Redemption Mountain (29 page)

The boy named Gabe replied over his shoulder, “Dicky, you better shut up 'bout playin'
some girl
, 'cause you ain't never played against Emma Lowe before.” He turned around and walked backward as he spoke to his teammate. “You're playin' defense, Dicky, so you better not let Emma
touch
the ball, 'cause, if she does, you ain't gonna see it again. Emma Lowe's the best player
you'll
ever play against, girl
or
boy.” The boys broke into a trot to join their team warming up on the field, leaving Charlie more intrigued about watching Emma Lowe play.

Charlie took a seat next to Hank on the last row of the bleachers. Eve Brewster was already seated with Ada Lowe, Mabel Willard, and several other women Charlie didn't know. From the look of the players warming up and the number of supporters on their side of the field, the blue team was formidable. Charlie chuckled as he picked out Pie, still wearing his Yankees cap.

Charlie was impressed with the powerful shots of the two black kids, one of whom he recognized as Sammy Willard. The other boy must be Sammy's brother, Zack. A blond boy also had a competent way with the ball, and Charlie wondered if that was the boy named Paul that Pie had told him about. Then he looked for Emma Lowe, but the only girl he saw on the field was a large black girl wearing the dark shirt and gloves of a goaltender. He turned to Hank. “Where's that girl Emma, who's supposed to be so good?”

Hank looked over the field for a second, then pointed to their right. Charlie turned to see the girl spread-eagled on the ground, her arms stretched out over her head. She remained like that as Charlie watched her, until Natty blew her whistle to summon her team to the sideline.

A few cars pulled up to park on the shoulder of the road just up from the bleachers. Charlie saw Natty's sister-in-law, Sally, get out of an old orange Camaro, accompanied by a rugged-looking man of about forty. Charlie wondered if Natty's husband would be joining them. He looked around for the white pickup but saw nothing.

“Charlie! Charlie!” The Pie Man's excited voice brought Charlie's attention back to the field.

Charlie waved. “Hey, Pie Man,” he called back. “Have a good game.”

Natty turned and saw Charlie. Then she quickly turned back and busied herself with her clipboard.

“Morning, Mrs. Oakes!” A voice bellowed from somewhere on the field.

Natty winced when she heard the voice of the commissioner of the soccer league, Kyle Loftus, with whom she'd had several run-ins the previous season. The owner of the Loftus Insurance Agency was a large man who moved purposefully, cellphone glued to his ear, ensuring that no one missed his entrance.

As much as she disliked this pompous man, Natty knew she had to try to stay on his good side so he wouldn't cause her any trouble. She knew he had it in for her and would love to suspend her from the league, if he got the chance. Loftus and several other coaches agreed that the league would be better off without this feisty little woman coach and her
girls
playing in a boys' league. “Field's still pretty substandard, Mrs. Oakes. Worst in the league,” said Loftus, making a show of kicking a rock toward the sideline.

“Been a real dry summer, Mr. Lof—” Natty stopped, as Loftus held up his palm to her and shifted his attention back to his phone conversation. She turned around and sent her team onto the field.

The Welch team had the ball to start, and after the initial touch, their left forward lofted the ball downfield and gave chase. Charlie watched the action for a few seconds, but he couldn't help looking over at Natty. She was on the sideline, closer to the Bones' end of the field. She'd taken off her blue sweater, and from the back, in her red Bones T-shirt, she could have been one of the players. When she turned to an older couple sitting along the sideline, Charlie saw the white flash of her smile and felt the pang in his gut that he hadn't felt since high school.

Charlie heard two car doors close behind the bleachers. Two women walked around the bleachers toward the field. One of them, who looked to be in her midtwenties, was tall, with an athletic build and short curly brown hair. She wore a powder-blue warm-up suit and white Nike sneakers. Her companion was a little older, with black hair, and was dressed as if she were going to the office. She cradled a leather notebook in her left hand.

Charlie eyed the women with curiosity, because even he could tell they weren't from Red Bone. There was something too professional, too major league about their demeanor, to mistake them for locals. The women made their way through the few spectators on the first two rows, the well-dressed woman in charge, leading the way with a practiced, polite smile. As they reached the seats directly in front of Charlie and Hank, the older woman caught their eye and said, “Good morning, gentlemen.” As the younger woman turned to sit, Charlie read the white lettering embroidered on her warm-up jacket:
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA SOCCER.

Emma Lowe stood in the middle of the field with her arms crossed, watching her team struggle to clear the ball. College scouts here to watch a thirteen-year-old, thought Charlie,
from the perennial number-one powerhouse team in women's soccer?
Charlie wanted to warn Emma to look alive and get busy. The well-dressed woman scanned the field for a minute, then turned around to Charlie. “Excuse me. Is that Emma Lowe?” She pointed toward midfield.

“Yes,” Charlie answered. “That's her.” She nodded and turned back to her companion, who rolled her eyes with disinterest. Charlie leaned forward and tapped the dark-haired woman on the shoulder. “Are you ladies here to, uh, scout Emma?”

“We don't call it scouting when they're this young, but we're looking at a few kids up in Beckley, and the coaches there keep telling us we need to come down here and see Emma Lowe play.”

They all turned their attention back to the field, where the Welch team was getting ready to take their third corner kick of the game. Natty's team had been panicking under the pressure of their more experienced opponents, giving up the ball on bad passes and booting it out of bounds to regroup. They hadn't been able to get the ball across midfield, and only some aggressive goaltending by Brenda Giles had prevented Welch from scoring.

Finally one of the Welch forwards made a mistake, trying to juke around Matt Hatfield. He gave up the ball and was headed in the wrong direction as Matt started up the field with some room to run. He passed the ball to Paul in the middle of the field, who sliced smartly through two defenders and looked for Emma. When the Bones began to advance upfield, Emma started to trot backward. Paul waited until a blue midfielder was almost upon him, then he pulled the trigger, lofting a long, high ball down the field to land well beyond the blue fullbacks.

Emma's acceleration was explosive as she streaked past the surprised fullbacks, circling slightly to the right to put herself on a better angle to the goal. The ball took one long bounce on the rock-hard ground; Emma leaped into the air to control the ball before it bounced a second time. With her right leg stretched out straight in front of her, she took the ball three feet from the ground and tipped it over the head of a quickly closing defender.

Charlie literally gasped when he saw Emma's midair move. “Oh,
man
!” he blurted. “Did you see that?” Hank smiled, but the women in front of them sat unmoving, their eyes riveted to the action on the field.

A moment before the blue sweeper reached her, Emma took two quick, measured steps toward the ball, then one powerful stride with her right leg. With her knees bent low and her head down, she fired her left foot through the slowly rolling ball with a sharp crack. The defenders hadn't expected a quick shot from twenty-five yards out and were taken by surprise. The ball left her foot like a bullet, alive with vicious, hooking spin, on a low, rising path to the far post. The goalie, who had started to come out toward the action, watched as the ball rocketed past him and buried itself high in the net. He shrugged helplessly.

The Bones whooped it up on the field and shared high-fives while the scouts stared out at the field in rapt concentration. The attitude of the woman in the warm-up suit had changed dramatically.

The Bones had regained their confidence and were executing the passing triangles that Natty drilled them on at practice. They now played aggressively, as a team, while their opponents played tentatively and started to bunch up.

After a few minutes of dominating the play, the Bones scored again, on a corner kick. Emma took it with her right foot from the left corner, sending a screaming hook toward the far post of the goal. As the ball came through the goalie's box, Paul took it out of the air with a vicious sidewinder kick that put the ball into the back of the net.

Charlie again leaped to his feet, and Natty couldn't help smiling at his enthusiasm. It was nice to have a man along their sideline who wasn't too old or too reticent to let out a cheer for her team.

After several near-misses and great saves by the Welch goalie, Sammy Willard sent a long crossing pass into the middle of the penalty area. Emma soared through the air, two feet above several defenders, and headed the ball into the back of the net, past the unsuspecting goalie. The North Carolina women finally stood to cheer. This is what they wanted to see. Emma's foot speed and powerful shots had become evident to the scouts early in the game, but they'd been reserving judgment until they saw if Emma could play in the air, a major part of the game at the college level. As they stood clapping, Charlie leaned between the two scouts. “So, what do think?” he asked. “Think she'll play for your team someday?”

The women from North Carolina looked at each other and smiled. Then the younger woman in the warm-up suit turned back to Charlie and said, “She could play for our varsity right now.”

After the third goal, Natty put Pie in the game for Hardy Steele. He ran onto the field, turning several times to make sure Charlie was watching. It was readily apparent that Pie would never be much of a soccer player, but it was also clear that no one enjoyed his time on the field more. On the few occasions when Pie came across the ball with some room to run, he would put his head down in concentration and dribble the ball upfield as fast as he could, before running straight into a defender. But his delight at being a part of the action was contagious, and his brief solo dashes with the ball became a crowd favorite, on both sides of the field.

A few minutes before halftime, Emma put on a show, dribbling and spinning through three Welch defenders, the ball seemingly glued to her feet as she broke into the penalty area. From eight yards out, she could easily have blasted the ball into the net on either side of the goalie, frozen in his tracks on the goal line, but she surprised everyone by continuing to dribble toward the right end of the goal. The goalie lunged out as Emma calmly sent a firm, accurate pass across the length of the open goal to Paul, standing all alone three yards from the goal post.

But instead of just slamming the ball into the net, Paul turned and sent a slow rolling pass to Gilbert Steele, eight yards away. Panting from his run up the field, Gilbert's eyes went wide with excitement as the first goal he'd ever scored in a game went skidding into the net. The chubby forward raced off to high-five all of his teammates as Natty walked onto the field to give him a hug. Walking back up the field, Emma looked over at Paul, pointed her index finger at him, and winked.

The scout with the notebook sat with her eyes glued on Emma. “She's incredible,” she said, without turning away from the field. “Five years from now, she's a national champion.”

At halftime, Charlie talked Hank into taking a walk uphill to the children's library, where Charlie explained his plan for the hearing before the planning board. “We've made the changes to the pond design that you wanted, Hank,” said Charlie.

“That's good, Burden,” said Hank. “I already told the other fellas what was happening. You'll get your permit.”

“I got something else for Thursday's meeting.” Charlie laid out his plan to have OntAmex fund the repairs to Natty's children's library. He would have Natty testify about how little the town had gotten out of the construction project and offer up the library project in exchange for the board's cooperation. He told Hank how he had already gotten tacit approval for the repairs. Now it was just a matter of putting on the show.

“I'd like to have a couple of other townspeople go up before Natty. If they said a few negative things about the project and opposed the plan to move the pond, it would set the stage nicely,” Charlie explained.

“They won't be hard to find,” said Hank, spitting a gob of tobacco juice over the cement wall. He looked over at the library building with its sagging roof. “This is a good thing you're doing, Burden,” said Hank. “But it ain't necessary. You're getting your permit 'cause I said you were getting it. So, tell me.” Hank studied Charlie's face. “Is this about the library, or is this about the Oakes woman?”

Charlie smiled at Hank's directness. “It's a little of both, I guess. It's a good project for OntAmex,
and
…” He paused to search for the right words. “I do like Natty—and Pie, too. I'd like to help her out with this, the library. It's something she's worked hard for, and she needs help. That's all.”

“That ain't all, and you know it,” Hank said irritably. “You're a big boy, Charlie, and you can take care of yourself. But you got to be careful in this area, 'cause Buck Oakes ain't somebody to fool with. He's a violent man, and he's mean-tempered.”

“Like you said, Hank, I can take care of myself,” said Charlie.

Hank shook his head with irritation. “Burden, it ain't
you
I'm worried about.”

Charlie looked down at the soccer field, where Natty sat on the grass surrounded by her team. “Okay, Hank. I understand. Don't worry. Nothing's going to happen there.”