Читать книгу Hooper's Revolution - Dennie Wendt - Страница 13

SIX

“So, listen, Danny, we’re going straight to the stadium today,” Molly said in the car. It was a long two-door Lincoln of some kind. Danny could’ve laid himself across the entire backseat.

“Last week was the first week of training camp and today’s the first day with the press. I’m afraid you’re going to meet the Portland media on the same day you’ll meet your new teammates. We’ll get there early enough to introduce you to Graham Broome and you can meet most of the guys. We’ll give you a pair of shorts and one of these gray practice shirts, and you’ll head out onto the field and answer some of the dumbest questions you’ll ever hear. ‘Do you ever just want to pick up the ball with your hands and run with it?’ ‘Do you think America would like soccer more if the goal was bigger?’ Stuff like that. I’m sorry in advance. They’re still learning the game... at least they care, huh? The good news is there’s a lot of excitement about you. ‘Our new center fullback straight out of England. Straight out of the FA Cup.’ Most of the sportswriters in Portland don’t know what that is, but it’s what Graham’s been telling them. ‘Straight out of the FA Cup, the big lad,’ he says.”

Well, my whole team’s straight out of the FA Cup because of me, Danny thought. That’s why I’m here, I guess. Or one of the reasons, anyway.

“Our defense was horrible last year,” Molly went on. “Gave up the most goals in the league. If you’re everything they say you are, and you are most definitely big and strong, then you’re going to cause quite a buzz around these parts, Danny. Are you one of the Clopshire Town boys? Most of the guys are. If you are, I suppose you’ll know most of them—”

“Cloppingshire United,” Danny said. “And no, I’m from another club. Don’t know any of them lot. But they’re not so different from us. Third Division grifters...” He trailed off, and Molly said, “Well, I don’t really know what that means, but OK.” She smiled and patted Danny’s thigh. “Lighten up, big man, you’re in America. It’s summertime. Relax.” She turned on the radio of the great vehicle. “Sister Golden Hair” by America was playing. She laughed. “Perfect. This is going to be great, Danny. I promise.”

Molly and Danny had been traveling on a freeway—that’s what Molly called it, a freeway—for ten or fifteen minutes. They passed a hospital, what appeared to be a shopping district with a few high-rise buildings. It was more or less unremarkable, other than a billboard featuring three footballers—soccer players, Danny told himself—in red-and-black-striped shirts in what appeared to be post-goal euphoria under the words “JOIN THE REVOLUTION.” All of the O’s were soccer balls. The other letters seemed to be vaguely Russian-inspired, blocky, Communistic. Danny shook the thought away. Don’t be paranoid.

Molly veered to the right as the freeway met a river and what appeared to be an actual town, a city. “That’s downtown,” Molly said, picking up on Danny’s expression. “On the other side of the river. It’s no New York or L.A., but it ain’t nuthin’.” Portland’s city center was crammed into a wedge of real estate between a boat-spotted river and a thick green heave in the land that had the look of a long wrinkle in a heavy blanket. The heave’s soft, verdant forest looked to be a lonely urban wood—almost supernatural to Danny’s industrial English eyes, like something that didn’t belong in a city.

Danny asked what it was.

“You’ve never seen a forest, Danny?” Molly said.

“Not in the middle of a city I haven’t. What’s on the other side?”

“More people.”

“Why don’t they live in the forest? Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a forest?”

“That’s not what that forest is for,” she said.

Danny thought that was the kind of answer that deserved to end a conversation. Danny saw another black-and-red soccer billboard. This one said “REV IT UP FOR THE BICENTENNIAL!!!”

Portland, Molly explained, was a city for people who weren’t sure how to love a city; a Portlander’s idea of a beautiful day was getting out of town: sneaking off into the woods, down to the river, or up into the mountains. Molly explained that it rained a lot, but it wasn’t always the same rain: the autumn rain hung in the air and made you feel like your eyesight was going; the winter rain was a shroud of cold that made you feel as if you’d never be able to warm up; the spring rain cascaded through sheets of sunlight and cleaned the air; the summer rain was like the moisture that lingers after you’ve taken a long, hot shower. “Around here,” she said, “the sun is mostly just a reaction to the rain.”

In Portland, in those days, wood moldered, paint chipped, bricks decayed. The rain and the sun attacked the city in uneven rhythms, and the hippies, war veterans, fishermen, loggers, on-again, off-again longshoremen, and kindly descendants of immigrants mixed with Portland’s earliest stock—the New Englanders who got there first and settled in their houses in the hills—and improvised a life thousands of miles away from American civilization and thousands of miles more than that from anywhere where soccer really and truly mattered.

Portland, Oregon, in the bicentennial year of the republic, was an outpost in a country that hadn’t elected its president or won its last war. It hadn’t figured out what to do about disco, Evel Knievel, or women in pants. Portland, Oregon, in the bicentennial year of the republic, was a counterculture refuge with the claim to fame that in its lawless early days, sailors had been drugged in its saloons and smuggled through underground tunnels onto ships bound for Asia—the origin of the singularly sneaky verb “to Shanghai.”

Molly exited the freeway and wended her way through the tightly packed buildings of Danny’s new city. She didn’t seem to be near anywhere that might be called a football ground. They seemed to be circling flat buildings, old hotels, Chinese restaurants, a bar—it all felt like the inside of the airport in New York, dingy and drab, a little down on its luck maybe, but with fresher air—and then she drove through an open chain-link gate and down a narrow hill.

There, deep in a hole a good story or two below street level, was a giant, otherworldly football pitch. “We’re here,” Molly said, with her wonderful, giant white smile. Danny liked her wonderful, giant white smile, and he reminded himself everybody probably did too. All those wankers from bloody Cloppingshire United. They probably loved it.

Other than the strange configuration of the J-shaped grandstand hugging the areas along one touchline and one end line, something else seemed odd about the Rose City Revolution’s home ground. Its pitch didn’t look... real.

And upon inspection, it was not.

Molly drove down the long ramp behind what Danny reckoned was the south goal of the stadium. When she reached the ground level, she turned right, passed the corner flag, and, to Danny’s shock and mystification, proceeded onto the playing surface before bringing the car to a stop sudden enough to leave a massive divot in any patch of grass. And yet none of the handful of players knocking balls around, nor any of the photographers watching them, flinched. Danny gasped. Molly said, “Are you OK?”

He said, “Well, erm, I, uh—everyone else is, so I guess I am.”

Danny stepped out of the car and onto the alien surface of Portland, Oregon’s Multnomah Stadium. He’d heard about these plastic pitches, but... He hopped up and down upon it two or three times and felt its strange little spring. It was like a rubber mat stretched taut on all four sides. He ogled a few players in their Revolution T-shirts launching star-spangled soccer balls at each other from thirty or forty yards and struggling with mighty bounces and slick spins on the slightly moistened turf. The balls pinged and ponged in entirely un-football-ish fashion, forcing the players to control them with un-football-ish maneuvers: a cushion with the back of a thigh, or a squeeze between the knee and the ground; a rounder man trapped a ball with his ass, then turned and had it at his feet.

Danny could hardly imagine a match taking place on the slippery substance at his feet. He was about to ask Molly if this synthetic trampoline had really truly hosted a football match when a stray red, white, and blue regulation AASSA soccer ball descended toward Molly’s head.

Danny stepped in front of her, tensed his upper body, and headed the ball up into the concrete grandstand. It felt good—Danny hadn’t touched a ball since heading that towering Dire Vale punt at the Auld Moors. His momentum carried him into his unsuspecting driver, and she held him up—just barely—with her version of a bear hug. As the two of them stabilized, she said, “Wow—thanks, man. That would’ve hurt like I don’t know what.”

He had no chance of responding before being set upon by a graying local photographer. The bearded, round man had raced over from the top of the penalty box, where he’d been casually snapping shots of players knocking the ball back and forth. He arrived a few steps in front of Danny, just ahead of an eager pair of reporters, and gasped an exhausted, “Are you OK?”

Danny said, “Excuse me?”

“Can you do that again?” he said. “Head-butt the ball like that? I mean, if it’s safe to do that two or three times in a row—can you? For a picture?”

Danny looked at Molly, who gave him a shrug and a smile and nodded back to the photographer. Danny said, “I can do that, well, over and over again, really.”

“I gotta get a shot of this,” the photographer said, shaking his head in disbelief.

Danny made a face, leaned over to Molly, and murmured that he thought this was the second season of the Revolution. “How haven’t these wankers seen a man head a ball yet?”

Molly stood on her tiptoes and whispered, “They all tried their very best to ignore us last summer. We’re working a little harder at helping the locals understand the game this year.”

He nodded. “All right then,” he said to the photographer and the reporters, “throw something at my head. Anything. Give me your worst, lads.”

What followed had the look of a dodgeball game, as the reporters and the photographer hurled starred balls at Danny and he steered them to safety with his giant forehead. They kept asking Danny if he was sure he was all right, and Danny kept saying, “Time of my life, gents.” The reporters were in hysterics, and the photographer dropped his camera once.

Finally a voice interjected: “Leave my big man alone, you nuggets!”

A squat, bowlegged sixtyish man with wild, wiry gray hair, a peculiar wispy beard, and a black tracksuit was hurrying toward them.

“Danny Hooper!” he shouted toward Danny with an outstretched arm. “I’m Graham Broome. Put it there if it weighs a ton, my boy!” Danny reached toward the possible Communist’s hand, thinking he had probably never shaken a Communist’s hand before, and shook it. Broome looked at the photographer and reporters and said, “We had a solid club here last year, but this”—he used two arms to gesture to Danny’s entire body, as if he were a model showing off a new Cadillac at a car expo—“is what we were missing. Men, this is Danny Hooper, a real number five, a big, strong center back in the truest and grandest tradition of English football. You may score on the Rose City Revolution in 1976, but you’ll have to get by this great mountain of a man in order to do it.”

He still held Danny’s right hand in his and had eased in closer. He was now pressed up against Danny, facing the photographer and the two or three others who had scrambled over to meet and photograph Portland’s newest professional athlete. Danny smiled his big bearded smile until Broome let go of his hand and pronounced, as if to the entire stadium, “Right! That’s it. That’s enough with the giant today. He’s just got off the plane, he hardly knows where he is, and you’ll get plenty of him this season. Off you go then,” and he waved the motley Rose City media contingent away as if they were annoying schoolboys. “I’ve got to talk to the lads.”

Graham Broome, now rid of Portland’s slim soccer-focused press corps, gathered the team in the corner of the rubber pitch.

Danny had not been looking forward to this moment, but he knew it as a rite that had to play itself out. He’d been on the other side of it many times in his years at East Southwich Albion, as Aldershot Taylor and the chairman tinkered with the creaky machinery of the old club. As the new man stared at the ground, the manager/coach would say something to confirm the necessity of new blood by belittling the men whose toil had gotten the team into whatever straits they found themselves. “Boys, as you know, this club would like to be more competitive than it is at the moment. We need to put on a much better show for these people who inexplicably part with their money to see us week in and week out. And that is why I’d like you to make Colin/Ancil/Abdul/Jens/Mick feel at home today.” At which moment Colin/Ancil/Abdul/Jens/Mick would offer a bland and abashed wave to his teammates’ you’re not home yet nods, and look back down at the ground. Then the manager/coach would utter a half-truth along the lines of “Anything that makes the team better makes us all better,” or something like that.

So it played out this day in the cool late-spring Oregon drizzle. As Danny stood next to Graham Broome on Multnomah Stadium’s prickly green rug, Broomsie said the usual things, ending with “he’s a damn fine footballer and we’re over the moon to have him.”

At this, Danny offered his obligatory look up from the ground and saw, in full for the first time, the Rose City Revolution. Broomsie moved his arm around the semicircle. “This is Petie, Pete, John, Peter, and John. Pete’s useless but don’t tell him that, and Peter will nick the odd goal against bad teams. They all came with me from Cloppingshire. So did Trevor, Jimmy, Jimmy, and that Peter over there. That second Jimmy didn’t play in England, but he’s got an English accent and he’s handy for banter so we brought him across for shits and giggles. Americans don’t know the bloody difference, do they? By the way, Peter, how’s the hammy? Good? Good. That’s Peter Surley, Danny. Peter Surley, who has a dodgy hammy and can’t push himself away from a table.” All the players appeared to be in their early twenties, except for Surley, who looked a good forty-five and at least that many pounds over his playing weight. He was balding and unshaven, wore loose, old socks floppy about his ankles and his shirt untucked, and he could hardly have looked less like a professional footballer. He could hardly have looked less like a Sunday pub team footballer, for that matter.

“Yes, Danny, this is the Peter Surley, in the flesh, the very same Peter Surley who scored a hat trick for Nottingham Athletic in their famous ’63 League Vase win over Southampton Orient. To this day, couldn’t buy himself a beer in Nottingham if he tried. I bought him for Cloppingshire for two schoolboys and a bag of balls—sorry to say, Peter, but even after your three at Wembley, they didn’t know your value, the miserable sods. Or maybe they’d just forgotten... it was 1963. Anyway, he’s been with me ever since.” Peter Surley reached out to shake Danny’s hand, and Danny knew Peter Surley could see what Danny was thinking: 1963... 1963... nineteen sixty-three...

But Broomsie just kept on: “Big Lou here is our goalkeeper and you can call him Big Lou. Played at Cloppingshire Town in the Mid-Central Council Conference with Petie, the other Jimmy, and that Trevor there before I rescued them. Here’s Dave, Dave, and Kelvin, wingers all three of them. Three fastest men we have. Tons of pace, especially Kelvin there. Over there are the other Trevors. You need as many of those as you can round up, you know. This is Todd, Todd, and the other American, whose name is...” The other American identified himself as Dave. “Dave, that’s right, but it gets confusing around here, so we call all the Americans Todd. Only one of them is any good. I’ll not tell you who. And this is Juanito, Juan, and Carlos—two forwards and a backup goalkeeper. Juanito has been tearing up the local men’s league the last couple years—he’s on trial with us just now but I reckon we’ll sign him up. Fast as hell. Going to be the biggest surprise in the league this season, eh, Juanito?”

“Sure, boss,” Juanito said, though you could barely hear him.

“Boys, meet Danny Hooper. Danny, the boys.”

The boys nodded. Not one spoke.

Danny looked back at Molly, standing by her car. She winked. A bird sang. He missed England for the first time.

Danny wandered off Portland’s pitch in a haze. Still jet-lagged and thoroughly reality-lagged, he harbored a lingering feeling that maybe none of this was happening at all, that Dire Vale United was still coming to the Auld Moors, that maybe East Southwich Albion could still advance in the Cup, that Molly was an invention of his young English mind. Then he heard his name. “Hooper.” Danny stopped. “Hooper. Turn around, lad.”

It was Peter Surley, still sweating, walking toward Danny as slowly as an athlete could walk. Even the energy required of his pillowy form to shout Danny’s name seemed to slow his momentum. When he got himself close enough to Danny for polite conversation, he said, “Fancy a pint?”

Danny would have liked to smile. He’d have liked to laugh. Of course he fancied a pint. But he knew better. He was too new. Couldn’t yet show the weakness of a smile. That would come, but he still didn’t know who was who or what was what, so he tightened his jaw and squinted into the Portland glare and said the obvious: “Yes, I would fancy a pint.”

“Good enough then, big man.”

“When will this be happening, Mr. Surley?”

“It’ll be Peter from now on, son, and it will be happening now. Go on inside. Clean yourself up. I’ll do the same. Then we’ll cross the road.”

Well, Danny thought, there might be a swifty with a softening old football man after all.

They crossed the road to a tavern nearly within sight of the old stadium’s pitch. “Strangest town in the league is what you’ve found, Danny,” said Peter from across a table and a pitcher and underneath a muted television showing a basketball game that Danny couldn’t quite keep his eyes off of. “Other than them”—he motioned toward the screen—“the city isn’t used to being in the spotlight. It’s a frontier outpost, my boy, and in a frontier outpost, everyone’s here for a reason. Everyone’s looking for one last shot, or their parents were. Suspicious and polite people is what that breeds. No one asks too many questions, but everyone’s wondering who’s following you... and where they might be.”

“Who’s following you?”

“Oh, nice of you to ask, my boy. Just England, only England. The past. I’ve won this and I’ve won that back at home, played for every City and Town and County and United you could name—and they’ve always wanted more from me, always thought there was more to come. They just kept yelling, ‘C’mon, Surley! C’mon, Surley!’ as if there was always more I could give them. But there wasn’t any more there really. I always gave what I could, and it was never enough for them. I swear to you, I gave. But I’m slow, slow and methodical, so they always thought I was holding back. One day I get a call from dear old Graham Broome, who’s found himself a home in a town I’ve never heard of, and he says, ‘Peter, come play for me, where the game is an amusement instead of a religion, where they don’t even know the laws of the game. Bring your magic to a place that will love you for what you can do instead of regretting what you can’t.’ So I came. I’m running away, Danny, just like everyone else. But I’ve run to America, and they’ll always give you credit for that. You’re running too, ain’t ye, lad?”

Danny looked about the tavern. In addition to a couple of flannel-clad loners and a pair of suspender-wearing workmen, whose beer glasses competed for space with dulled silver helmets on the table before them, were two men in the corner, looking entirely out of place, wearing suits and ties. To Danny’s eyes, they looked a bit like Three, or at least like Three types, and they seemed to be staring right at Danny and Peter. Danny stared back at them, seeing if he could elicit a reaction, but they didn’t budge. “Don’t worry about them, kid,” Peter said. “They’re watching the basketball.”

“Mmm, I suppose they are, I suppose they are.” Danny inhaled half a glass of his watery beer, half believing Peter Surley, half wondering how much those men really cared about basketball. To distract himself, he asked Peter to explain Portland to him.

“They don’t need much, the people here, and they don’t expect much either. You go to the finest restaurants and you’ll see jeans and sandals and jumpers and T-shirts. They believe what they believe, and they reckon you can believe what you believe too. Live and let live around here. To these folks, the teams that come and the players who play are as intriguing as the circus. To the good people of a distant western port town, men who can scarcely walk the streets in their native lands without being accosted by adoring fans are wonderfully exotic, not frighteningly foreign. We aren’t any good, Danny, but these like don’t know good football from bad. They’re happy to give a strange new game a fighter’s chance and they love us for bringing teams from L.A. and New York and Chicago to their strange old place, like these basket men up here on the telly. They were a little slow to catch on, but we brought the Pearl of Brazil to Portland, me boy. We brought the Pearl, but we’ve a loyal following, Hooper, and I’ll tell you something—if we can win, Danny, if we can win...”

“So you like it here then?”

“Aye, Danny. I like it here. Paid vacation. I could score a hat trick of own goals against anyone but Seattle, and they’ll have me back. And you know it’s their bicentennial, Danny, 1976. Two hundred years. Two hundred years without us watching over them. They’re making a jubilee of it. Everywhere we go, you’ll see it. And you know they think we sound like Beatles when we talk. We’ll be the Englishmen in the heart of their star-spangled summer.”

“You didn’t seem happy on the pitch.”

Peter gave Danny a paternal look through the pint glass at his lips. “Look at me, Hooper. I’d have to lose one of myself to be at me playing weight. I’ll never look happy on the pitch. It’s not possible. But I am, lad, I am. No place I’d rather be.” He set his glass back on the table. “Now tell me, Danny, who’s following you?”

A small cheer went up in the room. The home team had just done something significant in the basketball game on the screen. Everyone cheered except for the men in the suits and ties.