Catie shook her head. She was unable to stop thinking about some of the side effects of having pet birds, at least one of which had repeatedly occurred to her when as a youngster she’d gotten stuck with cage-cleaning for a pair of parakeets that her brother had lost interest in. “I can see where it would happen. But, George, what about…”
“…the stuff parrots usually leave on the bottom of their cages, getting all over a space station?” George laughed. “It didn’t. They just housebroke the parrots.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, seriously. It’s apparently not that hard to do. It’s partly a matter of controlling when they eat and what they eat, and partly reinforcing good behavior. See, I know a lot about this because of the nickname, because everybody—everybody! — asks that question as soon as they can.”
Catie laughed. “Okay,” she said. “So now I’ve done at least one thing that was expected of me.”
“Thank heaven. Now we can get on with life.”
“Which means the next game,” Hal said.
George picked up the second half of his sandwich. “There is more to life,” said George mildly, “than the next game. Though you wouldn’t think that CNNSI believed it. Or any of the other news services that’ve been camped out around my apartment lately, or the Miami area in general…especially the sports news services. They seem to think it’s bizarre beyond belief that I do my own shopping. Like, now that we’re in the championships, suddenly a personal shopper should descend from the heavens and start taking care of me.” He laughed, but it had a slightly despairing sound to it. “I caught the guy from AB/CBS going through my garbage the other day. For what? Clues about my training diet? To see what junk mail I throw out? He wouldn’t tell me! I told him he wasn’t allowed to do that unless he’d actually carried the stuff out of the house himself. And he volunteered. He volunteered to carry my garbage! Do you believe that?”
“This is what everybody thinks they want a piece of,” said Hal, a little somberly. “Fame…”
“It’s overrated,” George said. “It means you can’t go to a convenience store and let someone see you buy a six-pack of beer. If you do, they either declare you a closet alcoholic, or else the next morning some guy from the beer company turns up on your doorstep asking you to appear in commercials.”
“Or both,” Mike said.
George looked wry. “Don’t laugh. I could be rich about six times over, just now, just out of what I’ve been offered for endorsements. But I don’t want to do that! We’re an amateur organization, for one thing. Spat for me is about getting together with my friends, having a good workout, playing together skillfully, and being social afterward…. But the problem’s a lot worse than that. If I ever get stinking rich, I want it to be from something I made, something I did. Not something they did to me, or for me, as an accidental outgrowth of a pastime, a game, yes, a game! — which by itself isn’t worth that kind of money. But they don’t understand that,” said George. “And frankly, neither do my family, or my friends, a lot of them…They think I’m crazy. And the trouble is, I’m beginning to understand why.”
He let out a long breath and had some more iced tea. Catie looked at the glass, and looked at the window, wondering whether George’s choice of beverage had anything to do with a possible fear of distant cameras, trained on him, just waiting to see him do something that someone somewhere might consider inappropriate.
“But enough of my troubles,” George said at last, and put the glass down. “How about the game?”
“It was super,” her brother said. And that was about the last chance Catie would have had to get a word in edgewise for the better part of three quarters of an hour, for the ensuing torrent of spatball jargon took nearly that long to die out, as play after play was taken apart, turned inside out and upside down, analyzed, criticized, and dropped for the consideration of the next one. Mike was an eager participant in this, and Hal gave him a run for his money, while Catie listened with somewhat pained interest to terminology that kept getting tangled up in chords and lunes and great circles and geodesic slams and incidence relations. She sighed at those, for Catie had finished the usual run-in with solid geometry in school last year, and had come away from it successfully, but only just. Afterward, for her, the phrase “Through point A draw a line B” would normally have made a good start for a horrorcast.
But the game itself had been won against an opponent that had widely been expected to dump South Florida unceremoniously out of the tournament. That was the main thing. Now the publicity was heating up, and Hal and Mike amused themselves briefly with reciting some of the more specious and empty-headed rationalizations they had heard in the media for the Banana Slugs’ win, everything from plain dumb luck to sunspots. George mostly kept quiet during this, attempting to do something about the second half of his sandwich. Catie had already decided to take hers home in a doggie bag and have another run at it around dinnertime. And possibly a third attempt at breakfast tomorrow…
“Your team’s been attracting a whole lot more attention than you ever thought you would, I bet,” Catie said.
“Yes,” George said, putting the sandwich down again with a sigh. “We have. Not all of it friendly.”
There was something about the way he said this that made her look at him closely. George was looking out the window again, and his expression was very much that of a man who was sure that someone was watching him.
He glanced back at her. “We’re absolutely not supposed to be here, you know,” George said after a moment. “It’s surprising how easily people get upset when somehow a long-established status quo shifts. Not that publicity won’t do the team good in the long run. No matter what happens in these play-offs, our organizational life will be a little easier in the long run. You know — a few less cake sales, a little more time to actually play. But the hostility and confusion surrounding us at the moment are a little sad to see. There are plainly people who genuinely see us as a disruptive influence to the sport, or an embarrassing accident that the sport is going to have to recover from, or a way to make the rest of the sport look bad while we still get a whole lot of money and hold the ‘moral high ground’…wherever that is for spatball.” George let out a long breath that bespoke a fair amount of frustration and anger, all shut down to its lowest possible level for the moment. “It’s like they can’t understand our right to do what our group formed itself to do: play spat competitively, but never lose sight of the basic pleasures of it just for the sake of the win, or what comes with the win. Flight…” Fora moment there was a spark of delight in his eyes, and everything was all just that simple. “We’re every kid who ever jumped off the couch with a towel tied around his neck, pretending to be a superhero, or boinged along the ground pretending to be Neil Armstrong, or John Glenn, mostly free of gravity, but still free to be human, and to play.” He grinned, just briefly. “To play hard, but play fair, too, and be friends again afterward…”
Catie nodded quietly for a moment. That kind of feeling was the reason she played soccer, and why she had stayed with the same team of kids from Bradford Academy and the general D.C. area, even when she had opportunity to move to a better team. Sportsmanship, and companionship, expressed through the sport itself and the aftermath, mattered. She raised her eyebrows, then. “Somehow,” Catie said, “I don’t think that aspect of it is something you’ve said a whole lot about to the media lately.”