by Chris Lynch
“Let go, please,” she says. “That kind of hurts.”
I look up at her, surprised, a little offended, a little ashamed.
“God, I’m sorry,” I say. But I haven’t let go.
“You don’t know your own strength,” she says, reaching with her other hand to help the letting-go process along. And that’s easy now, the tension I felt before dissolving instantly at the touch of her fingers on mine. My hand comes away from hers as easy as a peel from a banana. I am moved by how gentle she is about it, and how warmly she now looks at me. We’re good. We are both good.
She reaches in with authority and yanks me to her side. She has my arm linked tightly to hers as we turn up the path toward the center of campus again.
“I’m not a geek,” she says casually, playfully. “I am an earth science major, with a concentration in geology. I love the earth.”
“The distinction is duly noted,” I say. “And, might I add, the earth absolutely loves you right back.”
“Uh-huh. Flatterer. So, Keir Sarafian. I guess I’ve sort of told you a little about me. Now, other than being our mother planet’s authorized spokesperson, is there anything I should know about you?”
I almost have the answer out before she’s finished the question.
“Nope,” I say.
She laughs, and tugs hard on my arm, which is good. Because I don’t know how I would explain my sudden quick, choppy breathing without her breathy breathtaking laugh to smother it.
“Okay, strong and silent,” she says, and I try to join in the laughing, try to cover up my sudden nervous-pervous panting. “You just take your time. Talk when you feel like it.”
“Ha,” I say, chopping out an off-key, out-of-place sort of laugh. She doesn’t appear to notice, and for that I feel even more helpless, hopeless affection toward her already.
special teams
Coach wasn’t joking.
When I finally get to break away from the mortal combat that is defensive backfield training, my spirit is lifted on the thought that I will now be where I belong, proving my true worth without risking my life. There was never any doubt that I could kick a football high, and far, and straight when I was called upon to do so. And the thing that really separates an exceptional kicker from just another guy with a strong leg is doing it under the most intense pressure. Boom! You could hear it from the next state. Like somebody shooting a moose. Or a moose hitting a speeding car. The sound of a perfectly struck football makes a gorgeous, full explosive noise way beyond what should come from anything that can sail through the air so lightly. And sail it does, thirty, thirty-five, forty, forty-two yards, beautiful arc, and then zip, through the uprights. If it was radio remote controlled it could not have gone more flawlessly than that ball did.
I stand there with my eyes still stuck up toward the clouds, toward the apex of the trajectory of that highlight-reel kick. I can still see it there lacing across the sky, that flight path, that vapor trail connecting the dead ball lying peacefully in the end zone, and the walk-on, soccer-playing sonofasomebody who just kicked it.
And there’s another one just like him waiting to tee it up right now.
This was never part of the plan. This was never part of any plan.
“Hey there,” says the second guy, holding a ball as he comes to greet me. “Keir, right?”
“Right,” I say.
“I’m Christian,” he says, smiling warmly and shaking my hand vigorously, the way you would if you were meeting a real somebody.
“Hi, Keir,” the first guy, the man attached to that mighty boot, says. I walk up to the spot where he is now crouched into holder position for the next kicker. He reaches up to shake hands from that position. “I’m Tory. We’ve been hearing about the surface-to-air missiles you’re known for routinely booting. Back East. Jeez, with the air up here, they’re going to have to start altering flight patterns with you around.”
It would be a good idea, and probably healthy, if I could work up a nice seething hate for these guys, with the competition between us an unavoidable reality. I’d seem to be off to a good start, with the first guy carrying a whole religion in his name and the other guy saying complimentary things that could only make sense as sarcasm.
Not to mention that whopping great kick that introduced us in the first place. A blistering, motivating hate shouldn’t be a problem.
“My kicks?” I say, pointing and tracing the line of flight Tory’s ball took just a couple of minutes ago. “That one kick right there would have earned you a scholarship offer from most of the recruiters who scouted me.”
“Ah,” he says, waving me away. He puts his head down and concentrates on the fine point of perfectly positioning the football for the other guy to make good. “This is easy. You’ve done it in the heat of real games. That’s a whole different beast. I don’t know what I’d do under those conditions.”
“Me neither,” says Christian, who is lined up several yards off the ball and looking at it like a pre-pounce cat zeroed in on its prey.
Well, he might not know what he’d do under those conditions. But under these ones he blasts the football with such a full-body assault that he is already facing in the opposite direction when the ball screams through the goalposts. It’s more like a line drive hurrying to exit a baseball park than anything I have ever seen happen to a football.
“Jesus,” I say as Tory stands up and the three of us admire a job pretty damn well done. The second ball wobbles to a stop just a few yards’ distance from where the first one is still playing dead in the grass, nursing its bruises and catching its breath.
“This is going to be some fun,” Tory says.
“I know, right?” Christian says.
A line drive, practically. From over forty yards out.
“Are you seriously telling me that neither one of you guys ever played organized football before this?”
“Never,” Christian says, arms up like a surrender.
“Never,” Tory says.
“I was all about soccer,” Christian says, “until I tore up my ankle and came back slower than our mascot. And we were called the Jumbos.”
“Same here,” Tory says. “I was all about soccer too. Until I sucked. I was a goalkeeper, so a bunch of times every game I was in a position to just punt the ball as far downfield as I could. I mean, just ka-blam it. It was a lot of fun. Except when the other team would bring the ball back upfield and put it in our net. Repeatedly. People in the stands started to make that whoosh sound before the ball was even behind me. I think I learned to blast the ball just out of frustration. I still can’t believe you can have a spot on the football team just for doing this one single, fun thing.”
“Exactly,” Christian says. “That’s exactly how it was for me. Hey, if they’d just let me use a round ball here, I could really get some distance going.”
“Yeah, right?” Tory hoots, and the two of them high-five in a sort of awkward way that I suppose soccer players do, or they do when they’re trying to simulate football behaviors that they have seen on TV but have not yet gotten natural with.
And yet, in reality I am the unnatural one here. I’m the one who is struggling even to hold up the undemanding tail end of the banter, because all I can say to the guys is, “So, you both do punting as well as placekicking?”
“Well, yeah,” Christian says, looking the slightest bit embarrassed for me, “but, I mean, what’s the difference, really, right? It’s all kicking.”
“It’s all kicking,” I say, as Tory starts jogging down the field to retrieve the many footballs they have already deposited into the end zone. Christian tugs me playfully by the shirt and starts me running alongside him, like a true teammate, behind Tory.
What’s the difference? If you happen to be great at both individual kicking specialties when coaches are deciding who makes it onto their special teams?
Probably it’s the difference between getting a spot on the final roster, and getting cut.
• • •
This was supposed to be the easy part. I was money at this, which was why kicking was the very centerpiece of my plan for the perfect life at Norfolk. And when that didn’t work out, kicking figured to be even more of a meal ticket when I adjusted my sights down to small-college ball at Carnegie.
And now. Now the kicking game turns out not to be easy at all, just like nothing is turning out to be easy at all the way I expected. And everything I thought I knew is completely confounded into my not knowing anything now and probably I never did.
I spend the rest of the day with these guys—the soccer guys, can you imagine? These are the same guys me and the rest of the real football players just one year ago would have been tossing around like orcas do with seals before tearing them into bite-size edible scraps. But I’m not tossing anybody around, and I’m not easy-breezing into my comfortable starting kicker position, because the truth is I am kicking my ever-loving guts out just to keep up. It is a straightforward competition, a process of three guys kicking one football over and over in turn, from different distances, with different holders, in front of different assistant coaches until we are eventually kicking in front of the big man himself. And suddenly everything is on the line, where I had previously assumed there wasn’t even a line for me to worry about.
As the afternoon wears on, the kicks mount up, and my lack of training starts to show.
And I start trying. Then trying harder. Then trying everything, everything I didn’t used to have to try because I just always knew the big kick was going to come when I needed it because it always had.
“Just ease up on it a little bit,” Christian says, startling me by patting my back when I peel off to the sideline. I’m frantically trying to massage the elasticity back into my right hamstring and force the searing pain right on out.
“How am I supposed to ease up?” I say, to the sound of Tory’s latest tape-measure-job of a punt. “The harder I try, the less distance I’m getting with every kick. And every yard I lose seems to somehow find its way into your results, and Tory’s. If I ease up now, my kicks will be going backward over my head by the end of the day.”
“Nah, you’re just pressing. The coaches can see that. Everybody knows what you can do, because you’ve done it. It’ll take more than a couple of squibs and shanks for them to forget about a talent like yours.”
Jeez, the squibs and the shanks. I botched more balls off the outside of my foot, or my toe, during this one tryout than in my entire high school career. It’s painful to even hear Christian say it.
But he doesn’t say it with any jerk in it at all. Like a lot of people would.
I straighten up when I hear Coach Muswell screaming for the competitors to get their asses on the field pronto unless we were just planning to concede both of the two kicker spots on the roster to Tory, which would be just fine with him if that’s what we wanted.
That is of course not what we want. What I want badly, what I have more or less always and only wanted, is that placekicker’s job on the college football team and the life that comes with it.
“Cut that out!” Coach hollers when he sees Christian doing the Christian-like thing and lending me a helping hand while I limp back toward the action.
“It’s okay, thanks,” I say, nudging his hand away.
“You sure?” he says, still walking close by. “I don’t mind getting yelled at.”
I’m shaking my head and clutching at my screaming hamstring while I struggle onward.
“Christian, I mean, thanks. But why are you being like this? It’s kind of a dog-eat-dog situation we’ve got going here. Supposed to be merciless. Why would you want to bother with helping me out, me being the competition, after all?”
He holds up his hands, laughing a little as Coach bellows for him to get over and kick that goddamn ball right this goddamn minute.
“It’s only football, Keir,” he says.
He pats my shoulder and runs to the spot on the field where our mighty head coach is very, very specifically pointing, as in, crouching down and possibly making contact with the grass with the tip of his pointing finger.
Tory also rushes to that pinpoint spot, squats into position, and plants the football precisely, as Christian strides up and blasts away, perfect form, kicking right through the ball the way they always tell you to do.
I’m just standing still, watching the flight of the ball with admiration, same as everybody else.
It’s only football, Christian says, and he is right. But he could have just as easily said that I wasn’t really his competition, either.
clean break
Joyce shows up unannounced at my door, or at least it was unannounced to me. Fabian is suspiciously flow-going about it. For a guy who monitors the weather forecast for a week in advance just to line up appropriate clothing, there is no such thing as a pleasant surprise.
“Here you go,” he says to her, dragging me by the arm to the door. “Stay out as late as you like, kids. I won’t wait up.”
Joyce finds it very funny when Fabian slams and bolts the door behind me. Joyce finds it funny pretty much whatever Fabian does.
“So, you’ve been driving your poor roommate insane,” she says as we walk along at my slow, sore pace.
“He was already insane when I got here,” I say.
“Fair enough,” she says as we reach the duck pond, “but you weren’t. As far as we know. Hmmm, do we know that? I probably should have asked that earlier.”
“Yes, Joyce, we do know that.” We do. We absolutely do.
“Great. I’m glad that’s established. As for today, though, Fabian’s a little worried about you. Ranting and slamming things around, that’s the kind of stuff that freaks people out, you know. Confidentially, I think he’s a little worried about his own well-being, too, ya big brute. Like he doesn’t really know you entirely yet, and if you wanted to decapitate him or something, there wouldn’t be much he could do about it with just the two of you trapped in that cell of yours.”
She says this so matter-of-factly, the same way she pointed out the campus’s two mailboxes, that I have to treat it just as casually or expose one or the other of us as maybe psychotic.
“True,” I say. “He’s got these little arms, like linguine. There’d be nothing he could do.”
As we reach the bridge that crosses the pond, I bend to gather up a handful of stones. “Bend,” though, is possibly not accurate. With my right leg burning from pain and calcifying to the point of uselessness, my bend is more like a mechanical flamingo maneuver, the petrified leg sticking up skyward while my upper body pivots groundward over the other hip.
When I eventually right myself again, Joyce has both hands covering her mouth, trying desperately not to laugh.
With basically nothing else left to lose, I go for the dignified approach.
“Did I miss something funny?” I ask, blinking repeatedly and clutching my rocks.
She no longer feels the need to try, and bursts out laughing. “You did, you so did, Keir.”
When I heroically continue with my silent blinking, she shakes her head and clutches my shoulders.
“And from the look of you,” she says, “you’re still missing it. Come on, now.”
I walk ahead of her up to the crest of the bridge. There we both sit, extending our legs through the metal bars of the railing, our feet dangling a few feet above the still water. Neither one of us says anything for a bit, which is not a bad thing. I toss stones, one every half minute or so, and watch the ripple rings expand and disappear again. My leg feels much better in this position. I could plunk rocks like this for a good long time, I think.
“But it is only football, you know, Keir.”
Plunk.
“How can football be only football, Joyce? Football is what got me here. Football is the main reason I’m here at all.”
“Is it? I don’t know that. How do I know that? For all I know, you could be here for a whole bunch of reasons. In fact, I think i
t would be bizarre if you were not here for more than just the one reason. That would be sad, frankly. I would think there would be more to you than that. I would certainly hope so.”
Plunk.
“Yeah?” I say, in a voice and an attitude that I regret and already wish I could undo. “Maybe you wouldn’t.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I’m out of stones.
“I’m out of stones,” I say, allowing my arms and legs to hang limply dead over the water.
“How can you say that, that I wouldn’t hope to find more to you than just a football player? Are you saying that you’re a nobody beyond your identity as an athlete? I don’t believe that for a minute. Even if you were crazy enough or brainwashed enough to believe it yourself, I still wouldn’t buy it. It’s obvious you’re more than that. Of course, everybody is more than that, right, of course. But to be honest, when it comes to college football players, if most of the ones I’ve met wanted to claim they were all ball and nothing more, I’d say, yup, I see what you mean. Do you really wish you were like that?”
I very, very almost do. What a straightforward life that would be, simple, comprehensible, unapologetic.
“Being a kicker on a football team, and doing it very well, is who I was, Joyce. It was the easiest, most reliable part of being me when being me was kind of not bad. And not difficult. It was the only thing I felt like I could count on when I made this massive leap of life to come to Carnegie. Now I find out there are at least two guys who do my best thing better than I do. That has my head spinning right now, it really does.”
She hops right up to her feet and starts helping me get up as well, even before I’ve decided I want to.
“Take it easy, please,” she says. “So you just ran into a rotten bad break. There was no way of knowing the only two guys around who could outkick you would suddenly decide to come out for the team.”
We pick up our slow, gimpy walk where we left off and trundle down the far slope of the bridge. “I don’t even know that much,” I say. “Those are the only two guys I’ve seen kick since I got here. Maybe everybody in the state kicks better than I do. You could very well punt a football twice as far as me, for all I know.”
