Once More with Feeling

by Méira Cook

  It’s fall and there’s a seam of cold running through the afternoon, ready to break open at any moment. I look over at the boys and they’re goofing off, as usual, hitting each other over the head with their water bottles and kicking up grass, which pisses me off so I send them on a ten-lap sprint of Grover Park Fields FC, all four fields, which, in turn, pisses off Coach Bob because now he’s finally ready to begin practice and the boys are tiring themselves out to no discernable purpose.

  The boys finally make it back in a huffing, raggle-taggle bunch, my kid somewhere in the middle, and Coach Bob starts explaining the drill when Frankie says, “Whoa, hold on, Coach, we have to wait for Mr. Automatic.”

  “Wha —?” says Coach Bob. You’ve got to hand it to my kid: butter wouldn’t melt in his goddamn ball sack.

  He blinks at Coach Bob for a moment then says, “Um, sorry, Cody. We have to wait for Cody.”

  We look back to where he’s pointing and in the distance we see Cody hobbling toward us, holding his side. The rest of the team cracks up, and in their laughter I hear every goal that has trickled through Cody’s legs all season, every ball that has slipped from his grasp, every penalty shot that has ricocheted off his unresisting body to hurtle into the back of the net. And more than that. In the laughter that breaks then gathers again, I hear the echo of Coach Bob yelling from the sidelines, Good try, Cody! Step it up on defence there, guys. I hear Coach Bob talking the team up after their last straight loss in seven games: Good game, guys. You’re really improving.

  It’s not my place to criticize, but if you ask me, there’s a fella who could really benefit from sitting down and having a beer with the truth. By the end of a game he always looks like he’s dying for a smoke but he’s persistent, give him that. “There’s no i in team,” he tells them, “there’s no u in win.” I’m sorry to say that he makes air quotes around the letters i and u, just as I’m sorry to report that he then snaps the elastic on his waistband and gives the boys the old thumbs-up. Both thumbs, as if this is a game he can highly recommend.

  There’s no y in because, I want to say to him. There’s no gee whiz in dammit. But there’s a couple of lousy o’s in open goal, if you’re interested. And another big fat o in Cody.

  Whenever Coach Bob begins his spelling bee routine, the youngsters look at him like he just crawled out of a spaceship. Who is this alien? They’re only eleven but already they prefer to take their medicine without the spoonful of sugar, or the song and dance about sugar and spoons that goes with it. Strangely, Coach Bob seems to favour all-out losses over dead heats. At the next game, where Cody, disoriented, runs into the post and has to be retired at halftime, our midfield, Mateo, takes over and proves himself to be something of a ball wall. We have a pretty decent second half and manage to tie it up with the dreaded Western Windigos. But during the after-game team talk, Coach Bob allows that he is disappointed.

  “Look guys,” he says, “a draw is like kissing your cousin. It’s like driving a Honda.”

  I’m driving Nagamo and Mateo home that night, and the boys are intrigued by the whole cousin-kissing deal. Mateo, it turns out, has in fact kissed his cousin. His mom made him do it last year when the cousin had her first communion, but he prefers playing soccer, even losing. My boy and Nagamo express their appreciation of Mateo’s ordeal with a lot of hooting and hollering and seatback kicking, but it’s difficult to know whether they’re ridiculing his innocence or its exploitation. Eleven-year-old boys are a mystery to me and I’m still sore at Coach Bob. Who’s he to sneer at my non-existent Honda, the Honda my ex drives now, the ghost Honda that I would accompany to Ed’s Wash ’n’ Wax twice a month, reading the sports page in the mechanic’s lounge while she had her hubcaps detailed. These days I drive a secondhand Chevy and I imagine poking Coach Bob in the ribs and asking, “So what’s a secondhand Chevy like, eh Bob? Losing? Forfeiting? Breaking your leg in the first half?”

  We’re still at practice, though. All this time the boys have been whooping it up and calling for Mr. Automatic, and when Cody finally limps up, he’s got himself a new nickname. Coach Bob says, “Guys, guys,” but there’s nothing he can do, and he knows it. A nickname is bigger than a kid or a dad or a coach, a nickname is bigger than a soccer field and more enduring than the memory of a hat trick. A nickname is vast and inescapable: it is the weather. And the strange thing is that I’ll bet none of the youngsters even remembered that moment in the lineup last week, when Cody congratulated my boy on his disqualifications.

  That’s Frankie for you, patient as they come.

  And you might say, so what? It’s just a name. Yeah, right. Remember that you’re talking to the guy named Boychuk, assistant to Coach Bubel over there. Besides, where I come from, I’m used to folks trying to pick the names of winners based on what some stud farm came up with five years ago. In eighteen characters or less. In other words, no horse called Chicken Run ever won the Kentucky Derby. It’s not rocket science.

  My own feeling is that every soccer team has to have a Dante or a Mateo on the bench. Doesn’t matter if they’re star players or no-hope ball-whifflers. That’s just the way it works. Hockey teams now, they’re all about the Aidens. My boss’s kid plays triple A and his team is all Aidens in one form or another: Brayden, Hayden, Jayden, and a couple of — yup, you guessed it — classic Aidens. Come to think of it, Bubel’s boy might’ve done better on the ice. Nah, probably not. There’s only so much a name can do for you. The wife and I had endless grief over what to call our boy. Being a social studies teacher, she was all for Winston, after her favourite prime minister. But I just played my Sinatra CDs over and over until she finally threw up her hands.

  “That’s how Noriega fell, I guess,” she said.

  And Frankie it was.

  The boy can’t sing — won’t, actually — and he’s no smoothie, no blue-eyed sultan of swoon. But damned if he doesn’t do things his way and always has.

  Back on the field it’s turning out to be a bad luck practice. Two of the players are injured in the first half hour, and Cody gets a concussion when he tries to dodge his opponent during the final scrimmage. Suspected concussion.

  “Damn it, Boychuk!” yells Coach Bob. “Was that your kid again?”

  I don’t bother answering him. Any fool can see that Frankie is way over on the other side of the field, has been all along.

  The fall has set in and I feel that seam of cold tear open. The chill in the air makes my heart contract. Or maybe it’s just the sun hanging low in the sky, turning everything hazy and lovable, even the boys who are hopping on one foot and then another to keep warm, shoving their reddened hands in their jerseys. I tell them to run a couple of laps, and walk over to help Bob with his son.

  Cody has an ice pack clasped to his forehead as he lunges to follow his dad’s finger.

  “Not with your whole head, son,” says Coach Bob. “Hold your head steady and move your eyes.”

  But the boy is too cold or too frightened or too confused, or perhaps he really is concussed and his father’s words make no sense. He clasps the lumpy ice pack to his forehead and moves his head from side to side as if it’s an ancient piece of machinery, creaky and grotesque. His head looks too big for his thin boy’s body and I feel sad, the way I always do, when a horse wipes out on the track, and the camera swerves away, and you have to imagine the marshals sweating to haul that broken-legged animal upright and into its box.

  “They don’t shoot horses anymore! My God, woman, what do you take us for?” I used to ask my ex.

  “I don’t plan to take you at all, mister. You’re not exactly a bargain,” she’d say.

  So I don’t bother to tell her about the vet and his oh-so-kind Ketamine shot, and how the trainer is allowed inside the box with the dying horse although fuck knows what he does there. Whispers in his horse’s ear, I guess. Of the endless blue furlongs of heaven and the weightless jockeys who never use whips.


  Coach Bob is cradling his son, but the boy jerks abruptly to one side and vomits. Gotta give him credit, he manages to avoid his father’s lap, if not the netted bag of soccer balls that lies to the right of the bench.

  “That does it,” says Coach. “I’m running this boy to Emergency.” He hauls Cody to his feet and the two make for the car park, Coach half carrying the boy. And he doesn’t look back, and he doesn’t wave, and he doesn’t say, Take over, pal, but then again, he doesn’t have to. We have an unspoken bond.

  Mostly I enjoy ball duty. It’s the assistant coach’s responsibility to retrieve the netted bag of soccer balls from the clubhouse before practice and, after practice, having counted them, duly return the bag. There’s always a couple of balls missing or one too many added in, but counting is a ritual like anything else. On brisk autumn days you walk across Grover Park Fields with the net slung over your shoulder and the clouds racing like Seabiscuit across a sky as wide as your incredulity. The clubhouse smells cool and dry, as if summer has finally sweated itself out, and every nostalgia station in the city is playing “October.” Although you’re nowhere near a radio, you can just about hear the opening chords.

  On days like this I make bets with myself: Five to one for a decent practice. Three to two Coach Bob calls it early, the lazy son of a bitch. Seven to two, Frankie gets reamed out for not passing. He’s a breakaway kid and tends to wrench at the reins, if you know what I mean. Not so much a ball hog as a ball stallion, is what I always think when I see him racing through the other team’s defensive line, taking those wide Frankie strides. As always, I call it (bad practice, ends early, Frankie bawled out for not passing). As a forecaster I’m hard to beat on a turf course but I only wager on practices because no coach worth his salt would ante up against his own team in a league game.

  Which reminds me of something my boss always says, which is that you can’t play the slots well, you can only play ’em more. The same goes for betting on a horse or a kid, if you ask me. You can study the form, and trace the lineage, and calculate the odds, but in the end you might as well pick a colour off the jockey’s silks or double down on your lucky number. When Frankie was born my ex used to advise me to get my head out of I won’t say where and pay attention, G-Damn-It. Kids don’t come with a racing form or a stud book, she liked to say.

  You can only take an analogy so far, I’d tell her. You being a teacher should know that. Yeah, she’d say, I did know that once. Back when I was a high school social studies teacher and not some baggy-assed mare chosen for selective breeding purposes.

  I guess I could have told her that we were just going through a stage, all marriages have hard times. Or that Frankie would settle down, he was just high spirited. Or that she still looked pretty good to me; I liked her ass the way it was (I’m a man who appreciates a certain amount of heft). And I tried to, kind of, only she said, Take your hand away, G-Damn-It, that’s not what I meant.

  I was always getting it wrong in those days, and I’m not saying it to boast. Like the song says: Regrets, I’ve had a few.

  And, yes, I’m drawing this out for as long as possible because there is nothing in me that wants to confront whatever is glopping from the net, and trickling down those balls, and collecting in a vile-smelling puddle on the pitch. The boys are still larking about and pretend gagging, which, in the way of these things, soon leads to real gagging, and practice is over anyway so I send them home. Then there is just Frankie and me, and I tell him to go work on his goal shots, both feet, because I have yet to meet a coach who doesn’t appreciate a really fine left-footed striker, but it doesn’t hurt to have right foot back up.

  I approach the bench, imagining all the lousy things the kid could have eaten before practice. Please God, not pasta in tomato sauce, not a Big Mac, not anything with cheese. When I finally stop praying and open my eyes it’s as I always suspected. The world is a rubber ball bouncing through a godless void. Or else somewhere there’s a God, but he’s holding his sides and laughing. He’s yelling, Ha, no free lunch, mister, and while we’re on the subject of lunch . . .

  So I take off my jacket and roll up my sleeves. I tuck my necktie into my shirt pocket like some downtown loser on a smoke break.

  “Okay, Boychuk,” I say, because I’m faking it real hard now. “Okay, Boychuk, you can do this.”

  I try to wipe the soccer balls on the grass, breathing through my mouth and training my eyes away from the mess of cheeseburger chunks and chocolate shake curds. On the other side of the field Frankie is a blur of a boy, hammering the ball into the net, first with one foot and then the other. Each time, he patiently retrieves the ball then steadies it before turning and jogging backward a couple of feet so as to take another good run at it. Tock, tock, tock. The ball plunges into the net like a tongue poking a cheek, and I am oddly cheered by the impudence of this gesture until my hand slides along the treacherous curved surface of a soccer ball and into the still-warm mess of Cody’s half-digested sick.

  You know how it is; you start gagging, can’t help it. It’s automatic, like what you do when some bloke yawns in your face at the office or an asshole cuts in front of you in the six o’clock traffic then flips you the bird. When Frankie was a baby he used to throw up, just for the hell of it. Every time he saw me, it seemed like. I started to feel real bad about it, if you want to know the truth. I mean I loved the little fellow, I was his dad and all, but by God he was a putrid ball of poop and spit-up and projectile glop. Mashed peas is what I remember, still can’t face ’em.

  “Godfrey! Maybe you shouldn’t come home at all,” says my wife this one time. I’d just walked through the door after a day at the off-track when the kid pulled his knees up to his gut and blew. I swear I saw his head swivel.

  “My name isn’t Godfrey,” I say, just to rile her. You’ve got to love a woman who won’t call on the Lord in vain, even when she’s standing there holding a kid covered in its own multi-coloured bodily fluids. There’s orange magma bubbling from its diaper and dark brown lava running down its thighs and up top is the head twisting around on its little Frankie neck, spewing out pea soup. I mean, you’d think if ever there was a time to God-bother it might be right about now. It’s not “in vain” if we get something out of it, I want to say to her. It’s not blasphemy if we’re begging.

  Instead I hold out my arms and she shoves the kid into them and I think, It’s okay, I can do this. I’m so damn proud of myself — big daddy come home, the kid still bubbling volcanically but settling down, and his mother flinging herself into a chair and glancing up, yes, gratefully. And I think, Yup, I’m doing this, by Godfrey.

  That’s when the gagging begins.

  The gagging is vast and impersonal and omniscient. At first I can’t even tell who the anonymous retcher is. It’s certainly not little Frankie, who is asleep in my arms but who wakes up as soon as I give this enormous tectonic shudder and spew all over him. Oh, I think, and then, Huh? That’s about all I have time for folks, because then the heaving begins in earnest. It’s all I can do to yell, “Take the goddamn baby, woman!” before this same baby is fully covered in his father’s half-digested lunch (burritos from Five Alarm Takeout) and about two gallons of coffee that burnt like acid coming up and didn’t feel that good going down either, if you want to know the truth.

  “Christopher!” yells the wife, by which I know she has just about had it with me. I don’t blame her, I really don’t. Andrew Boychuk, you have hit rock bottom! Boy, you have nothing left to offer! I think between spasms, but each time it seems that there is indeed a little more left to offer.

  “Dambusters, give me the baby!” she hollers, and I do.

  I bend over and clutch at my knees and breathe through my mouth and for a moment there is silence in that apartment. The stench is something dambusters awful and the look of the place, when I open my streaming eyes, is even worse, but the quiet is the quiet of angels dancing on their holy pins an
d threading themselves through the eye of heaven’s needle. The quiet is the best thing that has happened to me since I walked through the front door. None of us moves: I crouch there, hands on my knees, the baby halted in mid-howl, the wife clutching at a crystal vase that some fool gave us for a wedding gift and — bless her heart — she is as quiet as can be when she vomits quickly and efficiently into its open glass mouth.

  There’s no us left, just my ex and the youngster and me in different combinations that have to do with whether I’ve screwed up, and how recently, and so on. It wasn’t exactly the days of wine and roses but that’s how I remember us when we were all together. Don’t ask me why because it wasn’t what you might call a perfect day, and it took forever and about three more involuntary yaks on my part to clean up. We lost the damage deposit on the apartment when we moved, but by then we had a name for that day, “Throw-up Thursday,” and Frankie was sleeping through the night, and Catherine had gone back to being a teacher and stopped giving me grief about being a bookie, which I never was anyway.

  I’m still hunkered down, rubbing my hand clean on the grass, over and over again. Thinking about how one thing leads to another — you don’t see it coming, so you can’t stop it. Your kid throws up and then you do. Your wife gets sick to her stomach every time she lays eyes on you, and next thing you know she’s serving you papers. You start off coaching the Little Team that Could, but by the end of the season your boys can’t get through a practice without braining each other and you’re kneeling on the ground wiping vomit off your hand. The thing is, you begin by thinking you were born lucky and then you realize that luck isn’t genetic or earned; it’s not a reward for good behaviour. Luck is a whore, like the song says. She comes on to you, she fools around for a while, but in the end she leaves on some other guy’s arm.