Divisions (Dev and Lee) (21 page)

“With me? No. My flea said something about a commercial…” He’s frowning again, but puzzled this time. “Oh. Flea. A friend of mine called her agent that.”

“Ohhh.” He nods. “’Cause of how they just jump around from one guy to another, right?”

“Um. Because they suck your blood and don’t give anything back?”

He shakes his head. “No, dude, my agent is awesome. Listen, he scored me this beer commercial and I thought it’d be a good idea if you and me did it together. Like, the pitch could be, ‘No matter what your taste, you’ll like Strongwell Light.’ What’cha think?”

It’s my turn to frown. “Is that their slogan?”

He beams. “Nah, I made it up. Y’know, I coulda been in marketing. But this was the dream.”

“Right. Um, I haven’t heard from him…when did this happen?”

“Just like a couple hours ago. After lunch.” He gestures to the cafeteria.

“Really? You were on a call instead of working out?”

“Dude, I was on a call while I was working out.”

I’m trying to put together this image in my head and failing. “Which weight room were you in? I didn’t hear you.” I can’t imagine Jaws and some of the O-line tolerating a guy working out while yapping on the phone.

“Oh, I close the door when I’m on a call. Don’t want to be rude. But you should be hearing from—”

“Sorry.” I hold up a paw. “Still not quite getting it. You closed the door…?”

He smiles. “To my weight room. They set it up yesterday, it’s in an office just up from the locker room. Nothing fancy, you know. Treadmill, bench, barbells.” He waggles a paw. “The Port City one was a lot nicer, but I know they threw this together real quick.”

“Who spots for you?”

“I got my own spots.” He laughs, then looks down at his arms when I don’t join in the laughter. “Well, not now. Cheetah joke. My trainer spots for me.”

“Really? One of the trainers?” I stare.

“Well, no. My personal trainer. Not one of the staff here. I need him, ‘cause the other wideouts, they don’t lift near enough. Can’t spot the weights I use.”

“Okay, um.” Private weight room, personal trainer. I try to clear that out of my head; after all, this isn’t exactly “making it quick,” as Steez ordered. “So, call from my flea—my agent.”

“Yeah.” He grins. “I think you’ll like the amount. Go ahead, check.”

“My phone’s in my locker. I’ll check when practice is over.”

He stares at me. “You’ve gotta keep your phone on you. What if something blows up and you’re hours late to the party?”

“I don’t think my life moves that fast,” I say. I glance over at the film room again. “Anyway, it’s against policy. Coach makes us put the phones away.”

“Ahh, gotcha.” He nods, completely missing my pointed remark. “Okay, well, let me know what you think. I want to make this happen, so if you aren’t totally cool with it, I can take care of it. Dig?”

“Yeah, I, uh…dig.” He holds out his paw again, so I shake it. “I gotta get back to the film. Oh, and thanks. I appreciate it.”

“Not a problem.” His smile widens. “Good to help each other out, right?”

“Sure,” I say, though I can’t for the life of me figure how I’m helping him out by being in a commercial with him.

“About time,” Steez snaps as I rejoin the team, but I don’t hear anything else about it.

When I pick up my phone after practice, sure enough, the box is full. The first message is just Ogleby saying “Oh my God” over and over, interspersed with “Dev
call me!
” His squeaks are even higher-pitched than normal. The messages that follow are variations on the same theme, except for the one that sounds like he’s hyperventilating into the phone. And while I’m listening to the messages, the phone rings again. Ogleby, of course.

“Did you get my messages? Did you?” he squeaks when I pick up.

“Yes. Calm down. What’s this about?”

I’m really just curious to see if he can explain it to me coherently, and he mostly does. He sputters out Lightning Strike’s name, and “Strongwell Beer” and “commercial” and then he says a number.

“Wait, hang on. What was that?”

Panting ferret gasps come through the phone. “One. Million.”

I’m standing in the locker room half-dressed, in workout shorts and no shirt, surrounded by millionaires, or at least hundred-thousandaires, in a room that smells of sweat and work. The number one million seems completely remote and separate from everything else I am. I mean, I made a hundred K from the Ultimate Fit guys, but at the time I thought that was the ceiling for me—some of it was because I was willing to film a commercial quickly, not necessarily because of what I was worth. Next to it, one million doesn’t seem like that much, but it could lead to more, to enough that if I invest it well, Lee wouldn’t have to work. And when I retire from football, neither will I.

Ogleby’s squeaking in my ear. “Yeah, I’m here,” I say.

“You gotta make this work, Dev. It’s your big score, it might never happen again, you gotta do what it takes.”

“Even if it means losing the division because I’m away working on this commercial?”

“Dev, sweetie, maybe you didn’t hear me, I said they will pay you one million dollars just for this one day of work.”

“Day?”

“Just one day, I promise! No future options like in that Ultimate Fit contract.”

“Wait, what?”

“Oh, nothing.”

I lean back against the locker. “Ogleby…”

“Okay, look, it turns out that they have an option to film two more commercials at their discretion in the next six months but I told them not until the season is over. And that is still a great rate you’re commanding. That’s what I’m telling all the other people who ask about commercials.”

“What other people?”

“You don’t want to know, they only want to pay like fifty grand.”

“That’s still—” I breathe in. “Okay, send me along the terms and I’ll take a look at it.”

“We need to sign this week is the thing, they want it out for the playoffs.”

“So you better send it out today, huh?”

“I thought I could read it over the phone and—”

Deep breaths. Resist the urge to throw the phone across the room. “I think I want to read the whole thing.”

“Okay, okay, Dev, but let me tell you, I went through this and it looks great. Their tagline is ‘No matter what your taste, you’ll love the taste of Strongwell’ and you don’t have to kiss the guy at all, just have your arm around him—”

“Wait. Stop. What guy?”

“The actor in the ad, there’s a guy for you and a girl for Strike.”

“Shit, Ogleby, they want me to hug another guy on camera? On national television?”

“
For one million dollars!
”

Less fifteen percent, of course. That’s, what, a hundred and fifty K? Worth it to him, but he doesn’t have a boyfriend to worry about. “I’m gonna have to ask Lee about it.”

“Be sure to tell him about the million—”

“I will.” And I hang up on him. I hold the phone in my paw, staring down, and then toss it into the locker.

Gerrard watches me. “More commercials?” he says. “Do I need to ask Coach to bar cameras from the stadium?”

“No,” I snap. “I don’t know. I haven’t agreed to anything. It’s Strike, he wants me to be in a commercial with him—”

Immediately I regret saying his name, because Gerrard lays his ears back. “Not even one full fucking day,” he says. “I wonder if he’s being this disruptive to the offense.”

I can’t say anything. Gerrard curses so rarely that I feel like my dad just scolded me. Carson’s eyes are wide too, and Charm yells across two lockers, “Hey, settle down, Coach.”

Gerrard’s ears come up and he shakes his head. “You think you can take phone calls and worry about commercials and still be preparing your best for a game…if you think that, you shouldn’t be in this locker room. That’s all.”

“I don’t think that,” I say. “Look, if I do this commercial, I’ll schedule it. They’re not just going to show up.”

“All right.” He looks at me seriously. “I trust you.”

There’s a nice serious moment that Charm ruins by slapping me on the shoulder and calling me “Coach Junior,” which after a pause he modifies to “Coach Gramps.”

I walk out with him through the pack of reporters, who mostly completely ignore us. Charm sees me looking at them, and elbows me. “Miss it?”

“What, that?” We clear the last reporter, a ferret who looks briefly at us and then returns to fixedly staring at the door. “It’s kind of cool, actually. They never stalked me outside the stadium.”

“I know a guy who can dye fur, if you want.”

I laugh. “I’m good with my stripes, thanks.”

“He can work small, too.” Charm draws a little heart in the air with his fingers. “This leopard chick I went out with, she had a red heart on her ass.”

“And nothing else?”

“Just me.”

We laugh back to our trucks, and I pull out the phone to call Lee when I get in. Then I remember he’s waiting at home, and put the phone down. At least I have that to look forward to, at the end of the day.

Ogleby sends the contract over, which is ridiculous because he’s supposed to be vetting these things for me. I consider hiring a lawyer to look at it for a couple hours and then I think about that some more and I get that nasty feeling like I need to get a new agent. I’d resisted because Ogleby was pretty good to me. He represented me when nobody else really was interested, and he did negotiate a good rookie contract with the Dragons. Granted, the pay is pretty fixed for those things. But still, he’s always looked out for me. He set me up with Caroll and got me some publicity—not as much as Brian’s blog posts, sure, but he also got me that Ultimate Fit contract—with those riders I didn’t know about…

Fuck. I print out the contract so I have something to hold and my claws punch through it as I grab it off Lee’s printer. I don’t want to be that guy, the one who dumps the first agent when he hits it big to sign with a more powerful one. But Lee’s told me I’ve already had some sniffs from other agents in my e-mail and I’ve gotten calls on my phone, too, ones I’ve ignored, but names I’ve recognized. One of them was from Fisher’s agent, and he was the most courteous, the one I almost returned. He didn’t drop Fisher’s name; I had to look it up. Plus, he’s a tiger.

“Hey,” I say. Lee’s on his computer writing something, an e-mail maybe. He looks up. I wave the contract. “Can you take a look at this with me?” I’ve learned that Lee sees angles and possibilities that I don’t. They’re not always ones I want to take, but they’re often ones I’ve never thought of.

“I’m not a lawyer,” he says, but he comes over to look.

“How’d your day go?” I hand him the papers.

He skims the text. “Fine. Talked to some people at Equality Now.”

I wait for him to say more. When he doesn’t, I nudge him in the side, and he looks up. “And?” I say.

“I’m going to have to look up some of these things on the Internet,” he says. “Why didn’t Ogleby look through this?”

“I mean about Equality Now,” I say.

“Oh,” he says. “Well, I can stuff envelopes or cold-call people next summer.”

He sits down at the computer and opens a browser, glancing at the contract. I stand behind him and put a paw on his shoulder. “That’s…not very interesting, is it? But it’s something.”

“It’s not how I want to spend the next month and a half. Okay, this part here just means you can’t use the footage anywhere else. I think.”

“So you can just relax for a month and a half. You deserve some time off.”

He scrolls through a couple more pages, types in some terms. “This one seems like a standard clause too. Means they can use stills from the commercial in their advertising. That’s fine.”

“Thanks.” I squeeze his shoulder. “So, are you okay?”

He doesn’t look up, but he slumps, and that’s enough of an answer. I wait for him to talk, though, and finally he says, “I only have a month and a half. After that, I think I’ll be too busy to do anything. And I have to do something.”

“Why?”

Now he looks up. “What if…what if your college coach found out you were gay and tried to kick you off the team? What if your parents found out that was why you were kicked off, and told you it was a disease? A…” His lips twist into a grimace. “A ‘disease of the soul.’”

“Uh.” I shake my head. “This is about that Vince King kid, right?”

“It’s not just him. I can’t stop looking at these college players and wondering how many of them are gay. How many of them are scared, how many of them feel like they’re just holding their world together with string and mirrors, that at any moment it could all collapse on them? How many of them feel like they’re abnormal?”

“You made it through childhood all right,” I say, because I’m not sure what else to say to him.

“I was lucky.” He leans his head against my hip, and I hug him by the shoulder. And then he goes back to the contract. “You should get a lawyer to look over this, really, but it looks good to me.”

“Thanks,” I say, and then, “you know, it’ll be nice having you around through the season. And maybe I can go up to Yerba with you after and help you get set up there.”

For a couple seconds, he just sits and stares at the computer, and then he says, “I’m thinking of calling Brian tomorrow.”

The words sink in slowly. At first, I think he’s talking about the guy from Yerba, and I start to say that I thought his name was Peter or Manuel or something and then I realize what he said. I take my paw from his shoulder. “Lion Christ, Lee, why?”

“Because he’s doing that kind of work with them.”

“How did he get in and you can’t?”

He shrugs. “Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he’s just stuffing envelopes there. But at least he’s in, and he knows people. Maybe he can point me to the right person to talk to.”

“Maybe he can fuck up your life one last time before you learn to leave him alone.”

When he looks at me, it’s with narrowed eyes. “I’ll be careful.”

“I’d feel better if you just left him the fuck alone.”

His expression softens. “I need this,” he says softly. “I need to try, at least. I can’t just sit on my ass here and live my good life.” He reaches out. “It is a good life. I know that. I’m not going to do anything to fuck it up.”

His paw rests on my hip. I sigh, and drop my paw back onto his shoulder, and hold him close.

***

Strike corners me again Wednesday, going into the dining room. He steps up behind me as I’m grabbing two burgers, same as I do every day.

“So what’cha think of the commercial? My agent says he’s waiting on yours. It’s gonna be a great opportunity for you, and Strongwell can’t wait to get going on it.”

Carson, in front of me, turns his head to look back. “Strongwell tastes like rat piss,” he says.

“We don’t have to
drink
it,” Strike says. “I don’t drink any alcohol, in fact.”

I grab an energy bar from the basket and a 32-oz. sports drink. Strike has a protein shake, and a huge spinach salad, which he taps as we move on. “No greens? Spinach is really good for you.”

“The deer and rabbits look at me funny when I go over there,” I say. Carson looks at us sideways; he’s got the same thing on his plate as I do.

“I eat a good spinach salad twice a day, and a spinach omelette for breakfast most days.” He takes an energy bar, looks at it, and then tosses it back. “These things are full of chemicals.”

Carson mutters something about the cheetah’s forearms which I think is a Popeye reference. I manage not to snicker. “More chemicals than in your protein shake?”

“This is organic.” He points at the big green word “organic” on the label.

“Yeah, well, I was raised on chemicals,” I say. “So it’s okay.”

Strike shakes his head. “You want to get two more years out of your career, give that stuff up.”

“Fisher eats them,” I say, while Carson moves on to sit down.

“Fisher?” Strike flicks his ears and creases his brow. “Oh, Kingston? Where is he? Don’t see him around.”

“Okay, but he’s not playing because he got stabbed in the leg, not because he…” I wave at the salad. “Didn’t eat spinach.” I have no idea what happens to old players who don’t eat their spinach.

“You heal faster with organics in your body. All those chemicals just slow you down.” Strike grins. “You know I ran a faster 40 last year then I did out of college? You know how many people do that?”

“None?”

He jerks a thumb at his chest. “One.”

He follows me over to the tables, so out of courtesy, I don’t sit next to Gerrard and Carson. Both of them are so pointedly not looking up at me that it’s clear they don’t want to deal with Strike. So I sit next to Charm instead, because Charm doesn’t give a shit.

“Hey, Coach Gramps!” He shovels another mouthful of salad into his face. “Hey, Speedy.”

“It’s Strike,” the cheetah says, a little stiffly.

“Speedy Strike.” Charm grins affably and swallows his salad. “How ya likin’ it here in Chevali?”

“It’s Lightning Strike. I changed my name for a reason.”

“Charm calls everyone by a nickname,” I say. “It’s his thing.”

Strike looks about to say something else, but then subsides and goes back to his spinach. “Least he eats right,” he says. “So look, when do you think you’re gonna know about the commercial? Strongwell can’t wait to get in bed with the UFL’s only gay player.”

“They ain’t the only ones, right?” Charm elbows me.

“Tomorrow,” I say, ignoring Charm and choosing a definite answer to get Strike to stop talking about it. “Promise.” Lee was going to send it around to a lawyer and then maybe I can go over it with Ogleby on the phone or something.

“Great!” The cheetah leans over to Charm. “You’re a pretty good kicker, you know that?”

Charm nods, with a mouthful of greens. “Uh-huh.”

Strike points his fork at Charm’s plate. “Salad. That’s what does it.”

Charm swallows and shakes his head. “Tits,” he says.

I choke on a mouthful of burger. Strike stares for a second and then laughs and slaps the table. “You got a sense of humor, I can see that.”

“I mean it,” Charm says. “Games I kick a good one or two, I get more tits in the parking lot after. If I miss…” He wiggles his paw. “So-so.”

The cheetah’s still laughing. “At least you save the sex for after the games.”

Charm shrugs his big shoulders. “Before, after…whenever.”

“They let girls in the hotel the night before?”

I sometimes forget that not all teams have coaches as casual about that shit as Samuelson is. “Home games we don’t have to stay in a hotel. I did with the Dragons, but Coach thinks we’re more relaxed if we can stay at home. Long as we get here on time.”

“Huh. Still…you can’t have sex before games.” Strike leans in. “Totally kills your stamina and drive.”

“He’s a kicker,” I put in. “He needs stamina like you need a good kicking leg.” I can’t help thinking of Gerrard, though, and his girl coyote from Yerba. Does she follow him around to all the road games, or does he have a different girl in each town?

“I kicked a fifty-yarder in high school,” Strike says. He takes a gulp of his protein shake.

Of course he did. It’s Charm’s turn to laugh, but he doesn’t do it maliciously. “Those are high-school yards,” he says. “Everyone knows they’re shorter.”

There’s a fraction of a second where I think Strike’s going to explode. But he just shakes his head, shovels down the rest of his salad, and leaves.

“Thank you,” I say, taking a big bite of my delicious, juicy, dripping burger.

Charm’s smile doesn’t waver. “Fuck ’im if he can’t take a joke, right?”

I keep those words in mind for the rest of practice, but Strike doesn’t bother me through the end of the day. The crowd of reporters still circles the locker room exit, but without the numbers they had yesterday. A good sign, I guess. Maybe by the end of the season they’ll all be gone.