by Mal Peet
Five minutes later, Hellman blew the final whistle. We had won, two goals to nothing. My players surrounded me, ruffling my hair and giving high-fives and the rest of it. One or two of the Loggers shook my hand, which surprised me. Their penalty taker, the strong black player, was one of them.
‘You had a game, man,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry about the penalty,’ I said stupidly.
He grinned. ‘I thought you were beat. What you did was impossible, man. And I screwed up the kick. You know that?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You were going top right. I went for it too early.’
‘You did okay,’ he said.
I nodded, not knowing what to say. I was not used to praise. He grinned again and turned to walk away. Then he stopped and turned around.
‘And I never saw you before,’ he said. ‘Where’d you come from?’
‘Out of the trees,’ I said. I was still a bit woozy.
I went over to where my father was. His friends were talking to him about me, and he was shuffling his feet and looking embarrassed. He was in a difficult position. He wanted to be proud of me, but I had helped beat his team. He was smiling and shaking his head at the same time. In the end he said, ‘Your knees are a mess. We’ll have to get them cleaned up when we get home. Your mother will have a fit.’
We walked back up to the trucks. As we were passing the metal sheds, Hellman, still looking sharp in his referee’s uniform, came to the door of his office.
‘Hey, kid!’
We stopped, my father and I, and faced him. Father looked anxious because Hellman was frowning.
Hellman said, ‘You’re pretty good for a big, heavy kid. Where’d you learn to keep goal like that? You are one of them superstars who play in the plaza back in town, yah? What do they call you?’
‘They call me Cigüeña, boss,’ I said.
Hellman looked at me, hard and suspicious. ‘Stork? Why the hell they call you that?’
I shrugged, not knowing what to say. Or because it was a long story.
‘Okay,’ said Hellman. ‘But I want to see you play next Saturday, yah?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
My father hit me in the ribs with his elbow.
‘Yes, sir,’ I said.”
“THE NEXT DAY, Sunday, after church and the big meal, I waited until my family settled into the siesta and then I went into the forest.
I stepped into the clearing and looked left to where I expected to see the Keeper. He was not there.
I looked right and there he was, six yards in front of the goalmouth. As if waiting for a penalty. With his hands on his hips, just as I had stood in yesterday’s game. He looked so arrogant, so ridiculously sure of himself. Just as I had. The ball was on the penalty spot.
I realized that he was mocking me. Many times, the Keeper had made me confront my own failings — my clumsiness, my lack of faith. This was the first time he had made me feel shame. The feeling bored into me like the fat tip of Estevan’s drill. It was still twisting into me when it was followed by something worse. The Keeper had made me what I was, and there were no limits to my gratitude. But I had never imagined that he might follow me. I hadn’t wanted to leave him, but the possibility that I couldn’t, that he might haunt me forever, everywhere, was terrifying. Hateful.
I walked over and faced him. ‘You were watching, weren’t you?’ I had to force the words out. ‘You were there at the camp when I kept goal.’
His mouth moved beneath the deep-shadowed eyes. The words followed. ‘Of course.’
It was so matter-of-fact, the way he said it. As if he was confirming some trivial fact that I should already have known. My fear and my rage were, clearly, of no interest to him. He turned his back on me and walked into the goalmouth. Then he faced me again, crouching.
‘What now?’ I said at last. I could hear the bitterness in my own voice.
The Keeper pointed to the ball. ‘Be the penalty taker.’
‘You know I can’t beat you,’ I said.
The Keeper stood up straight. ‘I know no such thing.’
‘I have never beaten you. You have always known what I am thinking.’
‘Then think something I cannot imagine,’ the Keeper said. ‘Hide your thought from me.’
It was a ridiculous, impossible, stupid challenge. I hated him. I took four paces back from the spot, a small voice in my brain saying, I hate you. My strike on the ball: I hate you!
I drove the shot to my right and low. The Keeper’s body seemed to want to go in two directions at once; his upper body went to the right but hesitated. His hips and legs and feet seemed to be thinking differently and threw his balance to the left. He staggered, recovered, and was on his way to meet the ball with his left hand when it flew past him and into the net, but he was lost, and too late. He ended up on one knee, his left hand on the ground. I had beaten him.
He didn’t look at me. He took the ball from the net, rolled it in his hands, bounced it twice, and then held it.
‘A good penalty,’ he said. ‘You hid your thought well. I could not read it at all.’
I looked down at the grass as if I had seen something really interesting there.
‘Enough for today, I think,’ he said. ‘Your family will want you home. It is getting dark.’
I looked at the sky. The sun was still well above the shoulders of the trees.”
“On Monday morning we traveled to work under a blue sky. A long cloud of red dust followed the pickup. At the camp my father patted me on the back and then left me. I walked over to the steel sheds. Estevan was already at the bench, squinting at a work sheet clipped to a board. He looked up when my shadow fell on him. And then he did a strange thing. He bowed, making a fancy sweep of his arm like a servant in a comedy.
‘Good morning, El Gato,’ he said. ‘I hope you are well, Gato.’
I looked at him. I thought he was being sarcastic in some mysterious way. I thought that perhaps I had done something wrong, something I did not know about. Puzzled, I remained silent.
Estevan straightened up and looked at me with great concern. ‘El Gato?’ he said. ‘Has some other cat got your tongue, Gato? Is there something wrong?’
‘I am fine, Señor Estevan,’ I said at last. ‘What is this “El Gato” thing?’
Estevan opened his eyes wide, two brown-and-white targets. ‘You don’t know? This is what everyone is calling you now, after the game on Saturday. I thought I had just a boy learning tool shop. Now I hear I have a great goalie working with me. El Gato, the Cat. The people here are saying, “Estevan, look after this boy. Keep his hands away from the drills, the blades. Make sure he does not get hurt like the others. He is like the cat, the gato!” Also,’ said Estevan, ‘I was at the game. You were quite good.’
Throughout the morning and the whole day, men who came to our bench or just passed it made a big thing of calling me ‘Gato.’ And that is where the name came from. Not from the papers, Paul, or from players, but from that hellish place. And since then I have had no other name.
My second week at the camp passed much as the first one had. I worked at the bench with Estevan, except when the two of us were wrestling with the greasy hydraulic guts of one of the giant, yellow machines. And the end of each day was the same also: the jolting ride back to the town, arriving as the last of the plaza players were giving up the square to the darkness; wolfing down the meal; falling asleep exhausted in my hot, small bedroom.
On Saturday, after we had lined up for our pay, Estevan presented me with something in a plastic shopping bag. I was standing with my father.
‘Come on, then, son, open it.’
‘What is this, Señor Estevan?’ I asked.
Estevan shrugged, glinting his gold tooth at me. ‘Take a look.’
Something soft, black, folded. I spread it out, and it was a new sweatshirt. On the back was a big white 1. On the front, Estevan had used some kind of white paint to draw a crude little picture of a leaping jaguar. My very
first uniform. I did not know what to say. My father and Estevan were grinning at me like two monkeys. Then I became aware of another person standing behind me. I turned; Hellman was there, already dressed in his perfect referee’s stripes.
‘Just because you have been given the number 1, this does not mean you have earned it,’ he said. ‘Anyway, put it on. We have a game to play.’ ”
“When we got to the red dirt field, there were already many men waiting to watch the game. I was confused and embarrassed when some of them applauded me as I walked to the goal in front of the Camp team’s supporters.
I was trembling. Not because of the crowd and what they were expecting of me. I was trembling on account of the spectator I could not see, and what he thought of me wearing the number 1 shirt. I walked around the back of the goal pretending to check the net. Was there, by one of the supports, a tall space where the air was colder and somehow denser? Perhaps. Or maybe what caused the shiver to run through me was remembering our last meeting in the forest — the fear and hatred that had overcome me and had brought the Keeper to his knees. That moment had changed everything. We had moved on to a different level, the Keeper and I. I did not know how, exactly. It was something that I could only feel, like a cold discomfort in my stomach. I wasn’t even sure whether he was there at the goal with me as my friend or my enemy. All I could do, the only thing I could possibly do, was play well. And go back into the forest the next day.
I stood in the goalmouth while Hellman blew on his whistle and the teams got into some kind of shape.
Our team was not the same eleven players who had played in the last game, but our goalscorer was there. Jao the Butcher was not mended enough to be part of the Loggers’ team. His place had been taken by an older man, a very tall man. The Loggers had decided that maybe I could be beaten in the air.
And that is how they tried to defeat me. A great many high crosses, some of them good, came in at me. Most of them were floated across by a short, bristle-headed player. He was right-footed but played out on their left wing, which puzzled me at first. Then I realized why he was there. He was good at fighting his way to the goal line and putting in his cross with the outside of his right foot, so that the ball curved away from me as it came over. When this happened, I had only two choices. I could try to force my way through the bodies in front of me and take the ball in the air. Or I could wait on my line for whatever kind of shot found its way through the mob of players. I didn’t like either option, and I still don’t. You have little control over what happens. Once, I had to punch the ball clear of the tall man’s head with my left hand, which is the worst and most desperate save a keeper like me can make. But I managed to stop every shot that was on target, including one that deflected off the thigh of one of my defenders, so that I had to switch my weight and direction at the last moment to shove it around the post. I also had to slide onto a terrible back-pass, which was picked up by the good black player whose penalty I had stopped in the last game. But by halftime, the Loggers had the smell of defeat coming off them. They had started to think that they would not get the ball past me.
As we changed ends, our good forward — his name was Augustino — put his arm around my shoulders.
‘Will we win this one, Gato?’
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘They smell a little bit beaten.’
Augustino laughed. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘The way it has been for a long time is this. The Loggers nearly always win. They are tougher than us.’ He shrugged. ‘The men used to bet on the game, but they stopped betting because we nearly always lost. But today, everyone is betting again. And we are favorites to win.’
‘I think we will win,’ I said.
‘Because of you,’ Augustino said.
‘No. I do not score the goals.’
‘My friend,’ Augustino said, ‘it is easy to score goals against a side who thinks they have already lost the game. And these guys think they have lost the game. And that is because of you. Forwards get very tired when they work and work and do not score. The way they get the energy back is to score. You have taken all the energy out of them. Do you understand what I am saying?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Someone told me this already.’
‘That person was telling you the truth,’ Augustino said.
Hellman blew a long blast on his whistle. We got into our positions and started play again.
We won the game, three goals to nothing. Augustino scored one of them. I did not disgrace Estevan’s shirt. My father lost ten dollars and joined in the applause as I walked off the field. But my father’s pride was no longer enough. I needed the respect of someone much harder to please. Someone who wanted something from me, someone who was waiting. Waiting with the kind of patience that only the dead have, because they have so much time.”
“He materialized from the tree shadows in the same instant that I stepped into the clearing. Immediately he dropped the ball in front of him, ran it down to the goal line, and positioned it for a corner kick. He had never seemed to be in a hurry before, and I was surprised. Almost impatiently he signaled to me to get into the goal, and when I got there, he sent over a high, in-swinging cross, which I caught near the top left corner. He gestured to me — again, that puzzling, hurried manner — and this time sent in a cross that cut back away from me. I couldn’t get to it. Again a gesture, another corner. And another, and another. He had found a weakness in me. Well, not a weakness, exactly. He was reminding me that there is a kind of cross that keepers will always fear — the kind I’d had trouble with in the previous day’s game at the camp. He began to send in ball after ball, which came straight across and then swerved away from me toward the edge of the penalty area. In the clearing that afternoon, I dealt with most of them easily enough, coming fast out of goal and pulling them to my chest or else punching them away.
But it was too easy. We both knew it. He brought the ball over to me and stood facing me.
‘Tell me,’ he said.
‘I wouldn’t be able to do that in a game,’ I said. ‘I’d be blocked in — even if I screamed for the ball and my defenders let me out. Because the forwards would just stand there and let me run into them: no foul. Like yesterday.’
‘Yes,’ the Keeper said. ‘So?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps there’s nothing you can do.’
The Keeper became agitated. It was very strange. His shape twitched and became slightly blurred at the edges, as if he wanted to be both here and somewhere else at the same time. This startled me. I was used to him being calm, expert, powerful. He dropped the ball and put his foot on top of it. Then he bent and picked it up. He turned away from me and faced the dark forest wall. He said something I couldn’t quite hear.
‘What?’
He turned back to me. ‘How can I show you?’ he said, and there was something very troubled in his shadowy voice. ‘There is so little time.’
For the first time in two years, he did not seem in control of me, or of the space in the forest. Or of himself. I felt sorry for him. I was amazed to feel that way. What are the words for what I had felt about him up to that moment? Terror, at first; fear, trust, respect, shame. Love, almost. Hate, sometimes. All big, big feelings. Now I had this small, cheap feeling — of being sorry for him. I was shocked to feel this way. And in that same moment I realized that I was now as tall as he was and could do many of the things that he could do. I was growing out of him, as a child grows out of games and daydreams. It was not a feeling I liked. So I tried to make a joke.
‘We need more players,’ I said. ‘We need a defensive wall for me to run against, forwards to face me. Perhaps you could call other players out of the trees.’
He looked at me as if this were a real possibility, as if he were considering doing something that was within his power but that also terrified him.
The stupid smile I was wearing froze on my face.
‘I was joking,’ I said.
He looked at me as if I had spoken words in a foreign lang
uage. Then his face came back into focus; the shaky edges of his outline steadied.
‘We do not have much time left,’ he said.
I felt disturbed, hearing this a second time.
‘Why not? What is going to happen?’ I asked him. ‘Are you going somewhere?’
‘No, you are,’ he said. He started to walk away from me, back toward that dark cloak of jungle.
‘Please,’ was all I could say.
He stopped but did not turn around.
‘Please,’ I said again.
He turned and came back. I thought he would throw the ball and resume our training, but he didn’t. He stood two yards from me and said, ‘Listen to me. Life changes. Change is everything — change is life itself. The only thing that stays the same is being dead, believe me. You have changed, and that is how life sings in you. When you first came here, you were weak and lonely and didn’t know what you had within yourself. Now you know. You are a keeper. You know what you can do. Go out and do it.’
It sounded like a goodbye, a dismissal, and I wasn’t ready. So I found something to say, something to keep him there with me.
‘I still don’t know what to do about that out-swinging corner,’ I said.
‘Stand on your line,’ he replied. ‘Stand on your line and expect the unexpected.’
I smiled. ‘Another of your riddles.’
‘No. The unexpected is the only thing you can depend on. This is what I have to tell you. The game always changes. If you are a player, you must change with it. Soccer, the kind of soccer I played, has gone. The power of the game moves. Now, midfield players score impossible free kicks from the halfway line. Defenders play like wingers. Center forwards play with their backs to the goal and lay the ball off to defenders coming through to strike. Everything is fluid. Everything is possible. Everything will change. You especially. And you are lucky, in one way. You have a place to be, and a place to defend. The forest has taught you this. It is quite simple, after all. Like the forest, you will come up against teams who can think of only one thing: how to cut you down. Or how to get past you, around you, through you. And all you have to do is stop them. Which is something you can do now, because I have taught you how. You have something to defend, to protect. It is only a soccer goal, of course: three pieces of wood and a net. But this is more than most people have. And if you can protect that, then perhaps other things, more important things, can also be protected. Do you know what I am saying?’