Griffith turns his car around the corner, listening to Blue talk about the game. “I think what I hate most of it is that they took it from me. I didn’t come up here to have it taken from me. This was my chance, this year, Griff.” Griffith glances over at his friend, before turning his attention back to the road. The rain had started again this morning.

“Where are we going, Blue?” Griffith asks, as they drive along the highway back to the city, looking for the restaurant strip. “Where do you want to go?”

“Anywhere,” Blue says, shaking his head and staring out at the grey, hovering wet above the farmland, “just get me the fuck out of Waldron.”

Griffith looks at Blue from the corner of his eye. “You want to go back to the city?”

Blue raises his eyebrows, smiling strangely.

1

Griffith looked around at the men playing touch. He stood next to where they had all left their bags, and shuffled on the spot. “Excuse me,” he finally said to the first person to come near him, a black guy whom he recognized from East Hellespont High School, who had been a couple of grades below him. “Is this where the Lions practice?”

The guy nodded, and smiled. “Are you a back? We need backs.”

“Uh,” Griffith said. He didn’t realize he’d be getting down to business so quickly. “Yeah. I actually went to school with you, I think. I graduated from East High three years ago.”

The guy smiled as he pulled a water bottle out of his bag. “Blue,” he said, holding out his free hand. When Griffith shook it, Blue laughed, and added, “You better be a back. With a grip like that you won’t last long with the forwards.”

Griff smiled nervously, looking at the size of some of the guys playing touch. Even from this far off he could tell they were huge. One of them in particular, a blond boy with massive shoulders and longish, curly hair, chuckled out loud like a Viking. “Yeah,” he said, “I’ve played outside-centre for a couple of years. My name’s Griffith Elford.”

“Great,” Blue said, “throw your cleats on and get in there, Griff. We’ve lost a few players, so you better get used to these guys quick. You might be playing with them Saturday.”

“Uh, right,” Griffith said, and put his bag down with the others. Everyone on the team seemed bigger than him, except for a couple of guys. Even the Smedley twins, with whom he had played a year in high school, had put on some muscle since the last time he saw them. “I’ll be out there in a sec.”

He watched Blue leave, dropping his water bottle off to the side before running back onto the field. The large blond one was holding the ball, and he winked at Blue before kicking off to the other side—a huge, unwieldy impact that he followed up with an unintelligible holler. As Griffith tied up the laces on his cleats he watched them play touch, fooling around and showing off, passing the ball in ways he knew he would never see in a game. Blue always seemed to be around the ball, cutting suddenly and giving his team an overlap without his opponents realizing what had just happened. Griffith had watched him play a couple of times at high school, where he had shown only a little of this confidence. Griffith reminded himself that this wasn’t high school anymore—not with players this big.

Griffith fell onto his side with a player dressed in a blue jersey on him. He had held onto the ball, and he slowly placed it behind him, wondering where that tackle had come from. The player from the other team got up and grabbed the ball, and Griffith covered his face with his hands and curled his body, as two players in gold and black jerseys nearly ran over him to tackle the other player. He rolled out of the way as the forwards came, cleaning up the loose ball by making a barricade over him that the University of Hellespont team couldn’t get through, heeling it back slowly through the ruck, and Blue, his body tall from Griffith’s vantage point, came in, grabbed at the ball and sent it out to the fly-half and the rest of the backs, who Griffith saw had lined up without him.

There was the sound of a kick, and the ball spiralled high into the air and out of play. The sound of clapping came from the sidelines. He rolled once more onto his knees and was about to get up, when the two huge hands of Yula Borthen grabbed him by the collar and yanked him into the air. “Run straight at the goal! Get your head into it!” Yula said, his furious eyes glowing angrily behind the blond curls of his hair. “Goddamned... got the wrong state of mind for this game,” he muttered to nobody in particular, his voice trailing off as he ran back to join the backs setting up into their line.

Griffith adjusted his jersey, which was out of place from Yula’s manhandling of him. Jogging back to his place in between Yula and the winger, a guy called Thomas Kent, he went by Blue who gave him a pat on the back and a smile. “Don’t listen to him,” he said in a low voice, “he’s all talk.”

Griffith nodded, swallowing back a nausea that was part exhaustion and part fear, and closed his eyes, trying to smother it. Don’t think about it, he said to himself, think about something else. Anything else. The lineout. Watch the lineout.

He went back and watched as the forwards lined up in two rows extending out from the sidelines, and the small kid on the university team threw the ball in. The Lions’ second-row, a man practically old enough to be everyone’s father, or at least a teacher at some college in town, was hoisted high into the air where he stole the lob away from the fingertips of the other team’s second-row, and it was so beautifully smooth, so much better than the lineouts he used to see in high school, that he wasn’t paying enough attention to Blue and Roy Smedley, who had just thrown the ball out to the backs, and before he knew it he was sprinting as hard as he could to catch up with Yula.

That night after the game, in which he’d had two decent runs, a few tackles, a couple of knock-ons, and a catch one of the other team’s impressive up-and-unders, the East Hellespont Lions celebrated the victory at the clubhouse. Griffith was in awe of the clubhouse from the moment he saw it, an old Victorian-style building built in an underdeveloped part of the city, nearly a minute’s walk from the closest street, across a field littered with several copses of trees. It was a two-storey house, with showers and a sizable lounge in the top floor, while the main level consisted of a miniature hall, with hard-wood flooring that lead up to a bartender’s counter, and a massive beer fridge humming away behind it, right next to a door to the basement where all of the spare beer was kept.

He had heard the stories about the rugby life, with its singing and drinking and partying after the games, but this clubhouse was just too much. There were pictures all over the wall, small plastic trophies commemorating previous victories, even a framed Team Canada jersey mounted on the wall from a national team player who had spent a few seasons with the Lions. He stood alone with a beer in his hand taking in the mass of the tradition around him, feeling strange that he was now on the verge of becoming a part of it. They had even taken a photograph of the team after the game and were going to mount it on the wall just below last year’s.

“Quite something, isn’t it,” said an older voice next to him, and he turned to look at it. It was the captain from their game today, Sheldon Woodard, except that everybody called him the Colonel. “I remember my first time in here. I must have been sixteen, I think. Thank God the cops didn’t show up, hey?” He gestured meaningfully with his beer bottle. “You played good today.”

Griffith chuckled. “I played like shit.”

“It always feels that way the first time,” Sheldon said, and grabbed Griffith around the shoulder. Turning him around a little forcefully to face the others, the captain put two fingers to his mouth and whistled. “Excuse me?” he called out, “Can I have everyone’s attention, please? Excuse me, ladies?” The talking died down, and when all of the other players looked his way, Griffith felt his face grow hot. “I just wanted to officially welcome Griff here—who played his first game today—to the East Hellespont Lions.”

The players made unrefined cheering noises, and Griffith felt a sheepish smile sneaking its way onto his face. Yula Borthen yelled something incomprehensible from the corner of the room, and a couple of the guys laughed.

“Thank you, thank you, everyone,” Sheldon said, before smiling and adding, “Now Pops, would you do us the honour?”

At this point, the crowd of players went wild, with everyone singing something which, when all of the voices finally came out of discord, became, “Shoooot, the boooot, the boooot, the boooot. SHOOOOT, the BOOOOT, the BOOOOT, the BOOOOT.” Griffith looked around, trying to figure out what it meant, as well as who among the players was Pops, when he saw the prop from today, the only player on the team older than the second-row who had won the lineouts all day against the other team. Behind the bar, Pops opened two bottles of beer and placed them on the counter, and then crouched out of sight before pulling up and placing alongside the beer the oldest, most rotten-looking rugby shoe Griffith had ever seen in his life. He swallowed hard, but stood firm, prepared to handle whatever it was he had to do.

As Pops poured the beer into the boot—it leaked slightly out the toe, prompting Pops to tilt the shoe back onto its heal—the door to the clubhouse opened, and in came someone he didn’t recognize from the game today. “Hewman!” some of the guys called out to the guy, who had brought a younger-looking girl with him. Griffith watched as Yula went over to give Hewman a slap on the back and the girl a kiss on the cheek. She had long, straight brown hair, which went nearly a foot down her long, slim form, and a face whose features were so soft you could barely make them out in the clubhouse’s poor lighting. Her face went into a cordial smile, and it was a sight Griffith immediately felt imprint itself into his memory.

The song of “Shoooot, the boooot,” was trailing off as Pops brought the rugby shoe from behind the counter, and Griffith’s attention was torn away from the girl at the door. He stole one last glance in her direction, where Yula and Hewman were more interested in something they were talking about than the spectacle, but the girl was looking back at him, her blue eyes lit up with amusement. Griffith turned back to the rugby shoe, which stank horribly before him, and Pops’s big, jovially-mustached face grinned away as he held it for Griffith to take. “Better do it all in one shot, Griff,” Sheldon said, and before Griffith let himself think about the alternative, he took it and chugged it down in eight swallows, to the roaring approval of the crowd, at which point Sheldon took it from him and held it upside-down over his head to show how much was left. A tiny trickle fell onto his hair, and Griffith took one quick look back in the direction of the girl, whose amused smile had grown, to reveal a set of perfect teeth.

2

Blue came over from across the hall with a fresh bottle of beer. Griffith took it and thanked him. “Drink up, Griff,” Blue said, smiling. “After what you did today, the more you drink now, the better.”

Griffith smiled as he remembered the try he scored that afternoon for the Lions. Scoring one’s first try for a club was bad enough, he knew from the stories players had told about this club, but he had also scored it on the day of the rookie auction, and against Waldron no less, and the thought of the last debacle he was involved in made him shudder about the potential embarrassment of this upcoming one. The try had come on a scissors play with Yula, and if the Wanderers had been expecting it properly he might have gotten plowed, but they didn’t, and Griffith had gotten a clean pass and just enough open space in between the defenders for his legs to dance through, spurred on by fright for his life, to a spot just outside the posts where he touched the ball down. The run was certainly pretty, but that wasn’t the worst of it—Waldron and East Hellespont had been cultivating a dangerous rivalry for years, and for a rookie to come in and score his first try for the club against them was, from what Griffith had garnered, a Zulu Warrior offense.

Griffith took a large sip and looked around the clubhouse. It was packed, and not just with all the players, but their girlfriends and wives, and former players with their girlfriends and wives and even some children, and Yula was there with his arm around a blond-haired girl who had “U of H Volleyball” written on her sweater and a smile that could melt ice cubes from across the room, and he was telling a story to her and some friends of hers who she had brought along, and, once again, Jack Hewman and Sonja Nielson were there. Griffith’s stomach knotted up at the sight of her, and he couldn’t help but grin stupidly in spite of himself.

“Oh, and you’d better look out, too,” Blue said, patting him on the shoulder. “I hear both Yula and Kyle are going to be bidding for you.”

“Is that bad?” Griffith asked.

Blue laughed. “Last year, when he got Phil,” he motioned in the direction of the team’s younger second-row, who was talking with one of the several girls Yula had brought with him, “Yula made him match each beer he drank, and by the end of the night, Phil was yacking it up in the field outside. He’s such a joker, that guy. Look at him.” Yula was holding his hands out in front of him, talking about the size of something. “Do you know that nobody on the club has any idea where he comes from? He tells every girl he meets a different story. I think he’s part German tonight.” Blue pointed to where Timothy Harting, the jumper who had caught Griffith’s attention in the first game and who, as it turned out, actually was a lecturer up at the university. “We tried running his last name by Harting over there, but he couldn’t figure it out either.”

“What about Kyle?” Griffith asked.

“Kyle?” Blue said, pointing out the short, red-haired hooker up at the counter. “Well, he brings stuff with him for occasions like these.”

“Stuff?” Griffith said, raising a nervous eyebrow.

“Let’s just say it’s a good thing the cops don’t come out here that often,” Blue said.

“I see,” Griffith said, and looked over at where Jack and Sonja were talking to an older man and his wife. “What about that guy? What’s he like?”

“Jack? He’s all right,” Blue said, “He probably would have been the scrum-half again this year if it weren’t for that job he’s just gotten in Vancouver working at a law firm. Look at him go, hey? Shmoozing it up with the-”

“Vancouver?” Griffith asked. “What about her?”

Blue licked his lips, looked down at the ground and smiled conspiratorially. “Sonja? She’s all right too. She used to come here all the time with Yula before she met Jack. I think it only started between them about a couple of months before you showed up.”

Feeling their stares, Sonja looked over, smiled and waved. Griffith waved back, all of a sudden feeling like an idiot because her gesture had probably been meant only for Blue, but he tried to seem aloof about it. Their eyes met briefly, and he looked away first, forcing an unimpressed pursing of his lips as he looked back at Blue, who seemed to know exactly what was going on as he sipped his beer.

“You like her?” Blue said.

“Oh, Christ,” Griffith said, furrowing his brow and smiling, “I don’t even know her.”

“You like her,” Blue said, lifting the bottle to his mouth another time.

“Look, she could be a fucking moron for all I know,” Griffith said, looking around at the clubhouse, trying to dismiss the topic.

“Oh, don’t worry, she isn’t,” Blue said. Then he motioned to where Yula was sitting, “now, that girls chatting it up with Yula, on the other hand...”

By the time Griffith’s name had been called out, the hall had already started moving a little on its own, which was fine with him. He took yet another beer with him up to the podium, no longer caring about how silly he was going to be looking in front of Sonja. As he took the step up, the crowd clapped and cheered, making more noise for him than they had for Christopher Dunn or Thomas Kent, neither of whom reached the ten-dollar bidding limit. Yula was going along with them, before trying to starting the chant, “Hangemdown, Zulu Warrior, Hangemdown, Zulu Chief Chief Chief Chief...” Evans Ferguson, the pack leader who had been conducting the rookie auction, waved the empty beer bottle—which he used to point out the bids—around in the air for silence.

“Whoa,” he said, when the room had quieted down, “looks like we’ve got something of a clubhouse favourite here, eh boys? Must be that try against them Waldron idiots today.” That got a couple of seconds of cheering before Evans raised the bottle again. “Okay, let’s get going. For those of you who don’t know, this is Griffith Elford, the last of our rookies tonight. He’s twenty-three years old, a Scorpio, and judging from the size of him he looks to be a pretty cheap drunk, ladies.”

“I can fix that!” Yula yelled out from the corner, and as the crowd broke out into laughter, Griffith chuckled nervously along.

“Alright, let’s get an opening bid here, shall we?” Evans said. “How about-”

“Two cents!” Isaac, the short-haired and tan-skinned prop. The joke got some groans from the audience—it hadn’t been any funnier the first two times he’d tried it.

“Four dollars!” Evans called out. “We’ll start the bidding at four-” “Five dollars!” Yula called out, and there was some cheering, and a pause before Warden Kirkpatrick said, “Five-fifty.” Evans pointed his bottle towards Warden and was going to say something when Kyle called out, “Six dollars!”, and before Evans could even point out that bid Yula had yelled “Seven!” The look on his face was challenging Kyle to go higher, which the hooker did, calling out, “Eight dollars!” The speed of the bidding was generating some excitement, so much that Yula was laughing before he could even make his next bid. “Are you going to raise it, Yula?” Evans called out. “Are you?” “Give me a second,” Yula finally said, trying to gather himself.

“I got ten,” Blue said from the side of the room, and the crowd roared its approval for Griffith’s bidding having gone the limit. Yula’s eyes were so round he looked like he was going to burst, but he eventually shook his head with a disbelieving smile as Blue got up, fishing the money out of his pockets.

“Ten dollars! Whoa,” Evans said, taking Blue’s money, and then raising his hands for quiet. “This is some rookie you got here, Blue. Anything to say?”

Blue looked at Evans, and then at Griffith, and then out at the crowd, breathed in deep, and began to sing, “HangemDOWNNNNnnnnn...” to which the crowd went into a frenzy, some of them jumping to their feet to join in and clap along, and when the usual cacophony finally settled, the song could be heard, “Hangemdown, Zulu WARRIOR, Hangemdown, the Zulu CHIEF CHIEF CHIEF CHIEF, Aah-zoobazoobazooba, Aah-zoobazooba-ay! HANGEMDOWN, ZULU WARRIOR...”

Griffith rubbed his hands to his face, but didn’t let his hesitation go any further than that. Deciding to get this done with a little bit of style, he raised his shirt over his head with a funny look on his face, twirled it around a couple of times, and let it fly into the audience. With each successive item of clothing the cheering got louder and louder, and before the underwear came off, and the door was opened for him to run around the clubhouse the required four times, he caught a glimpse of Sonja, who was smiling and clapping and singing along with the rest of them.

Christopher Dunn, who was something of an odd mixture in between a rapper and a rocker, had gotten his hands on the clubhouse stereo, and the sounds of heavy beat echoed painfully off the walls of the clubhouse with the deep-voiced words, “Small chance a smart brother’s gonna be a victim of his own circumstance! Sabotage, Shellshock, Rock...”, so loud that much of the party had been driven outdoors. Griffith was standing with the trophies the clubhouse had won over the years, looking at the different dates from each one.

“Why did you have to do that?” came a deep female voice right next to his ear, and he turned quickly to see Sonja standing there. The swig of beer in his mouth that he instantly swallowed was a big one, but whatever fog had settled in his brain vanished with it. “What did you do?”

“I, uh,” he said, realizing he was going to have to speak up, “I scored my first try today, for the club, I mean. Against Waldron. They liked that.”

“So you’re new here,” she said, tucking some of her straight, brown hair behind her ears. “I didn’t think I’d seen you here before.”

“Same here,” Griffith said, and when she furrowed her brow, it took him a second to realize that she wasn’t doing this to be cute but to show she didn’t understand, at which point he laughed, “I don’t know what I just said.”

She laughed too, and looked around at the crowd, who were sitting close together in order to be heard over the music. “Crazy party,” she said, before looking back at him and smiling.

“Yeah,” Griffith said, trying to seem as good-natured as possible, “Say, where’s that guy you were with?”

“Oh, him,” she said, sighing, “He had to leave early for the ferry back to Vancouver tomorrow morning. He’s such a bore sometimes.”

“Oh,” he said, “that’s too bad. How are you getting home, then?”

“We drove here separately,” she said.

“Oh, well that’s good,” he said. “I mean, it’s too bad you can’t drink or anything. I mean, I’d drive you home, and all, but I’m in pretty lousy shape right now.”

“You looked to be in all right shape before,” she said, raising an eyebrow and tightening her mouth into a smile, and giving an exaggerated appraisal of his stomach before laughing and grabbing his elbow. “Just kidding,” she said, and then her eyes widened, “I mean, I’m not, but...”

“You want to go outside?” Griffith asked. She nodded as she tried to suppress her embarrassed giggling.

“So, how do you like playing for the Lions?” she asked, as they walked slowly along the path from the clubhouse to the road, and then walked further than that, to a playground that was five minutes down the road. As they walked, he felt thrilled and anxious, by the way she looked at him, the way she laughed at his jokes, the way she always adjusted her step to keep them at the same, close proximity to each other, him not really paying attention to what he said except for how he could lead the conversation further and further away from the awkward moment when she would have to say that maybe it was time for her to go.

“It’s alright,” he said. “I remember when I was way younger, thinking of how old the guys in rugby clubs looked, and how I’d never belong with them because I’d never be a man in the way that they were men, you know? I guess that sounds silly-”

“No,” she laughed, “but I have to admit that most of them don’t always act like men.”

“Yeah,” he smiled.

Their conversation had uncovered similarities in between her and him both interested and excited him. She was going to be graduating from the university in biology that spring, while he was going to be transferring over from West Hellespont College into the university’s biochemistry program. She wasn’t originally from Hellespont, and neither was he, and so they joked about the things they thought were weird here that everybody else who was from here didn’t seem to notice—the hippies, the old people, how a tiny snowfall could lock the city down for three days. They talked about past relationships, and she said she’d been in her fair share of stupid ones—she rolled her eyes at the mention of Yula—and he mentioned that another reason why he had joined a rugby club was to get away from the women for a while, and they talked about that for a while. They had sat in all the different parts of the playground by the point they had exhausted the topic, and were sitting next to each other on the same side of the seesaw, looking over at the dark shadows of the buildings near the river, when she breathed in deeply and said, “It’s probably time for me to go.” He sighed in response.

On the way back to the car, he asked, “How are things with you and Jack?”

“He’s been very good for me,” she said, still not allowing them to get too far apart as they walked. “He’s not like the other guys I know. It’s strange that this relationship feels so mature compared to the others I’ve had. I mean, sometimes I miss the spontaneity, but it’s good. Yeah, I think it’s really good. I do.”

“Are you trying to convince me or yourself?” Griffith asked, and she laughed, punching him on the shoulder.

They walked in silence the rest of the way to her car, and when they arrived and she said good-bye, he put his hand to his lips and blew her a kiss, giving a dramatic bow before turning around and walking back to the clubhouse. He didn’t look back, except for one time, when he heard her car start, to see if she was watching him go.

She wasn’t.

3

They were sitting around in their Hallowe’en costumes telling jokes by the time it was already starting to look like the evening was going to be a bust. The sort of guys who guarantee that a party is going to be a good time weren’t there—Yula, Pops, Evans, Phil, Blue, Sheldon, Kyle and the Smedleys had all gone to a different party, and none of the former players had bothered showing up. Griffith watched the others there with a detached feeling, partly wishing he was somewhere else, but not altogether sure where that somewhere else could be.

“There was this one thing Yula said,” Warden said, “you remember it, Harting? That time you were talking about coming up with a title for that book you wanted to do? And Yula said that he was planning on writing his autobiography, and he was going to call it... what was he going to call it?”

“Women Getting Undressed,” Christopher said, and subdued laughter went around the room. “That guy. What’s he this week? Norwegian?”

“Hey, Isaac,” Warden said, “what was that joke you told Yula before that got him laughing so hard?”

“You want to hear it?” Isaac said, looking up from the floor.

“Yeah, shit yeah,” Christopher called out, “tell us a joke.”

“All right,” Isaac said, rubbing his hands together and standing up. “There’s this guy, and he wants to go hunting, right? So he takes his rifle out to the woods, and he sees this bear, and he shoots at the bear. The bear’s body falls off to the side, and he runs over, excited as all hell that he got so lucky. But, when he gets there, the bear’s body is gone, and he’s confused. Then, he feels a tap on the shoulder, and he turns around, and the bear’s there, and the bear swats him to the ground, pulls down his pants, molests him, and runs away. So the guy, he gets pissed off, and he goes home, and he gets a double-barreled shotgun. And he goes back to the woods, and he sees the bear, and he gets excited and mad, and he shoots at the bear, and the bear’s body falls off to the side. He runs over, wanting to see the dead bear, but the bear’s gone, and he’s confused. He feels a tap on the shoulder, turns around, and the bear’s there again and the bear swats him to the ground, pulls down his pants, molests him,” Isaac’s fingers danced around in front of his face to show how the molesting was done, and everyone was smiling at the ridiculous revulsion of it, “and then the bear runs away. So the guy gets real pissed off, and goes home, and gets an elephant gun. And he goes back to the woods, sees the bear, shoots at the bear, the bear falls off to the side. The guy gives a holler of victory, runs over, and there’s no bear. He feels a tap on the shoulder, turns around, and the bear swats him to the ground, and the bear says, ‘Gee, you’re not here for the hunting, are ya?’”

Half of them laughed and the other half groaned, and Griffith, who was one of the ones who groaned, turned around to look at the rest of the clubhouse.

At the entrance, standing just outside where only he could see, was Sonja. She was alone, wearing a costume of a mountain lion, and she stared back at him.

“How long had you been there?” he asked as they walked alone, outside and along that path that led in between the trees. He had pulled off his mask—he had come as a devil in boxer shorts—and she had taken off her hood, letting her hair fall down around her gold and orange suit. It wasn’t incredibly tight, but it did complement her figure, and in between that and the mountain lion’s makeup, it was all he could do to keep himself at arm’s length from her. “Did you hear the joke? It was funny.”

“No,” she said, “I was only there for less than a minute. I thought there was going to be a bigger party than that.”

“Yeah, well, so did I,” he said, and they walked along in silence some more, as the long, thin lines of nighttime clouds lit up by the waning moon gave the city, which was in the middle of the nine-month wet season, a rare view of the stars. This time, as they walked, she seemed to be trying to keep them a certain distance apart, and he couldn’t feel any of the happiness of their last walk together.

He wanted to tell her how crazy he was for her, but all he could do was stop still for a moment, and look at her. She stopped, and looked back at him, and from the look in her eyes, he could tell that there was something there within her that was feeling the same thing for him. There was another path, deeper into one of the copse of trees, and she started walking down it, and he followed. They didn’t say anything for a while as the path became narrower, and the trees seemed to block out most of the sky, until all of a sudden, they both walked face-first into a patch of spider webs, and she gasped, and then giggled, wiping her brow clean. They stopped walking, and he watched as she pulled the last of it from her hair, and then she looked at him.

“You’ve got some,” she said, and her hand reached out, delicately picking the web from his hair, her fingers dancing around through thin lines of spidersilk barely lit up by the moon.

As she picked out the last of it, his hand went to her shoulder and cupped it. He felt himself growing weak and silly inside, and if it weren’t for her eyes, locked onto his, he felt that he might have fallen down to the floor, a stupid mess of macho rugby player on the ground.

“Jack didn’t come up from Vancouver this weekend,” she said.

“Oh, sorry,” he said, feeling stupid but not wanting to take his hand away. They stood there for another minute, before finally, he couldn’t help himself.

At her place, it took him about ten wonderful minutes to get her mountain lion costume off, and the make-up was gradually wiped off in the process, while she skillfully got him out of his costume, performing various acts in the process, before the two of them were completely naked, her on top with her brown hair falling over him, and she, much stronger than her clothed slenderness let on, grabbed hold of him completely, and a momentary silence of indecision was all that passed before his hand went down, and she lifted herself up and over, and he felt himself enter inside her, and it began. And it didn’t end right away, because she was very good at it, and even though he was ready to finish it the moment she had taken him in her mouth back when they were still partway dressed, she held him, allowing herself to catch up, so that she matched the tempo for the two of them, lifting herself up and back at various moments to change the pace, bringing herself down and close again so that they could be close again, until suddenly, her breathing was different, more desperate, and in her breathing up until the end of it Griffith thought he could sense something he hadn’t felt before, a passion for him, from someone who he definitely felt a passion for, and one of the few important things he hadn’t told her about himself was this, that this would be the first time he would feel this way for someone, and something inside told him that it wouldn’t again be this good. It might be different, perhaps, but never as good—not unless, maybe, it was with her again. And, as before, he saw something in her eyes, as she kept them open for that final minute before closing them amidst the pained look which took over her face, that there was something inside her that felt that way, too.

“What’re you thinking?” he said to her back. She had rolled to face the window after they had taken a second break, but it didn’t look like he was going to be able to encourage her one last time. His hand went over the curvature of her hip anyway.

“You’ve got to go,” she said.

“Is he coming back here?” he asked.

“This weekend,” she said.

“So I can stay longer?” he asked, grinning.

“No,” she said, turning back in his direction. She looked confused. “You’ve got to go, Griffith.”

“I can’t,” he said, and he felt the weakness in his voice, and he hated it, but what he had said was true—his body wouldn’t let him leave just yet.

“Oh, get out,” she said, pushing him away with her arm, and pulling her blanket up over her face. “Don’t put it off.”

He looked at her a moment, and then nodded, and twisted his body over to the side of the bed. As he put his clothes on he looked outside. It was still night out, and his car was back at the clubhouse, but he didn’t mind walking there. At this point, he needed a walk.

When he got home, he realized she hadn’t given him her phone number. He thought about looking it up in the phone book, but didn’t. If she wanted him to call, he knew, he would have had her number now.

The next two months Griffith continued to start at outside-centre, and while he didn’t score again he had played well, becoming a decent tackler and the primary guy to handle the high kicks from the other team, and becoming good at drawing defenders away from the other runners, giving them the chance to score, which, on more than a couple of occasions, they did. Some of the time, though, his play was distracted, his attention turned to the sidelines, to see if, amongst all the old boys and their wives and children, and the players’ wives and girlfriends, Jack would show up and bring Sonja with him, which never happened.

4

Griffith spent most of the rookie initiation on New Year’s wearing a dress, and all of the club members took their turns making he and Christopher and Thomas do whatever came to their minds. There was a final ritual that they were saving for the end of the evening, and until then they were sitting around watching one of the college football championships on the television, drinking back more and more.

Richard Smedley, who had originally bought Christopher Dunn, sold him again for a bottle of scotch to Yula, and Yula was making Christopher pay for it, having given him no more than fifteen minutes to drink each successive bottle of beer that was brought out from behind the counter. Griffith watched as Christopher, with his eyes almost completely shut, swayed back and forth almost perfectly in time to the marching band music coming from the television.

“Is Christopher going to be all right?” Griffith asked. He looked over at Blue, who had made his evening very easy to handle, buying beer at a rate that he could easily handle. Even Thomas, whom Pops had bought, wasn’t having it so good, having to follow up every bottle of beer with a shot of thick, sweet coffee liqueur.

“Probably not,” Blue said, smiling. “Hey, don’t worry about him. You’ve got the attic to go yet.”

“Yeah,” Griffith said, his voice not sounding very enthusiastic.

“Shit,” Evans Ferguson said, all of a sudden, “Hey guys, I almost forgot. We got a postcard yesterday from Jack. It’s sitting behind the bar, if you want to get it.”

“Christ,” Yula said, smiling, “I don’t want to stand up and go all the way over there. Just tell us what it said.”

Evans laughed. “Something about how much fun the two of them were having, something about how beautiful Hawaii is, and that he’ll be back in a week, and that he’ll be coming up to practice with us for a bit.”

“Nothing about what the two of them are doing?” Yula said suggestively.

“Oh Christ,” Sheldon said, “shut up.”

“I’ll bet he’s giving it to her good, man,” Yula laughed. “In Hawaii? Holy Christ. I know how good to go she is. I’ll bet they’re rocking the hotel’s foundations.”

There was some laughter, and Sheldon, who was smiling himself, said, “Shut it, you pig! Show some decency.”

“Ruck the fundashun,” Christopher slurred out all of a sudden, and everyone in the room started howling with laughter, except for Griffith, who was staring at the wall below the television set, the only part of the room where there weren’t any pictures.

Blue gave him an appraising look, and then turned back to the television set, before standing up and telling Griffith to come with him, over to the bar. Griffith followed, swaying a little with drunkenness but not too badly. When they arrived, Blue reached over and pulled out a bottle of rye and a can of ginger ale. With a plastic beer glass he fixed Griffith a drink. “Come on,” he said, and Griffith followed him outdoors.

Once they were outside, he gave the drink to Griffith, who downed it, but it didn’t make him any drunker. “Are you going to keep it to yourself?” Blue asked, and Griffith opened his mouth, but, with the fact that Sonja had not called him, the fact that he didn’t have the courage to call her and go against what he knew she wanted, the fact that nobody in the club could ever know about it, that he didn’t know Blue all that well to tell him even in confidence... all of a sudden, he started shivering, and he began to gasp, and just as he started crying, Blue put his arm around his shoulder, and sipped his beer, waiting for Griffith to get it all out.

Later, when it was his turn to go up into the attic, he felt relieved. When the voice of Isaac came from behind the circle of executioner’s masks and black robes and told him to sip a glass of something and then do fifty push-ups, he did it willingly, and when he was told to eat the onion that the figure of Phil Chanteuil held out for him, he ate it quickly, feeling no nausea at all, and when the voice of Sheldon, belonging to a figure holding a broomstick, told him to bend over the back of the chair and pull down his pants, he did it, and when nothing happened for a moment, he turned around, and the broomstick was gone, and masks were all off, and he saw all of them there, Blue and Roy and Yula and the rest of them, and they shook his hands and patted him on the back, and gave him a glass of water to drink it all down, and when he went back downstairs, he saw the bewildered looks on Christopher’s and Thomas’s face, both of whom had expected horrible things up in the attic, and Griffith thought right then that, even though it could have been much worse than it turned out, he was sure he’d have been strong enough to handle it. More importantly, he knew that the next time he saw Sonja, she’d see it too. With just one look, she’d know just how strong he was.

5

When Griffith showed up to practice on Tuesday of the following week, Jack Hewman was there, playing touch with the others, sending perfect spiral passes to his teammates with ease. As he changed into his rugby shorts and did up his cleats, he watched as the two teams, with Blue on one side and Jack on the other, ran at each other, with the occasional player getting touched before passing the ball off, and then tapping the ball to their feet and going again.

The older players, Pops and Sheldon and Evans and Yula, were all on Jack’s team, and they showed a strange familiarity with the way that Jack played, and they pressed Blue’s group pretty hard. Of course, Blue broke through the their line on more than one occasion with some beautiful dummy passes that fooled even Jack, but there was nothing of the comfort and ease on Blue’s team that Jack’s showed. By the time Griffith was ready, Sheldon called for practice to start, and the Lions began to separate into groups, the tight-five together except for Phil Chanteuil, who was the best athlete among them and practiced with the back row instead, and then the backs, with Blue taking Roy and Richard Smedley and Thomas Kent, and Sheldon taking everyone else.

Not much was said throughout the practice to Griffith—most of the chummy talk was saved for Jack, who had put a certain awe into the eyes of those watching him. On the passing drills, Griffith ran next to him, and with each successive quick-hands drill as they spread themselves further and further out, the passes from Jack grew more impressive, still with that same perfect spin and a touch that felt like something invisible was guiding it through the air and right into his hands. When he could he snuck a glance at Blue’s group, and perhaps it was because of a juxtaposition of Jack Hewman’s effortlessness over his own mere adequacy, or perhaps it was because Blue felt that effortlessness himself and was letting it intimidate his own passing, but every ball that left Blue’s hands looked sloppy, and unsure.

They ran through their different back plays, with Thomas Kent watching from the sidelines because there was one winger too many—Sheldon had lined Blue up on the wing while Jack took scrum-half—and with every play that was run Griffith could see Blue watching, studying, as if in acknowledgement that Jack was the better player, if not on ability, then on the way the team all seemed unified under him. Roy Smedley’s up-and-under kicks seemed higher and surer than usual, and every scissors or skip play they ran was flawless, perfectly timed and spaced. When they met up with the forwards for the situations there was no difference, except that Jack was now incorporating the pack into the fluidity. By the end of it, there was only one dropped ball—Griffith, who had been hoping that Sonja would be coming to the practice to watch Jack and the rest of them, let his mind wander on a skip play, and while he just barely managed to catch the ball, he stumbled and sent up a wobbling hospital pass that was just out of Blue’s reach. Sheldon, who had never seemed this thrilled about a practice before, smiled and called it a night, saying they could skip the usual full-field sprints and go back to the clubhouse.

The Thursday practice was almost a complete repetition, including Sonja’s absence. Griffith ran through the plays with minimal concentration, dropping two balls in the situational plays, and screwing up a scissors with Yula, who had a few words to bark about it. When Sheldon announced the starting lineup back at the clubhouse after practice, Griffith was sure he’d be the one player sitting it out, but he still got the starting outside-centre position, with Blue at wing and Thomas on the sidelines. Evans joked about it being the first time all year that they’d be lucky enough to have a substitute, and how it was a miracle nobody had gotten hurt yet. Afterwards, when plans were made to go downtown afterwards, Jack Hewman left early, saying that he had to meet Sonja for dinner. Everyone moaned tragically before saying good-bye, and even when Griffith left an hour later after a slowly-sipped beer, little of the excitement about Jack’s returning to the team to play one last game had gone out of everyone’s eyes.

“You ready for today?” Blue asked Griffith before the game, when they were stretching. Griffith quickly took his eyes away from the bleachers and nodded. “No offense, but you’ve been kind of lousy lately.”

Griffith pretended to look surprised. “Excuse me?”

“You know what I mean,” Blue laughed. “You’re not playing like yourself. I don’t know if you have a certain person on the brain or not, but you’d better get over it before kickoff. I remember this one time back in high school that I was paying more attention to this girl on the sidelines than the game I was playing, and this guy from Samson laid me out like a carpet. It’s not as much whether you’re going to play badly for the team that concerns me, but whether or not you’re going to get hurt.”

“I’m fine,” Griffith said, tightening his jaw. As they both got up, put one of their hands on each other’s shoulder’s for support and with the other hand grabbing by the foot theirs legs bent up behind them, Griffith let Blue’s advice run through his mind. Blue was right, he realized, and he started to get angry, thinking about how, by not calling him or coming by the clubhouse, Sonja was making things even harder for him to get over. He looked over at Jack, who was doing the same quadriceps stretch with Sheldon, and the annoyance became more intense. Fuck her, he thought, if she’s going to pull this shit on me, then fuck her. As they wrapped up the stretching and lined up against the West Hellespont Barbarians, he breathed in and out heavily through his nose, and got himself mentally ready to tackle someone on the other team hard—all he would need, he decided, was a couple of hits to put everything back in perspective. As Jack got ready to kick off, Griffith’s eyes settled on the opposing team’s outside-centre, and he ground his teeth into his mouthguard.

He didn’t get that first hit on the kickoff, but throughout the game Griffith was all over the field, even joining other players on tackles. When he got the ball from Yula, he didn’t even bother passing it for the first while but ran straight forward at his man, who was surprised that someone so small would bother trying to crash the defense. He did it three times, and even though Blue nor Sheldon never said anything about the ball not getting out to the wingers, he could tell that they were wondering why he was being so aggressive all of a sudden. The attempts to tackle him by the other team’s backs were becoming increasingly sloppy, until he saw the moment he was looking for, when the Barbarians’ winger left Blue alone and joined in on the tackle, and just before the impact sent him to the ground, Griffith tossed a pop pass that Blue took at full speed, running up the sidelines with the inside-centre and the fullback scrambling to chase him down. Blue cut back into the field, and was met by them, but Griffith had already slapped and punched his way out of the Barbarians’ grasp and followed him up the sideline, and when Blue was struggling, being held back from running any further by the two players he had drawn to him, Griffith yelled “Outside!” Blue saw him and tossed him back the ball, on a wobbly but sufficiently long pass that Griffith caught and took the final fourty yards to the end-zone, outrunning the last of the opposing team, and when he turned and ran the ball across the end-zone to score it between the posts, he took a hit from the sprinting Barbarians’ eight-man before touching the ball down. The impact sent out a loud smacking noise across the pitch that got a response from the crowd. Griffith was up in an instant, however, and running back to join his teammates, ignoring any congratulations and not paying attention to any of their faces because he didn’t want to see Jack Hewman’s among them, and he breathed in and out heavily as he turned to face the Barbarians again, wanting more.

“Are you feeling all right?” Blue asked when they lined up again.

“Everything’s fine,” Griffith said, his jaw clenched.

That night, when the Lions had brought the Barbarians back to the clubhouse to drink, Griffith overheard Jack talking with Yula. He forgave himself for eavesdropping, telling himself that the only reason why he was able to listen was because they were close. He sipped his beer, thinking about the psychopathic way he had played that afternoon, and chuckling, embarrassed at himself.

“So where’s she working that she can’t come watch your last game with us?” Yula asked.

“She’s taken a second job,” Jack said, before taking a sip of his beer. “She wanted to come, but she’s working until late tonight.”

“Sucks,” Yula said, before clapping Jack on the shoulder, “must be hard on the old sex life, I guess.”

Jack smiled. “Oh, the old sex life is doing just fine, actually. Sometimes it feels like she has more energy for it than I do.”

Griffith curled his lips, surprised that they were talking about her like a trophy. Oh well, he added in thought as he took a sip of his beer, Fuck her.

Christopher, who had taken control of the music again, was filling the clubhouse with this weird, religious chanting monk-music. “Oh Lord, lead me not into misfortune, Oh Lord, quicken in me a good thought,” was what Griffith thought he was hearing but he couldn’t be sure. The song had an unnerving way of changing volume drastically, sometimes being barely inaudible and at other times booming deafeningly. He thought about going over to ask Christopher to put something normal on.

“Yeah, I’m still a little worried, you know,” Jack said. “She isn’t getting any days off for another month, but she says she wants to save up for our trip to Europe this summer. I don’t know if she recovered from the sunstroke we got in Hawaii, because she even fainted at work the other week. I told her to get her time cut down, but she still said no way.”

“Christ, I hope she’s all right,” Yula said, before adding, “Europe, eh?”

“Yeah,” Jack laughed, his eyes squinting, “anywhere you’d recommend, Yula?”

“Ah, the whole place is good,” Yula said. “Can’t say there’s anywhere I prefer.”

As Jack laughed, Griffith got up to buy himself another beer, thinking about Sonja fainting at work, thinking about Sonja spending a day in bed while he took care of her, cooking her meals and adjusting the fan and whatever else she wanted, and then he imagined her, kicking him out of her bed, and he sneered, and handed two dollars over to Pops, who as usual was working the till. “Nice run tonight,” Pops said, “although you shouldn’t be running away from your teammates like that all the time.”

“It’s alright,” Griffith said. “I won’t have to play like that again. I just had a little aggression to get rid of.” He walked over to Christopher and his stack of tapes, to ask him to put on some different music.

6

“What’s up, Griff?” Blue said as they ate breakfast at the diner they’d stopped at, on the way to the university. Griffith looked up from his scrambled eggs.

“Well,” Griffith said, trying to figure out how to say what was going on inside his head without going into the incriminating details, “I kind of did have a thing for Sonja, you know, Jack’s girlfriend. We talked that night after I’d done the Zulu Warrior, and I sort of got a real crush on her. But then,” Griffith coughed, “nothing happened, and I guess I got really mad at her and that guy, Jack, you know, for no real reason.”

Blue didn’t say anything in response, only chewed on his toast expectantly.

“And I just got to thinking,” Griffith said, “about how stupid I’ve always been with girls. I wish I could just be friends with them, properly, you know? If nothing else, by feeling that way about Sonja, I ruined a chance at really getting to know her, instead of all that bullshit that comes with liking somebody. We could have been good friends, I think.”

As he swallowed his toast, Blue looked a little confused. “You’re still thinking about this, after all this time?”

“I know, I know,” Griffith said quickly, “I know I have to get my head out of the past and shit, but I just can’t but feel stupid about the way I handled things.”

“Did she know how you felt?” Blue said, raising the apple juice to his mouth. “Did you ever tell her?”

“I think she got the idea,” Griffith said.

“You know,” Blue said, “the Valentine’s singles party is coming up, and Yula’s going to be getting a couple of the women’s varsity teams to come. You should go to it. It’ll help clear your mind up a little.”

“Nah,” Griffith said, wanting to find a way out of the conversation, “I don’t think more women will be good for me right now. I’ll probably sit that one out.”

“Suit yourself,” Blue said, and then began talking about a letter he got from a school in the states, offering him a full scholarship to play football. Griffith sighed, relieved that now he could say for sure that the topic was, once and for all, dropped.

After practice, when Griffith came back to the clubhouse, he saw the heart-shaped decorations all over the wall and torn streamers soaked with beer covering the floor. Everybody was walking around the mess like it didn’t exist, and he had heard a rumour that the rookies were going to have to clean it later on.

“Griffith,” Timothy Harting said, waving him over. The second-row had already been doing a fair bit of drinking.

“Yes, Timothy?” Griffith said, bringing his beer over.

“I was concerned about you,” Timothy said, slurring his words a little. “I was wondering about that game you played, and when you didn’t show up to the party, I mean, I don’t know you all that well, but I got a sense that something about you had changed.”

“I’m fine, Timothy,” Griffith smiled. In taking a sip from his beer he distanced himself from the professor, thankful to have a reason to back off.

“I mean, there was the practice, and...” Timothy said, before he stopped, looking like he was going to burp, but didn’t. “I mean, you played really strangely in that game, Griffith, it wasn’t you out there...”

“Don’t worry about me,” Griffith smiled, and patted the taller man on the shoulder.

“One day,” Timothy said, motioning in Griffith’s direction with his drink, “the initiate has to go out on his own, away from the comforts of the tribe, for only then can he become a man.”

“I see...” Griffith said.

“But he doesn’t have to go alone,” Timothy said, leaning in close. “Even if it is necessity that takes him away from the tribe, or even if he is stolen away, he doesn’t have to go it alone.”

“Griff!” Blue called from across the room, where he was sitting with Phil and Warden. Griffith nodded back in their direction, before patting Timothy’s shoulder once more.

“You gonna be all right?” he asked, but Timothy was already staggering over to another chair, mumbling something about Moses and Canaan. Griffith shook his head and went to join Blue.

“Don’t worry about him,” Blue said, circling a finger around his temple. “He gets a little difficult to understand when he’s drunk.”

“I’m not worried,” Griffith said, taking a seat in between Warden and Phil. Looking at the near-empty bottles of beer they were holding, it seemed to him that everybody had been drinking unnaturally fast tonight. “So, how was the party?”

“It was crazy,” Phil said, pointing at Yula. “You see that man? That’s one crazy man.”

“I haven’t played games like that since elementary school,” Warden said, rubbing his forehead. “Except that there wasn’t any drinking involved in those games.”

“Jesus, and the babes Yula got to come here?” Phil said. “Oh, my God. He’s crazy.”

“Crazy,” Warden agreed. He looked up at Phil. “How many phone numbers did you get?”

Blue didn’t say anything, and Griffith looked over at him. “Well?” he asked. “Was it that good?”

Blue shrugged. Phil laughed at him. “Oh, don’t listen to old Roger here,” he said, “he hasn’t been interested in girls since grade eleven.”

“Really,” Griffith said, squinting his eyebrows, “Why’s that?”

“No reason,” Blue smiled.

“Oh well, I guess I don’t want to know what you thought of the party, then,” Griffith said, and laughed, feeling a little light-headed from his drink. “So, who showed up?”

“Well,” Phil said, before swallowing a gulp that seemed difficult to handle, and following it up with a belch, “there was the women’s track and field hockey teams, and Ferguson brought his cousin along, and Jack and Sonja were there for a bit, and...”

With those words, Griffith suddenly felt as though he’d been struck. He didn’t listen to Phil, who continued to list off more names. He pretended to pay attention, but out of the corner of his eye he searched around the clubhouse, somewhat empty-looking despite the presence of the entire team, and he imagined Sonja there, really and physically there, walking within the walls, perhaps even sitting where he was sitting right now. He breathed in and out deeply, and did his best to contain himself from saying something aloud.

“...goes again,” Phil was saying, looking over at the stereo equipment. “Someone’s got to get Christopher away from the goddamned music. Back in a sec.” He and Warden got up and walked over to where Christopher, with a stupid grin on his face, was picking out a new tape.

“Griff,” Blue started saying, before Griffith cut him off.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he demanded. “You knew I wanted to see her. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know she was going to be here, Griff, I swear,” Blue said, and Griffith looked down at the floor. “They didn’t even stay all that long. Jack got everyone quiet for a moment, and then pulled out the podium we used for the rookie auction, stood up on it, and said he had an important announcement.” He took a deep breath, looking at Griffith with a concerned expression, but Griffith didn’t bring his dazed face up from the floor. “He said that he and Sonja were going to be getting married, Griff. Apparently she proposed to him earlier that day. He bought everyone a round of-”

“Did you talk to her?” Griffith asked. “Did you get a chance to talk to her?

Blue answered slowly, “Only once. I congratulated her before she left. Jack was getting the car for the two of them.”

“Did she say anything?” Griffith said hopefully. “Did she ask about me?”

Blue was quiet for a moment, staring at him. “Let me get you a beer,” he said finally, leaving Griffith alone at his chair, which he didn’t move from all night, until Sheldon said that it was time for the rookies to clean up the clubhouse, and when he complied, his thoughts couldn’t leave that night, out in the path, when she had picked the cobwebs out of his hair with her fingers and he had kissed her.

7

He missed a week of practices and the game against Waldron.

It took him until the beginning of March to get used to running with everyone again. But, when he did return to play, he didn’t look at the sidelines, and while he did drop the ball a couple of times it wasn’t because he wasn’t concentrating. Sheldon asked if he was going to be all right for the following game against the Barbarians, joking around that he didn’t want to have to call one of the old boys to fill in again, and Griffith said he’d be there. That game he got hit a couple of times really hard, and by the end of it all they had lost, but he felt better. There were two more games to go until the playoffs, and in the first he made improvements, rediscovering his legs all of a sudden one game when Thomas Kent had missed a tackle and it looked like the opposing team’s winger was going to score, but Griffith chased him down and, even though he couldn’t bring him to the ground, he managed to shove him just enough that the winger’s foot stepped on the sideline, and off the following won lineout Roy Smedley kicked the ball what must have fourty yards upfield, pushing back the danger for that moment. On the final game of the season he made even more progress, even thinking for himself on one botched play and sending a grubber kick downfield that somehow Kyle was onside for, and the hooker chased it down and was high-tackled ten metres away from scoring, and the referee awarded the Lions a penalty-try, and even though the game was meaningless because East Hellespont had already secured first place in the HRFF, it still felt good to be going into the playoffs with some momentum for his team, and some confidence for himself. In the first playoff game, against the University of Hellespont, the Lions scored three tries, all on good running up the middle by the forwards and Blue, but the Lions’s backs played well in keeping the university, which was trying to keep the ball in their own backs all day, from gaining any ground on them. All that final week of practice, Sheldon seemed as enthusiastic and nervous as ever, and he kept trying to calm everyone down when really, he was the one who needed calming down. As they went into the championship game against the West Hellespont Barbarians, who had trounced the Wanderers the week before with some exceptional running, Sheldon’s only concern was of the competence of his backs for that day, because it wasn’t going to be a forwards game against the Barbarians, and even though Griffith sensed that Sheldon’s prime concern was for him and Thomas Kent, the two youngest players on the team and neither of whom had ever been to a championship game, Sheldon never said anything but confident, encouraging words, even remarking that if Jack Hewman came back to play in the final he wouldn’t be able to crack this starting lineup, which, even though it was full of shit, was still a nice thing to say.

8

Hellespont had gone into a cold spell the day of the championship game, and as he rubbed his hands over his bare arms, Griffith saw Sonja and Jack sitting together on the sidelines, bundled up against the wind, and for a brief moment, as he jogged onto the field to take his place with his team, he felt some anxiety, but he looked down at the ground, smiled as much of it off as he could, and then put his game face back on. The Barbarians were already set in their huddle, and Blue and Sheldon had gone to talk to the referee and the opposing team’s captain.

Feeling that he was allowed as much, Griffith stole one more glimpse at the sideline, where Jack and Sonja watched the captains’ conference with the referee in the centre of the field. He allowed himself to wonder briefly if she was deliberately trying to keep herself from looking in his direction, and then, knowing that there were more important things to deal with, he decided to put her out of his mind until the end of the game.

When Blue and Sheldon came back, the Lions huddled up, and Blue gave his usual talk. Griffith didn’t feel any of the exhilaration he usually felt after Blue’s speeches, instead breathing slowly and calmly. When Blue looked at him, before calling the break, Griffith stared back, even allowing the corners of his mouth to turn upwards, slightly.

The opening minutes were sloppy as both teams tried to establish their first possessions, but with all the excitement neither team was settling down properly. On the Lions’ first chance at a run, Yula knocked the ball on, and two minutes later when they got the ball back Roy Smedley shanked a kick in front of their twenty-two that went straight into touch. As Blue yelled a play over the crowd’s cheering—both teams had drawn a large crowd of fans—the Lions backs came up in a single file across the field to defend for the potential of a lost lineout, with the wingers, and the fullback, staying back to cover a kick.

Phil Chanteuil was able to spoil the jump, and the ball came out clumsily to the Barbarians scrum-half, who somehow managed to get a kick off. It had more on it than any one of them was expecting, coming directly at Yula and Griffith like an eagle swooping low for the kill. As the ball came closer, Yula had planted his feet, unable to judge where it was going to land, because it would at once look like it was going to fall and then suddenly with one wobble look like it might carry another few yards, and by the time it was about hit the ground it was already out of Yula’s reach. Griffith cursed the kick, and then when the ball bounced high up into the air above him, he cursed that too, and as he blew quickly onto his cold fingers and sucked in his teeth, he planted himself under the ball, hoping that the Barbarian rush on him was still a way off. He caught it and then looked immediately upfield to see where the pressure was coming from. The black forms of the two Barbarian centres tearing up the ground towards where he stood put him into a momentary daze. His instincts dulled, and he suddenly realized that there were players on the other team coming at him, and they were going to want to tackle him, on this field in West Hellespont, and there were lots of people watching, and the two players were closer now, and there was a ball in his hands, and the two players were really close, and there were lots of people watching, among them Sonja-

“Griff!” called Richard Smedley from behind as he ran up the blindside, and Griffith turned around and clumsily popped the ball off. The Lions fullback barely caught it, and the Barbarians centres, who hadn’t expected the sudden pass, stopped running full speed ahead started to turn to try and catch Richard, but they couldn’t, and Richard was able to the ball an extra ten yards away from their goal line before the Barbarians’ winger hit him, and hard. Thomas Kent was running up behind to get at the ball, and Griffith followed half-heartedly, wondering what he’d have to do when he got there, wondering if he should just slow down, evaluate things first, maybe let the others take it so he would cover whatever they didn’t, but in an instant he thought stop thinking, and the closer he got the faster he made himself run, and when the Barbarians winger picked up the ball and managed to evade a poor tackle attempt by Thomas, Griffith was there, right on him. The Barbarian’s player looked at him and met his eyes, and Griffith’s heart leapt, as he saw something there which he hadn’t expected—a look of fear, of sick terror. Griffith’s eyes went down to the ball, which was being held too loosely near the gut, and he aimed his shoulder somewhere in the middle.

The impact was perfect, bringing the two of them rolling to the ground and punching the ball out into the loose, where both Evans Ferguson and Phil Chanteuil were there to clean it up. Griffith got up quickly and ran to the opposite side of the field, where the backs were setting up. “Good hit,” Sheldon said as Griffith approached.

The Barbarians had decided to use their entire back row along with their scrum-half to cover Blue, who hadn’t gotten anything more than one short run, in which he had to pass it back into the forwards because the Barbarians’ backs had covered every other possibility. The balls that he sent out for Roy were shaky and slow, and Roy, on more than one occasion, had to kick in the act of getting tackled, which made things difficult for the rest of the backs, who had lined up on a slant expecting to be running with the ball, not chasing it down.

As Griffith ran after the latest of Roy’s desperation kicks, he saw that both the Barbarians’ winger and fullback were having trouble getting at the ball, which was bouncing end over end towards the corner of the field. Having a faster jump on it than Yula or Sheldon, Griffith got there first for his team again, and the winger, sensing his presence, stood upright and held the ball still, drawing him in while the fullback got in a position further off to take the pass. Griffith sucked his breath in and made like he was going for the tackle, but kept his eyes on the ball. When the winger made a passing motion Griffith went for it, but the ball never left the winger’s hands, and he heard the crowd’s response as he saw he’d been fooled. In trying to recover he ended up falling flat on his face, and as he slowly gathered himself he heard another “Oh!” from the crowd, and he got up quickly to see what it was, looking just in time to see Yula getting up from the spot out of bounds onto where he had hit the Barbarians’ winger, lying flat under the inside-centre’s huge legs. When the two got up to go join the rest of the backs, Griffith heard one of them talking about the beauty of the dummy pass the winger had victimized him with. Yula looked at him and nodded his head. “It would have been nice if it worked,” he said, “don’t listen to the crowd. We got him anyway.”

Blue broke free from a tackle and took the ball the opposite way, towards the sideline, where he scissored it to Sheldon. Sheldon took it twenty yards and got hit, but not before Warden Kirkpatrick was there to catch a popped pass. Griffith watched from a distance as Warden scrambled the rest of the way, taking a hit of his own but able to fall just over the goal line, giving them the game’s first try.

The Lions’ forwards had finally started getting their act together, and Blue was granted a little more breathing room to get a pass off. Roy caught the ball and sent a high up-and-under kick which carried across the field, and both Griffith and Yula were under it. Yula made no mistake this time, catching it on the run and taking the hit. Even though the first Barbarian player bounced right off, two more were on him in an instant, but Griffith was there to take a pass at good speed. Blue, somehow, had looped behind the backs and was coming up behind him with Sheldon and Richard rushing up the field as well, quickly forming an overlap on his left. Once Griffith’s hands were on the ball he made an exaggerated behind-the-back effort in Blue’s direction.

But he didn’t let the ball go. The four Barbarians that were frantically running to cover the overlap skidded in their tracks when they saw Griffith had kept the ball. He took off and ran through them, straight for the fullback and, giving him a sidestep that Blue would have been proud of, he left the confused fullback stumbling impotently and managed to get to top speed before any of the other players in black could stop him. Knowing that the faster of them were on his left, he opted to go right instead, seeing only the fatter of the Barbarian forwards because the quicker ones had been sprinting out to cover the pass that never was, but with the fatter of those forwards he also saw the winger he had hit earlier on coming at him, and he knew that with all his speed he was still going to get swallowed up by one of them before he could get too far. Looking instead to Thomas, who had been left completely ignored and was jogging up the sidelines, he threw a pass over everyone’s heads that nobody could defend and which Thomas was able to catch at full speed, whereupon the winger took the ball for nearly twenty-five yards before diving into the endzone.

They switched Phil Chanteuil and Christopher Dunn around, putting Phil at eight-man for a while because Phil was a quicker runner than Christopher, which gave the Lions the added option of an eight-man pick-up out of the scrum. The first time they tried it Phil was wrapped up and they lost possession on the dead ball, but Blue called another one, and this time it worked properly, with Evans and Warden trailing behind Phil, and they crashed into the backs, and when Blue came up to handle the quick ruck, Sheldon had left his spot on the left side of the field to be right up with Blue to take the pop pass.

The Colonel ran straight across the field to avoid getting hit by the Barbarians’ winger and fullback, but the forwards, who had spent all of half-time getting yelled out by their coach for not getting around the field fast enough, caught him and brought him down to the ground, and tried to pick up the loose ball. Pops and Isaac, as if saving their energy for something like this, hit the other team’s hooker just as he got his hands on the ball, and upon wrapping him up the two props stopped the possibility of a clean second-phase. Both teams scrambled towards the struggling hooker, and by the time a maul was established and the ball came out for the other team, Yula, Thomas and Griffith were running around the crowd of forwards on either side, covering every player who might be getting the pass. The Barbarians’ scrum-half looked one way and then the other before keeping it himself, and Yula had him. The ball came loose, and Griffith was on it at full speed, splitting between the two players the scrum-half had originally wanted to pass off to, and soon they were behind him and trying to catch up. He took the ball all the way in, and was even able to touch it down close to the uprights, to give Sheldon the easiest conversion attempt of the day so far.

The Barbarians scored too, one penalty kick and one try that came off a sloppy Lions twenty-two drop-out, but by the end of the game, Blue, who had been silent for most of the day, finally got to put on a show, when on a really clean-looking ruck he chose to drop back alongside Yula and Griffith and called for Phil to cover the scrum-half’s job. Roy got the pass from Phil and sent it quickly to Yula, who sent it to Griffith, who sent it to Blue, who dummied to Thomas and cut back up the field, and as Griffith sprinted up frantically to be in a good position to take the pass from Blue, the Barbarians’ fullback didn’t know who to cover.

Blue sent yet another dummy at Griffith with the fullback bought, and ran nearly sixty yards up the rest of the field, and at this point, late in the game, the forwards who were running across the field to cover the play didn’t even bother trying to stop him. When he touched the ball down in the middle of the uprights, he jumped into the air, twirling his arms around, and when he jogged back to join the rest of his team, amidst the hollering of the fans, he held a single fist up in the air. The referee only played a half-minute of injury time before bringing the whistle to his lips for the three game-ending blows.

Griffith walked off the field, where he was hounded by the rest of the team and the East Hellespont supporters, who said he’d been the best player out there. He smiled and brushed it off, before his eyes met Sonja’s. From a distance, she watched the celebration alone, wrapped up tightly in her coat, Jack being among those who were congratulating the players. Later, at the victory party, they announced Rookie of the Year, and the podium was pulled out for Griffith once more.

The party that night went on for quite some time, before Griffith took the chance to break free from the rest of the players and walk over to where Sonja was sitting. Christopher Dunn had already gone through the techno music and was playing a few slow songs for everyone to slowdance to (“And if I shed a tear I won’t cage it, I won’t fear love, and if I feel a rage I won’t deny it...”) On his way over to Sonja, Griffith had to decline an offer to dance from a University of Hellespont rower, who was nearly six inches taller than he was. Being swallowed up by a girl that size would have been a first for him, but he didn’t want to miss this one last chance to close things up.

When she saw him coming, she drew herself up stiffly, looking on him with hard eyes and holding her hands securely on her lap. From the cold way she had herself wrapped up in her coat, he almost stopped right there, but decided he couldn’t leave it be, not now.

“Hi,” he said, smiling wide so that she might smile back.

“I saw you out there,” she said.

“I saw you too,” he said. “You want to get punch or something?”

“I can’t,” she said.

“All right,” he said, and took a seat next to her. They sat still for a minute, not saying anything, as the rest of the song played itself out, and another one was put on. Looking out into the crowd, he saw Blue, who was shaking his head at him but smiling as he listened to Jack Hewman explain a certain pass that Griffith was sure he had seen Blue do a hundred times on his own. He caught Blue’s face one more time and smiled gratefully back.

“I heard you proposed to him,” he said, still looking out at Jack’s form repeating the passing motion.

“Yes, I did,” she said.

“Are you getting married here?” he asked, turning back to Sonja, whose face had not changed.

“No,” she said, and when it looked like she wasn’t going to add anything, he turned to face her fully.

“Look,” he said, staring so intently at her that she looked away and then down at the ground, “I think after what happened between us you could be a little friendlier. You don’t know the hell I’ve been going through because of you.”

“The hell you’ve been going through?” she said, her hate-filled eyes shooting up at him. “The hell you’ve been going through?”

Griffith saw her hands. As she turned to face him, one had left her lap to steady herself against the chair, while the other stayed pretty much where it was, except that instead of holding her lap it went up slightly, as if to cup her the part of her stomach below the navel, exposed when the flaps of her coat opened up. He stared for a couple of seconds, before looking back up to meet her fiery eyes. His mouth opened slightly, and then closed, and he got up and went towards the other side of the room, feeling a shiver run through him as he rejoined the party.

“...and that’s when the bear said, ‘Gee, you aren’t here for the hunting, are ya!’” he heard Yula saying to the crowd of girls around him, and some of whom laughed in response while most groaned. One of them gave him a slap across the shoulder and said, “I don’t want to hear anymore of your dirty Swiss jokes!”

* * *

“It’s just, I didn’t want to fuck this chance up,” Blue says, unable to get the game out of his mind. “The Colonel was counting on me to do this one right, I know it. I just wish I could have had that one run, that one stupid run, over again.”
“Yeah,” Griffith says, looking down at his toast and the jar of honey next to it.
“I mean, these were my first games as Captain, and Lord knows how long I’ll have to wait before I get the chance again,” Blue says, shaking his head, before taking a sip of his apple juice. “I wish I could have done that game right over from the beginning. Christ, I wish I could just go back to Hellespont and start this weekend over, you know?”
“Yeah,” Griffith says, looking up at his glass of milk.