Keeper (11 page)

As we changed ends, our good forward — his name was Augustino — put his arm around my shoulders.

‘Will we win this one, Gato?’

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘They smell a little bit beaten.’

Augustino laughed. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘The way it has been for a long time is this. The Loggers nearly always win. They are tougher than us.’ He shrugged. ‘The men used to bet on the game, but they stopped betting because we nearly always lost. But today, everyone is betting again. And we are favorites to win.’

‘I think we will win,’ I said.

‘Because of you,’ Augustino said.

‘No. I do not score the goals.’

‘My friend,’ Augustino said, ‘it is easy to score goals against a side who thinks they have already lost the game. And these guys think they have lost the game. And that is because of you. Forwards get very tired when they work and work and do not score. The way they get the energy back is to score. You have taken all the energy out of them. Do you understand what I am saying?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Someone told me this already.’

‘That person was telling you the truth,’ Augustino said.

Hellman blew a long blast on his whistle. We got into our positions and started play again.

We won the game, three goals to nothing. Augustino scored one of them. I did not disgrace Estevan’s shirt. My father lost ten dollars and joined in the applause as I walked off the field. But my father’s pride was no longer enough. I needed the respect of someone much harder to please. Someone who wanted something from me, someone who was waiting. Waiting with the kind of patience that only the dead have, because they have so much time.”

“He materialized from the tree shadows in the same instant that I stepped into the clearing. Immediately he dropped the ball in front of him, ran it down to the goal line, and positioned it for a corner kick. He had never seemed to be in a hurry before, and I was surprised. Almost impatiently he signaled to me to get into the goal, and when I got there, he sent over a high, in-swinging cross, which I caught near the top left corner. He gestured to me — again, that puzzling, hurried manner — and this time sent in a cross that cut back away from me. I couldn’t get to it. Again a gesture, another corner. And another, and another. He had found a weakness in me. Well, not a weakness, exactly. He was reminding me that there is a kind of cross that keepers will always fear — the kind I’d had trouble with in the previous day’s game at the camp. He began to send in ball after ball, which came straight across and then swerved away from me toward the edge of the penalty area. In the clearing that afternoon, I dealt with most of them easily enough, coming fast out of goal and pulling them to my chest or else punching them away.

But it was too easy. We both knew it. He brought the ball over to me and stood facing me.

‘Tell me,’ he said.

‘I wouldn’t be able to do that in a game,’ I said. ‘I’d be blocked in — even if I screamed for the ball and my defenders let me out. Because the forwards would just stand there and let me run into them: no foul. Like yesterday.’

‘Yes,’ the Keeper said. ‘So?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps there’s nothing you can do.’

The Keeper became agitated. It was very strange. His shape twitched and became slightly blurred at the edges, as if he wanted to be both here and somewhere else at the same time. This startled me. I was used to him being calm, expert, powerful. He dropped the ball and put his foot on top of it. Then he bent and picked it up. He turned away from me and faced the dark forest wall. He said something I couldn’t quite hear.

‘What?’

He turned back to me. ‘How can I show you?’ he said, and there was something very troubled in his shadowy voice. ‘There is so little time.’

For the first time in two years, he did not seem in control of me, or of the space in the forest. Or of himself. I felt sorry for him. I was amazed to feel that way. What are the words for what I had felt about him up to that moment? Terror, at first; fear, trust, respect, shame. Love, almost. Hate, sometimes. All big, big feelings. Now I had this small, cheap feeling — of being sorry for him. I was shocked to feel this way. And in that same moment I realized that I was now as tall as he was and could do many of the things that he could do. I was growing out of him, as a child grows out of games and daydreams. It was not a feeling I liked. So I tried to make a joke.

‘We need more players,’ I said. ‘We need a defensive wall for me to run against, forwards to face me. Perhaps you could call other players out of the trees.’

He looked at me as if this were a real possibility, as if he were considering doing something that was within his power but that also terrified him.

The stupid smile I was wearing froze on my face.

‘I was joking,’ I said.

He looked at me as if I had spoken words in a foreign language. Then his face came back into focus; the shaky edges of his outline steadied.

‘We do not have much time left,’ he said.

I felt disturbed, hearing this a second time.

‘Why not? What is going to happen?’ I asked him. ‘Are you going somewhere?’

‘No, you are,’ he said. He started to walk away from me, back toward that dark cloak of jungle.

‘Please,’ was all I could say.

He stopped but did not turn around.

‘Please,’ I said again.

He turned and came back. I thought he would throw the ball and resume our training, but he didn’t. He stood two yards from me and said, ‘Listen to me. Life changes. Change is everything — change is life itself. The only thing that stays the same is being dead, believe me. You have changed, and that is how life sings in you. When you first came here, you were weak and lonely and didn’t know what you had within yourself. Now you know. You are a keeper. You know what you can do. Go out and do it.’

It sounded like a goodbye, a dismissal, and I wasn’t ready. So I found something to say, something to keep him there with me.

‘I still don’t know what to do about that out-swinging corner,’ I said.

‘Stand on your line,’ he replied. ‘Stand on your line and expect the unexpected.’

I smiled. ‘Another of your riddles.’

‘No. The unexpected is the only thing you can depend on. This is what I have to tell you. The game always changes. If you are a player, you must change with it. Soccer, the kind of soccer I played, has gone. The power of the game moves. Now, midfield players score impossible free kicks from the halfway line. Defenders play like wingers. Center forwards play with their backs to the goal and lay the ball off to defenders coming through to strike. Everything is fluid. Everything is possible. Everything will change. You especially. And you are lucky, in one way. You have a place to be, and a place to defend. The forest has taught you this. It is quite simple, after all. Like the forest, you will come up against teams who can think of only one thing: how to cut you down. Or how to get past you, around you, through you. And all you have to do is stop them. Which is something you can do now, because I have taught you how. You have something to defend, to protect. It is only a soccer goal, of course: three pieces of wood and a net. But this is more than most people have. And if you can protect that, then perhaps other things, more important things, can also be protected. Do you know what I am saying?’

Well, no, I did not know what he meant. I was, after all, very young. I felt as though a man much stronger than me was handing me a great burden because he could no longer carry it himself. It was not what I wanted. But I could think of nothing to say.

The Keeper turned toward the trees and walked away.

‘Wait!’ I called out to him, and he stopped and faced me. ‘You said that I was going somewhere else. What did you mean? Where am I going?’

‘I cannot tell you,’ he said. ‘I am not hiding anything from you. I do not know.’

We stared at each other across the clearing. I was almost as afraid as I had been the very first time we had stood there, so long ago. Then he turned away and melted into the gathering darkness of the forest.”

P
AUL
FAUSTINO HAD
interviewed hundreds of players, and trying to get them to describe the experience of playing, of winning or losing, a major game was almost always like trying to squeeze milk from a rock. Clichés dripped from these men with their sweat. But Gato was a different kind of animal altogether. He had described brutish kick-and-rush games in a logging camp in the middle of nowhere, and Faustino had found himself completely absorbed. He was desperate to get Gato to speak about the World Cup final in the same way that he had described those rough clashes. The problem was that Gato had a different agenda. For whatever reason, he had chosen this interview to unload this wild fantasy about himself and the Keeper.

Faustino told himself to be patient. Midnight had come and gone, but he had to be patient. He squinted at the digital counter on the tape recorder. Plenty left.

The goalkeeper was speaking again.

“The next week, at the camp, Estevan was comically proud of me, calling passing workers over and introducing me: ‘Hey, you know my boy, El Gato? Best player ever to come out of this stinking jungle. Hey, hey! Wipe your greasy hand before you shake his, man!’

On Thursday morning, the sky had a weird greenish tinge to it. As we lurched our way to work in the back of the pickup, hard gusts of wind began to blow needles of rain into our faces. By the middle of the morning, the storm had burst upon the camp. The wind screeched through the gaps between the metal sheds, hurling and twisting sheets of rain among the workbenches and the hulking yellow machines. Most of the men switched off their machines and crowded into the storage sheds to smoke and wait. But Estevan was as stubborn as a mule and insisted that we work on beneath the wild light of the bare bulbs that swung above our bench.

The storm drove the loggers out of the forest, and they came up to the camp. My father came across to us, his poncho slimed with red mud. He was clearly pleased that his son was one of the few still at work.

‘Dear God,’ he said, lifting his voice above the rage of the rain on the plastic roof. ‘It’s terrible down there. We almost lost a tractor, one of the big ones. It started to slide, and the driver jumped. I don’t blame him.’

Estevan sucked his teeth and shook his head, agreeing with my father while not troubling to interrupt his work with talk.

My father said, ‘Every day I thank God that my son is not doing that work. You are still pleased with him, Estevan? You think he has a future?’

The old man lifted his head and looked across at me. He showed all of his gold tooth.

‘This boy Gato? Oh yes. He has a future, I think, yes indeed. I think he will be very good one day, your son.’

I looked at my father. He was smiling, but his puzzled eyes moved from Estevan to me and back to Estevan again.

Before the end of the day, the storm raged away to some other place. The sun returned to burn through the wet air, baking a thin crust onto the mud around us.”

“On Saturday, as we were lining up for our pay, three vehicles pulled into the camp. Two were the high-wheeled three-ton trucks that carried men over rough country to far logging sites. ‘Sludge buses’ is what Estevan called them. These were not from our camp, though, and the forty or so men who climbed down from them were strangers, although many of them wore the same bright green jerkins that our loggers wore. Estevan sent a boy across the compound to find out about them. The boy came back, excited. ‘They are from Rio Salado, the camp at Salty River,’ he said. ‘They say they have come for the game.’

The third vehicle was a big black Mercedes-Benz four-wheel drive with those blue-tinted windows you can’t see through from the outside. Its gleaming panels were clouded with dirt. It parked a little way from the sludge buses, and for a whole minute no one got out of it. Then the passenger door opened, and a man stepped out and stretched. He could not have looked more out of place if he had landed from the moon. He had expensive dark hair and a gray mustache. His jacket, it seemed to me, was woven out of light; pale gray rippled into silver as he moved. Beneath the jacket he wore a silky black polo-neck sweater, and his black trousers were tucked into calf-height brown leather boots. He looked like a rich tourist who had decided to go somewhere dirty for a change.

While I — and scores of other men — were gazing at this magical creature, Hellman’s door banged open, and the boss came down the rough steps. He bustled across to the Mercedes and shook hands warmly with the elegant stranger; as he did so, the driver’s door opened and a woman stepped out. A woman! There, in that place! The whole compound fell silent. She too was dressed as if going on vacation, but her vacation was going to be in a toy jungle. She was dressed like one of those old-time Hollywood actresses playing a part in a Tarzan movie: a tight-fitting safari suit the color of milky coffee, lace-up boots, a dinky little rucksack over one shoulder. Her face was half hidden by big purple-tinted sunglasses and a cloud of red-gold hair. She walked carefully around the front of the car and also shook hands with Hellman. Then Hellman walked his guests to his office, stood aside as they went in ahead of him, went in himself, and closed the door.

The compound exploded with noise. Men gave up their places in the pay line to greet or insult or joke with the loggers from Rio Salado. Everyone had some comment to make about Hellman’s mystery guests. The pay man was yelling madly, trying to get the men back into line. Something odd was happening, and I had a worrying feeling that it had something to do with me. Maybe not, though. After all, Hellman had walked the two visitors straight past me, not even glancing at me. I tried to clear my head — I had a game to play, a goal to protect, a ghost to impress. I went to the pay man’s window, took my pay, found my father, gave the money to him. Then we walked with the crowd who were heading for the field.

The teams warmed up. We waited longer than usual for Hellman, but he came at last. The glamorous visitors were with him, and Hellman carried a rolled-up blanket. Toward the bottom of the slope that led onto the rough field, he stopped and made a row of men shuffle closer together to make room for the blanket, politely gesturing to the couple from the Mercedes. They sat down and looked around attentively. Hellman marched onto the field, blew, raised his right arm. The teams took up position. The practice balls were kicked away.