Shots on Goal Read online

  There’s no joking today, no comments about Herbie’s cigarette breath or Rico’s big nose or Dusty’s lisp. This game means too much, more than anything. Two undefeated teams: 3 and 0.

  “Kick some ass!” yells Joey, sending a ball into the high corner of the net.

  “Everything you got!” hollers Trunk, booting a line drive that Herbie leaps for and bats down.

  “We’re Number One!” shouts Herbie, picking up the ball and squeezing it. “We’re it, man!”

  Herbie tosses me the ball and I catch it on my thigh, bouncing it up and juggling it on my other foot. I give myself a lead, plant my foot and fire, and listen to the thud as the ball hits the crossbar and bounces back.

  The Greenfield guys are broken into pairs now, shadowing each other up and down the field, one guy dribbling, the other one backpedaling. They’ve got more players back from last year than I thought they would. A lot of good players.

  The coach calls us over; we gang up around him. My hair is wet but my throat is dry. The officials are huddled up at midfield. The Greenfield players run over to their sideline, leaping and yelling.

  I close my eyes for a second. It’s still early season, there’s a long way to go. But those Greenfield guys are ready to clobber us, to beat us as bad as last year. It shouldn’t really matter so much. Shouldn’t make me so nervous.

  We’ve got three wins already, but that holds no water against these guys. This game is the measuring stick. Our program is four years old, and we’ve never even scored against Greenfield. That’s eight straight shutouts.

  I look around at Rico, at Herbie, at the others. The coach clears his throat. “Last year,” he says slowly, “was a long, long time ago.…”

  Minutes go by before I finally touch the ball, intercepting a centering pass in front of our goal. I step left, then go right, creating space and moving down the field. I feed Joey on the run and he moves past the center line, dribbling into a mass of green-and-white shirts. “You can’t do it alone,” I holler, but he tries to anyway, and quickly loses control. I hustle back as the ball flies into our end.

  Up and down the field, neither team penetrating for most of the first quarter, until their striker finally breaks ahead of the pack and crosses the ball to a midfielder, who one-touches it right back and the striker boots it into the upper corner of the goal.

  I let out my breath in a huff and a cloud of moisture swirls up and away. Herbie punches the ball to the official, and Joey yells, “Let’s get it back!”

  Coach claps his hands and I wipe my forehead and jog back into position. “Let’s go!” I yell, as much to myself as anyone else.

  At the half we’re still down 1–0, but we’ve had some opportunities, this one’s within reach. Coach tells us midfielders to bear down and gut it out—get back on defense and keep sparking the offense. My arms are fatigued, even more than my legs for some reason; maybe it’s from tension, from the weight on our shoulders.

  But the Greenfield players are tired, too. The momentum shifts our way in the third quarter. A couple of shots on goal, a couple of close misses. Finally we’ve got a corner kick. Dusty floats it just in front of the near post and their goalie leaps to grab it. But the wet ball slips through his fingers and it’s all he can do to bat it free as he goes down. It wobbles to the left of the goal and I’m there, an open net in front of me, and a surge goes through me as I connect, and it soars, and it powers into the net like a punch in the stomach of our opponent.

  They mob me. It’s tied. Joey hits my shoulder hard enough to bruise it, and big Trunk lifts me off the ground in a bear hug. I break free and “Yes!” and race back to our end of the field. People on the sidelines are yelling. Herbie’s on his knees in front of our goal, facing skyward with his eyes closed. It’s tied.

  We’re on a new level now. We weren’t really sure about ourselves, not ready to admit that we’re as good as anybody in this league. But now we know it, now we can prove it if we can just get that ball through this defense again. Back and forth through the fourth quarter, neither team gaining much, neither team yielding. My nose is running and I suck it up and spit it out in a rapid wad. Eyes on the ball, eyes on the ball. Drive, drive, drive …

  We can beat these guys, but it has to happen now. I’m soaked but warm, my legs splattered with mud and my hair matted to my head. The rain is steady but light, so the footing hasn’t been bad until the past couple of minutes.

  Joey’s taking a throw-in near midfield; guys are shouting and pushing to get clear; there’s three minutes left in a 1–1 game. Teeth are clenched and elbows locked.

  “Bones!” he yells, but his throw bounces four feet in front of me and strikes me in the knee. Throw to the feet, Joey! The guy marking me takes the ball and I slip again, catching myself with my hands. I push back up, but the ball’s already gone.

  This is the guy who scored their goal, heading back upfield now. He chips it toward the middle, lobbing it over a defender, and they’ve got a guy in the clear zeroing in on Herbie. Herbie dives toward the corner, but the ball beats him there. Like that.

  The Greenfield players go wild. I mouth an obscenity and wipe my hands on my soaking blue jersey. “Throw to the feet,” I say to Joey, but it’s too late. And I should have controlled it anyway.

  Time races away now. We can’t mount a decent attack. We blew it. We had at least a tie, but we blew it. Herbie blocks a shot and boots it high and long, but the ref blows the whistle before it hits the ground.

  We ain’t undefeated any longer.

  My brother’s standing on the sideline when we walk off, hands in the pockets of a yellow windbreaker with the hood up. He’s fifteen months older than I am, fifteen pounds lighter, two inches shorter, and three times as strong. I don’t run in the same circles he does.

  “Nice,” he says, taking out one hand to shake mine. “Tough one.”

  “Sucked,” I say, but I know we didn’t. It makes me feel better that Tommy knows it, too. Coach is calling us over, huddling us up.

  Turning point, the coach is saying. The first real test and we held up like champions. We’re not doormats any longer. We’ll see these guys again.

  There’s steam rising from my hands. Everybody looks like they’ve crawled through a swamp. I wipe my nose with my sleeve and chew on the side of my lip.

  Coach reminds us that Greenfield’s a perennial power. We’ve got seven sophomores starting, three juniors, and a senior. There’s a lot of glory ahead.

  Everybody’s quiet. We wanted this game bad. We almost had it, too. When is the rematch?

  4

  DEESWASHING

  I get dressed in a hurry and yell to Joey to move his butt. We’ll get dinner at work. It’s slow on Tuesday nights; I might even get my homework done if Carlos isn’t around. Kenny doesn’t care.

  Work is the kitchen of the Sturbridge Inn: scrubbing pots, running the dishwasher, making the coffee. Six till we get done (they stop serving at ten) Sunday and Tuesday. Sometimes on Saturday if there’s a reception or something.

  My brother worked here all summer and he got me and Joey these jobs last month when some guys left for college. Tommy waits on tables for weddings and banquets.

  Carlos is in his office when we punch in, but he’s getting ready to leave. “Hello, boys,” he says. “It will be slow tonight, so you will have time to straighten up the walk-in and the storage closet.”

  We head for the back of the kitchen and Joey tries to imitate Carlos’s accent. “You run the deeswasher, I’ll scrub the pots.”

  “Real funny,” I say.

  We check the walk-in refrigerator. Kenny’s in there drinking a can of beer. He hides them behind the crates of celery and stuff, but he usually waits until Carlos goes home before he pops one open.

  “Hey,” he says real slow when we walk in. Kenny’s about thirty-eight, and he’s been working in this kitchen for twenty years. He had the same job we have until a year ago, when they decided he’d learned enough to cook on slow nights. It’
s an easy menu; I could handle just about everything on it—steaks and pork chops and fried shrimp. The toughest item is veal cordon bleu, and that’s no big deal once you’ve seen it a few times.

  “Starting early, huh?” Joey says to Kenny, meaning the beer.

  “Just the one,” Kenny says. “He still out there?”

  “Was when we came in,” I say. I start picking through a crate of lettuce on the floor, looking for rotten ones. Two of them are getting slimy, so I peel off the bad leaves and toss the heads back in the box. Kenny watches me. He’s got slick brown hair combed over to cover a high forehead, and dark-rimmed glasses. He’s short, thin except for his gut, and always wears a plain white T-shirt. “You boys win today?” he asks.

  “Just about,” Joey says. He’s taking tomato wrappings out of a box on the shelf. The tomatoes come individually wrapped in blue tissue paper, and most people leave the paper behind when they need tomatoes. So sometimes you have to dig through six dozen tomato wrappings minus one to find the last tomato in the box.

  It’s one of our duties on Tuesday nights to keep the salad bar full, so we know what it’s like to have to find the last tomatoes.

  “We’re gonna eat as soon as Carlos leaves,” Joey says to Kenny. Then he steps out into the kitchen and I follow. You don’t want to be alone in the walk-in with Kenny.

  We start with a load of lunch dishes that the day shift walked out on. You put them on trays and they run along a conveyer belt through the dishwasher. But you have to scrape all the crusts and uneaten cole slaw and other glop into the garbage first or it will gum things up. And the silverware has to soak in this blue stuff or it won’t come clean. You wind up doing some of the silverware by hand anyway if it’s got pancake syrup or dried ketchup on it.

  After a while I make a club sandwich the way Carlos taught me: take three slices of bacon from the pile (if you get breakfast here you could be eating reheated bacon that was cooked twenty-four hours before) and put it under the broiler for a few seconds. Make three slices of medium-brown toast, spreading the bottom one with a thin layer of mayonnaise. Put the bacon, three slices of tomato, and two lettuce leaves on the bottom piece of toast, add the second piece of toast, then spread some mayonnaise on that one. Put on about a half-inch layer of thin-sliced (THIN!) turkey breast, and cover with the third piece of toast. Put four of those toothpicks with the swirly plastic things on the ends through the whole thing (to hold the pieces together when you slice it), then take a big knife and trim off any lettuce that’s overhanging the bread. Gently support the sandwich with the fingers of your left hand, and carefully cut it into four triangles by slicing from corner to corner.

  I offer to make one for Joey. He says no. He takes two pieces of bread, spreads one with mustard, throws on a clump of turkey, puts on the other slice, and mashes it all down with the heel of his hand. Then we go to the storage room to eat.

  We sit on cardboard boxes on the floor and talk about soccer. We’ve got another game in two days.

  Joey’s got short dark hair and is solid all over, but he’s not very big. My mother says he’s handsome. She says he’s like her third son, since he’s spent so much time at our house, playing one-on-one basketball in the driveway or playing video games or just hanging out in my room. She’s always asking me if he’s got a girlfriend, but what she really wants to know is whether I have a girlfriend yet. If I did I wouldn’t tell her.

  Joey claims he had no idea Shannon was going to ask him out at the football game. I told him he sucks anyway, because he didn’t have to accept. He knows damn well I was after her. And I would have helped him out if the situation was reversed.

  At least I think I would have. Maybe not.

  Joey’s parents pressure him to excel; his mother insists on honor-roll report cards, and his father absolutely lives to see Joey’s name in the sports section. He used to do things like have their last name printed on the back of Joey’s Little League jersey, or call the newspaper when his son scored a goal in a YMCA game. Like anybody cared what a nine-year-old did.

  The result is that Joey can’t ever relax when the subject is sports. As talented as he is, I feel sorry for him because he can’t totally appreciate it when he does something good—his father robbed that from him. So I turn the conversation to music or girls or television whenever I can. Joey needs a break from the intensity.

  “We’ve gotta work on our ball control in the box,” he says. “We get the ball in there, but there’s no coordination. It’s like every man for himself.”

  Strange that he would say that, since he’s the worst offender. But at least he’s aware of how out of sync we can be.

  “I mean, I can pull it off, but some of our guys don’t have a clue.”

  That sounds more like Joey: arrogant and selfish. Even though it’s true.

  I’d say there are at least five guys on the team with more natural ability than Joey has. They’re faster or stronger or more agile, or all of those things. But Joey would kick anybody’s butt one-on-one. I wouldn’t tell him so, but I have to admire that.

  Kenny comes into the storage room and looks around. He reaches for a can of olives and turns it over in his hand. Then he sets it back on the shelf. “Got dishes piling up out there,” he says.

  Joey rolls his eyes at me. “We’ll get to ’em,” he says.

  Kenny just sort of grunts. “We ain’t paying you to sit on your ass,” he says, turning to leave.

  Joey scrunches up his face and sneers. He raises one eyebrow at me and gives a laugh. “Big shot,” he says quietly.

  “Hey, he’s earned it,” I say.

  “Yeah, I guess I’m just jealous,” Joey says. “I want his job, you know. That’s my career objective.”

  “You and me both,” I say.

  “Gotta admit, you work your butt off every day washing dishes for twenty years, you deserve a lot of respect.”

  “No question about it,” I say.

  “I only hope I have the tenacity to stay with it that long,” he says. “Someday, boy, someday. I’ll be the guy who gets to fry hamburgers, the man who can maintain this place’s fine reputation for baked potatoes.”

  “And I’ll be there with you,” I say. “You and me.”

  “We’ll be heroes.”

  “Like Kenny is to us.”

  “God bless him.”

  Seth the blond busboy brings in the last load of dishes at about quarter to ten, so we run them through the dishwasher and go in the back to start on the pots. There aren’t many, but we’re bored and want to get out of there. I dump some liquid soap into the sink and run the hot water on full, and Joey starts scraping out a giant roasting pan with a spatula. Carlos made meatballs in there this afternoon, and there’s a crust of baked-on grease and tomato paste.

  “Why the hell didn’t they at least let this soak?” Joey says, though he doesn’t say who “they” are.

  “They is us,” I say. “It was sitting there when we came in.”

  “Well, we suck then,” he says. “This shit is welded on there.”

  “Dump some water in it until we finish these others,” I say. “It’ll soften up.”

  But after we’ve scrubbed the other pots the giant one is not coming clean. We’ve gone through three heavy-duty Brillo pads on it, but there’s still a mound of tar in the corners.

  “You dump the garbage yet?” Joey asks.

  “Not the one by the dishwasher.”

  “Get it.”

  I carry it over and Joey picks up the roasting pan, and we go out the back door to the Dumpster. Joey sets down the pan. He opens the lid of the Dumpster and we get hit with the sweet smell of rotting garbage. It’s sort of nauseating, but sort of pleasant, too. The rats like it, anyway. Joey gently sets the pan between two full plastic trash bags. Then he takes the garbage bag from my hands and lays it on top. He nods to me and breaks out in a big stupid grin.

  We mop the floor real quick. Kenny’s asleep in Carlos’s chair in the office. He opens one eye w
hen I punch my time card and mumbles, “See you, boys.” We get out of there in a hurry.

  You can’t do much after a shift at work because you feel greasy from head to foot. So there’s no sense hanging out. But if you go home to shower you don’t get allowed back out, so we usually stop at the Turkey Hill store for some soda, then maybe spend ten minutes talking to Herbie and anybody else who’s still on Main Street.

  But Joey stops on the sidewalk in front of the bakery and says, “You know Shannon?”

  I look at him like I can’t believe he would ask such a stupid question. I don’t say anything.

  “You know her friend Eileen?” he asks next.

  “Yeah.” I know Eileen. She’s okay. She’s not Shannon.

  “I need you to go out with her.”

  “What?”

  “Not go out go out, just go to the football game with her. With me and Shannon.”

  “Why?”

  “To keep the conversation up,” he says. “You know. I don’t have that much to say. You talk to her good.”

  “To Eileen?”

  “To Shannon. You set her up for me.”

  I shove him on the shoulder, not real hard, and stare at him without knowing what to say. “You suck,” I finally tell him. I shake my head and start to walk. “You suck.”

  “I’m not asking much,” he says, following me. “Just come with us to the game. Friday night. You can ditch her afterwards.”

  I keep walking. “The game’s away this week,” I say.

  “Next week, then.”

  “See you tomorrow,” I say.

  “I’ll tell Shannon to tell Eileen?” he calls.

  “We’ll see.” I start jogging, to get away from him, to get home. I need a shower. I need sleep.

  Sturbridge: An Insider’s Guide

  By Barry Austin

  Down the end of Sixth Street, behind the abandoned garment factory, is a four-foot-wide pedestrian bridge across the Pocono River. The river is forty feet wide here and a few feet deep, with deeper pools where you might catch a trout if you want to fight your way down the steep, overgrown banks.