Football Hero (2008) (4 page)

TY HANDED HIS UNCLE
the phone.

Uncle Gus smiled at him and waggled his finger at the broom before pointing to the floor over by the entrance to the shop. Then he pointed at Charlotte and motioned with his thumb for her to get started in the kitchen. Charlotte rose from her seat without expression and floated past them, bending to scoop up a bucket of supplies without slowing down. Ty gripped the wooden handle of his broom and walked away, listening. When he glanced over his shoulder, he saw that Uncle Gus had turned away and was now hunched over the phone, muttering something to Thane.

Ty strained his ears, gently flicking the dust and dirt on the floor into a pile. He heard words like “in his
best interest” and “church seems to be helping so much” and “wouldn’t want to set him back.” He knew instinctively that Uncle Gus was lying about him, but he couldn’t think of what to do. When Uncle Gus said good-bye, Ty doubled his sweeping efforts and concentrated hard on the pile he’d created, ignoring the sound of his uncle’s footsteps as best he could. He heard his uncle go to the glass case behind the counter and pick out a donut before he ambled toward Ty.

When Uncle Gus cleared his throat, Ty pretended to be surprised at his sudden presence.

“Oh, Uncle Gus,” Ty said. “Can I say good-bye to Thane?”

“I said good-bye for you.”

“What did he want?” Ty asked, trying to sound innocent.

Uncle Gus poked the rest of a jelly donut into his mouth and licked away the spot of powder still clinging to his finger.

“Brotherly love,” Uncle Gus said through the mash of his donut. “Wants to spend a little time with you this weekend. Some ESPN thing, the draft and all that.”

“Oh,” Ty said, staring hopefully.

Uncle Gus swallowed and folded his arms across the belly of his pear-shaped torso.

“So, can I?” Ty asked.

“Well, that depends, doesn’t it?” Uncle Gus said, stroking his thick mustache now and working a little
blob of jelly into its bristles. “On how you’re doing. Your attitude. Let’s see how work goes. That’s a good way to measure.”

“Okay.”

“Your brother is about to become a very rich man,” Uncle Gus said.

“Oh.”

“But he’s not your guardian,” Uncle Gus said. “I am. I’m the one with the grocery bills. I’m the one who has to be responsible.”

“I know that, Uncle Gus,” Ty said apologetically.

Uncle Gus pointed to a spot on the floor where someone had left a small wad of gum. “Pick that up.”

As Ty bent down to do it, Uncle Gus walked away whistling.

In gym class the next day, Ty stifled a yawn and followed Coach V into his office while the rest of his classmates played dodgeball on the other side of the glass. Their hooting and hollering muscled its way through the walls, making the small, square office feel like an underwater chamber. The air was crowded with the smell of damp socks and basketballs.

Coach V sat in the squeaky chair, slid open his desk drawer, and removed a stapled stack of papers that he handed to Ty.

“Our playbook,” the coach said, clapping his hands on the big hairy legs protruding from his shorts.

Ty squinted at the Xs and Os and the arrows and nodded. He’d seen Thane draw similar things on the backs of napkins for their father, explaining secret plays they would run against upcoming rivals, plays that put the ball into Thane’s hands.

“Next fall,” Coach V said, “you’re gonna be my Z.”

“Z?”

“Strong-side wide receiver,” Coach V said, pointing to a single O on the very edge of the first page, the player farthest removed from all the others, the player with a long arrow sprouting from him like a spear. “That’s our ‘go’ route. You just go, run as fast and as far as you can, and the quarterback heaves it up for you. With your speed, we could go, go, go. I’ll show you out there today. After what I saw yesterday, I’m penciling you into the starting lineup. What do you think of that?”

“Coach.”

“Some of your teammates aren’t going to like it, but they’ll get over it.”

“Coach.”

“Winning is like deodorant. I think John Madden said that. Something like that.”

“Coach.”

“What, Lewis?”

“I can’t,” Ty said, placing the stack of plays gently onto the desk.

“Don’t worry about experience, it’s speed. The
game is about speed. Don’t say you can’t do it. Trust me, you can.”

“I mean, I can’t play at all. I have to work. Every day. Right after school. Right when practice is.”

Ty explained Slatz’s Cleaning Services. Coach V sat with his mouth open, fishlike, and blinking.

“I got a work permit,” Ty said after a few moments of nothing more than the sounds of screaming kids on the other side of the glass.

Coach V cleared his throat and slapped his knees before he rose. He sniffed as if he’d been insulted. “Well, if you can’t play, you can’t.”

On his way to the door, Coach V put his hand on Ty’s head, then let his grip slide down the back of Ty’s neck, where he let go after a firm squeeze.

Ty followed the coach back out into the gym, where sneakers squeaked among the battle cries. Instead of joining the ruckus, Ty put his back to the padded wall behind the backboard and let himself slip down the wall until he sat planted on the wood floor with his head in his knees. He closed his eyes and forced himself to think about Saturday night and the one thing Uncle Gus hadn’t yet said no to.

All he had to do was work hard. That’s what he thought.

FRIDAY AFTER SCHOOL, UNCLE
Gus sent Ty and Charlotte into the Breakfast Nook alone so he could listen to a Yankees/Red Sox game on the truck radio. They left him there, teeth grinding, hands clamped to the wheel, as Manny Ramirez stepped up to the plate.

The Nook, as they called it, was a small restaurant in a shopping center, an easy job to start out with, but farther away than the other accounts, and that’s why Uncle Gus liked to get it done first, before they went to Lucy’s Bar. The Nook only had one bathroom and apparently a very neat cook. The small kitchen rarely had anything more than some spattered pancake batter to worry about.

Ty mopped the kitchen floor, then went to work on the bathroom. He had given the toilet a final flush
when he heard Charlotte squeal. He bolted back into the kitchen. A knife clattered to the bottom of the sink, and she cradled one hand in the other, stamping around the kitchen, crying.

“I’m bleeding,” she said.

“Oh gosh,” Ty said. “Hang on.”

He yanked several paper towels off the roll on the wall and handed them to her. She plastered them to the long red gash across her palm, and the blood bloomed like a rose in a science movie. Charlotte sucked air in through her teeth with a hissing sound that reminded Ty of filling his bicycle tires at the gas station.

“You gotta hold it real tight,” Ty said, clamping his own hands over hers and squeezing as well.

After a minute her breathing slowed.

“I think it stopped,” she said quietly.

“Let’s see,” Ty said. He removed his hands and gently pulled the paper towel back. The angry red gash had begun to clot.

“Okay,” he said, “but keep holding it for a while.”

“What are you, a Boy Scout?” she asked. “You got a first aid badge or something?”

Ty felt his cheeks flush. “No. Thane—you know, my brother—he used to teach me all kinds of stuff like that. He’s a lot older.”

“Must be nice having a brother,” she said, looking down at her hand.

“Should I get your dad?” he asked.

Charlotte glared up at him and shook her head.

“You might need stitches,” Ty said, peering at her hand until she snatched it away and put it behind her back.

She looked scared, with her blue eyes wide open and her small red mouth making an O that reminded him of the playbook. Her blond hair had been pulled into the folds of a blue bandanna, making her face seem even rounder. It startled him to recognize something in her eyes, the same empty sadness that he saw in his own face when he looked into the bathroom mirror in school.

“Maybe I should get him,” Ty said.

“Not when he’s listening to a game. Never,” she said. “It’ll stop bleeding.”

“It’s just a game.”

She puckered her mouth like she’d tasted something sour. “Not when you bet money it’s not. When he does that, you don’t want to be around. Especially if they lose. Did you ever know a gambler?”

Ty shook his head.

“Well, you do now. Welcome to the club. Can you finish the sink?” she asked in the soft voice of an ordinary girl.

Ty nodded and went to work, glancing back only when he heard the sound of the vacuum cleaner that she operated one-handed. Her face had returned to
normal, lifeless as a loaf of bread. She turned the vacuum off at the same time he finished the sink. When he smiled at her and said he’d fill the napkin dispensers, only her eyes flickered at him. Besides that small glimmer and the bloodstained towel, Ty would have thought he’d imagined their entire conversation.

The minute Ty finished stuffing the last napkin holder, the front door crashed open, ringing the little bell so violently that it choked.

“Not done yet?” Uncle Gus screamed. His pasty face shone red, glazed with sweat. His eyes watered, and his teeth, like his fists, were clenched beneath the bushy mustache. “You two can’t do anything without me, can you? You might as well be on the Yankees. Losers, all of you.”

“I just finished, Uncle Gus,” Ty said. “We can go.”

Charlotte tossed her dust rag into a bucket and picked it up along with the vacuum, making for the door without a word. Uncle Gus pushed past her and walked into the kitchen. That’s when he roared Ty’s name.

“You call this clean?” he shouted.

Ty stepped into the doorway to see Uncle Gus stabbing his finger at the floor where three nickel-sized spots of blood glistened up at them.

Uncle Gus’s face burned with rage.

“MOP THE FLOOR,” UNCLE
Gus said, growling. “I told you, first thing you do, and you didn’t do it. What else didn’t you do? AROD misses a grounder, the Yankees lose! You miss the floor, I lose the account! Get it? That’s life. Just like you
not
going with your brother tomorrow night.

“That’s life, too.”

Ty felt his face fall. He clasped his hands.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Uncle Gus said. “We had a deal. You didn’t live up to your end. I guess you didn’t really want to go with him that bad after all.”

Ty sat cringing in the middle seat. Uncle Gus cursed and smoked as he raced through traffic, passing people, leaning on his horn, and using his middle finger, on
their way to the next job. To emphasize just how bad the Yankees played, he would wave his cigarette in the air, sending worms of ash tumbling about. Twice, the orange ember came close enough to Ty’s face for him to feel its warmth.

When they got to Lucy’s, Ty jumped out of the truck and headed past the empty kitchen and straight for the men’s room. He held his breath as long as he could, mixing some ammonia into the bucket with water from his length of hose. Even through the battered door, Lucy’s shouting made him jump. Slowly, he cracked open the door to see the action. Uncle Gus stood in front of the bar owner, wringing a dirty towel with his head hanging low. As much yelling as Uncle Gus could give out was about as much as he was now getting back from Lucy.

Lucy’s eyes bulged, and he slapped the crowbar into the palm of his hand.

“Do I look like a bank?” Lucy yelled. “You know what happens to people who don’t pay?”

Lucy raised the crowbar and Uncle Gus cringed. As angry as Ty had been in the truck ride over, he now felt terrible for his uncle, cowering like a puppy. Over in the eating area, Charlotte flipped on the vacuum and went to work on the carpet without seeming to pay attention. Ty eased the door shut and went to work. Not until he was finishing up with the toilet did the shouting subside. He heard Lucy go into the office
on the other side of the wall and slam the door.

The toilet brush slipped from Ty’s hand and clattered down into the corner of the stall. As Ty bent to pick it up, his ear brushed the rusty vent near the floor. That’s when he heard the faint echo of a voice. Ty glanced over his shoulder, then touched his ear to the grate to hear Lucy talking on the phone to someone about a delivery of beer. Being able to hear the bar owner without his knowing sent a chill of danger up Ty’s spine.

When the bathroom door suddenly swung open, Ty jumped. A shadow fell across him and he peered out from the stall.

“Can I get in there?”

Above him loomed Mike, the cook, all six foot seven, four hundred pounds of him. Ty pushed his glasses up on his nose, swallowed, and nodded, then glanced at the door.

“Don’t worry about your uncle,” the big man rumbled through his big dark beard. “They do this every couple weeks. Every time your uncle bets big, he loses big. Lucy won’t really hurt him. He just talks like that.”

Ty squeezed past Mike and reached for the door-knob. As he did, he noticed the backpack slung over the big man’s shoulder and he wondered what it contained and why Mike would bring it into the bathroom with him.

“I used to have to go down the street to the Subway to use the bathroom,” Mike said, wedging himself into the stall, closing the door, and dumping his backpack before letting his belt buckle clank to the floor with his pants. “Your uncle, he thinks throwing a bucket of ammonia in here and slamming the door is cleaning.”

Ty didn’t know how to respond. Should he thank the big man? Or tell him he wanted to do more with his life than cleaning toilets? He ended up saying nothing.

“You like that booger trick with your uncle?” Mike asked, his voice echoing off the tiled walls.

Ty froze. “You didn’t do that to me, did you?”

The stall was silent for a moment before Mike sighed and said, “Your uncle’s a horse’s backside. I saw him giving you crap for having a donut and it ticked me off. A kid can’t have a donut without catching grief?”

Ty breathed easier. “I laughed.”

“I’ll get him again with some earwax on your way out. Watch. Hey, don’t stay here on account of me,” Mike said. “It’s about to get pretty bad.”

Ty ducked out and saw his uncle sitting at the bar with his head in his hands. When Ty came out from cleaning the women’s room, Uncle Gus was still there, but now Lucy had rejoined him. As if on cue, the two of them swung their heads around to look at him. Uncle Gus signaled for Ty to come over.

Ty hesitated, then set his buckets down and crossed over to the bar. He stopped several feet in front of the two men and looked hard at their feet.

“Hey, kid,” Lucy said in a manner so friendly that Ty looked up to see if it had come from someone else. Lucy pointed the crowbar at him. “I got a deal for you.”