Losers Take All

by David Klass

  A girl with a ponytail let loose a ferocious kick. The ball soared over the goal, zoomed above a chain-link fence like a guided missile, and slammed into the side of our school bus.

  “No, we’re not in a lot of trouble, we’re dead meat,” Frank corrected him. “We’re about to be obliterated by a bunch of feral wombats.”

  “What exactly is a wombat?” Pierre asked.

  “An Australian rat,” Becca said. It was probably on one of her vocabulary lists.

  “Actually, I believe wombats are marsupials,” Coach Percy corrected her. He was decked out for our opener in brown trousers and an Argyle sweater, which looked like it might be the right outfit to wear to a foxhunt. “The interesting thing about wombats is that their pouches are backward to protect their young from getting covered with dirt when they dig burrows, which they do very splendidly.”

  “There’s nothing that’s gonna protect us from getting crushed,” Dylan noted.

  “Why does it matter?” Becca asked. “It’s a gorgeous day. Let’s just have a good time.”

  It was a beautiful fall day, and a large crowd had come out to see the curiosity of a girls’ junior high team taking on a co-ed high school squad. Thirty Marion girls stood on the sideline, ready to cheer on their friends. There were also several dozen Marion parents camped out on folding chairs, with cell phones and cameras ready to record the coming game.

  As far as I could tell, no one from Fremont had come to see us, which was probably a good thing. I knew Becca was right and we should just enjoy the beautiful day, but the Logan in me was dreading getting annihilated by a bunch of junior high school girls.

  We even looked awful—they had given us ratty old red-and-gold uniform shirts that the boys’ JV soccer team had discarded, and we all had bought our own different-colored shorts. Except Zirco, who was in blue jeans.

  Our warm-up was ice cold. We lined up and one by one kicked balls at the goal. Shot after shot went wildly off target. My teammates hit weak dribblers, and a few of them missed the ball completely and laughed. One dork named Alan Jenks, whom everyone called Jinx, managed to miss the ball as his leg kicked forward, and then as he stumbled back he somehow back-heeled it behind him. That was the most awkward shot, but there was an even stranger one—Pierre’s shoe flew off his foot into an upper corner of the net while Frank dodged and hooted with laughter.

  Frank had volunteered to play goalie—I think so he wouldn’t have to do any running. His six-foot-five-inch frame filled up a lot of the goal’s mouth, but he wasn’t exactly as quick as a cat in covering the sides and the corners. Low shots were a particular problem. He apparently didn’t like to lower his center of gravity so he just waved at low rollers, as if ushering them into the goal with a cheerful “Go ahead, be my guest.” Midway through the shooting drill Frank got both of his thick arms caught in the netting, and three of us had to untangle him.

  I glanced at our sideline and saw that we now had two fans. Principal Muhldinger was giving up an afternoon football practice to see our first game. And my father surprised me by showing up. I hadn’t told him about this game, but he must have seen it on the school sports Web site. My dad had a perfect record of coming to all family sports events. The two football icons of Muscles High stood together on the unfamiliar territory of a soccer sideline, towering over the Marion parents nearby. It reminded me of the evening in Founders’ Park when they had sat side by side on a bench and watched me get oral surgery the hard way.

  Percy gathered us in for one of the strangest pregame talks I’ve ever heard. “You may be overmatched,” he said, “but the important thing is your own positive mental attitude. Remember what Hannibal said when his army first saw the Alps and realized what a daunting journey lay ahead. His fierce warriors had conquered Spain and were setting out to try to destroy Rome. But when they saw the snow-capped Alps rising to the clouds, they despaired and were ready to mutiny. Hannibal gathered them together and asked them: ‘What are the Alps but just high mountains? Is there any height insuperable to men?’”

  Percy gazed out at us as if he had just said something inspirational, but my teammates didn’t look impressed. They weren’t exactly fierce warriors setting out to conquer Rome. They looked like the least athletic and most out of shape bunch who had ever put on Fremont jerseys, and it was clear from their faces that they couldn’t care less about conquering anything. I tried to tell myself not to care either, but then I glanced at my father and he gave me a thumbs-up.

  The ref called over: “Hey, Fremont, you guys ready? I need your captain.”

  I trotted out to midfield to face the girl with the ponytail whose shot had nearly knocked over our bus. Her face was tight with determination.

  “Fremont, call it in the air,” the ref said, and flipped a coin.

  “Heads,” I shouted, hoping I could at least win the coin toss.

  It was tails. “We’ll take the ball,” the girl said.

  “Which goal do you want, Fremont?” the ref asked me.

  “The smaller one,” I replied, trying for a little humor. Nobody even smiled. The ref raised his eyebrows, and the line judge blew a stream of warm air across his knuckles. The girl with the ponytail stared back at me like she was a Viking raider preparing to burn down my home and sack my town.

  “We’ll take that one,” I said, pointing to the goal behind me.

  “Good luck,” the ref said. “Let’s have a good clean game.”

  I trotted back to our team and found my teammates finishing their yoga stretches. “How did it go?” Becca asked.

  “We’re going to get clobbered,” I told her.

  “Fine,” she said. “It’s a good day for it.” She saw something in my face and added: “Jack, remember why we did this. You could have played on the football team. You didn’t want to buy into that.”

  “True,” I agreed. “Did you see that my dad’s here?”

  She nodded. “Don’t look so worried. I’m sure he’s seen family members lose before.”

  “Not often,” I told her. “And not like what’s about to happen to us.”

  Then it was game time and we walked out onto the field and took our positions. I lined up at center mid, looking across at the girl with the ponytail who was playing center forward for Marion. She stared back at me for just a moment, and then down at the soccer ball at her feet.

  The ref blew his whistle to start the game, and for about two minutes we looked like a reasonably competent soccer team. We actually managed to kick it into their half, and Pierre took a shot, which their goalie easily saved. She rolled the ball out to the left fullback who one-touched it up to their center midfielder.

  I stepped forward to challenge her, but she passed the ball up to the girl with the ponytail, who took off with it right at our goal at a hundred miles per hour. Chloe and Zirco were playing center defense and ran to take her on, but all they managed to do was collide with each other. Chloe’s glasses broke, and Zirco caught an elbow to the groin.

  The girl with the ponytail sped by them and let loose a rocket of a shot that caught Frank full in the face and richocheted off him into our goal.

  Frank sank to his knees, both hands cupped over his nose.

  Zirco rolled around on the ground holding his groin and making a high-pitched bleating sound like a lamb just before it’s slaughtered.

  Meanwhile, Chloe was on her knees, feeling around in the grass for a missing part of her glasses frame.

  Coach Percy ran onto the field, but he didn’t seem to know which wounded player to help first. Our season was less than two minutes old, the score was one to nothing, and we were already bruised, bleeding, and whipped.

  I’m sure it felt worse to be ambushed by Hannibal at Lake Trasimene, and that in the long history of world soccer there have been teams that looked worse than we did and were more thoroughly thrashed, but I doubt it’s happened very often. When Marion went up ten goals to zero—shortly after the half—their coach told his girls to stop scoring and just p
ass the ball around.

  The only thing more humiliating than having a bunch of junior high school Wombats score goal after goal on you is having them invoke a mercy rule and kick it back and forth for thirty minutes as you chase the ball hopelessly and their parents shout “Olé, olé!”

  Some things happened that afternoon that I doubt have ever been seen on a soccer field before. When Marion stopped shooting at Frank he lost interest and leaned against a goal post. A few minutes later the ref blew his whistle and pointed to where Frank was lying. I sprinted over to him, afraid the shot to his nose had caused some kind of concussion, but he was snoring peacefully. Coach Percy shook him, and Frank opened his eyes. “Are you okay?” Percy asked.

  “Oh, sure,” Frank said blearily, blinking and looking around. “I guess I just dozed off. How’s the game going?”

  “Not so well, big guy,” I told him. “Try to stay vertical.”

  A few minutes later Pierre ran a little faster and farther than he had trained for, and then he stopped, bent over, and threw up right near the sideline, where the Marion girls watching the game screamed disgustedly.

  Meg might have been a great actress, but she spent the whole game standing in one place, as if waiting for a cue that never came.

  Becca was fast and athletic, but she didn’t seem to care at all that we were getting massacred. When a ball was stolen from her near our sideline I heard my dad shout: “Fight for it. Win it back!” but Becca just turned to Meg and shrugged, and Meg grinned and shrugged back.

  Near the end of the game Zirco did a spinning three-sixty and kicked the ball as hard as he could out of bounds, as if he were aiming at a goal three soccer fields away. Several of us gave chase as the ball bounced across a baseball infield and rolled into a cluster of trees. On the other side of the trees was a lake, and by the time we reached the bank Zirco was wading into the water after the ball. The bank was steep and he slipped and floundered around in the water, yelling wildly. It took four of us to haul him out, and when we finally dragged him onto the reedy bank he shook himself dry like a dog.

  With five minutes to go in this nightmare, I stole the ball from the Marion game of keep-away. I dodged around their center midfielder, and when their sweeper came up to tackle me I kicked it by her and tried to run onto it. Suddenly it was a race between the two of us, and I usually win races. There was something unexpectedly thrilling about sprinting toward the opponent’s goal and pulling away step by step from the last defender. I took one final dribble, and as their goalie came out to cut down the angle I kicked it low and hard past her, for our first and only score.

  I turned to see my father’s reaction, but he had left. Muhldinger was still there, however, standing with his hands on his hips and his jaw locked tight. He didn’t say a single word till the game was over and we congratulated the Marion girls and got onto our bus. He got on last, and told us to move to the back.

  Muhldinger stood in the aisle, looking down at us. “That was,” he said, “the single most embarrassing thing I have ever seen in my entire life. The word ‘losers’ doesn’t do it justice. Nor does ‘disgusting.’ Or ‘pathetic.’ The word ‘vomit’ comes a little closer.” He glanced at Pierre.

  No one said anything. We just looked up at him and waited for the storm to pass. He was clearly angry at how badly we had stunk up the soccer field, but I knew there was something else lurking behind his fury. I remembered how certain he’d been that the person who’d locked his football players in the Keep was on our team. He looked around the bus at us like we were all guilty. When he started venting, his anger came spewing out like lava from a volcano.

  “You wanted a team and I gave you one, but I thought in return you’d have some respect for our school and our traditions. Clearly I was wrong. You have no respect. The opposite—you want to tear down all the things we’re most proud of at Fremont. Falling asleep on the field, puking on the sideline, running into a freaking lake—you’re wastes of your parents’ genes! Spastics. Morons. Garbage. You have no pride in our school, and you have no pride in yourselves, and I sure don’t blame you for that because if I were one of you I’d dig a hole and bury myself.”

  “To be fair,” Percy spoke up hesitantly, “it was our very first game. Of course there is plenty of room for improvement, but—”

  “Shut up, you idiot!” Muhldinger bellowed at him. I had never heard anyone talk to a teacher that way. “There’s no room for improvement because I’m pulling the plug on this pathetic experiment in losing. When I want to see a clown show I’ll go to the circus. Your team is finished and good riddance to it.”

  “But we’ve made commitments to play five other teams,” Percy pointed out bravely, ignoring the insult. “I realize you’re disappointed with our effort, but isn’t it in the spirit of Fremont High to honor those commitments?”

  Muhldinger looked momentarily flustered. “I run this school, not you!” he shouted at Coach Percy. “To hell with those commitments. Those teams will be better off without playing us. You call this the C-team. C is for cesspool and I’m flushing you turds.” And he slammed his open hand into the metal ceiling, then turned and stalked off the bus.

  There was complete silence.

  “For a Neanderthal, he does have a way with the potty talk,” Becca admitted softly.

  “It was a fun season, but a little short,” Dylan added sadly.

  “Spaghetti,” Xander Zirco chimed in mysteriously. “No meatballs.”

  18

  My mother was washing dishes and throwing mystified glances at the door that led to the basement steps. The thuds from below were muffled but ferocious, like someone trying to chop down a tree with a blunt ax. Dad didn’t usually work out in the evenings, but when his anxiety spiked—for example, when he had a problem at his job or a son who disappointed him—he headed down to the basement that he and my brothers had turned into a mini-gym, and he worked out his stress by running on a treadmill at maximum speed or walloping a heavy bag.

  “Do you know what’s gotten into him?” Mom asked me. “He barely said a word at dinner. Did something go wrong at work?”

  “It’s not his job.”

  “Well, then what? My lasagna wasn’t that bad.”

  BAM, BAM. The house seemed to shake.

  “It was great lasagna,” I said. “But it came after the worst sports performance any Logan has given in fifty years.”

  Mom put a dish in the drainboard and looked at me. “This is about a soccer game?” she asked incredulously. “But it was your very first one.”

  “And the last,” I told her. “Muhldinger’s pulling the plug on us. We stank it up today.”

  “You’d never played before,” she pointed out.

  “That must be why we were destroyed by a bunch of junior high school girls.”

  “Your team will get better,” she promised. “Just stick with it.”

  “The team is finished,” I told her. “Muhldinger was at the game, standing with Dad. They were both disgusted, and Muhldinger canceled our whole season. He told us we were turds and he was flushing us.”

  “That’s a side of Brian I never liked,” she said. “He can be a real bully. Will you have to join another team?”

  It was strange to hear her use his first name. “I don’t know,” I said. “This has never happened before at Fremont.” I paused, and couldn’t stop myself from asking, “Mom, how could you ever date that jerk?”

  She lowered her sponge. “Who told you about that?”

  “Dad.”

  She looked surprised, and not particularly pleased. “It was a very long time ago.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but he’s horrible.”

  “In some ways he was always a jerk,” she agreed, “but he was a sports star and super confident, and when I was eighteen I found that attractive.”

  “Was it just a few bad dates?” I asked hopefully.

  Mom hesitated. “No. It was serious. We even talked about getting engaged. But then your father came hom
e and that was the end of that.”

  I stared at her. “You almost married Muhldinger?”

  “I’m not sure I was thinking so clearly when I was in high school,” she said, a little defensively. “Would you say you’re always thinking clearly?”

  “No,” I admitted. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “That’s okay,” she said. “I married the right guy in the end.” A punch thudded from below like a cannon going off. “Even if he gets a little hotheaded sometimes.”

  I glanced toward the basement stairs. “He’s on full boil. What should I say to him?”

  “You don’t have to say anything. It’s not your fault that you’re on a lousy soccer team,” she told me. “He’ll get over it.”

  “No, I owe him an apology. I let him down today.” I headed for the basement stairs. They were steep and narrow. BAM, BAM, a one-two rattled the walls. The lightbulb blinked. It felt like I was descending into the lair of an angry monster.

  Then I saw him in his black shorts and sweaty T-shirt, the muscles of his arms and back standing out as he circled the bag, feinting and pretending to search for an opening. He was concentrating hard, his eyes sharp with fury. I wondered who he was pretending to hit. I reached the basement floor and walked toward him.

  Dad darted forward, his weight balanced, and his right fist flashed out—thud. The iron supports groaned and a dusting of plaster came down from the ceiling. He saw me and lowered his fists.

  “You’re going to wreck the house,” I said with a cautious smile.

  He hadn’t said one word all during dinner and clearly wasn’t in a talkative mood now. Without acknowledging my presence he walked to a stool, sat down, and started taking off his gloves.