Travel Team

by Mike Lupica

  He closed his eyes, knowing he was worn out from talking to Will in real life, and he certainly wasn’t in the mood to talk to him electronically, especially at this time of night.

  But when he looked closer he saw it wasn’t from WillStud, his screen name.

  The sender was ConTessa44.

  Tess, sitting at her own computer in her second-floor bedroom at 44 Butter Lane.

  CONTESSA44: Hey. You there? Hello? Calling Mr. Crossover.

  Crossover2 was his screen name. For obvious reasons.

  CROSSOVER2: I’m here.

  By now Tess knew that Danny wasn’t any more chatty in their personal chat room than he was in person. She liked to joke that he had completely mastered the language of instant-messaging, which she called “instant shorthand.” She also knew to be patient with him, even when he was only tapping out a couple of words, because he couldn’t type nearly as fast as she could. He’d been with her at her computer once while she talked online to Emma, who Tess said was slower than boiling water, and saw how Tess bopped her head from side to side while she waited for Emma to hold up her end of the conversation, occasionally moved from side to side in her chair, like it was sitting-down dancing.

  CONTESSA44: What’s up?

  CROSSOVER2: Just chillin. You know.

  CONTESSA44: Oh, I get it. The big hip-hopper.

  CROSSOVER2: JK.

  More instant shorthand. For “just kidding.”

  CONTESSA44: I know. You were acting weird today. You OK?

  He waited a second. And imagined her waiting for him, doing the head bop, the side-to-side sway.

  He hit the two letters. Then “send.”

  CROSSOVER2: No

  CONTESSA44: What up, dawg?

  CROSSOVER2: Now who’s the hip-hopper?

  CONTESSA44: Seriously.

  Danny took a deep breath, as a way of taking his time, telling himself he didn’t need to get into this with her now.

  But knowing he wanted to in the worst way.

  CROSSOVER2: I’m thinking about skipping b-ball this year.

  It took so little time for the doodlely-doo to come right back at him he imagined their words colliding somewhere over Route 37, the road that divided Middletown in half.

  CONTESSA44: NO NO NO NO…NO!

  CROSSOVER2: Why not?

  Now he was the one who waited.

  CONTESSA44: Because basketball is who you are. Like taking pictures is for me. It’s your gift, DW, no matter what the dumb Basketball Dads say. You can’t quit. If you quit, they WIN.

  CROSSOVER2: I’m just thinking about it, is all.

  CONTESSA44: Stop thinking about it. Right now. That’s an order.

  CROSSOVER2: You sound like a second mom.

  CONTESSA44: Wrong. I’m just your first biggest fan. Talk more tomorrow…Love, Tess.

  CROSSOVER2: Back at you. With the last part, I mean.

  He was reaching for the power button when he heard the goofy sound one more time.

  CONTESSA44: I know.

  Danny always imagined there was some all-seeing, all-knowing Computer God somewhere, up there in microchip hard-drive heaven, monitoring all the computer monitors, checking out all conversations like this. Keeping a Permanent Record like they did at school. Knowing that Tess Hewitt always managed to get the word love into the conversation with Danny Walker.

  And how he never stopped her, or made a joke about it.

  He washed up, brushed his teeth, got into bed, hooked his hands behind his head, stared up at the poster of John Stockton on his ceiling, feeling tired all of a sudden, knowing his eyes weren’t going to stay open for long. Still thinking about Tess, though. The tall girl. He didn’t know exactly how to describe the feelings he had for her, just knowing that outside of his parents—and ball—he couldn’t think of anything or anybody he cared about more.

  He smiled to himself, the first time he’d felt like smiling all night, or all week.

  Thinking at the same time:

  If it wasn’t love, for the Twelve-and-Under Division, it was certainly in the picture.

  But he was still quitting.

  7

  THE BIGGEST PUBLIC PARK IN MIDDLETOWN, MCFEELEY PARK, WAS ABOUT three blocks from the middle of downtown, and included one regulation baseball diamond, two Little League fields, all the ballfields with lights. There were four lighted tennis courts, a playground for kids, and taking up the whole northeast corner of McFeeley, the part closest to town, was what all the kids called Duck Poop Pond, the kids finding it somewhat less charming than the adults who brought small children there to feed the butt-ugly ducks and little ducklings who resided there.

  Up on a hill, past the tennis courts, was Middletown’s best outdoor public basketball court, with lights of its own.

  In many ways, the downtown area wasn’t really the main plaza in Middletown, McFeeley Park was.

  Danny sometimes thought that Middletown, even as small as it was, should be broken up into different divisions, the way sports leagues were. There were the Springs School kids, and their parents, and the St. Pat’s people. There were the people who lived in the Springs, the nicer section of town, south of Route 37, and the ones who lived on the north side, where Danny and his mom lived, known as the Flats.

  “We call it the Flats, anyway,” Will Stoddard liked to say. “People in the Springs call it the Pits.”

  But there was always one day in the fall when the whole town came together, for the McFeeley Fair. It was organized by the Chamber of Commerce to raise money for the upkeep of the pond, the fields, the courts, the playground, all the land donated by the McFeeley family, which had originally owned about half of Middletown.

  On the last Saturday in October, McFeeley Park was turned into a combination of amusement park and county fair, with rides and games and booths where you could dunk teachers and coaches, even a local garage band, picked every year in a big Battle of the Bands, providing the music.

  Other than maybe an important Middletown High football game, it was the one day of the year when the town actually felt like one town.

  “Look,” Tess said as she kept training her camera on the people in the crowds, “Middletown being nice to Middletown.”

  Tess loved taking pictures the way Danny loved basketball. She’d even had a few of them published in the Dispatch. Color, black-and-white, it didn’t matter. The ones she’d allow Danny to see, when she’d allow him to see her work, were always great. She liked to tell him that the way he liked to play in the dark, she liked to play in a darkroom.

  “I think I even saw Mr. Ross looking happy enough to qualify as an actual human being,” she said.

  “It’s some kind of trick,” Danny said. “Like you big-time photographers do with lighting and stuff.”

  Somehow she had been able to ditch Emma. Even more amazingly, Will had decided to work, his dad having offered to pay him to handle one of the dunking booths. Will said he needed the money and that you could never go wrong watching a science teacher do what he called the Finding Nemo thing.

  So it was just Danny and Tess. She had gone through two rolls of film already. He’d won her a stuffed animal by throwing a softball into the top of an old-fashioned milk bucket. After she’d picked out the huge character she instantly named Mr. Bear, she asked the St. Pat’s mom running the softball game, Mrs. Damiecki, to take a picture of the two of them.

  “C’mon,” Tess said when Danny started grumping about it, “it’ll take one second.”

  She was smiling as she said it, Danny could see by looking up at her. It killed him sometimes, having to look up at her.

  When Mrs. Damiecki told them to smile, he gave Tess and Mr. Bear a poke and got her laughing so she wouldn’t notice him getting up on the balls of his feet and making himself taller.

  Now Tess said, “Let’s go up to the basketball court, I want to take some shots of the game, in case I want to be a photographer for Sports Illustrated someday.”

  She made it sound casual,
but he knew what she was doing. They’d both seen some of the seventh-grade Springers shooting around. There’d be pickup games going on all day at the McFeeley Fair if the weather was nice enough, and it was beautiful today. The crowd around the court had been growing for the last hour, as if people were looking for a diversion from the dunking and Ferris wheel and junky food and garage-band music that sounded like broken electric guitars and overamped speakers.

  “Let’s go back over to the dunking pool,” Danny said. “I’ll even give up my body and let you take a picture of me doing my imitation of Leonardo going down for the count in Titanic.”

  “Oh, come up the hill with me,” Tess said. In her red plaid shirt and jeans that made her legs look longer than Danny’s whole body. In her cute pigtails.

  The tall girl, looking like a million bucks.

  “You don’t have to play,” she said. “We’ll just watch.”

  “You want me to play.”

  “Wherever would you get an idea like that?”

  Danny said, “I don’t have the right sneaks.”

  They both looked down at his Air Force Ones, with the hole in the right toe, as if on cue.

  “They sure look like basketball shoes to me,” Tess said. “Or were something very, very close to basketball shoes at one time.”

  “Well, they’ve been bothering me.”

  “Somehow,” she said, “I don’t think it’s your Nikes bothering you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that unless you’ve come down with some sort of weird virus, you would play ball barefoot if you knew there was a game anywhere near you.”

  “I thought we were having a good time,” he said.

  God, he thought, now you sound like a girl.

  “It’s time you started playing ball again,” she said.

  She had been maneuvering him up the hill as they talked, pushing him along, Danny in front of her. When he turned around, they were nearly eye-to-eye for once.

  “Who told you I haven’t been playing ball?” he said.

  She gave a toss to her hair even though Danny noticed there wasn’t any hair in her eyes. Then gave him one of her know-everything looks with that raised eyebrow.

  One of those looks that seemed to say:

  I know what you had for breakfast, whether or not you remembered to brush your teeth today. And if you’re wearing clean underwear.

  Danny said, “You talked to my mom.”

  Tess made a typing motion in the air in front of her.

  “Doodlely-doo,” she said.

  There was a mix of St. Pat’s kids and Springs kids laughing and pushing each other at half-court, as Ty and Bren Darcy tried to organize the teams.

  They weren’t doing it by school, or going from tallest to smallest, Danny saw, just trying to make the best and fairest sides. Jack Harty went with Bren, Daryll Mullins went with Ty, Alex Aaron, wearing an oversized Julius Erving replica jersey from the old New York Nets, went with Bren.

  Danny stood next to Tess, who was casually snapping her pictures, and thought to himself: Kids always did the best job making the best game, especially when they took the old Dad Factor out of the equation.

  It was Ty Ross who spotted Danny first.

  Tess saw, and gave Danny a little nudge with her elbow. “Uh-oh,” she said. “You’ve been made, as they say in the cop shows.”

  “You don’t watch cop shows.”

  “I try to keep up.”

  Without even hesitating, Ty said, “I’ve got Danny.”

  They all turned to where Danny and Tess were standing.

  “Wait a second,” Bren said, trying to sound indignant. “I didn’t know he was in the available talent pool.”

  Daryll Mullins said, “It’s the McFeeley Fair, Darcy, not draft day on ESPN.”

  Ty said, “You in, Walker?”

  They were still all looking at him.

  Danny looked at Tess, then back at Ty. And smiled. “I’m in.”

  “These aren’t fair sides now,” Teddy Moran said. He’d already been picked by Ty and was standing with the rest of his team.

  “I’ll make them fair,” Ty said. “Teddy, you and Andy go with Bren now. We’ll take Danny and Matt.”

  Teddy Moran, career complainer, said, “I don’t care about the squirt, but Matt gives you guys too much height.”

  Daryll Mullins, in that laid-back way he had, said, “But you give them more lip, Moran.”

  Teddy reluctantly moved over with Bren’s guys, trying to give Danny the playground staredown with his small pig eyes as he did. Teddy Moran, every kid in Middletown knew, thought there was something in the Town Charter that said he was always supposed to be on Ty Ross’s team.

  Ty and Bren sorted out the rest of the sides. It wasn’t quite warm enough for them to play shirts-against-skins; they all just agreed they’d have to know what everybody on their team was wearing.

  Right before Ty and Andy shot to see who got the ball, Danny gave a little wave to Tess.

  She looked at him without changing expression and snapped his picture, barely focusing it, using one hand, looking like a pro already.

  What Richie Walker saw, wearing an old blue Middletown baseball cap, slouched against a tree on the pond side of McFeeley:

  He saw his kid and the Ross kid play as if they were Stockton and Malone. Except the Ross kid had more imagination already than Malone ever had with his catch-and-shoot game. Had more of a feel for everything.

  Was more interesting to watch.

  That’s what he saw.

  And this: Nobody on the court could guard the Ross kid straight-up and nobody, not even the tiny kid with the freckles who’d helped pick the teams, the one who was like this crazed Mini-Me, could get in front of Danny.

  With all the joking around and what he was sure was small-fry trash-talking, all the fake beefs about fouls and who had really knocked the ball out of bounds, with the way the kids in the game kept playing to the kids in the crowd, Richie couldn’t take his eyes off Danny and Ty Ross.

  They were doing what good, smart players could always do.

  Make the game nice.

  The word—nice—actually made him smile, the way some old song could make you smile if you just heard one lick of it. He’d had a teammate on the Warriors, Raiford Tipton, a forward out of the University of Miami, a dude with the hair rows and the tattoos and the strut. When Richie would hit Raiford Tipton just right on the break, Raiford would run past him when they were getting back on defense and say, “Richie Walker, that was niiiiiccccce.”

  Making the word sound like it had three or four syllables in it, making it sound as if what Richie had just done with the ball was practically illegal.

  Danny and Ty Ross were nice.

  They worked the pick-and-roll. When they had a chance to get out and run on the fast break, Ty would get the ball off the boards and throw a blind pass nearly to half-court, knowing Danny would already be there.

  Or: Ty would draw two of three defenders to him in the low blocks and then kick it out to Danny, who kept launching that funny shot of his—though he was getting it more out in front, like Richie had showed him—and scoring with ease from the outside.

  Then Richie would wait to see a smile or a fist-pump from his kid, or any kind of change of expression.

  Only Danny never would.

  Like this was the way it was all supposed to be.

  There was a taller guard with a skinhead haircut who Danny couldn’t guard sometimes, at least when Danny would let the skinhead get to his spot in close to the basket. But only if he could get to his spot.

  Danny’s team won the first game of eleven baskets easy, Richie keeping score to himself, into it now, and they were about to do it again. It was 9–4 and here was Danny dribbling through a double-team—the skinhead and the freckled kid who was just a little taller than Danny—beating them at the top of the key and stopping at the foul line and no-looking Ty with a perfect bounce pass for a
layup.

  Richie felt himself give a little fist-pump.

  As he did, he heard: “Rich.”

  The voice made him jump the way Ali had that night outside the house. Like he was wearing some kind of sign these days that said, Please sneak up on me.

  Or maybe he was just so used to living deep inside his own head, blocking out everything: Noise. People. The world.

  He turned around to see Jeff Ross.

  “Hey,” Richie said.

  “Hey yourself.”

  Ross put his hand out. Richie shook it, studying him as he did: The little polo pony on the shirt, expensive sunglasses, what still looked to be a summer tan on him, hair a little grayer and a little thinner than Richie remembered from the last time he’d seen him a couple of years ago, but the hair still hanging in there.

  You still look like money, Richie wanted to say, you always did. But you’re no kid anymore.

  Of course, how old do I look to him?

  Ross nodded at the court. “Kind of fun watching the next generation have at it,” he said.

  Danny and Ty came up the court on a two-on-one break, passing the ball back and forth between them at warp speed, neither one of them taking a single dribble, Ty finally blowing past the long skinny black kid trying to defend them and Danny lofting a little pass that Ty caught and shot in one smooth motion.

  The crowd around the court, adults and kids, cheered like it was a real game.

  “Ball didn’t touch the floor,” Ross said. “Just like I teach them.”

  Richie turned so he was looking right at him. “Speaking of that, how did my kid not make your team, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  Getting right to it. Knowing he sounded like every father of every kid who hadn’t made the team, and not giving a rat’s ass.

  “Well, first of all, it’s not my team,” Ross said. “And secondly, I didn’t pick the team. My son was trying out, too, and I’m the president of Middletown Basketball as well. So I took myself out of the process.”