Two-Minute Drill (2 page)

Scott smiled for the first time since school had let out. Maybe the first time since he’d showed up at Bloomfield South on Monday morning. “I don’t think he was acting,” he said.

Now it was Chris’s turn to smile. “He’s actually not such a bad guy,” he said.

“Could’ve fooled me.”

Chris said, “It’s just that the only thing he’s really good at is knocking people down, like in football. And sometimes he forgets the game’s over. Or hasn’t started yet.”

Then, as if he’d remembered something, Chris stuck out his hand.

“I’m Chris,” he said.

It felt funny, and Scott was sure it looked funny, a couple of sixth-graders shaking hands, but they did it.

“I know who you are,” Scott said.

“And I know who you are,” Chris said. “The smartest kid in our class.”

“No way.”

“Way,” Chris said. “Like
way
the smartest. I watch you in class sometimes when somebody else is answering, and I can just tell you know the answer.”

Scott said, “Maybe that makes you the smart one.”

Chris gave him a funny look.

Just then the bus line finally started to move. Scott said he’d better get going, thanked Chris one last time.

“Dolan won’t bother you anymore,” Chris said.

“I wish.”

Chris grinned. “You’re cool now,” the coolest kid in their class said. “I got you.”

“Well . . . cool,” Scott said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

He started to walk toward the bus, and Chris walked with him, saying, “Hey, maybe we could hang out sometime, or whatever.”

“Yeah,” Scott said, “anytime.”

He said it like it was no big deal, but what he really wanted to do was yell “Yeah!” and pump his fist windmill-style, the way Tiger Woods did after he sank a big putt in
Tiger Woods PGA Tour ’07.

“See you tomorrow then,” Chris said.

“Yeah,” Scott said again.

He had to keep himself from running up the steps to bus number three.

Flying.

Just like that, he had a friend.

His mom was waiting for him when he got home.

This was the third time they had moved in the past five years. His dad worked as a salesman for Titleist golf balls, and the more he sold, the bigger his job seemed to get. Every time it got bigger, they moved.

But no matter where they were living, one thing hadn’t changed:

Scott Parry couldn’t think of a day in his entire life when he’d walked into whatever house they were living in and his mom hadn’t been there.

And ever since they’d gotten Casey, his golden retriever, as a pup two years ago, Casey was right there with her.

It was Casey who greeted him first today, jumping on him the minute he came through the front door, as if to say,
Where have you been all day?

His mom was right behind, asking how school had gone, the way she did every day, the way she probably would until he stopped being the new kid.

Whenever that was.

Usually he’d just tell her fine and go straight to the cookies. But today he surprised her.

“Crazy,” he said.

“Good crazy or bad crazy?” His mom was small, the way he was, and smart about practically everything. If that wasn’t enough, people said Scott looked like her, too.

They were in the kitchen. It wasn’t a special occasion that Scott could think of, but there on the table was what she called her Amazing Chocolate Cake.

“Both,” Scott said, and then told her everything that had happened with Jimmy and Casey’s picture and Chris Conlan.

“You’ve mentioned this Chris before,” she said, “right?”

“Mom,” he said, “he’s the
man.
”

“And he stood up for you this way in front of all the other kids?”

“Like I said, crazy, right?”

“Doing the right thing is never crazy,” his mom said. “Young Mr. Conlan doing what he did, well, that just says to me if he hadn’t, that would have been crazy.”

“Mom,” he said, “you’re the brain around here.”

She smiled at him. “Don’t tell your father.”

“Maybe it’s going to be okay at this school after all,” Scott said.

He was already tearing into the huge piece of Amazing Chocolate Cake she’d cut for him. When he looked up, she was still smiling at him.

“You think?” she said.

Then she said, “You know, if you want, I could call Chris’s mom . . .”

“No,” Scott said. “
No, no, no.
”

“A mouthful of cake and a mouthful of no,” she said.

“No,” he said.

“Sorry,” she said. “Got carried away there.”

“Runaway Mom,” Scott said.

“Leaving the kitchen now,” she said, backing away. “You and Case going out to play ball when you finish eating?”

Scott smiled at her now. “If the dog doesn’t practice,” he said, “how’s he going to get better at football?”

“You make a good point,” she said, smiling.

There were woods behind their house and a pond on the other side of the woods. But between the trees and the water was a small clearing that Scott’s dad made sure was mowed with the rest of their lawn.

“Got to take good care of your field of dreams,” his dad would say.

It
was
Scott Parry’s field of dreams.

This was where he would go with Casey and pretend he was a football player.

That he was one of the guys.

 

His dad had measured out the distances, painted an outline for an end zone, painted perfectly straight yard lines across the field that stretched out thirty yards. He’d even used the kind of chalk roller they used on tennis courts and baseball fields, so that Scott could make the lines white again when they started to fade.

The best part was at the back of the end zone. That’s where the goalposts were, the ones his dad had put up himself, and the big old tire hanging from the crossbar.

The tire was Scott’s target.

He would drop back and pretend he was throwing from the pocket. Or he’d roll out to his left or right, pretend he was being chased by some crazed guys on defense—a whole gang of Jimmy Dolans—and give himself points if one of his passes connected anyplace on the tire.

But the biggest victory, the pretend-the-crowd-goes-wild victory, was reserved for when he somehow threw the ball through the opening without touching anything, like a game-winning swish in basketball as the clock runs out. It didn’t happen very often, but Scott kept trying. He blamed his lack of accuracy on the size of his hands. They were too small to get a good grip on the ball or to throw a tight spiral except by accident.

He kept practicing, anyway.

“It’s what you do in sports, whether you’re the star of the team or somebody at the end of the bench,” his dad always told him. “You keep trying.”

“Even if I grow,” Scott would say to his dad sometimes, “I’ll never be as good at football as you were.”

“Be as good as
you
can be, kiddo,” his dad would say, “and I’ll be one happy guy.”

Scott would throw until his arm got tired, and Casey, who never got tired, would keep tearing after the ball and bringing it back to him, holding it by one of the seams that had come loose.

And then it was time for Scott Parry to get around to the only thing he was really good at in football.

He’d kick.

He might not have the hands, or the arm, or the size.

But Scott Parry could really kick.

He’d start at the ten-yard line, which meant a twenty-yard kick, because the goalposts were ten yards deep in the back of the end zone, just like in real football, and put the ball down on the practice tee he always brought out here with him. He’d swing his leg, try to kick the ball through the uprights, pretending as hard as he could now, pretending that time was running out and the game was on the line.

Pretending that he was the best and most famous placekicker in the National Football League.

Sometimes he would put the ball on his plastic tee and pretend there were only a few seconds left in the Super Bowl.

“So it has come down to this,” he’d say, like he wasn’t just trying to win the game, but announce it on TV at the same time. “The whole season is on the foot of Scott Parry.”

He’d take two steps back from the ball, then one long step to the left of it, take a deep breath. Then he’d stride forward and kick with everything he had, following through the way the kickers on TV did. Sometimes he’d see how many he could make in a row from this distance, his all-time record being six.

But no matter how many he made in a row, no matter how dark it was getting or close to dinner, Scott still wasn’t done for the day.

Always saving the best until last.

He had been watching with his dad the day Doug Flutie of the Patriots had made the first dropkick in the NFL in what the announcers said was like a hundred years or something. It was the last game of Flutie’s long career. Scott’s dad, who’d played football at Boston College with Flutie, explained how great Flutie had been when he’d played quarterback for BC, even though he was only listed at five-nine and was really shorter than that. How he’d won the Heisman Trophy, how he’d thrown one of the most famous touchdown passes in all football history against the University of Miami when he was a senior. After that, according to Scott’s dad, Flutie had spent more than twenty years in pro football, in just about every league there was. Even the one in Canada.

Now Flutie was about to retire. And because it was his last game, his coach had let him try to drop-kick an extra point. It turned out Flutie loved football history almost as much as he loved playing. He knew that guys used to drop-kick all the time in the old days and had taught himself how to do it. Not only taught himself how, but gotten really good at it.

So Bill Belichick, the Patriots coach, put him in at the end of a game against the Dolphins, and Flutie drop-kicked the extra point right through. And even though that point didn’t win any championships for the Patriots, his teammates had acted as if it had. So had the people in the stands that day.

“They said he was too small his whole career,” Scott’s dad said. “But every time anybody ever gave him a fair chance, he played as big as anybody on the field.”

That was the biggest dream of all for Scott, down here behind his house, in his secret place between the woods and the water:

Someday he was going to get the chance to do something big in football.

Chris Conlan came over on Saturday morning and brought his dog with him.

Scott hadn’t asked what kind of dog it was that day when Chris had said pictures didn’t do him justice. But in his head, he’d pictured a dog as big as Casey. Maybe a big old Lab, something like that.

It wasn’t a Lab.

Wasn’t even close.

The dog’s name was Brett, Chris said, for Brett Favre, his all-time favorite quarterback.

Brett was a black-and-tan Norwich terrier.

“Wow, he’s small,” Scott said when Chris came walking through the front door with Brett under his arm, carrying him the way he would a schoolbook.

Chris grinned and put a finger to his lips.

“Shhhh,” he said. “He
thinks
he’s big.”

But you had to say one thing for Brett: What he lacked in size, he made up for in speed. As soon as he was on the ground, he and Casey began tearing through every downstairs room in the house. Sometimes Casey was the one doing the chasing, sometimes Brett. Every few minutes, Casey would stop, lie down panting, tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth, and Brett would jump on his back.

The first time he did it, Chris said, “He looks like a jockey riding a horse.”

“Or Stuart Little riding one,” Scott said.

Right then the two dogs went tearing off again, like they were already best friends.

It wasn’t long before Scott’s mom pointed to them and said, “Outside. Now. Boys and dogs.”

Scott couldn’t wait to show Chris his field, anyway.

“Follow me,” Scott said as they made their way through his backyard, “there’s something you need to see.”

When they came through the trees, the dogs already running ahead of them, Chris spotted the goalposts.

“This,” he said, “is mad crazy.”

Scott said, “Welcome to Parry Field.”

Chris took Scott’s football out of his hands and, without even warming up or looking as if he were putting any effort into it, threw a perfect spiral from where they were standing that nearly clipped the top of one of the uprights.

“That throw didn’t exactly stink,” Scott said.

“Whatever,” Chris said. “Who does this field belong to?”

“Me.”

“This is . . .
yours
?”

“Mine and Case’s,” he said. “And my dad’s on weekends. You’re the first . . . guy I’ve brought here.”

He wanted to say “friend.” But he stopped himself, not wanting to scare Chris the very first time they were hanging out together. Besides, he’d always thought that being friends wasn’t something you talked about, it was something you just knew.

Something that just
was.

“We gotta get some other guys from school back here as soon as possible,” Chris said, his voice excited. “Have you had any games yet?”

“I don’t know anybody yet,” Scott said.

“Well, that’s gonna change now,” Chris said, like it was easy.

Maybe everything came easy to him, even being friends.

They had been so busy talking that Chris hadn’t noticed Casey standing next to him, the football hanging from his mouth.

“He returned the ball?” Chris said.

Scott nodded.

Chris said, “Tell me he doesn’t do that every time somebody chucks it somewhere.”

“Pretty much,” Scott said. “Unless he gets distracted by a squirrel or a rabbit. It’s a good deal, if you don’t mind a little drool.”