The Outside Shot

by Walter Dean Myers

  We got back to Orly Hall and to the room and both of us flopped across our beds. For a long time I just lay there, not really thinking even, or maybe thinking so many scattered thoughts that none of them made sense.

  “Hey, Lonnie?” Colin called to me.

  “What?”

  “You okay, man?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I didn’t know you were that close to Ray,” he said. “I just figured that if they were calling around looking for a friend, it wouldn’t cost us too much to be friends. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah. Hey, can I tell you something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You know, I wasn’t that close to Ray,” I said. “I mean, I’m sorry he’s dead and everything, I really am, but I wasn’t that close to him. But when they told me that he was dead, and then that he killed himself …”

  “You feel like it could have been you?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Lonnie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I felt a little like that myself. Sometimes this whole college thing seems so strange to me. I’m supposed to think that I’ll be a big-time ballplayer, or at least finish school. There’s only one thing that makes it even possible to believe any of it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t have anything else to believe in.”

  Ray’s family came and they decided to take him home to Chicago to bury him. They had a little service for him in a chapel in town and a few people showed up. The only ones from the team were me, Larson, and Colin. We said good-bye to Alethea and she asked if we would mind if she wrote to us. I said no, but I didn’t know why she would want to write. I think it had something to do with Ray being a ballplayer and us being ballplayers and her not wanting to just throw it all away so soon. I think Ray would have understood that too.

  The day after the service Skipper sprained his ankle at practice and Teufel told me that I’d be the third guard when we played Gary that weekend.

  “Maybe we’ll swing you back and forth between guard and forward,” he said. “That could work out fine if Wortham’s not up to it.”

  They ran a lot of plays for Go-Go to practice. They ran them against Wortham and Go-Go looked okay, but he still wasn’t Wortham. Wortham was a monster at practice. He knew that they were getting Go-Go ready to replace him and he showed everybody—Teufel, Leeds, and Go-Go—that he was still the man.

  Larson and Hauser caught up with me after practice and started rapping as we left the gym. Once in a while I rapped to Larson, but I almost never spoke to Hauser.

  “You hear how Hauser gets his speed?” Larson asked.

  “How’s that?” I asked, looking at Hauser.

  “Larson is so full of crap that it’s coming out his ears,” Hauser said. “Don’t listen to him, bright eyes, he’ll rot your mind.”

  “He gets McKinney to pour wintergreen up his butt and it has a jet effect.”

  “One time I twisted my back,” Hauser said, “and the trainer was away for the weekend. We were just practicing. So I told Mac to put some oil of wintergreen on my back. Instead of that he just pours it on my rear end—and you know where it goes—”

  “He took off around the gym like a thoroughbred,” Larson said.

  “Hey, look, bright eyes,” Hauser said. “If you get a lot of time against Gary, you might play against Bradley, too. Skipper’s ankle looks like it’ll be hurt for a while. And if you play back court against Bradley, we’ll have to work something out. We’ll have to talk about it when you have a chance. Okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said, wondering what he meant.

  “Look, I’ll see you at practice tomorrow.” Hauser waved and veered off toward the science building.

  “What was all that about?” I asked Larson after Hauser had left.

  “There’s a guy on Bradley’s squad that a lot of the pros are looking at,” Larson said. “He’s only about an inch bigger than Hauser. If Hauser has a big game against this guy, then he might get a tumble from the pros. If he has a bad game against this guy, he can forget it.”

  “So he needs me to help him look good,” I said.

  “One hand washes the other.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look, the Fat Man wants to see you,” Larson said.

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know, he didn’t tell me,” Larson said. “You afraid of the Fat Man? You sound afraid.”

  “Yeah, maybe I am,” I said.

  “That figures,” Larson said. “But if you get up any nerve, why don’t you give him a call?”

  I couldn’t get to sleep. I kept thinking about Ray and what must have gone through his mind at the Panteras tryouts. What must have happened, I thought, was that even though he knew what the deal was, that they weren’t looking for players other than the ones they had already been scouting, Ray must have figured he had some kind of outside shot of them signing him. What had made me feel so bad when I heard about Ray doing himself in was that deep in my heart I knew that all I had was an outside shot, too. I wasn’t bringing much to Montclare that anybody seemed to want. Sometimes I felt like just packing my stuff and going back to Harlem.

  But there were times I didn’t want to leave. There were times, on the basketball court, when I knew how Ray must have felt. There were moments when I would be on the floor and the ball would come to me and the world would be round and pebble-grained and in the palm of my hand. Other dudes would be around me, trying to get the ball, trying to snatch my play away, but they couldn’t. Suddenly I would feel full of power and full of life. There was no place on earth other than the court where I had ever felt that, and the moments were like some kind of crazy magic that was happening to me.

  Maybe some of them bright guys who turned out to be doctors could go into an operating room and look at a person lying on an operating table and feel the same way, I don’t know. But for guys like me, and Ray, it was different. On the court, once we got the ball we knew we could do it. Muscle and drive and quickness gave everything in life a meaning.

  Anyplace else we wouldn’t even get the ball.

  Montclare was not the world I knew, and I felt that it wasn’t the world I belonged to, either. But I knew it was a world that had some things in it that I wanted, and that I had a slim chance of making it after all. I told myself that I wasn’t ever going to give up. I wasn’t going to shoot myself, or run away, or let anybody push me out. If I had an outside shot, I was going to take it.

  I was tired the next morning when Larson came around and said the Fat Man was dying to see me. He ran down this stuff about how the Fat Man only wanted to talk to me for a few minutes and that I should just drop by and talk to him.

  “What he want to talk to me about?” I asked.

  “Look, the Fat Man has been a good friend to me for a long time,” Larson said. “I’m not going to start questioning him on everything he says. The guy’s been cool with me, so I’ll be cool with him.”

  I told Larson I’d think about it.

  The classes eased off a bit. That is, they were still hard but I didn’t go into a panic thing anymore. At first, when I was in history class and the professor would ask a question, I’d look the other way and hope he wouldn’t call on me. But after a while I didn’t tighten up if he called on me and at least I could try to figure out what he was talking about. A lot of the other kids put their answers a lot better than I could, but I was beginning to understand the stuff as well as most of them. I could see that a lot of them would be trying to jive the professor with answers that didn’t say anything and he would call them down for it.

  But if the classes were easing off, my thing with Sherry was beginning to get me a little uptight. Back in Harlem I had always had some kind of woman. In Montclare the closest thing I had was Sherry, and I wasn’t really getting next to her. The thing was, I figured, there must have been a difference between middle-class chicks and the way they operated and the kinds of chicks I used to know
. If a chick got up in your face with a lot of grinning and conversation, it meant that she was interested in you, and if she started throwing some heavy kisses and things your way, it meant she was looking for you to be her man or at least get into some kind of heavy action. That wasn’t what was going down with me and Sherry.

  Sherry would flash that nice smile, get your heart beating kind of fast, then throw a few soul kisses on you and walk away while you stood there with your motor running. Then she would come back with some talk about not being ready for no “serious” commitment. If I had been in the streets I probably would have just said later, but Montclare only had a handful of black chicks at best and Sherry, at least, would talk to you. Still, I couldn’t understand where she was coming from. Once I saw her and Linda, her white roomie, in the rec room and I wondered if Sherry was AC-DC. They were holding hands when I walked into the room and then Linda gave her a little hug and split. I told her that I didn’t know that she and Linda were “that” kind of roomies and Sherry blew up. We were still in the rec room and she threw a bag of potato chips at me and ran upstairs crying.

  I went up to her room thinking that if she was crying she’d probably be there. Then I thought that if Linda was there, she might be with her. I didn’t want no big confrontation thing but I didn’t want it to ride, either So many people were getting messed around so bad, it seemed, and I didn’t want to be part of the people who messed the others up.

  I knocked on the door and there wasn’t any answer. I tried the door and it was open, so I just walked in. Linda was out and Sherry was lying on the bed. I went over to her and sat next to her on the bed. She looked up and saw it was me and turned away.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She had the sheet twisted around her arm and her face was tucked under her hand so that she looked like a bird putting its head under its wing. She didn’t answer me and I just sat next to her. There wasn’t no whole lot I could say—I had put my mouth on the girl already and didn’t have no place to back out to. We sat like that for a good half hour before she moved. I thought she had fallen asleep. She got up and went to the bathroom and then came out and sat next to me on the bed.

  “You want to go get something to eat?” I asked.

  “Not hungry.”

  “I’m real sorry about what I said, you know. I like you a lot, but I really don’t know how—I’ve never met anybody like you before so I don’t know how to deal with you. I met some—what you call yourself? middle-class? upper-class?—girls before but they were real lade-da, you know, like they were something more than me. You don’t act like that, but then you don’t act like anything else I know, either. I guess when I saw you and Linda together this morning I was maybe—what?—looking for an excuse why I couldn’t connect with you or something.”

  “And now?”

  “Now it don’t matter if I connect with you or not,” I said. “You still okay and we can be friends if you want.”

  “Do you want to be friends?”

  “Yeah, look, I can use some friends out here,” I said.

  “But you still think I might be making it with Linda?” Sherry asked.

  “It don’t make a difference, is what I’m trying to say,” I said. “We can be friends on any level you want.”

  “Are you and Colin making it?”

  “You know better than that, baby,” I said. “That’s so ridiculous I won’t even get mad.”

  “But if I go and spend the weekend with Linda or hang around her, I have to be making it with her, right?”

  “Okay, what was all that about this morning?”

  “It was about me really being down,” Sherry said. “It was about me being out here in Indiana without many friends and about Linda being here from California without many friends. That’s what it was all about.

  “Back home I didn’t have that many friends, but I had a few good buddies, you know?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, most of them went to college, but I was the only one to come to Indiana.” Sherry moved back on the bed and folded her legs in front of her, Indian fashion. She had a birthmark on her right thigh. “When I got out here I found that there weren’t many black students. At first it didn’t bother me because I get along with the white kids as well as I get along with anyone else. Then I thought about dating and I saw that practically the only black guys out here were the guys on the teams. Half of them aren’t worth two cents and the others just expect me to say hello and start undressing. I dated a few white boys but I wasn’t too comfortable doing that.”

  “You did?” I said. “I didn’t know that.”

  “That was the whole point. I didn’t want anyone to know,” Sherry said. “You want a Coke?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  I watched as she went to her drawer, got some change, and then went into the hall. I was surprised that Sherry was having any trouble at all in school, because she looked really cool all the time. I was also surprised that she had dated white guys. She came back with two Cokes and handed me one before she got back into her squat-legged position on the bed.

  “Anyway—”

  “You were talking about dating white guys,” I reminded her.

  “Yes. Well, I kind of arranged the dates so that not too many people would know about them. I’d tell them I had to buy some new sneakers or a new wrist band and that they should meet me at the sports store.”

  “So you could meet them off campus.”

  “Right. And I liked some of the guys but I wasn’t comfortable. Some of them wanted to hit on me right away, too. I was trying to make up my mind about you, I guess.”

  “So what about me, you finish making up your mind yet?”

  “No, but I got all the ifs and ands put together. You want to hear ’em?”

  “Yeah, go ahead.”

  “On one hand you seem like a pretty nice guy … sometimes,” Sherry said. She had put her Coke down and I could see she had really been doing some thinking about the whole thing. “You’re nice-looking, you have a nice body—”

  “True, true.”

  It made me feel good to see her smile.

  “Most of all you seem interested in my track, which is what I’m about. That’s your big plus. You seem interested in what I’m about.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means that you’ve got me in a state of culture shock,” she said. “Then there’s the one plus one theory that my mother has.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She says you have to look out when you only find one guy around that you like. You start adding things up and your one and his one make an easy two.”

  “Sounds right to me,” I said. I had tried to sit squat-legged like she was, but it hurt my knees too much and I straightened out my legs.

  “One plus one equals that particular two,” Sherry said. “But if there’s a lot of guys around that you like, or could like, you look for the best because none of them is the only thing around. Dig it?”

  “Well, where does that put me and you?” I asked.

  “You mean what should we do?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What you should do is to worship the ground I walk on and be faithful and true to me and never look at another girl and every night you can go to sleep and dream lustful thoughts about me,” Sherry said. She was laughing.

  “And what you going to be doing?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She stood up and went over to the door. “But if you can catch me you can find out.”

  “How am I supposed to catch you and you’re a track star?” I asked.

  “You mean, I’m not worth the effort?”

  I stood up but my heart wasn’t in it. The chick was turning me on again and she knew it. She also knew that by the time I got across the room she could be halfway down the hall. I started to jump, hoping I could surprise her and freeze her for a moment before she could take off. Instead I stumbled and fell across the floor. I was pissed. I was just
in front of her feet. I looked up to see Sherry smiling.

  “Oh,” she said, reaching over and turning off the light switch near the door. “You got me.”

  I stood slowly and took her into my arms. I kissed her forehead, then lifted her chin gently until our lips met. She clung to me tightly as I kissed her again and again.

  “There’s a French restaurant just off campus if you want to get a bite to eat,” she murmured. “Maybe we can get the last bus if it hasn’t gone yet.”

  “If it has,” I said, “you can just hop on my back and we’ll fly.”

  The way I felt right then I could have, too.

  The next day I decided to go see what the Fat Man wanted. I didn’t think anything was wrong with it, but I decided against wearing the school sweater.

  I had never seen the Fat Man working in his pizza place before. Most of the time he just sat around and read the papers or added up columns of numbers on the backs of envelopes. This time he was kneading the dough. His huge hands looked as if he were strangling it. The white dough came through his fingers as he squeezed it, then he would pat it into a round ball, only to start strangling it again.

  “Lonnie, you know I do a lot of betting,” he said, not looking at me. “I enjoy it. I don’t make any money at it, but I enjoy it. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, sure you do.

  “Now, I talked to Larson. That Larson, he’s a class ballplayer. I don’t know if he’s a class guy, but he’s a class ballplayer. I tell him that to his face. I mean, I got nothing to lose by telling people what I think of them. Anyways, I talked to him and I asked him to do me a favor. I asked him to beat this Gary Tech team you’re going to be playing this weekend good. You know, run up the score. Sometimes you play against a team of rinky-dinks and you play just enough to win. So I say to him, Larson, the heck with it, run it up. Some clown comes along and he likes this team and wants to lay down a bet with me, that’s his business. Only he ain’t stupid. Some people are weak, mind you, but ain’t nobody stupid.”