“We suck,” Herbie says as we walk off the field. Me, Herbie, and Rico are trailing behind the others. We’re pissed off because we should have won this game, but we only managed a scoreless tie. I’m grumbling about Joey hogging the ball. Herbie says he cost us the win. Joey does all this talking about bringing the other players up to our level, but when game time comes he still tries to be a one-man team.
Wallenpaupack’s not in our league, so it doesn’t matter a whole lot, but we still should have beat them. Next week we start the second half of the league schedule, playing each team again, and we needed a win to gain some momentum.
Herbie yells toward the group walking ahead of us. “Hey, Joey,” he says. “Some of us were wondering. You’ve been playing soccer a long time. Did you ever have an assist?”
Joey turns and starts to speak, then realizes that Herbie’s busting his chops. “Screw you, Herbie,” he says.
“No, I mean it.”
“I had one last week.”
“Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. I thought you just lost control of the ball that time.”
Joey squints and stares at Herbie. He had at least three opportunities to set up goals today—he could have fed me twice—but he tried to take it in on his own every time. “I don’t think so,” he says.
Herbie says to me and Rico, “I figured he must have had one somewhere along the line.”
Joey stops and takes a step toward us. “What’d you say?”
Herbie keeps walking. “I said I figured you must have had one sometime in your career.”
“You got a problem, pal?”
Herbie stops and faces Joey. He’s got a smile on his face and I don’t think he’s looking for a fight. He knows how to get to Joey, though. “No problem. Just curious.”
“Screw you,” Joey says again.
“I just wondered, you know, with all your talent, if you ever tried to spread it around,” Herbie says. “You know, actually pass the ball instead of barging through people.”
“I got nine goals this year,” Joey says.
Herbie nods. He’s still grinning. “And one assist.”
“Yeah.”
“Just making sure I’ve got the count right.”
“You got it right.”
“Pretty good ratio,” Herbie says.
“I’d say so.”
Dusty has come over now, and most of the team is gathering around. “What’s your point, Herbie?” he says. Dusty plays forward, too, so he probably feels under attack.
“No point. Just thinking how much better we might be if we had an offense instead of a star.”
“Maybe you just wish you were the star, huh?”
“Maybe,” Herbie says. “Maybe not.”
Joey chimes in again. “There’s a reason we play offense, you know.”
“Yeah?”
“You think you get stuck playing goalie because you’re a good soccer player?”
Joey’s getting pissed, and Herbie can sense it. He’ll keep it up until Joey either starts swinging or walks away. I’m enjoying it—Joey deserves this—but I notice Coach walking toward us from the bus.
Joey makes another stupid-ass comment about the good athletes playing up front. “I’d like to see you run like we do, cigarette man,” he says to Herbie.
Herbie puts his hands over his heart and staggers backward. “God, what biting sarcasm,” he says. “I can’t take it.”
“Right, loser. You can’t.”
Coach has reached us now, but he doesn’t say anything. He just looks at Herbie, then at Joey, then at me. “Everybody get on the bus,” he finally says. “Except you, Herbie.”
We walk slowly to the bus; I can hear Coach yelling at Herbie about acting stupid. Joey’s glaring at me hard. I glare back.
“Nice new friend you got,” he says.
I just look away. Aren’t I allowed to have more than one friend? I take a seat by a window next to Rico and nobody says anything. We just look out at Coach and Herbie, back on the field. Herbie starts running laps. Coach walks over and gets on the bus and stares straight ahead. Herbie does five laps around the field, then walks to the bus, takes his time getting on, and sits in the seat in front of me. He turns and gives me a big grin as the bus pulls out of the parking lot.
Saturday night we all meet at Herbie’s bench—Rico, me, Hernandez, Herbie. The count is at seventy-six, but it’s slowed down considerably. The town has yielded most of its regulars already; the final candidates will be surprises.
It’s a dull night. There’s a party going on somewhere, but it’s mostly juniors and seniors. After a while Rico and Hernandez decide to walk over to the Mental Court for some hoops.
So it’s 10:30 and just me and Herbie are sitting there.
“Too early to go home,” I say.
“It’s always too early for that,” he says.
I say yeah, but then I start thinking about it. If I did go home I’d probably watch TV with my parents or hang in my room and read. It would be even duller than sitting here on the bench, but it wouldn’t be horrible. I get the feeling that it wouldn’t be quite the same at Herbie’s house.
“You ever go home?” I ask.
He gives me a puzzled look. “What, are you kidding?”
“No.”
“Yeah, I go home.”
I nod.
He sticks a cigarette between his lips and starts digging in his coat pocket for his lighter. “I try to see Pete as little as I can,” he says. Pete is his father.
“Yeah.” His father beats him up sometimes. Maybe his mother, too.
He gets the cigarette lit and blows a bluish stream of smoke straight up. “He’s a fine man.”
I just nod some more. Part of me wishes I could say I know how it is, say that my father is a son of a bitch, too, that he’s bitter and that he cuts me down and slaps me around and thinks I’m a loser. But none of that is true. Not in my case.
A car pulls up in front of the bench and stops. It’s my parents’ car, but Tommy is driving. Tony Terranova rolls down the passenger window and says, “Gentlemen.”
“Tony,” I say.
“Hi, guys,” says Shannon, who’s sitting between Tony and my brother in the front seat. She leans across Tony and says, “Seen Joey?”
“Hours ago,” I say. “I thought he was with you.”
“He was supposed to show up at Debbie’s,” she says. That’s the party house. Obviously Joey never got there. I don’t think Shannon’s all that distressed about it.
My brother gets out of the driver’s side, but the car is still running. He comes over to the bench. “What’s going on?” he says. He shakes hands with Herbie, who he hardly knows.
“Nothing,” I answer. “Party any good?”
“For a little while,” he says, gazing down Main Street. “I wasn’t into it.”
He notices that I’m looking at the car, trying to assess what’s going on with Shannon. Tommy turns to look at Turkey Hill, so he’s not facing the car, and he motions with his head for me to come around the other side of him.
“We’re just giving her a ride home,” he says quietly. “You wanna come?”
I shrug. “I guess.” I turn toward the bench and say, “Herbie, wanna get off that bench and cruise around a little?”
“Gee, I dunno,” he says. “It might throw off the balance of the universe if I abandon this spot.” He gets up, though, and reaches for the back door handle. He and I get into the backseat, and Tommy pulls onto the street.
We do a few loops of the town, not saying a whole lot. Shannon turns around and leans toward Herbie, slapping him on the knee. “Heard you and Joey almost got into it the other day,” she says, smiling.
“No big deal,” Herbie says. He puts up his fists and kind of rolls them around. “Just a little sparring, you know. A manly exchange of words.”
“Yeah, so I heard.”
“Just parrying back and forth,” Herbie says. “Two worthy opponents.”
She’s kneeling on the front seat now, turned completely toward us. She shakes her head and laughs. “You crack me up.”
We wind up driving all the way to Weston and back, just for the hell of it. We get doughnuts. It’s about 11:45 when we drop her off. Herbie gets out on Main Street and we drop Tony at his house. Then me and Tommy head for home.
“Nice girl,” he says after we’ve gone about two blocks.
“She’s fantastic,” I say, immediately wishing I hadn’t.
He smirks a little and nods slowly. His smile gets a little bigger.
“Shit,” I say, just to myself. Tommy punches me on the arm and turns up our street. But when we get to the house he keeps going.
He turns toward River Road and makes a left, past the cemetery and up the hill into farm country. “You gonna ask her out sometime?” he says.
I shrug. “She’s kind of … I don’t know. Joey’s like … you know.”
He tilts his head back and forth. “Joey didn’t even show up tonight,” he says.
“Did that piss her off?”
“Didn’t seem to.” Tommy looks like he’s thinking hard.
“Remember when I was a freshman and I had to beat Tony to make the varsity?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“I did beat him. He didn’t like it, but we stayed friends,” he says. “Better friends, even.”
I see the point he’s trying to make, but I don’t agree with it. “I think that’s different,” I say slowly.
He’s quiet for a moment. “Yeah,” he says. “It is.”
“She’s over my head anyway.”
“Is she?”
“I think so,” I say. “The thing is, she ought to be over Joey’s head, too.”
“You’re probably right. Thing is, Joey doesn’t think so.” He starts drumming with his fingers on the steering wheel. “Then again, maybe he does.”
I nod. Tommy pulls into a driveway and turns the car around. We don’t say much the rest of the way, but I feel okay. Not about Shannon, but about myself. Tommy doesn’t have all the answers, but he has more than I do. He sees my situation more clearly than I can.
You need people like that in your life.
Some night if you can’t sleep, get up and take a walk at three o’clock in the morning. Sneak out of the house without making a sound, and stick to back streets so you can duck into the shadows when a cop car goes by. Here are some things you might see if you stay out for an hour:
— Two doctors in green scrubs standing on the loading dock outside the hospital’s emergency room, smoking cigarettes.
— The skinny guy with funny teeth who runs the Chinese takeout place, in the driveway behind his restaurant, hosing down cabbages.
— Night-shift guys at Sturbridge Building Products, taking a coffee break in the parking lot.
— A prominent attorney walking an incontinent dog.
— Me.