Molly was right on time, waving her own copy of the paper. “Danny Hooper! You’re a star!” She made a show of asking for his autograph. She asked the hotel’s employees behind the front desk if they knew who their famous guest was.
One of them said, “A basketball player?”
By nine o’clock they were in Molly’s car, heading uphill toward the forest that had captured Danny’s curiosity on his way in from the airport.
Molly said, “Today the team runs. You ready for a run? How was your sleep?”
Danny said, “Horrible. I’m shattered, to be honest. Cream crackered. Haven’t a clue what time it is, what country I’m in, what club I play for. Don’t know that I’m up for much of a run, but I’ll do what I can.”
Molly reached over and up with her right hand and put it on Danny’s shoulder as she drove. She squeezed a couple of times and said, “Ah, you’ll be all right. This whole league is full of players who don’t know exactly where they are or why they’re here. And most of them can’t run at all. Once you get body, mind, and spirit aligned, you’ll feel fine. You have my word, Danny—you’ll love it, and the folks here will love you right back.”
Danny just wanted her to squeeze his shoulder again.
In what seemed like mere moments, Molly’s car left a concrete cityscape and entered a forest. “Where are we?” asked Danny.
“Still in Portland.”
He wondered at these trees that could so easily loose themselves from the soggy, saturated ground and crush four or five homes in one stormy, tumultuous moment. But then, what’s one more rainstorm? They’re trees after all, Danny reminded himself, not impetuous center backs with chips on their shoulders... Why should they wish to end it all for the fun of crushing defenseless people who just happen to be in the wrong defenseless place at the wrong defenseless time? Why would a tree do something that cruel? A chasm opened beneath them to his right—a steep ravine of impossibly deep green. Trees grew from trees, ferns grew from moss, ivy grew from whatever it could find and climbed whatever it wanted. He said, “So this is Portland, huh?”
Molly said, “This is Portland. Roll down your window. It’ll be cold, but it’ll feel good.”
Danny did as Molly said and suffered the first blast of what was now, finally, March air, and it did feel good. East Southwich still smelled coal-heated and fish-fed—the local industry was the local smell, and you couldn’t escape it with anything other than cigarettes and beer. Danny wasn’t even sure what he smelled rising up out of that Rose City ravine, dripping from the green canopy above, streaming past his face, and now getting stuck in his beard as he hung his considerable head out the window of Molly’s car. Was it a natural smell? He had no idea.
Molly turned and drove up a windy road, past numerous runners, walkers, bicyclists, dog-walkers, gravelly parking areas, and muddy trailheads, until Danny spotted a rocky shoulder in the distance filled with men in combinations of red, black, and gray football gear. The Rose City Revolution stretched, hopped, jogged, smoked, or stood in a loose orbit around Graham Broome, who looked not one bit like a man who could manage more than half a mile in these hills—though he was hardly the only one.
Molly pulled over, parked her car, and said, “Time to join the gang.”
Danny stepped out of Molly’s car and felt the stares of the twenty men he had silently met yesterday. Not one had offered him much more than a half-hearted handshake or a light nod of the head. Half of them—the fullbacks and the defensive midfielders—saw his arrival as a rebuke to their abilities and an open threat to their jobs, and the other half—the forwards, wings, midfielders, and goalkeepers—wondered how on earth someone of his astounding mass could possibly be agile enough to keep the league’s strikers—mostly small, lightning-in-a-bottle Latin demons and sorcerous Slavic craftsmen—away from the besieged Revolution goal. Only Broomsie amongst them smiled as Danny crunched the pebbly grit beneath him on his approach to his new team.
“Danny!” Broomsie shouted. “Haven’t seen you since I looked at the paper this very morn! Good to see you in the flesh, my boy! All right, lads, we’re all here! Take a few minutes to stretch what ails ye, and you know what to do from there. Down that hill, take a left every time you can. It’s four miles to the next car park. I will see you there.”
No one said hello to Danny. And a few minutes later, Broomsie said, “Right then, let’s go!”
And he turned his misshapen body down the hill behind him, disappeared along a trail, all bow-legged and jangly, and was followed in obedient silence by the Rose City Revolution: the Englishmen went first (except for Big Lou), then the Yanks, then Juanito and Juan, and finally the two goalkeepers. Danny watched it all, the men queuing at the top of the trailhead as if waiting for a beer or a toilet, giving the runner in front of him five or ten seconds before following (at first Danny thought this must have been out of a kind of forest-running etiquette, but he soon found that if you were any closer to the runner in front of you, your face would be caked in mud within your first twenty steps), and then plunging down the hill. Danny waited, taking his proper new-man place at the end of the line. When everyone else had gone, he went.
For a good quarter of a mile, Danny enjoyed himself. It was quiet in this forest, even with twenty-some other men. And Danny hadn’t really moved his body in a meaningful way since crushing that Welsh boy’s tibia at the Auld Moors. He could feel his pores reopen and gasp in delight at the clean, fresh air. He looked up and saw the mighty trees flicker by, the slivers of milky-white sky above them spitting down tiny capsules of unsoiled water onto his hairy face. He looked down and loved the mud beneath him on the trail. Mud, yes, mud, yes, he thought. He was cold, he was wet, and while he wasn’t entirely content, he had his first hints of American happiness—
But that was only for a quarter of a mile.
At the trail’s first curve, Danny slipped and nearly fell, just steadying himself with a deft left hand on the ground. It was muddier here, down the slope some; Danny could hear the subterranean drip-drip-drip of water rippling and settling into the hillside mud, something he’d never heard before. While Danny placed his feet in careful, almost dainty increments, trying to place as much of his soles on the ground as possible, the other players navigated the sloppy path like native creatures of the wood, surprisingly sure-footed in the mud. His new teammates. By the second turn, Danny could feel them drifting away from him, and he worried he might end up lost in this deep American forest, thousands of miles from home. He supposed that Broome would make his way to the back of the pack in time, and Danny figured if he couldn’t catch up to Broome, then he was a sorry excuse for an Englishman. But still he worried.
At the third bend in the trail, at a dead hollowed-out fir tree—that’s bloody huge, Danny thought, I’ve never...—Danny felt a sharp pain in one of his calves. For the briefest instant, as he felt his legs give out and as he extended his arms to ease his eventual collision with the ground, he thought one of his Achilles tendons had ruptured—just now, bloody just now, and here, he thought, bloody here. The thwacking sound he’d heard seemed to have been the sound he’d heard before, usually in players in their declining years, the slow terror of the mid- to late thirties, when no one was even near them. They’d try to accelerate with the ball, a move they’d made thousands of times in their footballing lives, and SNAP!, like the full sound of cricket bat against ball. They’d scream, go down, you’d run over, and the look on their faces was more of grief than pain: I’m done, the look would say. I’ve played this game since I could walk, I’ve scrounged a living out of it, built my identity around it, let it lead me around by the nose, and now here I am, on my back, in the mud, and one of my legs doesn’t work and will never really truly professionally