The handball wall at Corrado Park had a square painted on it in the upper left, and nobody in Merrimon could tell you who had painted it.
It was not a good square. One side leaned. The paint was the dull orange of a traffic cone left out for a summer, and it had been touched up at least twice in slightly different oranges, so that up close it looked like a square made of three squares stacked badly on top of each other. It sat about seven feet off the ground and two feet in from the corner of the wall, and if you stood at the chalk mark eighteen yards back and squinted, it lined up exactly with where the crossbar and the post of a full-sized goal would meet. Top corner. Upper ninety. The place where a goalkeeper's fingertips go to be disappointed.
Tavo Medrano had been hitting that square since he was twelve years old, and for most of those years he had believed he was the only one who knew what it was for.
He was there at ten to six on the morning of tryouts, the second Monday in August, with a ball under his arm and the cleats tied together by their laces and slung over his shoulder. The sky over the almond orchards east of town was the color of weak lemonade. The sprinklers on the Little League field had just shut off and the air smelled like wet dirt and cut grass and, faintly, the tomato cannery on the other side of Highway 99, which ran its boilers all night in August and made the whole south end of Merrimon smell like a pot of sauce someone had forgotten on the stove.
He sat on the curb by the wall and put the cleats on.
They were black Copa Mundials, or they had been. The kangaroo leather on the toes had gone gray and soft as a wallet, and it had cracked in fine lines across the top of the right foot where his laces pulled it every time he planted. The white stripes had yellowed. The left heel counter had split along its seam two summers ago, and someone, not Tavo, had stitched it back together with heavy red thread in a careful row of small X's, nineteen of them. He had counted once. The studs on the right sole were worn down unevenly, more on the inside edge than the outside, the way a pair of shoes wears when the person in them strikes a ball with the inside of the foot a few hundred thousand times. Those were not Tavo's wear patterns either. They were older than him in the cleats. His own wear was on top of them, newer and sharper, the way new snow sits on old ice.
They were a size and a half too big when he first got them. He had stuffed the toes with paper towels. Now they were a half size too small, and the nail of his right big toe had gone a permanent purple-black that his aunt Rosalba said made her want to cry every time she saw him come out of the shower.
"Buy new ones," she said, about once a week.
"After tryouts," he said, about once a week.
He laced them tight, stood up, and stamped once on the asphalt to feel the studs. Then he walked out to the chalk mark, eighteen yards from the wall, and set the ball down.
He did not take a long run-up. He never did. Three steps, the last one long, plant foot beside the ball and pointed just left of where he wanted it to go, hips open, body over the ball so it would not climb too much, and then the strike, inside of the foot, curling. He had done it so many times that he did not think about any of it anymore. He thought about the square.
The ball went up and bent left, and hit the wall a hand's width outside the orange, and came back to him in two bounces.
"Again," he said, out loud, to nobody.