He hit it again. Inside the square, low edge. Again. Center. Again. Outside, high. Again. Center.
At six-fifteen he heard the truck.
It was a white Ford Ranger with a green Sorensen Grain logo on the door, and it came up Corrado Avenue the way it always did, slow, with the window down and the radio on low to a Spanish-language station that played rancheras in the early morning, even though the man driving it did not, as far as Tavo knew, speak very much Spanish. The truck pulled into the gravel lot behind the backstop and parked crooked, half in a space. The engine shut off. The door opened.
The man who got out was twenty-three or twenty-four. He was tall and too thin for his height, with a dusty Sorensen Grain cap pulled low and a reflective vest unzipped over a gray T-shirt, and he walked like his feet hurt, which they did. He had been standing on the concrete floor of the grain elevator on Stockton Road since ten the night before.
"You're early," he said.
"You're late," Tavo said.
"I'm never late. I'm off at six. Six-fifteen is when I get here. Six-fifteen is on time." He stopped at the edge of the asphalt and looked at the wall, then at the ball, then at Tavo's feet. "Today."
"Today."
"Nervous?"
"No."
"Liar," the man said, not unkindly, and sat down on the curb where Tavo had sat, and stretched his long legs out in front of him, and closed his eyes for a second as if he were going to fall asleep right there. Then he opened them. "Okay. Show me what you got."
His name was Wyn. That was all Tavo had called him for three years: Wyn. He knew Wyn worked the overnight at Sorensen and lived in an apartment over the laundromat on Fourth Street, that he drank his coffee black from a dented steel thermos, that he had played soccer once, seriously, and did not anymore. He knew Wyn had been the one who painted the orange square, the second and third times at least, because he had watched him do the third time, standing on an overturned milk crate with a can of spray paint and a sheet of cardboard for a stencil. He knew Wyn had given him the cleats.
He did not know Wyn's last name. It had never come up, and by the time it might have, it felt too late to ask, the way it feels too late to ask somebody's name after you have been saying hi to them for a year.
They had met when Tavo was twelve, in the spring after he came to live with his aunt. He had been at the wall alone, in a pair of canvas sneakers from the Dollar General, kicking a ball that was going soft, and he had been bad. Not untalented, just bad, in the way a kid who has only ever played in a dirt lot is bad: everything off the toe, everything straight and hard and hopeful. Wyn had been sitting in his truck with the door open. He had watched for ten minutes. Then he had gotten out and walked over and said, "You're kicking it with your toe."