Playing Without the Ball

by Rich Wallace

  So we’re down by a point with nine seconds left, but that’s plenty of time, and we are going to win. Robin inbounds the ball to me and I dribble up fast. They try to trap me at midcourt but I get through it, take two more dribbles, and shoot. It hits. Nothing but net, as they say. I put up my fist and holler, and the whole team comes racing over and mobs me. Alan smacks my arm really hard and Beth climbs onto my back. Incredible. The other team is stone-faced and quiet. The difference between a win and a loss in a game like this is immeasurable. We’re back in first place, and we control our own destiny. We’ve gotta beat these guys again, and we’ve gotta beat Kaipo. And we’re gonna do it. It’s gonna mean something.

  ALSO AVAILABLE IN DELL LAUREL-LEAF BOOKS:

  SHOTS ON GOAL, Rich Wallace

  THE WHITE FOX CHRONICLES, Gary Paulsen

  THE BEET FIELDS: MEMORIES OF A SIXTEENTH SUMMER, Gary Paulsen

  GHOST BOY, Iain Lawrence

  KIT’S WILDERNESS, David Almond

  HOLES, Louis Sachar

  SIGHTS, Susanna Vance

  NIGHT FLYING, Rita Murphy

  PAPER TRAIL, Barbara Snow Gilbert

  THE BABOON KING, Anton Quintana

  I could make a long list of women who have nurtured and supported me, but I’ll dedicate this book to these: my mother and her mother; my sisters, Carol and Lynda.

  Singing, each to each.

  Thank you, Sandra Neil. I’ll love you forever.

  And to Tracy Gates, my editor at Knopf. I don’t know how to begin to thank you. Maybe by writing more books.

  Thank you, Tracy.

  Contents

  Against the Sky

  Basketball Reality

  What’s Missing

  Restless Nights

  Visions and Revisions

  Tendinitis

  Tryouts

  Salt

  Sprawling on a Pin

  Nine-and-a-Half

  “L.A. Woman”

  Various Protestants

  Introspection

  Gatorade

  Sort of Pulsating

  Laundry

  Noel

  Weasel

  Community Service

  Lockers

  The New Bishop

  Not Totally Paranoid

  Ground Zero

  New Sneakers

  “Days Later”

  A Common Thread

  Buying Pretzels

  Leftover Rice

  The Sound in My Head

  Riding Seaward

  If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.

  Asian proverb

  ONE

  Against the Sky

  The wind catches you by surprise when you turn the corner onto Main Street in Sturbridge, Pennsylvania. It’s brisker than you expect, and in your face if you turn off a half-deserted side street and head up toward the post office or Rite-Aid or the Turkey Hill convenience store. Especially in late autumn.

  It’s the week before Halloween, getting dark in a hurry, so Rite-Aid is busy with people picking up giant bags of miniature candy bars and little kids scoping out masks and plastic jack-o’-lanterns. The rest of the stores are mostly closed for the night, but the pizza place is busy and the music store is hanging on for another hour or so. Nobody’s in there except the clerk guy with long stringy hair, reading a magazine behind the counter. You can get used CDs for five bucks.

  The diner’s open across the street, but on this side the gun shop is closed, and Sid’s clothing store just shut its lights a couple of seconds ago.

  I turn into the alley between Shorty’s Bar and Foley’s Pizza. The alley is just barely wide enough for Shorty’s twenty-year-old blue pickup, but you can squeeze past it if you have reason to take a shortcut over to Church Street. You go around back to reach the steps up to the apartments.

  There are four doors up here. The one marked number 3 is mine, just a room with bare walls and a scuffed hardwood floor. The bathroom is painted mint green and has a stand-up shower stall and an oval mirror above the sink.

  I sleep on a mattress in the corner; I can’t afford a bed yet. I’ve got a closet, but I also hang clothes on my chair, especially wet stuff like my basketball shorts.

  I get free rent. Not exactly free—I work it off in Shorty’s kitchen three or four nights a week. The deal includes meals during work hours and five dollars an hour off the books.

  When I moved into this place in September, I was seventeen. I’d never had sex, never used drugs, never forgiven my mother, never been to church, and never been a basketball star.

  I guess that’s all still true.

  I played like hell last night—telegraphing my passes, missing layups. That’s the sort of thing that eats at me until I get a chance to redeem myself. I heard there’s a 6 A.M. game on Tuesdays at the Y, so I set my alarm for 5:30 and stumbled out the door.

  Six older guys and a girl about my age—I don’t know her; she’s new in town—are shooting around when I get there.

  “You in?” a tall, bald, old-as-my-father guy asks me.

  “Sure.”

  “You, me, and these two,” he says, pointing to my teammates. “Cover my daughter.”

  I smile a little. She’s dribbling the ball at the top of the key. I’ve seen her around school. Cute. An inch or so taller than me, short blond hair. “Hi,” she says.

  “Hey.”

  “I’m Dana.”

  “Jay.”

  She passes the ball in and I turn to double up on the pivot guy. Dana cuts to the hoop on a give-and-go, takes a little flip pass, and lays it off the backboard and in.

  I play back this time, guarding against the inside pass. She dribbles once, sets up from fifteen feet and shoots, hitting nothing but net.

  I blush a little. “I ain’t awake yet,” I say.

  “Right,” she answers, looking me straight in the eyes.

  I guard her tighter now, trying not to hack her. She’s very quick. Very agile and sleek.

  She drifts into the key, thinking she can post up on me, but one of her teammates has dribbled into the corner. He’s trapped—double-teamed—with his back to the basket, but he’s still trying to dribble his way out.

  “Oh, dear,” she mutters, close enough to my face that I smell peppermint. She gives me a kind of smirk, a half-look that elevates me. “Dribbling is bad,” she says.

  “Tell me about it.”

  The ball goes out of bounds. It’s ours.

  I stay inside. The ball comes to me. I try to back her toward the basket. She plays me tight; front of her thighs against the back of mine. I give a head fake and drive. She gets a hand on the ball, affecting my dribble, but I recover, spin, and lay it over her outstretched hand. It scores.

  Listen to this dream I was having when my alarm went off this morning.

  I’m at the diner and I’m finishing my third consecutive meal. All of them were chicken dishes; the first two were the same, the third somewhat different. I can’t recall the exact meals, but the chicken seemed to be fried and had thick gravy on it. I kept ordering dinners because I was hoping the waitress I had would go on a break and the more enticing new one would take over. But that didn’t happen. Plus, I was very hungry.

  Eventually I got up to pay, timing it so the preferred waitress would be at the register. I remember saying to her that I’d made a pig of myself.

  I paid with a twenty, and I needed two more dollars. I started digging in my wallet but I couldn’t find any singles, even though I knew they were in there. There was an elderly guy on line behind me, and he said he’d give me the money. I said no, I have it, but thanks anyway. Then I managed to spill everything in my wallet (in fact, far more stuff than I possibly could have carried in my wallet—my repo
rt card, a couple of golf balls, the lyric sheet from an Allman Brothers CD, a naked G.I. Joe doll, and a thousand pennies) all over the counter and the floor. As I was picking it up, the waitress who had served me came over and punched me on the shoulder and said, “Nice going, Jay, that guy behind you just died.” I stood up, kind of stunned, and she looked at me in disbelief and said, “Help him!”

  Well, the guy hadn’t died, but he was shriveled up and could barely talk, and he said he’d had a heart attack. The nicer waitress was propping him up. I said, “I’ll get some ice.” [Note: This would have been a useless gesture.]

  So I ran into the kitchen, gathered up a huge batch of ice, and then (holding the armload of ice) started trying to open cabinets and drawers to find a plastic bag to put it in.

  That’s when my alarm went off.

  Game point, 6-6. She sets a screen at the foul line, and I’m not sure of the protocol for fighting through an opposite-gender pick.

  “Come on,” she says softly, “use it.” But the guy dribbles toward the corner again. Same guy, same corner. This time he’s open.

  “That’s you,” she says, still whispering, like she’s announcing the game to herself. “Oh, dear,” she says as he halts his dribble and starts looking around. “Gotta shoot that.”

  Instead the guy tries to force a pass back to her, but it’s way too high. She gets a hand on it, but no way she can recover. I grab the ball, step behind the arc, and shoot.

  “Shit,” I hear her say as it goes in.

  About time.

  Basketball Reality

  Big crowd on Saturday night. On weeknights Shorty’s gets middle-aged regulars, guys who come in to shoot pool after work at Sturbridge Building Products and drink pints of Yeungling or Coors. Those nights I’m mostly frying hamburgers. But the group shifts way younger on Fridays and Saturdays if Shorty brings in a band. Then I’m cooking a lot of wings.

  Spit’s band is on tonight, so the fat guys in cowboy hats get to stare at skinny, barely legal women with breast tattoos. The noise level is high, and every five minutes or so somebody stumbles into the kitchen by mistake, expecting it to be a bathroom.

  It’s about 10 when Shorty hollers for me to bring up a case of Molson.

  “Extradite it,” he says.

  “Extra what?”

  “Extradite. Quickly. Chop chop.”

  So I pass through the bar room, checking out the clientele. I stay in back as much as possible because Shorty could get screwed for letting me handle alcohol. But I have to leave the kitchen to get to the cellar, so I squeeze through the crowd and cut behind the bar.

  You have to watch your head as you walk up the creaky wooden steps with the beer. Bobbi spots me and smiles. “They cold?” she asks.

  “Yeah.”

  Bobbi is about twenty-five and built, and she tends bar with Shorty on weekends. She takes one of the Molsons from the case and sets it on the bar in front of a landscaper named Chris, a beefy guy with curly blond hair in a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt. He’s married, but spends most of his nights on this bar stool. Bobbi smiles and sticks her tongue between her teeth as she opens the bottle.

  “Dee-licious,” Chris says as Bobbi pours it into a glass.

  “You haven’t tasted it yet,” she says.

  “I don’t mean the beer,” he says, winking at her.

  Bobbi is every guy’s fantasy in here and she knows how to flirt just enough to keep them interested. I watch her for a few minutes, drawing beers, smiling when they make their lame jokes about taking her home. You have to just about shout to be heard above the band, and above everybody else who’s shouting, too.

  Shorty catches my eye and motions with his head for me to get out of sight. I nod. I go.

  The first time I entered Shorty’s Bar was Labor Day weekend, almost two months ago. Me and my dad had reached a stalemate—I wasn’t going to California and my father definitely was.

  We’d been through this every night for about two months. My father had a “job offer” out in Los Angeles that he couldn’t pass up. The job was managing the breakfast shift at a Denny’s—with a promotion soon if it works out. Mostly he just needed to get away from here.

  I’ll get into that later. The abbreviated version is that, realistically, I have one season of basketball left and this is the only town I can use it in. No way I walk into a school in L.A. as a scrawny white senior and make the team. So we compromised. I’d rent this room from Shorty DiGiorgio—the only guy around with any use for my father—and Shorty would watch out for me like a hired uncle or something. Then in June I’d pack up and join my dad out west.

  Shorty stuck to the watch-out-for-Jay deal for about two days. Since then, I’m pretty much doing whatever I want to.

  Shorty is a man who does not give a shit. He rakes in money from this bar and from taking bets on sporting events. He liked my father because he was a major contributor to both sources of income.

  Here’s the basketball reality. I’m a borderline player, but at least I’m a known entity in this town. The coaches know I’ve run my ass off ever since the Biddy League back in fourth grade, even if my shooting touch is less than consistent.

  I’m about five-foot-eight, with good speed and strong legs. My style on the court can be deceptively smooth—simple but effective passes inside, more rebounds than a guy my size ought to get. But making the varsity is not a lock. If you’re not going to be an impact player as a senior, then you just aren’t going to stick.

  I see it. Why keep a non-contributing senior when you can develop a younger guy instead?

  I see it, but it sucks. If I was a coach, I’d never screw a kid who’d worked his butt off for so long. But a senior is far more likely to get the ax than an underclassman. So I have to be twice as good to stay.

  The thing about basketball is that it gets into your head real easy. Sturbridge is not a place where hoops has ever been big; high school wrestling is a town-wide obsession and that team is always among the best in Pennsylvania. But basketball has caught on here lately, more on the recreational level than scholastically. It’s fueled by the general desire for fitness, I suppose, but it goes a lot deeper than that. I’ve played enough with everybody—the doctors and lawyers who play like stegosaurs on Sunday afternoons, the playground boys who’d never go near a real team but can play their asses off anyway, the hardcore guys with beer guts and bad knees who play in the men’s league—to figure out the socio-dynamic crap.

  The Sturbridge YMCA runs men’s basketball leagues most of the year, using outdoor courts through the summer, but moving to late-evening hours inside the Y’s narrow, rickety gym from October through April. The men’s league has teams sponsored by bars and insurance agencies and pizzerias, and the rare opening on a roster is quickly filled with somebody’s buddy or a recent high school player who’s kept himself in shape.

  There’s also the forty-and-older league, which has a slower pace but only a few less fights and hard fouls. And there are pickup games going on whenever there’s open gym time at the Y. I’ve been spending as many hours there as I can, mixing in with whoever’s on the court. You learn the pecking order pretty quickly, moving up over time if you’re into it.

  The high school program is proud but undistinguished, run by Ralph “Buddy” Johnson, a gym teacher in his forties who played forward here a long time ago and is dead serious about the game. But he’s been coaching for twenty years and has only had four winning seasons. One league championship sixteen years ago—the banner is hanging from the ceiling above midcourt.

  “We play clean, unselfish basketball here,” Johnson tells us every year at the tryouts. “None of that Harlem playground shit in my gym.”

  Last year the varsity won just seven games, mostly on the shoulders of all-conference point guard Brian Kaipo. Some say the game has passed Johnson by. Others say it had a mighty big head start.

  I’m scraping burnt grease off the grill when the sound of Spit’s voice stops me cold. She’s singing an autobiogra
phical tune about being alone and bewildered, something I don’t think she’s over yet. I set down the spatula, wipe my hands on my white cook’s shirt, and lean against the doorway to watch the band for a few minutes.

  All potential goes to nothing

  Anoint or you’ll annoy

  If you concentrate, you can hear a trace of the Mediterranean in her voice, beneath the Newark and the punk and the confusion. There’s an athleticism in her wired frenzy, her ropy black hair swinging against her shoulders, and her pale stomach showing when her shirt whips about on the stage.

  Feed your ego, feed your soul

  Create or you’ll destroy

  Something, the knotty strength in her legs maybe, makes you believe that she really could have been a gymnast, back before her growth and her addictions and her anger.

  Spit. For Sarita. The most unlikely friend I’ve ever had.

  She’s almost twenty, spent a year at Tyler School of Art, lived with one of her instructors in Philadelphia since the middle of the first semester—some guy named James. He broke her heart last spring so she came to Sturbridge where her mother had landed after finally going through with the divorce.

  Spit’s working as a legal assistant. “It sucks,” she says, “but it supports my excesses.”

  Her excesses, the obvious ones, are energy, hair color (streaks of orange in the natural black), emotion (approaching both extremes), and intelligence. She’s the lead singer, songwriter, and apparent brains of the rock group Elyit, which formed within a week of her arrival in town. They play at Shorty’s about three times a month, but so far have not landed any other “gigs.”

  Bobbi brings in the predictable run of orders around 11:30 when guys who’ve been drinking for three hours get the munchies. Four cheese steaks, three orders of fries, and a hamburger.

  “And somebody broke a bottle over by the jukebox, when you get a chance,” she says.

  I clean up the bottle before starting on the orders, brush ing the bits of glass into a dustpan. The bar room is long and tight, and a guy backs into my head when I’m bent over. About eight people are dancing on the tiny dance floor, but most of the customers are standing around, packed in close, looking for somebody to go home with. I know how they feel.