Dali couldn’t believe his eyes. The striker looked seventeen, eighteen, if that. Not a line on his forehead or beneath his marble-sleek eyes. His tongue slipped to the side of his lips like a child lapping a sweet. He blazed across the field tossing bits of soil like smoke. There was no way in the world the kid could be twenty-five. And what an underhanded jibe calling him kid when it had been rumored he was a father of two, maybe three boys. He was no kid. He was a man, mopping up the pitch with small boys. But, this wasn’t a bitty prank to lopside a pickup game this was a calculated ploy to make a fortune, raise a bedraggled city’s hopes and lump them onto the shoulder of a five foot nine corner kicker even at the expense of bankrupting trust. This was the stuff of men. Their infantile wishes, their pious lost glory, their Faustian tradeoff for a better afterlife.
Oh, there were coaches, fathers, errant mentors, and yes, meddlers involved— whole associations and competing associations. Musa pinched the tip of his nose with his knobby fingers. He made a violent snort as if he were trying to unclog water from his ears. Dali shook his head.
“So what am I supposed to do,” Dali said.
Musa scratched something down on his pad.
He watched the kid steal a pass then weave past defenders his face, body, and limbs all looked boyish, but his menacingly, single-minded expression didn’t even appear human. Not even a trace of joy. Dali felt as if he’d been wrapped in a cold wet blanket.
The kid smashed a brutish kick into the net and then robotically raised his arm.
Musa went out to the field to flag down his outlier. Dali dickered on his toes, counted pebbles in his nearby radius. As Musa got closer, bringing alongside him the kid, Dali cringed. The kid made no fanfare gripping Dali’s hand. And just like that Dali mission stretched wider.
Girma Dali 