“Tell him real nice, eh?” Farrell said slowly. With his hands on his hips he glanced up and down the darkening street, not quite sure of what he was looking for; the sidewalks were empty and the houses snugly bright against the dusky shadows, and Farrell suddenly realized that he had been hoping to see Sam Ward or Bill Detweiller or any of his neighbors in the street. Detweiller usually showed up at the tag end of a game to collect Bobby, and there were times when Sam Ward, cheerfully ludicrous in a peaked fishing cap and sweat shirt, would amble out for a few minutes exercise before dinner.
The two big teen-agers were flipping the ball back and forth between them now, the blond shouting, “You give it to him!” and the boy in the red sweater yelling, “Don’t be so lazy, you big stupe!” and underneath the excitement in their voices ran a hard thread of mockery. Farrell saw that they were watching him alertly from the corners of their eyes.
The half-dozen smaller boys were huddled together in a group at the edge of the lot. He said to Jimmy, “Do you know these fellows?” But Jimmy shook his head quickly without looking at him.
Farrell did not know what to do. The situation was absurd and infuriating. “All right, a joke’s a joke,” he said, walking toward them. “But you’re holding up our game.” He had timed his approach to intercept the ball, but the blond feinted a pass, checking it at the last instant, and Farrell’s leap into the air was futile; when he landed heavily on the sidewalk, stinging the soles of his feet, the blond boy casually lobbed the ball back to the youth in the red sweater.
“Here’s a nice game,” he said. “Piggy keep-away.”
The two boys trotted down the lot, kicking their heels friskily. “Come on, Mister,” the big blond called over his shoulder. “Don’t you want to play?”
Bobby Detweiller said, “It’s getting late, Mr. Farrell. I got to go in.” He turned and hurried toward his home, and the two Sims boys ran after him, their legs pumping whitely in the gathering dusk.
Farrell walked toward the end of the lot where the two husky teen-agers were grinning at one another and throwing the ball back and forth with lazy skill. Farrell felt the uneven stroke of his heart and the heat of anger and embarrassment in his face. He knew he was being made a fool of. They were faster than he was, and could keep the ball away from him indefinitely. But if he demanded the ball and they told him to go to hell — what could he do then? Call the police? And tell them what? “Officer, a pair of youngsters won’t give me back my football. Would you send over the riot squad, please?”
Farrell stopped about twenty feet from them and put his hands on his hips. “You’re pretty good at this game,” he said.
“Gee, thanks, Mister,” the blond said.
“It figures. It’s a game for girls. Like beanbag and hopscotch. It requires a certain limpness of wrist, if you know what I mean.”
The dark boy in the red sweater studied him with indifferent eyes. “Trying to make us mad, eh?” He nodded at his companion. “This is psychology, see.”
“I could take that ball away from you in a game of tackle,” Farrell said. “Want to try me?”
The blond smiled slowly. “Sure, let’s give it a whirl, Mister.”
“He’s suckering you,” the boy in the red sweater said. “It’s psychology like I told you. He’s got you worried. So you got to prove something to him.” He grinned suddenly. “Don’t blame me if you get hurt.”
“No, I won’t blame you,” the blond boy said. He was grinning, too. “Let’s go, eh?”
They trotted toward him at an angle, the big blond running interference, the boy with the ball trailing alertly behind him, feinting a breakaway every now and then and obviously waiting for a chance to sprint past Farrell into the open. Farrell drifted sideways with them, trying to cut them off and force them to change direction; when they did that he could check the blond with his hands, and then drive into the ball-carrier.
The blond boy veered toward him, moving with a look of lazy power, his body bent in a crouching position and his weight riding easily on the balls of his feet. Six feet behind them the boy in the red sweater was slowing down, bouncing from side to side on springy legs, calculating the narrowing area Farrell had forced him into along the edge of the lot.
Farrell felt sure he had him; the boy had come to a dead stop to change directions. He moved in swiftly, hands ready to check the blond, legs ready to drive at the ball-carrier. But something went wrong and it went wrong so fast that Farrell was only conscious of his hands missing their target, and then a jolting blow in his stomach that knocked the wind out of him, and finally the cold scrape of stubble on his face as he hit the ground. When he rolled over and sat up the two boys were a dozen yards beyond him, laughing with exuberant good humor.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the boy in the red sweater said. “Treating an old man like that. You should show some respect for his psychology, at least.”
“He rolled kind of like a football, didn’t he?” said the blond boy. “End over end, nice and crazy. Next time let’s roll him like a basketball, smooth and easy, I mean.”
Farrell got to his feet and brushed the dirt and clinging leaves from his trousers. He was badly winded, and there was a cut at the comer of his mouth; he could feel the blood welling warmly against his lip. For some giddy and irrelevant reason he thought of the plans conference in the agency that afternoon, and Weinberg’s talk of oral satisfaction and keeping rooms. He got slowly to his feet. His side hurt and he had the feeling that he had eaten too much lunch. “Nice going,” he said. He took a slow, careful breath and smiled. “Let’s try it again, eh?”
“A glutton,” the blond said, shaking his head.
Farrell’s smile was for Jimmy’s benefit; he didn’t feel like smiling at all. Grin and bear it. More verbal glucose. Stand up to bullies. Hit ’em and they fall apart.
They were trotting toward him again, and he wiped his hands on his trousers and moved slowly to meet them. His muscles were stiff and he knew that his reflexes were not very reliable; it might have been in another existence that he had been able to do this sort of thing efficiently. He had played three years of college football and had been an all-conference end in his last season. A succession of coaches had drilled the fundamentals of the game into him until he could play his position from memory. But it was so damn long ago, he thought, and remembered with faint surprise the curious sense of futility and loss he had experienced the night before, the directionless nostalgia, the vague self-pity that had crystallized into the prosaic realization that time was passing and he was no longer young.
They were on top of him then, running fast this time, and Farrell had no time to think of what he was going to do; instinctively his hands went out to check the shoulders driving at his stomach, and instinctively he knew he was too late. His knee came up in a protective reflex then, smashing into the blond’s face. A surprised gasp of pain sounded and then Farrell was free, the blond sprawling at his feet, the boy in the red sweater exposed and vulnerable as he tried to reverse his field and cut back behind him.
Farrell took no chance on missing him; he tackled him high, well above the waist, and pulled him sprawling to the ground. The impact jarred the ball from his arms, and Farrell scrambled over him, scooped it up and got to his feet. He was breathing very hard. “I told you this was a grown-up game,” he said.
“The referee would have blown a whistle on you for that,” the blond boy said. He stood slowly and rubbed his chest. There was a smear of blood and dirt on his face, but he seemed more puzzled than angry.
“That’s psychology,” the boy in the red sweater said. He grinned at Farrell but the smile didn’t touch his eyes. “A great big knee in the puss. An Irish uppercut, we call it.”