Losers Take All (8 page)

“Could be,” I agreed, turning to face him. “How's your hand?”

His black eyes sharpened. “All healed up,” he answered softly. “By the way, we're pulling the plug on that C soccer team.”

“Why?” I asked.

“No coach,” he told me. “A team needs a faculty coach, and none of the teachers seem interested in cesspool soccer. To tell you the truth I can't blame them. But there are lots of other choices for you. Come talk to me in my office and we'll go over some options. Good stuff today, Jack. I'm sure it meant a lot to your dad and mom to have you out there.”

He gave me an extra-hard thump on the back with the same hand that had punched through the door, and then he was walking out to the center of the floor where the cheerleaders had finished their routine and was saying into his mic: “How about that, Fremont? Let's give it up for our lovely cheer girls!”

 

10

“This is a bad idea,” I warned Becca, as we locked our bikes up outside a sprawling, ugly brick five-story apartment building in the city of Hackensack. It was called Woodview Towers, but it was not towering, it had no view of woods, and the man we had just biked ten miles to see seemed to me to have less potential as a soccer coach than our seventy-seven-year-old school nurse.

“I ran it by him and he didn't say no,” Becca told me as we headed for the front entrance.

“That doesn't sound like an enthusiastic yes,” I pointed out. “And he's not exactly a sports coach kind of a guy.”

“Sometimes you remind me of the people who bashed your teeth,” she said. “Try not to pass judgments.”

“Live and let live is my motto,” I assured her. “But in school I once saw him reading a book and making notes while he walked down some stairs. He tripped on his own feet, tumbled down a whole flight, and nearly killed himself.”

“That could happen to anyone,” Becca said.

“Not to anyone else I've ever seen. He got up with a bloody nose and his busted glasses hanging off his face, but he was still holding on to the book.”

“I think that's sweet.”

“He'd nose-dived right in front of my gym class and everyone was laughing—except the few of us who were worried he'd broken his neck. But he dusted himself off like it was just another day in the life of a Latin teacher and walked off reading.”

“Well, maybe a guy who trips and falls and doesn't care if people laugh at him is exactly the kind of coach we need.”

We reached the main entrance to Woodview Towers, and Becca walked in through a stone archway ahead of me. She was wearing snug blue Lycra biking shorts and a yellow T-shirt from some horse show, and just watching her leaning forward on her bike with her legs pumping and her hair flying behind her had taken my breath away for a good part of the ten miles from Fremont to Hackensack. She seemed so free-spirited and happy that it was hard to imagine this was the same girl who'd had the panic attack in the barn.

She found a list of tenant names on the side wall near the locked front door. “Haskell,” she muttered, running her eyes down the list. “Here it is, Percy Haskell.”

“Percy?” I repeated dubiously.

“He told me he was named for Shelley,” she explained.

“For who?”

Becca gave me an exasperated look and rang the buzzer. “Don't play dumb. Percy won't understand it and I don't like it either.”

“I'm not playing dumb. Listen, he's a part-time teacher, he has no connection to our school or town besides teaching one course there twice a week, and he may be the most unathletic man I've ever seen in my life. I'm not being judgmental—I'm just saying that I don't see how this is going to help us with Muhldinger.”

“Hallo there, friend or foe?” a voice called down in a British accent.

“Friend,” Becca said into the mic. “It's Becca and Jack.”

A loud buzz sounded, and we pushed in and headed to the elevator.

“Friend or foe?” I repeated.

“I like the way he talks,” she told me. “He uses the language beautifully—he even writes his own poetry in verse. And part-time or not, he's technically on the faculty. If he wants to be our coach, then we have a faculty coach.”

“And why would he want to be our coach?” I asked her. “What's in it for him?”

“Good question,” she admitted. “But it won't hurt to try.”

We took the elevator to the fifth floor, and Percy Haskell was waiting for us in gray flannel pants and a purple polo shirt. He was several inches shorter than me and so thin I wondered if he had been ill. “Welcome,” he said, greeting Becca with a smile and then shaking my hand. “I don't think we've met.”

“Jack Logan,” I told him. “I take Spanish. But I hear you're a great teacher.”

“I wouldn't rely on my favorite student for an accurate opinion on that score,” he said with a laugh. He led us into his small apartment, and the door swung closed. It looked very solitary, like a jail cell or a hermit's cave. Besides an old bicycle and many well-thumbed books, there weren't much in the way of personal touches to indicate he had friends or a girlfriend or any kind of outside interest. I didn't see a computer or a TV or any electronics. I wondered how such a smart guy from England had ended up alone in a dingy one-bedroom apartment in Hackensack, with a job as thankless as part-time Latin teacher at our jock school.

“Tea?” he asked us.

“I'm fine with a glass of water,” I said.

“Me too,” Becca told him.

“Cold tap water it is then,” he said, “coming right up.”

He waved us into the living room. There was a couch and a table near the one window, which looked down at an auto parts store. Several old books with leather bindings sat on the table, some of them propped open. Wedged inside were file cards with notes written in tiny handwriting in different-colored ink.

He came in with two glasses of water and handed them out. “Sorry I don't have much in the way of snacks.” He began gathering up the file cards and books. “I was just doing a comparison of the differences between Livy's account of the Battle of Cannae and the way Polybius describes it,” he told us, as if we would know what he was talking about. Actually, Becca probably did. “I've always been keen on strategy and tactics in the Second Punic War. That's Hannibal, right there, by the way.” He pointed to a wall near the window where a poster from the British Museum was taped up. It was a photo of a warrior's face on an ancient coin. He looked out defiantly from beneath his helmet, glowering across a few thousand years at us. “Of course, nobody knows what he really looked like, but there are a few commonly accepted images…”

Percy dropped one of his books, and as he tried to grab it he knocked over a stack of file cards, then swatted one of the water glasses, which sailed through the air and shattered on the floor near the window. He hurried into the kitchen to get paper towels, and Becca and I got down on our hands and knees to gather up the fallen file cards.

“Quick,” I asked her. “When was the Second Punic War?”

She shrugged. “After the First Punic War?” And then she asked me: “Any idea where it was fought?”

“Punica?” I tried.

She grinned. “Punica?” I smiled back. She looked so cute beneath that table that I was trying to come up with the right strategy and tactics to go in for a first kiss, but Percy had returned from the kitchen with paper towels and was saying, “Frightfully sorry. Please don't go anywhere near the broken glass. I don't want the Second Punic War to cause any new casualties,” and he laughed at his own joke, a high-pitched warble that sounded like the call of some weird tropical bird.

In a few minutes the mess was all cleaned up, and the three of us were seated at the table. “So,” Percy said, “Becca explained that you two are thinking of starting a team. That's very enterprising of you.”

“We kind of have no choice,” I told him. “Our school—”

“With Muhldinger now in charge,” Becca cut in.

“Yes, he has certainly let the faculty know that he is sweeping in with lots of enthusiasm and a very new broom,” Percy added, and I wondered what kinds of e-mails Muhldinger had been sending to the teachers over the summer.

“Our school,” I continued, “has a new policy that all seniors have to join a sports team. Most of the teams are super serious and obsessed with winning, and we're trying to start a soccer team that isn't.”

“Which means,” Becca added quickly, “that it will be low-key and dedicated to everyone just having a good time.”

“Splendid,” Percy said. “I was never much of an athlete myself, and I took some ribbing from the other lads who were a bit more serious about their rugby. And they gave me a couple of hard knocks, too, along the way.” His voice held a note of bitterness, as if a few old schoolboy bruises were still healing.

I tried to imagine Percy playing rugby. I knew very little about the game except that it was like football without pads. This toothpick of a guy must have been smashed seven different ways.

“Yeah, that goes on at our school, also,” I told him. “I got some of my teeth cracked earlier this summer.”

“Sorry to hear it,” he said. “A friendly soccer team seems like an eminently sensible solution.” He smiled at us. “But I'm not sure how I fit in.”

“We need a coach,” Becca told him, wasting no words.

Percy looked back at her in surprise. “You want me to be a football coach?”

“Soccer coach,” she corrected him.

“Your soccer is my football. And I'm touched that you would peregrinate all the way to Hackensack to ask me. But I'm afraid I wouldn't make a very good coach.”

“No problem,” I told him, standing up. “Thanks for hearing us out.”

“We're not looking for a good coach,” Becca said, remaining in her chair. “I won't say we're looking for a bad coach, but what we're definitely looking for is a nice person who won't make us run wind sprints or do push-ups.”

“He already said no,” I pointed out.

But Becca didn't give up easily. “Look, Percy … I mean, Mr. Haskell…”

“Percy is fine outside of school,” he told her.

“Look, Percy, we wouldn't be asking you if there was anyone else willing to do it,” she said. “I don't want to put pressure on you, but you're our last hope. And there is a little money as a coaching salary. I think it's a thousand dollars for the season. I know you hate jocks as much as I do, it's a big time commitment, and the weather's gonna get cold…”

“You're not doing a good job of selling me on this, Becca,” he told her.

“But we want to have a very different team than the others. We're getting together a really nice group, and we won't care if we win or we lose. So there won't be any pressure—just fun. Sometimes it's good to try something new.”

He looked thoughtful. “Yes, sometimes it is,” he agreed. He glanced at me. “Anything to add?”

“No,” I said. “Except that maybe you could use some strategy and tactics from the Second Punic War. We're going to need all the help we can get.”

I had meant this as a joke, but he seemed to take it seriously. “I'm not sure a double envelopment will work on a football pitch … sorry, a soccer field. Let me think this over for a moment.”

He folded his hands behind his neck and began to pace back and forth the full length of his apartment, as if forgetting that we were even there. I glanced at Becca, who was also watching him pace. He was more than a little nutty, but I already sort of liked him and also felt sorry for him. He reminded me of a trapped animal in this small apartment, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that we were trying to trap him another way.

I was absolutely positive he would never in a million years leave his Latin classics to commit to coaching a Fremont soccer team, and I couldn't blame him. It had been a crazy idea from the start.

Suddenly he stopped pacing, unknitted his hands, and looked at us. “A bit of fun wouldn't hurt. Count me in,” he said decisively, jabbing the air with his index finger and knocking over a lamp, which fell on the carpet but somehow didn't break. “Let's hitch up our shorts and give it a run.” Which I think was his peculiar way of saying: “Let's just go for it.”

 

11

Given that I had never had a girlfriend before, I had also never brought a girlfriend home before, and I was pretty nervous. But almost from the moment Becca walked in the door, she hit it off with my mom. She recognized Becca from the library, they got into a discussion about their favorite writers, and it turned out they had half a dozen in common.

I took her on a quick tour of the house, and Dad was in the family room watching a mixed martial arts fight. He clicked it off as soon as she walked in and stood to shake her hand. I wasn't sure if she'd seen the fight, but I did notice her glance at our trophy case and I knew she was probably thinking that we were a bunch of total sports wackos. She did her best to pretend to look impressed by the trophies, and she asked Dad about the biggest one. He explained he had gotten it for being the best offensive player in his senior year.

“The best in the league?” she guessed. “In the county?”

“In the whole state of New Jersey,” I bragged from the doorway.

“Wow,” she said, looking at the three-foot silver cup. “That's really something.”

“It was a weak year,” Dad said modestly. “I'd better go fire up the grill.”

We ate outside on the back patio. August was giving way to September and there was a chill in the air with a 100 percent chance of school in a few days. At first our conversation seemed awkward. My father kept asking Becca about her parents, which was perfectly reasonable except that she didn't seem inclined to talk about them. I had a pretty good idea why she kept trying to change the subject, and I felt a little uncomfortable. But then a strange thing happened—my dad and Becca hit it off over fishing.