True Legend

by Mike Lupica

  Which one?

  Wasn’t like he could go back now to the guy behind the desk, tell him the truth, tell him he was trying to solve a mystery.

  Outthink the guy, Drew told himself. The way you outthink people every time you play a game. At least until you don’t dive for the ball . . .

  Well, he would just have to find some way to dive headfirst now.

  It was then that he saw the skinny young guy come out of the hotel, dressed in what looked like a cheap bellman’s outfit, probably the only bellman they had in the place.

  Drew was up and moving right away.

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  The skinny guy was startled at first. Drew’s voice was as loud as a siren on the otherwise empty street.

  The bellman, if that’s what he was, turned around. Then it was like he was about to say one thing, but changed his mind when he got a good look at Drew’s face.

  “Drew Robinson?” he said.

  Yes.

  “That’s me.”

  “Dude, I’ve seen you play.”

  He’s not much older than I am, Drew realized.

  “Thanks,” Drew said. “Listen, I need a favor.” Grinned. “What’s your name?”

  “Josh,” he said. “I got out of Westlake Village High a couple of years ago. I go to the community college.”

  “Cool,” Drew said, trying to act like he cared. “Nice to meet you, Josh.”

  Think fast.

  He took a deep breath and let it rip.

  “Anyway,” Drew said, “it’s a long story, but there’s a guy staying here, older dude, I played some ball with him over at Morrison? He never told me his last name, we were just bros in the park, you know? But I saw him walk into the hotel tonight, and the guy behind the desk wasn’t much help . . .”

  Drew tried to look as helpless as he felt.

  “Vic,” Josh said. “He wouldn’t throw water on you if you were on fire.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Can you describe the guy?”

  Drew did the best he could.

  “I know him.” Josh said, “That’s the old dude with all the books. I brought him up some coffee once. He’s in 3G.”

  “Fresh,” Drew said. “One more thing? Is there another way I can get up there without going through the front door? I don’t want Vic to think I’m a stalker or something.”

  “I can’t believe I’m with Drew Robinson,” Josh said, and then took him around to the service entrance, showed him where the back stairs were.

  Drew was already moving toward the staircase as Josh was saying good night. When he got to the third floor, he found 3G, heard what sounded like jazz music coming from inside.

  Knocked on the door.

  TWENTY-TWO

  This time there was something in the man’s eyes Drew had never seen before. If it wasn’t fear Drew was looking at, it was close enough. Like what he really wanted to do was run. Shove past Drew and just escape into the night, run with whatever his old legs still had left in them.

  Instead, he took a deep breath and said in a tired voice, “You followed me.”

  “Followed you good.”

  “And you’re feelin’ good ’cause you found me.”

  Drew shrugged.

  “Good for you. Now leave.”

  “You know I can’t do that. That I’m gonna stay with you now.”

  “’Cause you think this is, what, some kind of game?”

  “In a way, yeah. Maybe.”

  “Well, it’s not. To you maybe. Not to me. You don’t want to get into my business.”

  “Not your business. Just who you really are.”

  The man shook his head.

  Drew said, “You gonna let me come in, by the way?”

  He thought he saw the man smile.

  “It’s not what I do.”

  “Do what?”

  “Let people in. Been doing a much better job at keeping them out. Least till now.”

  “So is your name really Donald?”

  “Partly.”

  “You’re partly named Donald? Give it up, okay? If I partly found out about you, I can find out the rest now.”

  And just like that, he did seem to give up, like he was quitting a game of one-on-one. Or a fight. He leaned himself against the door frame, almost like he needed it to hold himself up. Then he said, “Urban Donald Sellers. Least before the world changed my middle name to Legend.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  So it was true.

  “You’re him.”

  “Used to be him. Past tense. Back when that was my biggest problem. Me being me. Never got the hang of that, not till it was too late, anyway.”

  Drew knew how dumb it was going to sound, but said what he wanted to say anyway.

  “You’re supposed to be dead. It was one of the headlines after that fire: ‘Death of a Playground Legend.’”

  “Trust me,” Urban Sellers said, “that Legend had been dead a long time before that shelter went up in flames.”

  They were still facing each other in the doorway, Legend just inside the room, Drew in the hall.

  “That Legend,” he continued, “died a long time ago. Of natural causes. Starting with the natural cause of stupidity. And he’s gonna stay dead, with or without your help.”

  “Ask you again,” Drew said. “You gonna let me in, or we gonna stand out here all night?”

  “Might as well,” he said. “Maybe then you’ll leave me be.”

  “You mean like you’ve let me be?” Drew said.

  Legend motioned him into the room.

  • • •

  The inside was nothing like Drew expected.

  Starting with how clean it was, like it shouldn’t even have been part of this old run-down hotel. It didn’t fit, the way the run-down hotel didn’t seem to fit the town.

  The bed was made up nice, no wrinkles showing. No clothes or towels on the floor. Nothing at all, then, like Drew’s room at home, no matter how many times Darlene Robinson marched him back in there and told him to clean up, that she wasn’t his maid and God hadn’t put her on this earth to pick up after him.

  No TV in this room.

  No laptop that Drew could see anywhere.

  Just a small CD player on the table next to the bed, discs stacked neatly in their cases beside it. Drew was close enough to read the top one: Kind of Blue, by Miles Davis.

  Drew knew his mom liked Miles Davis, recognized the sound of the man’s trumpet because he’d heard it so much growing up.

  But it wasn’t the familiar music that struck him, the neatness and order of the place.

  It was the books.

  Books everywhere.

  They were piled on top of an old green footlocker that Urban Sellers had shoved against a wall next to the bathroom. In other places, they were just stacked against the walls, going nearly all the way to the ceiling. On either side of the one window in the room, they were in shelves that Drew wondered if the man might have built himself. On the desk were more books, and some of those old-fashioned Mead Square Deal black-and-white tablets, the kind Drew remembered from grade school, with a place for your class schedule on the inside cover.

  There was barely enough room in one corner for an old recliner chair, fake leather, Drew could tell, black tape holding it together in some places, a reading lamp next to it.

  The only other chair in the room was a swivel chair pushed up to the desk. Urban Sellers motioned now for Drew to sit himself there. He got on the bed, grimacing as he forgot to put the weight on his right knee.

  “You like to read,” Drew said.

  “Do now.”

  “You didn’t when you were my age?”

  “Didn�
�t think I had to,” he said. “Thought there was others supposed to take care of that the way they took care of everything else except playing ball.”

  Drew had so many questions he didn’t know where to begin, but Urban Sellers asked one first.

  “Why’d you have to know so bad?”

  Drew shrugged. “When I get fixed on something . . .” He shrugged again. All he had.

  “Got to have what you got to have,” Urban Sellers said.

  “’Cause I’m so spoiled?” Drew said. “We on our way back to that?”

  “You are spoiled,” Sellers said. “But spoiled doesn’t have anything to do with this. It’s about who you are. One of the things that’s gonna at least give you the chance to be great. That thing I had once before I lost it. The thing on the court that makes you sure nothing or nobody is gonna get in your way. Even when you mess up like you did tonight. When you give up.”

  “I know what I did. Or didn’t do.”

  “Everybody makes mistakes,” Legend said. “You just gotta stay away from the big ones.”

  They sat there eyeballing each other.

  “Does anybody else know you’re alive?”

  “Hardly anybody,” he said. “And that’s the way it has to stay, provided I can trust you.”

  “You can.”

  “Because if I can’t trust you . . .” Legend stopped right there, tired all of a sudden. Like he’d lost his place. “If I can’t, it won’t matter you found me, ’cause I’ll be gone.”

  “I didn’t come here to run you off.”

  “But you got the power to do that now, boy. Like you got the power to name your future.”

  Drew looked around the room, at the books, like he was looking at Urban Sellers’s world.

  “I read about you,” he said. “You had the same kind of power once. You weren’t supposed to end up like this.”

  “Now, that’s where you’re wrong. I figure this is exactly how I was supposed to end up.”

  Drew said, “Why’d you let everybody think you died? How did you?”

  Legend leaned back, staring at the ceiling.

  “There was somebody had crashed in the room I’d been living in. Somebody who showed up that day, needing a bed. Big guy, about my size. A brother. Burned up as bad as everybody else, the place went up that easy. In the papers the next day, it said they thought it was me, and I let them. Nobody was gonna turn it into one of those CSI shows.” He still had his eyes closed, telling it. “I just let Urban Legend die once and for all, ’cause I knew nobody was gonna miss him. ’Specially me.”

  Drew got up. It was a way of filling the silence that was in the room now, the silence between him and the end of the man’s story. He made himself seem busy looking at the titles of the books all around him.

  Even some school-type textbooks, the kind Drew only opened up as some kind of last resort these days. And there was a copy of The City Game, by Mr. Pete Axthelm, on top of one of the stacks. Drew picked it up.

  “You read this?” he said.

  “I did. You?”

  “Yeah.”

  Urban Sellers said, “You read outside of school? On your own?” Sounding surprised.

  “If it’s something I think might be fresh. My friend Lee gave it to me.”

  Not wanting to tell Legend that it was the only book he’d ever read outside of school.

  “Recognize anybody in it?”

  Drew felt himself sag. “I’m not like them, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You mean the crash-and-burn guys like me?” Urban Sellers said.

  “I’m not gonna end up in a room like this, if that’s where you’re going with this.”

  He was sorry as soon as the words were out of his mouth, falling out of the air between them like some forced shot. It was then that he noticed the old basketball Urban Sellers had been using behind the recliner. Seeing it there, knowing what the man could do with it, only made Drew feel worse.

  “That came out wrong,” he said.

  “No, son, it did not come out wrong. It came out exactly the way you meant. And don’t worry about hurting my feelings, because I don’t have those anymore.”

  With that, he got off the bed, forgetting again to put his weight on his right knee, pulled another face.

  “Time for you to go,” he said.

  “But I just got here.”

  “And now you’re out of here,” he said. “You got school in the morning, if you’re still bothering to go to school. And I got work.”

  “You’ve got a job?” Drew knew he sounded as surprised as Urban Sellers had when Drew told him he read books.

  “I do.”

  Sellers walked past him, opened the door.

  “I’m gonna say this again, straight up,” he said. “If you tell anybody about me, where I live, who I am, you’ll never see me again.”

  “What about Lee? My friend? Can I tell him?”

  “Nobody.”

  “I’d trust Lee with my life.”

  “Doesn’t mean I have to trust him with mine,” Legend said. “Anybody shows up here asking questions, looking for me, I’m gone. And this time, nobody will ever find me again.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “If I’m lyin’,” he said, “I’m dyin’. All over again.”

  “Okay,” Drew said.

  “Your word really count for something?”

  Drew couldn’t remember anybody ever asking him that question before.

  “Yes, sir, it does,” he said. Hoping it did.

  Urban Legend Sellers put out his big right hand, one that Drew knew by now could make a basketball look as small as a baseball.

  Drew shook it.

  Sellers didn’t let go right away.

  “Your word, Drew Robinson,” he said.

  “I give you my word,” Drew said, like he was swearing on a Bible.

  Then he added, “What do I call you? I can’t think of you as anything except Legend.”

  “I told you,” the man said, his voice soft, like the jazz music behind him. “That Legend died a long time ago. The only legend on me is the one about how I threw it all away.” He looked hard at Drew and said, “Don’t you do the same.”

  When Drew finally left the little room, the door closed so quickly it nearly hit him in the back on his way out.

  • • •

  Drew walked to the train station, got himself a cab, quietly let himself in the front door at home so as not to wake his mom.

  It seemed as if that night’s game had been played a week ago, because of what had happened after it. Following Urban Legend to his room, to where his life had taken him after he’d played all his ball for Coach Fred Holman.

  But there was something about the man that made it impossible for Drew to feel sorry for him. A sort of pride. Living with his books in that little room, the whole world thinking he was dead, having forgotten him a long time ago.

  David Thompson, the one they once called the Skywalker, who’d had his own fall, he was still around, Drew knew that, having checked him out on Google. He was off somewhere living his Christian life. Trying to help young players not make the same mistakes he’d made. Thirty years after he had played his last game at North Carolina State, he even went back there and got a degree in sociology.

  What did Urban Sellers have? An old ball and those books and some memories?

  And that pride. The one thing he’d managed to hold on to, along with his ability to play himself some mad ball.

  Maybe that’s what I’ll find out someday, Drew thought.

  Maybe the swagger is the last thing to go.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  This was one of the days when the girls got to practice first.

  So Drew had to w
ait a couple of extra hours to get back in the gym the day after the Conejo game, get back out there, start putting the ending to the game behind him. And when he finally did, Drew Robinson was on fire, playing the scrimmage at the end of practice like it was the state finals, even getting into it with Lee under the boards one time when Coach put Lee with the second team to give them more offense.

  They both had their hands on a rebound, both were fighting for it, and even after Coach blew the whistle, they kept fighting. Drew, who was stronger than he looked, finally ripped the ball away, sending Lee flying into the basket support, a surprised look on his face.

  But he didn’t say anything. The look on Drew’s face must have told him all he needed to know.

  Even when practice was over and Drew should have blown off enough steam, he couldn’t let go of last night’s game, the humiliating way it had ended for him, the way he had to watch helplessly as the kid’s shot was tracking for the basket.

  He hadn’t just let his team down, he’d let himself down. Listening to Mr. Gilbert like he had, Mr. Gilbert telling him to be careful, not get himself hurt. Only you couldn’t play basketball careful. Or afraid.

  He should have listened to himself, and he hadn’t.

  When everybody else left the court, a couple of minutes after eight o’clock, Drew stayed out there, shooting at one end of the court, then dribbling to the other as if he were on a breakaway, throwing the ball down, then shooting at that basket for a while.

  Lee came back out from the locker room looking for him, asking if he wanted a ride home.

  “I’m good,” Drew said.

  “I can wait,” Lee said.

  Friend to the end, even after practice was over.

  “Nah,” Drew said, trying to sound casual. “I got some things I need to work on by myself. And I don’t want to wait to go over to Morrison at midnight.”

  “You sure you’re good?”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Drew said. “I’ll call you later.”

  When he had the gym to himself again, he pushed himself even harder than he had in practice. Ran the court more, made pull-up J’s. Still on fire, wanting to dunk the ball tonight.