War and Watermelon

The cheerleaders are practicing at the same time we are today, so we keep looking over at them. Most of them have boyfriends on the team.

“We should sleep out soon,” says Tony, standing behind me. We’re in line for a pass-catching drill.

We do that a few times every summer, pitching a tent in the yard and stuffing our faces with candy all night. Last time, he brought a cigar from his father’s stash, and we both nearly puked after taking a few puffs.

The cheerleaders are doing their basic introductory cheer, going through the names of the players. I know they do a cheer for every guy on the team, and that the names come up alphabetically, but I still get kind of a chill when I hear Stephie Jungerman doing my name. Tony smacks me on the arm and I blush, listening to Stephie.

As it turns out, it’s my turn to run a pass route the second the cheer ends. I take four quick steps, make a juke to the left, then turn to the right for the ball.

Ferrante’s thrown it way inside, and I reach back for it. It smacks off my shoulder pad and rolls to the dirt.

I go to pick it up and I knock it with my foot, and it wobbles about five yards away.

“She got to ya, huh?” Tony says as he gets in place behind me. He made a great catch, tipping an overthrow and diving for it.

“No way,” I say. I glance over at Stephie, sixty yards away. “Like she even knows who I am.”

“Nice math,” Tony says. “They only have four or five names each.”

It’s true that none of the cheerleaders would even know who I am. I don’t even know if I know who I am.

I finally get a chance to play some offense near the end of the scrimmage session, going in at tailback. Tony’s at fullback. Joey Salinardi is taking the snaps; he’s a year younger and probably won’t play much in the games unless Ferrante gets hurt or we have some blowouts.

Coach Epstein is calling the plays. He drives a delivery truck for Wonder Bread, so he starts his days even earlier than my dad, which makes him available for our practices at three thirty.

“Okay, mini-backs, let’s move the ball,” Coach says, hands on his knees and froth in the corners of his mouth. “Forty-two on two.”

We clap our hands, break the huddle, and line up. Forty-two means a handoff to me between the center and the right guard. I’ll be following Tony through the hole, if there is one.

I try to stay steady, not looking toward the hole. Joey takes the snap and immediately drops the ball. It takes an odd bounce right off its tip. Tony dives on it and covers it up.

Coach shakes his head as we huddle up. “You gotta have the ball before you try to give it away, Joey. Run it again. On three.”

I’m less tense already. Somebody else screwed up before I got the chance to.

Joey fakes to Tony and I come charging up, head down, wrapping my arms around the ball. Tony gets knocked backward and I dodge so he’ll miss me. There’s no place to run. I cut to my right and am met head-on by Magrini. I hug the ball as I go down.

“Where’s my blockers?” Coach says. Brian Finken is at right guard, and he got swamped. “Thirty-one this time.” That’s Tony to the other side.

“I don’t know. Can you?” Coach smiles. “Let’s keep it on the ground. Forty-six pitch.” He looks at me and nods, wiping his mouth with his wrist, then turns to Joey. “Fake it to Tony going off the other guard first.”

The fake to Tony pulls the defense in that direction, and Joey flips the ball to me on the run. Magrini’s already in the backfield, but I dodge inside him and sprint past the line of scrimmage. The only guy in front of me is Kenny Esposito, playing cornerback.

I cut toward the sideline, running as hard as I can, and race upfield. Esposito’s got an angle on me and brings me down hard, but I pop right up and jog back to the huddle.

My breath is coming in short little bursts, and my heart is beating like crazy. Salinardi whacks my helmet and says, “Nice run!”

Coach calls another handoff to Tony. As we break the huddle, I hear Tony whispering, “Rah rah Brody Winslow!”

“Honky Tonk Women” has taken over the number-one spot on the charts, so they’re playing it at least twice an hour. I can agree with that, but here’s my own top five for the week:

• “Get Together” (meaningful)

• “A Boy Named Sue” (hilarious)

• “Honky Tonk Women” (rocking)

• “Sweet Caroline” (mellow)

• “In the Year 2525” (eeeerie)

These are the worst:

• “Crystal Blue Persuasion” (nauseating)

• “Sugar, Sugar” (I hate chewing bubblegum and I hate listening to it.)

• “Little Woman” (Don’t even ask.)

I couldn’t sleep even if I wanted to. It’s humid, but that’s not it. I keep thinking about that run, the way the hole opened up and I saw the entire field in front of me. How I raced past the defenders and would have scored if Esposito hadn’t had the perfect angle.

It feels like my whole life’s about to change. Moving into junior high is like stepping out of childhood, whether you want to or not. And I keep worrying about how much longer my brother will be around, and maybe my father, too, and wondering why they can’t see eye to eye about anything this summer.

There’s enough light coming in from the streetlight that I can study the cracks on my ceiling. It’s like looking at cloud formations. There’s one pattern that looks like a baby alligator sitting on the back of a bigger alligator. You have to use some imagination to see it, but it’s there.

There’s another spot that looks like a football player stretching to catch the ball. That one’s a lot more abstract than the alligators. It never dawned on me that it looked like a football player until I saw some paintings in a magazine a few years ago.

See, Ryan has always been a huge Giants fan. He and my father watch every away game on TV and listen to the home games on the radio. Ryan has kept a Giants scrapbook for years. It’s mostly clippings from sports magazines, but he also has some old stuff like game programs from the 1940s that belonged to my father’s father.

Anyway, one day when I was seven, I found a magazine on the counter and it had paintings of some of the Giants. It wasn’t a sports magazine; it was Time or Life or something like that. The paintings weren’t very detailed—just bright colors and wide strokes—but they looked so active.

I figured Ryan would love to have them for his scrapbook, so I cut them out. I did a very crappy job of it, too.

A while later I’m in my room and I hear Ryan yell, “Who cut up my magazine?”

I brought the pictures downstairs and said, “I cut out the Giants for you.”

“Oh,” he said. I could tell he was fighting back something—tears or anger, maybe—but he stayed quiet for a minute. Then he took the pictures and went up to his room.

Later he called me over and showed me how he’d retrimmed the pictures and carefully pasted them in the scrapbook. “They look even better here than they did in the magazine,” he said.

They didn’t, and we both knew it. But the thing is, he didn’t get mad at me. At least, he didn’t show me that he was mad. He’s never said a harsh word to me. Not once in my entire life.