by Mal Peet
El Gato dragged his gaze away from the World Cup. “Sure,” he said. “Whatever. Do you mind if I have a quick look around the Paul Faustino Library of Useless Knowledge?”
Faustino already had the phone in his hand. “Be my guest,” he said. Then he started talking rapidly into the receiver.
He was still talking when Gato came out of the other room and said, “Paul?”
There was something, a vibration in his voice, that made Faustino look around immediately. The goalie had a book in his hands. Faustino recognized it. It wasn’t a book exactly; it was a photo album. An old one, with padded covers of faded brown leather. Gato was holding it open, staring down at it.
“What, Gato?”
The keeper laid the book down on the table, in the lamplight, beside the World Cup. There was something so intent in the way the big man stared at it that Faustino said into the phone, “I’ll call you back,” and hung up. He went over to the table.
“What team is this?” Gato said.
Faustino looked at the photo, a small black-and-white picture fixed to the page with yellowing mounts. It showed eleven players in an old-fashioned group pose: five in front, crouching; six players behind, standing with their arms folded. A short man in a terrible suit stood at the end of the back row. The stocky man in the middle of the front row was obviously the captain. His hand was resting on a soccer ball. The shirts they wore had high collars and broad vertical stripes. Below the photograph, handwritten in fading ink, was a list of names arranged to match the players’ positions in the picture.
“Don’t you know?” Faustino said.
“Paul, I wouldn’t have asked if I did,” Gato said. There was impatience in his voice.
“Sorry,” Faustino said. “I’m just surprised. But I suppose there aren’t many photographs of these guys. This is the national team of 1948 to ’50. The greatest team we ever had, or so they say. The Lost Ones.”
“The Lost Ones? What do you mean?” El Gato didn’t lift his eyes from the photo.
“They vanished,” Faustino said. “By all accounts they were brilliant. Didn’t lose a single game for two years. They were favorites to win the World Cup in Rio de Janeiro in 1950. These guys were better than Hungary or Italy. Way better, some say. They were going to bring the Cup here for the first time.”
“What happened?”
“The team took off for Rio three days before the finals. But they never got there. Their plane went down in the jungle, presumably. It was pretty much all jungle between here and Rio in those days. They reckon they ran into one of those electrical storms. The army sent planes out for a week, searching. But they never found a thing. The jungle just swallowed them up. Terrible.”
The phone rang. “Excuse me,” Faustino said, and went to answer it. Seconds later he heard the door close and looked around. Gato had gone. Faustino said “Wait” into the phone and went out into the corridor. It was empty, but the elevator doors were shut, and the red indicator light was moving down the floor numbers.
Faustino went back into his office. He should have gone back to the phone but didn’t. He went to the table and moved the photo album farther into the light of the lamp and studied it. He looked carefully at the photo of the Lost Ones. In particular, he looked at the tall figure in the middle of the back row. It was hard to get any real impression of what he looked like because he was wearing an old-fashioned cap, and the peak of it threw a dense shadow over the upper part of his face, entirely concealing his eyes.
Faustino was squinting at the names below the photo when he realized that the World Cup was no longer on the table.
THE HAWK RODE the rising air with the morning sun behind her. Her yellow eyes were fixed on the reddish-black track that cut through the trees far below her. This was the track along which the shiny, fast animals ran. This was the track where the hawk fed now. She no longer had to trouble to hunt in the forest canopy, because the shiny, fast animals killed but did not stop to eat. They left meat on the track where they had killed it, and then ran on, their low howling slowly dying away. The hawk did not understand this, or care about it. All she had to do was wait on the wind for a kill and then stoop to take it.
She did not have to wait long. The track was still half shadowed by the low sun when the first stream of dust and the first glint of light reflected from the shell of a fast animal caught her eye. She readied herself, tilting slightly on the hot air.
The car was a slightly beaten-up Japanese four-wheel drive. Not the kind of vehicle to attract attention, which is why the man driving it had hired it, rather than the new Mercedes-Benz he had been offered. The road was rough in places but much better than he remembered it. Traffic was light; logging in the forest ahead of him was just starting, and the heavy trucks carrying timber back down the road had not yet set out. Once or twice he swerved to avoid small animals. He reached the town at the time he had meant to — after the men had left, after the children had gone to school, and before the women had left their houses. He was surprised to see a sign on the road telling him where he was. It had not been there when he was last here. The town had no name to put on a sign back then.
The driver parked the Toyota beside the church and got out. After looking about him for a second or two — looking for watchers, perhaps — he opened the back door of the car and took from the seat two small bunches of white flowers and a small, leather rucksack. He locked the car and then followed the rough pavement that led to the graveyard.
Although the graves were arranged in straight lines with equal spaces between them, no two graves were exactly alike. Some were gaudy, covered with tiny painted statues, plastic flowers, toys, little dishes filled with candy, written messages, even soccer emblems and cigarette-card portraits of players. Some were covered in clean white gravel, while others were bare rectangles of dusty earth outlined by rough stones. Most had plain white-painted headstones made of concrete, inset with little square hollows containing photographs behind glass. The photographs all showed people who looked as if death was the last thing on their minds.
Gato stopped in front of two graves side by side. Both were neatly bordered in pale pink stone and covered in white gravel. The headstones were unusual in that they were slabs of expensive marble. On one, the photograph was of a happy middle-aged man with a halo of wiry hair. On the other, the picture was of an old woman called Maria who had stared into the camera as if it had been a gun. Gato placed a bunch of his white flowers on each grave. Then, kneeling, he unzipped the rucksack and took out a medal attached to a loop of gold and purple ribbon. With his hand he dug a hollow in the white gravel of the man’s grave, put the medal into it, and covered it over. After a few moments he stood up, lifted the bag, and walked away.
He had expected some difficulty in finding the house, but it was easy. What surprised him, and worried him, was that it no longer stood at the edge of the forest. The town had hacked the trees back; the area behind the house where pigs had rooted and chickens had scuffed was now a rough street with cars parked in it. New houses sprouting TV antennas and satellite dishes occupied the space from which his paths had once wound into the forest. But the dark wall of trees was still there — pushed back, but still there; still close, still dark — and this gave him hope. He made his way around the back of the houses and, without much difficulty, found the track he was looking for. He followed it, feeling very uncertain because the last time he had tried to return he had failed and got lost. But this time the forest opened to him, led him in. He walked deeper into the trees, through the shattered darkness, as if he were following someone he could trust. So this time when he pushed aside the curtain of thick, glossy leaves and walked into the impossible turfed clearing, he was not in any way surprised. He walked into it like an ordinary man strolling onto his lawn on a summer’s morning.
He walked through the dense silence to the goalmouth and put his hand against the left upright, feeling its ancient texture. Then he turned and went to the center of the clearing, to t
he center of the green space that had changed his life. He slid the leather rucksack off his shoulder and placed it on the grass. Then he stepped back a pace and waited.
The Keeper came out of the trees, a mixture of himself and his own shadow, as always. When he reached the edge of the trees’ shade and moved into the light, his outline seemed to grow steadier. As before, his eyes were lost in the darkness below the peak of the old-fashioned cap. Five yards from El Gato, he stopped.
El Gato had, of course, practiced what he would say. Or, more accurately, he had practiced many small speeches without choosing one. He did not know how much the Keeper already knew. He had hoped that the Keeper would speak first, but that didn’t happen.
So, stupidly perhaps, El Gato said, “I have come back.”
The muscles in the Keeper’s face shifted awkwardly as if he were trying to dislodge something stuck in his mouth. As if he were remembering, slowly, how to speak. His lips moved, and the words came — slightly late, as ever.
“Of course.”
Gato’s words came out in a clumsy tumble. “I am sorry I took so long. It took much more time than I thought it would. I thought I would be able to come here four years ago. The thought of you waiting, of your long wait, has, has . . .”
“Has what, son?”
“Has troubled me. Haunted me.”
The Keeper lifted a hand. “And it has made you great,” he said. “It has made you complete something. And as for time . . .” He shrugged. “We are used to it. It is like rain to us — we knew it would stop, eventually. And that then we would be in the sun, at last.”
“I was afraid,” Gato said, “that you would think I had failed. That I would not come back.”
“There was never any doubt,” the Keeper said.
There was a silence then. The living man and the man who had not managed to die stood facing each other in the unnatural quietness.
The Keeper ended it. He said, in a controlled, formal way, “I believe you have brought something to us.” He held out his arms as a father might reach for a child. Except that they were trembling.
El Gato opened the rucksack and took out something the size of a baby, something swaddled in a purple and gold shirt. He unwrapped the World Cup and carried it to the Keeper, and when the Keeper took it, their fingers met briefly. It was the first time the men had touched. The Keeper’s fingers were neither warm nor cold, but they left a faint print of numbness on the living man’s hands.
The change that came over the Keeper was slight but also astonishing. Holding the Cup in his large hands, he became more solid. To Gato, it was as if a character in a movie had stepped out of the screen, or as if a reflection had materialized from a mirror. He was flesh, not air. He cast a shadow, a sharp defined shadow, on the grass. He lifted the trophy above his head and raised his face to it, and the light that flashed from the gold illuminated his features. For the first time, El Gato saw the Keeper’s eyes: intense black pupils within rings of amber. Glittering with tears.
The Keeper stood motionless for several moments.
And then the Lost Ones, the Waiting Dead, came out of the forest.
They appeared at first as a sort of interference in Gato’s vision: darker shapes within the darkness of the trees. Then they moved out into the clearing, becoming men. They wore the old national shirts with their broad vertical bands of purple and gold. The captain, Di Meola, came first, then the plump little coach, Santino, in his ill-fitting suit. Behind him Miller, then El Louro, the fair-haired winger. Cabral, Vargas, Neruda, the others. They gathered around the Keeper, paying no attention to El Gato. Perhaps they could not see him. The Keeper lowered the World Cup and handed it to Di Meola. Di Meola kissed it and then crouched on the turf, placing the trophy in front of him. Two players crouched on either side of him and put their arms around each other’s shoulders. The other six players, with the Keeper at the center and Santino at the right of the line, stood behind with their arms folded. El Gato understood that he was looking, through his own tears now, at the living version of the photograph he had seen in Paul Faustino’s office. Except that Di Meola’s hand was not resting on a soccer ball, but on the trophy he had been destined to win. And these players were not living.
A sudden furious gust of wind, impossible on such a still morning, set the trees in motion. A quiet roar, like the rejoicing of a distant crowd, filled the clearing briefly. Gato looked up at the whirling treetops, delighting in their energy, and when he looked back at the Lost Ones, they were already fading. The Keeper was the last to go, his right arm raised. His eyes died like stars in the morning light.
El Gato picked up the World Cup, a worthless, priceless, and magical chunk of metal. He wrapped it in the shirt, put it into the leather rucksack, and walked out of the clearing, into the trees. The curtain of thick, glossy leaves closed behind him.
Almost immediately, the forest sent its thin green fingers out into the space he had left, feeling for new places to grow.
MAL PEET grew up in a small town in Norfolk, England, where the only worthwhile pastimes were reading books and playing soccer. These are still his main interests. He is the author of Tamar, which won the Carnegie Medal, and Exposure, another novel featuring Paul Faustino. Of Keeper, he says, “Many soccer stories seem to get stuck in the mud like a heavy ball on a wet Saturday afternoon, but there’s no reason why they can’t shift into a different and magical dimension. Keeper is about soccer, of course, but it’s also about the supernatural, about relationships and loneliness, about believing in yourself — and about having something you would do your utmost to protect and defend.”
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2003 by Mal Peet
Cover photograph copyright © 2006 by Nozicka Studio
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First U.S. electronic edition 2011
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Peet, Mal.
Keeper / Mal Peet — 1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Summary: In an interview with a young journalist, World Cup hero El Gato describes his youth in the Brazilian rain forest and the events, experiences, and people that helped make him a great goalkeeper and renowned soccer star.
ISBN 978-0-7636-2749-2 (hardcover)
[1. Soccer — Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations — Fiction. 3. Coming of age — Fiction. 4. Brazil — Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.P3564Kee 2005
[Fic] — dc22 2005050786
ISBN 978-0-7636-3286-1 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-7636-5434-4 (electronic)
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