Keeper (21 page)

So, stupidly perhaps, El Gato said, “I have come back.”

The muscles in the Keeper’s face shifted awkwardly as if he were trying to dislodge something stuck in his mouth. As if he were remembering, slowly, how to speak. His lips moved, and the words came — slightly late, as ever.

“Of course.”

Gato’s words came out in a clumsy tumble. “I am sorry I took so long. It took much more time than I thought it would. I thought I would be able to come here four years ago. The thought of you waiting, of your long wait, has, has . . .”

“Has what, son?”

“Has troubled me. Haunted me.”

The Keeper lifted a hand. “And it has made you great,” he said. “It has made you complete something. And as for time . . .” He shrugged. “We are used to it. It is like rain to us — we knew it would stop, eventually. And that then we would be in the sun, at last.”

“I was afraid,” Gato said, “that you would think I had failed. That I would not come back.”

“There was never any doubt,” the Keeper said.

There was a silence then. The living man and the man who had not managed to die stood facing each other in the unnatural quietness.

The Keeper ended it. He said, in a controlled, formal way, “I believe you have brought something to us.” He held out his arms as a father might reach for a child. Except that they were trembling.

El Gato opened the rucksack and took out something the size of a baby, something swaddled in a purple and gold shirt. He unwrapped the World Cup and carried it to the Keeper, and when the Keeper took it, their fingers met briefly. It was the first time the men had touched. The Keeper’s fingers were neither warm nor cold, but they left a faint print of numbness on the living man’s hands.

The change that came over the Keeper was slight but also astonishing. Holding the Cup in his large hands, he became more solid. To Gato, it was as if a character in a movie had stepped out of the screen, or as if a reflection had materialized from a mirror. He was flesh, not air. He cast a shadow, a sharp defined shadow, on the grass. He lifted the trophy above his head and raised his face to it, and the light that flashed from the gold illuminated his features. For the first time, El Gato saw the Keeper’s eyes: intense black pupils within rings of amber. Glittering with tears.

The Keeper stood motionless for several moments.

And then the Lost Ones, the Waiting Dead, came out of the forest.

They appeared at first as a sort of interference in Gato’s vision: darker shapes within the darkness of the trees. Then they moved out into the clearing, becoming men. They wore the old national shirts with their broad vertical bands of purple and gold. The captain, Di Meola, came first, then the plump little coach, Santino, in his ill-fitting suit. Behind him Miller, then El Louro, the fair-haired winger. Cabral, Vargas, Neruda, the others. They gathered around the Keeper, paying no attention to El Gato. Perhaps they could not see him. The Keeper lowered the World Cup and handed it to Di Meola. Di Meola kissed it and then crouched on the turf, placing the trophy in front of him. Two players crouched on either side of him and put their arms around each other’s shoulders. The other six players, with the Keeper at the center and Santino at the right of the line, stood behind with their arms folded. El Gato understood that he was looking, through his own tears now, at the living version of the photograph he had seen in Paul Faustino’s office. Except that Di Meola’s hand was not resting on a soccer ball, but on the trophy he had been destined to win. And these players were not living.

A sudden furious gust of wind, impossible on such a still morning, set the trees in motion. A quiet roar, like the rejoicing of a distant crowd, filled the clearing briefly. Gato looked up at the whirling treetops, delighting in their energy, and when he looked back at the Lost Ones, they were already fading. The Keeper was the last to go, his right arm raised. His eyes died like stars in the morning light.

El Gato picked up the World Cup, a worthless, priceless, and magical chunk of metal. He wrapped it in the shirt, put it into the leather rucksack, and walked out of the clearing, into the trees. The curtain of thick, glossy leaves closed behind him.

Almost immediately, the forest sent its thin green fingers out into the space he had left, feeling for new places to grow.

M
AL
P
EET
grew up in a small town in Norfolk, England, where the only worthwhile pastimes were reading books and playing soccer. These are still his main interests. He is the author of
Tamar,
which won the Carnegie Medal, and
Exposure,
another novel featuring Paul Faustino. Of
Keeper,
he says, “Many soccer stories seem to get stuck in the mud like a heavy ball on a wet Saturday afternoon, but there’s no reason why they can’t shift into a different and magical dimension.
Keeper
is about soccer, of course, but it’s also about the supernatural, about relationships and loneliness, about believing in yourself — and about having something you would do your utmost to protect and defend.”