Maverick Mania (3 page)

To them, we were as tempting as fresh hamburger. They didn't even bother to bark as they bolted straight toward us.

Steve and I scrambled around the corner of the house and ran for the end of the driveway, arms pumping, legs churning.

“The top of the van!” I shouted. “It's our only hope. Climb the van!”

Steve didn't say anything. He was too busy pushing off me to get ahead.

Behind us came the scratch-scratch of dogs' nails scrambling on concrete. Not a nice sound, especially when you're in front of it.

I had almost reached the end of the driveway when I heard a dog's jaw snap closed. At the same time, I felt a hard tug at my shorts. I kept running.

We hit the street and beelined toward the minivan.

Bang! We both slammed into the side of the van to stop our momentum. It was quicker than trying to slow down. Steve nearly pushed my head off as he scrambled up.

I reached the roof of the minivan a few seconds later.

We looked down, expecting to see two vicious German shepherds leaping up at us.

But they weren't even close. They had stopped just at the edge of the yard. They
sat there, whining in disappointment at our escape and gazing at us with longing eyes.

I hit Steve in the shoulder.

“Hey,” he said. “What was that for?”

“Pushing me back toward the dogs as we ran,” I said. “If you were that desperate, why didn't you just flat-out trip me?”

“I thought of it,” he said. He was panting for breath, just like me. “But I figured it would be worth it only if both dogs stopped to get you.”

“Jerk,” I said.

“That's me.” He grinned. “Just remember I've got the keys. And it's a long walk back.”

I shook my head. But my mind was already on other thoughts: like, why Caleb's parents were so strict. And how to get Caleb to the next game.

It turned out I didn't have to worry. Five minutes before the afternoon game started, Caleb rode up to the field on his mountain bike. He wore an old pair of sweats. After he set the bike down, he jogged toward us.

Because the rest of us had on our team sweats, Caleb stood out from the crowd of players. The guys on our team mobbed him and fired questions and comments as he walked over to meet with Coach Poulsen.

“Where you been, man?”

“Good to see ya.”

“We were worried, man!”

“We missed ya, bud.”

Only the coach stayed silent. Mr. Poulsen was extremely tall and extremely thin. He kept his hair bristly short, and it matched his dark brown mustache. Mr. Poulsen wore dark sunglasses, and I couldn't tell if he was angry at Caleb for missing two games.

“Riggins?” was all Coach Poulsen said.

“I need to talk to you, Coach,” Caleb said. He looked around at us. “Not a big deal, guys. I just want to explain to the coach.”

Earlier, Steve and I had agreed to keep quiet about our morning visit. Caleb sometimes got teased because his parents were so protective. We didn't want to make it worse for him by telling everyone that at sixteen he had been grounded for getting a mark as bad as a B-plus.

Coach Poulsen and Caleb stepped away from the rest of the team.

I stretched as I looked around. The players on the Phoenix Memorial High Pirates, in green uniforms, were just coming onto the field. Fans filled the stands on both sides of the field. And in the distance, the mountains cut a jagged line against the blue sky of another perfect desert day.

I liked the way I felt. Nervous, but not scared. Inside, butterflies were dancing little circles of excitement, like offstage ballerinas who could barely wait for the music to begin.

My legs felt good too. Two games in one day was pushing it, but with all the games it took for eight teams to play each other, it couldn't be helped. We'd been practicing and competing all year for this. We still had five games left to make the finals of the tournament, and we had Caleb Riggins back. I was pumped and ready to go.

As we stepped out of our sweats, Caleb and Coach Poulsen rejoined us. Coach nodded at Caleb, and Caleb peeled off his old sweats to show that he, too, wore our blue uniform.

I didn't think it was strange at the time, but I should have. I just wanted to get a chance to talk to Caleb before the game started.

“Just want you to know,” I said, “Steve and I kept it quiet about visiting you this morning. Whatever you tell the team is fine with us.”

“Thanks,” Caleb said. “About the dogs—”

Coach Poulsen called for a team huddle.

“Later,” I told Caleb. “We've got a game to win.”

He grinned.

It was good to have him back.

Twenty minutes into the second half, we faced our biggest challenge. We were up 1–0, thanks to an early goal by Caleb. He had taken a pass from a corner kick by Steve and bounced it just under the crossbar of the net with his head.

Nobody could head the ball better than Caleb. When I asked him about it once,
he told me it was simple: He pretended he was throwing his eyes at the ball as he jumped at it.

As the game wore on, that one goal began to look bigger and bigger. If our defense held, we would win the game. And, so far, our midfielders had done such a great job of clogging the center line that we had not been pressed once.

Now, though, as two of the green played a tricky give-and-go, Johnnie ran into Steve and both of them fell. The greens took the opportunity to swarm into an open gap in our territory.

I watched carefully.

We played a man-to-man defense; Coach Poulsen had told us early in the season he would give us that freedom as long as we could prove it worked better than a zone defense. So far, it had. But now Steve and Johnnie lay in a tangle, way behind the play.

As sweeper, I didn't have anyone specific to guard. Last man back, I could see most
of the field. My job was to anticipate dangerous plays and stop them.

Their striker—one of the forward attackers—was a tiny redhead, quick as a hummingbird. I figured they would try to get the ball to him.

He began to edge toward the sideline, staying just ahead of me to remain onside.

I watched their midfielders pass the ball back and forth, advancing it so quickly that Steve and Johnnie couldn't catch up to them.

Then it came!

The same bomb play that I had tried the day before.

Their redheaded striker was bursting toward the center. One of the midfielders booted a high, hard pass.

I didn't make the mistake of going for the ball. It was too big a risk. By chasing it, I would have taken myself on a diagonal line away from the center of our net. If I missed it, their striker would have a short clear shot.

Instead, I turned my back on the ball and focused on the tiny redhead. The ball was just behind him, and he had to take a half-step hop to slow himself down. I slid and hooked my foot, stopping the ball as he overran it. I hopped up, spun around and looked upfield.

Riggins!

He was a blue blur, already near their sweeper, who had been just a little too confident about their forward press.

Without even thinking, I snapped a hard kick, putting my whole body into it. When the ball landed, it was ahead of Caleb by about ten steps, but he was in full sprint and reached it with a three-step lead over the nearest green player.

The rest of the play seemed to run in wonderful slow motion.

Caleb dribbled the ball without losing speed, held it long enough to force the goalie deep into the net and picked an easy wide-open corner.

The net bulged. The hometown crowd went wild. And we were up 2–0.

I'd held my breath while watching; I finally sucked in some air.

The redheaded striker on the other team stood beside me.

“Nice block,” he said. “And nice pass. You guys deserved that goal.”

“Thanks,” I answered. With so little time left, the game was almost ours.

“Too bad about your shorts, though,” he said as he trotted away. “Aren't you afraid of a sunburn?”

I stared after him, puzzled. Then I reached around behind me. And discovered a not-so-good thing.

It had probably started when the dog had nipped my shorts in Caleb's driveway. And my slide apparently hadn't helped. When I reached behind me, I discovered a very big hole in the back of my shorts.

I stood there, worrying about how to get off the field without showing the entire world a part of my body that my mother had powdered when I was a baby. Before I could move, Caleb's father walked up to the field from the parking lot.

He was a big man with a dark beard, dressed in a dark blue three-piece suit. He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.

Caleb looked over, dropped his head and slowly trotted to the sidelines.

Although there were still five minutes left in the game, Mr. Riggins grabbed Caleb by the elbow and took him away.

While everyone was watching them, I was able to get to the bench and put on my sweats unnoticed. But it suddenly seemed that ripped shorts were a pretty minor problem.

“Can a parent do that?” I asked at the table during our evening meal. I had just explained to Mom what had happened to Caleb. “I mean, it was like Mr. Riggins thought he owned Caleb. If anyone else had dragged Caleb away like that, it would have looked like kidnapping.”

Dad pushed his food—some kind of casserole—around on his plate. Because my parents both work, Mom insists that
Leontine and I each make dinner once a week. It was Leontine's turn to torture us, and everyone, including Mom, was too afraid to ask about what we were eating.

“Well,” Dad said, “it did look unfair. But there might be a lot you don't know about the situation. I think it's wrong to judge. For all you know, Caleb lied to you about why he was grounded. And it looked to me like Caleb had disobeyed by going to the soccer game. He wore old sweats to hide his uniform and rode to the field on his bike instead of getting a lift. You know his dad always drives him to games.”

“But legally, can't Caleb do something?” I mushed my food, trying to make it into smaller pieces that I could hide under a piece of bread. I hoped the phone would ring and Leontine would answer it. That would give me a chance to dump my dinner back into the casserole dish. “How can they stop him from playing soccer?”

“He's not eighteen,” Dad said. “I believe the law would still consider him a minor and under his parents' care.”

“I know there's something mysterious about all of this,” Mom said.

“Do you like the casserole?” Leontine asked me.

“It's an interesting flavor,” I said. Interesting is a good nonspecific word. The casserole was horrible, in an interesting way. “Is that a new streak of green in your hair?”

All it takes to distract Leontine is to get her talking about her hair or her clothes.

“Oh, yes,” Leontine said. “Me and my friends had nothing to do today, so we—”

“My friends and I,” Dad corrected her. “What you do is take away ‘my friends' and see whether ‘I' or ‘me' works by itself. You wouldn't say, ‘Me had nothing to do today.' You would say, ‘I had nothing to do today.' Then add your friends to the sentence, and it comes out, ‘My friends and I had—'”

“Listen,” Mom said from her end of the table, “I really did find out something that makes this a mystery.”

She says that a lot. Last month, she was convinced that one of our neighbors—old Mr. Cardston—was a Nazi war criminal.
The embarrassing part was when he caught her stealing his garbage to look for letters from other Nazi war criminals.

Dad rubbed his bald head with both hands. He tells us he does it because the stubble itches where he's shaved his scalp. But Leontine and I have noticed he only does it when he doesn't want Mom to see him smirk at another one of her crazy ideas.

“Yes, dear?” Dad asked mildly.

“On my way to work today,” Mom said, “I drove past the Rigginses' house. I took down their license plate numbers and got some of my police friends to check them out. I spent the rest of the day asking questions and learning everything I could.”

Dad began to rub his scalp harder. “Yes, dear,” he said again.

Mom was so excited about her detective work, she didn't notice his lack of enthusiasm.

“First of all,” she said, “the Rigginses moved here about thirteen years ago when Caleb was only three.”

Dad whistled. “Lock them up.”

Mom frowned at him. He smiled sweetly, like a little boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

“You were saying...,” he said.

“The thing is, there is a weird gap in their credit record. It's like they stopped living for the year before they moved to Lake Havasu City. How do you explain that? Then, when they resurfaced, they had a lot more money.”

“Must be part of the Mafia,” Dad said. “I bet he used to own half the mob in New York. He moved here to get away from them and lives under an assumed name.”

Mom looked at him with a thoughtful expression.

“I was just joking,” Dad said quickly. “Maybe he inherited a fortune. Or won a lottery. There could be any of a dozen explanations.”

“Uh-huh...I'd like you to do me a favor. You have keys to the school, right?”

Dad nodded. He looked like he had heartburn, but I knew he hadn't touched
any of the casserole. So it must have been from Mom's need to find a mystery in everything.

“Check the school files,” Mom told him. “Caleb is a year ahead of Teague—”

“Matt,” I said. “Please, it's Matt.” I live in dread of the day she'll call me Teague in front of my friends.

“Caleb is a year ahead of Matt in school,” Mom told Dad. “Surely there's something in the grade school records about Caleb.”

Dad finally sighed. “I'm not sure it's right to do that. It's not public information and—”

“There's one thing I didn't tell you,” Mom said. Her voice became quiet. “There's a police file on Charlie Riggins. And it makes me really sad.”