time? What do I know—maybe you’re not tired at all. Like I said, I’ve never been on a long trip like that. And you with those long legs.” She sized him up as if he were a statue in a museum. “You’re huge. How did you fold yourself into those little seats? Maybe you get more space on an international flight. Longest trip I ever took was to Disneyland with my family. You have to go to Disneyland. I know, it’s for little kids, but it’s so much fun. We have a game in L.A. Maybe we’ll go. Well, maybe. We’ll see. Is that all you have?”
Danny had flipped his duffel bag over his shoulder and momentarily tuned Molly out—no easy task for a number of reasons—as he took in the sights, sounds, and colors of the airport in his new American hometown. “Oh, um, yeah, I mean—yes, this is all I have.”
“In the world?” Molly said. “I mean, you do live here now. This is your home, Danny. That’s it? Did you find someplace to store your other things back in England? Did you keep your old place?”
“Um, yes. I mean, no,” Danny muttered back. He was groggy from the travel, and his head had been thoroughly discombobulated by Molly’s babbly enthusiasm and questions and, if he was honest with himself, appearance. She was prettier than most girls, he allowed himself. She was like an English girl, but all smoothed out—wide confident shoulders, wide tanned cheeks, wide white teeth. She laughed and asked him what he meant by “yes, I mean, no.” He apologized and said, “Yes, yes, this is all I have. And no, I didn’t keep my place. It was a clean break, as they say”—Danny grinned a little at his first American joke—“but that’s all behind me now.”
He smiled to himself, then said, “Molly.” It was worth a try, he thought. She smiled.
“So, listen, Danny, we’re going straight to the stadium today,” Molly said in the car. It was a long two-door Lincoln of some kind. Danny could’ve laid himself across the entire backseat.
“Last week was the first week of training camp and today’s the first day with the press. I’m afraid you’re going to meet the Portland media on the same day you’ll meet your new teammates. We’ll get there early enough to introduce you to Graham Broome and you can meet most of the guys. We’ll give you a pair of shorts and one of these gray practice shirts, and you’ll head out onto the field and answer some of the dumbest questions you’ll ever hear. ‘Do you ever just want to pick up the ball with your hands and run with it?’ ‘Do you think America would like soccer more if the goal was bigger?’ Stuff like that. I’m sorry in advance. They’re still learning the game... at least they care, huh? The good news is there’s a lot of excitement about you. ‘Our new center fullback straight out of England. Straight out of the FA Cup.’ Most of the sportswriters in Portland don’t know what that is, but it’s what Graham’s been telling them. ‘Straight out of the FA Cup, the big lad,’ he says.”
Well, my whole team’s straight out of the FA Cup because of me, Danny thought. That’s why I’m here, I guess. Or one of the reasons, anyway.
“Our defense was horrible last year,” Molly went on. “Gave up the most goals in the league. If you’re everything they say you are, and you are most definitely big and strong, then you’re going to cause quite a buzz around these parts, Danny. Are you one of the Clopshire Town boys? Most of the guys are. If you are, I suppose you’ll know most of them—”
“Cloppingshire United,” Danny said. “And no, I’m from another club. Don’t know any of them lot. But they’re not so different from us. Third Division grifters...” He trailed off, and Molly said, “Well, I don’t really know what that means, but OK.” She smiled and patted Danny’s thigh. “Lighten up, big man, you’re in America. It’s summertime. Relax.” She turned on the radio of the great vehicle. “Sister Golden Hair” by America was playing. She laughed. “Perfect. This is going to be great, Danny. I promise.”
Molly and Danny had been traveling on a freeway—that’s what Molly called it, a freeway—for ten or fifteen minutes. They passed a hospital, what appeared to be a shopping district with a few high-rise buildings. It was more or less unremarkable, other than a billboard featuring three footballers—soccer players, Danny told himself—in red-and-black-striped shirts in what appeared to be post-goal euphoria under the words “JOIN THE REVOLUTION.” All of the O’s were soccer balls. The other letters seemed to be vaguely Russian-inspired, blocky, Communistic. Danny shook the thought away. Don’t be paranoid.
Molly veered to the right as the freeway met a river and what appeared to be an actual town, a city. “That’s downtown,” Molly said, picking up on Danny’s expression. “On the other side of the river. It’s no New York or L.A., but it ain’t nuthin’.” Portland’s city center was crammed into a wedge of real estate between a boat-spotted river and a thick green heave in the land that had the look of a long wrinkle in a heavy blanket. The heave’s soft, verdant forest looked to be a lonely urban wood—almost supernatural to Danny’s industrial English eyes, like something that didn’t belong in a city.
Danny asked what it was.
“You’ve never seen a forest, Danny?” Molly said.
“Not in the middle of a city I haven’t. What’s on the other side?”
“More people.”
“Why don’t they live in the forest? Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a forest?”
“That’s not what that forest is for,” she said.
Danny thought that was the kind of answer that deserved to end a conversation. Danny saw another black-and-red soccer billboard. This one said “REV IT UP FOR THE BICENTENNIAL!!!”
Portland, Molly explained, was a city for people who weren’t sure how to love a city; a Portlander’s idea of a beautiful day was getting out of town: sneaking off into the woods, down to the river, or up into the mountains. Molly explained that it rained a lot, but it wasn’t always the same rain: the autumn rain hung in the air and made you feel like your eyesight was going; the winter rain was a shroud of cold that made you feel as if you’d never be able to warm up; the spring rain cascaded through sheets of sunlight and cleaned the air; the summer rain was like the moisture that lingers after you’ve taken a long, hot shower. “Around here,” she said, “the sun is mostly just a reaction to the rain.”
In Portland, in those days, wood moldered, paint chipped, bricks decayed. The rain and the sun attacked the city in uneven rhythms, and the hippies, war veterans, fishermen, loggers, on-again, off-again longshoremen, and kindly descendants of immigrants mixed with Portland’s earliest stock—the New Englanders who got there first and settled in their houses in the hills—and improvised a life thousands of miles away from American civilization and thousands of miles more than that from anywhere where soccer really and truly mattered.
Portland, Oregon, in the bicentennial year of the republic, was an outpost in a country that hadn’t elected its president or won its last war. It hadn’t figured out what to do about disco, Evel Knievel, or women in pants. Portland, Oregon, in the bicentennial year of the republic, was a counterculture refuge with the claim to fame that in its lawless early days, sailors had been drugged in its saloons and smuggled through underground tunnels onto ships bound for Asia—the origin of the singularly sneaky verb “to Shanghai.”
Molly exited the freeway and wended her way through the tightly packed buildings of Danny’s new city. She didn’t seem to be near anywhere that might be called a football ground. They seemed to be circling flat buildings, old hotels, Chinese restaurants, a bar—it all felt like the inside of the airport in New York, dingy and drab, a little down on its luck maybe, but with fresher air—and then she drove through an open chain-link gate and down a narrow hill.
There, deep in a hole a good story or two below street level, was a giant, otherworldly football pitch. “We’re here,” Molly said, with her wonderful, giant white smile. Danny liked her wonderful, giant white smile, and