“Do you know where he is?”
“He’s over hanging out with that Jill girl again.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” she says, “I think you and I feel the same about that.” Creature’s mom licks her fingers, flattens her hair in the front. “I told him not to go over there anymore, but he doesn’t listen to me.” She slides the last few strands of hair behind her ears. Takes a deep breath and opens the door wider. “Wanna come in?” She’s in a Lycra suit with a low V-neck. She plays with the collar a little, kind of peeling it back. Purses her lips.
I don’t know how to feel when she acts like this. I don’t know if she’s actually flirting with me or just being friendly, and also, she’s Creature’s mom.
“Uh,” I say, “I better go try to find Malik over at Jill’s.”
“Okay,” she says, and stops playing with her collar. “If he’s there, talk some sense into him?”
“I’ll try,” I say, then I hop off the porch.
I dribble crossovers all the way to Jill’s house and I’m sweating by the time I get there. Jill’s house is a blue mobile home at the end of the second loop, a quarter mile from Malik’s. Her porch is covered in old Astroturf, patchy and thin, and the plastic railing that goes around the front is missing six of its dowels.
When I knock on her door, I hear music playing inside but nobody answers. I knock again. Her porch faces south and it’s hot standing on that patchy Astroturf. I wait for a minute, then knock again, and jog back down the steps. I start to dribble in the direction of home, but I sort of begin to play a game in my head and get trapped in a full-court press by invisible defenders trying to keep me from crossing midcourt. I cut right, go behind my back, and sprint 30 feet. Then I pretend to take an inbounds going the other direction and break the press that way too. After that, it’s sort of back and forth for a while. I’m sweating and dribbling hard against the defenders in my head when Creature comes out of the house.
He’s sweating too. He says, “Whoa, T, that guy was all over you.” He points at the air behind me. “And that guy’s a monster.” Creature smiles.
I pick up my dribble. “Come on, man. What are you doing at Jill’s again? I thought you said you weren’t coming back here anymore.”
Creature leans down to tie his shoelaces. He doesn’t even have his ball with him.
I say, “Did you forget something?”
“Oh, damn,” he says. “My basketball.”
He jogs back up the steps and knocks on the door. Jill opens it and kisses him long and slow. I don’t like to see that. Then she hands him his basketball and pushes on his face.
He steps back and says, “You can’t push me away. I’ll see you again soon.”
“Soon, baby.” She winks at him.
—
Creature and I dribble down the street without talking.
When we get close to his house, Creature says, “I know what you’re thinking.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he says, “that I’m 18 and she’s 24.”
I shrug. “I was really wondering how NBA guards can drive straight, go up right, switch to left, and still lay it in soft.”
Creature says, “She already has two kids, and I know that.” He dribbles right, right to right, then left to left, then changes to crossovers and jukes. “But,” he says, “those kids have nothing to do with me.”
“They could,” I say. “You could be the next baby daddy.” I smile at him.
He points at me. “No, no, no,” he says. “That’s never going to happen.”
I dribble through my legs, turn, and dribble through my legs again. “How’d you meet her anyway? How’d all of this start?”
He says, “I didn’t tell you?”
I shake my head.
“Oh, it was weird. She’s at the end of my newspaper route one morning. She’s just sitting on the porch looking hella fly.”
“Just sitting on her porch early in the morning?”
“Yep, six o’clock. Just about when I finish my route and go home. It was like she knew I was coming. She was wearing this coat that didn’t really cover her dress and this dress that didn’t really cover her body.”
“At six in the morning?”
“Oh baby, I mean it looked like she’d just put it on for me right then,” he says. “Not that I was complaining. Nobody else in this park looks super fine at six in the morning. Mostly I get to see old guys in stained boxers or women all hunched over with their dentures out.”
“Huh,” I say.
“Don’t ‘huh’ me. You’d have done the exact same thing in my position. She looked super fine with her messy mascara and her slinky lingerie under that tiny dress, and her kids were with their daddy that weekend, so there was nobody else home. There was nothing I could do about it.”
“Nothing?”
“Well, you know, I’m a man.” Creature palms his ball and stretches out his arms wide on both sides like that old Michael Jordan poster I used to have on my wall.
I do a quick crossover. “ ‘Nothing’ because you’re a man?”
Creature copies my crossover move but does it a little lower and a little smoother. Sometimes I feel like I’m oatmeal and he’s Cream of Wheat.
“Trust me,” he says, “if you saw Jill in lingerie, you’d be going back twice a day. No doubt. Maybe three times.”
For some reason, right then I think of Creature’s mom in her workout gear. I dribble in place and get sort of carried away for a second, but then I stop myself and shake my head.
—
We’re back at my house then, and we shoot for a while in the driveway.
I clang a miss off the side of the rim, and Creature retrieves the ball. “Do you want to play under the bridge with me tomorrow tonight? There’s a big pickup game going on. Lots of older players, small-college players, a few guys down from Portland.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Let’s do that.”
We walk over by the porch to drink water out of the hose.
Creature says, “How’s your grandma?”
I shake my head.
“That bad, huh?”
“I can tell it’s getting real bad. She won’t talk about it, but I know.”
Creature bends down and reties his shoelaces. He says, “Have you asked her directly? Have you said, ‘Grandma, what’s really going on?’ ”
“No. I don’t know why.”
“Talk to her, then. See what’s up.”
“Okay.” I palm my basketball against my wrist, run into the driveway, and try to dunk, but I get rim-checked, same as always.
YELLOW WIG
Grandma doesn’t have the TV on. The room’s nearly dark, one night-light plugged into the wall on her side of the bed. She looks asleep so I start to turn around, but she says, “Come on in, sweetie. I was just resting.”
I go and sit on the side of her bed. “Hey, Grandma. How are you?”
“Good, sweetie, good.”
I feel the thick veins on the back of her hand. In the light, they’re bright blue, but now I can’t see the color. I say, “How are you really doing?” I say it like Creature told me to. I want her to tell me the truth. And she can hear it in my voice.
“Oh, you know…,” she says.
I put my hand on her head then, where her hair is brittle, where it feels like strands of nylon.
Grandma sighs.
I say, “Are you gonna lose your hair again?”
“Yes,” she says.
“So it’s bad again?” I just want her to tell me. I just want the truth.
“Who knows?” she says. “I’m not even sure the doctors do.”
I rub her scalp with the ends of my fingers and she closes her eyes. I had a dream recently that she was my kid. It was a weird dream because she was old and I was young, just like in real life, but she was my kid anyway, and she was sick, and I was always sitting by her bed. In the dream, she called me Dad and I nodded every time she said that, but when I wok
e up I was sweating and I had to get up and walk around to clear my head.
I say, “What did the doctors tell you?”
“Not much, sweetie, not much.”
I wait for her to say more, but she doesn’t.
“Grandma, would you tell me if it was real bad? Would you?”
She pats my hand. “You’re a sweet boy, and it’s not your job to worry about me.”
I think about her being bald again, that strange yellow wig she wore two years ago, the one that reminded me of McDonald’s French fries. I don’t know why. I say, “But I’ll worry about you anyway.”
“I know, sweetie. I know.” She reaches up and touches my shoulder. “Are you still doing all of those push-ups and pull-ups this summer?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” she says. “This is going to be a great year for you.”
When she says that, I remember the news cameras. I remember how they were there on the court, how I looked over when I was sitting on the bench after I got ejected and the game finally resumed. All three cameras were pointed at me. I say, “I hope so. We all know last year wasn’t a good year.”
Grandma smiles. “Hopefully, that’s all over now. Hopefully, those coaches will let that be in the past.”
Just then, down the hall, the crowd cheers in the baseball game that Grandpa’s watching, and we hear Grandpa say, “Oh yes. Oh yes. Run, you son-of-a-bitch! Yes!”
Grandma smiles.
The game gets quiet again and Grandpa mutters something but I can’t hear what it is.
Grandma says, “I heard that there might be some sort of monster in the lake.”
“Did Grandpa tell you that?”
She closes her eyes. “Everyone’s talking about it.”
That makes me happy. I tried to downplay it with Grandpa so he’d be even more sure, so he’d stick with his opinion. But Grandma is generally more reserved. She has to be encouraged to believe in something. “Could be something big,” I say. “I guess people are saying that. So maybe we should go out and look for it tomorrow evening when the light’s good. I could paddle for us and you could try to spotlight whatever it is. Wanna just hold the flashlight?”
She adjusts her head on her pillows. “I don’t know, sweetie, I’m pretty tired these days.”
I say, “I could carry you to the canoe. I could put you in there with pillows and blankets. Then I’d do all of the paddling. It’ll be like last time when you were sick.”
Grandma smiles. “Those were fun nights.”
“Yeah, I’ll paddle and you’ll tell stories,” I say. “I always loved your stories. They always made me happy.”
She turns her face away from me. Says, “I don’t know if I’m strong enough to do anything like that right now. I don’t feel good if I’m moving.”
I lean over and kiss her forehead, and when I do, I realize that she’s crying.
“It’s okay, Grandma.”
“I’m just so tired,” she says. “I probably need my sleep now.”
“Okay.” I stand up.
She still has her head turned away. “Good night, sweetie.”
I feel bad about pushing her. I want to say I’m sorry, but I don’t. Instead, I just say, “Good night, Grandma.”
After I close her door, I go out on the back porch and stare at the lake. I try not to cry myself, but I do anyway.
On the other side of the glass, Grandpa jumps up off the couch and slides the glass door open. He says, “The Giants have two men on base. Only one out.”
“Good, Grandpa.”
“No, it’s not good. It’s excellent. You have to come in and watch this.”
“No thanks. I’m going down to my tent now.”
“With two men on base?”
“Yeah,” I say. “But let me know what happens in the morning, okay?”
Grandpa doesn’t understand how I could walk out on a game situation like that. He looks at me like I’m trying to eat soup with a fork.
I say, “Goodnight, Grandpa.” Turn and walk down to my tent.
I keep my tent flap open. Try to read but can’t. None of the books I have seem interesting. After a while, I hear Grandpa come out on the porch. I click my headlamp off and watch him pack a bowl. He smokes it down, then packs another and smokes that one down too. I lie on my bag and watch him puff. With the porch light in his face, he can’t see me down the hill.
He goes back inside.
I have to piss, so I get up and slip on my shoes, walk up the hill and down the street to Mr. Tyler’s house. No one’s out at this time of night. I look both ways but don’t see anything moving—no cats, no people, no cars, no dogs.
As I’m pissing on Mr. Tyler’s porch, I think about the time he called Creature “a dirty little coon.”
WHAT HAPPENS THEN?
“Hey, Creat. Why do you write about those Russian princesses?”
“I don’t know, baby.”
I say, “You have to know something. Some reason.”
“I do,” he says. “I do.”
“And that is…”
Creature spins his basketball in his hands. He says, “I guess it’s like this: they didn’t have any power.”
“Who?” I say. “The princesses?”
“None. Everything I read about them, they were powerless. Being a Russian princess is like being some no-name skinny-ass clothes model in New York City. You just put on whatever clothes they give you, walk out on that runway, and look as good as you can. Then you walk back to wherever you stay all day and do jack-shit nothing for the rest of your time. Maybe you smoke some cigarettes. Maybe you don’t eat too much. That’s it.”
“Is that right?”
“I think so.”
I say, “If that’s how it was for the princesses, then why do you write about them?”
“I guess I like to put me there too. With them. What if we had love affairs? What if we had powerful love affairs? What’s the difference in our lives?”
“The difference between you and a Russian princess?”
“Exactly.” Creature taps his chest with his index finger. “What do I have?”
“You’ve got basketball.”
“Right,” he says. “Basketball could bring me money. It could bring me wealth. Same as being a Russian princess.”
I shake my head. “It’s different.”
“How?” he says. “Tell me.”
“I don’t know. You get to play, for one thing. You get to. You don’t have to.”
Creature spins his ball in his hands. “Tell me, baby, what do we have here? What power? What influence? We live in a fucking trailer park in a middle-class town in the western United States. You and I are shit on by everyone at school unless they’re afraid of us. We go to Taft, a trashy, rich-person school.”
“Yeah, but we’ve got basketball, man.”
“And the princesses, well, they get to be princesses. So tell me: What happens if you take that one thing away from us? What happens if we lose our one thing? What happens then?”
T. S. ELIOT AND BASKETBALL
I bike to meet Creature at the Washington-Jefferson Bridge courts, and these are the rules:
Shirts vs. skins
All by ones to eleven
Winner’s outs
Call your own fouls
Winning team stays in
I lock my bike and find Creature shooting on the far rim. He says, “We’re gonna be ‘a pair of ragged claws tonight, scuttling across the floors of silent seas.’ ”
I nod. Take a warm-up shot.
“Nothing?” he says. “T. S. Eliot, baby. ‘All the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo’?”
I say, “My poet is Rajon Rondo.”
“Yeah, whatever,” he says. “Let’s find some big men to run with.”
Creature and I pick up three forwards and wait to get in on the next game. Creature says, “Pick and cut through for easy layins and dunks.” Then he points at me and says, “You play the point and I’l
l take the two, got it?”
“Yep.”
“Off the ball,” he says, “I’ll commit murder. Plus, we’ll run the pick-and-roll up top. If I’m not open on the roll, you pop or hit one of these big guys underneath. Keep the other team honest, right?”
“Right.”
—
Creature’s only 6'1", but he dunks bigger than 6'1". And on the first pick-and-roll, that’s exactly what he does. His man slides in front of me, and I hit Creature over the top for an uncontested dunk down the middle of the lane. The rim is reinforced, no breakaway, and Creature takes a moment to do a slow pull-up on the double rims. He yells as he drops down. And then the rout’s on. We win that first game 11 to 2, the other team never figuring out how to stop Creature.
The next game is the same. And the next. I pass to the three big men a little more because I want them to stay interested in playing with us, but Creature’s always my outlet on the break. I don’t have to shoot, so I almost never do unless they drop two to the paint on the pick-and-roll.
Fourth game. Some thug-looking guys from Portland step in.
I play defense, dribble, and pass. Bring it up top to reset. Drive to draw the defender. I love this part of a game, when I get to run everything but don’t have to take a shot. I start to get into a flow where it’s just me. I’m myself and I’m alone, and there are motions when I have the ball and motions when I don’t have the ball, and I think about my footwork, my body position, square up my shoulders, backpedal with my butt low, point at the cutter, play the left-side top of the two-three zone.
Sometimes when it’s like this, I don’t hear anything, or I guess I hear things and I react to what I hear, and I talk to my teammates, but even that isn’t conscious. Even that part of my brain goes away somewhere, and then there’s just this flow of the game and everything I love about it.
Creature snaps me out of my head. He yells, “I’m eating your entrails right now, bitch,” and he’s wagging his finger in a gangbanger’s face, and the gangbanger looks pissed. Then I can hear. And I’m with everybody else, and one of our bigs seems worried.
Two possessions later, Creature dunks and does another pull-up on the rim. Says, “I’m just getting so damn tired from all these dunks on you.”
This is the Part Where You Laugh Page 5
