the Big Time (2010) (2 page)

TROY'S MOM'S GLARE FADED.
She hung her head and quietly said, “You were always clever, Drew. I bet you're some lawyer.”

“That means you agree,” Troy's father said, pushing back the flaps of his leather blazer so he could plant his hands on the waist of his jeans.

“No,” she said, shaking her head so that the sheets of her long brown hair fell in a curtain about her face. She looked up with burning eyes. “I won't agree. I'd still like you to leave now. We're having a celebration, and you weren't invited. You're not part of my life, and you're not part of Troy's. You missed your chance. Go.”

Drew's face fell. He dropped his hands and shifted his cowboy boots so that they scuffed the grit on the stone stoop. “You can't just—”

Seth stepped forward and held his hand up like a traffic cop, almost touching Drew's chest. “No. She asked you to leave, so you need to do that.”

Troy saw the flicker of anger in his father's eyes. His jaws were working side to side, and his hands curled into fists.

Troy stood paralyzed by it all—unable to move, unable to think, barely able to breathe.

“Don't do this,” Seth said, quiet and almost friendly.

Then the fire went out. Troy's father cast a sad, almost desperate look at Troy before he turned and retreated down the stone walkway. The orange Porsche's lights blazed and the engine revved, then the car shot out backward into the road. The tires yelped, and the Porsche surged up the street to be swallowed by the night.

Troy descended the steps, moving in the car's direction until he stood alone on the edge of the light where it met the shadows of the front lawn's towering trees.

“Dad?” he said.

“
MY GOD,” TROY'S MOM
said under her breath.

Troy looked up at her as she turned and disappeared into Seth's house before reappearing to say “Troy, get your things. You've got a big day tomorrow.”

Troy looked at his friends. Seth frowned and followed Troy's mother back inside. Nathan scowled in confusion. Tate tilted her head to one side, looking into Troy's eyes as if she could read his feelings. Her eyes glistened with sadness and concern.

Tate descended the steps and touched his arm. Speaking quietly, she asked, “Troy, are you okay?”

“I—I don't know,” he said, taking a deep breath and letting it go. Troy felt suddenly tired and sore. The finger he'd dislocated during the championship game
throbbed, and the thrill of winning sputtered under the storm of feelings about his father.

His mom reappeared on the front steps with her purse. Seth followed, and she kissed him good-bye, all business.

“Okay, Troy,” she said, coming down the steps and past him on the walkway toward where her pale green VW bug waited in the driveway.

Troy wanted to go back to the party and reclaim the joy of the victory celebration. He opened his mouth to protest going home. His mom stopped where the stone walk met the driveway and turned as if she sensed his resistance. The look she gave him changed his mind. He said good night and thanked Seth for coaching the team to victory.

“Don't worry,” Tate said, “we're going home now, too.”

Troy hustled after his mom, his face hot with shame from some unknown source.

They rode in silence, exiting the Cotton Wood Country Club through massive gates and essentially circling a huge block of county highways to their own home down a winding dirt road. Their house, a single-story saltbox not much bigger than a cabin, sat amid a cluster of pines just the other side of the train tracks and a ten-foot concrete wall surrounding the exclusive development where Seth lived. When they pulled up into the
red dirt patch just off their front porch, Troy's mom hopped out and went directly inside.

Troy didn't move.

It had been a wild week for them all. Seth had been suspected of illegal steroid use. Troy had been accused of being a pawn in the Falcons' scheme to steal the signals from opposing NFL teams. And both of them had to be cleared so that they could help the Falcons continue their march to the playoffs. At first the media frenzy worked against them, but ultimately Troy used an interview with Larry King to set things right.

Tomorrow they'd be back at it, Troy calling the plays so that Seth could adjust the Falcons' defense, making the team virtually unstoppable in much the same way as their junior league football team had been unstoppable in its own championship game.

But that didn't seem possible now.

Seeing his father, even for those brief minutes outside Seth's house, changed things for Troy. Suddenly none of it seemed to matter. Troy knew that wasn't true. He knew how deep and strong his dream of being a part of an NFL team now—and one day playing on a team himself—really was. He knew that in his head; but his heart, swollen and aching for the father he never knew, made even his lifelong dreams fade into the background.

Troy didn't know how long he sat there in the dark with the pine trees whispering overhead before the front
door cracked open and a band of orange light fell out onto the porch. Without closing the door behind her, his mom shuffled down the steps and rapped her knuckle on the car's passenger side window.

Troy opened the door but didn't get out.

“
WHAT, MOM?” TROY ASKED
,
his voice dull.

“You've got a big day tomorrow,” his mom said. “The Falcons need you. I've got about a hundred emails with media requests that we've got to make some decisions on. You need to come inside and get some sleep. How's that finger?”

Troy shrugged.

“Can I see it?” his mom asked.

Troy held out his throwing hand, wincing even though she held it gently, and clucked her tongue.

“Come inside, Troy,” she said. “We need to put some ice on this, and you need to get to sleep.”

“You said that already,” Troy said.

His mom squatted down so that her eyes were level
with his. She gently let go of his hand and touched his shoulder. She spoke in a soft whisper. “You have to forget him, Troy. He's not part of our lives. I'm sorry.”

Troy's eyes brimmed with tears, and he shook his head. “All this time you said he didn't care, Mom. You said he wasn't a father, but he didn't
know
.”

“Honey,” she said, softer still, her fingers trailing through his hair, “he knew. Believe me, he knew.”

“You said it was
possible
,” Troy said, his voice hot. “I heard you; you just said that.”

“Troy, ‘possible' is a huge word,” she said, still stroking his head, her voice still soft. “It's possible that the world could stop spinning, but it won't. Your father can twist things around—he's tricky like that; he always was. I'm not surprised he became a lawyer.”

“I want to see him,” Troy said, crossing his arms and dipping his chin.

His mother's hand stiffened, and she pulled it back and stood up so that he couldn't see her face outside the glow of the car's overhead light.

“That's not going to happen,” she said, her voice cold now. “You come inside. It's bedtime.”

Troy sniffed hard and swept the tears from his face. He jumped out of the car and glared at her.

“No,” he said, “I won't, and you can't make me. I'm going to see my father if I have to hitch a train to Chicago, and you can't stop me!”

“Troy!” she yelled.

Troy didn't care.

His feet were already moving, flying across the tops of the needle beds, weaving through the pines and into the pitch-black of the night.

FROM THE MIDDLE OF
the woods, Troy thought of something and went back to his house—not to return, but to retrieve the football he used to throw at the tire that hung from a tree on the edge of the dirt patch in front of the house. Troy had collected the signatures of the entire Falcons offense; if he was going to really go somewhere, he didn't plan to go without it.

He found the ball just inside the shed, closing its door quietly, with one eye on his house, before heading back through the pines and out toward the tracks. Up the stony bank Troy climbed. After the total darkness of the woods, he could almost see the shiny metal tracks and their straight path due north to Chicago or south to Atlanta, depending on your direction. Troy
headed south—not to Atlanta, but to the Pine Grove Apartments where both Nathan and Tate lived. It was Tate's apartment he went to, scooping up a handful of pebbles from the landscaping and tossing them up at the second-floor window he knew was hers.

It took a dozen stones before her light went on and the window slid open.

“Who's there?” Tate said, hissing into the night, just the edge of her face appearing between the curtains and the window frame.

“Tate,” Troy said, “it's me.”

Tate stuck her head right out the window then and, looking down, still whispering, asked, “What in the world are you doing?”

“Can you come down?” he asked.

Tate swept her long brown hair behind her ears and said, “You really need me to? It's, like, almost midnight.”

“I do,” he said.

“Okay,” she said with a forceful nod, “let me get out of these pajamas.”

Troy circled the apartment building and waited in the shadows until Tate's form slipped free from her front door and down the steps. She held a finger to her lips, and they stayed quiet until they reached the railroad tracks in back.

“Are you crazy?” Tate asked, still whispering.

“You don't have to whisper,” Troy said.

“Who doesn't whisper?” Tate asked. “It's the middle of the night. The last time we did something like this, you almost got gunned down by a security guard inside Cotton Wood.”

“I didn't almost get gunned down,” Troy said.

“He
had
a gun.”

“You sound like Nathan,” Troy said.

“Where is Nathan?” she asked.

Troy shrugged. “I needed to talk to you. A woman's perspective, I guess.”

Tate went silent for a minute, and they began walking down the tracks before she asked, “About your mom and your dad?”

“I ran away,” Troy said.

“From home?”

“I guess.”

“You can't do that,” Tate said, upset.

“Now you sound like her,” Troy said, smacking the ball he held with his free hand, then firing it at the trees beside the tracks so that it took off like a rocket, nearly straight up into the air, “telling me what to do, treating me like a little kid when I'm not. I'm making ten thousand dollars
a week
. And now with me being cleared by the NFL to help the Falcons, agents are coming out of the woodwork wanting to negotiate a deal for me with the Falcons or even another team for
millions
. Think about that, Tate. Millions.”

“Well,” she said, staring up at the tree toward which
Troy had thrown his ball, “at least you can afford to buy yourself another ball.”

“What?” Troy said, following her gaze.

“That thing never came down,” she said.

“It had to,” Troy said, starting for the big pine tree.

“I didn't hear it,” she said, following him.

“Me neither,” he said, mumbling and searching the ground beneath the tree.

Tate stared up and said, “It's stuck.”

“I got that signed by the entire Falcons offense,” he said. “I need to get it.”

Tate sighed and spit on her hands, heading for the trunk of the enormous pine tree.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I'll get it,” she said, annoyed.

Troy watched her shinny up the trunk and scramble into the tree's branches. She shook one branch wildly, and the ball came tumbling down. It landed with a thump before bouncing crazily around and rolling down into the ditch beside the tracks. The branches shook as Tate moved into sight, then hung from the lowest branch and dropped down beside him as easy as if she were a cat.

“How'd you do that?” he asked.

Tate just shrugged and said, “A woman of many talents.”

“You're like a lemur, Tate,” Troy said, retrieving the ball from the ditch before climbing up onto the tracks,
“but thanks. I wouldn't want to run away without this.”

Troy turned to go, but Tate stopped him, and he could see her dark eyes glinting, even in the faintest light. “You just said you ‘ran away.' That's what little kids do, not grown men.”

“My father was a grown man,” Troy said, swatting her hand away. “She says he ran away. I guess I'm like him. Anyway, I want to find him. If she doesn't want me, I can go live with him.”

“
WHOA,” SHE SAID. “I
know you took some shots in that game, but I didn't know it scrambled your brains completely.”

“Why couldn't I?” Troy asked. “He seemed like a good guy.”

“Troy, you met the man for about three minutes,” Tate said.

“He had a pretty nice car,” Troy said, then quickly added, “and he got into Cotton Wood because he said he had a client there. He must be pretty legit to have a client in Cotton Wood. Those people are all rich.”

“You know what I'm saying,” Tate said, stopping on the tracks. “Where are we going, Troy?”

“I don't know,” Troy said. “The bridge?”

“It's pitch-black,” Tate said with a shiver. “And it's
cold. I don't want to go far. You should go home. Really, you can't just run away. Think about it. I know you're mad. I know you want to see your dad.”

“I
will
see my dad,” Troy said.

Tate nodded her head. “I think so, too.”

“You do?”

“Yes,” Tate said. “He's your dad, Troy. He looks like you, and if he acts anything like you at all, then he's not just going to disappear. But you go home now, Troy. Trust me.”

Troy gripped Tate's arm. “I do trust you, Tate. I know that no matter what, I can count on you. Best friends?”

“Best friends forever,” Tate said, grinning.

Suddenly there was a noise in the bushes along the tracks: snapping branches and a guttural growling. Troy felt his heart jump into his throat.

“Oh my God,” Tate said. “What is it?”

A figure burst out of the underbrush and bolted up the railway bed.

“Sheesh,” Nathan said, swiping sweat from his brow. “Talk about a third wheel. All this best-friends stuff and I'm not even in on it?”

Then Nathan laughed to show he wasn't serious, and they joined him.

“You scared the stuffing out of me,” Tate said. “Why are you crawling through the bushes?”

“My dad stayed late to help Seth pick up after the
party, and I saw you guys disappearing around the building when we pulled in,” Nathan said. “I had to go out through my bedroom window, and I took the shortcut to catch you. What's up?”

Troy told Nathan what had happened. He nodded and agreed that Troy should go home.

“We all should,” Tate said. “You okay, Troy?”

Troy nodded, and they all said good-bye. By the time he slipped in through the front door, the clock on the wall showed that it was just before one. He took a deep breath and tiptoed across the floor. With his mom, it was always best to work through things in the morning. Without putting on the lights, Troy crept down the short hall to his bedroom, eased the door shut behind him, then flipped on the light. He breathed easier, smug with his strategy.

Then he turned around, and screamed.