Fantasy League (6 page)

Finally he said, “You want to talk some football, Charlie?”

“I always want to talk football.”

That is what they did, the old man even pulling a piece of paper and a pen out of his back pocket, taking a few notes to himself as they went position by position, going through the strengths and weaknesses of the Bulldogs.

At one point Joe Warren said, “You won't ever lie to me, will you, Charlie? Or just tell me what you think I want to hear?”

“No, sir.”

“Good.”

But he looked more than tired in that moment, he looked sad, Charlie wanting in the worst way to take the sad look off his face in the middle of what felt like such a great day. He wanted to do something
right now
to justify the old man's confidence in him, his trust, his friendship.

“I never talk much about my dad, Mr. Warren,” Charlie said, “not with anybody except my mom, and even her not so much. He left when I was little and never came back and I don't think he's ever going to come back. He doesn't ever talk to my mom and he doesn't ever talk to me.”

“Anna told me about him,” the old man said. “Or as much as she knows about him.”

“I'm not telling you that because I want you to feel sorry for me, Mr. Warren,” Charlie said. “I'm telling you because I just think that no matter how bad things might seem sometimes between you and Matt, well, it just seems to me those aren't such bad problems to have.”

Joe Warren smiled then, smiled like he meant it, reached over and squeezed Charlie's hand.

“Charlie, my boy, I'm awfully glad of something.”

“What's that?” Charlie said.

“You're not just my football friend,” he said. “You're my friend, period.”

They went back to talking football after that until Anna came out of the trees looking for them, saying that her mom was here and it was time to go.

• • •

The next day thirty-eight-year-old Tom Pinkett threw three touchdown passes and no interceptions as Charlie watched with Anna and her grandfather from his suite.

And the Bulldogs went to 1–0, upsetting the 49ers.

TWO THINGS HAPPENED THE NEXT week, both huge in Charlie's universe.

First: Finding out that Kevin Fallon's dad was going to play Charlie's fantasy picks from
The Charlie Show
on
his
nightly radio show. Kevin and his dad had listened to the podcast and Mr. Fallon thought his listeners would get a kick out of a twelve-year-old being this informed about pro football, especially a kid from his own Pop Warner team. So he said that if Charlie was willing they'd give it a shot, see how the audience reacted, think about making it a regular segment.

Charlie “Brain” Gaines on E-S-P-N radio.

Second huge deal: Joe Warren invited Charlie to watch practice with him on Thursday, telling him that he'd asked Anna to come along, too, but was reminded she had a piano lesson that couldn't be moved. It was her mother's idea, Anna learning a musical instrument, a fact that Anna was constantly reminding Charlie of, telling him her mother thought music would make her more of a lady.

She always put air quotes around “lady.”

“I'm wondering,” Anna said to him one time, “if Mom wants me to be the kind of musical lady that somebody like Lady Gaga is. Or that other famous lady, Miley Cyrus.”

But of course she had gotten really good at piano really fast, despite her constant grumbling that it was taking her away from sports, and Charlie knew she actually looked forward to her lessons. Just not tomorrow, because she would rather have been at Bulldogs practice with Charlie and her gramps.

On Wednesday night, Charlie and Anna were at her house, up in her room, waiting for the last fifteen minutes of Mr. Fallon's show . . . and for Charlie's debut on ESPN radio.

They'd finished the second
Charlie Show
that afternoon over at Charlie's house, then gone to the Anna's for dinner, Charlie's mom having another late night at the studio.

Now they waited through the calls and guests on Mr. Fallon's show. To Charlie the show usually felt like one more place on the dial you could go to for nonstop Bulldogs bashing. Yet not this week, not after the way Tom Pinkett and the whole team had played in the opener. Even Steve Fallon—normally one of the bashing kings of L.A. radio—was being nice tonight, though what he was mostly doing was telling listeners to enjoy the team's victory while they could, before this week's princes turned into next week's frogs.

“These are the two hours of the day when I don't like Kevin's dad very much,” Anna said. “He's mean even when he's trying to sound nice.”

“I don't think he means it,” Charlie said. “Most guys on the radio, and you know how much I listen to the radio, say stuff just to draw attention to themselves. And usually think they're funnier than they actually are.”

“Mean is still mean.”

“How about all the mean things
you
say about your own family's team?”

“To you,” she said. “I say them to you. You never hear me do it in front of other kids. Not even Kevin.”

“But you do mean
your
mean things.”

Anna laughed. “Soooooo much.”

Steve Fallon had been taking calls for most of the last half hour, Charlie thinking the comments were mostly boneheaded, people acting as if they had no idea what they were watching when they watched the Bulldogs play. Mr. Fallon had begun the last hour of his show, which ran from seven to nine, interviewing one of the radio broadcasters from the Ravens, who Charlie thought sounded like just another caller, only with a deeper voice.

Like he should have just identified himself as Bob from Baltimore.

Finally—
finally
—with about eight minutes left in the show, Mr. Fallon introduced the clip with Charlie, explaining that he played on a team with his son, Kevin, that he was known as Brain to his teammates, and was practically like the pinball wizard of fantasy football.

“What's a pinball wizard?” Charlie said.

“No clue,” Anna said.

“By the way?” he said. “I pretty much could have gone the rest of my life without being called ‘Brain' on the radio.”

“Deal,” she said. Her way of telling him to deal with it.

Then she was shushing him, even though she was the last one talking, because there was Charlie's voice coming out of her radio, from the clip Mr. Fallon was using from
The Charlie Show
.

He listened to himself make his picks, talking about the points he'd picked up in Week One, talking about a trade he'd made already, talking about how his kicker—from the Texans—had made three long field goals in Houston's opener, getting him even more points from that position than he'd expected. Who to sit and who to watch and how his team defense, the Giants, had not only shut out the Eagles, but scored two defensive touchdowns and had six sacks.

Charlie tried to act like it was no big deal, tried not to act excited in front of Anna.

Knowing he was ridiculously excited.

“You sounded like a pro,” Anna said when she shut off the radio.

“I sounded like a small dog. I'm just glad I didn't have to do it live.”

“You could have.” Anna smiled. “Dog.”

“Mr. Fallon said maybe down the road. For now if he just takes some of our show, he can play it whenever he wants in his show and I don't have to sit around waiting for him to call me.”

“You know I'd be all over you if it wasn't any good,” she said.

“Tell me about it.”

“But it
was
good. Really good. Really.”

“I wonder if anybody was really listening.”

“Just wait, Charlie Gaines,” she said. “Just wait for the reaction from people who really were listening, and are about to find out how much of a Brain you really are about football.”

He didn't mind when she said it.

“If I'm so brilliant, how come you disagree with me so often?”

She smiled right at him. Charlie wondering, and not for the first time when he was with her, how old you had to be to tell a girl how much you loved a smile like hers; if you had to wait until you were in high school.

“Being a brain doesn't mean always being right,” she said. Still smiling she added, “Deal with that, too.”

MR. WARREN'S DRIVER, CARLOS, PICKED up Charlie at eleven sharp the next morning for the ride to practice. Charlie didn't know a lot about cars or have much interest in them, even living in Los Angeles, but he knew enough to recognize that he was riding in the backseat of a shiny black Mercedes.

Something else he didn't know:

Whether he was supposed to talk to the driver or not.

But then it was Carlos who started talking about the Bulldogs, Charlie figuring out quickly that he knew his football, and loved his L.A. Bulldogs almost as much as he loved Joe Warren.

“He deserves so much better,” Carlos said. He had volunteered to Charlie that he had been born in Mexico, but had hardly any accent.

Charlie said, “Maybe last week is the start of something, and they're going to surprise us this season.”

Looked up from the backseat, saw Carlos looking at him in the rearview mirror. Grinning.

“
De tus labios a los oídos de Dios,
” he said.

“I'm bad at Spanish.”

Carlos said, “From your lips to God's ears, young man.”

When they got to Bulldogs Stadium they used the players' entrance for cars, went down a long ramp, Charlie starting to think that the next stop for them might be the fifty-yard line. Eventually they parked in a space that Carlos said was only about fifty yards from the Bulldogs' locker room. The sign on the wall in front of them said “Mr. Warren, Sr.”

Next to them was a fancy red convertible, top down. The sign in front of that one said “Mr. Warren, Jr.”

And on the other side of that, Carlos told him, was the Jeep Laredo belonging to the team's head coach, Nick Fiore.

Charlie and Anna had talked about Coach Fiore, whom they both liked. Everyone in the media seemed to agree that Nick Fiore's job was on the line this season. For once, even Charlie and Anna agreed that it wasn't fair to blame Coach Fiore, that you could only coach the players you had. Anna always adding, “The players my uncle drafted or traded for.”

But even at the age of twelve, Charlie had figured out that nobody had ever passed a law saying sports had to be fair.

Any more than life had to be.

Carlos and Charlie rode up to Mr. Warren's office in a private elevator, the office one level below his suite, a whole wall of windows behind his desk looking down at the field.

There were two men standing at the windows with their backs to the office, watching practice.

“Mr. Warren,” Carlos said, “your guest is here.”

Joe Warren's sweater was a light blue today, but other than that he looked the same as he had at the house the day before the opener. The younger guy standing next to him, Charlie knew right away, was Matt Warren, the Bulldogs' general manager.

Mr. Warren's son. Anna's uncle.

And the guy most local sports fans, at least the loudest ones, thought was responsible for the team being as bad as it had been since its first season, whether they'd just won the first game of this season or not.

“Charlie,” Matt Warren said, coming around his dad's desk to shake Charlie's hand. “Good to see you.”

They'd met briefly in Mr. Warren's suite during the Panthers preseason game, Matt just stopping in for a few minutes.

“Nice to see you again, Mr. Warren.”

“Call me Matt. My dad's the Mr. Warren in the family.”

“See how they treat you when you're as old as Sunset Boulevard?” Joe Warren said.

His son said, “We're just standing here wondering if the team we're looking at can get to 2–0 against the Ravens.”

“We've never done that,” Charlie said. “Started 2–0.”

Matt Warren raised his eyebrows and said, “You weren't joking about this kid. He knows his stuff.”

“I do believe I might have mentioned that in passing,” Joe Warren said, winking at Charlie.

“Tell me about it,” Matt said. “Charlie, my dad spends more time these days talking football with you than he actually does talking football with me.”

“I guess I'm as lucky as you are,” Charlie said. “Getting to talk football with him, I mean.”

“Young people make old people feel less old,” Joe Warren said. “Sometimes the younger the better.”

Joe Warren motioned Charlie to come around the desk and stand with them at the windows. There were players and coaches all over the field, the players in full pads, offense scrimmaging against the defense, Matt Warren explaining to Charlie how they'd changed the rules in the last few years, the NFL reducing the number of full-contact practices. A lot of it had to do with the attention brought to concussions and brain injuries, but the players' association had bargained for it, Matt Warren said, thinking it might lengthen careers.

All of which Charlie knew, but he wasn't going to tell Matt Warren that.

On the field Tom Pinkett threw a bullet pass over the middle, then floated a deep ball just over the hands of defensive back Ray Milner—Charlie knew who it was before he saw the number—and into the hands of the best wide receiver out of all the ones Matt Warren had drafted, Harrison Mays.

“I have to admit,” Matt Warren said, “I never thought the old guy would throw like he did last Sunday ever again, at least not in a real game.” Shook his head and said, “Most yards he's thrown for in ten years.”

This time, Charlie couldn't help himself, didn't hold back what he already knew.

“Actually,” he said to Matt Warren, “he had that one game three years ago when he came off the bench for the Titans and went crazy and ended up throwing for more than that.”

Matt Warren turned and smiled at Charlie. The kind of smile you got from your parents—or your parent—when they were trying to be patient with you without coming out and telling you that you'd just said something that was dumber than hamsters.

“Not for three-fifty,” Matt said.

“Three ninety-two,” Charlie said.

He was a guest here, even if he wasn't Matt Warren's guest. But this was football. And in football the numbers mattered. Maybe more to Charlie Gaines than to anybody.

So even though he knew he should have dropped it, he hadn't. He turned and saw Joe Warren smiling at his son the same way Matt Warren had just smiled at Charlie, Charlie thinking the old man's eyes were full of mischief as he said to his son, “Why don't you check on that fancy phone of yours.”

“Really, Dad?”

“Just for the fun of it.”

Matt Warren sighed, knowing he had no choice in the matter, not in front of Charlie. He pulled his iPhone out of his back pocket, moving his thumbs across the keys on the screen like he was sending a fast text.

Then he put the phone away and shrugged. “Turns out you were right, Charlie. Titans against the Colts. In Indy. Twenty-four out of thirty-eight, for three hundred ninety-two yards. Three TDs and a pick. Guy bounced around so much, I lost track of him.”

“Well,” Charlie said, not wanting this whole scene to get any more awkward than it already was, “we were both sort of right. Tom hadn't thrown that way in a while.”

“Charlie boy's a fantasy whiz, I probably mentioned that, too,” Joe Warren said. “In passing.”

On the field, they'd moved the offense back to its own twenty-yard line and Tom Pinkett threw another long ball, this one to Maurice James, another one of the Bulldogs' high-draft-choice wideouts from two years ago. He was the biggest talker on the team, constantly complaining that nobody would toss him the rock, as he put it, at least not often enough to keep him happy.

But Matt Warren barely seemed to notice, turning to his father and saying, “You've been talking about Charlie and fantasy football so much lately I think I need to get you into a league.”

“Me? With a team in a fantasy league?” Joe Warren said with a wink. “Well, that's just the craziest thing I've ever heard. I'm busy enough just owning one team.”

Charlie grinned, knowing Joe Warren was playing a bit of a game with the two of them.

“Speaking of our beloved Bulldogs, isn't there something you'd like to say to Charlie boy, Matt?”

Matt Warren sighed and Charlie thought his face started to redden. Yet his voice sounded sincere. “I had my doubts. Yet if Tom Pinkett keeps playing the way he did against the 49ers, he really could be more than a
one
-game changer. So if I haven't officially thanked you, I'm doing that now.”

Charlie, smiling back, said, “You're welcome.”

Matt said, “I know everybody, starting with my dad, is stuck on the subject of Tom Pinkett right now. But I think we've all got to take a deep breath and remember he can't be a one-man team.”

“I'm not stuck on him,” Joe Warren said. “Unless the definition of stuck means being pleasantly surprised.”

“What else have we been talking about for the past week,” Matt said. “How you think the Dodgers are going to do down the stretch against the Giants?”

Still smiling, even though Charlie didn't think he meant it all that much at the moment.

“Anyway,” Matt said, “one of my jobs around here right now is to keep reminding everybody it really did count for just one win from Charlie's quarterback. And I need to keep thinking of other ways to improve our team.”

“For which your father is constantly grateful, if I haven't mentioned that to you lately.”

Matt started to say something, kept it inside instead. Then he told Charlie he'd see him around, told his dad he'd talk to him later, turned and left, Charlie feeling in that moment as if a whole lot of tension had left the room with him.

“Sometimes he thinks I'm putting more pressure on him than I really am,” Joe Warren said finally. “It's not as easy as it looks to run a team.”

He sat down now, pulled back the middle drawer of his desk, took out a small pill bottle, popped one into his mouth, drank it down with water. Saw Charlie watching him.

“Don't worry,” Joe Warren said. “Pill taking is as much a part of being old as forgetting where you put your reading glasses.” He smiled. Small one. “Or getting stuck on things and annoying your children.”

He slapped his palms on the desk, stood up, said to Charlie, “Okay: Do we watch practice from up here, or down on the field?”

“No-brainer,” the boy known as Brain said. “Field.”

“Thought so,” Joe Warren said. “Let's go down there and remind ourselves that football is still supposed to be fun.” He smiled again. “For football fans old and young.”

• • •

They took the elevator down and walked through a tunnel and then up a runway and then everything in front of Charlie was green grass and blue sky.

He was on the practice field with his team.

Not Joe Warren's team in that moment.

His.

As soon as one of the equipment managers saw Joe Warren on the field, Charlie saw him running toward another runway, one closer to the Bulldogs' locker room. What felt like a minute later, he came riding out on the field with a golf cart that had a roof on it, drove it right over to where the old man and Charlie were standing, at the end of the home team's bench.

The old man said to Charlie, “They need to bring me my own shade.”

The two of them sat down in the cart and Joe Warren took the wheel, promising Charlie he'd let him have a turn later. Charlie said that he was totally down with that.

Then they watched as Tom Pinkett and the offense kept scrimmaging right in front of them, like football was finally close enough for Charlie to wrap his arms around it, Charlie hearing the grunts and the thud of contact, not to mention some of the most colorful and creative swearing he'd ever heard in his life.

“When you get home later and your mother asks how your day went,” Joe Warren said, “please leave out the part about the salty language.”

“My mom says you can never shock her with bad words. Part of her job requires saying no to agents.”

The old man laughed.
A good sound
, Charlie thought.

Practice went on. Neither one of them spoke, Charlie concentrating, trying to take in everything at once.
Observating
, Anna would call it. At one point Charlie took a couple of pictures with his phone, just to have something to show Kevin Fallon tomorrow at his own practice.

They had been there about half an hour when Joe Warren said, “Let's play a little game.”

“Don't make it a hard one,” Charlie said. “I'm having too good a time.”

“As am I, Charlie boy. As am I.”

“I don't know why this feels even way cooler than getting to come to games, but it does,” Charlie said.

“Maybe it's because the stands are empty,” the old man said. “It feels like the sport belongs just to us.”

Nailed it on the head
, Charlie thought.

“So what's the game, Mr. Warren?”

“A game of pretend,” he said. “Think of it as a different kind of fantasy football.”

“Okaaaaay.”

“Every football fan's fantasy is to own their own team, right? Let's pretend for the next little while that the Bulldogs are really yours, and not mine.”

Wait for it, as Anna liked to say.

“Tell me what you'd do if it was your team to make it better.”

“You mean it?”

“Hardly ever say anything I don't, son,” Joe Warren said. “Thought you knew that already.”

Charlie took in some air. Then he swallowed. Just buying himself a little bit of time.

Then he said, “We're as good as a lot of contenders on both lines, especially on defense. But if we don't improve our linebackers and secondary, we're never going to beat anybody.”

He kept going from there.

Charlie Gaines talking football with someone listening to every word he said. Yeah. A
whole
different kind of fantasy football.