Chapter 8 Tomáš
?íma arrives at nine minutes to nine in yesterday’s clothes, sits down in front of the plate I set, and gives Polá?ek a bourbon story nobody requested.
I put down my coffee and run the day in my head. I don’t look at the clothes. That’s all I have to say about breakfast.
Corner practice during our morning session. I deliver six to the near post. Four arrive where they’re meant to arrive, and Novotny gets his head to three, and coach watches with his arms crossed.
“Again,” I say.
“It’s gone in four times,” Novotny says.
“It hasn’t gone in against their keeper. Again.”
“Their keeper isn’t here.”
“Then beat the one in your head.”
“He’s beaten,” Novotny reports, three deliveries later, flat on the grass. “He’s retired. He’s opening a restaurant.”
We go again. My legs are good. Suspiciously good, for the sleep I got. The body keeps its own timetable. I’ve learned not to examine a good morning too closely.
After training, I reorganize the kit room.
Nobody asked me to reorganize the kit room. The kit man watches me do it with the expression of a man whose house is being renovated by weather.
“Hajek. It was organized.”
“It was organized for a group stage. We’re in a semifinal. The semifinal wants the away kit forward.”
“The semifinal wants that?”
“It’s been very clear about it.”
“And the bibs needed numbering?”
“The bibs have always needed numbering. Somebody finally listened to them.”
He lets me finish, because he’s wise. Once the kit room can pass a military inspection, I feel better in a way that has a shelf life of maybe forty minutes.
Polá?ek finds me before the forty minutes are up, holding the seating chart I posted this morning.
“You assigned bus seats.”
“Optimized. Sleepers at the back, talkers at the front, Novotny by a window that locks.”
“We’ve sat wherever we liked before.”
“And look where it got us.”
“The semifinal.”
“Exactly. Imagine the final.”
He walks away shaking his head, and he takes the chart with him, which is how I know it stands.
The semifinal does this to me. Everything I can reach gets an order. Travel manifests, checked twice. Recovery slots, rebalanced. The physio’s queue, resequenced by muscle group, which she accepts with one eyebrow at legal maximum and then uses.
I know what I’m doing. I’m a dispatcher, running perfect timetables for everything in the country.
?íma comes through the recovery room with half the squad behind him and stops like a tour guide who has found the monument.
“There he is,” he says, to his audience. “The man who gave the bibs a government.”
“Numbers,” I say. “The bibs got numbers.”
“Novotny’s photos are in the chat. There’s a hierarchy. There’s talk of a constitution.” He watches my hands, which are squaring the protein tubs on the shake station by expiration date. “Captain. Those tubs have been interviewed twice already. They have nothing new to say.”
Novotny laughs from the ice baths. Polá?ek just looks at me. That’s worse.
“Expiration dates matter in a semifinal week,” I say.
“They expire in March,” he says. “I checked. It’s on the record.”
I put the tub down. He’s already moved on to narrating Novotny’s ice bath like a cup final. He doesn’t look back to check whether it worked. He doesn’t have to.
And that’s all I have to say about the recovery room.
Damián finds me in the players’ lounge mid-afternoon, holding his phone like a boarding pass.
“The shipping people emailed. The boxes from my apartment in Germany come in three weeks. Nine boxes. That’s either very sad or very efficient.”
“Efficient. You’ve been living out of overnight bags since Munich.”
“Right?” He drops into the chair opposite. He has the lightness about him again, the one that switches on whenever the future gets mentioned. “Tobík found a place that does proper knedlíky. The bread kind. He sent a picture. ?íma’s going to defect.”
“He’ll demand an inquiry.”
“It’s how he keeps control.” He scrolls, grinning. “I have a bunch of Czech league programs in the boxes. I should probably get rid of them.”
“Or give them to someone staying.”
It’s out of my mouth before the scan finishes. I watch it go in the way you watch a tackle you can’t take back. Someone staying. As if the man across from me didn’t bleed for this federation at multiple tournaments. As if his place on the team stops being his the day the boxes arrive.
Damián doesn’t flinch. He does something worse. He looks at me for one second, and then he puts the phone down and lets it be true.
“Okay,” he says. “Fair.”
“Dami…”
“No. It’s fair. I’m the one leaving.”
“It’s not fair.” I lean forward, elbows on knees, because if my hands don’t get a job they’ll organize the coffee table.
“I want the programs. I’m asking for your programs to stay with me.
And I’m sending you knedlíky every month, frozen, in a crate, because whatever Tobík found is mediocre at best.”
“A crate?”
“A regulation crate. Monthly. It’s going in my calendar as a fixture.”
“You’re going to air-freight dumplings across an ocean because of a bakery in Atlanta.”
“It’s a bakery’s bakery, and yes, and you’ll defrost them wrong the first time and call me.”
He laughs, and the drop of blood between us gets a bandage, and we do ten more minutes of shipping logistics.
Tobík texts when we get back to the hotel.
Coffee. Lobby. I have forty minutes and Mami’s cookies.
My brother is at a corner table with two coffees already ordered, wearing the Czechia team lanyard. He looks good. He looks like a man whose life fits him. He pushes a coffee at me and starts talking before I sit.
"Dami doesn't believe I have a bakery guy. Says I'm exaggerating."
"You've had a bakery guy for nine months, Tobík. Exaggerating would be new information."
"There's a card. With my face on it. Punch ten loaves, the eleventh is free, and mine had three punches on it before I even walked in the first time, because apparently that's how loyal I am." He grins over his cup. "I'm grandfathered into a bread program."
"Nine months and you're bakery royalty."
"Nine months, a standing Tuesday pickup, a card with my face on it, and a woman named Deb who saves me the end piece because she knows I like the crust." He shrugs, entirely too pleased with himself.
"Everyone in that bakery could pick you out of a lineup."
"They could pick me out of several lineups, Tomá?. I brought them kolaches at Christmas. I am beloved."
This is my brother at twenty-two. Easy in his skin.
Easy in his life. Funny the way people are funny when they’re not performing.
I spent years managing every road around him to make his life as smooth as possible.
The bumps and bruises were there anyway.
Some of it was from me. And he came through it into this. Whole. Better than whole.
“How’s the week?” he says. “You eating? You look like you’re captaining in your sleep.”
“The week’s a semifinal week.”
“Uh-huh.” He dunks a federation biscuit, taking his time. “You reorganized the kit room today. Dami sent me a picture. There are photos, Tomá?. The bibs are alphabetized.”
“The bibs are numbered.”
“The bibs are NUMBERED, forgive me.”
And then he does it. No wind-up. No angle. Both hands around his cup, my little brother looks at me across a hotel lobby and says, “Who’s it for, the organizing?”
“The semifinal.”
“Mm. See, the semifinal gets the normal amount. That’s you.
That’s a Tuesday.” He turns the cup once.
“This is a different amount. You did the other amount when Dad died. The kit room that time was you driving to Brno twice in one month for meetings that could have been calls.” He isn’t accusing me of anything.
That’s what makes it unanswerable. He’s reading a gauge.
“You’re carrying something. I can see it.
It doesn’t have a shelf yet so you’re out here building shelves for everything else. ”
The lobby carries on around us. The lift dings. Staff cross with trays. A tournament breathes. My brother drinks his coffee and watches me with our mother’s eyes and doesn’t push.
Pushing I could defend against.
“It’s a big week,” I say.
“Okay,” Tobík says, easy, and means it. He reaches over and takes a cookie from the box.
And with his mouth full, no ceremony, my managed brother leaves a door standing open in the middle of a hotel lobby.
“Whenever, though. If it ever wants saying.” He shrugs.
Crumbs on the lanyard. “You don’t even have to say it well. You can say it badly. It still counts.”
“Eat something with the coffee,” I say, and signal the bar for a plate. “You’re all biscuits and lanyard.”
“And there he is,” Tobík says, warm, to the ceiling, to the tournament in general. “The plate is summoned. The topic is closed. It’s like watching Mami with a tea towel.”
He finishes his coffee and leaves to meet Damián at the club shop. He hugs me on the way out, and the lanyard leaves an imprint on my collarbone that outlasts the hug.
Team dinner and then recovery are the only things on the scheduled for the night. At dinner, coach stands up and delivers the full address.
“Rest. Hydrate. Nobody gets clever.” He looks at Novotny. “Nobody.”
“Why me?” Novotny asks, to the room.
“History,” the room says back, almost as one.
“Twice,” Polá?ek adds. “History twice.”
The room disperses, and on the way out I straighten the set-piece folder, because the folder can take it.
Instead of sleeping, I can’t keep the thoughts away. Damián, letting my worst words of the week go through him and staying kind. Mami on the phone every night, asking for nothing with both hands. Tobík telling me I can say the thing badly and it still counts.
Every person I love keeps leaving a door open for me.
I know they’re open. And every night I count the doors, and hold my own door open for other people, because that’s what a captain is for.
The one box in the mental warehouse stays where it is.
Taped. Unlabeled. Heavier every time I walk past it and don’t look.
?