This is the Part Where You Laugh

by Peter Brown Hoffmeister

  I flinch when he says that. That weight bar is still pushing down on my neck and I can’t look up at Coach.

  “But,” Coach says, “we won’t let that happen to you. I won’t let that happen. You were just a kid last year, a freshman in high school, and it was a mistake. So that’s not what I think of when I see you. It really isn’t.” Coach takes a deep breath and lets it out. “When I look at you, I see a young player who’s passionate about the game, someone who works three times as hard as the average player. You’re on the short side and you don’t have Rajon Rondo–size hands, but you have a lot of talent and you also love the game. And that matters. Big-time. You hear me?”

  “Yes, Coach.”

  “So that incident? That punch? That suspension for the rest of the season? It doesn’t mean much to me now. It’s over. You hear me?”

  When he says that, it’s as if that weight bar slides down a little, settles on my shoulders, not just the back of my neck, and I can lift my head. I say, “Thanks, Coach.”

  “This is a new year,” he says, “and if you keep working the way you do, then you’ve got a shot at All-League as a sophomore. Then, who knows from there?”

  I don’t say anything but I smile pretty big when he says that. I want All-League bad, but I never tell anyone about that.

  Coach says, “That’s the truth. You could earn that. And I’m excited about the coming season.” He leans over and takes another Gatorade out of his mini-fridge, opens it, and gulps a big drink. He sits back and sighs. “Now, honestly,” he says, “how’s your anger?”

  “Coach?”

  “I mean, when was the last time you got in a fight?”

  I hesitate a little because I know I can’t tell Coach the whole truth. I lower my head and say, “I don’t really fight, Coach.”

  “You don’t?” he says. “Let me put it this way: When was the last time you punched someone?”

  The Seventh-day Adventist pops into my head. I can see his head spin when I hit him, the way his mouth was open halfway as he lay slumped against the wall. But I can’t tell Coach about that. I have to lie. I say, “I haven’t hit anyone since that basketball game.”

  “You haven’t? Are you sure?”

  “That’s the truth, Coach.” When I say that, I can feel my eyes wanting to twitch, like I want to blink a lot or something, and I remember how my science teacher last year told us about the physical signs of lying. So I make myself look Coach right in the eyes, and I don’t blink, and I don’t look away.

  He says, “So you’ve been avoiding trouble altogether?”

  “Yes, sir,” I say. Another lie. He doesn’t know about shoplifting either. But—I ask myself—is it trouble if I never get caught? In my head I go back and forth on that one, and in the end, I decide that it’s not trouble since I don’t get in trouble for it.

  Coach takes another big drink of his Gatorade. “That’s good, T. That’s real good, because I want you to have a full season this year.”

  “Okay, Coach.” I stand up and throw my Gatorade bottle in the garbage can next to his desk.

  Coach leans down, picks the bottle back up, and tosses it in the recycling bin instead.

  HOUSEHOLD PETS

  Near the Chevron late that evening, I see another missing dog poster. It reads:

  LOST BOXER-CHIHUAHUA MIX

  BLACK-AND-WHITE, NAMED LUCY

  LOST NEAR AYRES LAKE ON SATURDAY

  REWARD OF $100

  CALL (541) 554-6095

  I shake my head. Feel sort of bad. There was a dog that hung around one of our motels a few years ago. He was a small gray terrier, skittish and mangy, but I loved him and I named him Chris Paul III. Sometimes I’d bring him into our room when my mom was gone. I would save a little food for him, Taco Bell meat, anything I could find in the Dumpster, or unfinished food I’d scrounged at Subway.

  I’d sit on the bed in our motel room and pet behind his ears, watch him fall asleep on my lap. We’d watch television, and sometimes a loud noise on the screen would make him pop his head up and look around like someone was trying to get him. Sometimes he’d even growl at the screen, and his ears would turn into two sharp triangles, and that always made me laugh.

  But one day I couldn’t find him and I searched all over. I searched behind the adult video store, the shoe outlet, and the fast-food Dumpsters. I went over to the Red Apple and the Mexican food cart. But he was nowhere, and it wasn’t until I was walking home after dark that I found him.

  He’d been hit by a car on 6th Street. I found him lying on the gutter grate, the storm drain, his head turned the wrong way around. He was so small lying there, and I picked him up and saw that his front leg was broken too, snapped and pushed back, and I threw a rock at the nearest parked car even though I knew it wasn’t the car that had hit him.

  I remember the week after he died, how I didn’t want to shoot baskets or watch TV, how the motel room felt so empty when my mom was gone, how I kept looking for him each morning before realizing, once again, that he wasn’t coming back.

  I was thinking about this and feeling sort of bad for the people who’d lost their pets. In a way, I’d known these things might happen when I released the caimans, but in another way I hadn’t. I guess I didn’t really think it all through. I wanted something exciting for the people along the lake, and that is what’s starting to happen.

  I shake my head and jog over to Mr. Tyler’s house so I can do something I don’t feel bad about. In front of his single-wide, the warm stench of our collective summer’s worth of urine hits me before I even leave the sidewalk. I turn in a circle and check for anyone who might see me, then hop up on the porch.

  For some reason, Mr. Tyler’s left his shoes there by the front door. I look over my shoulder once more, but there’s still no one out in the neighborhood. I unzip my fly, whip it out, and pee long and hard into his shoes, fill one to the brim, then switch to the other, and get that shoe most of the way full as well.

  SMASHING

  When I get home, I stash my bike behind the shed. Walk up on the back porch and stop. Grandpa’s pipe, the old briarroot he loves, is on the glass table. I pick it up. Smell it. Smell the burnt marijuana, the ash. I walk down to the edge of the lake.

  I hold the pipe in my hand, dark-wood bowl, black stem, little white cloverleaf imprint in the middle. I snap the stem off, try to break each piece again but both the bowl and the stem are solid. My hands slip. I reach down and pick up a large pebble. Jam the pebble into the bottom of the bowl. Then I lay the stem on a wide rock and smash it into tiny pieces using another rock. Dump those off and grind the pieces into the dirt. Then I pick up the bowl, the pebble stuck in its mouth, and throw it in the lake.

  I look over at my tent and see two pages pinned underneath a rock, the white paper reflecting the early moonlight.

  The Pervert’s Guide to Russian Princesses

  Princess #31 (Rough Draft)

  Mathilde Kschessinskaya, I’ve watched you from the front row at the Imperial Ballet, looking up your tutu as you rise on pointe, your calves flexing and your feet arching downward like commas on the sentence of the stage.

  You became prima ballerina assoluta even though the maestro Petipa didn’t like you and called you “that nasty little swine.” He was afraid of you, afraid of how you could use your body. And you used your body like a goddess from an unknown religion. But I am not afraid of you.

  I will build a stage of marble, smooth and straight, underneath the naked sky, and we will dance without clothes when it rains. I will watch your muscles ripple over your bones, your thin ballerina’s body a perfect match for the long muscles of an NBA two-guard. I will guard you.

  I know that you created scandals and rumors by passing back and forth between two dukes of the Romanov family, that you held Nicholas II in the palm of your hand, but you will stay with me from now on and never be traded again.

  Your rivals mean nothing to me. Anna Pavlova, long limbed and ethereal-looking, a crowd favorite, wi
ll drink a concoction of lime juice and Ex-Lax before her next show, and she will lose control of her bowels onstage. And Preobrajenskaya won’t be given another premier role either. Her pointe shoes will always be missing, her costumes torn before she walks onstage, the hair on one side of her head shaved off in her sleep. You will hear your rivals weeping after every show, asking, “Will I ever star again?”

  The answer is no. Not again. Because of me.

  When you decide to quit dancing, you will ask me to move to France with you, and I will agree. We will rent an artist’s studio on the east side and live off bread and cheese and vegetables grown in our window boxes.

  In the afternoon, you ask me to suckle your neck on a riverboat heading up the Seine. You lay back on the prow, your skeletal body arched as I put my lips to your throat.

  In the evening, you will sit at a café barefoot, begging me to tickle the thick calluses on your gnarled feet, feet that will never recover from your years of dancing. I will pour water over the thickened twists of your toes, watch the drops fall from the yellow of your fungus-covered toenails.

  THE FRIDGE

  The next afternoon, I arrive at Natalie’s dock in the canoe, gliding to catch the edge.

  She says, “Hey there.”

  I’d seen her from across the lake, paddled hard. I say, “Hey back.”

  As I tie the bowline, I try to think of something funny to say. I want Natalie to kiss me again, but I don’t know how to start a new conversation after what happened. In the end I don’t say anything.

  Natalie frowns. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, sorry. I was thinking about something.”

  “Your face looked so serious. What were you thinking?”

  “Nothing.” I shake my head. “Do you have a bike?”

  “A bike? Yeah.”

  “All right. Then do you want to go jump off Knickerbocker Bridge with me?”

  “Knickerbocker? I can’t remember, is that a tall bridge?”

  “Not too tall,” I say. “Maybe 35 feet?”

  Natalie folds the corner of the page in her book. Sets it down next to her. “What are we jumping into?”

  “Water,” I say.

  “No shit.” She laughs. “I mean, is it a river, a pond, a lake, a creek…?”

  “Oh, right. A river. The Willamette River. The water’s deep, and not too cold.”

  Natalie nods. “Okay,” she says. “Let’s do it.”

  “Yeah?”

  She stands up and dusts off the back of her shorts. “Yeah, that sounds like fun.”

  “Okay. I’ll paddle back to my tent and get my bike. You get your bike. If you ride south on Gilham while I ride east, we’ll meet at the skate park. Sound good?”

  —

  When I get to the skate park, Natalie isn’t there yet, so I wait and watch the kids skate. Most of them aren’t any good, but one kid is, and I watch him do nollie kick-flip tricks on the tabletop and think about how much he must’ve worked to get those tricks down. I’ve always liked watching anyone who had to work to learn a skill. That’s why YouTube sucks me in sometimes. I couldn’t care less about kitten videos or the newest celebrity video of whatever it is that celebrities do, but I’ll watch a snowboarder or a BMX biker who’s dialed a new gap trick even though I’ve never ridden a snowboard or done a BMX trick in my life. I’ll sometimes watch the same video over and over, just thinking about how many times he messed up before he got it down. That’s what I think about when I watch skaters too. They have hundreds of attempts behind every successful stick. It’s a lot like watching Michael Jordan hit a double-clutch reverse layin so smooth and perfect, and people say stupid things like “It’s because he was such a natural athlete.” But I know better. It’s because he worked harder than other people were willing to work.

  I’m thinking about all of that, and I don’t notice when Natalie rides up. She puts her arms around me from behind and hugs me. “You okay today?” she says.

  I like her hugging me, so I don’t say anything other than “Yeah.” I keep watching the kid skating in front of us.

  I don’t know if Natalie understands how hard nollie kick-flips are because she doesn’t say anything while the kid’s skating, but she keeps hugging me and that’s good enough. When I turn around, she kisses me, one long kiss, and her lips taste like mint ChapStick again, and I feel the tip of her tongue and I want to kiss her like that all day long in the sun.

  She pulls back and raises her aviator sunglasses, her green eyes wide. “Ready?”

  I nod. “Yep.”

  —

  I’m riding in front, leading, and I look back at Natalie and she’s wearing a white tank top over a black bikini and the straps are thin and there’s so much tan skin to admire, and I wish that I could ride behind her so I could look at her as much as I want to.

  I smile back at her and pedal a little faster. She has her knee brace on her one leg, but it doesn’t seem to slow her down. She rides fast on her 27-speed white Surly, and I like seeing her big fat smile every time I look back.

  We ride along the river on the north bank, through Alton Baker Park, then down past the cottonwood grove at the footbridge. From there, the bike path winds along the field, the old landfill with the methane pipes sticking up every hundred feet, and I think about all of the homeless camps across the river, the big one behind the low-head dam, the dam’s angled cement graffitied in yellows, purples, and silvers, and how my mom lived there one summer. That was when I was 10, the first time I stayed with my grandma, and I thought the house on the lake was magical, the food in the refrigerator more than I could imagine. I remember going into the kitchen even when I was full, right after breakfast or lunch or dinner, and just opening up the fridge door and staring at all of the food lit up on the shelves. I would tell myself, I’m gonna eat that, then I’m gonna eat that, then after I finish, I’m gonna eat that and that and that until I’m so full that I feel sick. Then I’d open the freezer and look at the ice cream.

  —

  Knickerbocker Bridge straddles the river just down from the I-5 bridge near the edge of town. On the southeast side of the bridge, the water underneath is a smooth green channel, deep and fast. The wooden railing is gouged and carved, marked with names, dates, and arrows showing where people jumped from. There’s a TR,with a wide arrow next to it, and that’s my jumping spot. I’ve never hit the bottom from there.

  I say, “The police put up a NO JUMPING sign three times one year, but the sign was stolen every time.”

  Natalie says, “Can you get arrested for jumping, or is it just a fine?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She takes off her sunglasses. Wriggles out of her jean shorts. “Then we better jump quick.”

  There are some guys drinking at that end of the bridge, a little down from us. Each one’s holding a 40 of Olde E or Steel Reserve, swigging and laughing. One of them walks up, sets his bottle down on the cement, climbs over the rail, and holds on, facing me and Natalie. He has his back to the river below. He lets go and leans back, rolls through a slow backflip, and hits the water feetfirst. His friends cheer and hold up their 40s.

  Natalie says, “Damn, that was smooth.” She pulls her tank top over her head. Unties and reties her bikini top. Adjusts the straps on her knee brace.

  She climbs up on the rail. “Are you coming or what?” She stands there for a second, balancing, putting her arms out wide to steady herself.

  “You’re gonna jump from the top of the rail? It’s 35 feet from there.”

  She says, “Then I better not think about it,” and jumps. Her body arcs out into the space above the water. She falls. Pulls her feet up a little before she hits and I hear the slaps of the bottoms of her feet before she splashes into the water.

  The boys with the 40s cheer for her. Lean over the rail and yell, “Yeah, girl!” and “You killed it!”

  I wait for her to come back to the surface. When she does, I yell, “Are you good?”

  “Yeah,�
� she laughs. Slides under the water again and comes back up. “Nothing going on here. Just a little bit of a loose bikini.”

  The 40s boys cheer again when she says that.

  She treads water below us and reties the strap behind her neck.

  When Natalie gets back on top of the bridge, I say, “That was awesome. You didn’t hesitate at all.”

  “Well, if you hesitate, you’ll panic, and you might never go.” She tilts her head to the side and pounds water out of her ear. She grabs my face with her cold hands and kisses me. Her nose drips onto my nose. “Your turn,” she says.

  I want to impress her, and there’s only one way to do it. I kick off my shoes and climb up on the rail. Stand there for a second, then turn around.

  Natalie says, “What are you doing?”

  “Backflip from the top of the rail.”

  “From up there? I don’t know about that.” Natalie scrunches her nose. Squints one eye closed.

  I say, “I’ve got this.”

  I’ve done flips off people’s diving boards, off small rocks into the river, off a log that hangs about 15 feet over the McKenzie, but I’ve never done a backflip off anything high, nothing like a bridge, and I have no idea how to land a flip from this height. Inside I’m terrified, but I make my face into a calm smile. Relax my shoulders.

  The 40s boys walk up while I’m standing on the rail, my back to the water. The one who did the flip earlier says, “Get it, man. Go get it.”

  I can’t hesitate because I know I’ll chicken out if I do.

  Natalie says, “Please be careful.”

  And that makes me smile for real. I know I’ve impressed her if she’s scared for me. I put out my arms and lean back. No stopping myself now. I go into the flip and try to rotate slowly, but right away I know I’m going too fast. I tuck my chin and wave my arms, roll through all the way and see the water, too early, keep rolling, and I try to stop my flip but I only manage to twist my body sideways when I do that.