Keeper

by Mal Peet

  I can only say that I went into automatic. I was not really aware of what I was doing. I got up and made my way down through the shouting crowd and onto the field as if I were walking through someone else’s dream. The Camp team was still busy with Hellman and didn’t see me when I went and stood in the goalmouth. Then the crowd started yelling, ‘Ref! Ref! Goalie! Goalie!’

  Hellman and all the players turned to look at me. Jao, the Butcher, was the first to recognize me. He walked away from the ball until he was about twenty yards from me, stopped there, and put his hands on his hips. ‘Cigüeña?’ he said. ‘What are you doing there, idiot?’

  It was a pretty good question.

  Hellman ran up and sent Jao back to the center. He looked at me and shrugged, as if to say, ‘Well, it’s your problem.’ Then he ran, looking very professional, back to the middle of the field and blew his whistle to begin the game.

  From the very first kick it was obvious that this was not going to be a normal game played by the normal rules. Hellman whistled technical fouls — he was very tough on offside, and in the first couple of minutes gave free kicks for handballs, even though the players had taken the ball on the front of the shoulder with their arms down by their sides. On the other hand, he let savage tackles go unpunished; from my position in the goalmouth, I saw two punches and a kick in the back of the leg, but Hellman let them go.

  The Camp team seemed better than the Loggers, or maybe less exhausted, and for the first part of the game, I had nothing much to do. I stood five paces from my line, trying to watch the game with the Keeper’s eyes. I suppose I looked pretty calm, compared to the tall boy in the other goal. He scampered anxiously around the box, touching one of his posts and then the other, shouting, pointing. But inwardly I did not have the calm or the balance that I had learned in the forest. This was because I saw that this was not so much a game as a battle between two tribes. It had no pattern. There was no way I could read it. When the Loggers got the ball and advanced on my goal, I could not read the play because they had no plan. Every player who got the ball wanted only to show off, to do some trick or another to beat one or two of the players from the Camp. And the crowd encouraged this, yelling applause as if they were at a bullfight, not a game of soccer.

  Eventually, after our team had failed to score in a couple of ragged attacks, the Loggers broke free and came charging down the field. Four of their players against three of ours, all of them yelling for the ball at the same time. Jao, the Butcher, was one of them. He came pounding toward me down the center of the field, his right elbow jabbing at the face of the defender who was tracking him. A couple of rough tackles sent the ball out onto the Loggers’ left wing, off to the right of my goal. It was picked up by a pale-skinned, dark-haired guy, and he ran at my goal with his head down. Jao and two other Loggers were screaming for the ball to be crossed. But the man with the ball was easy, so very easy, to read. He had only one idea in his head. He wanted to score; he was not going to cross the ball. He was right-footed, and so I moved across the goal to my right, although I knew he would not get his shot on target. He dropped his left shoulder, just a bit too far, and I watched his right foot hit the ball in just the wrong place. I saw the track the ball was going to take and did not bother to move. It went past my right post, a yard away from the wrong side of it. The crowd roared as if it had been a near miss.

  Before I could fetch the ball, the Butcher stuck his sweating face up at mine. He showed me a grin full of yellow teeth.

  ‘Hey, Cigüeña,’ he said. ‘You were beat, man. Didn’t even move. You can’t keep goal, man. Get off the field, you idiot. You gonna get hurt if you don’t.’

  Hellman was blowing his whistle like crazy and waving at me to take the goal kick. I got the ball and put it on the smeared line of chalk six yards out from my goal and looked up to see who was moving, and to where. One of my attackers was being quietly beaten up by two of the Loggers; one had gone way out to the left to keep out of trouble. The midfield was a mess. For a couple of seconds, I just stood. The crowd was whistling and howling.

  Then I spotted the man who looked like he might know where to make a run. He was watching me but darted his head around constantly, checking where the defense was. There was a clear path for him, if he could get around the big man who was behind him. The big man looked slow, and I thought my player could pass him. The route he needed to take was as clear to me as a floodlit road on a dark night. I made the kick and dropped the ball into that road. I put a little backspin on so that it wouldn’t bounce too much. My player faked a move the wrong way, then turned onto the ball, losing the defender completely. He took the ball well on the inside of his foot, and there was no one between him and the Loggers’ goal. I expected him to miss, because of the choices. When there is no one to challenge you, apart from the keeper, you have so many choices, and they confuse you. But this man did not miss. Three defenders were closing in on him, but he took a moment to steady himself, and as the Loggers’ goalie rushed out, he slipped the ball into the corner of the net with the inside of his left foot.

  The Camp team’s section of the crowd roared, and performed a Mexican wave — not very well. The Loggers’ supporters whistled and jeered, their goalkeeper began a furious rant at his defense, and the goalscorer almost disappeared under the congratulations of his teammates. I was not at all surprised that no one recognized the part I had played in the goal. And I told myself I didn’t care. Yet I was ridiculously pleased when, just as the game was about to restart, the scorer turned to look at me and raised both arms above his head and applauded me.

  Until just before halftime, nothing much happened to trouble me. When it came to attacking, the Loggers now had only one idea, which was to get the ball to the Butcher. He had already split the lip of the man marking him, and his fierceness obviously scared my defenders, who were not keen on getting close to him. So he had more space than he should have had. But when the ball was crossed to him, the Butcher was so busy shoving and hacking at the defenders that he forgot all about me. He believed I was no good anyway. So it was easy for me to intercept the high balls and the low crosses before they reached him, and this happened several times. Once, when the ball was aimed at him, he launched himself into the air almost horizontally, intending to volley the ball in a spectacular way. But because he had just that one thought in his head — he was already hearing the applause — he was watching only the ball and had no interest in where I was. I stepped quickly out of the goal and took the ball out of the air. The Butcher lashed his foot at nothing and landed in the dirt, arms and legs everywhere. The crowd was still laughing after I’d thrown the ball into midfield.

  I had made an enemy, and it was probably at that moment that the Butcher decided to hurt me as badly as possible. He got his chance just before Hellman whistled for halftime. The Loggers were trying to attack down their right wing. One of their players got around my left back, and although the ball was probably going out of play, the left back brought the player down with a brutal two-footed tackle. Hellman not only gave a free kick; he produced a red card. I was surprised when the left back simply walked off the pitch without even protesting. He just walked off into the storm of whistling and booing. You have to remember that I had no experience with referees. I was amazed that in this brutal battle Hellman could have such authority. But, of course, I had no experience with bosses, either.

  I did my best to organize my players into a defensive wall. I remembered what the Keeper had taught me: that the purpose of a defensive wall is not to stop a shot, but to tempt the man taking the kick into trying the shot you want him to make. But my players didn’t understand this. Worse than that, they didn’t link their arms together, so the Butcher was able to shove and elbow his way into the wall. Obviously, he was going to break out of that wall and charge at me the moment the kick was taken.

  In fact, the player who took the kick went for the direct shot at my goal. He did a big performance about signaling to his other forward, tryi
ng to bluff our defense into expecting a pass. But his eyes were full of lies, and when he ran up to the ball, he shifted his weight for the shot. It wasn’t a bad shot: low, past the wall, some bend on it. I saw the track he had set for the ball and threw myself to the left, leaving my legs trailing in case the ball struck one of my players and went on a different path. It didn’t, and I got all the fingers of my left hand onto the ball and pushed it outside the post. It was not too difficult, and I had a split second to shift my eyes. I saw the Butcher almost on me, and I saw that he was watching me, not the ball, because I was his target. And I saw his cleats lifted at my face, and I saw in his eyes the picture of the damage he wanted to do to me.

  And that was the first moment I understood how deeply the Keeper’s teaching had reached into me. I did not remember the jaguar. I did not have time to remember, or think about, the big cat. It was not a matter of me imitating her beautiful agility, the way she shifted herself in the middle of her leap. At that moment I was her. Like hers, my body knew what to do. So instead of simply falling to the ground once I had made the save, I twisted so that my hips and legs pulled my body past the post. I landed on my hands and knees, feeling the skin tear but feeling no pain, in time to see the Butcher crash into the steel upright of the goal inches from my face. His right foot hit the upright, throwing his body sideways and forward so that his raised arm, his angry red face, and his chest struck it at almost the same instant. The steel upright vibrated, and he hit the ground so brokenly that for a dreadful moment I thought he was dead.

  Hellman appeared in the goalmouth, whistling frantically. At the edge of my vision I saw the spectators stand to get a better view of the disaster. Hellman knelt beside the Butcher and pulled the unconscious boy’s eyelids back. A number of men came out of the crowd to help, or perhaps just to interfere. Hellman seemed satisfied that the Butcher would live, so he stood up and blew for halftime. The Butcher was carried off toward the camp, leaving a thin dark trail of blood in the pale red dust.

  I got to my feet and found Hellman’s face close to mine. He looked at me as if I were a particularly difficult piece of machinery.

  ‘Interesting,’ he said.

  There was no real pause in the game for halftime. Some of the players took drinks of water from bottles held out to them by spectators, but I wasn’t thirsty. The teams changed ends. After a great deal of fuss in the crowd, a man emerged to replace the Butcher. From the way he walked onto the field, it was clear that he was not going to be a problem.

  So we began again. One–nothing.

  Hellman had a tough time controlling the second half of the battle. He followed the game very well and was never far from the ball, but the crowd had more power than he had. Vicious tackles were applauded by the crowd, and so several times I saw Hellman put the whistle to his mouth to blow for a foul only to let play continue. Hellman was a strong man, but a crowd sometimes has more power over a game than the referee.

  So, just as in the first half, the game was very wild and hard to read. Several times I had to clear desperate back-passes from my own players. Most of my saves had to be made among a whirl of legs and flying feet, and I had to curl and fold my body around the ball to protect myself.

  Then Hellman gave a penalty. One of my defenders made a crazy tackle in the box, bringing down one of the Loggers from behind. There was no need for it, because the attacker was completely off balance and had no chance of scoring. But he was a good actor and fell in a spectacular way, rolling over and over and finally lying face-down in the dirt like a man who had been shot. The Loggers in the crowd let loose a storm of whistles and screams, and their players surrounded Hellman, waving their arms, falling to their knees, and raising their eyes to heaven as if praying to the Holy Virgin. It was like watching a play in a madhouse. Hellman fought his way off to the left of my goal, still surrounded by protesting and appealing players. The ball had rolled gently to my feet, so I just picked it up and placed it on the penalty spot. I walked backward halfway to the goal and stood waiting.

  For whatever reason, doing that calmed everything. My own players turned to me and stared as if I had done something completely insane. One of the Loggers put both his hands on Hellman’s shoulders and swiveled him around so that he could see what I had done. Hellman himself, who had been blowing on his whistle ferociously and trying to push players away from him, looked at me with a face that filled with surprise. The mob of players surrounding him parted, and he walked over to the ball and put his foot on it. He gave me a long, hard look — but there was something in that look that was also kind. I had helped him out of trouble, and he knew it. He turned his back to me, and with his arms and his whistle drove everyone back behind the ball. I stayed exactly where I was, halfway between the ball and my goal line.

  One of the Loggers’ defenders, a strong-looking, black player, came up the field to take the kick. A huge wave of whistling came from the crowd. Hellman moved away from the ball and stood off to my right. I didn’t move back into the goalmouth. I was trying to fill myself with everything the Keeper had taught me about penalties. There was a mental battle to be fought between me and the penalty taker, and I was willing him to look at me, to look at me and see that he was more afraid of the situation than I was. Hellman blew a furious blast on his whistle and gestured to me to get back into the goal. And just as I was going to move back, the Logger made the mistake of looking up and meeting my eyes. I saw that he was an intelligent man who understood what was going on. He tried very hard to tell me with his eyes that he was going to beat me, but I saw that really he was listening to the howling of the crowd and imagining, seeing, how terrible it would be for him to miss. So then I moved back onto my goal line. He turned and walked seven paces back from the ball. I counted those paces and saw that he was going to shoot with his right foot. He stood still until Hellman blew the whistle. In those few, tiny moments while he was waiting, I stood up straight and put my hands on my hips as if I were watching something that did not interest me much at all. I thought I was being very clever.

  He took the shot exactly as I had expected him to. He did a good job of disguising it, but in the split second before he struck the ball, he shifted his weight and told me that he was going to put the shot high to my right. I remembered that first day with the Keeper, him firing at me, me standing still, tears in my eyes, yelling ‘Low, right!’ or ‘Left, high!’ And, just as then, I knew where the shot was headed. So I launched myself into the path of the ball, arms flexed for the impact, hands wide open, my body facing out to the ball, my legs spread in the air. I was absolutely certain that some part of me — hands, arms, face, chest, thighs, legs, feet — would block the shot. In my mind I could see all the angles that the ball might follow.

  What I had not thought of was the possibility that the kick would go wrong. I had not thought of that at all. Perhaps because he was nervous, he scuffed the shot. His foot scraped the ground at the same moment that it struck the ball, and the ball did not go where I was going. Instead, it wobbled toward the center of the goal and the spot where I had been standing a split second earlier.

  The scuff slowed the ball just a little bit, and that gave me the tiniest chance. I screwed my body around and threw my left hand into the ball’s path, and my clawing fingers somehow got to it and tipped it over the bar. That hanging moment seemed to last forever, and then time sped up and I crashed to the ground on my back and shoulders. The impact slammed the breath out of me, and it felt as if I had broken every bone in my body. The world went brilliantly red and then completely dark for some moments. Then I felt myself being dragged to my feet, and I was among my players, held up, kissed, shouted at, baffled. I got free of them and clutched the goalpost, fighting to get my breathing back and bring the pain to an end. Hanging on to that post, I lifted my head and saw — or imagined — a silver-black figure like a photo negative standing behind the goal, watching me. Then it disappeared, and I straightened up and turned around and found Hellman looking closely at m
y face.

  ‘You are okay, yah?’ he said. ‘You want to go on?’

  I nodded, managed to say, ‘I’m okay.’

  Hellman said, ‘It’s a corner. Are you ready for it?’

  I nodded again. Hellman ran backward, briskly, and whistled for the kick.

  My defenders and the Loggers were pulling at each other, trying to find the space to block or shoot. The ball came in from the corner, too high for me and too far from me to take even if I had been feeling good. I was trying hard to concentrate on the movement of the ball, but the edges of my eyes were fuzzy. The corner didn’t reach anyone in the Loggers’ attack, and one of my defenders headed the ball out toward the midfield. It landed beautifully for one of the opposing players, who leaned forward and took it down with his chest. He took it past two of the Camp players, and when he was twenty yards out, he struck a perfect half-volley at my goal. It came fast, and it had a spin on it. I stopped it by pure animal instinct. I was still too groggy from the fall to follow the flight of the ball, but I fell to my left, arms and legs spread. The ball hit the inside of my left arm, which took the pace out of the shot. The ball landed close to where I fell, and I rolled onto it and covered it with my body. I had an overwhelming desire to sleep right there, in the dust, with my arms around the ball and feet stabbing at my head.

  Hellman’s whistle forced me to my feet. I bounced the ball twice, trying to win myself enough time and strength to kick it forward. But I couldn’t. So I threw it out to a free player on the right wing. It was a good enough throw. My player took it well and went past a couple of halfhearted challenges almost to the Loggers’ goal line. He made a good cross, and the same player who had scored for us in the first half met the ball sweetly with his head and put it past their goalie, who was expecting him to miss it and had his weight on the wrong foot.