“You gennamin like a lil’ friendly game a’ three-on-three?” a lanky black player asked Randleman.
“Sure, House,” he said. “Shirts and skins?”
House laughed. “Don’t make no difference. You all too white to mix up. Go ’head and take it out.”
The black guys all went by nicknames. Cassidy had played with “House” and “Satch” plenty of times, but he didn’t know the little guy they called “Dee-troit.” The first two were over six feet and could both jump, but neither one could throw a ball in the ocean from more than five feet away. Dee-troit was quick as a mongoose, however, and had a deadly short jump shot. He got by Cassidy at the top of the key and nailed three in a row before the game was barely under way.
“That’s okay,” Stiggs said to Cassidy. “Three to zip. Let him shoot whenever he wants.”
“You want him?” Cassidy asked. Stiggs thought about it, shook his head.
Cassidy tossed it in to Randleman coming up into the high post and then broke right around Dee-troit and flared for the basket, calling for the ball back. Randleman ignored him and backed House down into the key before wheeling into his famous hook shot, which House immediately spiked like a volleyball.
Cassidy had anticipated this and had circled out to the backcourt to watch Randleman’s humiliation. It so happened that House spiked the ball right to him.
House was still doing his victory dance in the key, shaking his finger in Randleman’s face and making his usual catcalls. “In yo’ face, baby!” he said. “Man got nuffin’! Try hook shot on the House-man, sheee-it!”
Cassidy stood, ball on hip, giving Randleman an inquiring look he could hardly misinterpret. It said: Are you ready to play ball now? Randleman nodded grimly.
Cassidy leaned around Dee-troit and one-handed a bounce pass to Randleman back in the high post, and this time cut left to the basket, again leaving Dee-troit flat-footed as the man watched the ball instead of Cassidy. Stiggs saw Cassidy coming and cleared out along the baseline, taking his man with him and leaving the hoop open.
Randleman backhanded a no-look bounce pass to Cassidy, who laid it up softly with his left hand.
The play was so quick and professional looking that it almost shut House up momentarily. “Man right-handed but shoot left,” he muttered, calling for the ball. Dee-troit lobbed it in to him at the top of the key. He turned to face Randleman, looking to take him to the hoop. But Dee-troit hadn’t broken for the basket and instead just floated back out in the backcourt, leaving Cassidy to loiter around the top of the key, seemingly ignoring House.
House made a clumsy head fake left and started right, just as Cassidy anticipated, and when the ball hit the floor for the first dribble, Cassidy’s fingertips were already there, flicking the ball up to Randleman, who pivoted and laid the ball in.
There followed a huge argument over whether the basket counted because they didn’t take it “out” first, which in turn depended upon whether they were playing “possession” or “backboard.” It was settled, as always, by counting the basket “this time” but agreeing that on all future changes of possession the ball would have to be taken back beyond the top of the key before it could be advanced toward the goal by the opposite team.
But some kind of threshold had been reached, and from then on the airmen took the high school kids more seriously. Still, to their shock, they lost the first game 11–8. In the second game, Dee-troit again left Cassidy twice at the top of the key, first hitting his short jumper and next time dumping off to Satch, who had enough momentum and clearance from Stiggs to cram a thunderous two-handed dunk down the pipe.
So overjoyed were the trio by this stark put-down, they seemed not to notice that they lost again, this time 11–9. When the kids won the third game 11–6, the airmen walked off to the showers, high-fiving and celebrating like they had just won an NBA division title. Cassidy, Stiggs, and Randleman stood there sweating, hands on hips, looking at each other in amazement.
“What just happened?” asked Stiggs. His socks bunching up on his ankles made his calves look even skinnier. “Unless they changed the Arabic numeral system, we won every game, didn’t we?”
“All they care about is Satch jamming on Randleman. Far as they’re concerned, that’s better than winning,” said Cassidy.
“They wouldn’t be sayin’ that if there was another group in the stands ready to play winners,” said Randleman. “Then they’d have plenty of time to celebrate sitting on their asses.”
“Aw, it was a pretty good dunk, you have to admit,” said Stiggs, retrieving his sweatshirt from where it was tucked into the top of the safety pad under the basket. He and Randleman were drenched and still breathing hard.
“You guys want to stay and do some drills?” said Cassidy. He was standing on the foul line, shirt off, breathing lightly, a sheen of perspiration on his skinny brown chest.
Stiggs and Randleman, as usual, looked at him like he had three heads.
* * *
The tall windows on either side of the court were darkened now as Cassidy drove the full length down the floor at his best under-control speed, flicking the ball out in front of him, dribbling with his head up and eyes downcourt scanning for approaching defenders or streaking allies, though the gym was empty.
The slapping of taut leather on varnished oak echoed in the far rafters of the huge place. The sweat-blackened leather ball smelled of pennies and the gym smelled of varnish and piney sawdust.
He reached the top of the key dribbling with his right hand, gave a quick glance at the rim, and brought his left hand up as if to pull up for a shot. Instead, he took a quick stutter-step, crossed over his dribble, and drove down the left side of the key, launching himself off his left foot and going up with his right hand to flick an improbable-looking reverse layup up toward the painted white square on the glass. On the way up, the ball appeared to have been overshot, landing too far inside the square and destined to cross the rim and tick off the right side and out, but there was just a hint of backspin on it, and when it kissed off the glass, its arc changed subtly. Instead of going all the way across the rim, the ball pitched slightly upward, stopped in its arc altogether, hung for a moment, and dropped gently through the net.
Breathing hard and sweating profusely, he landed and turned a hundred and eighty degrees so that his back slammed into the protective wall pad with a whack. He used the rebound effect to reverse direction, catching the ball as it dropped from the net and flicking it back down the court toward the other end, where he started the process all over again.
Though it was decidedly cool in the gym now, he was glistening under the lights, and sweat flew from his fingertips on every dribble.
He had already done his jump shots from around the top of the key, using a portable volleyball judge’s tall stand as a substitute defender, driving toward it as if coming off a screen, pulling up into his jump shot directly in front of the wooden stand, arching backward into a slight fadeaway, and launching the ball toward the rim twenty feet away. He took care that the ball always left his fingertips with just a hint of reverse English, and that his hand flopped over into the perfect swan’s neck follow-through. He had made eighty-eight out of one hundred.
Then there were the hooks, fifty on each side, using the left hand on the left side, right hand on the right side. Next there were the baseline jumpers and then the free throws.
Now he was at the end of the routine, the full-court layup drill, as hard as he could go, at least twenty of them, and some nights as many as forty. He never walked off the court without being utterly exhausted. He had made up this routine himself and he had intentionally made it so physically punishing that he was sure no one he knew would want to do it regularly, if at all. Stiggs and Randleman had tried it one night and had walked off the court halfway through, laughing at him.
His rasping breath and the sound of slapping leather were the only sounds echoing in the rafters as he drove himself down the court on the last one. He had pushed himself so
hard he felt his thighs catching occasionally as if wanting to spasm, but he didn’t ease up. He went the length of the court, this time stutter-stepping and veering to the right, laying the ball up perfectly at the top of his jump, trying without success to nick the bottom of the backboard with his fingertips on the way down.
This time when he slammed into the end pad, he did not bounce off. Leaning back against his own indentation in the damp canvas, he reached down and grabbed his knees and squeezed his stinging eyes shut against the sweat pouring down his face, desperately gasping as much air as he could get into his lungs.
He tried to take a few steps toward the locker room, but his vision went all hazy and he had to stop. He grabbed his knees again and gave himself a few more minutes of desperate gasping before stumbling off to the showers.
The gym manager, a corporal named Don Spacht, was making his closing rounds. His dog tags jangled against his sleeveless GI olive-drab undershirt as he picked up the ball where it had rolled up against the bleachers. He looked at Cassidy with a sympathetic smile.
“You are either going to kill yourself or you’re going to be all-state, Cassidy,” he said.
Cassidy gave him a tired little wave as he stumbled toward the locker room. He would have a long bike ride across a spooky old World War II airfield to get home, and his dinner would be in the oven, barely warm but still waiting for him. Some nights he could barely eat it.
Outside in the chilly night air as he mounted his beat-up ten-speed, Cassidy felt his quivering thighs protesting. They did not want to go back to work so soon. He knew from experience that they would be all right in a few minutes.
In the middle of his ride across the dark, abandoned airfield, he would look up at the clear panoply of winking stars and feel like the last person on the planet. It was a biting kind of loneliness that had surprised and almost frightened him as the days became shorter. Now it was familiar, almost comforting.
And too, before leaving the gym that night he realized that he had finally become comfortable with the most forlorn sound in athletics: a solitary dripping showerhead in the far corner of a deserted locker room late at night. It was, he realized finally, the answer to the question: What does excellence sound like?
He was fifteen years old, he could touch the third row of knots on the net, and though he had not yet made a single basketball team he had tried out for, he was never the last one picked anymore.
CHAPTER 25
* * *
THE BLEACHERS
It was not even midmorning, but it was already stifling as the second-period gym class waited in the bleachers for Coach Stoddard to waddle out in his squeaky ripple-soled coaching shoes to take role. It was their first day of high school and as hot as any day in the summer had been, but even the heat couldn’t suppress the ambient excitement.
They were not “dressed out” today. This class would merely be a somnambulant orientation session (“You will be required to bring with you on Monday of every week the following: one pair of clean cotton gym shorts, red in color; one clean jock strap of the appropriate size . . .”).
Cassidy sat next to a faintly unpleasant kid he had known since second grade, Gary Castleton, a redheaded, fox-faced creature who perpetually looked as if he had just smelled something distasteful.
“Are you going out for basketball?” Gary asked.
Cassidy, trying not to show too much enthusiasm, said that he was.
“You won’t make it,” Gary sneered dismissively.
Cassidy was surprised at his own visceral reaction to this pronouncement. The fine hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. His scalp actually tingled at this casual prediction of failure.
Somehow he knew it wasn’t personal. As far as he knew, Gary Castleton had never even seen Cassidy so much as pick up a basketball. His prediction of unavoidable failure was generic in nature. Cassidy wouldn’t make the team because nobody Gary Castleton knew would make it. Those twelve spots were reserved for a handful of extraordinary beings, and Gary Castleton wanted Cassidy to understand that he was anything but extraordinary, just like Gary himself.
His was the voice of the real world, issuing a stinging denunciation of a foolish dreamer.
The all-purpose negativity of people like Gary was loathsome to Cassidy, and he realized later that the reason he resented them was that, statistically speaking, such people were usually right. And if Gary was right about him, it meant that Cassidy was a fatuous idiot, throwing away his life in empty, smelly gymnasiums, running laps around hardscrabble tracks, busting his gut in claustrophobic weight rooms, choking down ridiculous mail-order protein pills. And for what?
For the chance to prove sniveling naysayers like Gary Castleton spectacularly correct in the most public, the most final, the most humiliating manner possible: a typed list on a bulletin board at the bottom of the stairs in a high school gymnasium. A list on which his name was, simply, not.
Cassidy readily understood that most dreamy high school thespians would not become international movie stars; most tots prancing across stages wearing rhinestone tiaras would not become Miss America; most ROTC standouts would not become heroes or astronauts.
But at the same time he was pretty sure that a few would. He had to believe in his heart that some of them would do these things. He understood that, even if Gary Castleton did not.
What he really blamed Gary for was his almost joyful renunciation of The Possible. Gary would not even acknowledge some tiny sliver of one percent of humanity actually would wear an Olympic garland; actually would be handed an Oscar by a smiling and envious colleague; actually would fly a rocket to the moon and whack golf balls into orbit.
That night at the gym, the thought of Gary Castleton’s sneering dismissal would drive Cassidy through an extra fifty jump shots from the top of the key, an extra twenty hooks from each side, an extra ten full-court layups. All of it leaving him a pile of mush once more, leaning unsteadily against the safety pad, gasping for breath in the dank and empty gymnasium.
Stumbling to the locker room, he contemplated his long, dark bike ride home and the cooling dinner awaiting him. Maybe Gary Castleton is right, Cassidy thought, eyeing the sky full of bright stars over the deserted airfield. But then again, maybe he isn’t.
Some have to be chosen. Maybe I am one.
CHAPTER 26
* * *
THUNDEROUS ASCENSION
The first clue that something was up was when they were stopped by the MP at the entrance to Fort Murphy. Accustomed to breezing through without slowing down, Stiggs and Cassidy almost wrecked their bikes when they heard the first angry blast from the guard’s whistle. After that it was all “yes, sir” and “no, sir” to the black airman in full regalia, including leggings, white MP helmet, white cord epaulets, nightstick, and .45 automatic. They usually just wore fatigues and waved everyone through. But this one demanded their military IDs, and when they were produced, stuck them on his clipboard and began making notations. As he was writing, his attitude seemed to change and he no longer seemed so ticked off.
“Hey, what gives?” asked Randleman. “Nobody ever stopped us before.”
“Yeah,” said Cassidy. “There an inspection or something?”
The MP handed their cards back.
“What are you, kiddin’ me?” he said. “Haven’t you guys heard what’s goin’ on?”
Cassidy knew only that his parents had been strangely quiet, shooting glances at each other at dinner.
“We’re just kids,” said Randleman. “We can hardly find out the correct time.”
“Well, how ’bout this. How about we’re at Defcon three,” said the guard, turning to deal with the cars stacking up. “If we go to Defcon two, no dependents allowed at all. So enjoy base privileges while you can.”
“Yes, sir,” said Cassidy.
“Yes, sir,” said Stiggs.
“And you,” said the guard, pointing his clipboard back at Cassidy, “stop shootin’ so much.”
Ca
ssidy studied the guard’s face.
“Dee-troit!”
“Yeah. Now get outta here. These other guys been waitin’.”
“That was Dee-troit?” said Randleman as they pedaled toward the gym. “I never saw him in anything but those gross red shorts and black Converse high-tops.”
“Yeah,” said Cassidy. “Most people look different when they’re armed.”
* * *
Mr. Kamrad was more wound up than usual in civics class. It was known to some around school that while a student at Rollins College in Winter Park, Mr. Kamrad had hung out with people who wore beards. He had allegedly sat around drinking flavored coffees at a place called the Careera Room, where he discussed the conformist masses and the men in gray flannel suits who led them around like sheep. He was even rumored to be friends with a beatnik writer guy who lived in a little bungalow on Clouser Avenue in College Park with, of all things, his mother. The guy’s name was Kerouac.
Mr. Kamrad these days was pretty straitlaced and his hair was shorn almost to military precision, as befitting a man who had started the only high school crew team in the southeastern United States, but he was said to still harbor some fairly exotic political views. This made for interesting discussions in this new kind of civics class that had recently been added by legislative fiat from Tallahassee. The class was actually called “Americanism versus Communism,” which everyone had to pass before they could graduate in the state of Florida. It was Mr. Kamrad’s last semester to teach it, so Cassidy got permission to take it early. Almost everyone else in the class was a senior.
“How many of you saw the president on TV last night?” Mr. Kamrad asked. Nearly every hand went up.
“Would anyone care to sum up what he said? Alan?”
Alan Mcree was the son of a full bird colonel, an honor student, a football player, and a shoe-in for an appointment to the Air Force Academy. He also, incongruously, did a pretty good rendition of the Kingston Trio’s “Scotch and Soda” on a twelve-string guitar.
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