The Outside Shot

by Walter Dean Myers

  When everyone had been signed up, they announced that there were sixty-eight players altogether. They were going to have a game and put people in and take them out as the game went along.

  The game started out with guys I had never seen or heard of. They each had a number that they wore and went out on the floor as the guy running the show called the number.

  “Teddy Liston, Muncie Junior College, Danny Moses, Our Lady of the Mysteries College, Jack Lapham, Carroll Street Devils …”

  It went on like that, with the guys who weren’t being called giving a hand to the guys about to play. When they got ten guys on the court they just let them play. It was pitiful. There wasn’t any coaching, and so guys just ran up and down the court, all trying to impress whoever was watching with what they could do. One guy was screaming for the ball at the top of the key and they didn’t seem to want to pass the ball to him. He got into an argument with his own team guy when the ball was turned over. It was funny in a way; in another way, it was pathetic. Then when they brought the ball back down he got the ball and heaved up a shot from far enough away to need radar. The only thing the ball touched was the top of the backboard before it hit the clock on the wall.

  I looked down at the table where the guys running the tryouts were sitting to see if they were laughing or anything. They weren’t. They weren’t even paying attention to what was going on out on the floor. Then I saw Sweetman.

  Earl “Sweetman” Jones had been a professional basketball legend for nearly ten years. It was said, when he was playing, that he had more moves than a crab in a hot skillet. He was so bad that one of the guys who used to sing with The Miracles had written a theme song for him and they used to play it whenever he pulled one of his cool moves. He was also one of the black ballplayers that would give a hand to a young ballplayer. When I had been ready to give up on my game, it was Sweetman who convinced me that I was feeling sorry for myself, that I wasn’t taking charge of my game or my life. It had hurt when he laid it on me, but it was true.

  I went on down to where he was and hoped that he would remember me.

  “Hey, yeah, I remember you,” he said. “You trying out for this Italian team?”

  “No, man, you got to be kidding,” I said. “I’m playing for Montclare and I didn’t have anything to do today so I thought I’d come over, maybe pick up a game later.”

  “How you doing at Montclare?” he asked. “You starting?”

  “No, they got these white boys starting,” I said. “You know how that is.”

  “Yeah, I know how that is.” Sweetman looked at me, smiling. “Them white boys out here can play some ball, can’t they?”

  I had to admit that the guys on my team were good. Sweetman asked me if I was shocked to see how good they were.

  “You mean the white boys?”

  “I mean everybody playing on a college level,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”

  “I’m here to check on this brother,” Sweetman said. “He was let go by the Nets early last year and my team needs a big forward.”

  “You going to give him some play?”

  “I’m just here to see if he can play on his bad leg,” Sweetman said. “He tore his knees up something terrible last year. The doctors figured he couldn’t play anymore so they cut him loose.”

  “Most of these guys won’t make the Italian team,” I said as I watched a fat boy hit a two-handed set shot.

  “They’re only interested in looking at two guys,” Sweetman said. “They asked them to come out and everything else is public relations.”

  “No lie?”

  “Hey, do the Sweetman lie?”

  “Who they interested in?” I asked.

  “This guy Jenkins I was telling you about,” Sweetman said, “and another big boy out of Bradley. They got a lot of guys over in Italy around six feet, six feet two and they can only have four Americans on the team. So the only thing they’re interested in is size.”

  I thought about Ray. Ray was a good six five, maybe six six, but he played smaller. He was strong but he really couldn’t leap.

  I watched the rest of the tryout with Sweetman. He was goofing on the players and I goofed along with him, but it wasn’t that funny to me, not really.

  When Jenkins got out on the floor, he played good for about five minutes. Then he grabbed his knee. He stayed out on the floor and just about took over the boards when he was out there, but you could tell his knee wasn’t up to no whole lot of pounding up and down the floor.

  “What you think?” I asked Sweetman.

  “No way,” Sweetman said. “He can’t make it. Too bad he can’t talk a little better. Maybe he could get into some public relations or something. Look, I’ll check you out later. Glad to hear you doing okay.”

  Sweetman went over to the guys at the table and shook hands all around as he got ready to leave.

  “Say, you know, you want to get rid of some extra tickets to any games you play against the Pacers, I’ll take them off your hands,” I said when he came over to shake my hand.

  “You sound different than when you were up in Harlem,” he said, reaching into his inside coat pocket and coming up with some tickets. “The midwesterners are teaching you how to talk like them.”

  “You just don’t remember how I talk,” I said.

  “You probably don’t remember either,” Sweetman said.

  He waved and started out, stopping to shake hands here and there and sign a few autographs. I felt good talking to him like that. I also felt good because I had decided to wait for a while before I signed up for the tryouts.

  The rest of the games were about the same. There were a few names that I had heard of, guys who had played college ball and then disappeared and a few who had played some in the pros. When Ray got on the floor he was on with some real scrubs. There was no way he was going to look good with those guys. I checked out the guys at the table. They were passing around the coffee and talking among themselves. On the floor Ray was sweating hard, working hard trying to make an impression. Over on the far side of the gym a white guy stood next to a girl holding a baby. She was rubbing the back of his arm. He was going to be on the floor next. I had this feeling that he didn’t have a chance to make it, and that all three of us knew it.

  It was late when I got back to Montclare. I looked around for someone to go get something to eat with but everybody I knew was out. Sometimes Colin went to church on Saturday nights and I figured him to be there. Juice and Sly had probably found a party. I went over to where Go-Go and Skipper roomed. Skipper could always be counted on if you wanted someone to go eat with. He was as skinny as you could get but he was always eating. I found Go-Go but Skipper was out.

  “He went to the movies with his old lady,” Go-Go said.

  “How she look?” I asked.

  “She ain’t that bad,” Go-Go said. “And I think her favorite pastime is parking.”

  “How come guys like Skipper always find the right chicks?” I asked.

  Go-Go shrugged and went back to reading his book. I wouldn’t have minded rapping with him for a while, but he was one of those heavy dudes who was probably going to be a senator or something. I copped a handful of fig newtons from him and split.

  I hit the bed and must have dozed right off. The next thing I knew, somebody was shaking me by the shoulder. I looked up to see Colin. He was talking on the phone and he was real white.

  “Yeah, he’s here now,” Colin said.

  “Who is it?” I asked, trying to figure out from the way Colin looked what was wrong.

  “It’s the campus security office,” Colin said. “Ray York’s dead.”

  “What?” I couldn’t believe it.

  “They wanted to know if he had any friends on campus,” Colin said. “I said that we were.”

  We got dressed without speaking to each other. I felt confused, like somebody had made a mistake and I was part of it. I looked at the clock and it was four o’clock in the mor
ning.

  On the way over to the security office I had to stop twice because I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t believe what they were saying. I had just seen him, running up and down the basketball court, his sweat shirt dark from where he was sweating, getting up for rebounds in a crowd of bodies. Now they were saying he was dead.

  In the security office there were some policemen talking to Andy, the head of campus security.

  “Give me your full names, fellows,” Andy said, “for the record.”

  “Colin Young.”

  “Lonnie Jackson.”

  “Colin and Lonnie are both on the varsity basketball team,” Andy said. “Ray was on the team a few years ago. Real good ballplayer.”

  “You guys want coffee or anything?” The policeman didn’t look any older than me and Colin.

  “Unh-uh.” Colin shook his head. “What happened?”

  “From what we can tell,” the other policeman, a big, broad-shouldered guy, said, “it looks like he took his own life.”

  “Oh, man.” I felt tears coming up inside of me and I didn’t want to cry. I hadn’t even known Ray that well, and I didn’t know why I felt so bad, but I felt terrible. “Oh, man.”

  I felt somebody put a chair behind me and I sat down. I put my head down for a moment and tried to pull myself together. I put my hand over my face and took a deep breath and then I was just about together.

  “What we thought”—the policeman knelt by my side—“was that, seeing how his … wife is all alone, maybe somebody could go by and, you know, let her talk for a bit. Sometimes that helps.”

  “I’ll give you a lift over if you guys want to go,” Andy said. “You don’t have to, you know.”

  “We’ll go,” Colin said.

  We got out to Ray’s house and there were more police drinking coffee in the kitchen. I imagined Ray sitting at that same table, thinking about the tryouts for the Italian team, wondering if he was going to make it. Through the door I could see into the bedroom. There was a girl sitting on the bed. She had her legs crossed and one hand was in her hair. She was rocking on the bed. There was a crib and I could see a leg. The girl was either light-skinned black or white, I couldn’t tell.

  “Had an old piece of gun”—the policeman that was talking had big hands, the kind that could have been a carpenter’s—“and he just stuck it in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Had to do it twice. She said she heard a noise that sounded like a little pop and a grunt. Said she called to him and he told her to go back to bed, then she heard another pop and he fell off the chair. Damn, you have to be a hell of a man to shoot yourself twice like that.”

  “Knew an old boy up near Gary,” a man in civilian clothes with a police badge on his shirt pocket said through thin lips, “tried to blow his head off with an under-and-over Marlin. One of them adjustable-barrel numbers. First shell went through his cheek. He had to get up and go out to the garage to get another shell. Well, it was one cold son-of-a-bitching day and he went out there and couldn’t get the lock to the garage open because the son of a bitch had frozen. He come in and called the hospital and they called us. Me and Jack Sucrette—you know Jack?”

  “Goes fishing all the time? Retired last year?”

  “Yeah, that’s him. Me and Jack Sucrette go in and see how he’s messed up. Now, we got there first before the ambulance. And old Jack, he says to this fellow, ‘You want us to try to stop the bleeding or you just want to borrow another shotgun shell?’ Well, that fellow got mad enough at Jack that if he had a shell he would have shot Jack.”

  I walked into the bedroom. I saw the kid lying in the crib. He was too big for the crib, really. The girl looked up at me and I kneeled down near her. She wasn’t white, but damn close to it.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said. She looked at me. Even though I was kneeling I was just as high as she was and our faces were close. Her lips were quivering and she wanted to cry.

  “You want me to close the door?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, rocking back and forth. “I’ll wait till they’re gone. I’m used to waiting on things. You a friend of Ray’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He didn’t have many friends,” she said. “Sometimes he went out drinking with the guys from the mill, but they weren’t really what you would call close friends.”

  A guy came in with a piece of paper for Ray’s wife to sign. He told her that if she would just sign it where he pointed, the police would leave. She took it and the pen he pushed in front of her. By this time Colin had come in, and he took the paper from her and looked at it before she could sign it.

  “Who’re you?” the guy with the paper asked.

  “A friend,” Colin said firmly. Then he gave her the paper and told her it was all right to sign it. I wished I had done that.

  She signed it, Alethea York, and gave it back to the guy. He left, and one of the policemen came in and said that if she needed anything she could give them a call. He sounded like he meant it.

  “You have anything to eat, ma’am?” Colin asked. “I could make you some eggs or something.”

  “I’ll make something for you,” she said.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  “No, neither am I,” Colin said.

  “Please?” she looked at us both. Then she went into the kitchen and we followed her.

  We sat where the police had been sitting before. There were cigarette butts in the ashtray. She picked up the coffeepot and shook it. There was still coffee in it and she put it back on. It was the electric kind of pot. When she plugged it in there was a small orange light that glowed.

  “You’re not from the mill, I can tell,” Alethea said. “You’re too young. You from the school?”

  “We play ball for the school,” I said.

  “We used to play ball for the school, too,” she said. “I used to play on the girls’ team and you know about Ray. He could never give that up, you know.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “How you like your eggs?”

  “Any way,” I said. Colin didn’t answer.

  She started making the eggs. I looked over at Colin but he was looking down.

  “He came home last night and he was really down,” she said. “I knew he was down and it surprised me because when he left in the morning he just said he was going to some tryouts just to play a little ball and maybe we’d get a babysitter and go to the movies tonight. He wanted to see something—I forgot what it was.”

  She finished scrambling the eggs and put them on plates. There was another pot on the stove and she opened it and took out some sliced ham and served that.

  “He was just so down when he came home. I asked him what was wrong and he said that the guys he was playing with couldn’t play very well. He said something like that. I really wasn’t listening that close because as soon as I heard it was about basketball …”

  We ate the eggs and some ham and had the coffee black. She had only coffee and sat at the end of the table. She was crying but she wasn’t making any noise. Her eyes were gray, and they were filling up with tears that spilled over her thin cheeks. She was thin, but she could have been pretty if she fixed herself up a little. Sometimes she would look up and catch me and Colin looking at her and try to force a smile.

  “He always felt he was too close to making it to just give up,” she said. “He always said it was an inch higher, a half-step faster, one more shot, between the guys that made it and the ones that didn’t. He was working on his outside shot. Sometimes, when he wasn’t hitting it, he would come home and just sit by himself in the bedroom. He wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me or Jimmy.”

  “That’s your son?”

  She nodded.

  “The police said that if you needed anything …” Colin said. “But you could call us …”

  “I’m going to wait here a few days and then maybe I’ll go to St. Louis,” Alethea said. “I’ve got some people there. I’ve got a
teacher’s license. You know, he made me go back to school after the baby was born and get my teacher’s license?”

  “That was a good idea,” Colin said.

  “I’ll probaby go to St. Louis because I’ve got people there,” she went on. “I got people in Oklahoma, too, but I didn’t fulfill their dreams. I was supposed to go to college and be a teacher.”

  “You can still be a teacher,” I said.

  “I know, but I just don’t want them to be thinking that I’m okay now that …”

  We talked for a while longer; then the police came by again and asked some more questions. A guy from the school paper came and got some details about what Ray had been doing. A minister and his wife came by and said that they were going to stay with Alethea for a while and Colin and I said that we would be back and to call us if she needed anything.

  “I just want to say again that I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s okay.” Alethea took my hand. “He just put so much into it and when nothing worked out for him, I mean with the basketball and everything, he just took it so hard. I thought he was going to be okay because he knew that he couldn’t make the Italian team when he went to the tryouts, but when he came back he was still …”

  Colin was almost out the door when I stopped to look at Alethea York.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’ll get along. And thanks for coming by.”

  “He had a chance to make the team,” I said. “He played okay, except that the guys he was playing with just weren’t that good, so it made him look bad.”

  “No, they were only there to look at two players,” she said. “Ray knew one of the organizers and called him before the tryouts. He said he just went for the game.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Did you go with him?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  We got outside and the car from the campus was still there and the guy took us back to Orly. I felt like nothing. I kept remembering Ray playing at the tryouts, running up and down the courts hustling every minute. What the hell had he been hustling for? They weren’t keeping score and he knew he didn’t have a chance to make the team. What the hell had he been hustling for?