The Off Season (3 page)

Luckily once I got to football practice there wasn't any time to think. From the way Jeff Peterson acted, you'd think we'd lost that scrimmage by thirty-five points instead of winning like we did, and he put us through some kind of workout.

By the time we headed home, I was just beat. Plus I had a ton of homework already. It was like, boom, yesterday was summer and today I was up to my neck in work. Curtis was just as beat from his football practice, although he spent the whole ride reading my A&P book, probably the section on teeth considering he secretly wants to be a dentist. Even Mom seemed fried. I guess being principal can be just as tough as being a kid.

Right as we walked into the kitchen, though, the phone was ringing, and Dad hollered that someone better pick it up, and it was Brian, and all of a sudden my exhaustion evaporated like sweat. I took the portable phone into the little office, which is as far as you can go with our phone because it's so old. "Hey, how are ya?"

I could hear Brian smiling through the phone. I'm sure that seems impossible, but I know what his smile sounds like. "Not so bad ... How was your first day?"

"Oh, awesome," I lied, and we laughed. Oh, man, did it feel good to talk to him.

We chatted about classes for a bit, and then Brian said like he couldn't wait any longer: "Hey, there's this truck part my dad needs in Minneapolis, and he wants me to go pick it up on Saturday morning. You wanna come with me?"

I couldn't believe it—a road trip to
Minneapolis
with
Brian.

"My mom wants me to go with someone," he added, "and she figures you're, you know, safer than some of my friends."

Smart woman. I wouldn't trust Brian's Hawley friends with a broken tractor. "Sure!" I managed to say finally. "That would be awesome."

"That's great. I'll pick you up around ten, I figure—"

"Oh no, wait."
Saturday.
Saturday, if you don't know, is college football day, every weekend all fall, and both my brothers were playing on national television. That is, Win, my oldest brother, was a backup QB, which meant he could go in at any moment, and Bill they were talking about starting even though he's only a sophomore. I couldn't give that up, even for a trip to Minneapolis with Brian. Sure, we tape the games with our dusty old VCR but you can't watch the tape. Well, you can, later. But you have to watch the game exactly while it's happening because ... Well, I can't explain. You just do.

"I'm sorry, it's just the Saturday games—"

"Aw, jeez! I should have remembered. I didn't even think—"

"It's okay. Maybe some other time." Boy, did I hate saying those words. I mean, if there was some way to do both things ... but no. So we talked another minute, and then I went to dinner feeling like a bug that had run into a windshield, just in time for Dad to serve this thing with goat cheese, which tastes extremely weird if you've never had it before.

About ten minutes later, though, Brian called again. "Hey, guess what! We can go Sunday instead. I mean, if you can make it."

So I asked Mom and Dad, and of course they couldn't say yes right away because they had to go into all these extremely embarrassing questions about where we were going and how long we'd be gone and when we'd be back, and what kind of driver Brian was, like I had his record in front of me, and Mom had to point out I hadn't been to church in a while, like that would be a deal breaker, but finally they said okay, and I got to tell Brian okay and get off the phone before Dad got too much grumpier about his goat cheese getting all cold, and let me tell you, that goat cheese tasted a heck of a lot better, and everything else as well, now that I was going to get to go on a road trip with Brian Nelson.

Wednesday, Amber came to school at least, with all these stories about driving to St. Paul with Dale and insisting I hang out with her and Dale on Saturday night. Which gave me something to think about you can bet, given that Dale is, well, I guess you could say that she's Amber's girlfriend although Amber didn't actually use that word and you can be sure I didn't. Then after practice Jeff announced that I had officially passed sophomore English, which meant I could officially play football, and from the way the guys cheered, I felt more than ever like I was part of the team. That was the other second-day-of-school news.

Friday night we played Cougar Lake, which is always a tough game because we're so evenly matched. Not to mention the Cougar Lake players, and some fans it sounded like, didn't care one bit that there were TV cameras filming the game, and a bunch more spectators than normal, so long as they could kill that girl from Red Bend. After those first couple tackles, I fought back as much as I could, and whenever I played offense I'd stay really close to Kyle Jorgensen because the refs always keep an eye out for the QB. At one point this Cougar Lake guard even grabbed my face mask, which is extremely illegal, and Cougar Lake lost fifteen yards and we ended up scoring, which Jeff Peterson couldn't help pointing out is what happens when you lose your temper and he was sure none of us would be so stupid. We ended up winning 24–16, which was pretty great, and during that whole game I only thought about Brian and Minneapolis three times. Maybe four.

Saturday morning, even though I was so sore I could barely move, I still had to help Dad and Curtis get the first of the silage in, and the last of the alfalfa, the three of us working like dogs, even Mom lending a hand though she's not supposed to be lifting bales, so we'd be ready when Jimmy and Kathy Ott came over to watch the games.

The Otts come to watch every game they can at our house, or we go to theirs, because they're as much a part of our crazy football family as, well, as me, when I think about it. Actually, it's pretty funny that we're all so close given that Jimmy Ott coaches the Hawley football team and he spent a bunch of years training his players to beat the stuffing out of Win and Bill, and now he's training them to beat the stuffing out of me. But because of all that stuffing training, I guess, or because he and Dad are such good friends, and Mom and Kathy are too, the Otts care about Win and Bill playing just as much as we do, and Jimmy follows their games so closely that you'd think he was their personal coach. Plus it was Jimmy's idea to send Brian over here to work for us in the first place because he's the number one fan of the Schwenk Work Ethic. So if nothing else, I'll always be grateful to him for that.

Bill started! They said his name right there in the opening lineup, that he was a sophomore from Wisconsin and grew up on a dairy farm and his older brother plays for Washington. Oh, that was
so
awesome, and I was so glad I was sitting in our living room with my family and my parents' best friends rather than driving to Minneapolis, even with Brian. Minnesota lost, but Bill played really well, although it's hard to tell because all the camera ever does is follow the ball, which a linebacker doesn't spend too much time with. But Bill had some great tackles that we could see, and if nothing else he didn't embarrass himself, which some days is the most you can hope for.

Right after Bill's game ended, Washington was on another network. For some guys, backup QB would be the most frustrating thing in the world because in four years of college you might not play fifteen minutes. But Win is so serious about football that it didn't matter, because he works so hard and gets everyone else working so hard that he's absolutely critical to the team. And let me tell you, if I had Win right behind me breathing over my shoulder, I'd work my butt off trying to stay ahead of him. And the impression I got from Win was that Washington's starting quarterback felt exactly the same way.

But here's the thing: five minutes into the second quarter, the starting QB took a bad sack and had to be pulled out. So right there before our eyes Win ran in, the announcer mentioning how he grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and has a younger brother who plays for Minnesota. Which we already knew from the previous game.

Actually, it was pretty frustrating because the phone kept ringing with neighbors congratulating us and making sure we were watching, letting us know they were taping it too. I was so busy being polite I missed this pass Win threw, a good thirty-six yards right to his receiver, but they replayed it about six times, and the touchdown that came from it. And right near the end of the game, Win scored a touchdown from the eleven-yard line and the announcers couldn't stop saying how good Washington's backup quarterback was.

By the time that game was over,
all
of us had to help with the milking, we were so late. Even Jimmy came out to rehash it with Dad as we worked. Curtis joined in a couple times with these little observations that catch you totally off-guard, like how Win spun to the right before he ran to make it look like he'd be passing instead, which I hadn't even noticed and now I had to look at Curtis twice, trying to figure out what made him so smart.

Halfway through milking, Mom came trotting out to say Win was on the phone, which is a very big deal because Dad and Win hadn't talked since December. I got to the kitchen in time to hear Dad tell Win how proud he was, and get all choked up and have to blow his nose. That was pretty great—not the nose-blowing part, but the rest of it. I had to blow my nose too.

So all in all it was a pretty big Saturday, and it wasn't until I was in the shower getting ready to go to Amber's that I had the time to wonder about this Dale person. I mean, I'd never known one of those kind of people before, not counting Amber, who hadn't bothered filling me in on that particular aspect of her personality until this summer, which hadn't been so fun for a while. Were the two of them, you know, going to talk about it? Or—jeez—kiss or something? By the time I got dressed I was actually pretty nervous, but when I came downstairs Dad and Jimmy were camped out in the living room to watch Win's game again in slow motion, and as much as I love Win there were other ways to spend an evening, so I took the pickup and headed out.

I was still pretty nervous walking up to Amber's house, but as soon as I caught sight of Amber, she said, "Hey, baby, check out my wingspan," in this deep husky voice.

"Yeah, baby," I said back the exact same way, "you should take a look at my tail action."

Dale looked at us like we were both crazy—which she had every right to do—especially when we both just about collapsed with laughter, and then we had to calm down enough to explain.

Which turned out to be hard because it actually sounded pretty stupid when we tried to put it in words. You see, a couple years ago—wow, maybe five, now that I think about it—I was hanging out at Amber's house one weekend and we rode our bikes over to the town park, which of course has a lake because this is Wisconsin, and after we'd played on the little-kid playground for a while, we ended up on this bench watching the ducks do their waddling-around thing along the shore. Only there was this guy duck who was totally into one of the girl ducks, and he would not leave her alone no matter how many times she walked away. He just kept waddling after her and quacking in that gossipy way ducks have, like eventually she'd change her mind and let him, you know, date her or something.

Anyway, Amber started talking in this goofy deep voice like she was the guy duck. "Hey, baby, why don't you let me snuggle up against those glossy feathers of yours," she said. "Hey there, you duck female, wanna make some eggs together?"

For a while I tried to be the girl duck and talk like I was blowing him off, but it was so much more fun to do the guy-duck voice that I joined in, and we spent hours on that park bench cracking each other up. I'm sure the guy duck thought we were there for him. At one point Amber said, "Hey there, ducky, what's your name? I'm Bob."

"Bob?" I asked in my normal voice. Because it didn't, you know, seem like that appropriate a name to me.

"Yeah, baby. Bob the
duck.
" Which, again, doesn't sound funny when I write it down, but at the time I was dying with laughter at that dumb-guy sound she was making.

So we had to explain this all to Dale, Amber quoting some of her best lines—my favorite was "Hey, baby, wanna fly south with
me
?"—and Dale either got a kick out of it or did a good job pretending she did. Plus she knew, don't ask me how, that a guy duck is actually called a drake, and she came up with "Hey, babe, this drake's for you." Which made us laugh even more. And all of a sudden I realized my nervousness about Dale was long gone.

Just so you know, Dale Wagner is really cool. I mean, I don't know that much about cool people. I don't hang out with the cool kids at school, I'm not even sure who the latest cool kids are except that I'm not one of them, and the only really cool person I know is Brian. Not that I like him for that reason, but he is. And I don't know what Dale was like in high school because she's twenty-two now. But that's not what makes her cool, the fact that she's so much older than we are. She's cool because she's got this voice that cracks, and she has a great belly laugh, and she drives a pickup with a little camper on the bed, the littlest camper you ever saw, kind of a dollhouse for truckers. She uses that camper too, because on weekends when she's not working she drives all over the Midwest, down to St. Louis sometimes, for barbecue competitions.

Did you know people actually
compete
at barbecue? I didn't, but I learned pretty fast. Like there are teams and you join up with a team—an amateur team, not the pros, which she said like of course
everyone
knows that—once word gets out that you're available as a sub and that you're pretty good, and the competitions run for days, and there are different categories and special woods and sauces that are Carefully Guarded Secrets. That's why Dale works in the meat department at the Super Saver, where she met Amber, because she was so in love with barbecue when she got out of high school that she studied to be a butcher, figuring that it would be a great way to learn about barbecue's most important ingredient.

"Man," she said, "you get a couple contacts at the slaughterhouses and you don't
know
what you'll get, it's so good."