing. Now it seemed less strange to do so. I went to the ancient, silvery goalmouth and stood between the posts and looked at him.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Come and stand here.’

  I did not want to. I was still very, very afraid of being close to him. I had seen his huge hands seize the soccer ball, and my grandmother’s superstitions had taken root in my imagination.

  I stood a short distance from him. The shadow on his face was as dark as ever, and he did not seem to have any eyes at all.