Keeper (12 page)

And that’s when the trouble started. Augustino was the captain of our side that afternoon and was standing at the center spot with his foot on the ball, waiting for Hellman to signal the start of the game. But before that could happen, Hellman was distracted by some sort of problem in the crowd. The men from Rio Salado had all sat together in the same place, of course, but now our supporters, the men from the camp, were yelling and screaming at them and making wild gestures toward the pitch. The Rio Salado men were laughing, making ‘sit down’ gestures back. The Loggers’ supporters were doing the same thing. A few bottles were thrown. Hellman ran across to the troubled area of the crowd. At the same time, a number of our players gathered around Augustino.

By now, I had walked out of the goal to stand beside one of my defenders.

‘What’s going on?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Something to do with that guy, there. You see him? The white guy, standing on the center circle?’

I saw him. He was pale skinned and fair haired. He looked European. German, maybe, and old, for a player. At least thirty. He must have known that the fuss, the holdup, was all about him, but he appeared quite unconcerned. He ran on the spot, he stretched, he put his hand on his left foot and then his right. And all the time he kept his eyes fixed on me.

I put my hand on my defender’s shoulder. ‘Do me a favor,’ I said. ‘Go up there and find out what’s going on.’

I watched him run up the field and get lost in the mass of players from both sides who had now surrounded Hellman. Within thirty seconds, Hellman’s whistle was screeching, and the knot of bodies around him reluctantly untied itself. Now I could see Hellman; he was making two-arm gestures to both teams: settle down, let’s play the game, shut up. I looked across at where the elegant strangers were sitting on their blanket. They looked completely relaxed about what was going on, as if it was exactly what they had expected. The woman was writing in a small notebook. The man had taken off his gleaming jacket, folded it neatly, and placed it beside him. He too was looking closely at me.

My defender jogged back.

‘Well?’

‘That pale guy,’ he said. ‘He’s what it’s all about. He’s from the Rio Salado camp. The Loggers brought him in. Augustino and the others are raising hell because he’s not from here. Hellman says it doesn’t matter, he’s a logger, and one logger is the same as another.’

‘So who is he?’ I said, watching the strange player watching me.

My defender shrugged. ‘They are calling him El Ladron,’ he said. ‘The Thief.’”

E
L
GATO LOOKED
up at Faustino. “Mean anything to you?” he said. “El Ladron? The Thief?”

Paul Faustino put his hands behind his head and gazed at the ceiling. He liked this sort of thing, the testing of useless knowledge. He was seriously addicted to trivia quiz shows on TV.

“Let me see,” he said. “I can think of three players called Ladron. One of them was Spanish. Played for Real, I think. Then there is that Roberto Something-Something, the Mexican.”

“That’s two,” El Gato said. “You said three.”

“Yeah. The other one came from Sweden originally. Or his parents did.” Faustino tapped his forefinger rapidly against the side of his head, as if his memory could be jogged from the outside. Which it could, apparently, because with a click of his fingers he said, “Larsson. That was it. He played here, years ago, for Sporting Club. An old-fashioned center forward, tough. A goal poacher. I never saw him play, though. He was expected to be tapped for the national team, I seem to remember. Then something happened, and he vanished from the scene. An injury, was it?”

“Not to himself, Paul,” said Gato. “He half killed a goalie in a Cup game, and after that he lost his nerve and no one would touch him. He was transferred to some Junior League club up north.”

“And it was Larsson, this mystery player at the camp? What the hell was he doing there?”

Gato smiled. “Apparently, he’d quit professional soccer and joined the logging company his father worked for. He’d ended up at the Rio Salado camp. He was their star player. And our loggers had brought him in to deal with me, to take me out of the game. That’s what we all thought, anyway. That was what our supporters thought, for sure. That’s why they were going crazy. And that’s why Augustino ran twenty yards back toward me and pointed to his eyes with one hand and to Larsson with the other. He was saying, ‘Watch that guy; he’s out to get you!’

But if the crowd was expecting fireworks, it didn’t get them. Not at first. In the first half, our forwards seemed hypnotized, forever drifting back into our own half. They were expecting the battle to be fought between El Ladron and me, and they were behaving like spectators. Augustino was going crazy on them — every time he won the ball, he had to hold it up to wait for support.

And so the Loggers were able to run the game. I had to work much harder than in the earlier games. And, yes, Larsson made life very difficult for me. He was a short-range player, you know? Very quick over short distances — ten, fifteen yards. And he never seemed farther away from me than that. He deserved his nickname — he was there to make confusion and then steal goals from half-chances. And he never avoided tackles. He just went through them somehow, as if he was doing the tackling, not being tackled. He was always onto me, always between me and the ball, so that I had to get around him or above him. If I got down to a low shot, I would look up and see his feet close to my face. When the Loggers won corners, Larsson would not look for a space in which to receive the ball. Instead, he came in close among my defenders, messing up their marking and their concentration. He was constantly shoved, pulled at, body-checked, but he never went down, never retaliated. It was as if he didn’t even notice. He was there to crowd me, to rattle me, and nothing else mattered to him. He was the first professional I had played against, and I struggled to deal with him.

So I had to do a different kind of goalkeeping. With all the play in my own half, under attack all the time, there was not much point in trying to read the game or launch counterattacks. I had to make a crazy number of reflex saves from close-range efforts by Larsson, as well as from some wild deflections and slices. I seemed to be on the ground for most of the first forty-five minutes. When I wasn’t, I was twitching in the goalmouth like a spider when rain strikes its web. Also, I was scared. The feeling among the supporters and the players had got to me: I was waiting for El Ladron to damage me.

In fact, he was standing over me when Hellman blew halftime, and I was lying in the dirt hugging the ball, trying to make myself as small as possible. Then Larsson pulled on my arm to help me to my feet, and I found myself face to face with him. To my surprise, he winked at me; then he turned away and jogged off to join the rest of his team at the center spot. I realized something: Larsson hadn’t given away a single free kick. He’d been in my face the whole time, but he hadn’t actually fouled me once. What was going on? Was he biding his time? Were his instructions to cut me down during the second half? Was that what his wink was telling me?

‘You did nothing to prepare me for this,’ I said aloud. If I expected a reply from the Keeper, I didn’t get one.

Augustino burned the team’s ears at halftime, and we played with much more spirit in the second period. Larsson didn’t see much of the ball for the first fifteen minutes or so, but was always making little runs, challenging defenders, chasing the ball, running at me. He had a lot of energy for an old man. Then Hellman gave a free kick to the Loggers just outside the box, about twenty yards out and just to my right. I screamed at my defenders and managed to get them into a wall in the right place. But they didn’t link arms, and I watched helplessly as Larsson stole around the back of the wall and pushed his way into it from behind. The defender on the end of the wall was shoved sideways, blocking my view of the kick taker just as he shot. My best guess was that when the ball came around the wall, it would be heading for the top-left corner of my goal, and I launched myself sideways into the air. I’d guessed right, but one of my defenders made a heroic attempt to head the ball away. It struck him on the side of his face and ricocheted off course back toward my right. I was beaten, really, but somehow managed to hang in the air long enough to fling my right arm out and palm the ball over the bar with a desperate scooping movement. I crashed heavily down onto the hard earth, not sure if the roaring I could hear was coming from the crowd or from inside my own head. Someone helped me up. It was Larsson. He looked closely at me, smiling slightly, and tipped his pale head to one side as if to ask if I was okay. And that gesture changed the way I felt about him. He wasn’t there to hurt me; he wasn’t a hired assassin. He was all right.

I’d been conned. That caring gesture was just a tactic to put me off my guard, and for the last quarter of the game El Ladron hassled and jostled me, shoved me, grabbed my shirt, leaned into me; his face was as blank as a whitewashed wall. I lost the thread of the game; I was aware of him and only him: where he was, what he was going to do next. I was beginning to lose control of my goalmouth, too, because all I could do was focus on Larsson, on how to avoid him, how to defeat him.

A cross came in from my left, and it would have been an easy one for me to cut out. Except that Larsson stood on my foot as soon as I began to move out to it, and I fell on my face in the dirt. Hellman didn’t blow for the foul. The ball went harmlessly out of play. I got to my feet, and a main fuse went bang in my brain. I screamed at Hellman, but he simply ran backward away up the field, signaling me to shut up and take the goal kick. I turned on Larsson, stalked toward him where he stood on the edge of the area. My fists were clenched, and it was as if a red fog closed in around everything except his bland, expressionless, punchable face.

Then the Keeper spoke to me. A clear, calm voice from somewhere behind me spoke straight into my skull. I can’t remember the words he spoke. Perhaps he didn’t use words. But his voice, and his presence, damped down the fire in me and blew the fog from my vision. It was as if a cooler blood filled my veins.

I stopped, turned. I was certain that I would see him there behind the net, shadow faced, arms folded, invisible. But all I saw was a grinning logger who had come out of the crowd and put the ball down for the goal kick. There was now an enormous noise coming from the spectators, a noise like a wave that threatened to pile down on me and crush me. I walked back to the goal line and held on to the post for a second, steadying my breathing. The anger that had filled me became something small and hot and red, something I could pluck out and throw away. I ran onto the ball and drove it upfield: a long, long kick that carried my fury away with it. I felt a wonderful coolness and calm wash over me. I had won. I was back in control. Larsson could not get to me.

Except that he did. Got to me and got past me, and in the last minutes of the game. After he’d brought me down, he stayed outside my area, hardly bothering to run, not trying to lose his markers. He looked tired to me, and once or twice he bent over with his hands on his knees as if he were short of breath. Then he wandered away from the center out onto the Loggers’ right wing, as if declaring that he had nothing more to add to the game. So I relaxed, and that was stupid. When one of the Loggers lashed in a clumsy cross from their left wing, a cross that went over the heads of their forwards and bounced toward my arms, I took a leisurely pace toward the ball and waited for it. That’s when Larsson, the Thief, came out of nowhere and earned his nickname. He arrived at great speed from my left, went past my amazed left back, who was watching the ball, leaped into its path with his arms high in the air, took it on his chest, and turned it into the bottom-right corner of my goal. A goal worthy of the great Diego Maradona himself — a goal made of nothing. I put my hands over my face; then, as a roar like the ocean washed around me, I put them over my ears.

On the ride home, my father kept his arm around my shoulders. He and the other men spoke at length about the great save I had made from the deflected free kick. It meant little to me. I had tasted defeat for the first time, and it was sour.”

“L
ATER
, I
SAT
with my father and my sister at the table outside the front of the house while my mother and grandmother cooked the Saturday evening dinner. The smell of chicken boiled with sweet peppers and chili drifted out into the dusk. My sister was weaving her doll’s hair into ridiculous styles; my father was reading the weekly newspaper and drinking beer. I played the afternoon’s game over in my head while I watched a fat full moon rise over the trees. From the forest, frogs were calling, trilling like a thousand distant telephones. We all looked up when we heard the sound of a car; traffic on the road was unusual at this time. We saw the lights as they passed the end of our track; then the brake lights flared and the engine paused. We heard the vehicle reversing, turning. The pepper tree and the corner of the house were bathed in light for a moment and then returned to darkness. The scrunch of tires on gravel. Doors slamming.

My father got up and walked around the corner of the house to investigate. Almost at once he reappeared. He was holding his hands out in front of him, and they were making frantic little ‘Get up!’ gestures. His eyes were swiveling like a frightened pony’s. It was as if he had become some sort of mad person just by walking around the corner. I stood up and was amazed to see that the next person to appear was the movie star woman, now wearing a shining leather jacket over her jungle costume. Then the elegant man with the mustache. Then Hellman, dressed in smart jeans and a sweater. I did not recognize the fourth person at first. He looked a little like a monk, in a big, loose gray sweatshirt with a hood. But as he came into the light he pulled this hood away from his face, which was pale, gray-eyed, smiling. It was Larsson. I just froze, my mouth hanging open. I must have looked like the village idiot.