Keeper by Mal Peet Page B

direction at the last moment to shove it around the post. I also had to slide onto a terrible back-pass, which was picked up by the good black player whose penalty I had stopped in the last game. But by halftime, the Loggers had the smell of defeat coming off them. They had started to think that they would not get the ball past me.
    As we changed ends, our good forward — his name was Augustino — put his arm around my shoulders.
    ‘Will we win this one, Gato?’
    ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘They smell a little bit beaten.’
    Augustino laughed. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘The way it has been for a long time is this. The Loggers nearly always win. They are tougher than us.’ He shrugged. ‘The men used to bet on the game, but they stopped betting because we nearly always lost. But today, everyone is betting again. And we are favorites to win.’
    ‘I think we will win,’ I said.
    ‘Because of you,’ Augustino said.
    ‘No. I do not score the goals.’
    ‘My friend,’ Augustino said, ‘it is easy to score goals against a side who thinks they have already lost the game. And these guys think they have lost the game. And that is because of you. Forwards get very tired when they work and work and do not score. The way they get the energy back is to score. You have taken all the energy out of them. Do you understand what I am saying?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Someone told me this already.’
    ‘That person was telling you the truth,’ Augustino said.
    Hellman blew a long blast on his whistle. We got into our positions and started play again.
    We won the game, three goals to nothing. Augustino scored one of them. I did not disgrace Estevan’s shirt. My father lost ten dollars and joined in the applause as I walked off the field. But my father’s pride was no longer enough. I needed the respect of someone much harder to please. Someone who wanted something from me, someone who was waiting. Waiting with the kind of patience that only the dead have, because they have so much time.”
    “He materialized from the tree shadows in the same instant that I stepped into the clearing. Immediately he dropped the ball in front of him, ran it down to the goal line, and positioned it for a corner kick. He had never seemed to be in a hurry before, and I was surprised. Almost impatiently he signaled to me to get into the goal, and when I got there, he sent over a high, in-swinging cross, which I caught near the top left corner. He gestured to me — again, that puzzling, hurried manner — and this time sent in a cross that cut back away from me. I couldn’t get to it. Again a gesture, another corner. And another, and another. He had found a weakness in me. Well, not a weakness, exactly. He was reminding me that there is a kind of cross that keepers will always fear — the kind I’d had trouble with in the previous day’s game at the camp. He began to send in ball after ball, which came straight across and then swerved away from me toward the edge of the penalty area. In the clearing that afternoon, I dealt with most of them easily enough, coming fast out of goal and pulling them to my chest or else punching them away.
    But it was too easy. We both knew it. He brought the ball over to me and stood facing me.
    ‘Tell me,’ he said.
    ‘I wouldn’t be able to do that in a game,’ I said. ‘I’d be blocked in — even if I screamed for the ball and my defenders let me out. Because the forwards would just stand there and let me run into them: no foul. Like yesterday.’
    ‘Yes,’ the Keeper said. ‘So?’
    ‘I don’t know. Perhaps there’s nothing you can do.’
    The Keeper became agitated. It was very strange. His shape twitched and became slightly blurred at the edges, as if he wanted to be both here and somewhere else at the same time. This startled me. I was used to him being calm, expert, powerful. He dropped the ball and put his foot on top of it. Then he bent and picked it up. He turned away from me and faced the