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shopping bags, winter boots, kitchen sinks and, once, a clown’s hat. But never his father’s mailbag.
    He thinks his mother will say “Heaven help me” but she does not. She’s cool. She puts down baby Polly and unloads the bag into the toilet. She scours it with a stiff bristle brush and hand soap. She rubs it with Marley’s Leather Cream. She sweetens it with a splash of Mennen’s aftershave and sets it into the playpen for baby Polly to crawl into.
    Hungry again, Zinkoff eats a full dinner that night. And throws up into one of his socks.
    â€œHeaven help me.”

9. Champions!
    Soccer is Zinkoff’s kind of game.
    Baseball has too much waiting and too many straight lines. Shooting a basketball demands precision. Football is fun only for the ball carrier.
    But soccer is free-for-all, as haphazard and slapdash as Zinkoff himself. He plays in the Peewee League in the autumn of his seventh year. His team is the Titans. Every Saturday morning he’s the first one there, kicking pinecones around the field until the coaches show up.
    Once the game begins, Zinkoff never stops running. He zigs and zags after the checkered ball like a fox after a field mouse—except he hardly ever catches up to it. Someone else always seems to reach it first. Zinkoff is forever swinging his foot at the ball a half second after it goespast him. He winds up kicking the shins, ankles and rear ends of the other players. Twice he’s kicked the referee. Once, somehow, he kicked himself. His teammates rub their bruises and call him “Wild Foot.”
    To Zinkoff a net is a net. He doesn’t much care which team the net belongs to. Several times during the season he kicks the ball at the wrong goal. Fortunately, he always misses.
    The first game is against the Ramblers. When it’s over, Zinkoff jumps up and down and pumps his fists as he has seen athletes do and yells “Yahoo!” He does not notice that he is the only Titan cheering. “What are you so happy for?” says Robert, one of his teammates. “We lost.”
    This is news to Zinkoff. Throughout the game, and even at the end, he has not thought about the score. Apparently, losing has made Robert very unhappy. It shows on his face. It shows in the way he’s kicking at the turf. Zinkoff looks around. Other Titans are kicking turf or stomping their feet or pounding their thighs with their fists. Every Titan wears a sour puss.
    And then the coach calls the Titans into a huddle and says, “Okay, on three, yea Ramblers. One, two, three—” Zinkoff bellows, “Yea Ramblers!” And adds, “You da man!”
    â€œYea Ramblers” barely crawls from the lips of the other Titans.
    And then the coach is lining them up, and the Ramblers are in a line too, and the Titans and Ramblers are patting hands down the line like dominos, pat pat pat pat, no sour pusses on the Ramblers, who keep saying “Good game, good game, good game…” and Zinkoff is the only Titan saying “Good game” back.
    And then the Titans are heading for their parents on the sidelines, and in order to show their parents what serious soccer players they are, they kick the turf some more and tear off their knee pads and shirts and throw them to the ground and stomp on them. One Titan even falls to his knees and bawls while pounding his head into the grass.
    Zinkoff wants to be a good Titan. He kicks at some turf too. His mother and father look on with mouths agape as he tears off his shirt and shoes and finally his socks and stomps them allinto the ground. He gets down on his knees and rips up grass and flings it into the air. He snatches the pacifier from baby Polly’s mouth and hurls it onto the field. He pounds his fists into the ground and cries out, “No! No! No!”
    By now other parents and players are watching.
    Zinkoff’s mother says, “Just what do you think you’re doing?”
    Zinkoff looks