Kid Owner Read online

  “I thought this was gonna happen.” Coach Simpkin cinched the strap of his floppy coaching hat as the rain pounded its brim, his voice already going raspy from raising it. “We got a lot of plays to put in and stuff, but you all know where Coach Markham and I like to go when it rains?”

  “The RING!” my teammates cheered as one, already slapping one another’s shoulder pads and helmets, giddy with anticipation. Coach Markham had his hood up, a stubby green unlit cigar waggling from between his grinning teeth.

  “That’s right, bull in the ring!” Coach Simpkin blew his whistle and pointed toward the far edge of the field where the grass dropped off to the drainage grate.

  Everyone had cheered—me included, even though I’d never seen it done—and took off in a stampede, the rain pouring down on us in sheets. Just before I disappeared over the lip of the field, I looked back at the parking lot. My mom’s King Ranch sat parked facing the field, headlights on, wipers slapping away the rain. I gave a quick wave and thumbs-up to the dark shape behind the windshield where my mother’s face had been swallowed up by the gloom.

  Then I turned, joyfully, like a lamb to the slaughter, and entered the ring.

  8

  I felt like a real football player, with those sheets of rain and the thick mud and everyone focused on chopping his feet to the tune of Coach Simpkin’s whistle. We’d chanted in a huge circle, like mad prehistoric warriors, running in place to warm up for the main event. On the whistle, we’d throw ourselves face-first into the mud, then pop right back up. Our sweat mixed with the rain. We gulped for air.

  Then, Coach Simpkin pointed to Bryan Markham and shouted, “Markham, bull in the ring!”

  Cheers. Markham, growling, sprinted into the center, chopping his feet and spinning in place.

  “Get ’em going!” Coach Simpkin followed his cry with a whistle blast.

  We all started chopping our feet again, running in place.

  “Seventy-three!” the coach shouted through the rain.

  A lineman I knew as Big Donny Patterson took off running toward Bryan Markham with the bellow of a crazed water buffalo. Markham spun to face him, crouching and lowering his pads. The two boys smashed into each other, but Markham got his pads beneath Donny. He exploded up and extended his hands, throwing the huge lineman right off his feet to come crashing down in the mud. Everyone went bananas.

  So it went, Coach Simpkin calling out numbers, players racing toward the destruction waiting at the center of the ring. After a dozen hits, Coach Simpkin changed the bull to Big Donny. When Jason Simpkin knocked Patterson down, he took over the middle of the ring. Then another player took out Jason Simpkin and so it went, each player taking a turn in the center until he was defeated.

  Except me.

  I’d checked the number on my jersey several times: twenty-three. A number I couldn’t associate with any NFL player or college star, past or present. I kept my feet chugging, staying ready, believing after each impact that Coach Simpkin would call out my number on the very next turn. Finally, I raised my hand. Teammates around me were huffing and puffing, groaning and growling.

  Coach Simpkin had looked right at me, but only smiled and winked. I’d thought about just running out there and hitting someone on my own, but it was my first day, and I knew there must be some kind of initiation I must have missed before I’d be allowed to join the fray.

  The drill finally ended and we marched back up the hill for more practice. I caught up to Coach Simpkin and tugged at the sleeve of his Windbreaker.

  “Coach? How come I couldn’t get a turn?”

  “Hey, Ryan.” Coach Simpkin swept the raindrops from his face with one hand. “Oh, you’ll get plenty, don’t worry about that. We’ve got to ease you into this. You just watch and get a feel for things. That’s the best way.”

  I felt relieved at that news, and so I watched and waited while the raindrops danced on the surface of the puddles like popping corn.

  The team did tackling drills and blocking drills.

  The only things I was allowed to do was hit dummies or foam pads and run—run through obstacles, run laps, run sprints, run forward, sideways, and backward.

  That lasted a week, and at the end, I asked Coach Simpkin again. He smiled and patted my shoulder pads and suggested patience. I watched and waited a few more practices, and then a strange thing happened, something I can’t explain. Something I’m ashamed to admit.

  9

  I don’t know if those two coaches did it to me, or if it was just growing up in a house where physical violence was the only thing worse than an F-word. I began to fear hitting. I’d stopped asking to be put into full-contact drills, not because I didn’t think they’d listen but because I didn’t want to go in. I’d grown accustomed to being the shell of a football player. And no one, not even the mean kids like Bryan Markham and Big Donny Patterson, ever said a word to me. They’d tease other players for shying away, or getting knocked off their feet, but me they ignored. And I was okay with that, because I didn’t want to hit or, most of all, be hit.

  They let me be on the team. My teammates even let me sit with them at lunch in the elementary school cafeteria if one of the regular guys was sick or something. When that happened, I’d nod my head in agreement when they all talked big about how we’d smash whoever was our upcoming opponent. (Of course, I’d never talk about smashing anyone.) I wore my jersey on Fridays like everyone else. My teammates would nod to me when we passed in the halls. And for the next four years, I got to collect the golden statue awarded to our championship team at the end-of-season banquets, same as the rest. I don’t think any of our other classmates suspected I was anything but a full-blown Highland Knights football player.

  My mom had no idea either because I’d even gotten some playing time. I was no starter, but our team was so good that we rarely went into the fourth quarter fewer than four touchdowns ahead of whoever we were playing. That’s when Coach Simpkin emptied the bench, putting the less skilled players into the game to get their taste. Me they sent out as the Z wide receiver, where I could stand away from the rest of the crowd. Occasionally, I’d have to run a pass pattern, always a go route, straight up the field, no chance to hit or be hit.

  And it was in this way that Coaches Simpkin and Markham coaxed me into a state of complete and total cowardice. I was further from a football player than if I’d never put the pads on. It went on for four years, until a few months ago, when we graduated from the Highland Knights to middle-school football.

  Now, everything’s changed.

  10

  PRESENT . . .

  My alarm woke me and for a few seconds, I didn’t even know where I was.

  It all came back quickly, though—crashing down on me: the father I never knew was now gone.

  Exhausted from my sleepless night, I got dressed and went downstairs. My mom sat quietly at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, reading the news on her tablet. When I sat down, she put it aside with the half a grapefruit she hadn’t touched. Teresa asked me if I wanted eggs. I said yes, strongly aware that my mother was watching me. Her eyes looked tired and her mouth sagged.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’m going to the funeral later today.”

  I paused a moment and picked up my fork, even though I had nothing to use it on yet. “Why are you telling me?”

  “Because I’m not taking you,” she said. “It’ll be a zoo—your father knew many, many people. Plus, you have practice anyway. I know you won’t want to miss that, right?”

  I shifted in my seat. It wasn’t like she was even giving me the option, and I wanted to protest, but something in her eyes kept me quiet. “Well, Jackson is coming home with me after practice. Can you pick me up?”

  “If I can’t, Julian will. Jackson is welcome anytime. You know that.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know what I know,” I mumbled. It was as much of a protest as I felt comfortable with.

  “You don’t need to know,” she said. “
Trust me.”

  Trust her? I trusted her about not needing to know my dad and now he was gone. Part of me wanted to scream, but I buried it and went to school in a daze. After practice, it was my mom who picked us up, and after a short swim, Jackson’s mom arrived to take him home.

  “You’re welcome to join us for dinner,” my mom said to his mom.

  “You’re too kind, but I made a tuna casserole that’s waiting for us,” replied Jackson’s mom.

  Before he left, Jackson pulled me aside. “You okay, Ry? You’re acting too quiet, even for you.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. I don’t know why, but I still hadn’t told him about my dad.

  He gave me a doubtful look, then shrugged. “Okay.”

  I watched them pull away, then returned to the kitchen. Teresa had dinner all out on the table. My mom sat with a napkin in her lap, sipping iced tea and watching me closely. I wasn’t going to ask about the funeral. Something in me refused to make a fuss. It wasn’t until halfway through dinner when my mom cleared her throat to speak.

  “You’re going to have to leave practice early tomorrow.”

  An alarm went off in my brain. “What? Mom, I can’t just leave practice early.”

  “I’ll talk to your coach, Coach Hubbard,” she said. “You don’t have a choice.”

  I dropped my fork and it clanged off my plate. Missing football practice wasn’t something you just did. “What do you mean? Why?”

  I watched her face turn red and then she scowled. “Am I not your mother?”

  “I can’t miss practice.”

  “For this you can.”

  “For what?” I wanted to know.

  My mother made a fist and brought it down the way a judge hammers his bench with a gavel. Everything shook. The silverware jingled and even Teresa froze with a pot in her hands at the kitchen sink. “If I knew for certain, I’d say it, Ryan, but I don’t know. Let’s just say that it has to do with your father and leave it at that, shall we?”

  The tone of her voice didn’t allow for anything other than total agreement.

  11

  The next day, I endured the embarrassment of walking off the practice field an hour before the rest of my team. It was only after I showered and changed into the dress clothes my mother handed me outside the locker room that she was ready to talk.

  “We’re going to your father’s office,” she said as her big white truck merged into the traffic out on the highway.

  “Like, where he worked?” I asked.

  “Not really,” she said. “It’s a family office.”

  “What’s that?” I was totally confused, because how could a family need an office?

  “Just . . . you’ll see,” she said.

  “Why are you so mad about it?”

  She shook her head. “It’s excessive, Ryan. Everything your father did was excessive. It doesn’t even make sense when there are people, children, in the world who have nothing.”

  I thought that was strange. We had a lot, so did that not make sense? But I kept quiet because my mother was not to be questioned when she got like this, with the wild look in her eye and the tremble in her voice.

  We got off the highway close to downtown and pulled into the parking lot of a building that looked almost more like an old home than an office building, with its stone walls and slate pitched roof. We went in and up the stairs. Everything and everyone was quiet. We were ushered into an enormous conference room. We met a slew of people, all somehow related to my father, including his most recent wife and some half brother named Dillon. It blew my mind. I asked no questions, just nodded politely as my mother introduced me to some, while others she just pointed out. And when we were given seats at one end of the table facing a tall window, I barely listened to everything that was being said as they read my father’s will. My mind was spinning out of control because I couldn’t believe who my father actually was.

  Outside, a ball of late August sun glared down on the city of Dallas, melting the tar on the streets. Inside the conference room, I shivered beneath an invisible blast of frigid air. It was cold and clammy as a tomb beneath a winter freeze.

  When the lawyer said “Ryan Zinna,” every person in the room jumped like they’d been pinpricked, and they turned my way. My half brother, Dillon, stopped chewing his gum. His jaw slackened to reveal a mangled green wad draped over a line of molars and tucked next to his tongue. Dillon’s mother pinched her lips together and scowled. In her left hand was a bottle of water, which she strangled until it cried out, crackling.

  I looked over at my mom just as she reached for my wrist, the way she’d do when she was about to run a yellow light in the car. I stopped her with a desperate look and a slight tilt of the head. My mom pulled back her hand and sat primly beside me in one of two dozen high-backed leather chairs surrounding the enormous conference table. Everyone wore black.

  The lawyer’s suit had tiny pinstripes so fine they might have been real strands of silver to match his cuff links. He sat at the head of the table adjusting his sleek black-and-chrome glasses and then clearing his throat before he continued to read.

  “To my son, Ryan Zinna,” he said, repeating my name in the context of being the dead man’s son, so there should be no mistake, “I leave the entirety of my ownership interest in . . .”

  The lawyer looked up at me again, swallowed, and blinked in disbelief. “The Dallas Cowboys.”

  I think my mother uttered something like, “Oh, dear Lord.”

  Dillon gagged, then hocked the wad of gum onto the table where it lay like some dead sea creature, moist and alien out of its true element. His mother sucked air in through her rigid lips with the sharp hiss of a punctured tire. “No!” She slammed her palm down on the table and sprang to her feet. She stood tall and slender, quaking like a volcano. Her tan face turned purple and her pale-blue eyes glinted like ice, dancing with pins of hate-filled light.

  Dillon’s pale-blue eyes, on the other hand, brimmed with tears, and his lower lip, like the gum, morphed into a fat wad for all to see. Dillon is twelve, like me, even though he’s as tall as any fourteen-year-old. But he acted more like a ten-year-old.

  His face crinkled. “But, Mommy . . .”

  His mother slammed her water bottle onto the table. “He will not get the Cowboys!”

  It was her turn to be stared at. My mother and I weren’t the only people in the room she likely hated. My father had several brothers and they all had kids he apparently remembered with some degree of fondness or they wouldn’t be here to cash in on what the lawyer called the last will and testament of Thomas Peebles.

  The gathering had been called at the main conference room of the family office, their family office. I wasn’t family. Not to them, or, in my mind even to him. He, the dead man, was my father in name only, a wildly successful billionaire with enough spare money to own an NFL team, but without the emotional means—according to my mother—to love and be loved.

  A man you’ve seen only in pictures isn’t really a father, is he?

  “Jasmine, please.” The lawyer hooked a finger inside the collar of his crisp white shirt and tugged it to get some air. He pointed a fat pen at Jasmine’s chair. “Sit down.”

  “You can’t be serious, Jim.” Dillon’s mother glared at the lawyer.

  “It’s his will, Jasmine. You figure very prominently in it, I assure you.”

  “Prominently?” She seemed to lose her breath and she reached backward, feeling for her chair to sit. “That football team is prominent. It’s called ‘America’s Team’ for a reason, Jim.”

  “The estate is substantial.” The lawyer spoke gently. “You know that, Jasmine.”

  Silence—well, maybe a whimper from Dillon—before the lawyer began again. “Until the time at which Ryan Zinna shall reach a majority age, all interest in the Dallas Cowboys shall be held in trust, with said trustee, Mr. Eric Dietrich, providing guidance and assistance while adhering as closely as he can to the wishes of Ryan Zinna during his t
erm as a minor. Upon his attainment of majority, said trust shall cease to exist and the entirety of the trust’s asset shall vest in Ryan Zinna.”

  “What?” The word escaped me.

  The lawyer nodded toward a man in the corner of the room, sitting in a chair against the wall with a painting over his head, two sword fighters ready for a duel. The man named Eric Dietrich sat upright wearing a black three-piece suit with a gray-and-black-striped tie and silver-rimmed glasses that magnified steely dark-blue eyes. He was bald but for a thin ring of snow-white hair just over his ears. He looked vibrant, tan, and fit, with the predatory smile of a jackal, but he had to be seventy years old.

  “Eric Dietrich,” said the lawyer. “He’s your trustee, but your father’s instructions are to give you control.”

  “Of the team?” I asked.

  The lawyer nodded.

  “The Dallas Cowboys?” I still couldn’t believe it.

  He nodded.

  I turned to my mother, knowing her to be a source of truth, even when it hurt. “I own the Dallas Cowboys?”

  For some unknown reason, my mother looked far from pleased. Her mouth grew thin as a paper cut, but still, she nodded her head. “Yes, I think you do.”

  12

  My mother and I walked out of that family office in silence after they read my father’s will, with the enraged shrieks of Jasmine Peebles still leaking through the thick walls.

  All I could think of was that even though I now owned the Dallas Cowboys, I was still me, Ryan Zinna. I still had my two best friends—Jackson and a girl named Izzy. I was still in seventh grade and would still be on the Ben Sauer Middle School football team.

  But my heart had swollen a hundred times its normal size, because this was unbelievable. There we were, me and my mom, walking through the carefully trimmed landscaping that led to the parking lot. We still climbed up into her King Ranch pickup. She still reminded me to buckle up, even though I always did that automatically. I still turned on the radio and selected the Pulse and she still switched it without a word to the Highway. And, even though I owned the Dallas Cowboys, I knew better than to switch it back.