Compulsion (16 page)
Authors: Heidi Ayarbe
We’re all stuck.
The spiders will go away.
I scratch my neck.
Luc claps me on the back and says, “Shit, M&M. Enough Dr. Phil
.
Just forget about it. I think this game is getting to my head too much.” He practically jumps out of the car. I watch him through the curved windshield. He crunches through the last of the leaf piles on the street like a little kid. He twirls his key chain around his finger and stomps through the gutter, twigs snapping underneath.
Luc returns to the car, tapping the car hood. He rings his thumb and forefinger around his nose. “
Marica
,” he mouths, and grins.
“Assmunch.” I ease out of the car, then close the door, shutting the truth inside.
Saturday, 10:23 a.m.
Ten twenty-three. One times two is two plus three is five. OK.
We walk up Coach’s porch, a tricycle and sand toys scattered everywhere. His wife opens the door and lets us in. The table looks like it was attacked by mad dogs, but she leads us to the kitchen to plates piled high with fruit and wheat toast, scrambled egg whites, and orange juice. “There’s more,” she says, and smiles.
Coach’s daughters hide behind her.
The guys are playing Pro Evolution Wii soccer. Diaz says, “Dude, Martin, when can we play you on the screen?”
I pretend not to notice Luc flinching and turn to him. “Camacho,” I say, “only with you on defense, man,” and pretend to give him a big kiss on the ass.
“Ahh, shit.
Que joto
,” Diaz says, and rolls his eyes.
“Hey!” Coach hollers. I didn’t even see him sitting in the back corner, holding his rosary. The beads click together when he makes a fist. “Watch your language.”
Diaz nods and says,
“Sí, señor.”
The room is blanketed in silence. Coach’s wife comes in and discreetly covers her nose with a Kleenex. I inhale. There’s nothing smellier than fifteen nervous, sweaty guys who haven’t jacked off for the last twelve hours. It’s like smelling live aggression. I wonder how we can stand each other.
She says a prayer and sends us on our way. We pile into the cars and drive to school, heaving our bags to the locker room.
I put my earplugs in and crank up Tiger Army’s “Ghosts of Memory”:
This place is poison to my soul
Can’t take much more, I’m losing control
I’m haunted.
Yeah. That’s it.
Focus.
I lose myself to the beat of the music, letting the words skip across my consciousness. I sit on the bench closest to the door, pulling on my left sock, then shin guard. Right sock, then shin guard. I put on my shoes and leave them untied, pulling out the laces so they’ll brush the ground. Luc’s listening to 3 Pesos. Everybody plugs in.
In here I’m normal. In here it’s fine to count, to do the routines, because in here everybody knows the team needs them, and everybody has their own: Kalleres changes his laces out every game. Grundy sleeps with his cleats on the night before. Keller hasn’t shaved since the season began.
Here, it’s all okay.
The locker room has the familiar musty-towel smell mixed with lemon-scent cleaning detergent and spicy-smelling deodorant. We’re quiet when we get dressed. There’s something at stake for everybody today.
Everybody.
Coach comes in. He scans the room, looking every one of us in the eyes. “You all know what you have to do. Remember, no one, and I mean no one, comes into our house and pushes us around. This is your game now, gentlemen. And for you seniors, it’s your last one, so make it count, because you will remember it for the rest of your lives. Let’s get ’em.”
We huddle in a tight circle, shoulder to shoulder, head to head, and roar, “Carson, Carson, Carson!”
We follow one another down the hallway to get to the field, falling into pairs—same order, same pairs for the past three years. Luc and I walk behind Diaz and Keller, listening to them bet on Coach’s speech. “Bet you don’t know the movie, man,” Diaz says.
“How much?” Keller asks.
“One Andrew Jackson.”
“A Jackson? Feeling pretty sure of yourself,
joto
,” Diaz says, and glances back to make sure Coach can’t hear him. Diaz is always talking about everybody else being
joto
. It’s like everybody’s doing “The Rainbow Connection” in the world of Diaz.
“What? And you’re not?”
“Fine. Twenty bucks.” They shake hands.
“Rudy,”
Keller says.
“
Rudy
?” Diaz pauses. “I don’t know.”
“Look it up.”
“Will do.”
They walk so close together, their knuckles brush up against each other. Diaz turns back and glares at me, stepping away from Keller. “What’s your deal, Martin?”
And I realize we all have secrets.
Saturday, 2:47 p.m.
Two forty-seven. Two plus four is six plus seven is thirteen. OK.
I unclasp my watch and hand it to Marty, our team manager, who wears it for me during the game. When he was in the hospital because he had appendicitis, he sent his girlfriend to do it for me. Marty’s one of the coolest guys I know.
Coach leads us down the hall; we follow in silent reverie, hypnotized by the
click-clack
percussion of our cleats on linoleum. It’s the sound of battle.
Before heading outside, we clump together at the end of the hall. We form another circle, then on Luc’s command shout,
“Ua! Ua! Ua!”
—the words echoing down the empty hallway, our cleats tap-tapping on the floor, filling up the long corridor like an earthquake.
Luc raises his hand and we stop.
Silence.
Then two by two we head toward the field.
Luc and I slip through the side door, not touching it. Everybody’s gone out now. They’ll wait for Luc and me so we can make our official entrance.
Luc pulls the door shut behind us, and we’re in that place between inside and outside. I feel like we’re in an aquarium, just swimming around, slamming our noses against the glass.
“This is it, you know?” Luc says.
“What’s it?” I ask.
“
This
,” he says. “The game. State. Three years in a row. Graduating at the end of the year.” He looks outside at the line of cars coming from Saliman Road to the parking lot. Full house today for the game.
We’re quiet, and I count the cars, trying to let the words in past the numbers.
“There’ll be other games and stuff,” I say.
Luc shakes his head. “Not like this one.”
Luc’s right. He’s not good enough to play post–high school soccer—except for one of those old-guy city leagues where guys with paunchy guts play, blow out knees, and talk about their glory days and enlarged prostates. We both know that.
So today is it for Luc.
And today is it for me.
Three in a row.
We’ll be heroes.
I’m supposed to go to college on some hotshot scholarship. Full ride. Luc’ll work at the family business. Sealed destinies.
The spiders wake up when I think about telling Coach and Dad that I can’t play anymore—perfection can’t be repeated. And I’d rather give up a lifetime of tomorrows of soccer to have normal. Normal.
I clear my throat and try to think of the right words.
For a second that veil of ever-macho Camacho has slipped away and he’s like me: scared shitless.
Maybe I’m not such a freak.
Luc holds out his fist, and I tap it with mine, like when we were little, returning to the time before this.
“One more time,” he says.
“One more time,” I say.
He cuffs me on the neck and laughs, opening the door to head out to the field, leaving us behind. I hesitate, stuck in that doorway, hoping that somehow it can come together here in the space between inside and outside.
“After you, M&M.” Luc holds the door open; November’s chill enters our glass bubble.
I walk outside and watch the door close behind us and hate that I didn’t say anything real to him.
The crowd roars when we take the field. I look up at the sea of people wearing blue bonnets and laugh. Only Luc could get an entire student body and faculty to wear bonnets. We pull our bonnets out and put them on and the crowd goes nuts.
Luc turns to me. “We are air, Martin. We are air.” He bends down and takes a blade of grass, crosses himself, and kisses the blade before letting it fall back to the field.
And I get that. I get that everything Carson City breathes today is because of us. We are a reason—
the
reason.
But what if we lose?
The thought snags on a nerve in my brain, then spreads like an electric storm throughout my whole head.
What if we lose?
Fuck
.
I’m stuck—stuck until I can tear the thought out. I tie my shoes when I hit the halfway line, then double-knot them. My head clears. The routine clicks in—a place where I can do it in front of a thousand people.
No hiding.
Because this is where the magic works. Where it’s accepted.
I run down the halfway line laterally, stop, move forward three steps, and repeat until I complete five rotations, ending up on the opposite side of the field, facing the bleachers, right where the penalty box begins.
The ref blows his whistle, so I loop around the goal and return to where the team is huddled. Luc’s getting ready to call the coin toss.
“Heads,” I say.
Luc nods. “Heads.” He looks at me like I’m Jacob Martin, the last few days erased. He believes in me, in the magic. He knows I’m right when I call heads because we can’t lose.
The
what if
s have evaporated.
We huddle one last time around Coach, and he says, “Being perfect is about being able to look your friends in the eye and know that you didn’t let them down, because you told them the truth.”
Luc and I lock eyes.
What truth?
I wonder. Because it seems to me like there are a million truths out there, depending on who tells them.
“And that truth is that you did everything that you could. There wasn’t one more thing that you could’ve done. Can you live in that moment, as best you can, with clear eyes and love in your heart? If you can do that, gentlemen, then you’re perfect.”
Luc grabs my fist in his. “Truth!” he shouts.
The team shouts, “Truth!” after him.
“Okay, boys,” Coach says, tucking his recycled Hollywood speech in his pocket. “Kick the hell out of that ball!”
And that’s the best thing I’ve ever heard Coach say—not borrowed from
Friday Night Lights
or anybody else’s script. So today I play for Coach.
Today I play for Luc.
Because this is the day they will always remember—the day we were perfect.
Saturday, 5:27 p.m.
Marty shouts to me over the roar of the crowd.
Five twenty-seven. Five times two is ten plus seven is seventeen. OK.
The air tastes like snow—sagebrush and snow. The Sierras are completely covered in clouds, leaving us with a gray-blue late afternoon. Balls of saliva dry in the corners of my mouth, and I gulp down the water Marty tossed me from the sideline. Second overtime.
Fuck.
We collapse to the grass. Marty, our manager, and some other guys are pounding on our legs, keeping the blood pumping. Field lights go on with a hum, and we are flooded in light.
Coach weaves in and out among us, his rosary beads clacking in his hands.
Magic.
Magic.
We’re all looking for it.
The stands are full. Everybody huddles together, sipping on the watery hot chocolate the snack shack sells. They still wear bonnets, the ones that say *%#@ GORMAN, over earmuffs, hoodies, and heavy hats.
I squeeze my eyes shut and listen to the pound of the drums and the band playing our fight song. I listen to the beating of my heart, blocking out everything until the only sound I hear is the one that comes from within.
I turn on my stomach, the grass tickling my chin, and open my eyes. Gorman’s players are huddled together, jumping up and down, an impenetrable wall.
Coach calls us together, and we limp into our huddle. I look over my shoulder at the Gorman players, jumping, jumping, huffing.
“I can’t get through,” Kalleres says. “I swear to God there are more of them than us on the field.”
Luc rubs sweat out of his eyes.
I readjust my headband. “Move Luc up. They’re just playing defense. Like some kind of pansy-ass stalemate. They
want
penalties.”
One, two, three, four, five . . .
Our breaths come out in ragged gasps.
“No penalties. Penalties is like shooting craps. The best team does
not
win.” Coach’s rosary beads click like marbles. He stares each of us in the eyes. “
You
are the best out there.
You
need to win this right here, right now.”
“That leaves us totally open on the defense,” Keller says, then pauses. “But it’ll work. It can work.”
Coach nods. “Keller and Grundy, you’re on your own down there. You’ve got to be the whole defense because I’m pulling Camacho up to the front line. Kalleres, Martin, Camacho, and Randolph, you will score. I don’t want the ball to go past the halfway line. It’s all on our end, and we will pound the ball until it goes into the net.”
“No more waiting,” I say. I hate waiting on somebody else’s terms.
The ref blows his whistle. Our team huddles up. “CARSON! CARSON! CARSON!” we chant together, then head to our positions. Luc moves up next to me.
“Let’s end this fucking thing,” I say. “I’m wrecked.”
“Okay, M&M, time to do our thing.”
And this time, when we’re on the field, the magic comes. We cast shadows from the bright glow of field lights, and it’s like there are twenty-two of us dancing with the ball.
Twenty-two.
Two minus two is zero.
