The Underdogs Read online

  Every kid in school would want in.

  Or so he thought.

  CHAPTER 09

  By the end of the first week of school Will had only found ten guys his age who wanted to play football in Forbes this season.

  On a scale often?

  He felt like a zero, felt almost as bad as he did when he thought there was going to be no season.

  The worst part?

  The team had no coach.

  Mr. Carrington, who worked at the Bank of Forbes, had coached the twelve-year-old team in town for as long as Will could remember. And Mr. Carrington had agreed to do it again this season, at least before the town council had spread the news about not having enough money. But when Will and Tim stopped by the bank on Monday to tell him about New Balance, tell him they were going to have a season after all, he heard a different kind of bad news.

  Mr. Carrington had gotten a better job at a bank called Fifth Third, in Toledo, Ohio. It had all happened so quickly, but it was too good of an opportunity to pass up. He said that his wife and kids had already moved so that they could start school on time.

  Mr. Carrington said he felt terrible telling them like this, that he hadn’t bothered to tell the kids on the team or even the town council, because he didn’t think there was going to be a team. Said he’d been away for most of the last couple of weeks looking for a house to buy in Toledo.

  “As great an opportunity as this is, I honestly feel terrible about leaving you guys,” Mr. Carrington said. “And once Bobby hears the news, he’s going to feel worse than I do. This has been hard enough on him already.”

  So that’s why none of the guys had seen Bobby lately. Their quarterback had moved to Toledo.

  No coach, no quarterback. Just like that. Not even Troy Palomalu could sack that many people with one hit. Now the week had come to an end—amazingly, at least to Will’s way of thinking—with them being one player short of being able to call themselves a real team. Will had thrown up his prayer and New Balance had answered it . . . except it turned out they only had ten live bodies in a sport where you needed eleven.

  So now Will and Tim and Chris and Jeremiah were sitting on the floor of Will’s bedroom, an emergency summit of the core players on the team. They had all chipped in to order pizza.

  “It’s a good thing we have food,” Tim said. “I don’t think nearly as well when I’m hungry.”

  “Then how do we explain the way you think the rest of the time?” Will asked.

  Tim neatly folded the slice of pepperoni in his hand and said, “Why do you have to be such a hater?”

  There hadn’t been much talking while they waited for the pizza to be delivered. Their initial enthusiasm over the letter, the excitement of spreading the news that Mr. DeMartini and New Balance were willing to finance their team and their season had been replaced now by the very bad vibe they all had now because of the lack of enthusiasm shown by the rest of the seventh grade when it came to football.

  Before the letter came, Will had thought the only number he had to worry about was ten thousand dollars.

  Not ten players.

  They had all talked up the team to their classmates. They had posted a sign-up sheet and had everyone on the team add their name to get the ball rolling. Ten names on Tuesday.

  By Friday?

  The same ten names.

  One kid from last year’s team, Carlos Estrada, had decided he wanted to play soccer this year, not football. “Where?” Will asked him. “On what team?”

  “Castle Rock.”

  “Dude, you’re killing me,” Will said.

  But there was no talking him out of it. Carlos had been a soccer player growing up in the Dominican Republic and he was happy to be playing again.

  So he was gone and Bobby Carrington was gone, and thirteen had become eleven. Brendon Donelson, their center from last season, was the next to go. He had broken his arm at the skateboard park over in Castle Rock at the beginning of August and was still in a cast. He was just hoping he’d be ready for basketball season.

  Ten guys. Nobody new wanted to play.

  It was beyond amazing to Will.

  “You sure you talked to everybody?” Chris Aiello said.

  “I talked to every jock in the middle school,” Will said. “I talked to baseball players, basketball players, I even tried to hijack some of Carlos’s new friends on the soccer team. Nothing.”

  “We just have to find one more guy,” Tim said. “How hard can that be?”

  Will said, “How hard can it be? Let me ask you something: how we lookin’ so far, big boy?”

  There was another long silence while they ate. Every so often you would hear the sound of Tim’s cell phone buzzing. He was the only one of them who had one. Will wondered who could be calling him when his best buds were right here in this room.

  “And think about it,” Will said. “Say we do find another guy. We’re gonna try to play the whole season with eleven? Really? What if somebody gets hurt? We’re right back to where we are right now. I can see it now: Mr. DeMartini shows up to see us play only we don’t that day, because it turns out to be a stinking forfeit.”

  “They wouldn’t have this problem in Castle Rock,” Tim said. “They have to cut kids over there.”

  “Not just football country over there,” Will said. “A whole different football planet.”

  He could hear Ben Clark’s voice inside his head again, clear as a bell, right after Will told him they had the money for the team and Ben had said, “In Forbes?”

  Will started to take a bite of pizza, then tossed his slice into the box, no longer hungry. The week he’d just had felt like a whole game of hard hits. And he still couldn’t believe they were in this kind of fix. It had been a perfect plan. As Tim loved to say, Will felt as if he’d absolutely crushed the whole idea of getting their team back together.

  Now this.

  “We gotta figure something out,” he said.

  “You know what this all means? That we drove the ball down the field and couldn’t push it across.”

  Will turned and glared at him, but Tim gave him a wave-off, standing up now, not just addressing Will, addressing the whole group.

  “Let me finish,” he said. “And by the way? That glare of death from you doesn’t scare me nearly as much as it used to.” He took a deep breath. “Okay, we’ve been all over the place tonight. I think what we need to do right now is prioritize.”

  Will couldn’t help it; as frustrated and angry as he was feeling, he barked out a laugh.

  “You don’t even know what that means,” he said.

  “Do too,” Tim said. “I made my mother use it in a sentence at breakfast.” He said to Will, “Do I have your permission to continue?”

  Will nodded.

  “This is only my opinion, but before we think about finding another player, I think we have to make sure we’ve got somebody to coach us. Because they won’t let us play in the league without a coach, even if we get to eleven.”

  He sat back down then, picked up the slice that Will had just dropped into the box and said, “You gonna finish this?”

  “Okay, so let’s talk about coaches,” Will said.

  They sat there and began to go through the list of possibilities. “What about Mr. York?” Chris said. Mr. York had coached them last year. Maybe they could talk him into moving up and coaching them, if somebody else could coach the elevens.

  Will said, “You didn’t hear? He moved to Castle Rock and took a job in the bottle factory, some kind of night manager.”

  “Never mind,” Chris said.

  Jeremiah said, “What about Mr. Pags? He played in college, right?”

  Mr. Pagliarulo was their phys ed teacher at Forbes Middle. But he was also their math teacher and everyone knew his idea of teaching phys ed was handing his kids a few basket- or soccer balls, taking his whistle and sitting on the bleachers grading homework.

  Then they talked about their dads.

  Will said his
couldn’t do it, no way, not holding down his post office job and going to night school. Will had always thought his dad would make a great coach but knew he wouldn’t want to do it, would rather do just about anything than get back on a football field. That’s why Will wasn’t even going to ask, knowing how bad his dad would feel when he said no.

  Tim’s dad was also ruled out instantly. The guys knew he was constantly traveling back and forth between Forbes and Pittsburgh, where he’d landed temp work as a computer technician, hoping it would eventually lead to a full-time job. Will didn’t even want to think about what would happen if Mr. LeBlanc got his wish and had to move.

  Chris’s dad was an interstate truck driver and was usually gone for half the week and sometimes more. Jeremiah’s parents had divorced after the sneaker factory closed and his dad had left town not long after that, taking an assembly-line job in Detroit for one of the car companies.

  “Maybe if some of the dads took turns coaching,” Chris said.

  In that moment Will felt like he was a D lineman with a big hand up, swatting a pass out of the air.

  “We’re desperate,” he said to Chris. “But not that desperate. At least not yet. Coaching by committee? It would feel like they were babysitting us.”

  “Why don’t you coach?” Tim said to Will. “Seriously, dude. You know more about football than any five kids I know. Or any of us know. And more than most adults.”

  “This isn’t a book,” Will said.

  Wishing it were.

  Thinking about the happy endings you got in the sports books he loved. Sitting there in his bedroom and thinking about the happy ending he thought he had—or at least the beginning of one—when he’d opened Mr. DeMartini’s letter.

  They heard the front door close, Will’s dad giving them a shout-out from the bottom of the stairs. Then Will could hear the slow walk up the stairs he had heard so many times before, almost being able to time when his dad would finally get to the top.

  Joe Tyler poked his head in, saw the scatter of pizza boxes and empty Gatorade bottles. “I assume,” he said, surveying the mess with one raised eyebrow, “that you gentlemen are going to clean up when you’re done.”

  “On it, Mr. T.,” Tim said.

  “I actually meant the other guys, Timmy. Tragically I gave up on your cleanup abilities long ago.”

  Tim put his head down, trying to look sad. “A family of haters,” he said.

  Will’s dad said, “Any progress?”

  He knew what the summit was about, knew the spot they were all in; Will had been giving his dad the play-by-play all week long.

  “Nope,” Will said. “Not unless you count knocking off two large pies and still not coming up with one more player, or one coach.”

  “You’ll think of something, you always do,” Joe Tyler said.

  Will said, “You sound like him.” Nodding at Tim.

  Joe Tyler grinned and said, “Watch your mouth.” Paused and said, “Seriously? Look on the bright side. You wouldn’t even be here tonight if you hadn’t come up with the brilliant idea of sending the letter to the sneaker guy.”

  “I know, Dad. Believe me, I know. But I was sure that when guys found out that not only were we gonna have a team, that we had a sponsor—”

  “A proud sponsor,” Tim added.

  “—like New Balance, guys would be willing to run through a wall to play with us.”

  His dad said, “You’ve never had to run through walls because you always found a way to make a hole for yourself, even when the blocking broke down. Or found a hole. So find one now.”

  His dad made it sound so easy. Will wished. The guys helped him clean up. Then they left, too. It was still way earlier than when Will went to bed, especially on a weekend night. But sometimes thinking this hard, on anything, thinking this hard and wanting something this badly, exhausted him in a way that sports never did.

  He washed up, got ready for bed, shut off the lights, found the Pirates station on his small radio, knowing they were getting ready to play the Padres in San Diego. Will liked baseball well enough. But he loved games from the West Coast in the night.

  So now that was his background music, the voices of the Pirates announcers, the sounds of the game coming into his bedroom from all the way across the country.

  But he was still thinking football thoughts, back of his head on the pillow, fingers laced behind it, staring at the ceiling.

  Waiting for another brilliant idea.

  Trying to find his hole.

  CHAPTER 10

  This time he wasn’t going to tell anybody what he planned to do, not even Tim. He was just going to improvise, the way you did with a broken play.

  He had decided in the night that Tim was wrong, that his first priority was to find more bodies, not a coach, even though he was pretty much set on who he thought the coach ought to be. It was actually pretty funny, Will thought. Not Simpsons funny. Just odd. Just by writing a letter and getting a response he never expected, it was like he was now running football for twelve-year-olds in Forbes. Like he was the town council guy for the West River league.

  And all he really wanted to do was have somebody hand him the ball.

  For now, he was keeping his eye on the ball.

  Somehow—whatever it took—he kept repeating that one line to himself, over and over—they were going to have a season.

  Somehow, he had been telling himself all night and all morning and would keep telling himself, he was going to find at least one more guy. Had decided that was job one, as his dad liked to say. If they had to start the season with eleven, so be it, they’d just line up and pray that nobody got hurt. Or quit. Will had come too far to back up or back off now.

  Whatever it took.

  Of course he’d never heard of a team going into a season with just eleven players. Of course he knew enough about football to know how they’d be living on the edge every time the ball was snapped. Oh, sure, he could see it now, some close game where their best guys would never get to come off the field. That part was fine for Will, of course, he never wanted to be off the field for a single play. He even loved playing on the kickoff team and flying downfield as a gunner covering punt returns. But not everybody was like him. They just weren’t. He knew his friends loved football, just not the way he did.

  So it wasn’t too hard to see Tim or Chris or Jeremiah being totally gassed by the end of some games, especially when the weather was still warm in September, hands on knees, too tired to make the tackle or the block or the play that might make the difference between winning and losing.

  Because that was Will Tyler’s big thing, even though he hadn’t been talking about it with his buds; they had other things to worry about these days. But he didn’t just want to have a season. He wanted to win the season. For him, the object of the game hadn’t changed since last year’s championship game against Castle Rock:

  To beat them in the big game.

  To do that, he knew he needed more bodies.

  Starting with one more, just because you had to start somewhere.

  It was why he got on his bike on Saturday morning and went looking for the biggest body in the seventh grade at Forbes Middle School.

  Toby Keenan, who looked like he was two or three years older than he was—or more—lived in a small one-story house on the far side of town away from the river, his street becoming a dirt road at the end where the house was.

  Toby lived there with his dad, who’d been a teammate of Will’s dad at Forbes High School, a middle linebacker on defense and a guard on offense.

  “But his real positions were mean and scary,” Joe Tyler said.

  Now Dick Keenan worked for the town of Forbes, not for the town council, the way Tim’s dad did, but a guy who did road work and tree work in the summer and drove a snowplow in the winter, clearing roads for the town and driveways on his own time. Dick Keenan was big himself, with a huge belly and a look on his face, every time Will saw him behind the wheel of one of his trucks,
that made you think that in the very next moment he was going to pick a fight with the whole world.

  Will didn’t know a whole lot about Mr. Keenan’s wife, even had trouble remembering what she looked like when she was still living with them. Basically he just knew that she wasn’t living with them now, that she was another person who had left Forbes and never come back.

  Will had asked his dad one time why Mrs. Keenan had left her husband and son behind and all his dad said was, “The reason was Mr. Keenan.”

  When Forbes was still playing in Pop Warner, the last year they played in Pop Warner, Toby had played in fifth grade, as a middle linebacker, just like his dad. He and Tim were about the same size then; it was before Toby just shot up past everybody in their grade. One time Mr. Pags had looked out at the gym floor during phys ed and said, “Sometimes I think I can hear Toby growing.”

  But Toby could play. They put him at middle linebacker and had him play some tight end, didn’t even look at him anywhere else, just because of his size. And he wasn’t just a load, he could run, even if he seemed reluctant—at least in Will’s view—to really lay people out on defense; sometimes the coaches had to remind him that it was a contact sport and hard tackling was allowed.

  But when he did put a hard tackle on you in practice, as Will found out more than once, it was about the same as running into a tree.

  Everybody could see he had a talent for football and two things going for him that Will’s dad always said you couldn’t teach:

  Big and scary fast.

  Toby Keenan just seemed almost too gentle a kid for football. Maybe that’s why, Will’s view again, he never loved playing. And that would have been enough right there to hold him back, but there was something much bigger going on for the big kid:

  His dad.

  Forget about loving the game; in the end Dick Keenan made his son hate it.

  Mr. Keenan came to most games, home and away, a permanent game face on him, one that reminded Will of a balled fist. That wasn’t the worst of it, either, the worst of it was that he yelled almost the whole time. Yelled out more than even the coaches did. More than the other parents combined.