by Mal Peet
Well, no, I did not know what he meant. I was, after all, very young. I felt as though a man much stronger than me was handing me a great burden because he could no longer carry it himself. It was not what I wanted. But I could think of nothing to say.
The Keeper turned toward the trees and walked away.
‘Wait!’ I called out to him, and he stopped and faced me. ‘You said that I was going somewhere else. What did you mean? Where am I going?’
‘I cannot tell you,’ he said. ‘I am not hiding anything from you. I do not know.’
We stared at each other across the clearing. I was almost as afraid as I had been the very first time we had stood there, so long ago. Then he turned away and melted into the gathering darkness of the forest.”
PAUL FAUSTINO HAD interviewed hundreds of players, and trying to get them to describe the experience of playing, of winning or losing, a major game was almost always like trying to squeeze milk from a rock. Clichés dripped from these men with their sweat. But Gato was a different kind of animal altogether. He had described brutish kick-and-rush games in a logging camp in the middle of nowhere, and Faustino had found himself completely absorbed. He was desperate to get Gato to speak about the World Cup final in the same way that he had described those rough clashes. The problem was that Gato had a different agenda. For whatever reason, he had chosen this interview to unload this wild fantasy about himself and the Keeper.
Faustino told himself to be patient. Midnight had come and gone, but he had to be patient. He squinted at the digital counter on the tape recorder. Plenty left.
The goalkeeper was speaking again.
“The next week, at the camp, Estevan was comically proud of me, calling passing workers over and introducing me: ‘Hey, you know my boy, El Gato? Best player ever to come out of this stinking jungle. Hey, hey! Wipe your greasy hand before you shake his, man!’
On Thursday morning, the sky had a weird greenish tinge to it. As we lurched our way to work in the back of the pickup, hard gusts of wind began to blow needles of rain into our faces. By the middle of the morning, the storm had burst upon the camp. The wind screeched through the gaps between the metal sheds, hurling and twisting sheets of rain among the workbenches and the hulking yellow machines. Most of the men switched off their machines and crowded into the storage sheds to smoke and wait. But Estevan was as stubborn as a mule and insisted that we work on beneath the wild light of the bare bulbs that swung above our bench.
The storm drove the loggers out of the forest, and they came up to the camp. My father came across to us, his poncho slimed with red mud. He was clearly pleased that his son was one of the few still at work.
‘Dear God,’ he said, lifting his voice above the rage of the rain on the plastic roof. ‘It’s terrible down there. We almost lost a tractor, one of the big ones. It started to slide, and the driver jumped. I don’t blame him.’
Estevan sucked his teeth and shook his head, agreeing with my father while not troubling to interrupt his work with talk.
My father said, ‘Every day I thank God that my son is not doing that work. You are still pleased with him, Estevan? You think he has a future?’
The old man lifted his head and looked across at me. He showed all of his gold tooth.
‘This boy Gato? Oh yes. He has a future, I think, yes indeed. I think he will be very good one day, your son.’
I looked at my father. He was smiling, but his puzzled eyes moved from Estevan to me and back to Estevan again.
Before the end of the day, the storm raged away to some other place. The sun returned to burn through the wet air, baking a thin crust onto the mud around us.”
“On Saturday, as we were lining up for our pay, three vehicles pulled into the camp. Two were the high-wheeled three-ton trucks that carried men over rough country to far logging sites. ‘Sludge buses’ is what Estevan called them. These were not from our camp, though, and the forty or so men who climbed down from them were strangers, although many of them wore the same bright green jerkins that our loggers wore. Estevan sent a boy across the compound to find out about them. The boy came back, excited. ‘They are from Rio Salado, the camp at Salty River,’ he said. ‘They say they have come for the game.’
The third vehicle was a big black Mercedes-Benz four-wheel drive with those blue-tinted windows you can’t see through from the outside. Its gleaming panels were clouded with dirt. It parked a little way from the sludge buses, and for a whole minute no one got out of it. Then the passenger door opened, and a man stepped out and stretched. He could not have looked more out of place if he had landed from the moon. He had expensive dark hair and a gray mustache. His jacket, it seemed to me, was woven out of light; pale gray rippled into silver as he moved. Beneath the jacket he wore a silky black polo-neck sweater, and his black trousers were tucked into calf-height brown leather boots. He looked like a rich tourist who had decided to go somewhere dirty for a change.
While I — and scores of other men — were gazing at this magical creature, Hellman’s door banged open, and the boss came down the rough steps. He bustled across to the Mercedes and shook hands warmly with the elegant stranger; as he did so, the driver’s door opened and a woman stepped out. A woman! There, in that place! The whole compound fell silent. She too was dressed as if going on vacation, but her vacation was going to be in a toy jungle. She was dressed like one of those old-time Hollywood actresses playing a part in a Tarzan movie: a tight-fitting safari suit the color of milky coffee, lace-up boots, a dinky little rucksack over one shoulder. Her face was half hidden by big purple-tinted sunglasses and a cloud of red-gold hair. She walked carefully around the front of the car and also shook hands with Hellman. Then Hellman walked his guests to his office, stood aside as they went in ahead of him, went in himself, and closed the door.
The compound exploded with noise. Men gave up their places in the pay line to greet or insult or joke with the loggers from Rio Salado. Everyone had some comment to make about Hellman’s mystery guests. The pay man was yelling madly, trying to get the men back into line. Something odd was happening, and I had a worrying feeling that it had something to do with me. Maybe not, though. After all, Hellman had walked the two visitors straight past me, not even glancing at me. I tried to clear my head — I had a game to play, a goal to protect, a ghost to impress. I went to the pay man’s window, took my pay, found my father, gave the money to him. Then we walked with the crowd who were heading for the field.
The teams warmed up. We waited longer than usual for Hellman, but he came at last. The glamorous visitors were with him, and Hellman carried a rolled-up blanket. Toward the bottom of the slope that led onto the rough field, he stopped and made a row of men shuffle closer together to make room for the blanket, politely gesturing to the couple from the Mercedes. They sat down and looked around attentively. Hellman marched onto the field, blew, raised his right arm. The teams took up position. The practice balls were kicked away.
And that’s when the trouble started. Augustino was the captain of our side that afternoon and was standing at the center spot with his foot on the ball, waiting for Hellman to signal the start of the game. But before that could happen, Hellman was distracted by some sort of problem in the crowd. The men from Rio Salado had all sat together in the same place, of course, but now our supporters, the men from the camp, were yelling and screaming at them and making wild gestures toward the pitch. The Rio Salado men were laughing, making ‘sit down’ gestures back. The Loggers’ supporters were doing the same thing. A few bottles were thrown. Hellman ran across to the troubled area of the crowd. At the same time, a number of our players gathered around Augustino.
By now, I had walked out of the goal to stand beside one of my defenders.
‘What’s going on?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Something to do with that guy, there. You see him? The white guy, standing on the center circle?’
I saw him. He was pale skinned and fair haired. He looked European. German, may
be, and old, for a player. At least thirty. He must have known that the fuss, the holdup, was all about him, but he appeared quite unconcerned. He ran on the spot, he stretched, he put his hand on his left foot and then his right. And all the time he kept his eyes fixed on me.
I put my hand on my defender’s shoulder. ‘Do me a favor,’ I said. ‘Go up there and find out what’s going on.’
I watched him run up the field and get lost in the mass of players from both sides who had now surrounded Hellman. Within thirty seconds, Hellman’s whistle was screeching, and the knot of bodies around him reluctantly untied itself. Now I could see Hellman; he was making two-arm gestures to both teams: settle down, let’s play the game, shut up. I looked across at where the elegant strangers were sitting on their blanket. They looked completely relaxed about what was going on, as if it was exactly what they had expected. The woman was writing in a small notebook. The man had taken off his gleaming jacket, folded it neatly, and placed it beside him. He too was looking closely at me.
My defender jogged back.
‘Well?’
‘That pale guy,’ he said. ‘He’s what it’s all about. He’s from the Rio Salado camp. The Loggers brought him in. Augustino and the others are raising hell because he’s not from here. Hellman says it doesn’t matter, he’s a logger, and one logger is the same as another.’
‘So who is he?’ I said, watching the strange player watching me.
My defender shrugged. ‘They are calling him El Ladron,’ he said. ‘The Thief.’”
EL GATO LOOKED up at Faustino. “Mean anything to you?” he said. “El Ladron? The Thief?”
Paul Faustino put his hands behind his head and gazed at the ceiling. He liked this sort of thing, the testing of useless knowledge. He was seriously addicted to trivia quiz shows on TV.
“Let me see,” he said. “I can think of three players called Ladron. One of them was Spanish. Played for Real, I think. Then there is that Roberto Something-Something, the Mexican.”
“That’s two,” El Gato said. “You said three.”
“Yeah. The other one came from Sweden originally. Or his parents did.” Faustino tapped his forefinger rapidly against the side of his head, as if his memory could be jogged from the outside. Which it could, apparently, because with a click of his fingers he said, “Larsson. That was it. He played here, years ago, for Sporting Club. An old-fashioned center forward, tough. A goal poacher. I never saw him play, though. He was expected to be tapped for the national team, I seem to remember. Then something happened, and he vanished from the scene. An injury, was it?”
“Not to himself, Paul,” said Gato. “He half killed a goalie in a Cup game, and after that he lost his nerve and no one would touch him. He was transferred to some Junior League club up north.”
“And it was Larsson, this mystery player at the camp? What the hell was he doing there?”
Gato smiled. “Apparently, he’d quit professional soccer and joined the logging company his father worked for. He’d ended up at the Rio Salado camp. He was their star player. And our loggers had brought him in to deal with me, to take me out of the game. That’s what we all thought, anyway. That was what our supporters thought, for sure. That’s why they were going crazy. And that’s why Augustino ran twenty yards back toward me and pointed to his eyes with one hand and to Larsson with the other. He was saying, ‘Watch that guy; he’s out to get you!’
But if the crowd was expecting fireworks, it didn’t get them. Not at first. In the first half, our forwards seemed hypnotized, forever drifting back into our own half. They were expecting the battle to be fought between El Ladron and me, and they were behaving like spectators. Augustino was going crazy on them — every time he won the ball, he had to hold it up to wait for support.
And so the Loggers were able to run the game. I had to work much harder than in the earlier games. And, yes, Larsson made life very difficult for me. He was a short-range player, you know? Very quick over short distances — ten, fifteen yards. And he never seemed farther away from me than that. He deserved his nickname — he was there to make confusion and then steal goals from half-chances. And he never avoided tackles. He just went through them somehow, as if he was doing the tackling, not being tackled. He was always onto me, always between me and the ball, so that I had to get around him or above him. If I got down to a low shot, I would look up and see his feet close to my face. When the Loggers won corners, Larsson would not look for a space in which to receive the ball. Instead, he came in close among my defenders, messing up their marking and their concentration. He was constantly shoved, pulled at, body-checked, but he never went down, never retaliated. It was as if he didn’t even notice. He was there to crowd me, to rattle me, and nothing else mattered to him. He was the first professional I had played against, and I struggled to deal with him.
So I had to do a different kind of goalkeeping. With all the play in my own half, under attack all the time, there was not much point in trying to read the game or launch counterattacks. I had to make a crazy number of reflex saves from close-range efforts by Larsson, as well as from some wild deflections and slices. I seemed to be on the ground for most of the first forty-five minutes. When I wasn’t, I was twitching in the goalmouth like a spider when rain strikes its web. Also, I was scared. The feeling among the supporters and the players had got to me: I was waiting for El Ladron to damage me.
In fact, he was standing over me when Hellman blew halftime, and I was lying in the dirt hugging the ball, trying to make myself as small as possible. Then Larsson pulled on my arm to help me to my feet, and I found myself face to face with him. To my surprise, he winked at me; then he turned away and jogged off to join the rest of his team at the center spot. I realized something: Larsson hadn’t given away a single free kick. He’d been in my face the whole time, but he hadn’t actually fouled me once. What was going on? Was he biding his time? Were his instructions to cut me down during the second half? Was that what his wink was telling me?
‘You did nothing to prepare me for this,’ I said aloud. If I expected a reply from the Keeper, I didn’t get one.
Augustino burned the team’s ears at halftime, and we played with much more spirit in the second period. Larsson didn’t see much of the ball for the first fifteen minutes or so, but was always making little runs, challenging defenders, chasing the ball, running at me. He had a lot of energy for an old man. Then Hellman gave a free kick to the Loggers just outside the box, about twenty yards out and just to my right. I screamed at my defenders and managed to get them into a wall in the right place. But they didn’t link arms, and I watched helplessly as Larsson stole around the back of the wall and pushed his way into it from behind. The defender on the end of the wall was shoved sideways, blocking my view of the kick taker just as he shot. My best guess was that when the ball came around the wall, it would be heading for the top-left corner of my goal, and I launched myself sideways into the air. I’d guessed right, but one of my defenders made a heroic attempt to head the ball away. It struck him on the side of his face and ricocheted off course back toward my right. I was beaten, really, but somehow managed to hang in the air long enough to fling my right arm out and palm the ball over the bar with a desperate scooping movement. I crashed heavily down onto the hard earth, not sure if the roaring I could hear was coming from the crowd or from inside my own head. Someone helped me up. It was Larsson. He looked closely at me, smiling slightly, and tipped his pale head to one side as if to ask if I was okay. And that gesture changed the way I felt about him. He wasn’t there to hurt me; he wasn’t a hired assassin. He was all right.
I’d been conned. That caring gesture was just a tactic to put me off my guard, and for the last quarter of the game El Ladron hassled and jostled me, shoved me, grabbed my shirt, leaned into me; his face was as blank as a whitewashed wall. I lost the thread of the game; I was aware of him and only him: where he was, what he was going to do next. I was beginning to lose control of my goalmouth, too, because all I could
do was focus on Larsson, on how to avoid him, how to defeat him.
A cross came in from my left, and it would have been an easy one for me to cut out. Except that Larsson stood on my foot as soon as I began to move out to it, and I fell on my face in the dirt. Hellman didn’t blow for the foul. The ball went harmlessly out of play. I got to my feet, and a main fuse went bang in my brain. I screamed at Hellman, but he simply ran backward away up the field, signaling me to shut up and take the goal kick. I turned on Larsson, stalked toward him where he stood on the edge of the area. My fists were clenched, and it was as if a red fog closed in around everything except his bland, expressionless, punchable face.
Then the Keeper spoke to me. A clear, calm voice from somewhere behind me spoke straight into my skull. I can’t remember the words he spoke. Perhaps he didn’t use words. But his voice, and his presence, damped down the fire in me and blew the fog from my vision. It was as if a cooler blood filled my veins.
I stopped, turned. I was certain that I would see him there behind the net, shadow faced, arms folded, invisible. But all I saw was a grinning logger who had come out of the crowd and put the ball down for the goal kick. There was now an enormous noise coming from the spectators, a noise like a wave that threatened to pile down on me and crush me. I walked back to the goal line and held on to the post for a second, steadying my breathing. The anger that had filled me became something small and hot and red, something I could pluck out and throw away. I ran onto the ball and drove it upfield: a long, long kick that carried my fury away with it. I felt a wonderful coolness and calm wash over me. I had won. I was back in control. Larsson could not get to me.