alone here in this forest with at least one destroyed Achilles?
The answer to both of those questions was no.
Before he could turn his face to the sky, two men were upon him, wrestling him into the hollowed fir. One of them had a hammer... a bloody hammer. Danny screamed a generic arghhhhhh and then a mighty heyyyyyy, calling the men a great variety of names; he swore mightily, threatened to kill them, even yelled for help—but the men remained silent until Danny was settled against the rough interior of the dead tree. Then one of them uttered a heavily accented, “We know why you are here, Mr. Hooper.”
One of the men picked up Danny’s left foot and held it aloft, creating a forty-five-degree angle out of Danny’s leg and the ground. Danny thought it was a strange thing to do, but he was in no position to resist. Then the man who had spoken held the hammer up in the air. He said, “We are also knowing what you did to that Welsh player in the FA Cup.” It had been difficult for the man to say “Welsh.”
“I will maybe do that to you right now.”
Danny said, “No, no. Don’t.” It was all he could come up with. He felt like an idiot, but his mind had been softened by the events of the last few days.
“Oh, and why not, Danny Hooooper?”
Danny thought that was a pretty good question. He said, “Well, first off, who would you be avenging exactly? I mean... you don’t look like Dire Vale supporters to me, though they’ve got some frightening characters of their own...and I wouldn’t guess you’re much bothered about the future of the Welsh national team, such as it is. And here I am, trapped in these woods with the worst team in the American league, in a bloody tree with you two—I’ve been well punished so far, haven’t I?” It was the most he had spoken at a stretch since meeting Three.
The man lowered his hammer—slowly, to his side. Danny continued: “And besides that, if you really know why I’m here, then you know nothing can happen to me.”
Danny couldn’t believe he had said this, because he couldn’t believe he’d thought it. Maybe his mind had caught up to his body—both were in America now, totally engaged in a situation that was getting stranger with every move Danny made, or that was made upon him. Yes, he thought, yes, Danny, you’re goddamned right these probable Russians have to leave you alone... because if anything happened to you... “Whoever it is that knows whatever they know and sent me here will know that you know what they know.”
The men shot puzzled looks at each other and then back at Danny. “Say that another time please,” said the one who hadn’t said anything yet.
Danny said, “You know what I mean.”
“Yes,” said the man, suddenly pensive, and suddenly seeming like an entirely reasonable chap. “Yes, we do.”
The men stood inside the tree for a confused moment. Then one of them, the more reasonable seeming of the two, said: “You are here to foil a plan that has been in place for many months, Hooooper. The American imperialists and their Western conspirators will fail. They cannot conquer the world without football, but we will not allow them to conquer the world with football.”
Ah, for Christ’s sake.
The other man took over: “America’s ignorance of football will be its downfall. We will conquer from within. You may report all of this to your man in England. He will not stop us. This season, the bicentennial year of the great U.S. of A., we will use American soccer to make the greatest announcement ever—ever!—of Soviet power.”
Danny looked for a means of escape. Inside a moldering former tree, with raindrops finding their way through the ferns and ivy and sundry fauna that occupied the space between ground cover and treetop in this greenhouse of a green space, Soviet agents were laying bare their intentions of using the 1976 AASSA season as a major milestone in Cold War brinksmanship.
“Yeah? Well, you can both sod off,” said Danny inside that tree. He rose, and neither man could stop him. As he stood, he stumbled from the pain in his calf, but he still towered over each man. He pulled back a fist as if to punch the nastier of the two, who cowered, but Danny restrained himself. “You’ll fail, I promise you that. You will fail. I never want to see either of you ever again, you got that?” Danny knew he’d see them again.
The men inside the tree were clearly scared of Danny’s fist—but they weren’t entirely intimidated.
“Danny Hooooper,” one of them said, “you may go. But you will never be far from us. Remember, Danny—we know why you are here.”
“I’m here to win a championship. That’s it,” Danny lied, though he sure wished he were telling the whole truth. “Now you can bloody well leave me alone.” Danny ran out of the tree and down the hill, before realizing that he had no idea where he was going. So he ran back up the hill, past the tree, screaming terrible, terrible words in as intimidating a voice as he could summon, in the event the men were still there, which they most likely were. When he reached the car park, he considered waiting there for help, but thought that was too close to the Communists and probably useless, so he ran down the road—his calves hurt, oh, they hurt—thinking Molly, or Broomsie, or someone, would come along in time and rescue him.
It occurred to him to cry, and he did a little. Not tears of sadness or self-pity, but of confusion. He could hardly comprehend the madness that had overtaken his life since strolling out at the Auld Moors to the cheers of the good people of East Southwich, in the royal blue he loved so dearly, what, a few days... a week ago? Something like that. Since the first few moments of that match, since heading that goalkeeper’s punt back up into the coal-choked East Southwich air, since scrambling for the ball with that whelp of a winger, almost nothing had made sense. He just wanted to be home, home in England, anywhere in England. Or on a football pitch, even here in America—a plastic one would do fine. He just wanted desperately, passionately, dreadfully, frantically to be somewhere he understood and as close to now as absolutely possible.
But he was on the side of a mountain road, on the side of a mountain, as far as he knew, in a distant and wild semi-metropolis, and he had no choice but to choke back tears and run and walk and run and walk until someone found him.
“Danny,” Molly yelled out of her rolled-down window, “what are you doing here? I was just coming back to get the balls out of Graham’s car...” She pulled over, got out, and put her arms around Danny, which felt good. “Oh my god,” she said. “You look horrible. Get in the car.” She guided Danny over to the passenger-side door and eased him into the seat. “You poor thing,” she said. (She really said that! Danny thought.) She had a blanket in the back and she put it over him.
“Let’s get you somewhere warm,” she said. “Danny, what happened? Where have you been?”
Danny would have loved to tell Molly everything. But he knew how it would sound—he knew he would eventually have to say, “There were Communists in the tree”—and he knew he would have to find a decent place to start and he had no idea how he would do that, and he really just wanted to get into a nice long conversation with Molly about anything—anything—other than what had just happened. Instead, Danny just said, “I got lost. I’m new here, you know.”
Molly blurted a spurt of air through her lips and said, “Yeah, right. The entire front of your body is covered in mud, you’ve scraped the side of your face that already has a black eye, it looks like maybe you’ve cut your lip—likely story, big man.” She looked over at him with a dubious face that was nonetheless the most appealing sight Danny had seen in a good while, maybe even ever. Danny looked at her, held Molly’s gaze until she looked back at the road, and said nothing.
“OK,” she said. “That’s fine. You got lost. I guess I’d be a little embarrassed too. Lost in the woods. Maybe attacked by a bear? Let’s get you back to the hotel and get you cleaned up. You’re off to one hell of a start!”
He kept his mouth shut, leaned his head against the window, and just watched the greenery