Jump

by Mike Lupica

  “We didn’t tell the press, but they’ll go at six.”

  DiMaggio looked at his watch. “That gives Richie and me about four hours.”

  “Do what you have to do,” Salter said. “Even if he has to miss practice, I’ll square it with Gary.”

  “Now wait a fucking—” Collins tried to stop himself, but it was out there already.

  “No,” Salter said in his calm voice. “You wait, Richie. You don’t know where Ellis is, fine, you don’t know. But if Mr. DiMaggio thinks there’s even a chance that taking a ride over to Jersey might help find him, then you take the ride.” Salter smiled and said, “Would that be all right with you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Salter said to DiMaggio, “My car’s right outside. Where you came in. Call me if you need anything else.” He went for the door, saying “Frank?” over his shoulder. The two of them walked out of the locker room.

  It was just DiMaggio and Collins now.

  DiMaggio said, “You have to wake up here, Richie. You have to understand that you’ve got no power base left without Ellis. No juice.”

  He felt like Salter all of a sudden, tired of Richie Collins, tired of his problems. “So let’s go get in the car and take a ride. But I have to be honest with you. If you mouth off to me one more time today, I’m going to break your fucking nose.”

  Collins got up, walked past him as if all DiMaggio had said was “Let’s go.”

  “Follow me,” Collins said. “I’ll show you the quickest way out of here. We can cut across the court.”

  DiMaggio followed him, thinking about Ellis Adair.

  Trying to see him somewhere on that blue bike.

  Salter’s driver, Rudy, said to DiMaggio, “We doing any chase scenes this time?” DiMaggio said, “Not unless we end up in the wrong neighborhood in Jersey City.”

  Richie Collins, next to DiMaggio in the backseat said, “Isn’t anything but wrong neighborhoods in Jersey City.”

  They went through the Holland Tunnel. Richie Collins didn’t say anything. DiMaggio let him go. Rudy found a jazz station on the radio after they got through the tunnel; DiMaggio recognized Coltrane, then Paul Desmond, finally David Benoit doing his light, breezy version of “Cast Your Fate to the Wind.” When they got to the Jersey City exit off the Jersey Turnpike, Collins, looking out the window, said, “Get off here,” and then took over.

  “Anything in particular you want to see?”

  DiMaggio said, “You decide.”

  They took a left on Grand Street off the exit and came to an intersection, crossed that, went another block, and made a right on Pacific. “Up on the right here is the Lafayette project, where I grew up,” Collins said. DiMaggio looked past him. It could have been any project in any neighborhood like this. This one just happened to be named Lafayette, in Jersey City, New Jersey. It would have another name in Overtown, in Miami, in the South Bronx and Detroit. This was just Richie Collins’s geography.

  DiMaggio said, “You still have any family here?”

  Collins looked straight ahead. “I barely had any to begin with. Ellis had his Aunt Mary. I didn’t have that. My mother was pregnant with me when my old man got killed. He was in the navy. Not fighting or anything. Just standing in the engine room one day when it fucking blew up. She was living in Newark when I was born anyway, and then we ended up over here. I was sixteen when she died.”

  DiMaggio said, “How—?” And Richie Collins cut him off, looking straight ahead on Pacific, Lafayette behind them now, said, “Her pimp cut her throat.” There was just a small beat, and Richie Collins said to Rudy in a dead voice, “Take Johnston Avenue here.”

  “Who raised you after that?” DiMaggio said.

  “I raised me after that,” Richie Collins said. “I raised me. And me and Ellis’s Aunt Mary raised Ellis.”

  “How did you get by?”

  Collins turned around now in his seat. “I did jobs,” he said. “And when that wasn’t enough, I took.”

  “Took what?”

  “Whatever I could take. After Ellis came along, and everyone knew Ellis ‘n’ me were a team when it came to playing ball, then I didn’t have to take anymore because people started to give.”

  He showed DiMaggio the court at a playground called Baby Rucker, with its sad, ruined concrete and fenced-in basketball hoops and a tavern across the street. Collins told Rudy to pull up at Baby Rucker and stop. Collins got out and motioned for DiMaggio to do the same. He went through the playground and hooked his fingers through the fence around the court. “Lot of action here in the summer,” Richie Collins said. “Drunks coming across the street to make bets, drug deals going on all night long. But ball like you couldn’t believe. Ellis doing shit …” Collins closed his eyes. “Bad guys and scumbags all around, and Ellis doing things with a basketball that knocked your fucking eyes out.”

  They got back in Salter’s town car, went back to Pacific and made a left, then took a right on Communipaw and finally a left on Garfield. They went past a big car wash, and then out of nowhere was another basketball court. “Look at that,” Richie Collins said. “Stop here,” he said to Rudy.

  “What’s the problem?” DiMaggio said.

  “They got a net down,” Richie Collins said. “Man, nobody wants to play without a net. You have to be from here to understand. One net down at a place like this can fuck up twenty or thirty lives. Twenty or thirty kids who got nowhere else to go except here.”

  The two of them got out again, went and stood in the middle of the Garfield Avenue court.

  “Aunt Mary’s was right up there,” Collins said, pointing to a white-frame house up the hill. “This is the court where I found Ellis shooting that night, after her party. Damn, he always liked this court, even when we were kids. I shouldn’t’ve been surprised to find him in the middle of the night. There was nights Ellis’d shoot all night long. He was funny that way. Ellis was afraid of everything growing up. Especially of the dark. I told him once, it wasn’t the dark he was afraid of, it was the dark at Booker T. But he’d get out here, just shooting by the streetlights at that basket right down there, the one that still has the net, and he wouldn’t be afraid of nobody.”

  They got back into the car. Richie said to Rudy, “I’m gonna use that phone. All right?” Rudy said, “Go ahead, Mr. Collins.” Collins got information for the Jersey City Police Department. “Emergency?” he said to the operator. “Only sort of.” He got the number, punched it out, and said, “I just want to leave a message. This is Richie Collins of the Knicks. Tell somebody there’s a net down at the Garfield Avenue court.” He handed the phone back to Rudy in the front seat and said, “That shit shouldn’t go on over here.”

  They ended up finally at Booker T. Washington. Collins explained that there were three big projects over on this side of town. Lafayette, Montgomery, and then Booker T. “The other ones have ten-story buildings,” Collins said. “Booker T.’s only got two stories. Less floors, higher crime rate.”

  Collins said to Rudy, “We won’t be long. But go ahead and lock the door anyway.” He took DiMaggio down a long sidewalk between the low buildings and into the courtyard in back where the basketball court was. “Ellis lived on the second floor, this building to your right,” Collins said. “And this court right here, this was where I first met him, where we started playing ball. There’s a lot of games, especially in the summer. There’s this great game, over at this place White Eagle, a bingo hall over on Newark Avenue. But that’s once you’re in high school, and college. You ever hear of Bobby Hurley? Slick little guard, even slicker than me? He came out of Jersey City, ’fore he went to Duke and then the pros. His father’s the big coach in town, over at St. Anthony High. Coach Hurley always organized the games at White Eagle. But when you were coming up, trying to make a name for yourself, the best game was at Booker T., right here on this court. This was where you found the best runs in town.”

  “Runs?” DiMaggio said. Collins would lose him sometimes.

  “B
est games,” he said. “Best ball. If you keep winning you can have yourself a run that would last all day and night. More bad guys over here than over at Baby Rucker. But nobody ever messed with Ellis. There’s only one kind of royalty in a place like this, and that’s basketball royalty. Ellis ’n’ me, we were as safe playing games in here as we are playing ball right now at Madison Square Garden. I used to see drug dealers pull their guns out on each other if they thought anybody was messing with Ellis. See, they knew Ellis was going to get out. He was going to do what none of them would ever do. Alive, anyway.”

  In the middle of Booker T. Washington, Collins pointed in the direction of New York City.

  “Ellis was going somewhere,” he said.

  He looked all around him, at the ruins of Booker T. “So, Ellis,” Richie Collins said softly. “Where are you?”

  23

  Hannah would let Jimmy’s answering machine pick up the phone. Then she’d listen and decide if she wanted to talk. Her mother had already called three times. The second and third times she started off by saying, “Hannah, I know you’re there,” so Hannah just turned down the volume.

  If there’d only been a volume switch like that my whole life, she thought to herself.

  It was seven o’clock. She was going to watch Marty Perez’s show, Chronicle, and then Entertainment Tonight.

  Now the phone rang, and when the machine picked up she heard him saying, “This is DiMaggio.”

  She pictured him leaving his message, serious in his blue suit, with those sort of sleepy-looking brown eyes and black hair with some gray getting into it, ready to smile but not giving in. Harvey and Jimmy had told her to stay away from him. Except that all of a sudden, Hannah didn’t care what Harvey and Jimmy said.

  DiMaggio was saying something about New Jersey, having spent his afternoon over there when Hannah picked up.

  “Mr. Second Opinion,” she said.

  “Guilty,” he told her.

  “Somebody has to be,” Hannah said, and smiled to herself. Sometimes she surprised herself, getting off a one-liner right away and not having it come to her later.

  “What are you doing right now?”

  Hannah said, “Reading.” Then, not waiting, she said, “Where are you calling me from? You said you were in New Jersey today?”

  “I’m back now. I’ll tell you all about it if you have dinner with me.”

  Hannah tried to picture him in something other than a blue suit, couldn’t.

  “What do you say?” he said, trying to sound casual about it.

  “I’m not even supposed to be talking to you.”

  “Have dinner with me. We won’t talk about anything you don’t want to talk about.”

  Hannah said, “I hear you’ve been talking to my friends.”

  “A few.”

  “The cops talk to them first, then you come along. Or you talk to them first. They don’t have time to talk to me anymore. They’re too busy talking to you and the cops.”

  “It’s a living,” he said, making it sound like a joke somehow.

  “They say you know everything about me except what time I walk my dog.”

  DiMaggio said, “You don’t have a dog.”

  Hannah laughed. It felt good. Maybe he was funny. It seemed like she was surrounded now by people who were never funny, who were always grim these days. A grim brother. A grim lawyer. Even Beth—a grim shrink.

  Hannah thought: Who am I kidding? Even me. A grim me.

  “Can you give me half an hour?”

  “I’ll meet you downstairs.”

  “Dress casual?”

  “Whatever.”

  Hannah said, “No lawyering.”

  “I promise.”

  She said, “Mr. Second Opinion.”

  DiMaggio said, “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “I wanted to see where they came from,” he was saying to her, “but that wasn’t all of it. I wanted to spend some time with Collins, not just see what he was like cut off from Adair, but in a place where he might not be on every minute.”

  They were sitting in the back room at Antolotti’s, one of his favorites. On Forty-ninth, between First and Second. DiMaggio had called Sonny Antolotti, the owner, and told him they didn’t want to be bothered. So there was nobody else back there.

  He sipped a Corona. Hannah Carey had a Diet Coke in front of her with a lime in it. She was wearing a camel blazer. Her turtleneck was either navy or black, DiMaggio couldn’t tell in the light.

  She didn’t do anything with the opening about Richie Collins.

  “What’s it like?” she said. “Over there, I mean.”

  “Here’s what it’s like: I rode around over there and walked around and wondered if I would have been tough enough to get by, much less get out.”

  “It’s bad,” she said.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” DiMaggio said. “There’s nice places, too, where you can see the city across the river. But the projects where Adair and Collins come from might as well be another country. Or on the goddamn moon.”

  The waiter brought a plate with bite-sized pizza slices on it and set it between them. “On Sonny,” he said. Sonny Antolotti was a big ball fan DiMaggio had met when he was with the Yankees. The season he got those hits on the last day to get over .200, Sonny was hip to the significance of not ending up under .200 and treated it as if DiMaggio had won the batting championship. He bought DiMaggio and his flight attendant dinner on the house.

  “So you spent the day with Richie Collins,” Hannah said, bringing it back to him on her own. Surprising him.

  “You don’t have to talk about him if you don’t want to.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t,” she said. “Tell me more about Jersey City.”

  “Why are you so interested?”

  She said, “I’m interested in them, too.” He studied her hands, palms flat on the table in front of her. Big hands for a big girl, but with slender fingers and nail polish just a slightly darker shade than the pale hands themselves. DiMaggio thought about tracing them on the white tablecloth the way you did when you were a kid. Taking his time.

  They were beautiful hands.

  Now she said, “I’m just not interested in spending any more time with them.” Hannah Carey took the swizzle stick out of her Diet Coke and held it the way you would a cigarette.

  DiMaggio said, “The funny thing with him, Collins, was he seemed so proud of all the places he was showing me. But then telling me over and over, every few minutes, how happy he was to be away from there.”

  Hannah Carey said to DiMaggio, “You sound like you might feel a little bit bad for them.”

  “No,” he said. “That’s not it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  DiMaggio noticed a tiny scar over her right eye. You could almost miss it. A tiny pockmark. And he noticed that in Antolotti’s dim lights, her blue eyes seemed almost gray. She was locked in on him the way she had been on Hollywood Bob.

  Like the pretty girl in the front row of class staring up at the professor. She was looking at him that way and getting him to do the talking when DiMaggio wanted it to be the other way around.

  DiMaggio said, “I don’t feel bad for them because of the projects or Jersey City. You start explaining things away that way, you can explain away every cheap crackhead punk with a gun and an attitude. I just think I understand them a little better is all. I’ve got a frame of reference now, especially with Richie Collins.”

  “Why him and not—?”

  “Ellis? Because he’s black and Richie isn’t.”

  “It matters?”

  “In those projects I saw, yeah, it matters. There’re other places, lots of places, where I’d say the black guy had to be tougher, not just to survive, but to go on and do something. Just not at Lafayette and Booker T.” He paused. “Richie Collins is probably every lousy thing people say he is as a human being. But he’s tough enough.”

  “It always comes back to that,” she said. “With you
guys.”

  “Which guys?”

  She smiled and said, “All guys.”

  DiMaggio said, “You know, I’d rather talk about you.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Where you came from, I mean.”

  “It’s like Mother always said,” Hannah Carey said. “Take a look at the Official Airlines Guide.”

  He said, “Tell me about it.”

  Keep her talking.

  The best Sheila Carey ever did was Top Ten twice, Hannah said. Ahead of Betty Stove, that big Dutch girl, one time. She made the quarterfinals of Wimbledon once, the quarterfinals of the Open. That was it. Her tennis never made her a celebrity.

  It was being on the circuit and having kids that made her a celebrity.

  “My mother likes to tell people now that she was the first nineties woman,” Hannah said. “Only it was the seventies.”

  She had started out on the tour as a teenager, decided she wasn’t going to make it, dropped out, got herself a teaching job outside Philadelphia, married the head pro at the club. She had Hannah when she was twenty, Jimmy fourteen months later. The head pro died in a car accident. Sheila Carey got herself back in shape and decided to take one more crack at the tour.

  “She packed up a dozen Wilson rackets, Jimmy, and me,” Hannah said.

  So in the winter they traveled the circuit that Billie Jean King built, then it was to Europe for the spring and early summer, then Wimbledon and then to tournaments in Switzerland and Sweden and Austria. Sheila Carey told them they were seeing the world. At Antolotti’s Hannah said, “Every once in a while we’d see a castle or a museum even. The rest of the time I got to see the backseat of the courtesy car or the women’s locker room. Or Mother’s match.”

  DiMaggio said it didn’t sound like much of a way to be a kid, and Hannah said, “I never felt like a kid. I always felt like a spectator with a locker-room pass.”

  Hannah started playing tennis at thirteen, learning the game from all the big names, taking to it much more easily than Jimmy did; Jimmy’s part was being the darling of all the players, the straights and the lesbians both. He was the prettier of the two of them. “He was prettier even then,” Hannah said, lifting her shoulders and then letting them drop. They all loved Jimmy. The attention neither of them got from their mother, they got from all the other players. Jimmy, she said, seemed to need it more.