The Football Side

It had rained in the night, hard, the way it rains in November when it means it, and the field behind the high school in Maryland where Ellicott’s junior varsity was to lose at nine o’clock was not so much a field as a proposal for one. The middle of it was brown. The ends of it were brown with puddles in. Somebody had tried to paint the lines on it that morning and the paint had sat on top of the mud in white stripes and then slid, so that the forty-yard line on the home side wandered off towards the bleachers like a man who has forgotten where he parked.

“Oh, good,” said Theo, getting off the bus. “Swimming.”

There were perhaps sixty people in the bleachers on the home side, parents mostly, in rain jackets, with flasks, and a dog, and on the visitors’ side there were ten, all of them Ellicott parents, and two of them were Mr and Mrs Hartigan, Mrs Hartigan in her nurse’s anorak with a thermos and a blanket, who had come on the early bus from the depot because it was the one Saturday in the month when neither of them was working. And there was Castellanos.

Castellanos was not in the bleachers. He was on the touchline, at the end of the visitors’ bench, where he could see the bench and the field and the car park and the road beyond it, in his long dark coat and the green scarf, the very long one, wound twice round his neck, standing with his hands behind his back in the drizzle and looking, as far as Frederick could tell, at a seagull on the goalpost.

Nobody on the home side looked at him twice. He looked like somebody’s uncle.

Before the kickoff the referee, a small round man in a striped shirt that was already brown to the knee, blew his whistle twice and held up both hands, and said something to the two benches that Frederick could not hear, and both teams stood up and took their helmets off and stood on the touchlines in the drizzle with their helmets under their arms, for a minute, for Los Angeles, because it had been decided that morning, the referee said afterwards, by every high school league in the Realm, and nobody had needed to be told twice. On the home side a woman in a rain jacket held her phone against her chest for the whole of the minute, with the screen lit, and Frederick did not know who was on it and did not need to.

---

Ellicott’s junior varsity did not win. It had not won in Frederick’s time on it. It had won twice the season before he joined, which the older boys spoke of the way people spoke of a war, and since then it had lost, steadily, by margins that Coach Daley described to the school newspaper as competitive and that everybody else described as the usual. The team did not mind as much as it should have.

He did not play much. That was the arrangement, and it was not a Household arrangement, it was Coach Daley’s, made in his first fall, when Coach Daley had watched him catch a ball in practice and drop the next four and said, not unkindly, “Hanover, you’ve got the hands of a concert pianist and the instincts of a deer.” He was put in late, in games that had already been decided, at wide receiver, because he was tall and could run in a straight line and it did not matter very much what happened to him there.

Theo played on the defensive line, where the big boys went, and Theo was one of the big boys, and had been since he was thirteen, square and heavy and low to the ground, and he liked it there, in the mud, in the dark under the pile, where nobody could see what you were doing and the only thing that mattered was pushing. He said it was the only place in the world where he was allowed to lean on people and they had to lean back.

They lost the toss. They lost the first quarter. By the end of the second quarter they were losing twenty to nothing, and everybody on the visitors’ bench was the same colour as the field, and Theo had been under the pile so many times that his helmet had a clump of grass in the face mask that he did not seem to have noticed.

“Freddie,” he said at half-time, on the bench, through the grass.

“What?”

“This is the best day of my life.”

“You’re losing twenty to nothing.”

“I know,” said Theo happily. “Nobody’s looked at me once. Not once. Not one person.” He pulled the grass out of his face mask and looked at it. “They don’t know who I am. They don’t know who you are. Nobody on that side has got a clue. We’re just two idiots in the mud.” He threw the grass away. “I could cry.”

Frederick looked across the field at the home side, at the boys on their bench in their red jerseys, at the parents with their flasks and the dog. It was true. He had a helmet on, and eighty-four on his back, and mud from the knees down, and nobody had the faintest idea.

“Me too,” he said.

“What?”

“I could cry too.”

“Don’t,” said Theo. “You’ll get mud in it.”

---

He went in with six minutes left in the fourth quarter, at twenty-seven to six, which was decided by anybody’s standards. Coach Daley tapped him on the helmet and said, “Eighty-four. Go and stand somewhere useful,” and he went out onto the field in the drizzle and lined up wide on the left, by the wandering forty-yard line, opposite a boy in a red jersey who was shorter than he was and much wider and who looked at him through his face mask with the bored contempt of a boy who has been winning all morning and is about to win some more.

He ran his routes, badly, in the mud, his cleats balling up with it so that every third step he was running on a platform. The quarterback, a junior called Okoro who threw like a man skimming stones, did not look at him, which was the arrangement. The boy in the red jersey ran with him and leaned on him and said nothing, and once, when Frederick slipped and went down on one knee in a puddle, the boy in the red jersey stopped and held out a hand and pulled him up, without a word, and jogged back to the line.

With a minute and ten left, on third down, Okoro looked at him.

He did not know why. Afterwards Okoro said it was because everybody else was covered and Frederick was the only one who had fallen over enough times that the red jersey had stopped bothering with him. He was running a slant, in from the left, across the middle, slipping, and he looked back over his shoulder and the ball was in the air, coming at him, wet and spinning and slightly wobbling, the way Okoro’s balls always wobbled, and there was nobody between him and it, and he put his hands up.

He caught it.

It hit his hands and his chest at once and he closed everything on it, the way you close on something you will not let go of, and he held it, and then the boy in the red jersey hit him from the side, very hard, low, at the knees, and he went down into the mud on the forty-yard line, full length, on his face, with the ball under him, and the mud went into his face mask and up his sleeves and down the back of his neck, and he lay there with the ball under him and the boy in the red jersey on top of him, and the whistle went, and he had caught it.

He lay in the mud.

From the visitors’ bleachers, eleven people made a noise like a hundred. He heard Mrs Hartigan’s voice over all of them, high and clear, in German, saying something he had never heard her say and would never repeat. He heard the visitors’ bench, all of it, on its feet. And from somewhere on the touchline, at the end of the bench, very short and sharp, he heard a sound he had never heard before and could not at first place, and then could: it was Castellanos, clapping, twice, the way you clap once for a dog that has done something clever, and then stopping.

The boy in the red jersey got off him. He stood over Frederick in the drizzle and held out his hand again and pulled him up, and they stood face to face on the forty-yard line, two masks of mud, and the boy in the red jersey looked at him through his face mask for a moment, and said, quite friendly, the only thing he said all morning:

“Nice catch, man.”

“Thanks.”

The boy in the red jersey jogged back to his side. He did not know. He would never know. Frederick stood on the forty-yard line with the ball in his hand and mud in his teeth and watched him go, and thought that it was possibly the nicest thing anybody had said to him in five weeks, because it had been said to a boy in a helmet with eighty-four on his back, and nobody else.

They did not score. They ran two more plays and lost four yards and the clock ran out, and they lost twenty-seven to six, which was the usual.

---

At the end, in the handshake line, they took their helmets off.

That was the rule: the two teams walked past each other in two lines at the middle of the field, helmets in their hands, and slapped hands, and said good game, all down the line, fifty boys, in the drizzle, and it was the only moment in the whole morning when anybody’s face could be seen.

Frederick took his helmet off.

He was the eighth or ninth in the Ellicott line, behind Theo, who had his under his arm and his hair stuck flat to his head with sweat and rain. He went down the line slapping hands. Good game. Good game. Good game. The red jerseys went past him, one after another, boys he did not know with mud on their faces, and they slapped his hand and said good game back, and did not look at him, because nobody looks at anybody in a handshake line, and he was halfway down it when he got to the boy who had tackled him.

He knew him at once. He was the only one wide enough.

The boy had his helmet off too. He had a round, cheerful, freckled face with mud in the eyebrows, and he held his hand up for the slap without looking, the way all of them did, and Frederick slapped it, and said, “Good game. Good tackle,” and the boy said, “Nice catch, man,” again, and looked at him, for the first time, properly, in the face.

He stopped.

He stood in the handshake line in the drizzle with his hand still half up, and looked at Frederick’s face, and Frederick watched it happen in the freckled face under the mud, very slowly, the way you watch somebody realise that the person they have been talking to at a party for an hour is the person whose party it is.

“Wait,” said the boy in the red jersey. “Are you…”

The line had stopped behind them. A boy at the back said come on.

“Hanover,” said Frederick. “Eighty-four.” He held out his hand again, properly, not for a slap. “Thanks for picking me up. Both times.”

The boy in the red jersey looked at the hand. Then he looked at the mud all down the front of Frederick’s jersey, which he had put there himself, at the knees, very hard, at a minute and ten. Then, with an expression of slowly dawning and absolutely enormous horror, he looked down at his own hands.

“Oh my God,” he said. “I tackled the King.”

“It was a good tackle,” said Frederick.

“Oh my God.”

“It was,” said Theo, from behind, cheerfully. “It was the best tackle of the morning. I saw it. Everybody saw it. You flattened him.” He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and moved him gently on down the line. “Don’t worry about it. He gets that all the time at practice. Good game.”

The boy in the red jersey went on down the line, looking back over his shoulder with his mouth open, and Frederick heard him say to the next red jersey along, in a voice of the most profound wonder:

“Dude. Dude. I tackled the King into a puddle.”

---

Rosalind Aird had moved the Saturday ten to two o’clock, because of the football, and had sent word that she had, and when he came into the library at five past two he had showered and changed and was clean everywhere except his knees, which were still faintly brown in the creases where the mud had got in under his football trousers and soaked into the skin and would not come out however hard he scrubbed.

“You’re limping,” said Rosalind Aird.

“I was tackled.”

“By whom?”

“A boy in a red jersey. He said I made a nice catch.” Frederick sat down at the long table. “He didn’t know. And then he did.”

Rosalind Aird looked at him for a moment, and then wrote something in her notebook, and did not tell him what, and he did not ask. Then she put the shoebox on the table.

It was the same kind of shoebox, from the same shop in Cleveland, and on the end of it in marker pen she had written SATURDAY, and under it, smaller, 5.

“Same as before,” she said. “Nine random. One not.”

He looked at her.

“One not,” said Rosalind Aird. “I’ll tell you which when you get to it. It came on Thursday in the same handwriting as one of last week’s, and the post room set it aside the way they did with Ciaran’s, and I took it out of the sack before I shut my eyes, and Sergeant Cole has noted it on his form, which he has now redrawn with a box for it.” She paused. “And there’s one other thing that’s different. You’ll see it on the envelopes.”

He took the lid off.

He saw it at once. It was on the top envelope, and the one under it, and the one under that. On the twenty-eighth of October the envelopes had said Prince Frederick, all of them, in every hand, in pencil and biro and fountain pen and once in crayon. Today the top one said, in a careful old-fashioned hand, His Majesty King George V. The next one said To the King. The next one said King George, and then, in brackets, as if the writer had not been sure and wanted to be safe, (Frederick). And the one under that, in large green capitals, with a Milwaukee postmark, said TO KING FREDDIE, and had a small drawing of a crown on the back of it, and a smaller drawing of a bus.

Frederick looked at the last one for a long time.

“That one’s random,” said Rosalind Aird. “I promise. I nearly fell off my chair.”

It was from a boy of eleven who wanted to know whether a King was allowed a Page who supported Chicago, and if so, he was available. Frederick put it aside for Theo.

---

He read them in order.

The man in Ohio with the green ink wrote again. It was one side this time. It said that he had not changed his opinion about anything, and that the family should still stop, and that Frederick should still become a dentist, but that he had seen the business on Tuesday about the boy going back into his geometry class, and that it was the first thing any of them had done in fifty years that he could not find anything wrong with, and he had looked, and he wanted that on the record. He signed it with his full name and his telephone number again, and underneath, smaller, Congratulations anyway.

Frederick read it twice and put it on the pile, and Rosalind Aird, who had not read it, looked at his face and wrote something in her notebook again.

---

The one that was not random was ninth. She had put it ninth on purpose, he thought, so that he would have got used to the others first.

It was a long white envelope with a typed address, and it said To the King on the front, typed, and under it, in the small clear handwriting he knew from the twenty-eighth, in ink, as though the typing had not been enough: Columbia Palace, New Westminster. Personal. And on the back: I. Ochoa (Mrs), East Lester Street, Tucson.

He looked up. Castellanos was in the doorway, half in the room and half in the corridor, with his hands behind him, where he always stood, looking at the ceiling above the bookcase with the atlases.

Frederick opened it.

Dear Sir, she had written, and then crossed it out, neatly, with one line, and written above it, Dear Frederick, and then, in the margin beside it, very small, I hope that is all right. I taught fourth grade for thirty-four years and I have never once called a child by his title and I find I cannot start now.

Thank you for your card. I did not expect an answer. I expected even less to find on the bottom of it, in what I assume was your own hand, the words “The lizard is forgiven.” I sat down at the kitchen table and read them about six times. Then I got out my old class lists, which I keep in a box in the hall cupboard because Ruben says I am the only woman in Arizona who has kept every class list since 1990, and he is probably right.

Yes. It was me. Sam Hughes Elementary, room fourteen, the year 1996 to 1997. There was a lizard on the windowsill in a tank. He was a desert spiny lizard and his name was Mr Bigotes, because of the marks on his face, and he bit exactly one child in all the years I had him, and the child was a small, serious, extremely tidy boy called Raymond Castellanos, who had been told three times not to put his finger in the tank and put his finger in the tank.

He cried. He cried a great deal, and then he stopped, quite suddenly, and looked at his finger, and looked at Mr Bigotes, and said, “That was fair,” and went back to his long division, and I have thought of it at intervals for thirty years as the most sensible thing a nine-year-old ever said to me.

I read your card to Ruben at supper. I read him the part about the lizard, and I told him who it must have come from, and why, and Ruben put his fork down and looked at me for a long time, the way he does now when he is looking for a word. And then he said, “Castellanos.” Clear as anything. He has never met the boy. He has only ever heard me tell the story. He has not said a new name since the spring.

I wanted you to know that, and I wanted you to tell him, if he is still near you, that I remember him, and that Mr Bigotes lived to be eleven, which is very old for a spiny lizard, and is buried under the palo verde in our back yard, and that I am glad he is looking after you. He was always a boy who did what he had been told after the first time, and who never needed telling a second.

Yours sincerely,

Inés Ochoa (Mrs)

P.S. Ruben says his team will still do better next year. I have stopped asking why.

He put it down on the table.

He looked at the doorway.

Castellanos was looking at the ceiling. He was looking at a point on the ceiling just above the bookcase with the atlases, the same point he always looked at, a small brown stain in the plaster the shape of nothing in particular, and he had his hands behind his back and his feet a little apart, the way he always stood, and he did not move. He did not move for a long time. Frederick watched him not move. The rain had started again outside on the garden, on the wet leaves and the barrow on the lawn, and the library was so quiet that Frederick could hear it, and Rosalind Aird beside him had stopped writing and put her pen down and was not looking at anything at all, very carefully.

“Mr Castellanos,” said Frederick.

“Sir.”

“It was her.”

“Yes, sir,” said Castellanos, to the ceiling. “I gathered.”

“Ruben said your name. Her husband. He’s never met you. He hasn’t said a new name since the spring, and he said yours.”

Castellanos said nothing.

“She says she remembers you,” said Frederick. “She says you put your finger in the tank after being told three times not to, and it bit you, and you cried, and then you stopped and said that was fair, and went back to your long division.” He looked at the letter. “She says Mr Bigotes lived to be eleven. He’s buried under a palo verde in her back yard.”

There was a very long pause.

“It was a very small lizard, sir,” said Castellanos, eventually, to the ceiling, in a voice that was not quite his ordinary voice.

“She says you always did what you were told after the first time.”

“That’s not true, sir,” said Castellanos. “It was the fourth.”

He went on looking at the ceiling. He looked at it for what Frederick counted, afterwards, as about a minute, which is a long time to look at a stain in some plaster, and in the whole of the minute nobody in the library said anything, and the rain went on outside on the leaves, and then Castellanos lowered his eyes from the ceiling, very slowly, as if they were heavy, and looked at Frederick, directly, for the second time that Frederick could remember, and said:

“May I see it, sir? The letter. Only the bit about the finger.”

Frederick held it out.

Castellanos came across the library, which he had never done, not once, in five weeks of Saturdays, and took the letter, and stood beside the long table under the green lamp and read it, all of it, not only the bit about the finger, slowly, with his lips moving very slightly at one point, which Frederick would have bet a great deal of money was That was fair. Then he folded it back along its creases, exactly, and gave it back.

“Thank you, sir,” he said.

He went back to the doorway. He stood in it, half in the room and half in the corridor, with his hands behind his back, and looked at the ceiling, at the stain the shape of nothing in particular, and did not say anything else for the rest of the afternoon, and when Frederick looked at him, once, during the tenth letter, which was from a man in Saint Lucia whose roof had come off in the hurricane and who wanted the King to know that it was back on, there was something on Castellanos’s face that Frederick had not seen on it before, and could not name, and decided, after some thought, to leave alone.